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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. |
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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. |
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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. Then I could speak, shout, laugh from a place that was uniquely mine, that was no one else's in the history of the universe, that would never be anyone else's, ever. |
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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. |
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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. This was the house Papa talked about when he held a lottery ticket and this was the house Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed. |
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My Papa's hair is like a broom, all up in the air. And me, my hair is lazy. It never obeys barrettes or bands. Carlos' hair is thick and straight. He doesn't need to comb it. Nenny's hair is slippery — slides out of your hand. And Kiki, who is the youngest, has hair like fur. But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain, and Mama's hair that smells like bread. Boys & Girls The boys and the girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours. My brothers for example. They've got plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside they can't be seen talking to girls. Carlos and Kiki are each other's best friend ... not ours. Nenny is too young to be my friend. She's just my sister and that was not my fault. You don't pick your sisters, you just get them and sometimes they come like Nenny. She can't play with those Vargas kids or she'll turn out just like them. 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. |
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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. |
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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. 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? |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. 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 ... |
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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. |
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And anyway, a woman's place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star, the one that appears early just in time to rise and catch the hind legs hide behind the sink, beneath the four-clawed tub, under the swollen floorboards nobody fixes, in the corner of your eyes. Alicia, whose mama died, is sorry there is no one older to rise and make the lunchbox tortillas. Alicia, who inherited her mama's rolling pin and sleepiness, is young and smart and studies for the first time at the university. Two trains and a bus, because she doesn't want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin. Is a good girl, my friend, studies all night and sees the mice, the ones her father says do not exist. 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. |
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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. |
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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... 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. |
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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? |
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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. She teaches us to cross and uncross our legs, and to run like a double-dutch rope, and how to walk down to the corner so that the shoes talk back to you with every step. Lucy, Rachel, me tee-tottering like so. Down to the corner where the men can't take their eyes off us. We must be Christmas. Mr. Benny at the corner grocery puts down his important cigar: Your mother know you got shoes like that? Who give you those? Nobody. Them are dangerous, he says. You girls too young to be wearing shoes like that. Take them shoes off before I call the cops, but we just run. On the avenue a boy on a homemade bicycle calls out: Ladies, lead me to heaven. But there is nobody around but us. Do you like these shoes? Rachel says yes, and Lucy says yes, and yes I say, these are the best shoes. We will never go back to wearing the other kind again. Do you like these shoes? In front of the laundromat six girls with the same fat face pretend we are invisible. |
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They are the cousins, Lucy says, and always jealous. We just keep strutting. Across the street in front of the tavern a bum man on the stoop. Do you like these shoes? Bum man says, Yes, little girl. Your little lemon shoes are so beautiful. But come closer. I can't see very well. Come closer. Please. You are a pretty girl, bum man continues. What's your name, pretty girl? And Rachel says Rachel, just like that. Now you know to talk to drunks is crazy and to tell them your name is worse, but who can blame her. She is young and dizzy to hear so many sweet things in one day, even if it is a bum man's whiskey words saying them. Rachel, you are prettier than a yellow taxicab. You know that? But we don't like it. We got to go, Lucy says. If I give you a dollar will you kiss me? How about a dollar. I give you a dollar, and he looks in his pocket for wrinkled money. We have to go right now, Lucy says taking Rachel's hand because she looks like she's thinking about that dollar. Bum man is yelling something to the air but by now we are running fast and far away, our high heel shoes taking us all the way down the avenue and around the block, past the ugly cousins, past Mr. Benny's, up Mango Street, the back way, just in case. We are tired of being beautiful. Lucy hides the lemon shoes and the red shoes and the shoes that used to be white but are now pale blue under a powerful bushel basket on the back porch, until one Tuesday her mother, who is very clean, throws them away. But no one complains. |
| 20 |
A Rice Sandwich The special kids, the ones who wear keys around their necks, get to eat in the canteen. The canteen! Even the name sounds important. And these kids at lunch time go there because their mothers aren't home or home is too far away to get to. My home isn't far but it's not close either, and somehow I got it in my head one day to ask my mother to make me a sandwich and write a note to the principal so I could eat in the canteen too. Oh no, she says pointing the butter knife at me as if I'm starting trouble, no sir. Next thing you know everybody will be wanting a bag lunch — I'll be up all night cutting bread into little triangles, this one with mayonnaise, this one with mustard, no pickles on mine, but mustard on one side please. You kids just like to invent more work for me. But Nenny says she doesn't want to eat at school — ever — because she likes to go home with her best friend Gloria who lives across the schoolyard. Gloria's mama has a big color TV and all they do is watch cartoons. Kiki and Carlos, on the other hand, are patrol boys. They don't want to eat at school either. They like to stand out in the cold especially if it's raining. They think suffering is good for you ever since they saw that movie 300 Spartans. I'm no Spartan and hold up an anemic wrist to prove it. I can't even blow up a balloon without getting dizzy. And besides, I know how to make my own lunch. If I ate at school there'd be less dishes to wash. You would see me less and less and like me better. |
| 21 |
Everyday at noon my chair would be empty. Where is my favorite daughter you would cry, and when I came home finally at three p. m. you would appreciate me. Okay, okay, my mother says after three days of this. And the following morning I get to go to school with my mother's letter and a rice sandwich because we don't have lunch meat. Mondays or Fridays, it doesn't matter, mornings always go by slow and this day especially. But lunchtime came finally and I got to get in line with the stay-at-school kids. Everything is fine until the nun who knows all the canteen kids by heart looks at me and says: You, who sent you here? And since I am shy, I don't say anything, just hold out my hand with the letter. This is no good, she says, till Sister Superior gives the okay. Go upstairs and see her. And so I went. I had to wait for two kids in front of me to get hollered at, one because he did something in class, the other because he didn't. My turn came and I stood in front of the big desk with holy pictures under the glass while the Sister Superior read my letter. It went like this: Dear Sister Superior, Please let Esperanza eat in the lunchroom because she lives too far away and she gets tired. As you can see she is very skinny. I hope to God she does not faint. Thanking you, Mrs. E. Cordero You don't live far, she says. You live across the boulevard. That's only four blocks. Not even. Three maybe. Three long blocks away from here. I bet I can see your house from my window. Which one? Come here. |
| 22 |
Which one is your house? And then she made me stand up on a box of books and point. That one? she said, pointing to a row of ugly three-flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn't my house and started to cry. I always cry when nuns yell at me, even if they're not yelling. Then she was sorry and said I could stay — just for today, not tomorrow or the day after — you go home. And I said yes and could I please have a Kleenex — I had to blow my nose. In the canteen, which was nothing special, lots of boys and girls watched while I cried and ate my sandwich, the bread already greasy and the rice cold. Chanclas It's me — Mama, Mama said. I open up and she's there with bags and big boxes, the new clothes and, yes, she's got the socks and a new slip with a little rose on it and a pink-and-white striped dress. 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. |
| 23 |
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. |
| 24 |
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. 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. |
| 25 |
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. |
| 26 |
I thought I'd find an easy job, the kind other kids had, working in the dime store or maybe a hotdog stand. And though I hadn't started looking yet, I thought I might the week after next. But when I came home that afternoon, all wet because Tito had pushed me into the open water hydrant — only I had sort of let him — Mama called me in the kitchen before I could even go and change, and Aunt Lala was sitting there drinking her coffee with a spoon. Aunt Lala said she had found a job for me at the Peter Pan Photo Finishers on North Broadway where she worked, and how old was I, and to show up tomorrow saying I was one year older, and that was that. So the next morning I put on the navy blue dress that made me look older and borrowed money for lunch and bus fare because Aunt Lala said I wouldn't get paid till the next Friday, and I went in and saw the boss of the Peter Pan Photo Finishers on North Broadway where Aunt Lala worked and lied about my age like she told me to and sure enough, I started that same day. In my job I had to wear white gloves. I was supposed to match negatives with their prints, just look at the picture and look for the same one on the negative strip, put it in the envelope, and do the next one. That's all. I didn't know where these envelopes were coming from or where they were going. I just did what I was told. It was real easy, and I guess I wouldn't have minded it except that you got tired after a while and I didn't know if I could sit down or not, and then I started sitting down only when the two ladies next to me did. |
| 27 |
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. |
| 28 |
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. 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. |
| 29 |
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. |
| 30 |
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. 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. |
| 31 |
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. |
| 32 |
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. 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. |
| 33 |
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. |
| 34 |
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. 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. |
| 35 |
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. |
| 36 |
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. 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. |
| 37 |
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. |
| 38 |
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. 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. |
| 39 |
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. |
| 40 |
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. 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. |
| 41 |
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. |
| 42 |
Her father says to be this beautiful is trouble. They are very strict in his religion. They are not supposed to dance. He remembers his sisters and is sad. Then she can't go out. Sally I mean. Sally, who taught you to paint your eyes like Cleopatra? And if I roll the little brush with my tongue and chew it to a point and dip it in the muddy cake, the one in the little red box, will you teach me? I like your black coat and those shoes you wear, where did you get them? My mother says to wear black so young is dangerous, but I want to buy shoes just like yours, like your black ones made out of suede, just like those. And one day, when my mother's in a good mood, maybe after my next birthday, I'm going to ask to buy the nylons too. Cheryl, who is not your friend anymore, not since last Tuesday before Easter, not since the day you made her ear bleed, not since she called you that name and bit a hole in your arm and you looked as if you were going to cry and everyone was waiting and you didn't, you didn't, Sally, not since then, you don't have a best friend to lean against the schoolyard fence with, to laugh behind your hands at what the boys say. There is no one to lend you her hairbrush. The stories the boys tell in the coatroom, they're not true. You lean against the schoolyard fence alone with your eyes closed as if no one was watching, as if no one could see you standing there, Sally. What do you think about when you close your eyes like that? And why do you always have to go straight home after school? |
| 43 |
You become a different Sally. You pull your skirt straight, you rub the blue paint off your eyelids. You don't laugh, Sally. You look at your feet and walk fast to the house you can't come out from. Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs to where a room is waiting for you. 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. |
| 44 |
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 ... |
| 45 |
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. 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. |
| 46 |
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. |
| 47 |
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. 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. |
| 48 |
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. |
| 49 |
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. 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. |
| 50 |
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. |
| 51 |
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. 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. |
| 52 |
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. |
| 53 |
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. She is happy, except sometimes her husband gets angry and once he broke the door where his foot went through, though most days he is okay. Except he won't let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn't let her look out the window. And he doesn't like her friends, so nobody gets to visit her unless he is working. She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission. She looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake. The Three Sisters They came with the wind that blows in August, thin as a spider web and barely noticed. Three who did not seem to be related to anything but the moon. One with laughter like tin and one with eyes of a cat and one with hands like porcelain. The aunts, the three sisters, las comadres, they said. The baby died. Lucy and Rachel's sister. One night a dog cried, and the next day a yellow bird flew in through an open window. Before the week was over, the baby's fever was worse. Then Jesus came and took the baby with him far away. |
| 54 |
That's what their mother said. Then the visitors came ... in and out of the little house. It was hard to keep the floors clean. Anybody who had ever wondered what color the walls were came and came to look at that little thumb of a human in a box like candy. I had never seen the dead before, not for real, not in somebody's living room for people to kiss and bless themselves and light a candle for. Not in a house. It seemed strange. They must've known, the sisters. They had the power and could sense what was what. They said, Come here, and gave me a stick of gum. They smelled like Kleenex or the inside of a satin handbag, and then I didn't feel afraid. What's your name, the cat-eyed one asked. Esperanza, I said. Esperanza, the old blue-veined one repeated in a high thin voice. Esperanza ... a good good name. My knees hurt, the one with the funny laugh complained. Tomorrow it will rain. Yes, tomorrow, they said. How do you know? I asked. We know. Look at her hands, cat-eyed said. And they turned them over and over as if they were looking for something. She's special. Yes, she'll go very far. Yes, yes, hmmm. Make a wish. A wish? Yes, make a wish. What do you want? Anything? I said. Well, why not? I closed my eyes. Did you wish already? Yes, I said. Well, that's all there is to it. It'll come true. How do you know? I asked. We know, we know. Esperanza. The one with marble hands called me aside. Esperanza. She held my face with her blue-veined hands and looked and looked at me. A long silence. |
| 55 |
There once lived, at a series of temporary addresses across the United States of America, a traveling man of Indian origin, advancing years, and retreating mental powers, who, on account of his love for mindless television, had spent far too much of his life in the yellow light of tawdry motel rooms watching an excess of it, and had suffered a peculiar form of brain damage as a result. He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills, and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company's Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming, and, of course, beauty contests. |
| 56 |
In the name of this so-called love he resolved zealously to pursue his "beloved" right through the television screen into whatever exalted high-definition reality she and her kind inhabited, and, by deeds as well as grace, to win her heart. He spoke slowly and moved slowly too, dragging his right leg a little when he walked — the lasting consequence of a dramatic Interior Event many years earlier, which had also damaged his memory, so that while happenings in the distant past remained vivid, his remembrances of the middle period of his life had become hit-and-miss, with large hiatuses and other gaps which had been filled up, as if by a careless builder in a hurry, with false memories created by things he might have seen on TV. Other than that, he seemed in good enough shape for a man of his years. He was a tall, one might even say an elongated, man, of the sort one encounters in the gaunt paintings of El Greco and the narrow sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, and although such men are (for the most part) of a melancholy disposition, he was blessed with a cheerful smile and the charming manner of a gentleman of the old school, both valuable assets for a commercial traveler, which, in these his golden years, he became for a lengthy time. In addition, his name itself was cheerful: It was Smile. Mr Ismail Smile, Sales Executive, Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc., Atlanta, GA, it said on his business card. As a salesman he had always been proud that his name was the same as the name of the corporation whose representative he was. |
| 57 |
The family name. It lent him a certain gravitas, or so he believed. This was not, however, the name by which he chose to be known during his last, most foolish adventure. (The unusual surname Smile, by the by, was the Americanized version of Ismail, so the old traveling salesman was really Mr. Ismail Ismail, or, alternatively, Mr. Smile Smile. He was a brown man in America longing for a brown woman, but he did not see his story in racial terms. He had become, one might say, detached from his skin. This was one of the many things his quest would put in question, and change.) The more he thought about the woman he professed to love, the clearer it became to him that so magnificent a personage would not simply keel over with joy at the first declaration of amour fou from a total stranger. (He wasn't as crazy as that.) Therefore it would be necessary for him to prove himself worthy of her, and the provision of such proofs would henceforth be his only concern. Yes! He would amply demonstrate his worth! It would be necessary, as he began his quest, to keep the object of his affections fully informed of his doings, and so he proposed to begin a correspondence with her, a sequence of letters which would reveal his sincerity, the depth of his affections, and the lengths to which he was ready to go to gain her hand. It was at this point in his reflections that a kind of shyness overtook him. Were he to reveal to her how humble his station in life truly was, she might toss his letter in the trash with a pretty laugh and be done with him forever. |
| 58 |
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! |
| 59 |
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. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl. |
| 60 |
A beauty might fall asleep and, when kissed, wake up speaking a different language and in that new language reveal a completely altered character. A flood might drown your city. A tornado might carry your house to a faraway land where, upon landing, it would squash a witch. Criminals could become kings and kings be unmasked as criminals. A man might discover that the woman he lived with was his father's illegitimate child. A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could become presidents. The water might run out. A woman might bear a baby who was found to be a revenant god. Words could lose their meanings and acquire new ones. The world might end, as at least one prominent scientist-entrepreneur had begun repeatedly to predict. An evil scent would hang over the ending. And a TV star might miraculously return the love of a foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic triumph which would redeem a long, small life, bestowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty. Quichotte's great decision was made at the Red Roof Inn in Gallup, New Mexico (pop. 21,678). The traveling salesman looked with desire and envy upon Gallup's historic El Rancho Hotel, which in the heyday of the Western had hosted many of the movie stars filming in the area, from John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart to Katharine Hepburn and Mae West. The El Rancho was out of his price range, and so he drove by it to the humbler Red Roof, which suited him just fine. |
| 61 |
He preferred places with at least some premium cable channels, but if none were available he was happy with the ordinary network fare. But on this particular morning he had no time for the local weatherman and his rescue pets. He wanted to talk to his friends about love, and the lover's quest on which he was about to embark. The truth was that he had almost no friends anymore. There was his wealthy cousin, employer, and patron, Dr. R. K. Smile, and there was Dr. Smile's wife, Happy, neither of whom he spent any time with, and there were front-desk clerks at some of the motels he regularly frequented. There were a few individuals scattered across the country and the globe who might still harbor feelings similar to friendship toward him. There was, above all, one woman in New York City (she called herself the Human Trampoline) who might once again smile upon him, if he was lucky, and if she accepted his apologies. (He knew, or thought he knew, that apologies were due, but he could only partly remember why, and at times he thought that perhaps his damaged memory had got things upside down and it was she who needed to apologize to him.) But he had no social group, no cohort, no posse, no real pals, having long ago abandoned the social whirl. On his Facebook page he had "friended" or "been friended by" a small and dwindling group of commercial travelers like himself, as well as an assortment of lonelyhearts, braggarts, exhibitionists, and salacious ladies behaving as erotically as the social medium's somewhat puritanical rules allowed. |
| 62 |
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. |
| 63 |
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. 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. |
| 64 |
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. He strongly resembled the boy in the photographs Quichotte had saved of his own childhood far away across the world. In one of those pictures, Quichotte aged nine or ten was seen in a white kurta-pajama wearing his father's sunglasses. In another an older Quichotte, about the same age as the apparition, had a faint mustache on his upper lip and was standing in a garden with his promiscuous Alsatian bitch. Quichotte when young had been a little short, a little chubby compared to other boys his age. Then, in late adolescence, as if an invisible divine hand had grabbed him and squeezed him in the middle like a tube of toothpaste, he shot up to his present height and became as skinny as a shadow. This monochrome boy was evidently at the post-toothpaste-tube-squeezing phase, as long and narrow a fellow as his father, and he was wearing the sunglasses Quichotte had worn all those years ago. He was not wearing a kurta-pajama, however, but was dressed like a good all-American boy, in a checked lumberjack shirt and denim jeans with turn-ups. |
| 65 |
Instead he had written his commonplace fictions of the secret world, disguised as someone else. He now saw that this had been a way of avoiding the story that revealed itself to him in the mirror every day, even if only in the corner of his eye. His next thought was even more alarming: To make sense of the life of the strange man whose latter days he was setting out to chronicle, he would have to reveal himself alongside his subject, for the tale and the teller were yoked together by race, place, generation, and circumstance. Perhaps this bizarre story was a metamorphosed version of his own. Quichotte himself might say, if he were aware of Brother (which was impossible, naturally), that in fact the writer's tale was the altered version of his history, rather than the other way around, and might have argued that his "imaginary" life added up to the more authentic narrative of the two. So, in brief: They were both Indian-American men, one real, one fictional, both born long ago in what was then Bombay, in neighboring apartment blocks, both real. Their parents would have known each other (except that one set of parents was imaginary), and would perhaps have played golf and badminton together at the Willingdon Club and sipped sunset cocktails at the Bombay Gym (both real-world locations). They were about the same age, at which almost everyone is an orphan, and their generation, having made a royal mess of the planet, was on its way out. They both suffered from physical complaints: Brother's aching back, Quichotte's dragging leg. |
| 66 |
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. |
| 67 |
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. |
| 68 |
And arrived at a similar building (also real) named Noor Ville, the city of light, and inside it on an upper floor a long-balconied apartment filled with soft cushions, sharp cactus plants, and the unmistakable yodelings of the famous golden-voiced sisters Lata and Asha singing the latest hit songs from the movies on the Binaca Geetmala, the weekend chart show sponsored by a toothpaste brand, emanating every Sunday from the walnut-marquetry Art Deco Telefunken radiogram in the living room. And in the middle of the living room's large Persian rug, martini glasses in their hands, here were his Ma and Pa, in backwards slow motion, dancing. (That Breach Candy was a tiny, lost world, long gone, preserved in the amber of memory like a prehistoric insect. Or: a miniature universe, the past captured under a glass dome, like a tropical snow globe without snow, and in it the tiny people of the past leading their microscopic lives. If the glass broke and they escaped into the great world beyond their boundary, how terrified they would be of the giants all around them, as terrified as he had been when he encountered the titans of his adult world! Yet, minute as they were, the whole future flowed from them. The little tropical snow globe without snow was the birthplace of everything Brother had been and done.) His parents' favorite LP was Sinatra's Songs for Swingin' Lovers! Ma, always more up-to-the-minute than her husband, liked some of the quiffed Americans. Ricky Nelson. Bobby Darin. But not only the white boys. |
| 69 |
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. |
| 70 |
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. And, it being Bombay, also movie people, inevitably. Talent, talent everywhere, lubricated by whisky-sodas and lust. |
| 71 |
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. |
| 72 |
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. 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. |
| 73 |
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. 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. |
| 74 |
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! |
| 75 |
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. |
| 76 |
Both the law and liberty were everywhere under attack. The thuggish deterioration of Indian society both allowed her to believe ever more fervently that she no longer wanted anything to do with that increasingly horrible country, and hurt more deeply than she cared to admit. The continuing American convulsion disgusted her, and the vulnerability of immigrants to abuse and worse was a growing part of her daily agenda here at home. On a bad (three-martini) day she came close to despair, telling herself that after all these years she was obliged to admit that she had misunderstood the country of which she was now a citizen and which she thought of as her country. She had deeply believed it to be a reasonable place, broad-minded, easygoing, and good to live in, and now she discovered that it was also — or not also, but in fact — narrow-minded, delusional, and, for people lacking the great virtue of acceptable skin color, not comfortable to live in at all. When she entered this kind of mood her husband the judge — the High Court judge Godfrey Simons — was a pillar of strength. Here he was now, coming down the stairs from the upper floor, where he had been getting ready to greet their guests. He was wearing the floor-length Vivienne Westwood gown, the pearls, and the new high heels tonight. It was a big night for his wife and he wanted to look his best for her. She applauded him softly as he descended. "You look resplendent, Jack," she told him. "Dignified, glamorous. And the shoes!" "Thank you, Jack," said the judge. |
| 77 |
And Shakespeare himself might have played Malvolio. Four hundred years later Sister had been present in the great hall when a prominent theater company restaged scenes from that original production as the centerpiece of a fundraising gala. She had been seated at a table with various luminaries of the West End stage and, on her right, a loud, fleshy Ukrainian sub-oligarch who claimed to love Shakespeare ("Have you seen Innokenti Smoktunovsky in Russian film Gamlet? No? Disappointing!"), did not understand the play ("But there are not twelve nights in this story! Disappointing!"), disapproved of all the cross-dressing, making a series of transphobic remarks ("Men instead of women! Disappointing!"), and thoroughly ruined her evening. The next day she called her host, the theater company's financial director, to thank him, a little coolly, for the invitation. "No, thank you," he said. "Why thank me?" "Because this morning the disappointing person you talked to all evening wrote us a check for nine hundred thousand pounds." She had been younger then and people told her she was beautiful, though she had never been convinced of that. Anyway, this had become a favorite anecdote of hers, and here she was telling it to the gathering of grandees who had assembled to offer her a seat on the crossbenches of the House of Lords and, shortly thereafter, the job of speaker in the British upper house. She would be only the second woman to be so chosen. It was if she had ascended Everest alone and without oxygen. |
| 78 |
A beautiful lady who cares for you is the best thing in such cases. She's like a super gorgeous no-commitment version of their wives." The Little King, a. k. a. Little Big Hands, liked this explanation. "If there are more like her out there," he told his sales chief, "just get them all." But the beauty of the sales force — gorgeous women sent to visit male pain management physicians, Clint Eastwood hunks of men sent to visit the female ones — wasn't enough, by itself, to explain the huge numbers of the sales. Beauty allied to drive and aggression: still not enough. When you wanted to pitch a restricted drug to board-certified oncologists, you needed to add a raft of additional techniques. Incentives: that was a better word than techniques. A group of additional incentives. It was Dr. R. K. Smile himself who thought up the speakers' bureau. Actually, one part of the idea wasn't original. The idea of recruiting big-name doctors to recommend a particular medication to other doctors was an old one. Word of mouth was always recognized as the most effective marketing device. But if you wanted to go off-label, hmm. That was borderline. Maybe across-the-borderline, because going off-label meant getting doctors to prescribe a drug for conditions other than the ones stated on the label, for which the drug was intended. Or, of course, for no conditions at all, turning a blind eye to recreational use, or, more seriously, to addiction. Another, more colloquial term for going off-label might be becoming a drug dealer. |
| 79 |
I guess the answer is, I know what he knows. If I listen inside myself I hear his book learning and all his favorite TV shows also — I know them all as if I watched them myself. And if I look I can see his memories as if they were mine, memories of falling out of a tree as a little boy and needing stitches in his head, memories of kissing an Australian girl when he was nine years old and cutting his tongue on the braces on her teeth, memories of bicycle accidents and school detentions and his mother's cooking. All his memories planted in my head. 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? |
| 80 |
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? |
| 81 |
Maxim, Sports Illustrated swimwear edition, these are my idea of books. This is what I check to keep in touch with what's going on. Even those I haven't checked so many of, my period on the planet being so far of brief duration. But he has the whole big-word library in his head — and what does he do with it? Watches reruns of old sci-fi movies about close encounters and the end of the world. And Special Victims Unit, he would be in love with Mariska Hargitay a. k. a. Olivia Benson if he wasn't already crazy smitten with Miss Salma R, America's Oprah 2.0, specially tooled for the younger demographic. Regarding Mariska, I see here a gateway to the dark material. On that Pinterest page of his memory there's a comment pinned. His mother passed when he was three years old, just like Mariska when her mom Jayne Mansfield died. But not in a horrible car accident. Cancer is all. I can say things like that, it was only cancer, because being a figment such as I am I assume I'm immune to sickness. Therefore I snap my fingers at cancer. I bite my thumb at it. Still, tough for Mariska age three and Jayne age thirty-four. On U. S. Highway 90 just west of the Rigolets Bridge, and future-Olivia was even in the fucking car. That's tough. I see that. And for him too. He was in the hospital room just like future-Olivia in the back seat of the car. Or not just like. But similar. When his mother died he was holding her hand. Three years old and the moment she passed he dropped that hand and ran out of the room crying, That's not her. |
| 82 |
I see him. He's a boy on a hill in Bombay. What do I know about this city? Less than nothing except what he sees. His mother's death, his father the painter weeping, himself stunned into dry-eyed silence. And then he loses his home as well as his mother, there's no more Bombay, the painter father can't bear to be home anymore, he goes west, so now there's Paris. 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. |
| 83 |
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. |
| 84 |
He's a computer engineer flying away from a Tibetan monastery after installing the supercomputer that will count the nine billion names of God, after which, they say, the universe will have fulfilled its purpose and will cease to exist. He's looking out of the window of the plane, knowing that the supercomputer has finished counting, and he sees that one by one, very quietly, the stars are going out. He mentions these two stories a lot, the tiny drowning aliens and the nine billion names. And when he mentions the second one he also mentions the following, he mentions it every time: that the purpose of the universe might not be the nine billion names. It might be the creation of a single perfect love, or, in plain language, the forthcoming happy union between himself and Miss Salma R. So what will happen in the unlikely event of his quest ending in success? I asked him this straight out. Does he think the world will come to an end? Obviously, he says. One by one, very quietly, the stars will start going out. I see him. Above all he's BilboFrodo, eleventy-one today, no wonder he's crazy for journeying. The Road goes ever on and on. I see him invisible, slipping the Ring on his finger. Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Invisibility is a thing he dearly wishes for. He wants to disappear. Here too is the origin of his desire to follow a wandering star. I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel. This is what he longs for. |
| 85 |
And he, the humiliated son, jumped up a moment later and began to shout. He remembers every word he said, I can hear them echoing in my ears now, deafening me, breaking forever what remained of the tie between father and son. I see him. As a son he broke the relationship with his father and so now as a father he wants to build a relationship with his son. Thus, I turn out to be the after-effect of that long-gone day, the consequence of his father's lechery. After which his father never spoke to him again, nor did he, Daddy Q, try to mend fences. He graduated with a fine degree but his father did not attend his graduation. And at some point after that he put his feet on the road and went a-wandering and so began his long decline and in the end there was the job with Smile Pharmaceuticals and then the loss of that job and the arrival of myself and bingo, we're up to date. Almost, but not quite. There's a whole area of his memory I can't access. I feel pain there, both received and inflicted. There's a lot in there, maybe everything that matters, maybe the whole point of him is locked away in that space. It makes him, what's the word. An enigma. In here is where the darkness has been cornered, where the codes that break the code are located. I want to get inside there. No I don't. Yes I do. At some point the painter father had died. There was no deathbed reconciliation. Sad story. Lost his mother, his home, his dignity, his father, his sense of having a goal in life. But now he has goals once more, insane as they are. |
| 86 |
She tried burning them in her microwave. She tried soaking them in acetone, baking them, freezing them. It was frustrating. She had turned to Perc30s and Roxies, which were thirty milligrams each of pure oxycodone (you could get OxyContin tablets containing up to eighty milligrams, so she needed larger quantities of these lower-dosage painkillers). Lately there had also been Opana and other, similar versions of oxymorphone. As she said, she had become an expert. None of the replacements were as satisfying as the old Oxys. Why did the world have to change? She needed to find a new solution. There were people who had been driven to heroin by the change in the Oxy tablets, but heroin scared her. The word "heroin" scared her. She wouldn't go there. The things she had now were workable, they would do, but the old stuff was the best. Take me away, she thought when she was alone in her bed at night and the painkillers were easing her spirit's pain, to those old Cotton fields back home. When she told her closest people she was having electroconvulsive shock treatment, they reacted badly. You have to stop, they said. Electricity? You can't do that to yourself, it's like torture. I'm not conscious when they do it, she explained. This isn't mad scientist stuff, it's medicine. But in a way it did feel like the stuff of fantasy. After the sessions she felt clearer, more in control, and kept seeing clear images of tiny evil gremlins in her brain being electrocuted by the voltage, screaming and tossing as they dissolved into puffs of smoke. |
| 87 |
"I'm auditioning right now, and if I could just remember why I'm standing in front of a crowd of strangers, I could put my hand on my heart — if I could remember where my heart is — and tell you the results are perfect, and I could remember what the results are." Privately, she knew that her condition wasn't particularly funny. She had begun to suffer from acute levels of anxiety and at such times she took refuge in a suite at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Columbus Circle and made a phone call to Anderson Thayer. "Come here, Rumpelstiltskin," she said, and he came, and she lay in his arms, wondering if this was the right time to fire him, or maybe she'd wait until tomorrow. If she fired him now he'd get angry, and when he got angry he might take hold of his left foot and rip himself in two, right up the middle. He was the man who knew too much. He had helped her cover up a scandal that could have derailed her career. There had been a third man after the two husbands. This man — she never used his real name, not even in the most private moments, agreeing always to call him by the fake name he told her he preferred, "Gary Reynolds" — was a political lobbyist and covert operator, an improbable partner for her, a man who claimed to have undertaken black ops projects for successive Republican administrations and to have destabilized and even overthrown three separate governments in Africa. "Gary Reynolds" was like the world of her old TV series come to life. Maybe that was why she fell for him, in spite of his politics. |
| 88 |
He was a glamorous, dangerous, exciting fiction become fact. She didn't even care that he told her he "identified as promiscuous." She didn't need him around every day, but when he showed up, he was real fun. The Mandarin Oriental suite was their pleasure dome. Yosemite Sam knew about his rival, and Salma could see it irked him, but he said nothing and did his job. Then one night she went to the hotel to meet "Gary," who had texted her to say he was already there waiting for her, and when she got there he was in bed, naked, and really very dead, indisputably dead, the most dead a dead person could be. On this occasion the suite was booked in his fake name, as it always was for their assignations, backed up by a "Gary Reynolds" credit card, but there were members of staff who recognized her, who knew she was the one who came to see him there. She stayed calm, held it together, just about, and called Anderson Thayer. Rumpelstiltskin, I need you. He came over and she kissed him, once, properly. I need you to fix this, she said. Don't tell me how, just fix it so it stays fixed. I don't want to know about it. I just want it done. Do this for me. He fixed it. Nothing connecting Salma to the death at the Mandarin ever became public. "Gary Reynolds" was buried at Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens beneath a stone bearing his real name, which there is no need to record here, and at once it was as if he had been erased from history. She began to feel a great sense of relief. The scandal had passed her by, like the thunderstorms that skirted Manhattan and did their worst to New Jersey. |
| 89 |
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. She wanted love. Instead, she had Anderson Thayer. When she faced the emptiness of her life she knew that the world would have no sympathy for the way she felt. She was a privileged woman complaining about small things. A woman whose life was lived on the surface, who had chosen superficiality, had no right to complain about the absence of depth. Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, "the cradle rocks above an abyss," and the one we were all "heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)." She was suffering from some sort of existential panic. She needed to put it away. But on the days after the electricity, as the confusion faded and her memory returned, she felt the presence of gaps. There were missing days, missing pages in the book of life. She reached back for childhood, for her mother, for India, and felt the dear remembrances of things past slipping through her fingers like sand. I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. |
| 90 |
If I'm real, I can really die, right? I'm leaning now against the side of the Cruze in a gas station drinking a Coke, wiping the cold sweat of passenger terror off of my forehead, and thinking about this Real thing, i. e., the question of being real, and I'm getting the uncomfortable feeling that the question's about to be answered thanks to an imminent fatal smashup on the road. I have to add that if, after I turn into roadkill and float up through the twisted metal, I find a God up there on the judgment seat, if that turns out to be what's real, clouds, pearly gates, flights of angels, all that jazz, it's going to be a shock. But I'm not wanting to get into a discussion about Paradise today. For now I just want to feel safe in the back seat of the car. That's the only seat on my mind. Slow down, I tell him, watch the road. I even yell at him, but he just waves a hand in the air. I've been driving for a living, he tells me. I've been doing this since before you were born. Yeah, I tell him, but that wasn't so long ago, was it. Please do not forget, I was literally born yesterday. Well, literally, a little before yesterday, but you get my point. I'm a lot younger than I look, because I'm growing up fast. Also my head is full of him, his version of everything, so it's hard for me to stand outside and see him for what he is. Even now, after I Pinocchioed myself into flesh and blood, I can't see myself as a being that's totally apart from him. I'm still more a-part-of than apart-from, see. |
| 91 |
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. |
| 92 |
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?... That's my pretty-woman dream-balloon right there but his behavior is bursting it. After the confrontation at Lake Capote it's like the balance of his mind got disturbed. |
| 93 |
Zap. Normal is Upside-Down Land. Our old friends are our enemies now and our old enemy is our pal. Zap, zap. Men and men, women and women in love. The purple mountains' majesty. A man with an oil painting of himself with Jesus hanging in his living room. Dead schoolkids. Hurricanes. Beauty. Lies. Zap, zap, zap. "Normal doesn't feel so normal to me," I tell him. "It's normal to feel that way," he replies. This is what I get instead of fatherly wisdom. Meanwhile, things fall apart as well as people. Countries fall apart as well as their citizens. A zillion channels and nothing to hold them together. Garbage out there, and great stuff out there, too, and they both coexist at the same level of reality, both give off the same air of authority. How's a young person supposed to tell them apart? How to discriminate? Every show on every network tells you the same thing: based upon a true story. But that's not true either. The true story is there's no true story anymore. There's no true anymore that anyone can agree on. There's a headache beginning in here. Boom! Here it is. Ow. What a time for me to arrive. Something is going wrong, even I can tell that. Something's badly off, not only with him, but also with the world outside the motel room. Some error in space and time. The motel room itself is unchanging wherever we are, whatever the name on the illuminated sign above the forecourt. Inside the room things are pretty constant. Twin beds, TV, pizza delivery, floral-print curtains. In the bathroom plastic cups wrapped in plastic bags. |
| 94 |
One's goal is the shedding of mental obstacles that prevent one from being flooded with the glorious universal, Love as Being. It is a goal, therefore, that requires of us the absolute and irreversible abandonment of reason, for love is without reason, above it and beyond it; it comes without a rational explanation and lives on when there is no reason for it to survive." It was morning in the Billy Diner, "Tulsa's go-to for breakfast," and he had ordered green eggs and ham. Sancho got involved with a big plate of huevos rancheros. They looked ordinary, an older guy and his son or maybe even grandson, eating an unsurprising morning meal, but they were attracting attention. It was as if, Sancho thought, that white lady's pointing finger had put the mark of Cain on them both, and now wherever they went there would be suspicion and hostility. Until this point in his brief life he had not thought of himself as Other, as worthy of disapproval simply by virtue of being who he was. Well, of course, in reality, he was totally Other, a supernatural entity plucked out of nowhere by Quichotte's desire and the grace of the cosmos, he was as Other as it was possible to be, but that wasn't the Other these people were disapproving of, the Other toward whom the white lady had pointed that accusing finger. He was trying to imagine himself into being a regular young human guy in a lumberjack shirt and blue jeans and boots, a dude who was discovering that he liked the music of Justin Timberlake, Bon Jovi, John Mellencamp, and Willie Nelson. |
| 95 |
Reality was a white lady at Lake Capote, it was what came out of the angry mouths he'd seen at a diner in Oklahoma, it was gunshots in Kansas, two wounded, one dead, a community shaken and in mourning, a beautiful young woman slamming a door in his face. Was that reality likely to dissolve and disappear? Could it really be dismissed as a sham? The Thayers were early Pilgrims, check. Thomas and Richard Thayer, brothers, classified among the Pilgrim Fathers, check. Their descendants married into the Mayflower family descended from John Alden, check. — Regarding the Mayflower itself, however? Were their names on that eminent list? They were aboard, right? — Um, not actually on the Mayflower, no. — Oh. How about on the Fortune, the second ship to make the crossing? — Ah... no, not on the Fortune, either. But they were early settlers. Early was good. Early was impressive. Words had a life of their own, Anderson Thayer believed, they developed meanings that only pedants would argue with, and Mayflower was — at least for him — by now pretty much synonymous with early. Little discrepancies did not make big differences. Small departures from the truth did not add up to lies. Therefore, Anderson Thayer saw no need to correct others when they believed his people to have come over on the fabled ship. He saw no need to correct himself. Small was not big. It was a principle he carried over into other parts of his life. He was a small man, and understood that this was not the same as being a big one. |
| 96 |
Still, she probably would not like the studio bosses to see the footage; even though they had heard all her stories, in these sensitive times the evidence of their eyes might be too much for them to take, even if the evidence of their ears could be set aside; so the material was not without value. So he was disloyal in little things, but loyal in the big ones: for he was indeed her protector, her guardian, he would do anything for her, he would clean up her messes, and — again, at least in his own opinion — he truly loved her. She was the giant and he the pygmy and he looked up to her, and adored. He was a student of the world of stardom, and of peripheral figures like himself who modestly played consort to the great. He paid particular attention to young men who were attracted, and attractive, to older women, fading beauties, falling stars. Demi and Ashton, of course, Madonna and that dancer guy, Cher and Tom Cruise, and the present-day gold medalist of this particular sport, the young nightclub king Omar Vitale. Omar and Demi, Omar and Heidi Klum, Omar and Elle "the Body" Macpherson. Respect, Anderson Thayer thought. However, his great role model, only recently deceased, was from the golden age. His name was Robert Wolders and he was a Dutch actor, mainly on TV although he had supporting roles in Beau Geste and Tobruk. His most substantial TV role had been in the cowboy series Laredo in the mid-sixties. But as the real-life leading man to a series of great stars, Wolders had no equal. |
| 97 |
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. |
| 98 |
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. The ayah came into the room. |
| 99 |
The lollipops are addictive. Do not have more than one hundred and twenty lollipops a month. Enjoy. After Anderson Thayer had left for the night (no room for him in her bed that evening, honey, she had a sweeter lover to entertain), she prepared for her first encounter with one of the juiced popsicles as if Casanova himself were about to enter her boudoir. She bathed, she shaved, she perfumed herself, she used lotion that her skin might not be ashy, she wove a single braid into her hair and let the rest flow down over her shoulders, and lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right, she took it in her hands, and, taking it, remembered whence those words came that had lollipopped unbidden into her thoughts. "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott. Was she preparing to die, then? To succumb to the curse of her family and follow her forebears to a self-willed end? No, she told herself firmly, she most certainly was not. She could handle this. She was by no means a user-not-accustomed etc. But she would take it slow. Start at the bottom of the ladder. Sixteen hundred micrograms of fentanyl were equivalent to 160 milligrams of morphine. That was a big hit and the sublingual version would hit even harder. Start with two hundred micrograms. Walk before you can run, run before you can fly. These days the only way to experience joy was through chemistry. It was necessary first to unplug from the Connectivity and then, as the world faded away, to put euphoria into your mouth and suck on it. |
| 100 |
"It makes me want to remind you that you work for me." So after a pleasant meeting they had parted on something less than the best of terms. But he was used to her hissy fits. He knew they didn't last and the gratitude she had expressed moments earlier represented her real feelings. He knew it would be business as usual tomorrow. Sometimes he felt as if he were her parent and she his brilliant, willful child. Sometimes he felt big and she felt small. He also knew that this attitude of his could be read as condescension and irritated her more than anything else, so he was careful not to let it show on his face. "I'll see you in the morning," he said. And now rising-sinking toward sleepy euphoria in her floating bed, she imagined him, Quichotte, beside her as the cosmos dissolved and they moved together into the beyond, the Timeless, where past and present and future all existed simultaneously, the time in which God lived, perhaps, seeing all things, as now they too would see all things, like gods, immortal, free. She looked toward him and saw her grandfather's face. She felt neither fear nor anger, neither bitterness nor disgust. She saw only an old man melting into dust, into light. In this moment, engulfed in chemical happiness, she found it easy, even natural, to forgive. Was that what Quichotte, purifying himself, was coming toward her to give her? Was he the one who would heal the wounds? These questions were too big to be considered under the influence of the China White. |
| 101 |
"Mine was a generation when frequent sexual intercourse was thought of as freedom, and like all the men of my time, I believed in that freedom with all my lustful heart." Now at last he spoke about his old life. The "girls" began to blur together in Sancho's thoughts. He noticed some common elements to the stories. The girls almost always left Quichotte after a short time, and they almost all had bland nondescript Western names, and Quichotte did not specify the cities in which he had known them or the languages they spoke or their religious affiliations or anything that would bring them to life as human beings. It was almost as if he hadn't known them very well. It was almost as if... and then he understood that they were all precursors of Miss Salma R, all shadows in his life as she was a shadow, people not known but loved from a distance. Maybe they were real people glimpsed across a room or in a magazine. Maybe they were dreams. Maybe they were all characters in TV shows. Or: were they all women he had pursued slash stalked? Or worse? Who was Quichotte anyway? There was one woman about whom Quichotte spoke differently. This was the lady in New York to whom he affectionately referred as the Human Trampoline. She didn't appear to be a past romantic liaison, but it sounded as if she did actually exist, and Quichotte was plainly uncertain of his welcome. "We will definitely look her up," he told Sancho, "and if she wishes to see us, that will be delightful for us both." He didn't use her real name or provide any further details. |
| 102 |
JonEsco pointing at them and laughing an insane laugh, and this is it, Sancho thought, looks like it all ends right here, and then a sort of cloud or fog descended suddenly over the scene, and when it dispersed the battle of Berenger had vanished, as had Berenger itself, and they were back in the Cruze turning off the turnpike, and Quichotte was saying slash had just said that "we ought to be fresh and perky for our entrance into the great city where Destiny lies." The fog dispersed quickly and there was a sign pointing to the town of Weehawken, New Jersey (pop. 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. |
| 103 |
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. |
| 104 |
"I believe there's a song about that." "I must confess to you," Quichotte said, "that the statement I have made was not an easy statement for me to make. For much of my life I have been, one could say, a disconnected man, keeping my own counsel, living with the glowing company of my TV friends, but with little real human companionship. Then love came to town and everything changed. Love brought me to town and here I stand, therefore, surrounded by the million million connections between this one and that one, between near and far, between this language and that language, between everything that men are and everything else that they are, and I see that the Way requires me to reconnect with the great thronging crowd of life, to its multiplicity, and beyond its many disharmonies, to its deeper harmonies. It is not easy after so long and I must ask for your understanding. Just as you must take your slow steps toward your Beloved, so I must — gingerly, with great nervousness — make my tentative moves back into human company. Entering New York, I feel like a Catholic entering a confessional booth. Much that has long remained unsaid must now, in all probability, be said. I must circle slowly toward this goal. It may take a little time." "What is it that's unsaid that must be said?" Sancho was curious. "All in good time," Quichotte replied. In the days that followed, Quichotte was pensive and said relatively little, leaving Sancho to wander the city streets alone while he stayed in the hotel room watching TV. |
| 105 |
He did not, for example, go to stand outside Miss Salma R's apartment building, or outside her offices slash studio, in the hope of glimpsing the woman whose heart he had set out to win. "There is much to be done before I am worthy of her presence," he told Sancho, and then, seemingly, did nothing. Sancho approached the city methodically, setting himself the task of walking around a different neighborhood each day. And there were moments when Quichotte shook off his apparent torpor and came out as well. It turned out that in the course of their travels he had taken the time to arrange a program of activities to ease himself and Sancho into city life, obtaining audience tickets for 50 Central, The $100,000 Pyramid, The Chew, The Dr. Oz Show, and Good Morning America, and on these outings into the world he knew best he seemed more like his usual self. But wasn't he supposed to have given up his addictions in the fourth valley, as he called it? Was he backsliding? Would that delay things? Sancho didn't care about the valleys and by now strongly suspected that they were to be numbered among Quichotte's delusions that had no meaning or effect in the real world, so that it made no difference whether he played by his own rules or not. But when, Sancho wondered, would the old man make his move? And how? "There's someone I have to see before this goes any further," Quichotte said at breakfast, after one week had passed. "Nothing can happen until this matter has been straightened out. The Path will remain closed." "Is it a woman?" Sancho asked. |
| 106 |
Well, excuse me for misunderstanding. I'd excuse her for misunderstanding too. But he's telling me about her now and she sounds like a goddamn saint. Made a stack of money on Wall Street when she was still in her twenties, a high stack, higher than the jumbo stack of pancakes in the diner down the street, if you take my meaning: I mean high... and then one day she said, this is not the life I need, and walked out past the charging bull and never worked for the finance bros again. Now she's running her own organization, facing toward India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, creating a second micro-banking operation alongside Grameen Bank, generating global funding to offer small loans to women in South Asia trying to start up their own enterprises, beauty parlors, food catering, child daycare centers; also fighting sex trafficking, campaigning against sexual violence toward women in India, you get the idea. A noble, selfless individual, giving her life to the betterment of others. A good woman of this type is a kind of trampoline. People bounce on her and fly. And if they fall they bounce on her again and rise again. She doesn't seek flight for herself but she spreads herself wide and people use her to climb as high as they can go. All this, he's telling me, and I go, okay, great, but (a) what happened between you and (b) what's she really like? I mean, without the halo? He answers the second question first, to keep me hanging on, drawing it out, so annoying. Well, he hasn't seen her for a long time, he says, so the picture in his mind must be horribly out of date. |
| 107 |
And then within twenty-four hours he'll step on some invisible land mine and the monster will come out of her, and she'll yell at him, scream abuse at him, and tell him to get out and never darken her doorstep again, and he'll end up broken into pieces in the gutter outside her building. He's afraid of her half-sisterly half-love. She's a cancer survivor, he did hear that, breast cancer, around ten years ago, double mastectomy, looks like she beat it, she has been in full remission for a long time. He's frightened of seeing the marks of her life on her face and of her seeing the marks of his life on his. After their father died they were briefly close. She called him Smile-Smile, he called her H. T. or Trampoline. They shared an interest in good food and they went out dining together. But there would be fights. At the end of all the warmth and laughter something he said, some innuendo she thought she heard in his voice, something that hadn't been there at all, would get her goat and she would start shouting. In public places, yes. It shocked him and made him retreat. So there were fewer dinners together, and then none. And at one of them he had done the unforgivable thing. Did you hit her? I asked him. Is that it? You hit her across the face with an open hand and a trickle of blood came down from her ear, and she spent the rest of her life campaigning against violent men? No. The memory came out of him with difficulty. The chronology was a particular problem. There were parts of their story that were lost to him now. |
| 108 |
He had accused her of having swindled him out of his inheritance. That was it. She had been the one dealing with lawyers on probate issues after their father's death, and he told her he knew that she had taken far more than her share. He went further and accused her of falsifying or even forging the will. He threatened her with public denunciation, a press conference. What he couldn't explain, because of the holes in his memory which were like rifts in the universe, areas of nonexistence in the middle of existence, was why he had done it, and he had done it, he thought he remembered, years after the event. She had retaliated against his threats, sending him a lawyer's letter saying that he should be in no doubt that she would do everything in her power to defend her good name. She pointed out that he had signed off on their father's will, and there were legal documents in the public record which proved his acceptance of it. His accusation was a major defamation, and if he made it public she would sue him for every penny he possessed. It was a letter designed to scare him into silence and it succeeded. They stopped talking and since then years had passed and both of them had gone through many changes: her sainthood, his increasingly isolated personality, her public persona, his private slide toward what he's become, which I prefer not to put into words right now. But whoa, this is what I said to him. Inheritance? You have an actual inheritance? Yes. All this time, you've actually had — what — a lot of money in the bank? |
| 109 |
He put twenty-dollar bills in Sancho's pocket and sent him to walk the streets alone. "It's not so warm anymore," he told his son. "Here. Take my coat." Once the youth had left, Quichotte began channel hopping. What caught his attention on this occasion was not his typically favored fare, but an interview with the celebrated American scientist, entrepreneur, and billionaire of Indian origin Evel Cent. The name Evel Cent was itself an invention, perhaps derived, Quichotte surmised, from the more Indian-sounding Awwal Sant, or something similar. Slick-haired, slender, and underslept, this reinvented man looked every inch like a Bollywood movie star moving from handsome youth into a slightly ragged middle age, and spoke in fast spiky riffs as if hopped up on methedrine, unapologetically using a mixture of the difficult modern vocabulary of high technology and the lingo of modern dystopian fantasy, as if to say, I don't care if you understand me or not, but I know how to get your attention if I choose to do so. Evel perhaps came from the great daredevil Knievel, and Cent was money, and there was the meaning of his name staring everyone in the face. Although the sound of the name gave off a different odor. Evel Cent, a bad stink. To some people that was what he was, an unpleasant self-promoting capitalist fart, but to others, mostly young others, he seemed like a kind of prophet, and here he was on television, doing a prophet's work while also justifying the opinions of those who thought him a phony egotist skunk. |
| 110 |
Way back when we were on the road I thought I might betray him by stealing his beloved Salma from him. I don't care about that now. The betrayal I need is my freedom. He said none of this aloud, but it bubbled in him like a stew. Quichotte, by contrast, was full of self-reproach. Sancho's injuries had plunged the older man into a condition of profound doubt, in which he questioned everything — how he had led his life, and even the hunger for a child that had brought Sancho into being. He had been something close to homeless for a very long time, living out of the trunk of his car with pit stops in cheap motels... what business did such a person have bringing a child into the world? He felt he should apologize to Sancho, but knew that if he did so Sancho would hear it wrongly, would think his father was wishing that he had never been born. In this way, father caring for son, son receiving his father's ministrations, they grew further and further apart, and the great quest upon which Quichotte had embarked seemed to recede into the distance. Then, in the middle of the night, while the sex shrieks of his neighbors kept him awake, Quichotte arrived at a moment of complete clarity. Enough of these orgasmic motels! His first and only duty was to provide a better life for his child. He would approach his sister, heal that rift, and together they could provide Sancho with the stable family environment he needed. This was how everything was connected. This was the only way the harmony and peace of the fifth valley could be achieved. |
| 111 |
Son was living with his American mother, Ex-Wife (she was another story Brother didn't care to revisit, another story whose new chapters he knew nothing about) up in the high nosebleed latitudes of the Upper East Side. She was happily remarried, that was a fact, and another fact was that he was the one who had introduced her to her Chinese-American husband, who had originally been Brother's friend but was his friend no longer, and that was quite a fact, and the new Chinese-American husband was rich and successful and kind of a big man in the city, and that also was quite something. Son developed a bad case of divided loyalties. To see his real father doing, it had to be admitted, not so well, while his new stepfather went in for expensive automobiles and owned a horse farm upstate, this made the boy feel ashamed, and from shame to anger was a short step. So Son was angry with both Brother and Ex-Wife and retreated from them both into his secret world. Brother didn't know who Son's friends were or where he went when he left his mother's house, and neither apparently did she, so when he disappeared (along with his laptop, tablet, and phone) and the police were alerted, neither parent had any leads to give the searchers. In the weeks that followed he saw a good deal of Ex-Wife as they sat together in sad cafEs and waited for the call that said, we found the body. 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. |
| 112 |
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. But that would require Ex-Wife to be there, too, as she had been way back when. He understood some of what he was doing, what material his unconscious was throwing up, transmuted, and splattering all over his pages. "The Human Trampoline"? |
| 113 |
Really? If Sister ever read what he was writing, she probably wouldn't like that. She would probably be disturbed, too, by the fact that Quichotte's financial complaints against the Trampoline were an echo of his own accusations against her. And then this sweet-easy reconciliation between Quichotte and H. T. on the phone, that's all it took?, as Sancho asked Quichotte disbelievingly. Well, if only, Brother thought. I'm on the same side as Sancho here. Real life isn't as easy as that. But he saw why it came out that way on the page. Like Sancho himself, H. T.'s welcome was born out of need, her own need as well as Quichotte's. Salma was all fiction. These days the only women in his life were ones he made up in his head. Or, yes, admit it, as with Quichotte, sometimes women he saw on a screen — in his own case, more often at the movies than on television or one of the streaming services. Fantasy women. The real thing seemed now well beyond his reach. And Dr. Smile? Well, Brother was a writer who believed in doing his research. Sadly, there were many real-life candidates who could fill the crooked doctor's boots. And, yes, his prescriptions too. If you wanted to say that the bizarre story he was telling, unlike any story he had ever told, had deep roots in personal necessity and pain, then yes, he would concede the point. But the old fool? He resisted the idea that Quichotte was just his Author with a pasteboard helmet on his head and his great-grandfather's rusted sword in his hand. |
| 114 |
Quichotte was somebody he had made up with a nod (okay, more than a nod) to the great Spaniard who had made him up first. Granted: his creation and he were approximately the same age, they had near-identical old roots, uprooted roots, not only in the same city but in the same neighborhood of that city, and their parents' lives paralleled each other, so much so that he, Brother, on some days had difficulty remembering which history was his own and which Quichotte's. Their families often blurred together in his mind. And yet he insisted: no, he is not I, he is a thing I have made in order to tell the tale I want to tell. Brother — to be clear about this — watched relatively little TV. He was a member of the last cinema generation. On TV, he watched the news (as little as possible, it being presently close to unbearable), and in the baseball season he watched the Yankees' games, and sometimes, when he was able to stay up that late, he watched the late-night comedy shows. That was more or less it. TV had ruined America's thinking processes as it had ruined Quichotte's. He had no intention of allowing it to ruin his mind as well. So, no, he insisted, not I. However: if he was so certain of the divide between character and Author, why had he so often been afraid that his spy novels had attracted the interest of real spies who were now spying on him? 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. |
| 115 |
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. There was writing on the button badge which was too small to read. On his lap, just lying there, was a high-powered handgun, which looked to Brother (who had to be up on such matters because of the genre of fiction in which he had until recently specialized) like a Gen4 Glock 22. Apart from the presence of this gentleman the apartment looked undisturbed. There was no sign that either entry — into the apartment or into Brother's computer — had been forced in any way. |
| 116 |
A. k. a. Joybubble? Now deceased?" Brother shook his head. "In 1957," said Lance Makioka, "a blind seven-year-old American boy accidentally discovered that whistling certain precise notes into his phone, at certain precise frequencies, could manipulate the system. The first note to work in this way was, I believe, the fourth E above middle C, having a frequency of 2637.02 hertz. This was the beginning of the practice known as phone phreaking, closely linked to the development of what afterwards became known as computer hacking, and at a certain point the phreaker community included such later luminaries as the computer entrepreneur Mr. Steve Jobs. The boy Engressia, as he grew, became a legend in this community. However, sir, in the end he got busted, he was maybe nineteen then, and he gave up phreaking. His subsequent life was not distinguished by great success. At one point he legally changed his name to Joybubble and announced that he was five years old and intended to remain five years old for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2007, aged either fifty-eight or five, as you prefer. The point of telling you this, sir, is that we, that is to say the appropriate agencies, wished to enlist Blind Joe in our battle against hacking, using the 'set a thief to catch a thief' principle. Like Cary Grant in the old Hitchcock movie. Some say he did work for us for a time but then ceased to do so. If he had done so, he would have had a secure income, health care, pension all the way to the end. |
| 117 |
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. |
| 118 |
You can take it. You're his dad. You want him back in your life, so you're going to let him say what he has to say. Once the steam is out of him, he's going to be able to hear the message you're going to deliver for us. And the message to him is, he plays ball, he does the right thing for his country, and he'll be well taken care of. Alternatively, he'll face cyber-terrorism charges and we'll make sure he goes to Guantanamo Bay for the rest of his fucking life." Again that sudden climactic roar and the right fist thumping into the left palm. The agent wore a fine suit and had a cultivated manner, but under all that, the naked guy under all that expensive clothing, was the scariest individual Brother had ever met. The world Brother had made up had become real. There was a black Cadillac Escalade waiting outside his building. Lance Makioka held open a door — rear door, near side — and ushered Brother into his seat. The blindfold requirement was delicately alluded to and Brother, having little choice in the matter, acquiesced. If he had been a real spy, he thought, he would have been able, even blindfolded, to follow the movements of the vehicle and know, at the very least, in which direction they were headed, east along the 495 for example, or north past the stadium, and on upstate. But he had no idea. Blindfolded, he experienced a certain dizziness brought on by the merging of the real and the fictional, the paranoiac and the actual outlook. Even the son he was going to meet felt fictional in a way. |
| 119 |
The Man of La Mancha mask! Like a dime-store Darth Vader who had escaped from Brother's story and gone over to the dark side. His doubly pseudonymous life, Quix 97, Marcel DuChamp. His son had become an imaginary being — two imaginary beings! — by the force of his own will. So also Brother had brought Sancho into the world, and then Sancho had willed himself into being real, live. These doubled births echoed one another, deafeningly. If he said to his son when they met, I have longed for you so much that I dreamed of an old fool giving magical birth to the son he never had, how would Son react? Was there any love left in him that might lead him to react lovingly? Was there a chance of a reconciliation? Estrangements, reconciliations... again, the dizzying union of the real and the imagined. A third party, reading these accounts, might even, at a certain point, conclude that both were fictional, that Brother and Sister and Son were imaginative figments just as Quichotte and Salma and Sancho were. That the Author's life was a fake, just like his book. They drove for two hours, or what felt to Brother like two hours, and all the way the Japanese-American gentleman spoke in soft conversational tones, briefing him. A team of genius-level cyber-warriors had been assembled and was being expanded, to fight the growing force of cyber-attacks emanating from Russia and North Korea and their proxies from the early identity-theft days of CarderPlanet to the full-fledged assault of Guccifer 2.0. |
| 120 |
(However, if it was true that Arachne's tapestry, which showed how the gods had abused humans, especially Zeus with all his rapes, was superior to Athena's, then she was all for Arachne, and vengeful Athena, spidering her opponent, didn't come out of the story at all well.) But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world's culture by its surfaces was a sad thing. The law came to her rescue as it always had, as she had always trusted it to do. Within the walls of that unimportant courtroom during this extremely minor case about noise abatement, certain old values still survived. There was evidence. There were facts which were not merely the assertions of rivaling bigotries. There was truth. Let me live and die here, she thought. This is my true home. She won the case easily. The restaurant's owners were obliged to apologize in open court for violating the terms of their license to operate, and for the defamatory innuendos about Sister. Overnight the troll army vanished, and the culture without memory, which all culture had become, instantly forgot how it had slandered an innocent woman, and moved on. The street quieted down. |
| 121 |
Maybe it was the Fates' reward for the way she had discarded Sad-Faced Older Painter and, according to some unkind tongues, helped to drive him into his grave. Then she had met Jack, and he had loved her in spite of it all. There followed the multiple miracles of love, marriage, a brilliant career, and happiness. The birth of a healthy child, Daughter, was the biggest miracle. She had supposed herself sterile as a consequence of the chemotherapy, but her womb had had other ideas. Now, no longer young, she feared that a shadow had returned. Most mornings she woke up with a sense of impending horror. Then she told herself not to be foolish, she was symptom-free, all was well. After that she told herself, if you're so worried, go in for a full checkup. But she had been afraid to do so. The Sancho case had felt, almost, like a welcome distraction. Now that it was over, the angels on her shoulders were whispering in her ear again. You're fine, said the left angel. Get yourself looked at, said the right. She ignored them both and went to work, came back to her neighborhood, stopped by Daughter's showroom to look at the beauty her girl was creating and to swap the day's stories with her, got home and had a glass of wine with Jack in his red dress, or his green or blue dress, and told herself she was living her best life. But still she felt it: the shadow in her blood. I'm not dying, she had said. Also, I'll live. She hoped that wasn't dangerously overconfident, hubristic, of her. Maybe she should have crossed her fingers for luck when she defied the exterminating angel. |
| 122 |
She had recently gone through a breakup with her lover and business partner, an older man, a Polish aristocrat and shrewd entrepreneur, whose cocaine habit had become a big problem. So now she was alone, looking for someone to manage the business end of things, trying to do it all herself, panicking a little, nursing her sadness, feeling close to an unhealthy edge. Yeah, she thought. I don't need a mask. I'm already the mask of myself. "I need some fresh air," she said to Ornella. "I won't be long. Hold the fort." She walked through the streets of stucco facades, some white, some brightly painted, past the church that was bombed in the Blitz and rebuilt after the war ended, and arrived at her mother's place, which would be unoccupied at this time. Her mother and the judge would be away at work, and the housekeeper would have left. She had her own key and let herself in past the bouncers standing outside Sancho, who gave her unfriendly looks. Unsurprisingly, there was some residual resentment about the outcome of the recent court case. She didn't respond to the dirty looks and went upstairs. Afterwards, she swore that she had not intended to do what she then did, that she had just wanted a quiet place to be in for a while, away from the pressure-cooker atmosphere of her workplace. Be that as it may: at some point that afternoon, she went into Sister's home office on the upper floor of the duplex, sat down at her computer, entered the password, which she knew, and composed an email from her mother to her uncle in New York. |
| 123 |
The Gould Industries building (Brother wrote, housing the Trampoline in the apartment of his fantasies), one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, 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. The Human Trampoline owned five thousand of those square feet, with high ceilings and exposed beams, high up at the penthouse level. A liveried doorman stood at that portal, eyeing Quichotte and Sancho suspiciously. Quichotte less than warm in his worn suit and Sancho in distressed denim and the coat that needed dry-cleaning made an unimpressive pair. They faced one another in a motionless standoff, Quichotte and the doorman, the traveler's dilapidated pride offering a silent repudiation of the uniformed flunky's sneer. Then there was a commotion in the lobby, and in a flurry of flying fabric and waving arms a woman with wild black hair — still black, defying the years! — burst out of the building and spread her arms in welcome. It was the Trampoline. She was tall, could perhaps even be called gangling, with a long, bony face, and if it wasn't for the hair and the expensive hoop earrings it would have been like looking in a mirror, thought Quichotte. She took him by the shoulders and leaned in for a kiss. Then she asked him what Sancho thought was an odd question: "What do you remember?" Quichotte seemed bemused all of a sudden. |
| 124 |
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. |
| 125 |
The Trampoline, however, was unquenched and on fire, had forgotten nothing, and what had been pent up in her during the long years of estrangement was blazing out of her like the flame of a second sun that had no intention of setting, not until its hot work had been done. "Betrayal blindness," she said, and it wasn't clear if she was addressing Quichotte or Sancho or planet Venus glinting in the darkening sky. "Victims of treachery find ways of deluding themselves that they are not being betrayed. Sexually, for example, but I assume in other areas too. Business, politics, friendship. We are good at fooling ourselves in order to preserve our trust. But it isn't only the victims who do it. The traitors, too, convince themselves that they are not committing treason. At the very moment of their deepest betrayals they assure themselves that they are acting well, even that their deeds are in the best interest of the betrayed person, or of some higher cause. They save us from ourselves, or, like Brutus and his gang, they save Rome from Caesar. They are the innocent ones, the good guys, or, at the very least, not so bad." "What did he do?" Sancho asked. "Dad, I mean, not Brutus." The Trampoline crossed her arms and clutched at her shoulders, and breathed deeply, gathering herself, like a storm. It was necessary, she said, by way of a preamble, to tell Sancho something about the problem of South Asian men. She presumed Sancho was not fully briefed on this topic? No, she hadn't thought so. |
| 126 |
The article was well received at first and was reprinted in many countries, including the South Asian countries. For a moment I was happy about the article's reception. Then the craziness began. People — South Asian men — began to send me messages of abuse. 'Man hater,' 'lesbian,' et cetera. Death threats were also received, and descriptions of the terrible things that would be done to my body before and after I died, and promises of hellfire, and, worst of all, threats against the women who used our organization. What shocked me was that respected, senior male members of the community in this country condemned me too. Religious leaders, but also business leaders, the same ones who had previously encouraged me and supported my initiatives. There was a demand that I make a public apology to all Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Sri Lankan men, the ones living in those countries and the ones in the diaspora too. For a moment it looked as if everything I had tried to build would be destroyed overnight. As if I had beaten one life-threatening disease only to be overwhelmed by a different kind of killer sickness. The name of the sickness was a word we were all just learning. "Blowback. "What saved me was the date. Let's just say, B. G., which is to say, Before Google. The world before the birth of the monster the Internet became, before the age of electronically propagated hysteria, in which words have become bombs that blow up their users, and to make any public utterance is to set off a series of such explosions. |
| 127 |
He began to talk about himself, which was normal with money guys. But most of them talked about their assets, their planes, their boats, their blah blah blah, which to me was an instant turnoff. This Evel talked about his obsession with the nature of reality, its fragility and mutability, and that was interesting too. He was thinking about parallel universes even then. When he started in about his love for science fiction, naming obscure-to-me writers of the old school — I remember the names Simak and Blish and Kornbluth and Sprague de Camp — I glazed over and was about to excuse myself but then he did something actually unpleasant. He grabbed me by my wrist and glared at me with what looked like anger and said, 'You can't leave.' I detached his hand. My secret anger was bigger than his, and I showed him just a flash of it. 'You need to learn how to behave,' I said. 'Let me know if you ever do.' Then I left. I looked back toward him from the doorway. He seemed lost in thought, wrapped up in himself. But he was watching. Afterwards he said to me, 'If you hadn't looked back I would never have spoken to you again. But you did look back. That was very important.' It was, I thought, the remark of a very vain individual. But, again, it was interesting. "I never believed any man would find me attractive after my mutilation, and I had reconciled myself to that. There was, yes, the secret anger. I had a lot of anger about what had happened to me. But I had also learned how to bury it so deep that it didn't know how to get out unless I chose to let it escape. |
| 128 |
It worked for me now, I told myself. I told myself a lot of things: that I was doing the work I wanted to do, I had loyal friends, a full and comfortable life, and I had cheated death. There was nothing wrong with that picture, nothing that required the presence of a man to put right. These good thoughts prevented the rage from rising up out of its burial ground. But it was there if I needed it. It still is. "This was the china shop in which I lived, into which Evel Cent charged, without a thought for the damage he might cause, talking about the end of the world. The morning after he grabbed my wrist he was standing on the sidewalk down there holding flowers, calling my cell number. I hadn't given it to him, or told him my address, but there he was. Resourceful. Determined. Apologetic. Urgent. I told him to come up and what followed, followed. No, that isn't correct. It was slow. The idea of undressing for a man was horrifying. The idea of being touched. He said, 'I'm in no hurry. The end isn't coming for a while yet.' What? I said. What? Out came his pet theory, the one to which he would devote his billions. The cosmos disintegrating like an oil painting on a fraying canvas, like the ruins of Egypt. The appearance of holes in space-time, the coming victory of Nothing over Everything. And then his grand design. He was already working on it, had built the research corporation, and had hired the top-drawer scientists needed to solve the problems of the science, and he already had the name for it. |
| 129 |
As also now Quichotte. Quester for love, supplicant for forgiveness, seated in the nightgloom of his half sister's home, while his ghosts, exhumed by her sorcery, walked all about him, including the phantom of himself as he once was. Chinese food was delivered and set upon a table, but Quichotte could not eat, feeling himself lost in darkness, encircled by the sadness of days gone by. Why had he been as he was, consumed by envy, ungenerous, competitive, harsh? He could not say. He had no access to that self. The reason for that was what happened that night in the Kips Bay of the past. It wasn't such a bad apartment. The ceilings were high and the neighbors were quiet and he could work there contentedly enough. On the night in question, however, it almost became his tomb. He had a nightmare that night in which he had awoken, in this his own bedroom, to see a shadowy figure standing at the foot of his bed, looking down at him, saying nothing. He understood, in the dream, that the intruder was both himself, or his shadow, and also Death. He woke up in fear. It was 3 A. M. He sat up in bed and turned on the lamp on his nightstand, his heart beating hard. There was nobody in the room, of course, and to calm himself he drank a glass of water and got out of bed to go to the toilet. That was when the Interior Event happened. There was a sort of explosion between his ears. He lost his balance, fell forward onto the floor, and blacked out. When consciousness returned — a moment or an age later, he couldn't tell — it occurred to him that he was not dead. |
| 130 |
At some point after that realization, he also understood that he could not move. His cellphone was on the nightstand and so was the landline phone he was old-fashioned enough to have kept, but he was on the floor facing away from them. So he was helpless. It took him two days to turn around and drag himself to the nightstand. For another whole day and night he tried to strike the table in such a way that one of phones fell off within his reach. On the fourth day he got hold of his cellphone and began to try to make a call. "Who did he call?" Sancho wanted to know. "He called me," the Trampoline said. "Who else would he call?" The call finally went through and she answered it but he was unable to speak. He lay there on the bedroom floor with the phone by his ear while her voice shouted Hello. Understanding that something was wrong, she had come quickly to his building, found the super, had the front door opened, found him on the floor, called the emergency services. He survived. He was a lucky man. This was America, and a stroke required long and careful treatment, and he was covered, because he had recently applied for and won a teaching position at a journalism school downtown, a tenure-track professorship that came with excellent health insurance. He endured a long period of rehabilitation, and after perhaps two years he was back in something like full working order, though his speech had slowed and he dragged his right leg. But the man who emerged from the Interior Event was not the same person as before. |
| 131 |
"I wish to apologize to you, my sister, for all offenses both remembered and forgotten, both those for which I feel guilt and responsibility and those which were the responsibility of a person who has faded from memory. In my small way I am what your Mr. Cent says the universe has become: a cosmos with holes torn out of it, where nothing remains. I am fraying at the edges and may not survive. Therefore I ask that both kinds of fault, the known and the unknown, be forgiven before we reach our ends, and I am willing to perform whatever deeds you ask for by way of a penalty, in expiation of my misdeeds, both those which I own and those which I can no longer own, as they have left me and gone far away. This is what I have crossed America to set right, for until there is harmony the path to the Beloved, who lies beyond the world and its grief, will not open." At this point, he moved slowly toward the Trampoline, his leg dragging heavily tonight, and when he reached her he fell, shockingly, to his knees and took hold, between his thumb and forefinger, of the hem of her garment. "Forgive me," he said, bowing his head, "and set me free, and yourself as well." Time stood still inside the room. Outside, or so it seemed to Sancho, a week passed, a month, a year, a decade, maybe a century. The sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned, the seasons fled by. Mighty men and women rose and fell, the world changed, the future enveloped them, and they were leftovers from an ancient past, unknown to all, lost in their own labyrinth of love and pain. |
| 132 |
On the rare occasions when he had no choice but to fly, he knocked himself out with Xanax and got through the journey that way. This time he had chosen vodka instead of Xanax. So far, it was working well.) Ever since his reunion with his lost child he had been thinking of broken families — of his own broken family — as allegories of larger-scale fragmentations, and of the search for love and healing as a quest in which everyone, not just his mad Quichotte, was involved. He made a note on his phone. Don't forget to resolve Sancho's love interest too. This was the latest addition to a list he had been making since the plane took off. Don't forget Sancho's visions — reality begins to be more phantasmagoric. Don't forget Quichotte's key. What does it open, and what's inside? And one more: Quichotte (sounds like) key shot. A key shot was a tiny bump of cocaine or heroin scooped up on a key. He didn't know how this fitted into Quichotte's story. Maybe there was no place for it. It would remain just a note, to be deleted later. The plane lost altitude suddenly and fast, like one of the balls Galileo imagined dropping from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, like an elevator plunging down its shaft, like a falling man. 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. |
| 133 |
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. Mysteries were the perfect analogue of human life as well as human death. Human beings were mysteries to others and to themselves as well. Some chance occurrence jolted them from their sleep and they began to act in ways of which they would not have believed themselves capable. We know nothing about ourselves or our neighbors, he thought. |
| 134 |
The nice lady next door turns out to be an ax murderer, giving her mother forty whacks. The silent, smiling, bearded gentleman upstairs is revealed as a terrorist when he drives a truck into innocent people in the town center. Death offers us clarification, it shines a harsh shadowless light on life, and then we see. The death of Don Quixote felt like the extinction in all of us of a special kind of beautiful foolishness, an innocent grandeur, a thing for which the world had no place, but which one might call humanity. The marginal man, the man laughably out of touch and doggedly out of step and also unarguably out of mind, revealed in his last moment as the one to care most about and mourn most deeply for. Remember this. Have this above all in mind. He raised his window blind to look out at the no-longer-dangerous sky. There were black dots dancing in his field of vision. He suffered from floaters, had done so for a long time, but they seemed to be getting worse. Sometimes a group of floaters seemed to come together near the corner of his eye and then it looked as if the universe itself might be fraying. As if empty spaces had appeared in the fabric of what-there-was. He pulled the window blind down again. We are lost wanderers, he thought. We have eaten the cattle of the sun god, and incurred the wrath of Olympus. He closed his eyes. Sister was waiting in London. That was what mattered right now. Death, and Quichotte, and everything else, could wait. A fourth vodka, however, would be a good idea. |
| 135 |
The death angel hovered and then set him free. (Later, when the angel released the plane in which he was crossing the ocean, he thought, that's two lives used up, and I'm not a cat.) His jumbled thoughts about death and Equinox filled the gap between the conclusion of his apology and the beginning of Sister's response, which came after a lengthy pause. When she spoke her words were as measured as a legal deposition. "Remorse and forgiveness are obviously related," she said, "but it's not a cause-and-effect relationship. The connection between them is the act. It is for the actor to decide whether or not he feels regret and remorse for the act, whether or not he is willing and ready to apologize in the hope of making amends. It is for the person acted upon to decide whether or not she feels able to set the act aside and move on, which is to say, to forgive. The decision of the person acted upon is not contingent upon the decision of the actor. One may genuinely feel remorse and make a genuine apology, and still not be forgiven, if the person acted upon is not ready to forgive. Alternatively, one may not feel ready to apologize, and still be forgiven, if the forgiver is ready to let bygones be bygones. You have apologized. That was and is your decision. I accept that it is a genuine apology. Now it is for me to decide whether or not I can forgive what you did. Or maybe I have already decided that. Or perhaps I never will." "I'm glad there's at least one lawyer in the family," Brother replied. |
| 136 |
And in spite of that there had been times — so many times! — when she had told herself, Yes! You can do the impossible, you can forgive the unforgivable, only let him ask, let him come to my door and bow his head and say, at last, after so long, after the years of blindness which were caused by my stupidity, I recognize the wrongs I did, I feel the pain you felt at their injustice, I see the truth, and the truth is that I have been guilty of arseholery, and so, at your door, with head bowed low, this arsehole asks to be forgiven. That was all he had to say and do. And now here he was doing and saying it, but he had left it so late, he had been so stupid for so long, that her rage could not be quenched. He should hang up and go away, take his voice out of her ear, let the silence between them be resumed, for she was accustomed to that silence and it was too late for peace. — No. — That was not how she had meant to end. — He should call her again tomorrow. There was no more to be said today. Words to that effect. And after the tirade, she was spent. "I have to go," she said faintly, and hung up. Brother had the impression that she had used up every ounce of her strength — her remaining strength — and had been brought to the point of collapse. He sat quietly with his thoughts for a long time after the end of the phone call. He tried not to allow the Shadow to become real. But he was becoming more and more certain that she was very sick. There were no calls for a few days following the explosion. |
| 137 |
The money was decimal but everything else was a muddle, and even the European Union had long ago given up the attempt to make the Brits standardize their weights and measures, one of many early signs that the country resisted the idea of being fully European. It was almost a relief to arrive in the middle of other people's crises and leave the crisis of America behind. At home he had stopped listening to the news and avoided social media to shut out the daily nonsense as much as he could. He had his book to write, and this private crisis to deal with, the crisis of Sister, and that was all he could handle right now. The apocalypse of the West would just have to wait in line. He looked out at the night sky and experienced once again the illusion of a void. There were holes in his field of vision, spots of nothingness. These seemed different in kind from the floaters he was used to. So either he had begun to experience some sort of degeneration of the retina, or, alternatively, the crumbling of the cosmos as prophesied by his character Evel Cent had begun to occur in the real world as well as the fictional. That was absurd, he scolded himself. That is absolutely not what is happening. That's a thing I made up. He made a note to visit an eye specialist on his return from London. He called Sister's phone. An unfamiliar female voice answered. It was Daughter. "She's resting," she said. "But we are expecting you. Your room is ready. Also..." She paused, then continued, "I'm really excited to meet you. |
| 138 |
The judge had dressed up, too, in his finest evening gown, a gorgeous silver sheath with lacy frills spreading out below the knee. "By Mr. Cecil Beaton," he said to Brother. "Sir Cecil Beaton. Since you ask." All of them, Daughter, Brother, and the judge, were needed to help her downstairs, Daughter going down backwards in front of her, arms extended, to prevent her mother from falling, and the two men beside her, sideways, helping her to go slowly down, step by anxious step. The members of the hospice staff stood by, ready to help, but understanding, on account of their great reserves of human sympathy, that this was a family matter. (During the family tea party the caregivers retreated upstairs to Sister's bedroom. Later, when tea was over, Sister preferred to allow one of them, a strong young orderly, to carry her back up to her room.) "Shall I be mother?" she asked, as if there were any doubt about the matter, and then tea was poured and passed and cakes and cucumber sandwiches consumed, and the flavor of everything was greatly heightened by the mingled pain and pleasure of knowing that something excellent was being done for the last time. "The thing I'm very pleased about," she said, "is that just before all this business in my body started up, I took out a very substantial life insurance policy, and now the buggers are going to have to pay up a fortune, which will look after my girl very well." Then she laughed, high and long. She could not cheat death, but she had put one over on the insurance company, and that felt almost as good to her, she said. |
| 139 |
They sent their great and apologetic love to Daughter and asked her not to grieve but to rejoice that they left the world as they had lived in it: together. In Sister's hand at the bottom of the letter (the rest of which had been written out by the judge, though clearly conceived jointly by them both) were a couple of lines from Marvell's "On a Drop of Dew." How loose and easy hence to go, How girt and ready to ascend. She was ready and had chosen when and how to give up her flower. They had both chosen, and they had kept their appointment. Brother came awake fast in the dead of night, his thoughts filled with sudden, sad understanding. The disembodied voices of the darkness had fallen silent, as if they, too, understood. He got out of bed in his pajamas and went rapidly toward Sister's room. He stood for a moment listening. Daughter was asleep on the couch downstairs. But the silence behind the closed door of Sister's bedroom was not the silence of sleep. He opened the door and went in. The judge was in a chair by her bedside, still dressed in the silver gown, his chin upon his chest. Sister had been sitting up in bed but had now slumped sideways so that her head rested upon her husband's shoulder. On her nightstand lay two chess pieces, the white king and the black queen, both knocked over, resigning their games. They had changed the rules, Jack and Jack. The queen had resigned as well as the king. There was no victor, or else they had both won. Now Daughter was there, too, opening and reading the letter. |
| 140 |
Quichotte preferred — both preferred and was frightened by — the story about the shadow. Shadows were treacherous and cryptic counter-selves, and needed to be watched. (The shadow of Peter Pan had escaped at one point also, and had had to be caught and reattached to Peter's feet by Wendy's deft and careful needle.) He had kept half an eye on his own shadow throughout his quest, but so far, to his relief, it had showed no signs of acquiring an independent spirit, a malicious nature, or competitive romantic inclinations. In the golden shade of the autumnal tree, his shadow was banished, and so, with a flutter, a kaleidoscope of butterflies in his stomach, he waited; and while he waited, thought — of course — about television. Just as King Arthur had needed his Merlin, so also Quichotte had come to the park today to meet the wizard who would work the magic he needed. He hadn't enjoyed the TV series about the youth of Merlin a few years ago. He was looking for an adult sorcerer today, not a callow boy who needed to grow up. Everyone wanted youth now. How tedious that was! Young Indiana Jones. Young Han Solo. Young Sherlock Holmes. Young Dumbledore. Any minute now there would be a mini-series about the young Methuselah. As an older person he wanted the trend to be reversed. How about Old Sex in the City? Old Friends? Old Girls? Old Gossip Girl? Old Housewives? Old Bachelors? How about old models on the runway? (Victoria, after all, had lived to be a very old queen, and no doubt still, in her old age, had her secrets.) Sure, The Golden Girls, okay. |
| 141 |
But that was just one show. How about Old Simpsons? How about an Old Fonz in Happy Days Got Older? He'd watch those shows. And America had an aging population, did it not? So, then. Time to stop pandering to empty-headed youth. Start pandering to the addle-brained elderly instead. The Wizard in the old show from the eighties had been a little person. The conjurer Quichotte was waiting for was scarcely a foot taller than its star, David Rappaport, had been. He kept his eyes peeled for this person, a small man of energetic disposition and a certain ethical vacuity: his cousin, the bearer of his destiny, Dr. R. K. Smile. Why was Quichotte so certain of what the day would bring? The answer was there for anyone to see who had eyes to see. It was the increasing number of spots dancing in his field of vision. Everyone had started seeing these spots now, but because of the infuriating ability of human beings to fail to understand what was right in front of their faces, explanations were being offered which were much more complicated than the truth. The eye condition which caused blind spots on the retina had long been known about, and had indeed for some time been the leading cause of blindness in Americans, but it was now — or so all the relevant authorities and respected journals proclaimed — attaining the status of a global epidemic, or even, to use the term beloved of writers, a plague. Plagues were mysterious in origin, random in their victims, and uncontrollable. They caused panic in the streets and required, often, the digging of mass graves in big cities. |
| 142 |
The Black Spot, as the new eye plague came to be known, did not appear to be fatal, although its consequences included a rising number of motor car accidents, which sometimes did lead to fatalities. There were also railway accidents in many countries, at a rate higher than the norm, most of them minor, but a few that were truly catastrophic. In addition, mistakes made by airline pilots during landing were reported from airports around the world. In countries where the expensive medication that could treat the plague was available, supplies ran short, even though the treatment — regular injections through the white of the eye to clear the retina — was one that many people were frightened to try, even though they knew that blindness was worse than a needle in the eye. The cause of the illness was the deterioration of the macula, the central part of the retina, which controlled human beings' ability to read, drive, recognize faces and colors, and see objects in fine detail. Often there was also a leakage of blood onto the surface of the retina. However, eye specialists in many countries who were now fully occupied by the treatment of the surge of cases reported strange results. Tests on their patients showed no noticeable deterioration in the macula, nor had blood leaked onto the retinal surface. In fact, the patients' eyes could in the majority of cases be said to be one hundred percent healthy. Yet the apparent effects of retinal decay were present in their vision. It was a medical mystery to which nobody could offer a plausible solution. |
| 143 |
Anyone could say a dog had traveled to a "neighbor Earth" and returned in good health. The dog itself was unable to bear witness, and no visual evidence had been made public. So, for the moment, Evel Cent was a voice crying in the wilderness, heard by many, believed by almost none. Quichotte believed him. Ever since he began his quest he had known that preparing himself for love, making himself worthy of the Beloved, also necessitated readying oneself for an ending, because after perfection was attained there was only oblivion to look forward to. These manifestations, erroneously characterized as symptoms of a medical emergency, were early warnings that both culminations were at hand. There was the tree, and there — poof! — was Dr. R. K. Smile. Hat, coat, small leather attachE case, like an old-world medico doing his rounds. And had that been a puff of smoke? No, that was just his imagination, Quichotte reproved himself. It was improbable that his illustrious cousin traveled the country with the Wicked Witch of the West's personal smoke effects in his baggage. But, on the other hand, in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, as he well knew, anything could happen. Maybe puffs of smoke were available now. Maybe you could buy them at Walmart, like guns. "Best of cousins!" Quichotte cried. "I'm happy to see you. I hope your mood is fine?" "Let's walk a little," said Dr. Smile. His mood, Quichotte noted with regret, appeared to be very far from fine. One might say that it was foul. "There has been an event today in Atlanta," Dr. |
| 144 |
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. Both in nasal spray form and in auto-injectors." Narcan was naloxone, the medication of choice in case of opioid overdose. Auto-injection brought the fastest results: this worked in about two minutes and the effect lasted for thirty to sixty minutes, so multiple doses might be required in the case of a major crisis. Narcan, Quichotte thought, was also the moral salve which made it all right for him to do what he was being asked to do, the shield that would protect the Beloved from self-inflicted harm. "Narcan, good," he said. But his mind was still mostly elsewhere, and Dr. Smile grew irritated. "What's the matter with you?" he snapped. "Maybe you're not the person for this very simple job. Maybe you've just become too loony and old dufferish. Maybe you're not to be trusted and I need to find someone else." You know those films of an explosion in reverse? How ffwwwappp everything comes flying back together and the world is in one piece again? The effect of these words on Quichotte was like that. He was alert and present and he would not let this opportunity slip. He would do what the Beloved asked of him and que sera sera. |
| 145 |
He had rehearsed many times the words he wanted to say. He would hand her the envelope with a little bow of the head and say, "This is sent with all respects by Dr. R. K. Smile, and comes also with two brief stories with great admiration from myself." If his powers of charm had not entirely faded she would allow him to tell the stories. The first story was the tale of what they had in common: a common city in the past, and the decision to leave it. The looking back and remembering, the decision not to look back, not to remember, and the ability of the past to insist, in spite of everything, on its right to return to haunt the present. This was their shared truth. The second story was an American story. Before the Mayflower became the first CentCorp portal into an unknowable future in an alternative reality, it was a ship, and among the travelers on the ship there was a love story. John Alden asked by Miles Standish to press his case to Miss Priscilla, who replied, Speak for yourself, John. And he, Quichotte, would say, I am here on another man's behalf, but given permission I would speak for myself. She was standing in front of him. He had passed through the veil. He stood before her like a fool and stammered. "Make it quick, darling," she said. "Eyes everywhere." "This is sent with all respects by Dr. R. K. Smile," he began, and then saw her eyes widen in fear and alarm. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth and she looked from side to side, planning her escape. "Sent by a smile," she said. |
| 146 |
He spoke little and made no calls. At night he kept his loaded gun, a Gen4 Glock 22, on the nightstand by his bed, with the barrel pointing at his head. On the eleventh day he stayed in bed nursing a light fever, moving in and out of nightmare-plagued sleep while a cold October passed outside. The TV murmured in his ears, and he surfaced in time for the early evening news. The growing world environmental crisis, the instability in reality which was finally grabbing the attention of politicians and scientists, even of the (many) politicians and (very few) scientists who had traditionally dismissed environmental issues as fake. A suspension bridge had collapsed in Australia because of the appearance of a strange cloud among the cables, which had caused the cables to snap as if cut with giant shears. "It was more like a hole than a cloud," an eyewitness reported. "Like a bit of the air that wasn't there." The story was rippling out across the world, creating alarm, but, oddly, not panic, or not as yet. People had grown used to the arrival of the incredible in the midst of the everyday. An island drowned in the South Pacific? That's too bad, it had great beaches, but everybody was rescued, right? And it was really small. Tornadoes in the Midwest? Yeah, they're big, but tornadoes have been out there forever, even before Dorothy got spirited away to Oz. Earthquakes in places that never had earthquakes before? Oh well. Join the club, North Texas and Plainfield, Connecticut. Guess we can agree that we all live on shaky ground. |
| 147 |
A perpetual twilight reigned. The noises of the street were held in stasis, a two-tone siren stuck on one tone, the bleep of a reversing truck sounding continuously like the whining of a mechanical mosquito, the traffic roaring, not as traffic does, but like the low sustained breath of some unknown beast. Quichotte neither ate nor drank and did not know the day from the night. It was as if he were a character in a show on TV and owing to a technical problem the transmission had frozen and he was caught in mid-gesture, trapped in electronic aspic. It was as if he were being written and the author could not turn the page. In that long nothingness it was not difficult to think of the gun as his only friend. He was like the postapocalyptic underground troglodytes he saw in a movie on TV, dependent for everything on the all-powerful Machine, unwilling to brave the surface of the Earth where a few brave souls were still moving, and so doomed when the Machine, without explanation, stopped. The Machine was stopping. The last valley, he remembered, was the Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, where the self disappeared into the universe and the Wayfarer became timeless. At a certain moment, in that moment without moments, he refused this ending, and found the courage to go on. Then with a great grinding noise the world around him began to move again, the cogwheels engaged, the end turned out not to be the end. The sun and moon, the traffic, the TV, here they all were once more, rising, setting, roaring, blaring. |
| 148 |
It became an option. The beating had also further detached Sancho from Quichotte. As the Trampoline had noticed, the youngster still felt a degree of filial loyalty toward the antique gentleman, but he was more certain than ever that his own destiny lay elsewhere. He thought a good deal about the young woman at the door of the house of grief, Miss Beautiful of Beautiful, Kansas, and he wanted very much to return to that door in the hope that his future might lie behind it. The more he thought, the more surely he convinced himself that if he were to present himself on her doorstep she would give him a positive response, and the thought of that filled him with a deep contentment and a hopeful belief in the meaningfulness of human existence. He began to imagine his escape from New York — his departure from the Emerald City, clicking together the heels of his ruby shoes, there's no place like Kansas, which wasn't home yet but if things went according to plan, it might be! — to dream the dream of leaving and to feel it as an urgent imperative, and it was that urgency, plus the memory of violence, that had added up to his crime. About his disorienting sense of having lost his grip on reality he spoke to no one, assuming that it would heal, as bruises do, and broken bones. And as to the rumored imminent end of the world, he didn't give that much credence. For him, the world had only just begun. If it was faulty, if bits were falling off it as if it were an old house in need of repairs, then it was because perfection was an illusion. |
| 149 |
Most worrying of all were the visual and aural symptoms. He looked down at his hand and saw it break up before his eyes like a bad TV image, and then re-form. That was impossible. He used the hand to rub his eyes and it worked just like a hand ought to work, which was partially reassuring. Then a few moments later he saw the phenomenon again. He wanted to ask the sandwich lady for help but she was out cold, snoring. He called out to her and to his horror heard his voice crackle and pop like a radio station that wasn't properly tuned in. He was, he reminded himself, misbegotten: born out of the irresistible need and imperishable desire of an old fool whose brain had been addled by television. Therefore, he himself was a by-blow of the junk culture that was addling the brains of many fools old and young, maybe even of America. Maybe this was what the symptoms of illness looked like in such an irregular creation as himself, born in the wrong way, motherless, only putatively real, like something from Syfy that stepped through the screen, and so possibly doomed to die a quasi-electronic death, death by a failure of the signal. I'm too young to die. The fallacy of youth. Death had never cared about the ages of those it claimed. He stiffened his resolve. If he had been created by an act of will, it followed that he must have inherited a strong will of his own. Didn't it? Very well then. If his father had imposed his will upon the angel of life, then he in his turn would set his will against the death angel. |
| 150 |
Maybe she will, maybe she won't. Go give it your best shot." And with that, she disappeared. "Thank you," Sancho said, and felt simultaneously uplifted and afraid. "Thank you, I will." But when he got off the bus in Beautiful, at the depot that was just down the road from the Rey-Nard mall, it was already too late. There were snowflakes gusting in the air, it was six degrees below, and the wind chill made it feel much colder. People were running wild in the streets, screaming The sky is falling. There were cars on fire and broken Best Buy windows, revealing that the desire for meaningless destruction and free TVs survived even at the end of days. This was the twelfth-best city to live in in the United States and its citizens, the twelfth-best citizens in America, were losing their minds. They'll never make the top ten now, Sancho thought, trying to hold it together, trying to keep a hold on sanity, as he began to run. The absences, the holes in time and space which he had seen in the sky, had multiplied rapidly and come down lower, and one of them yawned terrifyingly in the space where the Powers Bar & Grill used to be. Just to look at that thing — that no-thing which was the negation of all things — was to be filled with an incurable dread. Sancho ran from it as one might from the jaws of a man-eating dragon. As he ran he felt himself beginning to splinter too. He looked down at his arms, his hands, his torso, his legs. They were crackling and distorted. The picture quality had become really bad. |
| 151 |
And here he was back at his desk writing about the end of the world, in the process of wiping out everything he had invented to go along with the erasure of everything that mattered in his real life. His own world felt like it had just ended. Without a Sister, he was no longer a Brother. He was just a pseudonym, Sam DuChamp, writing the last bars of the music of his book. All that remained was the last of Quichotte. He was beset by his characters. They flew about his ears like bats, knowing that their stories were ending, insisting on his attention. Me, me, me, as Dr. Smile had taunted Quichotte, but now they were all doing it. Save me, save me. Quichotte alone found a little scrap of dignity, even nobility. He did not ask to be saved, but there was someone he wanted to save. The character was teaching the Author about the nature of true love. When his heart trouble began — he thought at once of Quichotte's youthful arrhythmia — he understood that his book had known about it all along, even before he had any symptoms. Everything he had written about the malfunction of time began to make sense. He had sketched out scenes in which time accelerated or decelerated, in which it became staccato, a series of pounding moments, or in which it seemed to skip a beat. As the laws of nature lost their authority, time would lose its rhythm. He already had that worked out. And now in his own body his fiction was coming to life. The world no longer has any purpose except that you should finish your book. |
| 152 |
Hollywood destroyed Manhattan regularly. It was a perverted expression of love. Her thoughts were all over the place. Where was Anderson. How could he leave her now. Where was Hoke. Why in the midst of the apocalypse was she going to meet a fentanyl pusher in the park. Why was she going to meet her stalker without anyone to take care of her in case he, in case he, what? He was a hundred years old and harmless. His face had a certain charm and there was education in his voice. Why was she talking to herself like this, she must have lost her mind like everyone else. He was a person to be careful of. Of whom to be careful. She had taken her bipolarity meds but she could feel the upswing toward hysteria in her blood. Her mother had given her many presents. A one-legged father who vanished. This bipolar disorder which she had to fight every day. And alcoholism which she had sublimated into drugs. One drug in particular. One version of that drug. The spray that went under your tongue, below language and therefore below argument and disorder, and brought you peace. Thank you, my mother. My life is your fault. If anything happens to me today, I blame you. Things started crumbling for me a while ago. I felt that. Okay, the overdose was stupid. I'm lucky to be here, lucky to be functional, lucky to be walking to Central Park up literally Mad Ave, but the network totally didn't have my back. If they put their people on it they could have squashed the story, made it much smaller than it was, just a minor health issue, but they let it blow up as big as the sky. |
| 153 |
I've been outspoken on the show, I get that, in these days anyone who gets even a little political has a target on their back, and a brown person, a brown woman? I had enemies I guess. I should have seen it coming. Instead I OD'd and put the knife to stab me with in their hands. Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy. Can I blame my mother for that too? Why not. What's a dead mother for. I can't look up. Up there, what is that. Like a colossus with a huge blaster blew a hole in the air. You look at it, you want to die. This can't be fixed. I don't believe there's anyone in DC or Canaveral who knows what the fuck to do about this. Is anyone even at their desks or is everyone just running up and down in the street the way people are here, charging around Dupont Circle and up and down the Mall and up and down Pennsylvania Avenue going aaaaaaaaa. And in the Oval Office maybe some oval charging. Aaaaaaaaa. That's all we've got. Oval charging. That's what the human race comes down to after all these years. Shakespeare Newton Einstein Gandhi Mandela Obama Oprah and in the end it's just an impotent scream. Aaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa aaaaaaaa. Yes, Salma, I hear myself, yes I do. I know I sound high and wild and this part isn't much better, talking to myself as if I'm someone else. |
| 154 |
It was just a word. Only the broken maddened road was real. The two of them strapped inside, wide-eyed, watching the horror of outside, rendered dumb by exhaustion and shock. They stopped for gas and Quichotte and his gun patrolled the vehicle while Salma filled her up. "Well, well," said the gun, sulking. "Guess I'm still useful for something, huh." From the gas station store they took toilet paper, soap, the last gallon jugs of water. When they needed to perform their natural functions they turned off the freeway and found a side road where danger looked, for the moment, to be absent. They cleaned and washed themselves and went on. Civilization was a skin they were in the process of shedding. Apart from gas and bowel movements, nothing made them stop. She drove for eight hours and slept for four. While she slept, he took over and drove for four hours, then slept for four while she took the wheel again. Then they were awake together for four hours and then she slept and he drove again. They were awake together for four hours in every twenty-four and in those hours they said whatever came into their heads, or nothing, with increasing hysteria. Theirs was the intimacy of outlaws on the run. Hollow-eyed, numb-brained, the bandits of the apocalypse, running for their lives. Running toward their last hope of life. He said: I lost my son my only child the blessing of my old age. She said: I want to go home I dream of Juhu Beach and instead of my wicked grandfather there could be you. |
| 155 |
Uthlaut sent a series of e-mails that respectfully but vigorously registered objections to the orders he'd received. The twenty-four-year-old platoon leader pointed out, among other shortcomings, that the mountainous topography would make communication between the divided elements problematic, and that embarking for Mana with just half a platoon, in his view, "was not safe." One of the most highly regarded young officers in the Army, Uthlaut had graduated at the top of his class at West Point as first captain of the Corps of Cadets. When George W. Bush was sworn in as president in 2001, Uthlaut was the guy chosen to lead the Army's procession down Pennsylvania Avenue in the inaugural parade. After leaving the academy and becoming a platoon leader in the Second Ranger Battalion, he quickly earned the admiration of the enlisted men and noncommissioned officers who served under him. Uthlaut was a disciplined soldier who seldom questioned orders, and never without a compelling reason. But his urgent requests to reconsider the directive to split the platoon elicited this brusque reply from headquarters: "Reconsider denied." "Nobody on the ground in Magarah thought it was a good idea to split the platoon," recalls Specialist Jade Lane, who, as Uthlaut's radio operator, had been privy to the entire extended debate between headquarters and the platoon leader. "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. |
| 156 |
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. |
| 157 |
Back in the 1980s the Afghans used to ambush the Russians in places just like this. They slaughtered them in these canyons from above. It's how they won the war." Shepherd pondered the obvious implications of this comment, nodded soberly, then pulled out his camera and documented their passage through the dirty windshield as he drove. For the next twenty minutes the convoy crept through the claustrophobic rift, forced by the severity of the terrain to move at an excruciatingly slow pace. The slot was so tight that the Humvees' fenders sometimes scraped against its sheer walls. The Rangers remained twitchy and anxious, expecting to be attacked from the high ground at any moment. According to Private Bryan O'Neal, a rifleman, "The canyon was very rough, there were large boulders everywhere, and the walls were at least a hundred feet high on each side. I actually had to lay on top of the vehicle to be able to pull security" — the cliffs rose so precipitously that O'Neal had to lie flat on his back in order to scan the canyon's ledges for Taliban through the scope of his M4 carbine.* After twenty minutes, Uthlaut's Humvee emerged from the western end of the slot. The valley opened, and the canyon floor broadened into a relatively flat gravel channel some thirty yards across. Corn and poppies grew in terraced plots of cultivated earth on both sides of the wadi. Clustered on a dun-colored hillside just outside the mouth of the narrows, eight or nine mud-walled buildings stood above the opium fields. |
| 158 |
Young Pashtun boys in filthy clothing ran up to the convoy as it rolled by, waving and laughing. The danger of an ambush appeared to have passed. A moment later, a series of loud explosions echoed from the narrows behind them. "I turned toward where we had just come from," says Baer, "and all of a sudden it looked like Star Wars back there. Red tracer rounds were flying up out of the canyon, lighting up the sky." Tracers are special bullets manufactured with a pyrotechnic charge that ignites as each projectile exits the barrel of a weapon, making the bullet's trajectory appear as a bright red streak, enabling the shooter to more easily adjust his fire toward the intended target. Every fifth bullet loaded into the machine guns used by American forces in Afghanistan was a tracer round; the Taliban in that area didn't use tracer ammunition. Baer understood instantly, therefore, that the red streaks flashing through the canyon's shadows were bullets from American soldiers returning fire against an enemy ambush. "I knew it was our guys getting hit," he says. "It was the other half of the platoon." The platoon's other element, Serial Two, was supposed to be miles away by then, towing the derelict Humvee in the opposite direction. Uthlaut and his men had no idea why Serial Two would impulsively reverse course and follow them, but apparently their counterparts in the other element had done precisely that, and were now caught in the middle of what looked and sounded like an intense firefight half a mile away. |
| 159 |
Serial One skidded to a halt and the soldiers jumped out of their trucks and Humvees. The element's highest-ranking Ranger under Uthlaut was a self-possessed staff sergeant named Matthew Weeks who had been awarded a Bronze Star for his valorous actions during a firefight in Iraq the previous year. He assigned a half-dozen soldiers to stay with the six vehicles and then ordered most of the rest to move with him up the north slope of the canyon toward the cluster of mud buildings they'd just driven beneath. Weeks informed Uthlaut, "I'm going to try to push past the village and see if I can overwatch Serial Two's movement out of the ambush zone," explaining that his squad would move no farther than a brow of high ground above the settlement. A Ranger platoon is typically organized into three squads, each consisting of two "fire teams" of six or fewer men. When Uthlaut was forced to hastily divide his platoon back in Magarah, he put Third Squad (commanded by Weeks) in Serial One and assigned the bulk of First and Second squads to Serial Two. Because the two convoys needed to be of more or less equal size, however, Uthlaut pulled two men from Second Squad and added them to Serial One. These two soldiers were Private O'Neal, a baby-faced eighteen-year-old who was the youngest, greenest member of the entire unit; and Specialist Patrick Tillman, the leader of O'Neal's fire team. Tillman — twenty-seven years old, previously employed as a strong safety in the National Football League — was unquestionably the most famous enlisted man in Afghanistan. |
| 160 |
And wherever he went, I went." The route to the village ascended a steep gully, the bottom of which was six thousand feet above sea level. Between his weapons, body armor, night-vision optics, CamelBak water bladders, grenades, and extra ammunition, each Ranger was carrying more than sixty pounds of dead weight. Thus burdened, within seconds of leaving the vehicles, everyone was gasping for air, but the sounds of the nearby battle — moving noticeably closer by the minute — kept the Rangers pushing upward despite the pain. When they reached the village, the Rangers performed a "hasty clear," passing quickly through the settlement without pausing to search inside any of the buildings, and then hurried toward the crest of a spur that rose above the village. Tillman was among the first to arrive atop the spur, which was devoid of trees or other cover. After pausing for a few seconds to assess the lay of the land, he continued over the crest and scurried down the other side to a pair of low boulders, accompanied by O'Neal and a twenty-seven-year-old Afghan soldier named Sayed Farhad. These rocks afforded only minimal protection from enemy fire but provided an excellent view of the wadi where Tillman expected Serial Two to emerge from the mouth of the gorge. A few minutes later two vehicles came speeding out of the canyon and stopped ninety yards beneath the boulders. Several Rangers climbed out of a Humvee and gazed up toward Tillman and O'Neal, who waved to let their buddies know they were up there and had them covered. |
| 161 |
In my life there have been a number." He then cataloged several. Foremost on his mind at the time, predictably, was his decision to join the military. But the incident he put at the top of the list, which occurred when he was eleven years old, comes as a surprise. "As odd as this sounds," the journal revealed, "a diving catch I made in the 1112 all-stars was a take-off point. I excelled the rest of the tournament and gained incredible confidence. It sounds tacky but it was big." As a child growing up in Almaden, California (an upscale suburb of San Jose), Pat had started playing baseball at the age of seven. It quickly became apparent to the adults who watched him throw a ball and swing a bat that he possessed extraordinary talent, but Pat seems not to have been particularly cognizant of his own athletic gifts until he was selected for the aforementioned all-star team in the summer of 1988. As the tournament against teams of other standout middle-school athletes got under way, he mostly sat on the bench. When the coach eventually put Pat into a game, however, he clobbered a home run and made a spectacular catch of a long fly ball hit into the outfield. 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. |
| 162 |
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. |
| 163 |
Another five million Afghans — nearly a third of the prewar population — had taken flight from the ravaged nation, mostly to dismal refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran, although some fled to places as far away as California. On the face of it, the trap set for the Soviets by the Carter administration in 1979 seemed to have worked. Nine months after Gorbachev pulled his troops from Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall came down, heralding the imminent dissolution of the Soviet empire — a collapse indubitably hastened by the staggering cost of the Afghan conflict. The climactic battle of the Cold War had been won without the American military even having to get off the couch. Acting as a proxy army, the mujahideen had given the United States a free ride. Or so it seemed at the time. In the summer of 1989, an essay titled "The End of History?" was published in the journal National Interest by a young State Department official named Francis Fukuyama. The essay, which catapulted Fukuyama from obscurity to overnight fame (and was later expanded into an even more widely read book, The End of History and the Last Man), argued that history is properly regarded as the progress of ideas rather than merely a record of human events, and that the end of the Cold War signaled the permanent victory of modernity — the apotheosis of which was the Western idea of liberal capitalist democracy. "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea," wrote Fukuyama, "is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism... |
| 164 |
* U. S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld received strikingly similar admonitions from American generals during their planning for the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. * Khost was part of Paktia Province until 1995, when it was split off as a province unto itself. Although Pat Tillman was born in Fremont, for all but two years of his childhood he lived thirty minutes down the freeway in a neighborhood known as New Almaden — a tranquil, closely woven community tucked alongside the narrow seam of Los Alamitos Creek, where the Tillman family occupied a tidy thirteen-hundred-square-foot cottage surrounded by shade trees. The slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains, redolent of Scotch broom and manzanita, jutted directly from their backyard. Thanks to the serenity of the setting and the proximity of so much open space, New Almaden still feels like it's at a distant remove from the hyperthyroidal sprawl of greater San Jose, even though the latter begins less than two miles down the valley. The hills immediately west of the Tillman abode are honeycombed with mine shafts that once yielded a bounty of mercury ore. It was the most valuable mine in California during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but the diggings were shut down in 1975, after which the site was designated a forty-two-hundred-acre recreational area and thirty-five miles of hiking trails were built across its sun-parched ridges. Mary Lydanne Tillman — known as Dannie to her friends and close acquaintances — spent countless hours walking these trails with Pat on her back when he was a baby. |
| 165 |
Pat inherited superlative athletic genes, as did his brothers, and he began playing in an organized soccer league at the age of four. Thereafter, Tillman family life was organized to no small extent around the sports played by Pat, Kevin, and Richard. In Pat's case, by the time he was in high school, the sport that he cared most passionately about was football. For reasons having to do with safety and liability, students were not allowed to play on the varsity football team until they were fifteen years old, so Pat didn't join the varsity squad until November 1991, when he was added to the roster for the playoffs during his sophomore year. By the time the 1992 football season got under way he had become Leland's star player. Despite his diminutive size, the coach used him on offense as a running back and wide receiver; on defense as a linebacker and strong safety; and on special teams as a punter, punt returner, and kick returner. Pat excelled at every position. Late in a crucial game near the end of the season, he ran the ball ninety yards down the field for a come-from-behind touchdown that earned Leland a berth in the playoffs. Not long after Pat was killed, a remote Army firebase seven miles south of the hillside where he perished was named in his honor: Forward Operating Base Tillman. In the winter of 2007 a small contingent of American soldiers was stationed here, along with a company of Afghan National Army recruits and a handful of fighters from the Afghan Security Guard. |
| 166 |
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. When larger boys menaced him, Pat responded by instantly going on the offensive, forcing the aggressors to either throw down or back away. Caught off guard by the puny kid's utter lack of fear, sometimes his adversaries would elect to retreat, but when they wouldn't, Pat wasn't shy about exchanging blows. This willingness to engage in fisticuffs when challenged was fostered by the culture of high-school football, in which members of the tribe were expected to demonstrate their courage and establish their place in the masculine hierarchy by fighting. |
| 167 |
It hit everyone hard." More than a quarter century after the Soviet invasion, great swaths of central Kabul still exist as bombed-out heaps of rubble. Although foreign visitors commonly take it for granted that this extensive destruction occurred during the Soviet-Afghan War, such assumptions are mistaken. During most of the Soviet occupation, Kabul remained a bustling, functional metropolis. Children filled the schools. Business flourished. The arts were vibrant. Basic services such as water and electricity continued to be provided. The war's horrors were myriad and savagely real, but they were generally visited on the countryside; Kabul dodged the worst of the violence. Life in the capital carried on much as it had before the conflict, by and large. The devastation of Kabul didn't actually come about until long after the infidel occupiers had departed. And it wasn't caused by the Soviets. The wreckage that blights Afghanistan's principal city was the fruit of mujahideen wreaking havoc on mujahideen: Afghans doing their best to kill other Afghans. During Pat's high-school years, as he was celebrating his youth, asserting his masculinity, and winning admirers on the football field, Afghanistan was sinking to new depths of misery — although most Americans remained oblivious to what was happening in this part of the world. When the Soviets pulled out, there had been anticipation within the Afghan diaspora, including many of the expatriates living just up the road from Pat in Fremont, that their nation was on the cusp of a new era of peace and renewal. |
| 168 |
When Hekmatyar's fighters arrived from the south a few hours later, ferocious block-by-block combat ensued. Massoud had moved quickly to seize strategic positions throughout Kabul, however, and Hekmatyar wasn't able to overcome the advantage. After a week of intense fighting, the latter's soldiers withdrew from the city and retreated whence they came, although without conceding victory to Massoud. Instead, Hekmatyar, in a senseless rage, began firing barrage after barrage of rockets into the city from afar, inflicting death and ruin without regard for whom or what they might strike. 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. |
| 169 |
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. |
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But the kids in Pat and Marie's crowd weren't much inclined to go there as teenagers. When they were in the mood to escape their local haunts and blow off steam they usually drove down to Santa Cruz — a seaside community known for its surf culture and progressive politics — which was thirty miles in the other direction. This is where Pat took Marie on their first date, to a restaurant called the Crow's Nest overlooking the Pacific Ocean. "We sat outside on the deck upstairs," Marie remembers. "It was the beginning of October, and it was a little cold out. Pat hadn't dated much, and I could tell he was nervous. Besides his mom, he hadn't really spent much time around girls. And Dannie told me that raising all boys, she downplayed her feminine side a lot and did things outside with them, teaching them to play sports, that kind of thing. His idea of what girls were all about was not typical. But it wasn't a big problem. All three Tillman brothers always had a lot of respect for their mom. From her they learned how to treat women." Despite Pat's inexperience with affairs of the heart, he and Marie established what would turn out to be an enduring bond. Throughout Pat's youth, his mother — a warm, expressive, tolerant woman — anchored his existence with a steadfast and unconditional love. Like most kids, Pat took this maternal devotion for granted; he was largely oblivious to the degree to which Dannie's unwavering gravitational field kept his hyper-kinetic young life securely in its orbit. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Instead, it asked the Taliban to perform the rescue, and Mullah Omar obliged. On November 3, Taliban forces overran the warlords' militia, executed its commander, and liberated the trucks. That same night, taking advantage of their momentum, they attacked other militias that controlled Kandahar City and routed them as well. Within a few weeks the Taliban were in control of the entire province. By the end of 1994 their forces had swelled to twelve thousand fighters, mostly madrassa students, some as young as fourteen years old. By the middle of 1995, Omar had twenty-five thousand jihadis under his command, he controlled half the provinces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban were advancing steadily north toward Kabul. Omar's impressionable young fighters believed that because they were holy warriors directed by the will of Allah, the Taliban could not lose, and this aura of invincibility affected the mujahideen they were fighting. When confronted by approaching Taliban forces, on several occasions mujahideen fighters simply surrendered en masse, without firing a shot, and then joined the Taliban themselves, at least in the case of the Pashtun mujahideen the Taliban encountered in the southern and eastern provinces. Among those who defected and came over to the Taliban was Jalaluddin Haqqani, from Khost, considered to be perhaps the most talented and effective of the mujahideen commanders. Energized by the Taliban's victorious march north, and inflamed by religious fervor, Mullah Omar enacted his singularly draconian interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. |
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By decree, every man was required to grow a beard no shorter than the span of his fist. Women were forbidden to work outside the home, or be seen in public unless accompanied by a male relative and covered head to toe in a stifling burqa. Girls were forbidden to attend school. A strict ban was enacted on such "unclean things" as satellite dishes, movies, videos, musical instruments, musical recordings, singing, dancing, dog racing, kite flying, chess, marbles, billiards, alcoholic beverages, computers, televisions, wine, lobster, nail polish, homing pigeons, firecrackers, statues, pictures, and Christmas cards. Despite this chilling assault on education, the rights of women, and ordinary pleasures, the initial response of most countries (including the United States) to the ascendancy of the Taliban ranged from apathy to guarded optimism. Any political entity that managed to replace Afghanistan's hellish state of anarchy with some kind of order was thought to be a good thing. Or so it seemed at the time. As Taliban forces continued to advance north and west into non-Pashtun regions, their progress slowed, and they even suffered some significant defeats. In the spring of 1995, twenty thousand Taliban fighters supported by tanks and jets advanced on Herat, adjacent to Afghanistan's western border with Iran. When the Taliban attacked, Herati forces led by Commander Ismail Khan slaughtered hundreds of young madrassa students and forced the Taliban to retreat all the way back to Kandahar. |
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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. The Taliban now governed the country, nevertheless. The administration of President Bill Clinton issued contradictory statements about this turn of events, muddying the waters about whether the United States approved of the country's new leadership or opposed it. But some Americans were encouraged. Unocal, the American oil company, believed that with the Taliban in control it might be able to finally realize its ambition to build a lucrative pipeline across Afghanistan to carry natural gas from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan to Pakistan. Just weeks after Kabul was captured, Unocal opened an office in Kandahar, not far from Mullah Omar's headquarters. To the handful of intelligence analysts who were paying close attention, however, there were many reasons to be alarmed by the Taliban victory, as well as by other recent developments in Afghanistan. |
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Furious, bin Laden departed but vowed to exact revenge on the United States for uprooting him. And then he contacted some of his old mujahideen associates in Jalalabad to let them know he was in the market for a new home. When the Afghans replied that they would be delighted to have the sheik back among them, bin Laden began preparations to shift his entire base of operations to Afghanistan. Upon learning of his plans, American officials smugly congratulated themselves for displacing him from Sudan. Bin Laden departed Khartoum in a chartered jet on May 18, 1996, refueled in the United Arab Emirates, and landed in Jalalabad. Two trips were required to ferry his entourage, which included three of his four wives, several children, and approximately a hundred bodyguards. In Afghanistan he was warmly welcomed by three commanders from the Northern Alliance, who provided him with austere accommodations a few miles outside of the city. At the time of bin Laden's return, Mullah Omar and most of the Taliban leadership were extremely wary of him; among numerous reasons for distrusting bin Laden, he had come to Afghanistan as a guest of the Northern Alliance, with whom the Taliban were then fighting viciously for control of the country. But bin Laden's longtime friend Commander Jalaluddin Haqqani had recently defected to the Taliban, and when Omar's forces captured Kabul four months after bin Laden's arrival, bin Laden decided it would be wise to make an overture to the man who had just driven his erstwhile hosts from Jalalabad and now ruled the nation. |
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Bin Laden therefore dispatched a confidant to Kandahar and requested an audience with the Taliban leadership. An October meeting was arranged in Kabul between bin Laden and one of Omar's most trusted deputies. By the time it concluded, bin Laden had sworn an oath of loyalty to the Taliban regime, and the Taliban had reciprocated by promising him sanctuary. The rapprochement seemed to please both parties very much. The relationship was sealed a month later when bin Laden traveled to Kandahar to meet Omar in the flesh. Upon being introduced, the Saudi sheik flattered the once-humble mullah of Sanghisar by addressing him as Amir al-Mu'minin, "the Prince of the Faithful" — a rarely bestowed honorific typically reserved for Islam's greatest caliphs. The flattery succeeded: Omar was charmed by bin Laden, and invited him to move his family from Jalalabad to Kandahar, where the Taliban could more easily ensure their safety. Bin Laden accepted the invitation and took possession of three compounds in and around Kandahar during the first months of 1997, whereupon he began spending much time in Omar's company. While delivering a Friday sermon at the largest mosque in the city, Omar brought bin Laden before the teeming assembly and lauded his new friend as "one of Islam's most important spiritual leaders." The nascent partnership was not without complications, however: The Taliban received many millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi royal family considered bin Laden a serious threat. |
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And the judge was a stickler about fulfilling all 250 hours of the sentence. To get Pat to work on time, therefore, Dannie was allowed to pick her son up at the county lockup and drive him to his daily assignment, working at a homeless shelter called the Julian Street Inn. A fringe benefit of this arrangement was that on several occasions Dannie brought Marie, or one of Pat's brothers, or one of his friends to visit with him during the drive, which was a great consolation to him. 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. |
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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. |
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As did the huge demands on his time made by football and classes, which left few spare moments to indulge in self-pity. Because Pat was determined to excel academically as well as athletically (as he had not done in high school), he spent almost as much time studying as he did in the gym or on the practice field — a significant change that to no small degree can be attributed to his experience behind bars. "After the Round Table incident," Marie concurs, "Pat felt he couldn't afford to be reckless and risk getting into trouble anymore." Instead, he decided to concentrate on school. At the beginning of the semester Pat enlisted the services of a tutor to make sure he did well in his mathematics class. Two other students happened to sign up for the same tutor — his roommate and football teammate, B. J. Alford; and an uncommonly talented tennis player from Hungary named REka CseresnyEs. Throughout the semester the three freshman athletes met with the tutor twice a week. "We studied together," says CseresnyEs, "and sometimes we would run into each other on campus or have lunch at the cafeteria. We wouldn't really hang out beyond running into each other and having these talks. But every time we'd get together, we would end up having deep conversations. So we became friends very quickly." CseresnyEs had grown up in Budapest under a repressive communist government, witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain as a teenager, and then leaped at the opportunity to come to the United States upon winning an athletic scholarship to attend Arizona State University. |
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"Once he got in the habit of studying, he found a lot of success," Marie says. Part of the motivation for that success, she adds, "was that most people expected football players to be kind of stupid. I think it appealed to him to go against the stereotype. He liked defying expectations." Pat also controverted the assumptions of those who thought he was too small and too slow to play college football for a powerhouse Division I-A school. During his first year he was only put into games as a special-teams player, during punts and kickoffs, and the Sun Devils had a lackluster season with three wins and eight losses. Pat earned a varsity letter, nevertheless, and Coach Snyder characterized his play as "so smart and so aggressive." The following year Pat started just one game, but he frequently came into games off the bench to play inside linebacker, and over the course of the 1995 season recorded the sixth-highest number of tackles on the team. That year the Sun Devils' record improved to 74, although there were some embarrassing defeats along the way, the most humiliating of which was inflicted by the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. On the first play from scrimmage, Nebraska ran the football sixty-five yards for a touchdown, and the rout was under way. The Cornhuskers had scored nine touchdowns by halftime, a school record, and the final score was 7728. The loss was especially humbling for the Sun Devils' defense. If a football team racks up that many points, it suggests that the team being scored against has some serious defensive flaws. |
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After seeing a baffling item called a McFu Burger on the menu, he wrote, "I had to have it." It turned out to be "just your standard quarter-pounder-type burger, minus the cheese, plus oriental sauce with lettuce and crazy carrot pieces and what have you. It was delicious. My hat is off to the McFu." A day later, in Interlaken, he was out on his daily run when he encountered a trail posted with signs warning that the route was closed and access was forbidden — which proved to be an irresistible draw. "Downed trees were all over the path," he wrote, "forcing me to do some nice maneuvers to get through. 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. |
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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... |
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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. Jazz played in the background and the help was real cool. A cheese dish and mushroom concoction made up our appetizers ... the mushroom deal was unbelievable. Unfortunately, with the appetizers came the vino. For dinner I had lamb, which kicked ass. All of our food was excellent with great sauces... Our conversation was humming, and as the wine was poured it got louder and louder. For dessert the ladies had creme brulEe and Alex a brownie. I opted for more wine. Now things start to get hazy. Alex and I are getting obnoxious as we get drunk. Like usual, I am swearing up a storm and as Marie tells it, the people around us are not pleased. We are not kicked out, but were politely cut off and went on our way. They were really cool and didn't get pissed but were happy to see us leave. Remembering that night, Christine Garwood issues a bemused sigh and then elaborates: "A girlfriend of Marie's had been to Paris, and she said we should go to this restaurant. It was a tiny place. |
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After this fracas Pat wrote in his journal: Coach Vince Tobin kicked my ass out of practice and added insult to injury by making me do the scout stuff. Later on I had to go in and speak to Mr. Tobin, where he said he was "incredibly disappointed" in my play Sunday; I'm "out of control"; and he doesn't think I'm a starter in this league. Pretty much everything I have been working to overcome. This episode really put the cherry atop a fucked-up week. What is the most disappointing is how well my camp had gone, pre-season, even last week's practice, only to be pissed on by a sub-par opening game. From here I've basically realized they will start Tommy Bennett, the strong safety who was injured near the end of 1999 as soon as he's healthy. In order to prevent this I'm going to have to pull something crazy off this weekend against Dallas. Oh well, could be worse. All I can do is keep working. One day after Pat wrote this grim wrap-up of his week, the Cardinals played what would turn out to be their best game of the year, against the Cowboys. Late in the fourth quarter Arizona was backed up to their own fifteen-yard line, trailing the Cowboys by five points, when quarterback Jake Plummer threw the ball to David Boston for a sixty-three-yard gain. Three plays later, with just under two minutes remaining in the game, Plummer passed to Frank Sanders in the end zone for a touchdown. Although the Cowboys only needed a field goal to win the game, Pat and the defense dug in and stopped them cold. |
| 186 |
In other words, without Nader on the ballot, Gore would have beaten Bush by nearly thirteen thousand votes and become president of the United States by a comfortable margin. But Nader of course was on the ballot, and on November 8 the Florida vote was therefore too close to call. When November gave way to December, it remained that way, despite the ongoing recounts. The waters were muddied by several contradictory rulings from various Florida courts, some of which favored Gore, others of which favored Bush. Complicating matters even further, federal law stipulated that in order to preclude a possible congressional challenge to the legitimacy of the representatives Florida appointed to the electoral college, the state's vote count had to be completed and certified by midnight on December 12. Missing this deadline, as it turned out, would not have invalidated the Florida election results: more than a third of the fifty states failed to meet the December 12 target without incident. The crucial deadline for certifying Florida's vote count didn't actually fall until January 6, 2001. But if the December 12 deadline wasn't particularly important, it was widely perceived to be, and therefore infused the ongoing drama with an added measure of tension. On December 8, Gore appeared to have prevailed in the legal arena when he won a key ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered yet another manual recount of some forty-five thousand disputed ballots throughout the state. As this recount got under way, Bush's lead rapidly diminished. |
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On December 9, however, before the tally could be completed, the U. S. Supreme Court voted 54 to issue an injunction that halted the recount in response to an emergency plea filed by Bush's attorneys. At the time this stay was granted, Bush's lead had dwindled to 154 votes and appeared to be fast on its way to vanishing altogether. The December 9 injunction provoked furious protests from Democrats and was derided by legal scholars as a transparently partisan attempt by the Rehnquist Court to hand the election to Bush. Unmoved by the firestorm of criticism, the Supreme Court justices issued their momentous decision in Bush v. Gore three days later, at 10:00 p. m. on December 12. Again by a vote of 54, the Court ruled that the December 12 deadline for certifying the vote count would in fact be binding, and because completing a constitutionally valid recount would be impossible within the two hours that remained before the clock struck midnight, there would be no further reckoning of Florida's disputed votes. Incensed Gore supporters quickly pointed out that just six paragraphs earlier in the text of the same ruling the Court had declared, "The press of time does not diminish the constitutional concern. A desire for speed is not a general excuse for ignoring equal protection guarantees." Furthermore, the Gore camp argued, the only reason a recount couldn't be completed by the court-mandated deadline was that the same five-justice majority had stopped the recount three days previously with their December 9 injunction, predetermining the outcome of their December 12 ruling. |
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Clarke writes in his book Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, "My message was stark: al-Qaeda is at war with us, it is a highly capable organization, probably with sleeper cells in the U. S., and it is clearly planning a major series of attacks against us; we must act decisively and quickly, deciding on the issues prepared after the attack on the Cole, going on the offensive." On January 25, Clarke alerted Rice that six recent intelligence reports uncovered statements from al-Qaeda operatives boasting of an upcoming attack. Over the following weeks, he repeatedly implored her to persuade President Bush to give much higher priority to terrorism in general and bin Laden in particular, but his e-mails and memos were met with apathy and annoyance. The Cardinals had paid Tillman a salary of $361,500 for his services in 2000, and had given him a contract that lasted only a single year. Based on his performance in the just-completed season, the St. Louis Rams — a terrific team that had won the Super Bowl a year earlier — believed Tillman was worth considerably more than that. On April 13, 2001, the Rams' management offered him a five-year deal for $9.6 million, $2.6 million of which would be paid up front, upon signing. Frank Bauer, Tillman's agent, immediately called him with the good news. "I get Patty on the phone," Bauer remembers, "and tell him, 'Listen to me. The Rams really want you, and I don't see Arizona matching their offer. I'm going to fax the Rams' offer sheet to you. |
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For his part, however, Tillman had no regrets. He was one of those rare individuals who simply can't be bought at any price. Although he had no qualms about making a boatload of money if it happened to mesh with his master plan, Pat was impervious to greed. His belief that other things in life took priority over amassing wealth never faltered. But if Tillman was uncommonly resistant to the temptations of the baser human appetites, and was thereby well defended against attempts by others to manipulate him into doing their bidding with such enticements, he found it nearly impossible to resist appeals to his sense of decency and justice. Paradoxically, this latter trait would ultimately prove to be his downfall. Although Pat spoke self-deprecatingly about his intelligence, and claimed that his academic success in college came from hard work rather than brainpower, his intellectual curiosity was boundless, and he was a compulsive reader who never went anywhere without a book. Pat Murphy, the celebrated Arizona State University baseball coach, remembers seeing Pat in the bleachers during most of the Sun Devils' baseball games when Kevin was on the team. "He always had a book with him," says Murphy. "Between innings, or anytime there was a lull, he'd have it open and he'd be reading something." Because he loved engaging in informed debate, Pat made an effort to study history, economic theory, and world events from a variety of perspectives. Toward that end he read the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Quran, and the works of writers ranging from Adolf Hitler to Henry David Thoreau. |
| 190 |
Kennison had gotten away from Pat, however, and was open in the end zone, so Pat grabbed him illegally to prevent him from catching the football. Although the pass was incomplete, a referee saw the infraction and charged Pat with a pass interference penalty, which gave Denver a first down on the Cardinals' one-yard line. On the next play, Griese threw the ball to the fullback Patrick Hape for an easy touchdown, putting the Broncos ahead, 3110. Pat was furious at himself for the rest of the day, but by the time he went to bed that night he had already regained his perspective, and was looking forward to using the episode as a learning experience to improve his performance in the future. "For the most part," Marie explains, "Pat put football in its proper place. If he had a bad game, he would take it hard. It was his job, and he took it seriously. But there were only a handful of instances that I can remember when he was really, really upset about it." The following Sunday, September 30, the Cardinals lost at home again, this time to the Atlanta Falcons, 3414. Only 23,790 spectators had shown up to witness the defeat, Arizona's smallest home crowd in many years. 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. |
| 191 |
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. |
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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. You have my full confidence, and you will have every tool you need to carry out your duty. I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these difficult times — a letter from a 4th-grade girl, with a father in the military: "As much as I don't want my Dad to fight," she wrote, "I'm willing to give him to you." This is a precious gift, the greatest she could give. |
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This young girl knows what America is all about. Since September 11, an entire generation of young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom, and its cost in duty and in sacrifice. The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail. Thank you. May God continue to bless America. Tillman stared up at the towering video screen alongside his teammates and pondered the president's words. The strikes against bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban of which Bush had spoken had commenced exactly two hours earlier when four American ships, an American submarine, and a British submarine launched a synchronized barrage of cruise missiles toward Afghanistan. The first of these fifty missiles had exploded into their targets just thirty-three minutes before Bush had begun his address to the nation. When images of the military action were shown on the JumboTron, the crowd filling the stadium let out a thunderous, cathartic roar. The attacks of 911 were being avenged. The United States was now at war. The game between the Cardinals and the Eagles began immediately after the president's speech. Arizona won it, 2120, when Jake Plummer threw a thirty-five-yard touchdown pass to MarTay Jenkins on fourth down with only nine seconds left on the clock. Tillman had to leave the game in the first quarter, however, with a severe sprain to his right ankle after he received an illegal cut block from the Eagles' Jon Runyan, a six-foot seven-inch, 330-pound offensive tackle. |
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Although Pat hopped off the field on one leg without assistance, the injury turned out to be serious. Other than the broken tibia he suffered when he was twelve years old, it was the only debilitating injury Pat ever received on a football field, despite the fact that he was one of the hardest-hitting and most aggressive players in the league. Immediately after returning to Arizona, ignoring the pain, Pat began working out so he wouldn't lose too much strength or speed as the ankle slowly healed. While his teammates practiced, Pat ran endless laps around the field with an inflatable cast on his foot. And as he continued to rehabilitate the injury over the weeks that followed, he closely followed the war in Afghanistan. On October 19, the first American ground troops — a small contingent of Army Rangers — landed eighty miles south of Kandahar. For the first months of the war, though, the Bush administration was extremely reluctant to involve more than a handful of Special Operations Forces in the conflict, relying instead on air strikes and ex-mujahideen militias whose services were purchased with duffel bags full of hundred-dollar bills. Most of these mercenary fighters (who received some $70 million all told) were Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Hazaras affiliated with the so-called Northern Alliance, which had been battling the Taliban for control of Afghanistan for the better part of a decade. Despite the severity of Pat's injury, he missed only four games before returning to the lineup against the Giants on November 11, a game the Cardinals lost, 1710. |
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The bombing continued around the clock — not a second went by without warplanes flying over our heads, day and night. The American defense ministry command room, with all its allies, put everything they had into blowing up and destroying this small area. They tried to eradicate it altogether." It appeared as though the onslaught from the sky had succeeded when, during the evening of December 11, the al-Qaeda fighters contacted one of the Eastern Alliance commanders and begged for a truce in order, they said, to negotiate the terms of their surrender. Despite vehement objections by the Americans, the Afghans agreed to the truce on the morning of the twelfth. Believing that bin Laden had no intention of capitulating, and that the cease-fire was merely a gambit to allow al-Qaeda forces to regroup, early that morning twenty-five American Delta operators and British Special Boat Service commandos attempted to climb toward bin Laden's redoubt in order to continue their attack, when eighty Eastern Alliance fighters on the American payroll leveled their weapons at the Western commandos and forced them to turn back. At 5:00 that evening, by which time no enemy had come forward to surrender, the Americans declared the truce to be invalid, ignored the protests of the Eastern Alliance, and resumed their assault on bin Laden's caves with even greater fury than before. Giant orange fireballs again flared across the slopes of Tora Bora as B-52s, F-18s, and B-1 stealth bombers released their payloads over al-Qaeda positions. |
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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. |
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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. Sports embodied many of the qualities I deem meaningful: courage, toughness, strength, etc., while at the same time, the attention I received reinforced its seeming importance. In the pursuit of athletics I have picked up a college degree, learned invaluable lessons, met incredible people, and made my journey much more valuable than any destination. However, these last few years, and especially after recent events, I've come to appreciate just how shallow and insignificant my role is. |
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When Pat told Kevin that he was thinking about enlisting in the military, Kevin decided to enlist along with him, as Marie had predicted. "When they were growing up in New Almaden," Marie explains, "Pat and Kevin were always together. There was never any competition or resentment. Even though they were so close in age, Kevin wasn't bothered by all the attention Pat got. Kevin and Richard were each very talented in their own right, and their parents were careful never to single out Pat, but there's no getting around the fact that Pat was the one who was usually in the limelight — which for a lot of people would be tough to take. But not for Kevin and Richard. All three brothers just loved each other to death." Pat and Marie announced to their families and friends that they would be getting married in San Jose on May 4, 2002. Kevin was then living in North Carolina, playing second base for the Burlington Indians, and he asked his team manager for time off to attend the wedding. When the manager refused, citing club policy, Kevin asked to be released from his contract, the Indians granted his request, and he showed up at Pat and Marie's home in Chandler in mid-April, free from professional obligations. By now both Pat and Kevin were certain they were going to join the military, but they decided not to break the news to anyone until after the wedding, so as not to distract from the festivities. They were leaning toward joining one of the branches of the Special Operations Forces. |
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With the Rangers, there were three possible places we could have been stationed: Fort Lewis, near Seattle; or one of two bases in Georgia — Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. At that time you could actually pick where you wanted to be." When they left the recruiting office after about an hour, Marie remembers, "I was thinking, 'We can live near Seattle! We'll be done in three years instead of four!' Also, we learned that Rangers deploy overseas for relatively short periods; they're usually gone for only three months at a time, compared to troops in the regular Army, who would go overseas for twelve months at a time. And by becoming Rangers, they would be with elite soldiers who knew what they were doing, so I assumed that would make things safer for Pat and Kevin. I came out of there feeling that it didn't sound that bad, all things considered — if I could put out of my mind the fact that they would be in combat situations." Pat, Marie, and Kevin traveled to San Jose at the beginning of May for the wedding and then returned briefly to Arizona before Pat and Marie departed for their honeymoon in Bora-Bora on May 10. In the interim, Pat and Kevin returned to the Army recruiting office, where they signed contracts committing them to three years of military service, beginning in July. Because he'd been such a big football star for both the Sun Devils and the Cardinals, Pat was a celebrity throughout Arizona, and he and Kevin were recognized while they were signing documents, prompting fears that their enlistment would be leaked to the news media. |
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Although they had intended to tell their family of their plans in person after Pat returned from Bora-Bora, Pat and Kevin decided they should notify them right away over the phone instead, lest Richard or their parents learn of their impending enlistment from the evening news. When the Tillman brothers made these calls on May 8 and 9, the announcement was not well received by their loved ones. Knowing Pat and Kevin as well as they did, nobody doubted that once they were in the Army, they would insist on being sent to the front lines. This prospect was especially upsetting to Dannie and Richard. While Pat and Marie were honeymooning in the South Pacific, Uncle Mike Spalding — Dannie's brother — flew out to Arizona and tried to convince Kevin that joining the Army was a terrible idea and they should call the whole thing off, but to no avail. Marie's parents called Pat's agent, Frank Bauer, and asked him to talk Pat out of it as well, but Bauer had no more success than Uncle Mike did. So Pat and Kevin's parents, in conjunction with Marie's parents, decided to attempt an intervention. It took place at the Tillmans' cottage in New Almaden, soon after the newlyweds returned from Bora-Bora. In attendance were Pat, Kevin, and the Tillman parents; Marie and her parents; Marie's sister, Christine Garwood; and her husband, Alex Garwood. "It wasn't a real intervention," says Marie, "because Pat and Kevin knew what was coming. But Pat believed that everybody had a right to tell him what they thought, and to try and talk him out of it. |
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Unintimidated, Pat yelled right back at him, and the two men came close to exchanging blows before some other recruits interceded. Despite this inauspicious episode, at the end of the day Pat and Kevin signed away their freedom, recited the oath of enlistment, and received orders to appear at Fort Benning, Georgia, on July 8, 2002. For three years thereafter, their lives would be under the nearly absolute control of the U. S. Army. Pat was twenty-five years old, and Kevin was twenty-four. Each would be starting at a base salary of $1,290 per month. As Pat and Kevin departed Phoenix on the appointed day, Pat pulled a journal bound in brown leather from his backpack and began documenting his impressions of the long stint stretching ahead of him. The first entry, dated July 8, begins, "It will be interesting to see how this little adventure pans out. At the moment I care little about the 'moral stance' that got this fiasco started... As I taxi down the runway on my way to Georgia, all I can think about is how nice it was to sit with Marie, sipping hot chocolate and watching Gosford Park last night. Or how comfy my big bed is with Marie's naked body pressed against me. I hope Marie is happy at home... I hope Ma's OK... I hope Pooh's OK... I hope Kevin doesn't get hurt... I know what I'm doing is right, but at times it is very difficult to see it that way." After landing in Atlanta, the Tillmans boarded a bus for the two-hour ride to the Thirtieth Adjutant General Reception Station at Fort Benning, known as Thirtieth AG, where they arrived shortly after midnight on July 9. |
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They would spend the next nine days "in-processing" here, bunking in a fifty-foot-by-fifty-foot concrete "bay" with 110 other new recruits in a nightmarish state of purgatory before moving on to the bona fide hell of basic training. Both Pat and Kevin were astonished, and appalled, by the immaturity of many of the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds among whom they found themselves at Thirtieth AG. These were not the kinds of men they'd envisioned themselves fighting alongside and entrusting their lives to. To be sure, not all of their fellow recruits were suspect. Some were intelligent and motivated, and would go on to become excellent noncommissioned officers of the sort who have formed the crucial backbone of the world's armies since Alexander the Great battled the forebears of today's Afghan insurgents in 330 B. C. But a disturbing number of the recruits in their bay struck the Tillman brothers as indolent whiners and losers who had enlisted not out of any sense of duty, or even adventure, but rather because their parents had booted them out of the nest and they lacked the qualifications to land a minimum-wage job. Twenty-four hours after the Tillmans arrived at Thirtieth AG, a fresh recruit named Tulio Tourinho showed up in the middle of the night and immediately crawled into his bunk. He was a Brazilian national whose family came to the United States when he was five years old in order for his father to get a doctorate degree, and then five years later returned to Brazil, where Tulio dreamed of one day making a life for himself in the States. |
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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... |
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The bitter taste came from the fact that Nub & I did awful in our land navigation... The sweet of the day was the fact we went on two long marches with our stuff on. It was nice to move on out of here for a while and meander about. It will probably take me a while to get used to lugging around a sack all day but I only have to look around me to stop feeling sorry for myself... One thing I find myself despising is the sight of all these guns in the hands of children. Of course we all understand the necessity of defense... It doesn't dismiss the fact that a young man I would not trust with my canteen is walking about armed... My moods at this point, with the exception of the constant loneliness & guilt associated with my separation from Marie, vary depending on how I'm doing at my tasks. Blow the land navigation, feel bad for a few hours; do something to help someone or get my marching calls correctly, feel good for a few hours... On the whole, in spite of any worries or fluctuating moods, Nub and I are standing fast and moving right along. How important it has been to have Nub around has been covered but must be reiterated. When Pat left home for the Army, he carried with him a laminated photograph of Marie taken on their wedding day. Unabashedly sentimental, he wrote that this "picture of Marie, outside of my ring, is my most prized possession. It's amazing how beautiful she is in her wedding dress... What a fantastic day that was." Gazing at the little photo in the barracks, he contemplated his marriage and other major milestones. |
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"It definitely made things more difficult for him," recalls Tulio Tourinho: The drill sergeants bent over backwards not to show favoritism toward him. Through it all, Pat just tried to be the best soldier he could. Whenever he was told to do something, he executed it. When there was a job to be done, he always did more than his share... If there is one thing certain about stress, and about despair, it's that it will inevitably show who you really are. And the amazing thing about Pat is that the despair and stress never revealed anything ugly about him. That astounded me, because when things got hard and the kids were being utterly disrespectful, I would become an ugly individual at times. I would lose it and tell them they were being spoiled brats. But Pat was restrained. He had fortitude. Pat's enlistment made waves throughout the Army, from four-star generals at the Pentagon to buck privates at boot camp. "Officers and other soldiers didn't really know how to react or what to do with him," says Marie. They weren't quite sure who he was — they were like, "Why is he here? He's not so great just because he played professional football." Pat anticipated that reaction to a certain extent. But it was definitely hard for him. I think it was maybe a little easier for Kevin because he wasn't so much under the magnifying glass. Pat felt more pressure. He was being looked at more closely. And he was feeling responsible for how everything might affect all the rest of us. His parents are worried. |
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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. "These last few weeks," he continued, have given me such an appreciation for everything we have in our life that were I to get hurt tomorrow and all my plans were dashed, it would all have been worth it... These next few weeks and most of the next three years we will be pushed and tried as a couple just as hard as Nub & I will be individually. When we come out of this intact, spirits unbroken, we'll be stronger, closer, and happier than we could ever have been otherwise. Anything else will seem trivial to what we've weathered. I'm already pleased at the strides we've made despite our distance. Even after all that's taken place and the miles between us, I still feel as close, if not closer, than we've ever been. The tighter we get, the more incredible a person I see, and the more proud I am to know I'll be sharing the rest of my life with you. Of course I do not expect these feelings to be reciprocated, especially not while I've left you all alone; for now it's enough that I feel it. A year ago completely changed our life. It taught me what truly matters... It clarified the direction I need to head and it reinforced that you're the best thing that has happened, or ever will happen, to me... I love you. On Friday, September 20, Pat and Kevin completed basic training. |
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When they learned that the Tillman brothers would be getting a thirty-hour pass to mark their graduation, Marie and Jeff Hechtle, Pat's high-school amigo, booked a flight to Georgia in order to spend the brief holiday with them. "In the days leading up to it everybody was walking on eggshells," Tulio remembers. "The Army hung the idea of the midcycle pass over our heads like a guillotine. If you do anything wrong, so much as breathe incorrectly or stand with an improper posture, they threaten to take it away from you." At 1:00 p. m. on Saturday, when the pass was due to commence, Pat, Kevin, and Tulio gathered with the rest of the recruits in the main assembly area for inspection, attired in their new Class-A dress uniforms and spit-shined boots. Because they would be required to report back at the base at 7:00 p. m. on Sunday, they were desperate not to waste a single minute of freedom. "We had a plan of action how to get out of there as quickly as possible," says Tulio. "As soon as we were dismissed, Kevin ran upstairs to grab our stuff, and I ran to a phone booth to call a cab for the three of us." Kevin, Pat, and Marie had booked rooms at a Days Inn near the gate to the base, and Tulio had reserved a room to meet his wife at a motel right across the street. When the cab pulled up to the Days Inn, Marie was standing in front of the motel waiting for them. "As soon as the cab stops," Tulio remembers, "Pat leaps out the door. Marie runs up and jumps on him, knocking him off balance, and they both fall to the ground. |
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They just lay there, kissing each other and staring at each other — him caressing her face, caressing her hair, telling her how much he missed her, how much he loves her. They stayed there on the ground like that for what seemed like ten minutes, although I'm sure it couldn't have been that long. 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. |
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A "Turning Blue" ceremony — wherein the recruits would receive light blue cords to wear on their Class-A dress uniforms, designating them as infantrymen — was scheduled for October 25. Marie, Richard, and both Tillman parents would be flying to Georgia to attend. Pat was very excited about seeing everyone. "I'm tired of our surroundings," he wrote, and need the positive chi of those I love to recharge my batteries... It's been almost a month since I've spoken with Marie. If she hasn't run off with anyone, she surely hates my guts. Once again those strong feelings of guilt and pain for all I'm putting her through surface. My hope is that during the weekend she visits, I can pull off some miracle and express just how much I miss her and give her something to sustain another six weeks of our separation. The poor girl is such a superhero — actually at this point a Greek tragedy heroine. I need to hurry and put an American (happy) ending to this story... I cannot speak for Kevin, but I feel no sense of accomplishment from finishing this place. I've learned no ultimate lessons and improved my character in no way. The only positive things this place has presented are a cast of solid characters, namely our drill sergeants, Tulio Tourinho, and a few others... It will probably take a while for me to get perspective on everything that's happened and, who knows, maybe eventually I'll feel it was a positive. Right now, it was not. Kevin and I have gained only a pessimistic view of human nature. |
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The Army never changed him at all. Pat's ability to weather his initiation into the Ranger fraternity was enhanced considerably by the fact that Marie was back in his life again, and they were living away from the base. Two months before Pat and Kevin reported to Fort Lewis, while they were still at boot camp in Georgia, Marie had flown to Seattle and spent several days looking for a house for them to rent. "When they first joined the Army," she says, "I was like, 'Maybe we should just live on base. It might be easier.' But Pat said, 'Absolutely not! We're not living on base!' So I went out there to see what kind of place I could find, because the Army didn't really give you much money for housing if you wanted to live off base." In his journal, Pat had expressed the hope that she would find "a quaint little cottage somewhere with personality and charm," along the lines of his childhood home in New Almaden. As it turned out, the first house she looked at, ten miles from Fort Lewis, fit this description almost precisely: a cute two-bedroom brick bungalow with wood floors and a fireplace, perched on a gentle slope above Puget Sound, surrounded by azaleas and rhododendrons and wintercreeper, with a big madrone tree in the side yard, a weeping cherry by the front steps, and a porch looking out across the water toward Fox Island and — when the clouds parted — the immense, mysterious peaks of the Olympic Mountains. The air was saturated with the scent of saltwater and cedar forests. |
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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 ... willingly allowed ourselves to be pawns in this game and will do our job whether we agree with it or not. All we ask is that it is duly noted that we harbor no illusions of virtue. |
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At 1:00 in the morning, the sleep-deprived officer leading the convoy, Captain Troy King, missed a crucial turn onto his assigned route, a six-lane expressway that would have kept him ten miles outside of An Nasiriyah, a congested city. Approximately five hours later, at a major intersection adorned with a statue memorializing the Iran-Iraq War, King missed another critical turn. The convoy — a few Humvees escorting an assortment of heavy trucks towing trailers — had unwittingly exited Highway 8, which also would have diverted it around Nasiriyah, and was now headed directly into the city on a four-lane boulevard. The board-flat, barren desert they'd been driving through since leaving Kuwait abruptly gave way to palm groves and lush green shrubbery. About a mile after leaving Highway 8, the convoy motored past several Iraqi T-55 tanks positioned beside the road, but failed to notice them in the dark, and thus continued driving blithely on. Half a mile farther, the convoy crossed a low, gently arching bridge, longer than two football fields, spanning the greasy, ash-colored flow of the Euphrates River. When they reached the far shore, they were in the heart of Nasiriyah. A military town, it was roughly the Iraqi equivalent of Colorado Springs or Tacoma or El Paso. Its 500,000 residents included three regiments of the Iraqi Army (about 5,000 soldiers) as well as an estimated 800 Fedayeen militia fighters. Lynch's convoy of cafeteria workers and desk jockeys were the first Americans to enter this exceedingly hostile environment since the start of the war three days earlier. |
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Some of the American soldiers panicked, and most of their dust-clogged, improperly maintained weapons jammed. In short order, Captain King lost his bearings in the maze of unfamiliar streets, one truck was disabled by enemy fire, and two other rigs got stuck in soft sand. Sergeant Donald R. Walters, who had been riding in the disabled truck, was inadvertently left behind, taken prisoner by the Fedayeen, and subsequently killed. As word traveled rapidly through the city that a befuddled, lightly armed American convoy had blundered into their midst, Fedayeen fighters were drawn to the scene like hyenas to a flock of defenseless sheep, and the attack intensified. The convoy splintered, and its vehicles soon became widely separated in the confusion and billowing dust. An American soldier was shot, and then another. Jessica Lynch and four other soldiers were in a Humvee towing a trailer near the rear of what remained of the convoy. Directly in front of Lynch's Humvee was a five-ton truck driven by Specialist Edgar Hernandez, towing a flatbed trailer. The two vehicles accelerated south through Nasiriyah down a street that the Marines would christen "Ambush Alley," desperately trying to flee the city as Fedayeen on rooftops shot at them with AK-47s, heavy machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. Around 7:20, they sped back across the long bridge over the Euphrates River and were nearly out of the kill zone when Hernandez's tractor trailer came upon an Iraqi dump truck that had been positioned across the road to block the Americans' passage. |
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Hernandez swerved onto the right shoulder to avoid hitting the truck, his trailer jackknifed, and a moment later Lynch's Humvee smashed into the back of the flatbed at fifty miles per hour. Lynch, who was in one of the rear seats, and her best friend, Private Lori Piestewa, who was driving, survived the crash but were gravely injured and taken prisoner by the Fedayeen. The other three occupants of the Humvee perished on impact or shortly thereafter. All told, eleven soldiers from the Maintenance Company lost their lives in the attack on the convoy, and seven were captured. Lynch and Piestewa, both unconscious, were brought to nearby Tykar Military Hospital, where Piestewa soon succumbed to her injuries. A few hours later, an Iraqi military ambulance transported Lynch to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, a civilian facility two miles across town. Within a few days American forces learned from multiple Iraqi sources, including the husband of an Iraqi nurse who was caring for Lynch, that she was being held at Saddam Hospital. The nurse's husband, a lawyer named Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, told some Marines manning a checkpoint outside of the city that he had spoken with Lynch at her bedside. When the Marines asked al-Rehaief to return to the hospital to gather more information, he went back twice and provided the Americans with detailed maps indicating the layout of the six-story building and Lynch's precise location. He also told the Marines that the American girl had been shot in both legs, her head was bandaged, and one arm was in a sling. |
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Relying on the intelligence provided by al-Rehaief, the operation to rescue her was set into motion on March 31. At dawn, Pat, Kevin, and their fellow Rangers were flown to Tallil, a sprawling, bombed-out Iraqi airfield twelve miles southwest of Nasiriyah that the Americans had captured ten days earlier. After sitting in the sun all day waiting for something to happen, they were informed the mission had been postponed for twenty-four hours. The next morning they again prepared for battle and waited throughout the day. That evening when darkness fell, explosions flashed in the nearby city as a Marine artillery battery began shelling an enemy command post to divert enemy forces away from Saddam Hospital. At midnight, a Special Ops team stormed the hospital, snatched Lynch from her bed, hustled her out on a stretcher to a waiting Black Hawk helicopter, and flew her to safety. During the rescue operation, the Tillmans remained just outside the city as part of a quick reaction force ready to storm the hospital in the event of trouble. Their role in the rescue "was marginal," Pat admitted in his journal. Throughout the night of April 1-2, "We sat on the airfield freezing our balls off waiting to be called in." But, he reported happily, "the girl, Jessica, was saved, no one was hurt, overall the mission was a total success." The definitive account of Lynch's ordeal was published on the front page of the Washington Post on April 3. "She Was Fighting to the Death," the headline announced above the story's breathless opening sentence: Pfc. |
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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. |
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It was Wilkinson's job to divert attention from this alarming setback lest it undermine the homeland's overwhelming support for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Several days later, after even more bad news further threatened to erode public support for the war, Wilkinson learned that Jessica Lynch was lying in a hospital bed, guarded haphazardly if at all, just a few miles from an American military outpost. Right away, he knew exactly how to make the most of the opportunity. In the predawn hours of March 23, 2003, as Jessica Lynch's convoy rolled across the Euphrates River and entered An Nasiriyah, Pat Tillman was asleep on his cot in Ar'ar, Saudi Arabia, having stayed up late the previous evening reading The Odyssey, Homer's epic poem about the Greek hero Odysseus and his ten-year effort to make his way home to his wife, Penelope, after the Trojan War. Pat had no knowledge of the tragedy beginning to unfold in Nasiriyah, nor could he have imagined that its aftershocks would one day be a source of unceasing torment to the people he loved. As the sun crested the horizon that morning in southern Iraq, hundreds of Marines were maneuvering into position to invade Nasiriyah and capture the very bridge that Lynch and the Army's 507th Maintenance Company had just driven heedlessly across, which was deemed crucial to the rapid push of American troops to Baghdad. When the First Battalion of the Second Marine Regiment drew to within several miles of this bridge, Iraqi forces responded with fire from small arms, machine guns, mortars, and artillery. |
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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. |
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Santare therefore assured the Warthogs, repeatedly, that there were no American forces north of that easily recognizable waterway. "No one is north of the 38 grid," he told Gyrate 73. "There are no friendlies north of the canal." When the pilots then requested clearance to fire on the "Iraqi" vehicles, Santare told them they had permission to light up their targets. The time was approximately 1:40 p. m. A few minutes before Santare cleared the Warthogs to attack the vehicles by the Saddam Canal Bridge, Charlie Company's commander, Captain Dan Wittnam, managed to get a brief, garbled call through to Grabowski, the commander of First Battalion, during which he said, "Charlie Company has seized the northern bridge ... and we are halting." He also told Grabowski that one of his tracs had been hit and that he had casualties. Overjoyed that the 176 men in Wittnam's company had taken the Saddam Canal Bridge and moved north of it so quickly, Grabowski slammed his fist down onto the hood of his Humvee in celebration and then radioed headquarters to tell his superiors the good news. At the time Grabowski learned that Charlie Company was north of the Saddam Canal, Santare was talking to the Warthog pilots from the hatch of a trac that was within a stone's throw of the battalion commander's Humvee. Because of the ongoing radio gridlock, however, Santare never received the news about Charlie Company's position, nor did he call Grabowski to let him know that Air Force jets were circling above the battlefield, about to commence their attack. |
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But Gyrate 73 and Gyrate 74 hadn't finished. Finding nothing of interest on their flight north, the Warthogs returned, at which time they saw five tracs moving rapidly south toward the Saddam Canal Bridge. Believing that the machines were Iraqi trucks bound for Ambush Alley to attack Bravo Company, Gyrate 73 got on the radio and informed Santare, "Hey, you've got vehicles from the northern target sector ... progressing into the city." "Those vehicles must not get into the city," Santare replied. The five vehicles heading toward the bridge weren't Iraqi, however. They were American tracs packed with wounded Marines making a desperate run south to escape the kill zone and evacuate the injured before they bled to death. The first vehicle across the bridge was trac C208, commanded by Corporal Nick Elliott and driven by Lance Corporal Noel Trevino. In the rear troop compartment were boxes of mortar rounds and ten Marines, several of whom were badly wounded. C208 was followed by C201 and then C206. As the tracs sped across the bridge at forty miles per hour, Gyrate 74 strafed them with his cannon, hitting all three but failing to stop them. He therefore flew back around and fired a Maverick missile at the lead vehicle, but it overshot C208 and detonated harmlessly beyond. Although most of the men of Charlie Company understood by now they had been strafed by one or more American A-10 jets, they still didn't realize that the Warthogs were also targeting them with five-hundred-pound bombs and Maverick anti-tank missiles. |
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After Gyrate 74's missile just missed C208, Gyrate 73 rolled into attack position, got a lock on the same trac, and let his first Maverick go. When C208 was about 150 yards past the bridge, the missile struck the left side of the trac's troop compartment and detonated. Trac C201, driven by Edward Castleberry, was fifty feet behind C208 when the missile hit. "I saw a white flash and the trac flew a foot and a half off the ground," he testified to the investigating board. "The side blew out. Everyone in the back blew out of it." Blood spattered Castleberry's windscreen. Body parts were hurled in all directions. Castleberry swerved right to avoid hitting the flaming shell of C208, then swerved back left to try to keep the trac on the road, but the steering wouldn't respond. During Gyrate 74's strafing run, the vehicle's transmission oil cooler had been hit with a 30-millimeter uranium round and the hydraulic fluid leaked out, causing the trac to crash into a telephone pole in front of a two-story cinder-block home. As the Marines scrambled out of the wrecked vehicle and ran inside the building for cover, Iraqis started shooting at them from across the street. When Castleberry had driven past the burning wreckage of C208, he was certain all twelve men inside must be dead. Ten of them were.* But there was an aluminum bulkhead between the troop compartment and the front part of the trac where Elliott and Trevino had been sitting, and it shielded them from the worst of the missile's blast. |
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By sunset the firefight was over, and the Marines held both of the Nasiriyah bridges they'd been told to seize — but at a cost of eighteen dead Marines, at least seventeen of whom were killed by friendly fire. Another seventeen Marines from Charlie Company were wounded, some gravely. The tragedy was caused by a classic snafu — which is a particularly apt acronym. Originally coined by soldiers in the 1940s, it stands for "situation normal: all fucked up." Chaos is indeed the normal state of affairs on the battleground, and no army has figured out a way to plan effectively for, let alone alleviate, the so-called fog of war. When the military is confronted with the fratricidal carnage that predictably results, denial and dissembling are its time-honored responses of first resort. * The missile killed Lance Corporal Thomas A. Blair, Private First Class Tamario D. Burkett, Lance Corporal Donald J. Cline Jr., Corporal Jose A. Garibay, Private Jonathan L. Gifford, Corporal Jorge A. Gonzalez, Private Nolen R. Hutchings, Lance Corporal Patrick R. Nixon, Sergeant Brendon Reiss, and Lance Corporal Michael J. Williams. On March 28, 2003, General Tommy Franks ordered an inquiry into what caused the casualties in Nasiriyah, as was required by Department of Defense regulations for all incidents of friendly fire. By doing so, Franks enabled the Army's information managers to reply to questions from reporters with their standard gambit: earnest assurances that a thorough investigation was under way, and until it was completed, it would be irresponsible to speculate or comment further. |
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When General Hodgkins's investigating board released its report, however, it refused to acknowledge that any of the deaths were attributable to friendly fire. On March 29, 2004, in a press release announcing the completion of the investigation, U. S. Central Command summarized the board's conclusions thus: A total of 18 Marines were killed and 17 were wounded. Eight of the deaths were verified as the result of enemy fire; of the remaining 10 Marines killed, investigators were unable to determine the cause of death as the Marines were also engaged in heavy fighting with the enemy at the time of the incident. Of the 17 wounded, only one was conclusively determined to have been hit by friendly fire. Three Marines were wounded while inside vehicles that received both friendly and hostile fire, and the exact sequence and source of their injuries could not be determined. The brazenness of the board's dishonesty was breathtaking. But mendacity of this sort, it turns out, is common in such inquiries. When the military convenes a friendly-fire investigation board, the organization responsible for the incident is called upon to investigate itself, so there are powerful incentives, both institutional and personal, to assign minimal blame. Although the investigating body typically goes elaborately through the motions of unearthing the facts, seldom is the truth pursued with the zeal demonstrated by, say, the National Transportation Safety Board when it investigates commercial aviation disasters. |
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Military investigations of friendly-fire incidents have a well-documented history of obscuring the truth more often than revealing it. If fratricide is an untoward but inevitable aspect of warfare, so, too, is the tendency by military commanders to sweep such tragedies under the rug. It's part of a larger pattern: the temptation among generals and politicians to control how the press portrays their military campaigns, which all too often leads them to misrepresent the truth in order to bolster public support for the war of the moment. The fact that the United States has used misinformation to promote the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not terribly surprising, therefore. What is alarming is the scale and sophistication of these recent propaganda efforts, and the unabashedness of their executors. The Bush administration took the ruthless stratagems developed by Karl Rove to impugn its political opponents — stratagems that relied heavily on managing public perception by means of deceit — and used them to promote the Global War on Terror, a name that was itself deliberately intended to help sell the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In October 2001, the Department of Defense established the clandestine Office of Strategic Influence specifically to dupe international news organizations into running false stories that would build support for war. When the New York Times revealed the existence of this program in February 2002, public clamor forced Donald Rumsfeld to officially kill it. |
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Thousands of enemy fighters were still moving freely through the streets, and Fedayeen guerrillas continued to skirmish with Marines who were securing the two bridges they had captured at such great cost. As the week dragged on, the Coalition of the Willing suffered further discouraging setbacks, and the bad news became harder and harder to contain. Reports came to light that in the early hours of March 23, a Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 jet bomber had been shot down by a Patriot missile fired in error by the U. S. Army, killing the airplane's British pilot and his navigator. On the night of March 24, an Abrams tank plunged off a bridge into the Euphrates River on the west side of Nasiriyah, drowning Staff Sergeant Donald May, Lance Corporal Patrick O'Day, and Private First Class Francisco Martinez-Flores. On March 26, a firefight broke out at the intersection where Lynch's convoy had made its fateful wrong turn three days earlier. In the ensuing confusion, one Marine unit attacked another Marine unit, wounding thirty-seven Americans, some critically, and two of their Kuwaiti interpreters. On March 27, a U. S. Air Force Warthog mistakenly attacked a British convoy of Scimitar light tanks outside Basra, seventy-five miles southeast of Nasiriyah, even though one of the tanks was displaying a Union Jack and all of the vehicles were marked with fluorescent orange panels intended to identify them as coalition forces. During the American jet's two strafing runs, uranium rounds fired from its nose cannon pierced the armor on two of the tanks, and they exploded into flames. |
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On this occasion, however, the soldier cast as the hero of the fable would be a professional football player whose sense of duty had inspired him to enlist in the Rangers after 911. On April 9, 2003, seven days after Jessica Lynch was flown to safety, Pat and Kevin Tillman were helicoptered to Baghdad International Airport with their Ranger cohort, where they took up residence in a cavernous aircraft hangar. As they arrived, Marines were attaching a cable to a forty-foot statue of Saddam Hussein in Al-Firdos Square, twelve miles away in the center of Baghdad, preparing to pull it down for a gaggle of photographers and television crews who had flocked to the scene to record the symbolic moment for posterity. A few hours earlier, the capital had officially fallen to American forces. A few hours later, an orgy of unrestrained looting would commence throughout the city and continue for many days. The Tillmans remained in Baghdad for the next five weeks. Despite the turmoil erupting all around them, their stay was relatively uneventful. Pat fired his weapon only once, on April 21. "Don't get too excited or upset," he wrote in his journal, "they were only warning shots to keep a couple of cars from getting closer and no harm was done." Their duties allowed plenty of time for conversation. "Pat and Kevin were always talking," recalls Russell Baer, a young Ranger who grew up in Livermore, California, thirty-five miles north of New Almaden. "They spent as much time together as they possibly could. |
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A Gallup poll conducted in May 2003 indicated that 79 percent of Americans believed the Iraq war was "justified"; among members of the military, support for the war probably exceeded 95 percent. For the Tillman brothers to denounce the war while on active duty in Iraq would no doubt have struck many Americans as treasonous. But Pat and Kevin had been raised to speak their minds, so speak they did. The Tillman brothers lamented how easy it had been for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to bully Secretary of State Colin Powell, both houses of Congress, and the vast majority of the American people into endorsing the invasion of Iraq. But Pat and Kevin were not particularly surprised. Their paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were serving in the Navy at Pearl Harbor during the devastating Japanese attack of 1941. Their maternal grandfather had experienced combat as a Marine in the Korean War. One of their uncles had enlisted in the Marines upon graduating from high school and had been stationed in Okinawa during the war in Vietnam. Dannie Tillman had been a history major in college, and when her sons were growing up, family discussions often turned to military history. Pat and Kevin were familiar with the words of Hermann Goring, Hitler's Reichsmarschall, who in 1946, shortly before he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, notoriously observed: Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. |
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Some of the soldiers lost more than thirty pounds of body weight. Half of the members of their class failed or dropped out, most of them during the first week. Pat and Kevin found the experience to be a satisfying challenge. Both of them graduated handily, received their Ranger tabs on November 28, and were promoted to the rank of specialist. Two years after Pat's death, an Army captain named Aaron Swain recalled coaching Pat through the three-week "mountain phase" of the course, during which the soldiers were taught rock-climbing skills on Mount Yonah, in the Chattahoochee National Forest. "Tillman was a stud," Swain attests. "He was the real deal." By the autumn of 2003, as Swain was testing the Tillmans' mettle in the backwoods of Georgia, it was becoming apparent that the war in Iraq was not turning out as predicted. Increasingly, critics of the administration were comparing it to Vietnam. In mid-October, a videotape was broadcast on Al Jazeera in which Osama bin Laden looked coldly into the camera and exulted, "I am rejoicing in the fact that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits, by the grace of God Almighty. Here is America today, screaming at the top of its voice as it falls apart in front of the world." Bin Laden regarded the invasion of Iraq as a tremendous gift from President Bush — a "rare and essentially valuable" opportunity to spread jihad, as the exiled sheik put it. |
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Not only had the United States eliminated Saddam Hussein, whom bin Laden reviled as "a thief and an apostate," but the American occupation was fueling Muslim rage even more than the invasion of Afghanistan had, inspiring throngs of Arab men to join the ranks of al-Qaeda. — — — — The contract the Tillmans had signed upon enlisting committed them to remain in uniform until July 2005. There was a strong possibility that they would be deployed to Iraq again before this date, and find themselves in the middle of the worsening violence there. Soon after graduating from Ranger School, however, Pat was presented with an opportunity to avoid this fate: he was offered a ticket out of the Army. In December 2003, Tillman's agent, Frank Bauer, was contacted by Bob Ferguson, who, as general manager of the Arizona Cardinals, had played a key role in bringing Pat to the Cardinals and launching his professional football career. Ferguson, who had moved on to become general manager of the Seattle Seahawks, told Bauer that Seattle was very eager to have Tillman on the Seahawks' roster when the football season got under way in the fall of 2004. According to Bauer, when he explained that Pat wasn't due to be released from the Army until the summer of 2005, Ferguson assured him, "We've checked into it. He's already served in a war. He can get out of the service. Just file his discharge papers. We'd love to have him here in the Seattle locker room." As it turned out, other teams were also interested in signing Tillman for the 2004 season, including the Cardinals, the St. |
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Then, in March, they learned that they would be deploying to Afghanistan in early April. "Pat knew they'd be sent over there again somewhere," says Marie, "and he was glad he was going to Afghanistan and not going back to Iraq. Even though he was more disillusioned with the Army by then, he still believed in the war in Afghanistan. Fighting there was why he had joined in the first place." There was much less news coming out of Afghanistan than out of Iraq. By 2004, many Americans didn't even realize the country was still fighting a war there. "Most people thought Afghanistan would be safer than Iraq," Marie says. "But I knew a little more about what they were supposed to be doing over there. I knew they were supposed to be patrolling along the Pakistani border and it wouldn't be a very safe situation. I was also a lot less naive about war and the Army by now, too. When they went to Iraq, they were straight out of boot camp, and it all happened so quickly I didn't have as much time to think before they left." In any case, after Pat and Kevin came home from Baghdad and graduated from Ranger School, Marie remembers, "We felt like they had passed the midpoint. It seemed like they were over the hump. They were supposed to deploy to Afghanistan for something like two months, come home for a month, and then deploy back overseas for maybe another three months, and then that was going to be it. So we felt like we only had to get through the next six months or so, and then we were home free. |
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It was like he'd gotten rid of any of his hang-ups. He'd sort of been evolving in this direction ever since he went to juvenile hall after the Round Table fight — resetting his priorities, figuring out what really mattered." Pat confided to Marie that the Army had "been difficult in ways he'd never imagined going into it," but that the experience had caused him to learn a lot about himself. He said the emotional trials he'd endured had made him a better person. He said the Army had humbled him. When Pat's mother came to Puget Sound to visit a week before Pat and Kevin shipped out to Afghanistan, Marie joked to her that Pat had become so sensitive he was starting to grow breasts. On April 7, Marie drove Pat and Kevin to Fort Lewis to catch their flight to Afghanistan, said good-bye, and returned to face their empty house. Shortly thereafter, however, Pat called to say their flight had been delayed two hours, so Marie jumped back in her car and met them at a Starbucks just outside the post's north gate in order to share a few more moments with Pat over a cup of coffee. When he and Kevin eventually filed into an Air Force transport jet and took off, Pat took out a new journal with a black leather cover and began to write. "To my left sits Nub," he inscribed on the first page. We sit inside a C-17 en route to Afghanistan via Germany to refuel. Staring at me, beside my journal, is the laminated picture of Marie in her wedding dress... Undoubtedly she's grown a thick skin these last couple of years and has proven she can weather anything that comes her way. |
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Baker's Humvee, driven by Sergeant Kellett Sayre, followed close behind the jinga as the Rangers riding in it blasted the ridge to the north with a .50-caliber machine gun, a 240 Bravo machine gun, two or three M4s, and an M203 grenade launcher. The convoy drove as fast as possible down the eastern portion of the canyon, but they were seldom able to move more rapidly than five miles per hour due to the rough terrain; enemy fighters continued to shoot at them all the while from the ridge far above. Baker, in the passenger's seat of the jinga, impulsively smashed out the window with the butt of his M4 and returned fire. When he broke the window, Baker testified, the jinga driver got "all pissed at me. I thought that was kind of weird at the time." As Parsons's Humvee bounced down the wadi, the canyon was so narrow, he says, that "we lost the 240 machine gun mounted on Arreola's side because he didn't pull it in; the gun hit a rock and got yanked off." Parsons had to stop while Arreola jumped off and retrieved the weapon, which had its buttstock sheared off in the collision. The third vehicle in the convoy, rolling just behind Baker's Humvee, was a Humvee commanded by Sergeant First Class Steven Walter, who saw another mortar round explode high on the canyon wall above them, after which the nervous and confused jinga driver stopped yet again, bringing the whole convoy to a halt behind him, because the canyon remained much too narrow for anyone to drive around the big truck. At this second stop, most of the Rangers once more dismounted their Humvees. |
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Looking up at the high ground to their north, Walter said that he "observed four enemy personnel on the northern ridgeline," running west along the high ground, wearing "gray man-dresses." Walter shot at them with his M4, and Brad Jacobson quickly set up a mortar tube and fired a 60-millimeter mortar toward the ridge crest as well. Within a couple of minutes Baker convinced the jinga driver to start moving again, and the convoy proceeded through the confines of the limestone slot, by which time most, if not all, of the enemy fire had ceased, although the Rangers in Baker's Humvee continued shooting hundreds of rounds as they drove. Approximately three-quarters of a mile beyond the place where they were first attacked, the jinga lurched out of the western end of the narrows, the valley abruptly opened up, and the truck came to a halt again, as did Baker's Humvee just behind it. As the vehicles rolled to a stop, they came into view of Bryan O'Neal and Pat Tillman, who were kneeling behind a pair of low boulders on the hillside above, looking down from only ninety yards away. When the first mortar exploded near Serial Two at the eastern end of the canyon, Serial One had just exited the western end of the narrows. Upon hearing the explosions and ensuing gunfire, twelve of the twenty Rangers in Serial One, including Tillman, scrambled out of their vehicles and, under the command of Staff Sergeant Matt Weeks, hurried toward high ground overlooking the mouth of the narrows to provide covering fire for Serial Two. |
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The next morning at dawn, back in the canyon where the Black Sheep had been attacked, First Sergeant Tommy Fuller walked up to the rocks where Pat had been shot. He had arrived the previous evening with the Rangers of Alpha Company's Third Platoon, who had rushed to the canyon to support the stunned soldiers of Second Platoon shortly after the firefight. Behind the uppermost boulder, Fuller testified, "Tillman's brain was still on the ground." He put it in a Ziploc bag, which he placed inside an ammo can, and then gave the can to one of his sergeants so it could be returned to Salerno and sent back to the States with Pat's body. This ammo can, and the remains it held, were never shipped to the United States. They simply vanished, and have never been accounted for. After talking to several of the survivors of the firefight, Fuller realized that Pat had been shot by his comrades, and he shared this conclusion with Captain William Saunders, the Alpha Company commander. Upon interviewing the men of Second Platoon, Saunders concurred with Fuller's assessment of the cause of death. Around 8:30 a. m., Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Bailey, commander of the Second Ranger Battalion, arrived on the scene, spoke with soldiers from both serials, and talked at length with Fuller and Saunders. "The three of us got together," Bailey testified. "So I said, 'Alright. I think I agree with you. We need to do an investigation.' So I called Colonel Nixon commander of the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and told him my gut feeling was that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire... |
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But even as his superiors assured Kevin they would leave no stone unturned in their hunt for the notebook, they were doing everything they could to deceive him about the cause of Pat's death. Standard operating procedure dictates that when a soldier is killed in action, his or her uniform is left on the body for shipment back to the United States, to be removed during the autopsy and analyzed as forensic evidence. For reasons that have never been explained, Tillman's blood-soaked uniform and body armor were removed at Salerno and placed into a trash bag before the body was flown to Bagram. On the night of April 23, Sergeant James Valdez testified, a captain named Wade Bovard "came to me with an orange plastic bag containing Tillman's clothes. He then related that he wanted me to burn what was in the bag for security purposes. Additionally, Captain Bovard related he wanted me alone to burn what was in the bag to prevent security violations, leaks, and rumors." Before destroying the items in the bag, Valdez went through the pockets of Tillman's uniform. In the cargo pocket of his pants he found Pat's notebook, after which he started a fire in an empty oil drum and destroyed the notebook, uniform, and body armor. As these items were burning, Valdez stated, "Captain Bovard came out one time to ensure that everything was going all right... Captain Bovard then came back right at the end, when I was finishing." The Rangers of Second Platoon arrived back at Salerno on the morning of April 24, still reeling from what had happened on the twenty-second. |
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According to McChrystal — a commander renowned for his obsessive attention to detail and intolerance of sloppy work by subordinates — he simply failed to notice that each of the documents purporting to describe the deadly firefight had been carefully crafted to omit its most salient particular — the fact that Tillman had been shot by his Ranger comrades. As a consequence of McChrystal's chicanery, on April 29, 2004, Secretary Brownlee formally certified the Silver Star award without knowing that Tillman was a victim of fratricide, or that his death was even under investigation. Meanwhile, Dr. Mallak, the military pathologist who had performed Tillman's autopsy, was still trying to find out why the official cause of death provided by the Ranger Regiment didn't match the medical evidence. In the hope of obtaining Tillman's helmet, uniform, and body armor for forensic analysis, he contacted Brigadier General Gina Farrisee, director of Military Personnel Management for the Army's deputy chief of staff, who happened to be processing Tillman's Silver Star recommendation when Mallak called. Unaware that the recommendation documents were fraudulent, Farrisee passed them along to Mallak in the hope that they might shed some light on the cause of death and clear up some of the confusion. When Mallak read the medal recommendation, however, his consternation only grew. He told Farrisee, "This story stinks." Crucial details of the firefight as described in the Silver Star documents appeared to be contradicted by Mallak's autopsy findings. |
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That didn't happen. Instead, Secretary Brownlee approved the medal based on the spurious documents submitted by McChrystal, and on April 30 the Army issued a press release announcing that Tillman had been posthumously awarded the Silver Star. Because it made no mention of friendly fire, none of the hundreds of news stories based on the press release reported anything about friendly fire, and the nation was thereby kept in the dark about the fratricide. As Brigadier General Howard Yellen later testified, "For the civilian on the street, the interpretation would be that he was killed by enemy fire." During McChrystal's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in June 2009, Senator Jim Webb asked him to explain his role in the Tillman scandal. McChrystal confessed, "We failed the family. And I was a part of that, and I apologize for it." But then he abruptly changed his tone and reiterated the same blatantly dishonest claims made by virtually every officer who participated in the cover-up: "It was not intentional... I didn't see any activities by anyone to deceive." A moment later, however, McChrystal hinted at what might have motivated him to orchestrate what can only be described as a broad conspiracy to conceal Tillman's fratricide from the secretary of the Army, the Armed Forces medical examiner, the Army Criminal Investigative Division, the Tillman family, the news media, and the citizens of the United States. "To provide context," McChrystal testified to Webb, "as you remember, Senator, we were still in combat when we were doing all of that... |
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And those were his exact words: 'I don't want them to parade me through the streets.' It just burned into my brain, him saying that." Following Tillman's death, there was nothing to prevent the Bush administration from using his celebrity to advance its political agenda. Jim Wilkinson, the master propagandist who had used the Jessica Lynch rescue to cover up the Nasiriyah catastrophe during the invasion of Iraq, had been appointed by Karl Rove as director of communications for the upcoming Republican National Convention, and was therefore no longer available to orchestrate the Tillman spin. But Wilkinson had trained his successors well. They wasted no time in concocting a narrative about Tillman that they hoped would distract the American public in the same way that Wilkinson's fable about Lynch had. The fact that Tillman had been cut down by his Ranger buddies rather than by the Taliban was potentially problematic for the White House, although there were ways to keep that information from entering the public domain for a while, maybe even a long while. The moment the White House learned of Tillman's death, the president's staff went into overdrive. On April 23, the day after Tillman perished, approximately two hundred e-mails discussing the situation were transmitted or received by White House officials, including staffers from Bush's reelection campaign, who suggested to the president that it would be advantageous for him to respond to Tillman's death as quickly as possible. |
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Jeanie Mamo — Bush's director of media affairs — sent an e-mail to Lawrence Di Rita, Rumsfeld's press secretary, asking for details about the tragedy so she could use them in a White House press release. By 11:40 a. m., a statement about Tillman had been drafted and forwarded to Press Secretary Scott McClellan and Communications Director Dan Bartlett, who immediately approved the statement on behalf of President Bush and then disseminated it to the public, even though doing so violated the Military Family Peace of Mind Act — a policy mandated by Congress and signed into law by the president just five months earlier — which was intended to give families of war casualties twenty-four hours to grieve privately before any public announcement was made about the victim. Because the Tillman family wasn't notified of Pat's death until the evening of April 22, the White House was forbidden to issue its press release before the evening of the twenty-third. Bartlett later explained that he rushed out the statement about Tillman illegally, and with such extraordinary haste, in order to accommodate overwhelming interest from the media, noting that the story (which did not disclose that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire), "made the American people feel good about our country ... and our military." While he was alive, Tillman had been the object of tremendous public fascination, and White House officials guessed that selling him as a fallen war hero would send the media into an orgy of adulatory coverage. |
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They were not disappointed. Thousands of tributes to Tillman appeared in all manner of media over the days and weeks that followed. As with the frenzy that followed the Jessica Lynch rescue, neither the White House nor military perception managers had to do much to sustain the media's focus on Tillman; indeed, they did little more than monitor the coverage and make copies of all the published articles for their files. On April 25, just two days after the initial White House press release, a "Weekend Media Assessment" compiled by the Army chief of staff's Office of Public Affairs reported that stories about Tillman had generated the greatest interest in the Army since the president's "Mission Accomplished" speech on the aircraft carrier the previous May, adding that the Tillman stories "had been extremely positive in all media." Had it been disclosed at the outset that Tillman was killed by friendly fire, the press coverage would have been no less voluminous, but its effect on the nation's mood would have been very different. The Army's announcement on April 30 that Tillman had been awarded the Silver Star prompted another torrent of favorable press. One day later, on May 1, McChrystal was promoted from Brigadier General to Major General. On Monday, May 3 — one day shy of Pat and Marie's second wedding anniversary — two thousand people gathered at the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden for Pat's memorial service. Lieutenant General Kensinger was in attendance, and sought out the family before the ceremony to personally express his condolences. |
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I got the news early on Friday morning about Pat's death. I'd been spending the day flying back home, and I watched the news on every layover, waiting for the word to break. Once I saw that it was out, I contemplated at that point calling Marie. I knew that there was going to be a lot going on and I didn't want to add to it. When my wife picked me up at the airport, she asked if I'd called Marie. I gave her my reason, and she looked at me and said, "If the tables were turned right now, would he have called me?" That's the kind of man Pat was. I immediately picked up the phone... The Silver Star and the Purple Heart that Pat has earned will be given to Marie at a private ceremony. The Silver Star is one of this nation's highest awards; the Purple Heart is rewarded for wounds received in combat. If you're the victim of an ambush, there are very few things that you can do to increase your chances for survival, one of which is to get off that ambush point as fast as you can. One of the vehicles in Pat's convoy could not get off. He made the call; he dismounted his troops, taking the fight to the enemy, uphill, to seize the tactical high ground from the enemy. This gave his brothers in the downed vehicle time to move off that target. He directly saved their lives with that move. Pat sacrificed himself so that his brothers could live. "I, like everyone in the audience, was greatly affected listening to the young Naval officer speak," wrote Dannie Tillman, recalling White's eulogy in Boots on the Ground by Dusk. |
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But each officer claimed that he felt obligated to wait until a thorough investigation had been completed in order to avoid telling "the family something that was not true," as Nixon phrased it, "and it took a considerable time to get the truth." All of them seemed to be reading from the same patently disingenuous script, reciting a series of self-serving rationalizations intended to justify what was actually a very calculated effort to deceive not just the Tillman family but also the American public — which of course was the real target of the misinformation campaign. By the morning of April 23, there was never any genuine doubt that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire. Scott's investigation, which confirmed the fratricide, was completed on May 8 and then expunged, causing it for all intents and purposes to vanish from the face of the earth. Kauzlarich's investigation, which unequivocally determined that "Corporal Tillman's death was the result of fratricide," was completed on May 16, but then kept under extremely tight wraps, treated as if it were a grave threat to national security. Nixon's sworn testimony notwithstanding, it's difficult to fathom how the obsessive secrecy, falsified documents, and destruction of evidence were intended to protect the family from receiving a false impression of how Pat died. The available evidence indicates that McChrystal and his subordinates in the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment engaged in a coordinated effort to deliberately mislead the family, and high-ranking officials at the White House and the Pentagon abetted the deception. |
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Although Di Rita's official title was assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, his responsibilities at the Pentagon were considerably greater than merely serving as Rumsfeld's press secretary. In truth, Di Rita's relationship with Rumsfeld was roughly analogous to Lewis "Scooter" Libby's relationship with Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove's relationship with the president. Di Rita was a major player in the Bush administration. The ensuing discussion between Di Rita and the military brass was tense. The greatest disagreement concerned the choice of a spokesman to stand before the television cameras and announce that the Army had shot its poster boy. General Brown wanted someone from Rumsfeld's office to do it, but Di Rita immediately quashed that idea. Part of his job was to make sure Rumsfeld's fingerprints were wiped clean from crime scenes like this; he wasn't about to let anyone associated with his boss appear within a hundred miles of this scandal. Instead, Di Rita decreed that a uniformed general would be the bearer of bad tidings. Because Tillman was a Ranger who had been killed by fellow Rangers, and it was the Ranger Regiment that had failed to keep a lid on the fratricide, the job was given to Kensinger, the highest-ranking officer in the Ranger chain of command. "They wanted to keep, sir, the other organizations separate from it," a colonel who was present explained to an investigator. Everyone agreed that under no circumstances should Kensinger take any questions from the media after making the announcement. |
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... I do not think that I should be Released For Standards from the unit that I love, dedicated so much to, and sacrificed so much for... If I am removed from the Regiment for this I do not feel the proper justice will have been done... I am the littlest man in all of this being only 140 pounds soaking wet at 5'5 and if I have to have the largest voice on this then I will because if my chain of command won't support what they have trained me to do then who will? I have not pushed myself to keep up and surpass others around me just to be fired without my honor as a warrior... I gave 100% and then some every time I did anything in this unit... Now someone wants to rip the heart out of me... I hope that after reading this you will take into consideration all that I have stated when it comes time to make your decision. I pray to God almighty that justice will be done and my fate to be an honorable one. Rangers Lead The Way! The thrust of Alders's letter seemed to be that the primary victim of the tragedy was not Pat Tillman or Sayed Farhad but Trevor Alders. 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. |
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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. "Nobody is satisfied with the answers in that family that they've been given," he complained. "Why do you think that the family is not satisfied?" Jones asked. Kauzlarich explained that shortly before the Second Ranger Battalion sent Pat's remains home from Afghanistan, he was arranging a repatriation ceremony when a sergeant approached him and said, "Hey, sir. Kevin Tillman doesn't want a chaplain involved in his repatriation ceremony." When Kauzlarich, an evangelical Christian, asked why, the sergeant replied, "Well, evidently he and his brother are atheists. |
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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... Our family has relentlessly pursued the truth on this matter for three years. |
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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. |
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According to the Army lieutenant colonel Dave Anders, "Siraj is the one dictating the new parameters of brutality associated with Taliban senior leadership." The Army is offering a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to Siraj's capture or elimination. The revival of the Talibanal-Qaeda insurgency isn't limited to Khost and Paktika provinces; the entire nation has spiraled deeper into violence and chaos. Afghanistan presently supplies 95 percent of the opium used in the global heroin trade, and narcotics production accounts for half of the country's gross domestic product. The Taliban takes a significant percentage of this drug money, which is one of the insurgents' primary sources of revenue, and much of the rest flows to high-ranking members of the Karzai administration, further debasing a government that was permeated with corruption even before the Taliban renaissance. Having squandered most of the credibility he once had with the Afghan people, Karzai is presently teetering on the brink, along with his government. On April 27, 2008, a cadre of Haqqani insurgents carried out an audacious, elaborately planned attempt to assassinate Karzai during the Afghan National Day military parade in the heart of Kabul. Although the president escaped injury, four others were killed, including a member of parliament who was sitting near Karzai in the reviewing stands. Taliban and al-Qaeda forces now move freely throughout the Pashtun regions on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier, and Osama bin Laden — still on the loose — is believed by most of the U. |
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As long as Pakistan feels imperiled by India, it is unlikely to mount an effective campaign to eradicate the Haqqani Network, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban from its Tribal Areas — an undertaking that would pose staggering challenges and tremendous risks for the current government in Islamabad, which is widely acknowledged to be corrupt and incompetent, and has only a tenuous hold on the reins of power. By staging hit-and-run attacks on targets in Afghanistan from camps across the Zero Line in Pakistan, the Haqqani clan and its ilk are using precisely the same strategy against the United States that they employed twenty years ago to defeat the Soviets at the behest of the United States. And in the long run, the insurgents may emerge just as victorious as they did in 1989, because until Pakistan ceases to give them sanctuary, it will be impossible for the United States and its allies to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban by military force, regardless of how many soldiers the United States deploys to Afghanistan — just as it was impossible for the Soviets to defeat the mujahideen despite the overwhelming superiority of the Soviet Army. If staying in Afghanistan is looking more and more like a no-win prospect for the United States, so, too, does pulling out. Both options are fraught with uncertainty, although the strife in South Asia is so incendiary, and so thoroughly entangled with American security interests, that American soldiers are apt to be engaged in Afghanistan for years to come, if not decades. |
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The loyalties that drove men to desperate acts of courage and sacrifice were proven by subsequent history to be silly prejudices. Men with modern educations were content to sit at home, congratulating themselves on their broadmindedness and lack of fanaticism. Mocking these contemptible "last men," Nietzsche's Zarathustra famously declares, "Thus you stick out your chests — but alas, they are hollow!" Which prompted Fukuyama to label such milquetoasts "men without chests." Given the current state of turmoil in South Asia, Africa, and the Caucasus, the onset of international peace prophesied by Fukuyama does not seem imminent. But his forecast about the ascendancy of the American wimp remains disturbingly accurate, according to the historian Lee Harris. In a polemic titled The Suicide of Reason, Harris argues, The problem is not that Fukuyama is dead wrong; the problem is that he is half right. Unfortunately for us, the wrong half. In the West, we are perilously getting down to our last man. Liberal democracy, among us, is achieving the goal that Fukuyama predicted for it: It is eliminating the alpha males from our midst, and at a dizzyingly accelerating rate. But in Muslim societies, the alpha male is still alive and well. While we in America are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless... We are proud if our sons get into a good college; they are proud if their sons die as martyrs. |
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To rid your society of high-testosterone alpha males may bring peace and quiet; but if you have an enemy that is building up an army of alpha boys to hate you fanatically and who have vowed to destroy you, you will be committing suicide... The end of testosterone in the West alone will not culminate in the end of history, but it may well culminate in the end of the West. Harris's dire conjecture certainly grabs one's attention, but it seems at least as far off the mark as Fukuyama's. Anyone who has spent time with American troops in Afghanistan or Iraq is bound to take issue with Harris's contention that the current generation of young men raised in the West suffers from a deficit of testosterone. In truth, our society produces all manner of males, in proportions roughly comparable to those in Muslim (and other) societies: compassionate and cruel; leaders and followers; brainiacs and fuckwits; heroes and cowards; selfless exemplars and narcissistic pretenders. Patriotic zeal runs strong in the United States, and young Americans are no less susceptible to the allure of martial adventure than young males from other cultures, including fanatical tribal cultures. Decades from now, when the president of the United States declares yet another war on some national adversary, a great many men (and more than a few women) will doubtless stream forth to enlist, just as eager to join the fight as the Americans who flocked to recruiting offices during previous armed conflicts — regardless of whether the war in question is a reckless blunder or vital to the survival of the Republic. |
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All renting families acted as individual chambers of commerce for the newcomers. Each teacher was told of the churches and the preachers, of the hairdressers and barbers, of the white store downtown and the Wm. Johnson General Merchandise Store where they were likely to get accounts to tide them over between paychecks. The new teachers were also alerted to Mrs. Henderson's mute granddaughter and her grandson who stuttered seriously. Summer was over and we returned to school with all the other children. I looked forward to meeting the new teacher of the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classes. I was really happy because for the first time Bailey and I were in the same classroom. Miss Williams was small and perky. She reminded me of a young chicken pecking in the yard. Her voice was high-pitched. She separated the classes by row. Sixth-graders sat near the windows, fifth-graders were in the middle rows, and fourth-graders were near the door. Miss Williams said she wanted each student to stand up and say his or her name and what grades they received at the end of the last semester. She started with the sixth-graders. I looked at Bailey when he stood and said, "Bailey Johnson, Jr." At home he would make me fall out laughing when he said what he wished his whole name was: "Bailey James Jester Jonathan Johnson, Jr." Because I didn't talk I had developed a pattern of behavior in classrooms. Whenever I was questioned, I wrote my answer on the blackboard. I had reached the blackboard in Miss Williams's room when the teacher approached me. |
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But the star of that show was the potato salad. Momma had mixed all the ingredients, then mounded the salad high above the top of the bowl. She had hard-boiled four double-yolk eggs and cut them in half and pushed them down into the potato mixture; then she placed crisp cucumber circles around the inside edges of the bowl. Each person was supposed to pick up the fork in the lettuce bowl and take one leaf up, let it drip in the bowl, then place it on the salad plate just to the left of the dinner plate. Then a spoon of potato salad would be placed on the lettuce leaf. That was how we did it, how everybody did it except for the Presiding Elder. He glanced at the chicken and immediately took the three largest pieces. Then he used his own fork to serve himself potato salad. Bailey cleared his throat and asked, "Would you like some lettuce?" Piss Ant was so used to ignoring children that he didn't even look at Bailey. He picked up the potato salad and fished out three of the halves of double-yolk eggs and put them on his plate beside the chicken. Then he completed filling his plate with the salad. His mouth was so stuffed we could hardly understand him. "Save me some greens, sure have a soft spot for greens." Bailey's face was a mask of angry disgust, and I knew he was going to do something. Just what, I wasn't sure. When Momma looked at her grandson, she also had a premonition. Bailey hesitated only a second. Using the lettuce fork, he speared every leaf in the bowl, held it up to drip, and then put the whole thing on his plate. |
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Momma reared back and pursed her lips. She didn't speak. She turned and started to prepare Uncle Willie's plate. Bailey looked at me. I wanted to laugh but didn't dare, but I was pleased that he had the nerve to get that Presiding Elder good. I did give Bailey a little nod and he nodded back. Then he took the whole stack of lettuce and started to put it back into its receptacle. Momma said, "No, sir, little master, you will eat every bit of that lettuce before you get up from this table." Momma didn't like the Presiding Elder either, but she was a stickler for the way to do things and the ways they shouldn't be done. Bailey sat back in his chair and surveyed the situation. Then he pulled up to the table, and taking one forefinger he flicked one of the leaves into his lap, slid it over to me, and got one more himself. He showed me how to roll the leaf like a cigarette and munch it. We ate the entire bowl of lettuce — and only the lettuce — for Sunday dinner. After the Presiding Elder left, Momma and Uncle Willie sat on the porch laughing. They would not admit to us that they had been laughing at Bailey, but Momma called us outside. "Now, young missy and young master, I know your stomachs are upset. I've seen how many times you went out to the little outhouse. You didn't have to make yourselves sick. I have told you never be concerned at how much others may have. I always keep something in the kitchen for Grandma and the children." That evening she gave us chicken from the oven and potato salad from the icebox. |
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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. |
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Oriental rugs were placed throughout the house. She had a live-in employee who was a fill-in cook for her and cleaned the house. Mother picked up Guy two or three times a week and took him to her house where she fed him peaches and cream and hot dogs, but I only went to her house when she was expecting me. My mother understood and encouraged my self-reliance. We had a standing appointment, which I looked forward to eagerly. Once a month, she would cook one of my favorite dishes and I would go to her house for lunch. One important date that stands out in my mind I call Vivian's Red Rice Day. When I arrived at the Fulton Street house my mother was dressed beautifully, her makeup was perfect, and she wore good jewelry. After we embraced, I washed my hands and we walked through her formal dark dining room and into the large bright kitchen. Much of lunch was already on the table. Vivian Baxter cooked wonderful meals and was very serious about how to present them. On that long-ago Red Rice Day, my mother had placed on the table a dry, crispy, roasted capon, no dressing or gravy, and a simple lettuce salad, no tomatoes or cucumbers. A widemouthed bowl covered with a platter sat next to her plate. She blessed the table with a fervent but brief prayer and put her left hand on the platter and her right on the bowl and turned the dishes over. She gently loosened the bowl from its contents and revealed a tall mound of glistening red rice (my favorite food in all the world) decorated with finely minced parsley and the green tops of scallions. |
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The chicken and salad do not feature so prominently on my taste buds' memory, but each grain of red rice is emblazoned on the surface of my tongue forever. Gluttonous and greedy negatively describe the hearty eater offered the seduction of her favorite food. Two large portions of rice sated my appetite, but the deliciousness of the dish made me long for a larger stomach so that I could eat two more helpings. My mother had plans for the rest of the afternoon, so she gathered her wraps and we left the house together. We reached the middle of the block and were enveloped in the stinging acid aroma of vinegar from the pickle factory on the corner of Fillmore and Fulton streets. I had walked ahead. My mother stopped me and said, "Baby." I walked back to her. "Baby. I've been thinking and now I am sure. You are the greatest woman I've ever met." My mother was five feet four inches to my six-foot frame. I looked down at the pretty little woman, and her perfect makeup and diamond earrings, who owned a hotel and was admired by most people in San Francisco's black community. She continued, "You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and my mother — yes, you belong in that category. Here, give me a kiss." She kissed me on the lips and turned and jaywalked across the street to her beige and brown Pontiac. I pulled myself together and walked down to Fillmore Street. I crossed there and waited for the number 22 streetcar. |
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In the 1960s, he wore Brooks Brothers suits, Van Huesen shirts, and Sulka silk ties. His shoes were custom-made. In 1969, Sam and I flew out to California to visit my mother, who was the most elegant-dressing woman I ever knew. She wore Dache hats and Lilli Ann suits, Lillie Rubin dresses, and Daniel Green slippers. They admired and even liked each other. They were a match. Sam and I were invited to dinner by a friend of my mother's, who declined to go. The date started to go bad from the first minute. Our host opened the door and invited us directly to the bar in his den. He told Sam that he shouldn't have dressed up. He added, "There's no one in my house you have to impress." I knew he was being friendly. Sam was offended. Sam wouldn't have thought that what he was wearing was dress-up. He said, "I didn't really have to try to achieve this just to come to your house." I knew Sam was just being Sam, but now the host was offended. Just as he was preparing his rejoinder, I stepped in. "May we order drinks? I've got dust in my throat." That was the height of the evening. In a half hour, the host had stopped speaking to Sam who retaliated by trying to drink the bar dry. Sam ordinarily drank one or two whiskeys before dinner and some wine with the meal. On that particular night, Sam had whiskey after whiskey, and when dinner was served he refused the wine, saying he would go out with whom he came in. He ordered another scotch. I don't think he tasted the food, and as quickly as I could, still being courteous, I said our thanks and good-byes. |
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I was near the cafe." She said, "Maybe we'll make do tonight. Maya is eating with us. Will you make drinks?" The doctor surprised me. He was familiar enough with M. J.'s house to know where the liquor was kept and where to find highball glasses. She had not told me everything. M. J. had set the table with colorful linens and Mexican plates. When she served the beans and rice, the carne Colorado, and the chicken and rice, the doctor spoke from the depth of a deep enchantment. "You made this? You yourself?" As she headed toward the kitchen, she motioned me to sit down. I did so. "Who would have thought that a smart and pretty woman like you could cook like this? This table looks like the real thing. If you had told me, I could have picked up some tamales." She walked in carrying a plate filled with the doctor's dream comestibles. When he saw the platter he lost all sense of propriety. He plucked a tamale and put it on his plate. When he unwrapped the hot savory from the cornhusks, his face was a study in hope and apprehension. The long cornmeal tamale lay on his plate, and he waited a few seconds just in case it wasn't as good as he wished. Then he lifted his fork and cut a bite and put it in his mouth. As the flavored cornmeal and the seasoned meat filling melted, he began to smile. Then the smile widened and he started to laugh. He made no eye contact, so he wasn't sharing the laughter. He was just enjoying himself with himself. When he finished the tamale, he looked at M. J. |
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The time could have been passed off as an ordinary lunch save that each table sported a handwritten menu of foods offered and the company was served at the buffet table by the uniformed head waiter and the tailored butler. The artists were addressed as dottore, which meant that their scholarship was respected. They were told that dinner was formal, and that was an understatement. Dinner was an event of meticulous structure. Guests were expected to dress each night and were directed where to sit by a placement, which lay on a hall table at the door of the drawing room. There must have been an exemplary social statistician in the Center's employ because in the four weeks when I was a resident, no one ever sat twice between the same two people. Jessica Mitford and I were invited and found ourselves to be the only female artists. We had brought along our husbands, Robert Treuhaft and Paul du Feu, but the staff, so unused to female scholars, could not bring themselves to address us as they addressed the thirteen male scholars. So they called us signora and our husbands dottore. One evening during a lull in the ten or twelve conversations plying the table, the director reminded the guests that Thanksgiving was approaching. He then asked if anyone had a good recipe for roast turkey and corn bread dressing. I waited, but no one moved. I said, "I do. I have a recipe." I spoke it before I thought. Everyone beamed at me except my husband, Jessica, and Robert. In a second, their faces told me I had done the wrong thing. |
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Company never volunteers, never offers. Nonetheless, the director said the butler would come to my suite mid-morning to collect the recipe. I broke my writing schedule to recall and write the recipe. I handed the missive to the butler. Within minutes he returned and said the chef wanted to see the dottore who had sent him the recipe. I followed him down a flight of dark stairs and, without a hint of change to come, stepped suddenly into a vast noisy, hot, brightly lit kitchen, where a fleet of white uniformed cooks were stirring steaming pots and sizzling pans. The butler guided me over to meet the head chef, who wore a starched white toque. His surprise at seeing me let me know that he had expected Dottore Angelou to be a white male, and, instead, a six-foot-tall daughter of Africa stood before him ready to answer his questions. He did shake my hand, but he then turned his back rather rudely and shouted to another cook, "Come and talk to this woman. I don't have the time." The second cook tried his English, but I told him we could speak Italian. He said, "Signora, we want to follow your recipe, but we have never made corn bread or corn bread dressing. We need your help." I asked for cornmeal, only to be offered polenta. I asked for baking powder and was told they didn't even know what that was. When I described the work of baking powder, I was shown a large slab of moist yeast. The polenta was an orange powdery meal many times brighter than American yellow cornmeal. During the Easter seasons, my mother always used yeast to make hot cross buns. |
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Porgy and Bess was appearing at the Teatre Wagram in Paris, and I was the principal dancer and sang the role of Ruby. I doubled singing blues and calypso in nightclubs after the curtain fell at the opera. I watched Miss Ross and wondered how I could raise her spirits. One early evening I went to Fouquets Restaurant on the Champs ElysEes. I asked to speak to the maitre d'hotel. My presence shocked him. He had not been summoned by many six-foot-tall African American girls. He asked me in French if I had ever visited a first-class restaurant. I replied, "No, but I am young and certainly I will do so in my life." He nodded. I told him about Miss Ross. I described her age and her loneliness. I said I didn't have much money but that I'd like to bring her to his restaurant for one great dinner. It might be her first and last time to have a superb French meal. His countenance softened and he called two waiters and repeated my story. I was invited inside to a table where the four of us sat down and pored over the menu. The experts chose a pate to start, then molded eggs polignac for our second course. We would be served veal medallions for our entree. A waiter showed me my bill. I was amazed at how little I was charged. Then I realized the maitre d' had reduced the price because of my story. On the designated night, Miss Ross and I got out of a taxi. We had dressed in our best and made ourselves up to go out for a fancy Parisian evening. We were greeted at the door as if we were royalty. |
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Every waiter made his way by to say hello. Obviously our tale had been told to the entire staff. The maitre d' seated us and within seconds there was a crowd of waiters around the table bringing still and carbonated water, serving bread and butter, and placing salt and pepper and mustard. To my surprise, Miss Ross was a refreshing dinner guest. She told charming stories and had a ready repartee. When the meal was served, I sat at attention to observe how she would enjoy her two-star dinner. She tasted the pate. She said she really liked that. She had long been partial to liverwurst but preferred it on white bread with a thick slab of raw onions and lots of mayonnaise. The molded eggs polignac also delighted Miss Ross. The staff sent approving nods around the room as the veal was served because Miss Ross made a slight smacking sound and rubbed her hands together. She tasted the meat. "Now this is good." She took another bite of the medallions. The nearest waiter recorded her approval and sent her reaction to his colleagues. Miss Ross said, "This is close to perfect. These people can truly cook." I was reminded of my mother's actions in restaurants. When she was particularly pleased with a dinner, she would send a glass of wine to the chef. I didn't think I had enough money for that gesture, but I was floating in self-admiration until I heard Miss Ross say, "All this needs is a little Tabasco." I looked at her, knowing that I had to dissuade her from asking the waiter to bring her the spicy sauce. |
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I began preparing the cassoulet, and my husband opened enough boxes for me to set a good table. When he brought Mary Frances back, we had a trio of good stories, laughter, and good wine. Mary Frances was easy with the chaos of my new house. She said, "All new houses are the same. They search around a few months for their true personalities. This is an amiable space. I think you'll both be very happy here." We had an aperitif then went to the table. I told her that the owners of the cookery shop were shocked that I would cook for her. She reminded me of what had happened to her in Hollywood. She said that in the 1930s and 1940s she had written scripts in Hollywood but her prowess as a cook had preceded her. The glamorous stars had invited her to their Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions for drinks and canapEs, cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. She said she could smell dinner as it was being cooked, but hosts were so intimidated by her reputation that after drinks they would have their chauffeurs take her back to the hotel. She said she would have given anything for a home-cooked hamburger or a decent omelet made in the kitchen of a friend. I served the cassoulet with good Sonoma bread. She spent a few quiet seconds savoring each flavor, but she was such an adept social guest that the conversation never lagged nor did the food get cold. We took dessert, a simple flan, out by the swimming pool. She was the perfect guest. She left at the proper time, not too early, nor too late. My husband took her home. |
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Bebe stayed in the kitchen as we chewed the crunchy vegetables and drank the beautifully flavored cold tomato soup. Bo collected the empty cups and asked if we would sit to table. There were place cards. We knew Bebe hadn't been brought up in a barn, but nothing about her prepared us for this sophistication. After we were seated, she stepped into the dining room and announced, "Dinner is served." When she turned back into the kitchen, the smile on her face was sweet enough to rot teeth. She and Bo returned, placing on the table petit pois with pearl onions in a cream sauce, haricots verts in vinaigrette, and twice-baked potatoes and mushroom gravy. The piece de resistance was a beef Wellington. We stood and applauded and she joined in the admiring laughter. Each of us knew the complexity of building a beef Wellington. How the duxelles must be prepared while the loin is in the oven. How the loin must be cooling as the short pastry rests in the refrigerator. How the pate must be at a spreadable consistency before the duxelles is patted in place. Bebe said she would love to tell us when we finished eating how a noncook had managed to bring off a four-star dinner. We sat with small bowls of good commercial ice cream for dessert and she described her day. At 10 A. M., she telephoned The New York Times and asked to speak to food editor Craig Claiborne. She would not be pacified by his assistant. When Mr. Claiborne answered, Bebe accented her already heavy accent and, with her flair for dramatics, began to cry. |
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"Mr. Claiborne, I am the wife of the Uruguay ambassador and I have invited eight couples of diplomats and two foreign vice presidents with their wives for dinner. This morning" — here a loud outburst of sobs — "my cook and his staff walked out in a huff. Oh my, Mr. Claiborne, I fear an international incident. I had the cook send out the menu, and I cannot possibly deliver." According to Bebe, Craig Claiborne asked what the menu was. She replied, "Gazpacho, beef Wellington, petit pois, twice-baked potatoes, and haricots verts." She told him she had all the ingredients and a grown daughter who could help her. He assured her that he would keep the telephone open all day and would walk her through each dish. All she had to do was follow his instructions to the letter. According to her, he did keep the telephone open, and from the success of the dinner, she certainly followed his instructions. As we left her apartment, she said, "I did this to prove to you unbearable egotists that cooking is no big thing. After we eat up all the leftovers, Bo and I will be back to pizza and salad. I'm not a cook and look what I was able to do." I think Bebe is a great cook. No one knew it then. I believe one can be born a great cook, achieve the status of a great cook, or have the greatness of cooking thrust upon her. Bebe is probably head chef at New York's Four Seasons today. Wherever she is, here are my recipes for beef Wellington, gazpacho, petit pois, twice-baked potatoes, and haricots verts. |
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Before she left, she invited me to her house for brunch the next morning. She said the invitation included Rosa. I thanked her and said I would come but that I wasn't sure about Rosa. I knew that in Rosa's house, after a rough Saturday night, Sunday morning always came late and didn't come easily. To my surprise, Rosa said yes, she would love to come. She wanted to see what someone so proper would serve for brunch. Dolly's apartment was ready to be photographed for House Beautiful. In the living room a Federal nineteenth-century sofa sat on a lilac wall-to-wall carpet. An antique sewing table functioned as a side table while Queen Anne chairs surrounded a Duncan Phyfe table. Her walls were filled with fine art. Dolly was graced in a long housecoat. We had laughed together so quickly the night before that I had not noticed her very formal manners. She served us good sherry in beautiful crystal glasses. I complimented her on their beauty and she said she had picked them up in France during her tour as a Fulbright Scholar. Had the aromas from the kitchen not burgeoned with savory promises, I would have thought that maybe she was too highfalutin to cook for my taste. I told her the food smelled inviting, then asked if she had some scotch. She said yes, and when Rosa said she'd like scotch as well Dolly said she would join us but with a sherry. On her last trip from the kitchen, she announced that brunch was served. Her dining table could have groaned under the weight of her offerings. |
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They had grown into loaves the size of giant Italian bread. I took them out and put the next load into the oven and was handed back six more giant loaves. While they cooled, I made more custard and more whipped cream and warmed more unsweetened chocolate. Hours passed as pastries cooled and custard thickened and cooled enough to be placed into the giant pastries. I dusted some of the giant pastries with powdered sugar and drizzled chocolate over them all. After stuffing the refrigerator in the kitchen full of them, I made room for them in the refrigerator outside by the swimming pool. Dawn had arrived bringing its pink and gold clouds before I was finished cooking and filling the eclairs. When I went back to bed, I was exhausted. I felt as if I had made dessert for an army. When my husband awakened and turned to sit up on his side of the bed, I raised myself and sat up, pretending I had not lain down just one hour earlier. When my husband sat down for his coffee, I asked, "Would you like a little chocolate eclair?" (I knew he loved sweet pastries in the morning.) I chopped off a huge piece from the custard loaf. "When did you make this?" He ate so happily I didn't feel the need to answer. That evening after dinner I offered a whipped cream eclair. He said, "Of course." The next day we repeated the actions of the day before except that I gave him whipped cream for breakfast and custard for dinner. The next morning he awakened before I did and left the bedroom. He came back immediately. |
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The story came out in pieces between laughing interruptions. The woman had come two days earlier and asked if Lee had a heavy black pot for sale. She showed her the item. The woman asked, "Could you cook a pot roast in this? I have a recipe that I had to steal to get." When Lee answered in the affirmative, the customer asked, "How do you use the pot? Do I have to wash it first?" Lee explained that any pots or pans sent from a factory must be scrubbed thoroughly to remove a film, which is put on to prevent rust. The customer asked, "I should wash it?" Lee said, "Get a Brasso scourer, use a little Ajax, and scrub the pot inside and out. Wash the pot again, and then use Brillo soap pads to scrub it again. When it feels smooth, wash it with regular dish-washing liquid. Dry it with a soft towel. Put some vegetable oil on your hands. Rub that all over the pot and the lid. Put the two into a very slow oven, about 150Fahrenheit Degrees, overnight. Next morning, take it out, let it cool, wash it again lightly, and then continue with your pot roast recipe." I told Lee that sounded about right. She said yes, except that the customer came into the shop screaming, "You have ruined my life. I followed your instructions and my fiance brought his parents for dinner last night. His mother makes a killer pot roast and I paid somebody to get her recipe for me. I followed hers as I followed yours, but when I served it they all began to frown and then giggle, and finally they all started laughing. |
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But Gaia was consumed with too much pain and too much fury to enjoy one of the world's most charming views. On the summit of Mount Othrys she set to work fashioning a most unusual and terrible artefact from its rock. For nine days and nights she laboured until she had produced an object which she then hid in the cleft of the mountain. Next she took herself off to visit her twelve beautiful, strong children. 'Will you kill your father Ouranos and rule the cosmos with me?' she asked each in turn. 'You will inherit the sky from him and together all of creation will be our dominion.' Perhaps we imagine that Gaia Mother Earth is soft, warm, bountiful and kind. Well, sometimes she is, but remember that she banks down fire inside. Sometimes she can be crueller, harsher and more terrifying than even the wildest sea. And talking of the marine world, the first of the children that Gaia tried to win to her side were Oceanus and his sister Tethys. fn3 But they were in the middle of negotiating a share of the oceans with Thalassa, the primordial goddess of the sea. All of this generation were stretching and flexing their muscles at this time, establishing their areas of expertise and control, nipping, growling and testing each other's strength and dominance like puppies in a basket. Oceanus had conceived the idea of creating tides and currents, which were to run like a great salt river around the world. Tethys was about to have his baby no sin in those early days of course: propagation would not have been possible without incestuous couplings. |
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I think he's got some kind of man-crush on me. He copies my hairstyle and leans limply against trees and boulders looking miserable, melancholy and misunderstood. As if he's waiting for someone to paint him or something. When he's not gazing at me he's staring down into that lava vent over there. In fact there he is now, look. Try and talk some sense into him.' Gaia approached her son. The Sickle Now, Kronos (or Cronus as he sometimes styled himself) was not quite the pained and vulnerable emo-like youth that Rhea's and Tartarus's descriptions may have led us to picture, for he was the strongest of an unimaginably strong race. He was darkly handsome, certainly; and yes, he was moody. Had Kronos the examples to go by, he would perhaps have identified with Hamlet at his most introspective, or Jaques at his most self-indulgently morbid. Konstantin from The Seagull with a suggestion of Morrissey. Yet there was something of a Macbeth in him too and more than a little Hannibal Lecter as we shall see. Kronos had been the first to discover that brooding silence is often taken to indicate strength, wisdom and command. The youngest of the twelve, he had always hated his father. The deep and piercing venom of envy and resentment was beginning to unravel his sanity, but he had managed to hide the intensity of his hatred from all but his adoring sister Rhea, who was the only member of his family with whom he felt comfortable enough to reveal his true self. As they made their way up from Tartarus, Gaia poured more poison into his receptive ear. |
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Kronos, standing silently in his hiding place, did not tremble. He was ready. 'Gaia!' roared Ouranos as he approached. 'Prepare yourself. Tonight we shall breed something better than hundred-handed mutants and one-eyed freaks ...' 'Come to me, glorious son, divine husband!' called Gaia, with what Kronos thought a distastefully convincing show of eagerness. The horrible sounds of a lustful deity slobbering, slapping and grunting suggested to him that his father was attempting some kind of foreplay. In his alcove Kronos breathed in and out five times. Never for a second did he weigh the moral good of what he was about to do, his thoughts were only for tactics and timing. With a deep inhalation he raised the great sickle and stepped swiftly sideways from his hiding place. Ouranos, who had been preparing to lie on top of Gaia, sprang to his feet with an angry snarl of surprise. Walking calmly forward, Kronos swung the scythe back and swept it down in a great arc. The blade, hissing through the air, sliced Ouranos's genitals clean from his body. All Cosmos could hear Ouranos's maddened scream of pain, anguish and rage. Never in creation's short history had there been a sound so loud or so dreadful. All living things heard it and were afraid. Kronos leapt forward with an obscene cry of triumph, catching the dripping trophy in his hands before it could reach the ground. Ouranos fell writhing in immortal agony and howled out these words: 'Kronos, vilest of my brood and vilest in all creation. |
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Worst of all beings, fouler than the ugly Cyclopes and the loathsome Hecatonchires, with these words I curse you. May your children destroy you as you destroyed me.' Kronos looked down at Ouranos. His black eyes showed nothing, but his mouth curved into a dark smile. 'You have no power to curse, daddy. Your power is in my hands.' He juggled before his father's eyes his grisly spoils of victory, burst and slimy with blood, oozing and slippery with seed. Laughing, he pulled back his arm and hurled the package of genitals far, far from sight. Across the plains of Greece they flew and out over the darkening sea. All three watched as Ouranos's organs of generation vanished from sight across the waters. Kronos was surprised, when he turned to look at her, that his mother had covered her mouth in what appeared to be horror. Tears were leaking from Gaia's eyes. He shrugged. As if she cared. Erinyes, Gigantes and Meliae Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed towards reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower. Where divine blood fell, life could not help but spring from the earth. So no matter how murderous, cruel, rapacious and destructive the character of Ouranos, he had been the ruler of creation after all. For his son to have mutilated and emasculated him constituted a most terrible crime against Cosmos. |
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Fn13 Brooding, simmering and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race has yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium? From the Foam We return now to the great arc in the heavens traced by Ouranos's severed gonads. Kronos had flung the Sky Father's junk, if you recall, far across the sea. We can watch it now. Near the Ionian island of Cythera it drops, splashes, bounces, rises up again and finally falls and half sinks beneath the waves. Great ropes of semen trail in its wake like ribbons from a kite. Where they strike the surface of the sea a furious frothing is set up. Soon all the waters bubble and boil. Something arises. From the horrors of patricidal castration and unnatural ambition it must be surely something unimaginably ugly, something terrible, something violent, something appalling, that promises only war, blood and anguish? The whirlpool of blood and seminal fluid foments, fizzes and foams. Out of the spindrift of surf and seed emerges the crown of a head, then a brow and then a face. But what kind of face? A face far more beautiful than creation has yet seen or will ever see again. Not just someone beautiful but Beauty itself rises fully formed from the foam. |
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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. |
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He would sever Kronos's head in one blow and raise it up in triumph before the world, creating a victorious tableau that would never be forgotten and that artists would depict until the end of time. But the scythe, forged by Gaia for Kronos, could not be used against him. Powerful as Zeus was, he was unable even to pick it up. He tried once, but it felt as if it was fixed to the ground. 'Gaia gave it to him and only Gaia can take it away from him,' said Rhea. 'Let it be.' 'But I must kill him,' said Zeus. 'We must be revenged.' 'His mother Earth protects him. Do not anger her. You will need her in the time to come. You will have your revenge.' Zeus gave up his attempts to move the scythe. It was vexing that he could not behead his hated father as he lay there snoring like a pig, but his mother was right. It could wait. There was too much to celebrate. In the starlight over Mount Othrys he and his five liberated siblings laughed and stamped and hooted and howled with delight. Their mother laughed too, clapping her hands with joy to see her radiant sons and daughters so well and so happy, out in the world at last and ready to claim their inheritance. Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their saviour and their leader. They swore allegiance to him for ever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order ... They would not, despite their parentage, call themselves 'Titans'. They would be gods. |
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We will leave them, their great bloodied heads bowed in full and final surrender, and take a moment to look at what else had been going on in the world while battle raged for those ten terrible years. The Proliferation The fire and fury of war had scorched, enriched and fertilized the earth. New growth burst through to create a fresh, green world for the triumphant gods to inherit. If you remember, Cosmos had once been nothing but Chaos. Then Chaos had spewed up the first forms of life, the primordial beings and the principles of lightness and darkness. As each generation developed and new entities were born and in turn reproduced, so complexity increased. Those old primordial and elemental principles were spun into life-forms of ever greater diversity, variety and richness. The beings that were born became endowed with nuanced and unique personalities and individuality. In computer language, it was as if life went from 2 bit to 4 bit to 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit and beyond. Each iteration represented millions and then billions of new permutations of size, form and what you might call resolution. High definition character, such as we pride ourselves in having as modern humans, came into existence and there was an explosion of what biologists call speciation as new forms burst into being. I like to picture the first stage of creation as an old-fashioned TV screen on which a monochrome game of Pong played. You remember Pong? It had two white rectangles for rackets and a square dot for a ball. |
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Existence was a primitive, pixellated form of bouncing tennis. Some thirty-five to forty years later there had evolved ultra hi-res 3-D graphics with virtual and augmented reality. So it was for the Greek cosmos, a creation that began with clunky and elemental lo-res outlines now exploded into rich, varied life. Creatures and gods that were ambiguous, inconsistent, unpredictable, intriguing and unknowable had arrived. To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began. The Muses One of the original Titans, Mnemosyne (Memory), was mother by Zeus to nine highly intelligent and creative daughters, the Muses, who lived at various times on Mount Helicon (where the Hippocrene fountain later played), on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, and in Pieria in Thessaly where the Pierian Spring, the metaphorical source of all the arts and sciences, flowed. fn3 We think of the Muses today as patron saints of the arts in general, and private sources of inspiration in particular. 'O for a Muse of fire!' cries the Chorus at the opening of Shakespeare's Henry V. He or she is 'my muse' we might say of those who fire our creativity and spur us on to greatness. The Muses can be found in 'music', 'amusements', 'museums' and general 'musings'. W. H. Auden believed that the image of a capricious goddess whispering ideas in the poet's ear was the best way of accounting for the maddening unreliability of creative inspiration. |
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Fn11 Atlas had been at the centre of every battle, rousing his fellow Titans into combat, shouting for one last supreme effort even as the Hecatonchires were battering them into submission. As punishment for his enmity, Zeus sentenced him to hold up the sky for eternity. This killed two birds with one stone. Zeus's predecessors, Kronos and Ouranos, had been forced to waste much of their energy in separating heaven from earth. At a stroke Zeus relieved himself of that draining burden and placed it, quite literally, on the shoulders of his most dangerous enemy. At the junction of what we would call Africa and Europe the Titan strained, the whole weight of the sky bearing down upon him. Legs braced, muscles bunched, his mighty body contorted itself with this supreme and agonizing effort. For aeons he groaned there like a Bulgarian weightlifter. In time he solidified into the Atlas Mountains that shoulder the skies of North Africa to this day. His straining, squatting image is to be found on copies of the very first maps of the world, which in his honour we still call 'atlases'. fn12 To one side of him lies the Mediterranean and to the other the ocean still named 'the Atlantic' after him, where the mysterious island kingdom of Atlantis is said to have flourished. As for Kronos the dark unhappy soul who had once been Lord of All, the brooding and unnatural tyrant who ate his own children out of fear of prophecy his punishment, just as his gelded father Ouranos had foretold, was ceaselessly to travel the world, measuring out eternity in inexorable, perpetual and lonely exile. |
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The Cyclopes' reward was to be appointed by Zeus his personal artificers, armourers and smiths. The Third Order The shattered world was still smoking from the savagery of war. Zeus saw that it needed to heal and he knew that his own generation, the Third Order of divine beings, must manage better than the first two had done. It was time for a new order, an order purged of the wasteful bloodlust and elemental brutality that had marked earlier times. To the victors, the spoils. Like a chief executive who has just completed a hostile takeover, Zeus wanted the old management out and his people in. He allotted each of his siblings their own domain, their areas of divine responsibility. The President of the Immortals chose his cabinet. For himself, he assumed overall command as supreme leader and emperor, lord of the firmament, master of weather and storms: King of the Gods, Sky Father, Cloud-Gatherer. Thunder and lightning were his to command. The eagle and the oak were his emblems, symbols then as now of fierce grace and unopposable might. His word was law, his power formidably great. But he was not perfect. He was very, very far from being perfect. Hestia Of all the gods, Hestia 'First to be devoured and the last to be yielded up again' is probably the least well known to us, perhaps because the realm that Zeus in his wisdom apportioned to her was the hearth. In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. |
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It is easy to dismiss Hera as a tyrant and a bore jealous and suspicious, storming and ranting like the very picture of a scorned harridan wife (one imagines her hurling china ornaments at feckless minions), exacting spiteful revenge on nymphs and mortals who have displeased her, failed to burn enough animals on her altars or, most fatally of all, committed the crime of consorting with Zeus (whether they had been willing or unwilling she never forgave them and could hold a grudge for lifetimes). But, ambitious, snobbish, conservatively protective of hierarchy and impatient of originality and flair as she certainly was the archetype of many a literary aunt and cinematic dowager dragon Hera was never a bore. fn10 The force and resolution with which she faced up to a god who could disintegrate her with one thunderbolt shows self-belief as well as courage. I am very fond of her and, while I am sure I would stammer, blush and swallow awkwardly in her presence, she finds in me a devoted admirer. She gave the gods gravity, heft and the immeasurable gift of what the Romans called auctoritis. If that makes her seem a spoilsport, well, sometimes sport needs to be spoiled and the children called in from the playground. Her special province was marriage; the animals associated with her were the peacock and the cow. Over the course of the war against the Titans she and Zeus developed into a natural couple, and it became apparent to him that she was the only one with enough presence, dignity and command to stand as his consort and bear him new gods. |
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Nevertheless even Zeus acknowledged with grudging consent that he was a necessary addition to Olympus. War may be stupid, but it is also inevitable and sometimes dare one say it? necessary. As Ares grew swiftly to manhood he found himself irresistibly attracted to Aphrodite as which gods weren't? More perplexingly perhaps, she was equally drawn to him. She loved him, in fact; his violence and strength appealed to some deep part of her. He in turn grew to love her, so far as such a violent brute was capable of the emotion. Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer. The Enchanted Throne To cement her position as the universally recognized Queen of Heaven and undisputed consort of Zeus, Hera felt the need to institute a nuptial feast, a grand public ceremony that would for ever bind her in wedlock to Zeus. Hera's twin impulses of propriety and ambition motivated almost everything she did. She had been pleased to see her son falling for Aphrodite, yet she did not trust the goddess. If Aphrodite agreed to make a public commitment to Ares, as Zeus was to do to Hera, then that would make everything binding and official, setting a permanent seal on her triumph. The world's first wedding would therefore solemnize two marriages. A date was set and invitations sent out. Presents began to arrive, the most spectacular of which, all agreed, was a marvellous golden chair addressed personally to Hera. |
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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. |
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Fn14 The Wedding Feast Fresh invitations to the marriage of Zeus and Hera, hastily amended to include the wedding of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, were now sent out. All who were summoned to the double wedding accepted with excited pleasure. Such a thing had never been known in all creation, but then creation had never known a goddess like Hera, with her great sense of propriety and intense feeling for order, ceremony and familial honour. Nymphs of the trees, rivers, breezes, mountains and oceans talked of nothing but the wedding for weeks. The wood spirits too the lustful fauns as well as the tough barky dryads and hamadryads made their way to Olympus from every forest, copse and spinney. In celebration of the nuptials Zeus went so far as to pardon some of the Titans. Not Atlas, of course, nor the long exiled Kronos; but the least threatening and violent, Iapetus and Hyperion amongst them, were forgiven and allowed their freedom. To add zest to an already frenziedly anticipated occasion, Zeus issued a challenge: whoever could devise the best and most original wedding dish could ask any favour of him. The lesser immortals and animals went wild with excitement at this chance to shine. Mice, frogs, lizards, bears, beavers and birds all put together recipes to bring before Zeus and Hera. There were cakes, buns, biscuits, soups, eel-skin terrines, porridges made of moss and mould. All things sweet, salty, bitter, sour and savoury were placed on small trestle tables for the King and Queen of the Gods to judge. |
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Melissa's name for it was 'honey'. It seemed to Hera that when she took a spoonful the scent of the loveliest meadow flowers and mountain herbs danced and hummed inside her mouth. Zeus licked the back of the spoon and mmm-ed with delight. Husband and wife glanced at each other and nodded. No more consultation was needed. 'Um, the ... er ... standard has been ... has been agreeably high this year,' said Zeus. 'Well done all. But Queen Hera and I are agreed. This ... ah ... honey takes first place.' The other creatures, trying to hide their disappointment, put on sporting expressions of pleasure as they formed a large semicircle and watched Melissa zip forward to claim her prize a wish that was to be granted by the King of the Gods himself. Melissa was very small and looked even smaller as she approached the winner's podium. She flew (for she could fly, despite looking as if she might be too bulky and bulgy in the wrong places to be able to) as close to Zeus's face as she dared and buzzed to him these words: 'Dread lord, I am pleased that you like my delicacy, but I must tell you it is quite extraordinarily hard to make. I have to zoom from flower to flower to collect the nectar deep inside. Only the smallest amount can be sucked up and carried. All day, for as long as Aether grants me light to see by, I must sip, search and return to the nest, sip, search and return to the nest, often travelling huge distances. Even then, at day's end, I will only have the tiniest possible fraction of nectar to convert using my secret process into the confection that has so pleased you. |
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'But you gave your word!' There was a gasp from the whole assembly. Could she really have dared to interrupt Zeus and question his honour? 'I beg your pardon, but I think you'll find that I proclaimed ...' growled the god with an icy self-restraint that was far more terrifying than any outburst of temper '... that the winner could ask any favour. I made no promise that such a request would be granted.' Melissa's wings drooped in disappointment. fn16 'However,' Zeus said, raising his hand, 'from this moment forward the gathering of your honey will be made easier by my decree that you shall not labour alone. You will be queen of a whole colony, a whole swarm of productive subjects. Furthermore, I shall grant you a fatal and painful sting.' Melissa's wings pricked up perkily. 'But,' Zeus continued, 'while it will bring a sharp pain to the one you sting, it is to you and your kind that it will bring death. So let it be.' Another rumble of thunder and the sky began to clear. Immediately Melissa felt a strange movement inside her. She looked down and saw that something long, thin and sharp like a lance was pushing its way out of the end of her abdomen. It was a sting, as finely pointed as a needle but ending in a wicked and terrible barb. With a wild twitch, a buzz and a final droning wail she flew away. Meliss is still the Greek word for the honeybee, and it is true that its sting is a suicide weapon of last resort. If it should try to fly away after the barb has lodged in the pierced skin of its victim, a bee will tug out its own insides in the effort of freeing itself. |
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The much less useful and diligent wasp has no such barb and can administer its sting as many times as it likes without danger to itself. But wasps, annoying as they are, never made selfish, hubristic demands of the gods. It is also true that science calls the order of insects to which the honeybee belongs Hymenoptera, which is Greek for 'wedding wings'. Food of the Gods Perhaps it was more than just temper and impatience that caused Zeus to punish Melissa whose honey really was quite marvellously delicious with such severity. Perhaps it had been policy. The whole assembled world of immortals was there to witness the moment. It had been a lesson for them in the implacability of the King of the Gods. The silence that now fell on the wedding feast was as dark and forbidding as the storm clouds that had massed earlier. Zeus raised the amphora of honey high above his head. 'For my queen and my beloved wife, I bless this amphora. It shall never empty. Eternally shall it feed us. Whosoever tastes its honey shall never grow old or die. It shall be the food of the gods and, when mixed with the juice of fruits, it shall be the drink of the gods.' A great cheer went up, doves flew overhead, the clouds and the silence were dispelled. The Muses Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore stepped forward and clapped their hands. Music played, hymns of praise were sung and the dancing began. Many plates were broken in ecstasy, a tradition that is carried on to this day wherever Greeks gather to eat, celebrate and earn tourist money. |
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He touched Metis under the table. Alarmed, she moved away. Zeus got up and followed her. She quickened her pace, turned a corner and darted down the mountainside. Zeus ran in pursuit, transforming himself first into a bull, then a bear, next a lion and then an eagle. Metis hid behind a pile of boulders deep in a cave, but Zeus, turning himself into a snake, managed to slither through a gap in the rocks and wrap his coils around her. Metis had always loved Zeus and, both worn down and touched by his persistence, she finally consented. Yet even as they came together something bothered Zeus. A prophecy he had heard from Phoebe. Something about a child of Metis rising to overcome the father. Afterwards, as playful pillow talk, they fell into a conversation on the subject of transformations metamorphoses as they are called in Greek. How a god or Titan might be able to turn others, or themselves, into animals, plants and even solid objects, just as Zeus had done as he had chased Metis. She congratulated him on his skill at this art. 'Yes,' said Zeus, with some self-satisfaction. 'I pursued you as bull, bear, lion and eagle, but it was as a snake that I captured you. You have a reputation for cunning and guile, Metis, but I outsmarted you. Admit it.' 'Oh, I'm sure I could have beaten you. Why, if I had turned myself into a fly you could never have caught me, could you?' Zeus laughed. 'You think not? How little you know me.' 'Go on, then,' Metis taunted. 'Catch me now!' With a buzz and whizz she turned into a fly and darted about the cave. |
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There was a terrible silence as everyone stared in stunned horror. The stunned horror turned to wild disbelief and the wild disbelief to bewildered amazement as they now witnessed, rising up from inside Zeus's opened head, the tip of a spear. It was followed by the topmost plumes of a russet crest. The onlookers held their breaths as slowly there arose into view a female figure dressed in full armour. Zeus lowered his head whether in pain, relief, submission or sheer awe nobody could be certain and, as if his bowed head had been a ramp or gangway let down for her convenience the glorious being stepped calmly onto the sand and turned to face him. Equipped with plated armour, shield, spear and plumed helmet, she gazed at her father with eyes of a matchless and wonderful grey. A grey that seemed to radiate one quality above all others infinite wisdom. From one of the pines that fringed the shoreline an owl flew out and perched on the shining she-warrior's shoulder. From the dunes an emerald and amethyst snake slid forward and coiled itself about her feet. With a slightly unpleasant slurping sound Zeus's head closed up its wound and healed itself. It was clear at once to all present that this new goddess was endowed with levels of power and personality that raised her above all the immortals. Even Hera, who realized that the newcomer could only be the issue of an adulterous affair that must have taken place very close to her wedding day, was nearly tempted to bend her knee. Zeus gazed at the daughter who had caused him so much pain and smiled a warm smile. |
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One afternoon, when Artemis was still a very young girl, Zeus found her playfully catching and releasing mice and frogs in the undergrowth down at the base of Mount Olympus. He sat on a rock beside her and hoisted her onto his knee. She tugged at his beard for a while before she asked, 'Father, do you love me?' 'Artemis, what a question! You know I do. You know I love you with all my heart.' If you are the child of a faithless reprobate of a father there is almost nothing you cannot get him to agree to. Artemis now twisted Zeus around her fingers just as she twisted the hairs of his beard. 'Do you love me enough to grant me a wish?' 'Of course, my dear.' 'Hm. Come to think, that's nothing. You grant wishes to the smallest and least significant nymphs and water sprites. Would you grant me several wishes?' Inwardly Zeus groaned. The whole world seemed to believe that being the all-powerful one, sitting upon the throne of Olympus and commanding the heavens and the earth, was the easiest job there was. What did they know of paternal guilt, sibling rivalry, power struggles and jealous wives? Please one member of the family and you maddened another. 'Several wishes? Goodness! Surely you have everything a girl could want? You are immortal and once you reach your moment of greatest beauty you will never age. You are strong, clever, swift and ow!' This last exclamation was in reaction to a hair that had been plucked with some violence from his chin. 'They aren't difficult wishes, daddy. |
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In essence he was the god of harmony. The idea that the base material world and its ordinary objects had divine properties and could resonate with the heavens, this was Apollonian, whether expressed in the magical properties of squares, circles and spheres or in the perfect modulation and rhythms of a voice or a chain of reasoning. Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift. Apollo had it in abundance, allied to an inability ever to lie. This made him a natural choice for taking charge of oracles and prophecy too. The python was sacred to him, of course, and the laurel. His particular animals were the dolphin and the white raven. fn27 It would be a fool who mistook Apollo's golden beauty for a sign of weakness. He was a supreme archer and when necessary as fierce and fiery a warrior as any on Olympus: like all his close relations he was capable of cruelty, meanness, jealousy and spite. Unusually for a god he was worshipped by the Romans under his Greek name without any alterations. Apollo was Apollo wherever you went in the ancient world. The Wrath of Hera On the floating island of their birth, the newborn twins Apollo and Artemis had found themselves the focus of the Queen of Heaven's continuing fury. Hera had done everything possible to prevent the birth of these living reminders of Zeus's infidelity and her frustrated rage at her failure knew no bounds. So she tried again. When the twins were just days old she sent the snake Python to consume them. |
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You remember the magnetite stone the pregnant Rhea had duped Kronos into swallowing instead of the infant Zeus? The one that he had later vomited up and which Zeus cast far from Othrys? Well, it had landed at a place called Pytho on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Lodged fast in the earth it would in time become the Omphalos or navel-stone of Greece the Hellenic belly-button, its spiritual centre and point of origin. From exactly the spot where it fell, at the command of Gaia, for whom this place was already sacred, there had emerged out of the ground a huge dragon-like serpent to serve as the stone's guardian. Taking the name of his birthplace he was called Python, as have been many snakes in his honour since. Hera in her anger now sent Python to the isle of Delos to kill Leto and her children. Zeus took the risk of incensing Hera even further by secretly whispering this news to the wind, which passed it on to the infant Apollo, who in turn sent a desperate message to Hephaestus, begging for the best bow and arrow his half-brother could fashion. Hephaestus toiled at the forge for seven days and seven nights, at the end of which time a matchlessly beautiful and powerful weapon and a set of golden arrows were despatched to Delos, just in time for Apollo to take delivery of them, conceal himself behind the dunes and await the great serpent's arrival. The moment Python emerged from the sea and slithered onto the sand Apollo stepped from his hiding place and shot him through the eye with an arrow. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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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? |
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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. Who would dare? A hamadryad drooping herself from the branches of her aspen could offer no clue but informed him that further up an assorted gaggle of nymphs had gathered around the mouth of Maia's cave. Maybe he would find his answer there? She would go herself if only she could leave her tree. When Apollo reached the top of the mountain he saw that the whole population of Cyllene had congregated at the cave. |
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Hermes was in the process of demonstrating the principle of natural harmonics when Apollo, entranced as he was by the feelings stirred in him by this extraordinary device, came to himself. 'Yes, that's all very well,' he said, 'but what about my bloody cattle?' Hermes eyed him quizzically. 'You must be, let me see ... don't tell me ... Apollo, right?' Not to be recognized was a new experience for Apollo and one that he found he didn't quite like. Being spoken to in superior tones by a day-old baby was another on his list of least favourite experiences. He was about to crush this cocky little squirt with a cutting remark and possibly a swift right hook to the chin when he found himself facing a dimpled outstretched hand. 'Put it there, Pol. Delighted to meet you. Hermes, latest addition to the divine roster. You'll be my half-brother, I think? Mother Maia here took me through the family tree last night. What a nutty bunch we are, eh? Eh?' Another new sensation for Apollo was being playfully poked in the ribs. He felt he was losing control of the situation. 'Look, I don't care who you are, you can't go round stealing my cattle and not expecting to pay for it.' 'Oh, I'll pay you back, don't worry about that. But I just had to have them. Best quality guts. If I was going to make a lyre for my beloved half-brother I wanted only the finest strings.' Apollo looked from Hermes to the lyre and from the lyre to Hermes. 'You mean ...?' Hermes nodded. 'With my love. Yours are the lyre and the art that lies behind it. |
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Later, Hermes would take on perhaps his most important divine responsibility, but for the moment we will seat him in the twelfth chair and survey the grandeur of Megala Kazaniafn35, the great stage at the summit of Mount Olympus. The Olympians Two great thrones face ten smaller ones. Each is now occupied by a god or goddess. Zeus reaches out his left hand for Hera to take. Megala Kazania, the amphitheatre scooped out of Olympian rock by the Hecatonchires during their great battering of the Titans, is spread out before the gods. fn36 A great cheer goes up from the crowd of immortals gathered there to witness this great occasion, Zeus's supreme moment. The Queen of Heaven takes his hand. She is content. She and her wayward husband have had a Conversation. There are to be no new gods. There will be no more seduction and impregnation of nymphs or Titanesses. The dodecatheon is complete and Zeus will now turn to the serious business of establishing his rule in perpetuity. She, Hera, will always be there to support and guide him, to uphold order and decorum. As he surveys the ten smiling gods ranged in front of them Zeus feels Hera squeezing his hand and understands just what that firm pressure means. He salutes the crowd of pardoned Titans and swooning nymphs massed below. Cyclopes, Gigantes, Meliae and Oceanids jostle each other to get a good view. The Charites and Horai shimmer shyly. Hades, the Erinyes and other dark creatures of the underworld bow low. The three hundred hands of the Hecatonchires wave their fierce loyalty. |
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Now, to signify the start of the Reign of the Twelve, Hestia steps down from her throne and sets light to the oil in a great gleaming bowl of beaten copper. A huge cheer rings around the mountain. An eagle flies overhead. Thunder rumbles across the sky. Hestia returns to her throne. Zeus watches her calmly smoothing the skirt of her gown and transfers his gaze to the others, one by one Poseidon. Demeter. Aphrodite. Hephaestus. Ares. Athena. Artemis. Apollo. Hermes. These gods and all creation are bowing down before him. All his enemies are scattered, destroyed, imprisoned or tamed. He has created an empire and a rule the like of which the world has never seen. He has won. Yet he feels nothing. He looks up and on the far edge of the mountain sees silhouetted against the sky a figure whose dark clothes billow in the wind. His father Kronos has come. The blade of his scythe catches the light of the flames below as he slowly swings it back and forth like a pendulum. Although even Zeus cannot possibly make it out so far away in such poor light he is sure that there is a cruel, taunting grimace on his father's gaunt and ravaged face. 'Wave, Zeus. And for heaven's sake, smile!' Hera's hissed undertone jerks him away. When he looks back the dark silhouette of his father has gone. Perhaps he only imagined it. More cheers arise. To the growl of thunder is added a rumble from the earth itself. Gaia and Ouranos are adding their congratulations. Or perhaps their warnings. The cheering will not stop. |
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A subservient, adoring race of little miniatures.' 'Male and female?' 'Oh, good heavens no, just male. You can imagine what Hera would say otherwise ...' Prometheus could indeed imagine what Hera's reaction might be if the world were suddenly filled with more females for her errant husband to involve himself with. He saw that Zeus was very excited by his grand scheme. Once he was set upon a course, Prometheus knew, even one as novel and strange as this, not even the Hecatonchires and Gigantes combined could sway his friend from it. Not that Prometheus was against the idea. It was an exciting experiment, he decided. Playthings for the immortals. When you came to think of it, it was really rather an enchanting notion. Artemis had her hounds, Aphrodite her doves, Athena her owl and serpent, Poseidon and Amphitrite their dolphins and turtles. Even Hades kept a dog albeit a perfectly disgusting one. It was only fitting that the chief of gods should design his own special kind of pet, more intelligent, loyal and endearing than the others. Kneading and Firing History does not agree on exactly where Prometheus and Zeus went to find the best clay for realizing the plan. Early sources, like the traveller Pausanias in the second century AD, claimed that Panopeus in Phocis was the place. Later scholars say that the pair journeyed east of Asia Minor, all the way down to the fertile lands that lie between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. fn1 The most recent scholarship maintains that the search took them right down past Nilus, crossing the Equator and ending up in East Africa. |
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Wherever it was, they found at last what Prometheus pronounced to be the perfect spot: a river whose slimy banks oozed with just the kind of mud and minerals he wanted for consistency, texture, durability and colour. 'This is good clay,' he told Zeus. 'No, don't settle down. I need to work in peace and free of all distraction. But before you go I shall require some of your saliva.' 'Excuse me?' 'If these creatures are to live and breathe they will need something of you in the composition.' Zeus saw the justice of this and was happy enough to hawk up and fill a dried out waterhole with his divine spittle. 'I'll need to line up my little clay figures one by one on the riverbank to be baked in the heat of the sun,' said Prometheus. 'So be back by evenfall and they should be nicely ready.' Zeus would have liked to watch, but he knew enough about the artistic temperament to leave Prometheus to it. Leaping upwards in the form of an eagle he flew away, leaving his friend alone with his art. Prometheus began tentatively, first rolling out sausages of clay, each roughly four podes long. fn2 On top of these he stuck a ball of spit-moistened clay for a head. It was then a question of teasing, twisting and tweaking, mushing, moulding and massaging, pulling, prising and pinching, until something like a small version of a god or Titan appeared. The more he worked, the more excited he became. Zeus had not been exaggerating when he compared Prometheus to Hephaestus he did possess real skill. |
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In fact what he exhibited now as he pressed and shaped was more than skill, it was artistry. Mixing the clay with different pigments he built up a diverse and colourful array of life-like masculine creatures. His first effort had been a small being whose skin closely matched the sun-kissed complexions of the gods. Next he made one in shining black, then another who was more a creamy ivory tinged with pink, then came figures of amber, yellow, bronze, red, green, beige, vivid purple and the brightest blue. A Reduced Set As evening fell Prometheus stood and stretched with a yawn and that special groan of weariness and satisfaction that follows a long session of concentrated labour. The afternoon sun had warmed his work into the supple, malleable consistency known in the world of ceramics as 'cheese-ware'. This was perfect timing on Prometheus's part, for if the finished creations had been exposed to fiercer midday heat they would have dried into 'biscuit-ware', rendering them too friable and frangible for any of the last-minute modifications that his royal and divine patron would be sure to demand. Longer ears, twice the number of genitals, that kind of thing. Gods are nothing if not capricious. And here, unless his own ears deceived him, came the King of the Gods now, crashing through the thicket in loud conversation with someone. Prometheus could make out an answering voice, female, low and measured. Zeus had brought along Athena, his favourite child. 'Your father the emperor god, the world knows,' Prometheus could hear him saying. |
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'Oh Prometheus, they're perfect,' she said in the mild voice that commanded more attention than the roars and screams of the other Olympians. Prometheus cheered up at once. Praise from Athena meant everything. 'Well, I did pretty much put my heart and soul into them.' 'Fine job, really fine,' said Zeus. 'Formed by a great Titan from Gaia's clay, they are held together by my royal saliva and fired by the sun and shall be brought to life by the gentle breath of my daughter.' It was Metis, always inside Zeus, who had sparked the thought in him that it should be Athena who brought these creatures to life. She would breathe into each one, literally inspiring them with some of her great qualities of wisdom, instinct, craft and sense. A Name Is Found Kneeling down on the bank of the river Athena breathed her warm sweet breath into each of the little statues. When she had finished she stood to join Prometheus and her father, looking on to see what would transpire. It all happened quite slowly. At first one of the darker figures gave a twitch and let out a kind of gasping moan. At the other end of the row a yellow one wriggled, sat up and gave a small cough. Within seconds all the little beings were alive and moving. Just moments later they were trying out their limbs, eyes and other senses, looking at each other, smelling the air, chattering and shouting. Before long they were standing and even taking their first wobbling steps. Zeus took Prometheus by both his hands and danced him round and round. |
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'Look!' he shouted. 'Look! Aren't they beautiful! They're wonderful, quite wonderful!' Athena raised a finger to her lips. 'Sh! You're frightening them.' She pointed down at the tiny men who were now staring up with looks of fear and consternation on their faces. The tallest of them didn't quite come up to the level of her knees. 'It's alright, little ones,' said Zeus stooping down and addressing them in what he hoped was a soothing voice. 'There's no need to be afraid!' But the colossal booming sound that emerged seemed to alarm the little creatures further and they began to flail and whirl about in alarm. 'Let's reduce ourselves to their size,' said Prometheus. As he spoke he shrank himself down so that he was only a foot or so taller than his creations. Zeus and Athena did the same. With embraces, smiles and soft words, the scared and bewildered beings were slowly pacified and befriended. They clustered around the three immortals, bowing and prostrating themselves. 'There's no need to bow,' said Prometheus, touching one of them and marvelling at the texture and life he could feel pounding within. Athena's breath had turned the clay into such quick, warm flesh. The eyes of them all were bright with life and energy and hope. 'Excuse me,' said Zeus, 'there is every need to bow. We are their gods and they are not to forget it.' 'I'm not their god,' said Prometheus, gazing down on them with an intense feeling of love and pride. 'I am their friend.' He knelt so that he was lower than them. |
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And so the early race of man came to be. Gaia, Zeus, Apollo and Athena might be said to be its progenitors as much as Prometheus, who fashioned humanity from the four elements: Earth (Gaia's clay), Water (the spittle of Zeus), Fire (the sun of Apollo) and Air (the breath of Athena). They lived and thrived, exemplifying the best of their creators. 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. |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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Fn2 'Here you are, my dear,' said Zeus. 'Now, this is purely decorative. You are never ever to open it. You understand?' Pandora shook her lovely head. 'Never,' she breathed with great sincerity. 'Never!' 'There's a good girl. It is your wedding gift. Bury it deep below your marriage bed, but you must not open it. Ever. What it contains ... well, never mind. Nothing of interest to you at all.' Hermes took Pandora by the hand and transported her to the little stone house where Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus lived, right in the centre of a prosperous human town. The Brothers Prometheus knew that Zeus would seek some kind of retribution for his disobedience and warned his brother Epimetheus that, while he was away teaching the newly sprung up villages and towns how to use fire, he should on no account accept any gift from Olympus, no matter in what guise it presented itself. Epimetheus, who always acted first and considered the consequences later, promised to obey his more perspicacious brother. Nothing could prepare him for Zeus's gift, however. Epimetheus answered a knock at the door one morning to see the cheerful smiling face of the messengers of the gods. 'May we come in?' Hermes stepped nimbly aside to reveal, cradling a stoneware jar in her arms, the most beautiful creature Epimetheus had ever seen. Aphrodite was beautiful, of course she was, but too remote and ethereal to be considered as anything other than a subject of veneration and distant awe. Likewise Demeter, Artemis, Athena, Hestia and Hera. |
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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? |
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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. It was a happy and successful party. |
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The last festival that the Golden Age was ever to know. That night, perhaps a little flushed with the praise that had flowed so freely in her direction, Pandora found it hard to sleep. Through the window of her bedroom the moonlight shone down on the garden. The sundial's gnomon gleamed like a silver blade and once again she thought she heard the music of the jar. Epimetheus was sleeping happily beside her. The moonbeams danced in the garden. Unable to stand it any longer Pandora leapt from her matrimonial bed and was out in the garden, unrolling the base of the sundial and scrabbling at the earth, before she had time to tell herself that this was the wrong thing to do. She pulled the jar from its hiding place and twisted at the lid. Its waxen seal gave way and she pulled it free. There was a fast fluttering, a furious flapping of wings and a wild wheeling and whirling in her ears. Oh! Glorious flying creatures! But no ... they were not glorious at all. Pandora cried out in pain and fright as she felt something leathery brush her neck, followed by a sharp and terrible prick of pain as some sting or bite pierced her skin. More and more flying shapes buzzed from the mouth of the jar a great cloud of them chattering, screaming and howling in her ears. Through the swirling fog of these dreadful creatures she saw the face of her husband as he came outside to see what was happening. It was white with horror and fright. With a great cry Pandora summoned up the courage and strength to close the lid and seal the jar. |
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'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. fn7 And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth. |
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'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. Two beautiful eagles swept down from the sky and glided close to Prometheus, blocking the sunlight. He could hear the hot wind ruffling their feathers. Zeus called up to him. 'You will lie chained to this rock for ever. There is no hope of escape or forgiveness, not in all perpetuity. Each day these eagles will come to tear out your liver, just as you tore out my heart. |
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Hermaphroditus, who was as shy as he was lovely, became greatly confused and unhappy when this forward creature, stunned by his beauty, tried to seduce him. Unlike most of her kind modest, hard-working nymphs who attended with diligence to the maintenance of the streams, pools and water-courses over which they had charge Salmacis had a reputation for vanity and indolence. She would rather swim lazily around admiring her own limbs in the water than hunt or exercise with the other naiads. But her peace and self-esteem were shattered by the beauty of this Hermaphroditus, and she exerted herself mightily to win him. The more she tried revolving naked in the water, winningly rubbing her breasts, blowing coy bubbles under the surface the less comfortable the boy became, until he shouted at her to leave him alone. She departed in a sulky surge, shocked and humiliated by the new and unwelcome experience of rejection. It was a fine day, though, and Hermaphroditus, hot and sweaty from the excitement of fighting off this tiresome sprite and thinking she was safely out of the way, stripped off his clothing and plunged into the cool waters of the spring to refresh himself. Almost immediately Salmacis, who had swum back under the cover of the reeds, leapt on him like a salmon and clung fast to his naked body. Revolted he wiggled and wriggled and jiggled to be set free, while she cried up to the heavens, 'O gods above, never let this youth and me part! Let us always be one!' The gods heard her prayer and answered with the callous literalness that seemed ever to delight them. |
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He bought an especially bristly and foul-smelling boar from a swineherd who lived not far from the palace and led it that evening to the window of the room where Psyche slept. More clumsily than you might think of a slim athletic god, he tried to clamber through the window with the pig under his arm without making a noise. A number of things happened very quickly. Eros landed safely in the moonlit room. Psyche slumbered peacefully on. Eros wedged the pig firmly between his legs. Eros reached behind his shoulder to pluck an arrow from his quiver. The pig squealed. A flustered Eros scratched his own arm with the point of his arrow as he drew the bow. Psyche woke up with a start and lit a candle. Eros saw Psyche and fell deeply in love with her. What a business. The god of love himself lovestruck. You might imagine that the next thing he would do is fire an arrow at Psyche and that all would end happily. But here Eros comes out of the story rather well. So real, pure and absolute was his love that he could not think of cheating Psyche out of her own choice. He took one last longing look at her, turned and leapt out of the window and back into the night. Psyche saw the pig running round in wild, snuffling circles on her bedroom floor, concluded that she must be dreaming, blew out the candle and went back to sleep. Prophecy and Abandonment The next morning King Aristides was alarmed to be told by a servant that his youngest daughter seemed to have turned her bedroom into some kind of piggery. |
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He and Queen Damaris had been worried enough already that, unlike her sisters Calanthe and Zona who had allied themselves to rich landowners, Psyche had stubbornly refused to marry. The news that she was now consorting with pigs made up his mind. He travelled to the oracle of Apollo to find out what the girl's future might be. After the correct sacrifices and prayers had been offered up, the Sibyl made this answer. 'Garland your child with flowers and carry her to a high place. Lay her on a rock. The one that will come to take her for its bride is the most dangerous being of earth, sky or water. All the gods of Olympus fear its power. So it is ordained, so it must be. Fail in this and the creature will lay waste all your kingdom and discord and despair shall come in its train. You, Aristides, will be called the destroyer of your people's happiness.' Ten days later a strange procession wound its way out of the town. Carried high on a litter, festooned with flowers and dressed in the purest white, sat a gloomy but resigned Psyche. She had been told of the oracle's pronouncement and had accepted it. Her so-called beauty had always been a source of irritation to her. She hated the fuss and stir it caused, how oddly it made people behave in her presence and how freakish and set apart it made her feel. She had planned never to marry, but if she had to then a rapacious beast would be no worse than a tedious fawning prince with mooncalf eyes. The agony of its attentions would at least be over quickly. |
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With piteous wails of grief and sorrow the crowd laboured up the mountainside until they came to the great basalt rock on which Psyche was to be laid for sacrifice. Her mother Damaris howled, shrieked and sobbed. King Aristides patted her hand and wished himself elsewhere. Calanthe and Zona, their dull, elderly but rich husbands at their sides, each tried their best to conceal the deep satisfaction they felt at the knowledge that they were soon to be the unchallenged fairest in the land. As she was bound to the rock Psyche closed her eyes and breathed deeply, waiting for everyone to have done with indulging in their lamentations and shows of grief. Soon all suffering and pain would be over. Singing hymns to Apollo the crowd wound its way down the hill, leaving Psyche alone on the rock. The sun shone down upon her. Larks called in the blue sky. She had pictured boiling clouds, shrieking winds, lashing rain and dreadful thunder as accompaniments to her violation and death, not this glorious idyll of late-spring sunshine and rippling birdsong. Who or what could this creature be? If her father had reported the oracle correctly then even the high Olympians feared it. But she had heard of no such terrible monster in all the legends and rumours of legends on which she had been raised. Not even Typhon or Echidna had the power to alarm the mighty gods. Suddenly a warm breath of wind ruffled her white ceremonial robes. The breath became a gust that pushed a cushion of air between her and the cold basalt on which she lay. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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She felt her body being gently pulled towards this figure. Sweet warm breath mingled with hers. 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. 'Don't fight it. Relax into it,' said Psyche as Zephyrus swept them up over the mountain. |
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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. |
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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. How could their younger sister, the stupid, selfish Psyche, now find herself in the position more or less of a goddess? |
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'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. So guileless.' 'So easy to take advantage of.' 'I don't understand.' The sisters looked at each other as if weighing up whether to reveal harsh truths. 'How well if at all do you know this ... this thing that comes nightly to visit you?' 'He's not a thing!' protested Psyche. 'Of course he's a thing. |
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And so that night it came about that, with Eros sleeping peacefully in the bed, Psyche found herself standing over him, a hooded lantern in one hand and a razor in the other. She raised the blinds from the lamp. Light fell on the curled-up naked form of the most beautiful being she had ever beheld. The warm glow danced on smooth, youthful skin and on the most wonderful pair of feathered wings. Psyche could not hold back a gasp of amazement. She knew at once whom she was looking at. This was no dragon or monster, no ogre or abomination. This was the young god of love. This was Eros himself. To think that she could have dreamed of harming him. How beautiful he was. His full, rosy lips were slightly parted and the sweetness of his breath came up to her as she leaned down to gaze more deeply. Everything about him was so perfect! The gentle heave and swell of muscles gave his youthful beauty a manly cast, but without that hard, bulging ungainliness she had seen on the bodies of her father's champion athletes and warriors. His tousled hair gleamed with a warm colour that lay between the gold of Apollo and the mahogany of Hermes. And those wings! Folded beneath his body they had the fullness and whiteness of a swan's. She reached out a trembling hand and ran her finger down the line of feathers. The soft fluttering whisper they returned hardly made a sound, yet it was enough to cause the sleeping Eros to shift and murmur. Psyche pulled back and shaded the lantern, but within a few moments an even rhythmic breathing reassured her that Eros was still deeply asleep. |
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She unmasked the lantern again and saw that he was now turned away from her. She saw too that his movement had caused a curious object to be brought into view. The lamplight fell on a silver cylinder that lay beneath his wings. His quiver! Hardly daring to breath Psyche leaned forward and pulled out a single arrow. Turning it in her hand she slowly fingered its shaft of shining ebony. The arrowhead itself was affixed by a band of gold ... Holding the lantern high in her left hand she ran her right thumb along the head and then ouch! So sharp was the tip that it drew blood. The moment it did a feeling washed over her, a feeling of such intense love for the sleeping Eros, such heat, passion and desire, such complete and eternal devotion, that she could not refrain from moving to kiss the curls on the nape of his neck. 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. |
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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. |
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Launch herself onto Zephyrus, who will pick her up and bring her to me. Tell the beautiful Calanthe all this, Psyche, I beg." This is his message which I have faithfully relayed.' You can imagine with what speed Calanthe prepared herself. She left a scrawled message for her husband explaining that they were not husband and wife after all, that their marriage had been a calamitous mistake, that the officiant who wed them had been drunk, incapable and unqualified, that she had never loved him anyway and that she was now a free woman, so there. At the high basalt rock she heard the rustle of a breeze and, with a moan of ecstatic joy, launched herself onto what she thought was Zephyrus. But the spirit of the West Wind was nowhere near. With a scream of frustration, rage, disappointment and fear, Calanthe tumbled down the hillside, bouncing from sharp rock to sharp rock until her whole body was turned inside out and she landed at the bottom as dead as a stone. The identical fate befell her sister Zona, to whom Psyche told the same story. The Tasks of Aphrodite With her revenge meted out, Psyche had the rest of her life to consider. Every waking moment was filled with the love and longing she felt for Eros and with the pangs of misery that stabbed her, knowing she was doomed never to see him again. Eros, meanwhile, lay in a secret chamber, racked by the agony of the wound on his shoulder. You and I could endure with ease the slight nuisance of a lamp-oil burn, but for Eros, immortal though he was, this was a hurt inflicted by the one he loved. |
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Such wounds take a very long time to heal, if indeed they ever do. With Eros indisposed the world began to suffer. Youths and maidens stopped falling in love. There were no marriages. The people began to murmur and grumble. Unhappy prayers were raised to Aphrodite. When she heard them, and learned that Eros was hiding away and neglecting his duties, she became vexed. The news that a mortal girl had stolen her son's heart and caused him such harm turned her vexation to anger. But when she discovered that it was the very same mortal girl that she had once commanded Eros to humiliate, she grew livid. How could her plan to make Psyche fall in love with a pig have backfired so terribly? Well, this time she would personally and conclusively ensure the girl's downfall. 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. |
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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. |
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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? To approach them now would mean a swift and painful death. But if you lie down to sleep, by evening they will have moved to new pastures and you will be able to swim across to the tree where you will find tangles of golden wool clinging to its lower branches.' That night an enraged and baffled Aphrodite cast the golden wool aside and insisted that Psyche descend to the underworld to beg a sample of beauty cream from Persephone. Since she had thought of little else but death since Eros had left her, the poor girl consented willingly and followed Aphrodite's directions to Hades, where she fully intended to stay and see out a miserable, lonely and loveless eternity. The Union of Love and Soul One day a garrulous swallow told Eros about the tasks which Psyche had been set by his jealous and intemperate mother. |
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Trying to ignore the still agonizing pain of his wound, he rose up and with a mighty effort opened his wings. He flew straight to Olympus, where he demanded an immediate audience with Zeus. Eros told his story to an enraptured audience of fascinated Olympians. His mother had always hated Psyche. Aphrodite's dignity and honour as an Olympian had been threatened by the girl's beauty and the willingness of a handful of foolish humans to venerate the mortal maiden ahead of the immortal goddess. And so she had sent Eros to cause Psyche to fall in love with a pig. He put his case well. Zeus sent Hermes down to the underworld to fetch Psyche and an eagle to summon Aphrodite. When they were present before the heavenly company, Zeus spoke. 'This has been an extraordinary and undignified entanglement. Aphrodite, beloved one. Your position is not threatened; it never can be. Look down at the earth and see how your name is everywhere sanctified and praised. Eros, you have too long been a foolish, impudent and irresponsible boy. That you love and are loved will be the making of you and may save the world from the worst excesses of your mischievous and misdirected arrows. Psyche, come and drink from my cup. This is ambrosia, and now that you have tasted it you are immortal. Here, witnessed by us all, you will for ever be yoked with Eros. Embrace your daughter-in-law, Aphrodite, and let us all be merry.' All was laughter and delight at the wedding of Eros and Psyche. Apollo sang and played on his lyre, Pan joined in with his syrinx. |
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He transformed Io into a cow, a beautiful plump young heifer with shivering flanks and large, gentle eyes. fn2 If he hid her in a field Hera would never spot her and he could visit her whenever he liked. Or so he imagined. When lust descends, discretion, common sense and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else. It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress. Hera, to whom cows were sacred, and who possessed therefore a keen, expert eye for the species, noticed the animal and suspected its true identity straight away. 'What a delightful heifer,' Hera remarked casually to Zeus at breakfast on Olympus one morning. 'Such a perfect shape. Such long lashes and appealing eyes.' 'What, that old thing?' said Zeus, looking down with a feigned air of boredom to where Hera was pointing. 'That's one of your fields, darling, so she must be one of yours.' 'Possibly,' said Zeus, 'very possibly. One has thousands of cows browsing around. Can't be expected to keep tabs on all of them.' 'I should very much like that particular heifer,' said Hera, 'as a birthday present.' 'Er ... really? That one? I'm sure I could find you a much fatter and fitter animal.' 'No,' said Hera and those who knew her would have recognized the glint in her eye and the steel in her voice. 'That is the one I should like.' 'Certainly, certainly,' said Zeus affecting a yawn. 'She's yours. There's a jar of ambrosia at your elbow ... |
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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. |
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He would say things like: 'Yes, next weekend dad Zeus, don't you know is inviting me up to Olympus for supper. He said he might let me sit on his throne, maybe take a sip or two of nectar. Had it before, of course. There'll just be a few of us. Uncle Ares, my half-sister Athena, a few nymphs perhaps to round up the numbers. Should be a laugh.' Phaeton would always return home in a fury after enduring this oh-so-casual name-dropping. 'How come,' he would complain to his mother, 'Epaphus gets to see his father every weekend when I have never even met mine?' Clymene would hug her son tightly and try to explain. 'Apollo is so busy, darling. Every day he has to drive his chariot of the sun across the sky. And when that duty is done he has shrines at Delos and Delphi and goodness knows where else to attend. Prophecies, music, archery ... he is quite the busiest of all the gods. But I'm sure he'll come and visit us soon. When you were born he left this for you I was going to wait to give it to you when you were a little older, but you might as well have it now ...' Clymene went to a cupboard and took out an exquisite golden flute which she handed to him. The boy at once brought it to his mouth and blew, producing a breathy and far from musical hiss. 'What is it supposed to do?' 'Do? What do you mean, darling?' 'Zeus gave Epaphus a magic leather whip which makes dogs obey his every command. What does this do?' 'It's a flute, my love. It makes music. Beautiful, charming music.' 'How?' 'Well, you learn how to shape the notes and then you ... |
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Well, you play it.' 'Where's the magic in that?' 'Have you never heard flute music? It's the most magical sound there is. It does take rather a lot of practice though.' Phaeton threw the instrument down in disgust and stormed off to his bedroom, where he sulked for the rest of the day and night. A week or so later, on the last day of term before the long summer holidays, he found himself being approached by the exasperatingly condescending Epaphus. 'Hi there, Phaeton,' he drawled. 'Wondered if you wanted to join me at the family villa on the North African coast next week? Small enough house party. Just dad, maybe Hermes, Demeter and a few fauns. We sail tomorrow. Could be a laugh. What do you say?' 'Oh, what a shame,' cried Phaeton. 'My father, Phoebus Apollo you know, has invited me to ... to drive the sun-chariot across the sky next week. Can't let him down.' 'Excuse me?' 'Yes, didn't I mention it? He's always going on at me to help take the load off his shoulders, do a bit of the old sun-driving for him.' 'You're seriously telling me ... Bullshit. Guys, you've got to come and listen to this!' Epaphus called the other boys over to where he and Phaeton stood facing each other. 'Tell them,' he demanded. Phaeton was caught in the lie now. Pride, fury and frustration drove him on. He was damned if he was going to back down and let this insufferable snob win the day. 'It's really nothing,' he said. 'Just that my dad Apollo is insisting I learn to drive the horses of the sun. No big deal.' The other boys, led by a sneering Epaphus, hooted their disbelief and derision. |
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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. |
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'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. |
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'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. '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. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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She was to bear Zeus three sons, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon who went on after their deaths, you may recall, to become the Judges of the Underworld, weighing the lives of dead souls and allotting them their punishments and rewards accordingly. The Quest for Europa Back home in Tyre, Europa's unhappy parents sent Cadmus and his three brothers to find their sister, with firm instructions not even to think of returning home without her. The Tyrians were already famous navigators and traders. Cadmus's brother Phoenix (not to be confused with the mythical bird) would in time succeed Agenor as ruler of the kingdom, which he renamed Phoenicia after himself. The Phoenicians' skill as merchants would bring them great wealth and prestige. They dealt in silks and spices from the far east, but it was the invention and propagation of the alphabet that gave them such an advantage over their neighbours and rivals. For the first time in human history any language could be written down according to its sound, which meant the Mediterranean coastline, including North Africa and the Middle East was able to communicate for the first time using symbols on papyrus, parchment, wax or pottery shards that could be spoken out loud. fn1 The marks on the page or screen that you are interpreting as you read now derive from that Phoenician alphabet. And it was Cadmus who would take his people's marvellous invention to Greece in the course of his long search for Europa. For years they travelled in vain. |
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Just as Cadmus's brother Thasos had settled a smaller nearby island, called Thasos, and Phoenix had given his name to the Phoenician kingdom, so the third of Cadmus's brothers, Cilix, now abandoned the quest for Europa, returning east to Asia Minor to establish his own kingdom, which he called Cilicia. fn5 With Harmonia by his side and a large retinue of loyal followers from Tyre in attendance upon them both, Cadmus headed for Delphi to consult the oracle. He knew in his bones, as all heroes do, that he was destined for greatness, but he did not know quite where his future lay; and he still needed guidance in the matter of his search for the lost Europa. You already know enough about oracles to be unsurprised by the eccentricity of the Pythia's response. 'Cadmus, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon,' she chanted. 'Cast aside the quest for your sister and follow instead the heifer marked with the half moon. Follow the cow until it drops down exhausted. Where it falls, there must you build.' 'Build what?' 'Farewell, Cadmus, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon.' 'What cow? I see no cow.' 'Where the cow falls, there must Cadmus, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon, build.' 'Yes, but this cow ...' 'The heifer with the half moon will help Harmonia and her hero, son of Agenor, son of Poseidon.' 'Look here ...' 'Farewe-e-e-e-ll ...' Cadmus and Harmonia looked at each other, shrugged and quit Delphi with their retinue of loyal Tyrians. It was possible that a cow really would materialize magically before them, or perhaps some celestial messenger might appear to guide them to such an animal. |
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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. |
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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. |
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'Let's sacrifice the cow to Pallas Athena. The poor thing's almost dead anyway. Athena will guide us.' Cadmus agreed and elected to pitch a primitive kind of camp right there. So that he could properly purify the sacrifice he sent some of his men to fetch water from a nearby spring. Cadmus slit the cow's throat and was just sprinkling its blood on a makeshift altar bedecked with wild flowers and burnt sage when one of the Tyrians returned in the most pitiable state of distress, bearing awful news. A dragon, in the grotesque form of a giant water serpent, guarded the spring. It had already killed four men, constricting them in its coils and biting off their heads with its enormous jaws. What could be done? Heroes do not wring their hands and wonder, heroes act. Cadmus hurried to the spring, picking up a heavy boulder on the way. Hiding behind a tree he whistled to attract the dragon's attention, and then threw the boulder at the dragon's head, smashing its skull and killing it outright. 'So much for water snakes,' said Cadmus, looking down at the monster's blood and brains as they mixed with the waters of the spring. A voice sounded out loud and clear. 'Son of Agenor, why do you stare at the snake you have slain? You too shall be a snake and endure the stares of strangers.' Cadmus looked around but could see no one. The voice must have sounded inside him. He shook his head and returned to the camp, delighted alike by the cheers of his supporters and the admiring kisses of Harmonia, to whom he said nothing about the voice he had heard. |
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Far enough away to be able to do so without Cadmus hearing, one of his men was drawing in his breath through his teeth with the irritating relish of those who have bad news to impart. This man came from Boeotia and whispered to his companions with a wise shake of the head that Drakon Ismenios, the Ismenian Dragon, which Cadmus had just slain, was known to be sacred to Ares, the god of war. Indeed, he went on, some believed that the creature was actually a son of Ares! 'No good will come of this deed,' he said, tutting and clicking. 'You do not cross the god of battles with impunity. No, sir. Makes no difference who your grandfather is.' It is worth recognizing here that one of the most burdensome challenges faced by the heroes and mortals of that time concerned their relationships with the different gods. Picking your way around the jealousies and animosities of the Olympians was a delicate business. Show too much loyalty and service to one and you risked provoking the enmity of another. If Poseidon and Athena favoured you, as they did Cadmus and Harmonia, for example, then the chances were that Hera, or Artemis, or Ares, or even Zeus himself would do everything possible to hinder and hamper you. And heaven help anyone foolish enough to kill one of their favourites. All the sacrifices and votive offerings in the world couldn't mollify an affronted god, a vengeful god, a god who had lost face in front of the others. Cadmus, by slaying an Arean favourite, had certainly made an enemy of the most aggressive and remorseless of the gods. |
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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'. |
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'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. Forward came the five, their swords pointing to the ground. |
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As a result Amphion and Zethus, as well as Cadmus, are credited as co-founders of Thebes. The work completed, Cadmus and Harmonia turned to the matter of their marriage. Descended from Titans and gods, allied to and punished by Olympians, but very mortal and very human, the pair might nowadays be called an 'iconic power couple'. Today's press and social media, one suspects, would hardly be able to resist dubbing them 'Cadmonia'. Their status as the foremost lovers of the known world meant their wedding feast was an honour never before accorded a mortal union, attended by the highest in the land and the highest from heaven. The gifts were stupendous. Aphrodite lent Harmonia her girdle, a magical item of lingerie that had the power to provoke the most dizzying and rapturous desire. fn10 It is said that Harmonia was bed-shy and that her love for Cadmus had yet to be consummated. This girdle, loaned for the duration of her honeymoon by the goddess of love and beauty (who may well have been Harmonia's natural mother), was therefore a gift of great value. But no wedding gift outshone the necklace that Cadmus conferred upon his bride. It was the most beautiful piece of jewellery yet seen. Fashioned from the choicest chalcedony, jasper, emeralds, sapphires, jade, lapis, amethyst, silver and gold, it caused gasps of wonder amongst the guests when he clasped it about his beautiful wife's neck. fn11 The whisper went round that it too had been given by Aphrodite. The whisper added that it had been made by Hephaestus. |
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The whisper went further and suggested that Hephaestus had been urged to make it by his wife Aphrodite because she in turn had been urged to do so by her lover Ares, who if you remember nursed a grievance against Cadmus for slaying the Ismenian Dragon. For the cruel and shocking truth about the necklace was that it was cursed. Deeply and irrevocably cursed. Miserable misfortune and tragic calamity would rain down upon the heads of whosoever wore or owned it. This is all confusing and fascinating in equal measure. If Ares and Aphrodite were indeed Harmonia's true parents, why would they want to doom their own daughter? All to avenge a dead water snake? Besides, could sweet Harmony really be the child of Love and War? And, if so, why would the gentle issue of those two powerful and frightening forces be cursed by them with such unnatural cruelty? The pairing of Cadmus and Harmony seems, like that of Eros and Psyche, to suggest a marriage of two leading and contradictory aspects of ourselves. Perhaps the eastern tradition of conquest, writing and trade represented by Cadmus his name derives from the old Arabic and Hebrew root qdm, which means 'of the east' can be seen here fusing with love and sensuality to create a new Greece endowed with both. But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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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! |
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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. So trusting. But, my dear, how can you know that it was Zeus? Isn't that exactly what some wicked seducer might say just to win you?' 'Oh no, it was Zeus. I know it was Zeus.' 'Bear with an old woman and describe him to me, my child.' 'Well, he was tall. He had a beard. Strong. Kindly ...' 'Oh no, I'm sorry to say so, but that is hardly the description of a god.' 'But it was Zeus, it was! He turned himself into an eagle. |
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I saw it with my very own eyes.' 'That's a trick that can be taught. Fauns and demigods can do it. Even some mortal men.' 'It was Zeus. I felt it.' 'Hm ...' BeroE sounded doubtful. 'I have lived amongst the gods. My mother is Tethys and my father Oceanus. I raised and nursed the young gods after they were reborn from Kronos's stomach. It's true. I know their ways and their natures and I tell you this, my daughter. When a god manifests himself or herself as they truly are it is like a great explosion. A wondrous thing of force and fire. Unforgettable. Unmistakable.' 'And that's just what I felt!' 'What you felt was no more than the ecstasy of mortal love-making. Depend upon it. Tell me now, will this lover of yours come to you again?' 'Oh, yes indeed. He visits me faithfully every change of the moon.' 'If I were you,' said the old woman, 'I would make him promise to reveal himself to you as he really is. If he is Zeus you will know it. Otherwise I fear you have been made a fool of, and you are far too lovely and trusting and sweet-natured for that to be allowed. Now, leave me to contemplate the view. Shush, shush, go away.' And so Semele left the crone, growing more and more hotly indignant all the while. She could not help it, but this warty and wrinkled old creature had got under her skin. So typical of old age to try to take away any pleasure that youth might feel. Her own sisters, AutonoE, Ino and Agave, had disbelieved her when she told them proudly of how she loved Zeus and Zeus loved her. |
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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. |
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As she was the goddess of his favourite pursuit, hunting, Actaeon should have known better than to stare dumbstruck at her nakedness. She was also the fierce queen of celibacy, chastity and virginity. But so beautiful was she, so much more lovely than any being Actaeon had ever beheld, that he stood rooted to the spot, his mouth open and his eyes and not only his eyes bulging. It may have been a twig snapping beneath his foot, it may have been the sound of Actaeon's drool hitting the ground, but something made Artemis turn. She saw a young man standing there ogling, and her blood was fired. The thought of anyone spreading the word that they had seen her naked was so abhorrent to her that she called out. 'You, mortal man! Your staring is a profanity. I forbid you ever to speak. If you utter just one syllable your punishment will be terrible. Indicate to me that you understand.' The unhappy youth nodded. Artemis disappeared from view and he was left alone to consider his fate. Behind him a halloo started up as his fellow huntsmen announced that they were once more upon the scent. Instinctively Actaeon called out. The moment he did so Artemis's curse descended and he was changed into a stag. Actaeon raised his head, now heavy with antlers, and galloped through the woods until he came to a pool of water. He looked down into the pool, and at the sight of himself he gave what should have been a groan but which came out as a mighty bellow. The bellow was answered by a great baying and yipping. |
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But when they came to a giant oak that stood alone at the end of the grove they stopped again. 'Why, this is the tallest and broadest of them all!' said Erysichthon. 'That alone will provide the timber for the rafters and columns of my throne room and still leave enough over for a great bed for me.' The foreman pointed a trembling finger at the oak's branches, which were hung with garlands. The king was unimpressed. 'And?' 'My lord,' whispered the foreman, 'each wreath stands for a prayer that the goddess has answered.' 'If the prayers have already been answered she will have no need of flower arrangements. Cut it down.' But seeing that the foreman and his team were too afraid to proceed, the impetuous Erysichthon snatched up an axe and set about it himself. He was a strong man and, like most rulers, he loved to show off his will, skill and sinew. It was not long before the trunk creaked and the mighty oak began to sway. Did Erysichthon hear the plaintive cries of a hamadryad in the boughs? If he did he paid no heed but swung his axe again and again, until down crashed the tree branches, votive wreaths, garlands, hamadryad and all. As the oak died, so died its hamadryad. With her last breath she cursed Erysichthon for his crime. Demeter heard of Erysichthon's sacrilege and sent word to Limos. Limos was one of the vile creatures that had flown from Pandora's jar. She was a demon of famine who might be regarded as Demeter's inverse, the goddess's necessary opposite in the mortal world. |
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One the fecund and bountiful herald of the harvest, the other the mercilessly cruel harbinger of hunger and blight. Since the two existed in an irreconcilable matterantimatter relationship, they could never meet in person, so Demeter sent a nymph of the mountains as her envoy, to urge Limos to deliver the hamadryad's curse on Erysichthon, a task the malevolent demon was only too happy to undertake. Limos had, according to Ovid, rather let herself go. With sagging, withered breasts, an empty space for a stomach, exposed rotten bowels, sunken eyes, crusted lips, scaly skin, lank, scurfy hair and swollen pustular ankles, the figure and face of Famine presented a haunting and dreadful spectacle. She stole that night into Erysichthon's bedroom, took the sleeping king in her arms and breathed her foul breath into him. Her poison fumes seeped into his mouth, throat and lungs. Through his veins and into every cell of his body slid the terrible, insatiable worm of hunger. Erysichthon awoke from strange dreams feeling very, very peckish. He surprised his kitchen staff with an enormous breakfast order. He consumed every morsel, yet still his appetite was unsated. All day he found that the more he ate the more ravenous he became. As days and then weeks passed, the pangs of hunger gnawed deeper and deeper. No matter how much he consumed he could never be satisfied, nor gain so much as an ounce of weight. Food inside him acted like fuel on a fire, causing the hunger to burn ever more fiercely. |
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With this action Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad. The princes, lords and neighbouring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him. The King of the Gods, though, was in a surprisingly forgiving mood. The people of Thessaly had acted quickly to show their revulsion at Ixion's double crime of xenia abuse and kin-slaying. Zeus was minded to be merciful. He not only released Ixion from his torment but went so far as to invite him to a banquet on Olympus. Such an honour was rare for mortals. The glamour and grandeur of an Olympian feast were beyond anything Ixion would have seen before. He was especially bowled over by the queenly beauty of Hera. Whether it was the intoxicating effects of the great occasion or the wine, nobody could afterwards decide perhaps it was nothing more than congenital boorish idiocy but far from behaving with the modest gratitude you might expect of any mortal invited to the immortal dinner table, Ixion committed the catastrophic error of trying to seduce the Queen of Heaven. He blew Hera kisses, winked at her, tried to nibble her ear, whispered lewd remarks and made concerted grabs at her breasts. He not only insulted the most dignified and proper of the Olympians but he once more transgressed the laws of xenia. Failing in the duties as a guest was considered as heinous as failing in the duties of a host. |
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Like Ixion before him he made the mistake of abusing Zeus's hospitality, in his case by returning from a banquet on Olympus with stolen ambrosia and nectar in his pockets. He also committed the unpardonable solecism of telling tales about the private lives and mannerisms of the gods, amusing his courtiers and friends with insolent mimicry and gossip. But then he committed a blood murder, one even worse than Ixion's crime of casting his father-in-law into a pit of burning coals. Hearing that the Olympians were furious at his mockery and the theft of their nectar and ambrosia, he made a great show of repentance and begged that they accept his own hospitality in recompense for his misconduct. Now, all of this took place around the time Demeter was searching for her abducted daughter Persephone. In her grief she had allowed all growing things to wither and die. The world was barren and infertile and no one knew how long this would last. The prospect of a feast came as a welcome excitement. Knowing of the opulent and ostentatious lifestyle of King Tantalus, the gods were greatly looking forward to the legendary pleasures of his table. fn5 They were in for a shock. As the Pelasgian king Lycaon had done before him, Tantalus served up his own son to the gods. The young Pelops was killed, jointed, roasted, slathered in a rich sauce and set before them. They sensed instantly that something was wrong and declined to eat. But Demeter, whose mind was wholly on her lost daughter, distractedly picked at and ate the boy's left shoulder. |
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Tyro's group made their way across the fields. 'Tell me, sire,' said Melops, 'it has always surprised me that despite your bitter feud with King Salmoneus, you chose to marry his daughter. 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. |
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Taxing them, plundering their treasures, making free with their women, shamelessly transgressing every canon of the sacred laws of hospitality. And now he presumed to interfere in matters that were none of his business, to meddle in the affairs of his betters, to tell tales on the King of the Gods himself. It was time to take measures. An example must be set that would serve as a warning to others. Death and damnation to him. Despite Sisyphus's royal blood, his life had been too wicked, too shameless, Zeus ruled, to merit the dignity of his being conducted to the underworld by Hermes. Instead Thanatos, Death himself, was sent to shackle and escort him. Cheating Death Inasmuch as so gloomy a spirit was capable of so cheerful an emotion, Thanatos always enjoyed that moment when he manifested himself in front of those marked down for death. Appearing before them, and visible to no one else, his gaunt form cloaked in black, wisps of hellish gasses streaming from him, he would stretch out his arm to his victims with a cruelly deliberate slowness. The moment he touched their flesh with the tip of his bony finger there would come a piteous whimper from the soul within them. 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. |
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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. |
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'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. 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. |
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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. |
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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. Hera demanded to know when he had last been seen. 'Surely, Hermes,' said Zeus, 'it wasn't so long ago that you sent him to fetch the soul of that black-hearted villain Sisyphus?' 'Damn!' Hermes slapped his thigh in annoyance. 'Of course! Sisyphus. We sent Thanatos to chain him up and escort him to Hades. Wait here.' The wings at Hermes' heels fluttered, flickered and hummed and he was gone. |
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He returned in the blink of an eye. 'Sisyphus never reached the underworld. Thanatos was sent to Corinth to fetch him half a moon ago and neither has been seen since.' 'Corinth!' roared Ares. 'What are we waiting for?' The locked wardrobe in the bedchamber was soon found and wrenched open, revealing a humiliated Thanatos sitting tearfully in the corner under some cloaks. Hermes took him to the infernal regions where Hades waved his hand to release the enchanted manacles. 'We will speak about this later, Thanatos,' he said. 'For the moment a logjam of souls awaits you.' 'First let me fetch that villain Sisyphus, sire,' pleaded Thanatos. 'He won't be able to trick me twice.' Hermes arched an eyebrow, but Hades looked across to Persephone, sitting in her throne next to his. She nodded. Thanatos was her favourite amongst all the servants of the underworld. 'Just make sure you don't foul it up,' grunted Hades, dismissing him with a wave of the hand. Burial Rites We have established that Sisyphus was no fool. He did not imagine for a second that Thanatos would stay locked in his closet for eternity. Sooner or later Death would be released and set upon his trail once more. In the town villa in which he had made temporary lodging, Sisyphus addressed his wife. After his niece Tyro drowned his sons and left him he had married again. His new young queen was as kindly and obedient as Tyro had been wilful and contrary. 'My dear,' he said, drawing her to him, 'I feel that soon I shall die. |
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'Nothing could be further from my mind.' The manacles were attached and the pair glided down to the mouth of the underworld. Thanatos left Sisyphus at the near bank of the Styx and departed, anxious to make headway with the great backlog of souls that were awaiting collection. Charon the ferryman sculled his boat across and Sisyphus stepped aboard. As he poled the boat off the bank, Charon stretched out his palm. 'Nothing doing,' said Sisyphus, patting his pockets. Without a word Charon pushed him overboard into the blackness of the Styx. It was cold, abominably cold, but Sisyphus managed to get across. The waters burned and blistered his skin almost beyond endurance, but once he was on the other side he knew that he presented just such a piteous sight as he had intended. Shades flitted past him, averting their eyes. 'Which way to the throne room?' he asked of one. Following their directions he found himself in the presence of Persephone. 'Dread queen,' Sisyphus inclined his head. 'I beg an audience with Hades.' 'My husband is in Tartarus today. I speak for him. Who are you and how can you dare stand before me in this condition?' Sisyphus was naked, an ear was torn off and one of his eyes hung down from its socket. His spectral body was covered in bite marks, welts, bruises, gashes and open sores, testimony to its physical counterpart's rough treatment on the streets of Corinth above. His wife had obeyed his instructions. 'Madam,' he bowed low before Persephone, 'no one feels the impropriety of this as keenly as I. |
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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. |
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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. Sisyphus put his shoulder to the boulder and began to push it up the slope. Halfway there and he was confident that life eternal was assured. Three-quarters done and he was tired, but not blown. Four-fifths and ... damn, this was hard work. Five-sixths, pain. Six-sevenths, agony. Seven-eighths ... He was within an inch of the top now, within a fingernail's length, just one more supreme effort and ... Noooooooo! The stone slipped, bounced over Sisyphus and rolled down to the bottom. |
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'Well, not bad for a first effort,' Sisyphus thought to himself. 'If I take my time, if I conserve my strength, I can get there. I know I can. I'll discover a technique. Maybe I'll go up backwards, taking the weight on my back. I can do this ...' Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again. He will be there until the end of time. He still believes he can do it. Just one last supreme effort and he will be free. Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind's courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit. Hubris To the Greeks hubris was a special kind of pride. It often led mortals to defy the gods, bringing about inevitable punishment of one kind or another. It is a common, if not essential, flaw in the makeup of the heroes of Greek tragedy and of many other leading characters in Greek myth. Sometimes the failing is not ours but the gods', who are too jealous, petty and vain to accept that mortals can equal or surpass them. All Tears You may remember that Pelops was not the only child of Tantalus and Dione. They also had a daughter, Niobe. Despite the terrible fate that befell her father and the bleak adventures of her brother, she was a proud, confident woman. |
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'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. |
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Fn4 There was one problem with this splendid instrument: whenever Athena played it gorgeous as the music that emerged undoubtedly was it elicited from her fellow Olympians nothing but roars of laughter. There was no way for Athena to get a good sound from it without blowing so hard that her cheeks bulged. To see this goddess, the very personification of dignity, going all pink and swelling up like a bullfrog was more than her disrespectful family could take without howling out loud. Wise as Athena was, and free (for the most part) of affectation and conceit, she was not entirely without vanity and could not bear to be mocked. After three attempts to win the gods over with the mellifluous sounds of her new instrument, she cursed it and cast it down from Olympus. The aulos fell to earth in Asia Minor, in the kingdom of Phrygia, near the source of the Maeander river (whose winding course lends its name to all mazy, wandering streams), where it was picked up by a satyr called Marsyas. As a follower of Dionysus, Marsyas was gifted with curiosity as well as many more disreputable traits. He dusted the aulos off and blew into it. A small peep was the only result. He laughed and scratched at the tickling buzz in his lips. He puffed and blew hard again until a long, loud musical note was produced. This was fun. He went on his way, blowing and blowing until he could, after a surprisingly short time, play a real tune. Within a month or two his fame had spread around all of Asia Minor and Greece. |
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He became celebrated as 'Marsyas the Musical', whose skill on the aulos could make trees dance and stones sing. He revelled in the fame and adulation that his musicianship brought. Like all satyrs he required little more than wine, women and song to make him happy, and his mastery of the third ensured a ready supply of the other two. One evening, the fire crackling, Maenads at his feet gazing up adoringly at him, he called drunkenly to the heavens. 'Hey there, Apollo! You, god of the lyre! You think you're so musical, but I bet if there was a compishon ... a compention ... a condition ... What's the word?' 'Competition?' suggested a drowsy Maenad. 'One of them, yes. If there was ... what she said ... I'd win. Easy. Hands down. Anyone can strum a lyre. Boring. But my pipes. My pipes beat your strings any day. So there.' The Maenads laughed, Marsyas laughed too, belched and fell into a contented sleep. The Competition The next day Marsyas set off with his many followers to Lake Aulocrene. They had arranged to meet other satyrs there for a great feast at which Marsyas would play wild, corybantic dances of his own composition. He would pluck some reeds from the shores of the lake (whose very name testified to their abundance aulos means 'reed' and krene is 'fountain' or 'spring') and cut himself a new mouthpiece for his aulos. Piping and dancing he led his followers in a merry trail of music until he turned a corner to find his way blocked by a dazzling and disturbing spectacle. |
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Immediately Marsyas put the aulos to his mouth and repeated the phrases. But he gave each a little tweak and modulation a shower of grace notes here, a riffle of accidentals there. A gasp of admiration from his followers and even a nod from Calliope herself encouraged him to end with a flourish. Apollo replied at once with a variation on the phrases in double time. The complexity of his picking and strumming was marvellous to the ear, but Marsyas responded with even greater speed, the melody bubbling and singing from his pipes with a magical splendour that provoked yet more applause from the audience. Now Apollo did something extraordinary. He turned his lyre upside down and played the phrases backwards they still held up as a tune, but now they were imbued with a mystery and a strangeness that enthralled all who heard. When he finished Apollo nodded to Marsyas. Marsyas had an excellent ear and he started to play the inverted tunes just as Apollo had, but the god interrupted him with a sneer. 'No, no, satyr! You must turn your instrument upside down as I did mine.' 'But that's ... that's not fair!' Marsyas protested. 'How about this then?' Apollo played on his lyre and sang, 'Marsyas can blow down the infernal thing. But while he does it, can he sing?' Infuriated, Marsyas played for all he was worth. His face purple with the effort and his cheeks swollen so that it looked as if they must rupture, hundreds of notes exploded in a volley of quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes filling the air with a music that the world had never heard before. |
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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. |
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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. 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? |
| 385 |
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. |
| 386 |
She took a length of thick hemp from the floor. 'If I cannot weave I cannot live!' she cried and ran from the cottage before anyone could even think of stopping her. The spectators pressed around the window and the open door and watched in frozen horror as Arachne ran across the grass, swung the rope over the branch of an apple tree and hanged herself. They turned as one to look at Athena. A tear rolled down the goddess's cheek. 'Foolish, foolish girl,' she said. The crowd of onlookers followed her in appalled silence as she made her way out of the cottage and towards the tree. Arachne was swinging at the end of the rope, her dead eyes bulging from her head. 'A talent like yours can never die,' Athena said. 'You shall spin and weave all your days, spin and weave, spin and weave ...' As she spoke Arachne started to shrivel and shrink. The rope she dangled from stretched itself into a thin filament of glistening silk up which she now pulled herself, a girl no longer but a creature destined always busily to spin and weave. This is how the first spider the first arachnid came into being. It was not a punishment as some would have it, but a prize for winning a great competition, a reward for a great artist. The right to work and weave masterpieces in perpetuity. More Metamorphoses We have seen the gods transform men and women into animals out of pity, punishment or jealousy. But, just as they could be as proud and petty as humans, so the gods could be equally motivated by desire. |
| 387 |
'Why don't we hold a banquet tonight to bid her farewell and to honour the kindly hospitality you have offered her?' Philomela whimpered and nodded her head vigorously. 'She seems to think it would be a good idea too.' Tereus grunted his assent. At the feast that night a succulent stew was served which the king greedily consumed. He soaked up all its juices with hunks of bread, but found he still had room for more. Just out of arm's reach lay a dish covered by a silver dome. 'What's under that?' Philomela pushed the dish towards him with a smile. Tereus lifted the dome and gave a shout of horror when he saw his dead son's head grimacing up at him. The sisters screeched with laughter and exultation. When he realized what had been done to him, and understood why the stew was so deliciously tender, Tereus gave a great roar and snatched down a spear from the wall. The two women ran from the room and cried out to the gods for aid. As King Tereus chased them out of the palace and down the street he found himself suddenly rising into the air. He was being transformed into a hoopoe bird, and his yells of pain and fury began to sound like forlorn whoops. At the same time, Procne was changed into a swallow and Philomela into a nightingale. Although nightingales are famous for the melodious beauty of their song, it is only the male of the species that sings. The females, like tongueless Philomela, remain mute. fn6 Many species of swallow are named after Procne to this day and the hoopoe bird still wears a kingly crown. |
| 388 |
Unlike many born with the awful privilege of beauty, Ganymede was not sulky, petulant or spoiled. His manners were charming and unaffected. When he smiled the smile was kind and his amber eyes were lit with a friendly warmth. Those who knew him best said that his inner beauty matched or even exceeded his outer. Had he not been a prince it is likely that more fuss would have been made of his startling looks and his life would have been made impossible. 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. |
| 389 |
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'. |
| 390 |
Fn7 'Sir!' As her mouth opened to remonstrate, Cephalus pushed in the squashy fig. 'A sight to enflame the gods themselves,' he said. 'Be mine!' 'I'm married!' she tried to say through the seeds and pulp. 'Marriage? What's that? I'm a rich man and will give you whatever jewels or ornaments you ask for, if only you will yield. You are so beautiful. And I love you.' Procris paused. It may have been that she was trying to swallow the remains of the fig. It may have been that she was tempted by the offer of precious things. Perhaps she was touched by this sudden and intense declaration of love. The pause was long enough to cause Cephalus to rise in fury, cast off his disguise and reveal himself. 'So!' he thundered, 'This is what happens when you are alone! Dishonourable, deceitful woman!' Procris stared in disbelief. 'Cephalus? Is that you?' 'Yes! Yes, it is your poor husband! This is how you behave when I am away. Go! Leave my sight, faithless Procris. Away with you!' He lunged forward, shaking his fist, and the terrified Procris fled. Out of the house she ran, out into the woods, never stopping until she collapsed with exhaustion on the fringes of a grove sacred to Artemis. The goddess discovered Procris lying there the next morning and coaxed from her the story of what had happened. For a year and a day she stayed with the divine huntress and her retinue of fierce maidens, but at last she could bear it no longer. 'Artemis, you have looked after me, tutored me in the arts of the chase and shown me how men are always to be shunned. |
| 391 |
It was thought this vulpine terror was unleashed by Dionysus, still thirsting for revenge upon the city that had shunned and mocked his mother Semele. An increasingly desperate Creon, having heard tell of the almost supernatural gifts of Cephalus and his wonderdog, Lailaps, sent word to Athens begging to borrow it. Cephalus was happy enough to lend Creon the marvellous hound, which was soon set on the fox's trail. The ensuing debacle reveals a marvellous quality of the Greek mind: their fascination with paradox. What happens when an uncatchable fox is set upon by an inescapable hound? This is akin to the problem of the irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Round and round dashed the Cadmean Vixen, while hot on her tail flew Lailaps, from whom no prey could escape. They would still be caught in that logic loop now I suppose, if Zeus hadn't done something about it. The King of the Gods looked down at the sight and pondered the strange self-contradicting problem that presented such an affront to all proper reason and sense, and so vexingly subverted the notions embodied in that splendid Greek word nous. Zeus's authority was underwritten by a deep law that said no god had the power to undo the divine enchantments of another. This meant that the dog and the vixen were fated to be locked in this impossible condition for ever, making a public mockery of the order of things. Zeus solved the conundrum by turning the fox and the dog to stone. In this way they stayed frozen in time, their perfect possibilities unachieved for eternity, their destinies for ever unreconciled. |
| 392 |
At length, even this locked state seemed to him to challenge common sense, so he catasterized them removed them to the heavens where they became the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. Cephalus and Procris, I am sorry to say, did not prosper long. Deprived of Lailaps, but still armed with the enchanted javelin that could never fail to find its target, Cephalus loved nothing better than rambling about the hills and valleys that surrounded Athens, taking what prey he happened on. One fiercely hot afternoon, after three hours of chasing and spearing, tired and drenched in sweat, he lay down to doze. The heat of the day, even in the shade of his favourite great oak, made him uncomfortable. 'Come Zephyrus,' he called up lazily to the West Wind, 'let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, calm me, ease me, soothe me, play on me ...' By the greatest misfortune, Procris had come out to where Cephalus was, to surprise him with a dish of olives and some wine. Just as she drew near she heard her husband's last few words, 'let me feel you on my skin. Embrace me, ease me, soothe me, play on me ...' After all that show of possessive rage he was now betraying her? Procris could not believe her ears! The dish and the wineskin fell from her nerveless fingers and she gave an involuntary gasp. Cephalus sat up. What was that stumbling in the undergrowth? That snuffle! A pig, by heaven! He reached for his spear and threw it towards the bushes from which the noise had come. |
| 393 |
This was the real thing. This was it. Love at First Sight As Eos approached along the sand, Tithonus looked up and fell in love with her quite as instantly and entirely as she had fallen in love with him. They held hands straight away, without even having exchanged a word, and walked up and down on the shoreline as lovers do. 'What is your name?' 'Tithonus.' 'I am Eos, the dawn. Come away with me to the Palace of the Sun. Live with me and be my lover, my husband, my equal, my ruler, my subject, my all.' 'Eos, I will. I am yours for ever.' They laughed and made love with the waves crashing around them. Eos's rosy fingers found ways to drive Tithonus quite mad with joy. For her own part she knew that this time she could make it work. Her coral, pearl, agate, marble and jasper apartments within the Palace of the Sun became their home. Few couples had ever been happier. Their lives were complete. They shared everything. They read poetry to each other, went on long walks, listened to music, danced, rode horses, sat in companionable silence, laughed and made love. Every morning he watched with pride as she threw open the gates to let Helios and his chariot thunder through. The Boon A problem nagged at Eos, however. She knew that one day her beautiful beloved mortal youth must be taken from her, as Cleitus had been. The thought of his death caused her an inner despair that she could not quite conceal. 'What is it my love?' Tithonus asked one evening, surprising her fair countenance in a frown. |
| 394 |
'Eos, my love, my life. I know what it is that you aren't telling me. I can see it for myself. The looking glass tells me every morning.' 'Oh Tithonus!' she buried her head against his chest and sobbed her heart out. Time passed. Each morning Eos did her duty and opened the doors to a new day. The boys grew up and left home. The years succeeded each other with the remorseless inevitability that even gods cannot alter. What scant hair that remained on Tithonus's head was now white. He had become most dreadfully wrinkled, shrunken and weak with extreme old age, yet he could not die. His voice, once so mellow and sweet to the ear had become a harsh, dry scrape of a sound. His skin and frame were so shrivelled that he could barely walk. He followed the beautiful, ever young Eos around as faithfully and lovingly as ever. 'Please, pity me,' he would screech in his hoarse, piping tones. 'Kill me, crush me, let it all end, I beg.' But she could no longer understand him. All she heard were husky cheeps and chirps. Inside, however, she guessed well enough what he was trying to say. Eos may not have had the ability to grant immortality or eternal youth, but she was gifted with enough divine power to do something to end her beloved's misery. One evening, when she felt neither of them could take any more, she closed her eyes, concentrated hard and watched through hot tears as Tithonus's poor shrunken body made the very few changes necessary to turn him from a withered, old man into a grasshopper. |
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Fn2 In this new form Tithonus hopped from the cold marble floor onto the ledge of the balcony before leaping out into the night. She saw him in her sister Selene's cold moonlight, clinging to a long blade of grass that swayed in the night breeze. His back legs scraped out a sound that might have been a grateful chirrup of loving farewell. Her tears fell and somewhere, far away, Aphrodite laughed. fn3 The Bloom of Youth The story of Eos and Tithonus can be considered a kind of domestic tragedy. Greek myth offers us many more stories of love between gods and mortals that more often fit into the genre 'doomed romance', sometimes with an element of rom-com, farce or horror thrown in. In these love affairs the gods seem always to say it with flowers. The Greek for flower is anthos so what follows is, quite literally, a romantic anthology. Hyacinthus Hyacinthus, a beautiful Spartan prince, had the misfortune to be loved by two divinities, Zephyrus, the West Wind, and golden Apollo. Hyacinthus himself much preferred the beautiful Apollo and repeatedly turned down the wind's playful but increasingly fierce advances. One afternoon Apollo and Hyacinth were competing in athletic events and Zephyrus, in a fit of jealous rage, blew Apollo's discus off course, sending it skimming at speed straight towards Hyacinth. It struck him hard on the forehead, killing him stone dead. In a flood of grief Apollo refused Hermes the right to transport the youth's soul to Hades, instead mixing the mortal blood that gushed from his adored one's brow with his own divine and fragrant tears. |
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Aphrodite sensed all this and determined to keep Adonis safe from the harm her resentful family might do him. Because her precious mortal lover, like most Greek boys and men, showed a great passion for hunting, the protective Aphrodite told him that while he was free to chase prey of manageable size and limited ferocity hares, rabbits, doves and pigeons, for example he was absolutely forbidden from pursuing lions, bears, boars and the larger stags. But boys will be boys, and when the girls are away they cannot resist reverting to type and showing off. And so it came about that, one afternoon, Aphrodite's beloved found himself alone on the trail of a great boar (some say the boar was actually Ares himself in disguise). Adonis cornered the beast and was just pulling back his spear ready for the kill when it turned on him with a savage roar, tusks bristling. Adonis dropped his spear in fright as he leapt back, but he was a brave young man and managed to steady himself and plant his feet firmly enough to meet the boar's charge. As it rushed forward, Adonis spun his body round in a graceful turn like a dancer the brute missed him and Adonis seized it by the neck as it passed. But the boar was cunning. It dropped its head to the ground, letting the boy think he had subdued it. Kneeling down Adonis pushed with one hand against the animal's head, feeling with his spare hand for the knife he kept in his belt. The boar sensed its chance and pulled its head up with a snarl, lifting and twisting its great tusks. |
| 397 |
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. |
| 398 |
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. 'Well may you stutter and stammer. You love the sound of your voice, don't you? Hear this ...' Hera drew herself up and raised her arms high. Her eyes seemed to shine with a purple light. Echo quailed before the grandeur of the sight and wished the ground could swallow her up. 'I command your wicked, lying powers of speech to be still. From this moment you will be mute unless spoken to. You will have no power to reply except to repeat the last thing that has been said to you. None can undo this curse. Only I can. Understand?' '... |
| 399 |
Can understand!' cried Echo. 'That's what happens when you disobey the gods.' '... obey the gods!' 'I do not forgive. No mercy.' '... give no mercy!' With a snort and sneer of triumph Hera whisked herself away, leaving the unhappy nymph shivering in fear and frustration. No matter how much she tried to speak, no words would come. Her throat seemed to catch and tighten every time. One of her sisters came upon her wordlessly retching and spluttering. 'Hello, Echo what are you doing?' 'What are you doing?' said Echo. 'I asked first.' 'I asked first.' 'No I did.' 'No I did!' 'Well, if you're going to be like that, go to hell.' 'Go to hell!' Echo cried after her, wild with misery. One by one all her friends and all her family shunned her. The curse inflicted upon one who had lived her life for gleeful gossip, who valued nothing above cheerful chatter and who had derived all her pleasure from prattling repartee was so terrible that Echo now wished for nothing more than to be left alone to welter in silent agony. Echo and Narcissus Into the painful solitude of Echo's private hell there crashed one day all the laughter, shouting and boisterous clamour of a hunt. The youths of Thespiae had chased a boar all the way into the wood, and one of the huntsmen had become separated. He was a youth of such transcendent beauty that Echo, whom the tender passion had passed over all her life, was instantly lovestruck. The youth was Narcissus, now older and more dazzling than ever. He had never fallen victim to the tender passion either. |
| 400 |
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. |
| 401 |
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. I hate the sight of you.' 'The sight of you!' 'Stop it, will you? Just don't!' cried Narcissus. 'Go away!' 'Don't go away!' 'You're driving me crazy.' 'Driving me crazy!' 'Go away before I do something so desperate ...' 'So desperate!' 'Don't tempt me, now.' 'Tempt me now!' Narcissus picked up his hunting sling and loaded it with a stone. 'Go. Just go. I'll hurt you if you don't. Understand?' 'You don't understand.' The first stone missed her, but Echo turned and fled before Narcissus could reload and try again. |
| 402 |
As she ran he called out after her. 'And never come back!' 'Never come back,' she cried. She ran from him and kept running until she fell weeping to the ground, her heart bursting with grief and shame. The Boy in the Water Narcissus watched her go. He shook his head angrily. Would he never be free of these silly wailing people and their whining, clutching madness? Love and beauty! Words, just words. Hot and thirsty from all the stress and drama he knelt down to drink from the stream. He caught his breath in astonishment when in its waters, he saw the loveliest face he had ever laid eyes upon, the sweet and surprised face of a most beautiful young man. He had golden hair and soft red lips. Narcissus recognized with a thrill that the youth's beguiling and loving eyes had the hungry, needy look he had always found so repellent in others. But the very same expression on the gorgeous face of this mysterious stranger made Narcissus's chest swell and heart thump with joy. It must mean that the glorious creature in the river felt the same way as he did! Narcissus leaned down to kiss the lovely lips and the lovely lips came up to kiss his, but just as Narcissus lowered his face, the stranger's features broke into a thousand dancing, rippling pieces until he could see them no longer and Narcissus found he was kissing nothing but cold water. 'Stay still, lovely one,' he breathed, and the boy seemed to whisper the same to him. Narcissus raised a hand. The boy raised his hand in reply. Narcissus wanted to stroke the boy's lovely cheek and the boy wanted to do the same. |
| 403 |
But the face fractured and dissolved the moment Narcissus got close. Again and again each one tried. Meanwhile, in the bushes behind them, Echo fired and strengthened by her great love had returned to try her luck again. Her heart skipped a beat when she heard him say: 'I love you!' 'I love you!' she called back. 'Stay with me!' 'Stay with me!' 'Never leave me!' 'Never leave me!' But when she came closer Narcissus turned with a snarl and hissed at her 'Go away! Leave us alone. Never come back! Never, never, never!' 'Never, never, never!' wailed Echo. With a savage roar Narcissus picked up a stone and hurled it at her. Echo ran and tripped. Narcissus then grabbed his bow and would surely have shot her dead had she not scrambled to her feet and disappeared into the wood. Narcissus looked anxiously back to the stream, frightened that perhaps the marvellous boy had gone. But there he was a worried and flushed look on his face but as beautiful and loving as ever and with a wonderful gleam in his deep blue eyes. Narcissus lay down again and brought his face closer to the water ... The Gods Take Pity Echo ran and ran up the hillside, sobbing with grief and desolation. She hid in a cave high above the river by whose banks the lovely Narcissus lay. Inside her head Echo framed the words of a prayer to her favourite goddess, Aphrodite. In mute despair she begged to be relieved of the pain of love and the intolerable burden of her cursed existence. Aphrodite answered the nymph's prayers as best she could. |
| 404 |
The feelings of others are railroaded and stampeded, while such considerations as honesty, truthfulness or integrity are blithely disregarded. Bragging, boasting and delusional exaggeration are common signs. Criticism or belittlement is intolerable and can provoke aggressive and explosively strange behaviours. fn5 Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another's eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism? Lovers Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Catherine, Sue Ellen and J. R. the doomed lovers we know all owe a great debt to the tragic Greek tradition that preceded them. Pyramus and Thisbe When we hear the name 'Babylon' we think of a Middle Eastern civilization famed for ribaldry and excess. Its Hanging Gardens were one of the original Seven Wonders of the World and for a time Babylon was the largest city in the world. fn1 The Babylonian Empire took in much of Asia Minor, indeed some believe that this story really took place in Cilicia, the kingdom that Cilix founded before he joined Cadmus and the other sons of Agenor in their quest for Europa. Ovid, however, in his version of the tale, is happy to locate the action plum in the centre of Babylon and so that is where I have placed it too. |
| 405 |
A distinctly feminine beauty at that. Picking up a chisel, Pygmalion ran his artist's eye over the work and knew that with some merciless and well-aimed blows he could easily enough get back on course and not waste the valuable block of marble for which he had paid a month's income. Crack, crack, crack! This was more like it. Tap, tap, tap! Must have been some weird subconscious urge. Chip, chip, chip! Or indigestion perhaps. Now, let's step back again and see ... No!!! Far from rescuing the work and bringing the general's masculine and martial glare back to the face of his sculpture he had somehow managed only to amplify its soft femininity, grace, sensuality and goddammit sexiness. 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. |
| 406 |
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. |
| 407 |
At last he threw himself at his Galatea, encircled her with his arms and with his legs, nuzzled himself against her, kissing and pawing and rubbing until everything inside him exploded. The madness that consumed his soul did not abate after that first frenzy. He now devoted himself to Galatea with all the ardour and attentive tenderness of a true lover. He called her affectionate names. He went out to the market and bought her gowns, garlands and trinkets. He adorned her wrists with bangles and bracelets and her throat with necklaces and pendants of jasper and pearl. He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet. His love was passionate and generous but except to his fevered imagination in its most optimistic moods wholly unreciprocated. This was a one-way wooing and in the depths of his bursting heart he knew it. The day came for the festival of Aphrodite. Pygmalion kissed the cold but lovely Galatea goodbye and left the house. All of Cyprus and thousands of visitors from the mainland had gathered in Amanthus for this annual holiday. The great square in front of the temple was crowded with pilgrims who came to pray to the goddess of love and beauty for success in matters of the heart. Garlanded heifers were sacrificed, the air was thick with frankincense and every column of the temple had been entwined with flowers. The prayers came thick, fast and loud. |
| 408 |
'Send me a wife.' 'Send me a husband.' 'Improve my performance.' 'Slow me down.' 'Take these feelings away from me.' 'Make Menander fall for me.' 'Stop Xanthippe from cheating on me.' Beseeching cries and wails filled the air. Pygmalion shouldered blindly through the press of pedlars and petitioners. He reached the temple steps, bribed the guards, coaxed the priestesses and at last was led into the inner sanctum where only the richest and most influential citizens were allowed to pray directly in front of a great statue of Aphrodite. He fell to his knees before it. 'Great goddess of love,' he whispered. 'It is said that you grant wishes to ardent lovers on this your festal day. Grant the wish of a poor artist who begs that you might ...' At the altar rail important men and women were babbling their imprecations to Aphrodite, and although the chances of Pygmalion being overheard were slim, some kind of modesty or shame stopped him from uttering his real desire. '... poor artist who begs that you might provide him with a real living girl just like the one he fashioned from marble. Grant this, dread goddess, and you will have won a devoted slave whose life and art will be devoted always to the service and praise of love.' An amused Aphrodite saw through the prayer. She knew perfectly well what Pygmalion really wanted. The candles on the altar in front of him flared up and leapt in the air nine times. Pygmalion flew home. To his dying day he could not tell you the way he went or how long he took. |
| 409 |
The delirious rhythms of this folk dancefn4 maddened the excitable Tarentines, but towards the end he tamed them with a medley of his softest, most romantic airs. 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. |
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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. |
| 411 |
Choking is a terrible panicky nightmare, but true drowning is a serene and painless release. So he had been told. Despite this comforting knowledge, Arion kept his mouth firmly clamped, and with bulging cheeks he kicked at the water, hugging his kithara. And then, just as his lungs were ready to burst, something amazing happened. He felt himself being pushed upwards. Pushed hard and fast. He was surging through the water. He had broken the surface! He could breathe! What was going on? It must be a dream. The rush of the water, the bubbles and spray, the tilting, rocking horizon, the booming in his ears, the soaking, the roar and the dazzle it all prevented him from understanding what was happening until he dared look down and through stinging eyes saw that ... that ... he was on the back of a dolphin! A dolphin! He was riding it over the waves! But its skin was slippery and he began to slide off. The dolphin barrelled and twisted and Arion was somehow righted again. The animal had deliberately manoeuvred to keep him safe! Would it mind if he stretched out one hand and held onto the dorsal fin, much as a horseman might grip the horn of a saddle? The dolphin did not mind, indeed it bucked a little, as if in approval, and increased its speed through the water. Arion slowly reached for the strap of his kithara and swung the instrument behind him so that he could enjoy the ride with two hands on the fin. The brig was out of sight now. The sun shone down, dolphin and man ploughed furrows through the sea, sending up plumes of iridescent spray. |
| 412 |
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. |
| 413 |
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. I wish it had been more, sire, really I do.' 'I see ...' Periander frowned. |
| 414 |
'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. |
| 415 |
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. He rode it on the rolling waves. |
| 416 |
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. |
| 417 |
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. 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. |
| 418 |
'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. |
| 419 |
'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. 'Gentlemen I am so very sorry,' she said, and there were tears in her eyes. 'I'm afraid your meal will be crude and disagreeable.' 'Tush, lady,' said Arguros, pouring more wine for everyone. |
| 420 |
'I've never partaken of a finer feast.' 'Sir!' 'It's true. Tell them, father.' Astrapos gave a grim smile. 'We have been turned away from every house in Eumeneia. Some of the townspeople swore at us. Some spat at us. Some threw stones at us. Some set dogs on us. Yours was the last house we tried and you have shown us nothing but kindness and a spirit of xenia that I was beginning to fear was vanished from the world.' 'Sir,' said Baucis, feeling for Philemon's hand under the table and squeezing it. 'We can only apologize for the behaviour of our neighbours. Life is hard and they have not always been brought up to venerate the laws of hospitality as they should.' 'There is no need to make excuses for them. I am angry,' said Astrapos, and as he spoke a rumble of thunder could be heard. Baucis looked across into the eyes of Astrapos and saw something that frightened her. Arguros laughed. 'Don't be alarmed,' he said. 'My father is not angry with you. He is pleased with you.' 'Leave the cottage and climb the hill,' said Astrapos, rising. 'Do not look back. Whatever happens do not look back. You have earned your reward and your neighbours have earned their punishment.' Philemon and Baucis stood, holding hands. They knew now that their visitors were something more than ordinary travellers. 'There is no need to bow,' said Arguros. His father pointed to the door. 'To the top of the hill.' 'Remember,' Arguros called after them, 'no looking back.' Hand in hand Philemon and Baucis walked up the hill. |
| 421 |
'You know who that young man was?' said Philemon. 'Hermes,' said Baucis. 'When he opened the door to let us go, I saw the snakes twined around his staff. They were alive!' 'Then the man he called his father was ... must have been ...' 'Zeus!' 'Oh my goodness!' Philemon paused on the hillside to catch his breath. 'It's getting so dark, my love. The sound of the thunder is getting closer. I wonder if ...' 'No darling, we mustn't look back. We mustn't.' Disgusted by the hostility and shameless violations of the laws of hospitality shown to him by the townspeople of Eumeneia, Zeus had decided to do for this community what he had done back in the time of Deucalion and the Great Flood. The clouds gathered into a dense mass at his command, lightning flashed, thunder boomed and the rain began to fall. By the time the elderly couple struggled to the top of the hill, torrents of water were gushing past them. 'We can't just stand here in the rain with our backs to the town,' said Baucis. 'I'll look if you will.' 'I love you Philemon, my husband.' 'I love you Baucis, my wife.' They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden. For hundreds of years the two trees stood side by side, symbols of eternal love and humble kindness, their intertwining branches hung with the tokens left by admiring pilgrims. fn1 Phrygia and the Gordian Knot The Greeks loved to mythologize the founders of towns and cities. |
| 422 |
I drank most of his wine, ate most of his food, pissed in his water jars and sicked up over his silk cushions. Never complained. Thoroughly good soul.' Silenus slapped Midas on the back. Midas smiled as best he could. He hadn't known about the water jars and the silk cushions. Dionysus, like many deep drinkers, could easily become very emotional and affectionate. He pawed gratefully at Midas. 'You see?' he declared to the world in general. 'You see? Just when you lose faith in humanity, they show their worth like this. This is what my father means by xenia. Makes my heart burst. Name it.' 'Excuse me?' Midas was keen to leave. Ten days and nights of Silenus had been quite enough. He yearned now to be alone with his flowers. A drunken Dionysus with a full entourage of Maenads and satyrs might just be too much even for his patience. 'Name your reward. Anything. Whatever you hic! desire I will providely divine. Which is to say,' Dionysus amended with dignity, 'I will divinely provide. So there,' he added belligerently, turning suddenly round to face off no one in particular. 'You mean, my lord, that I can ask anything of you?' Which of us has not entertained joyous fantasies of genies and fairies granting us wishes? I am sorry to say that, at this offer from Dionysus, Midas had rather a rush of blood to the head. I have mentioned that Phrygia was one of the poorer kingdoms, and while Midas was not considered by his friends to be rapacious or avaricious, he did long, like any ruler, for more money to spend on his armies, his palace, his subjects and his municipal amenities. |
| 423 |
The expenses of a royal household mount up and Midas had always been too benevolent a king to burden his people with heavy taxes. And so he found a most extraordinary wish making its way from his fevered brain to his mouth. 'Then I ask this,' he said; 'that everything I touch be turned to gold.' Dionysus smiled a rather diabolical smile. 'Really? That's what you want?' 'That is what I want.' 'Go home,' said the god. 'Bathe yourself in wine and go to bed. When you arise in the morning, your wish will be granted.' Goldfinger It is probable that Midas did not believe that anything would come of this exchange. The gods were notorious for dodging, twisting and sliding out of their obligations. Nevertheless, just in case after all, what harm could it do? I mean, one never knows that night, Midas poured a few hogsheads from his diminishing store of wine into the royal bath. The fumes from it ensured that when he went to bed he enjoyed a deep and untroubled sleep. Midas awoke to a sparkling morning that cast all ideas of wild wishes and drunken gods from his mind. With thoughts only for his flowers, he sprang from bed and hurried to his beloved garden. Never had the roses looked more beautiful. 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. |
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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! |
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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. 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. |
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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. '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. |
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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. |
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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. The barber loved his wife and family and was in any case loyal enough to his monarch not to have any wish to humiliate or embarrass him. But that bulging, ballooning secret had to be released somehow before he burst. No unmilked cow with swollen udders, no mother of overdue twins, no gut-stuffed gastronome straining on the privy, could ever feel such a desperate need for relief from their agonies than this poor barber. |
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Finally he hit upon a scheme which he felt sure would rid him of his burden without endangering his family. Awaking from a tortured night in which he had dreamed that he revealed the secret to the gaping populace of Gordium from a balcony in the main square, he went out at first light deep into the remote countryside. In a lonely place by a stream he dug a deep trench in the ground. Looking about him in all directions to make sure that he was alone and that there was no possibility of being overheard, he knelt down, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted these words into the hole: 'Midas has ass's ears!' Scrabbling frantically to close up the hole before the words could escape, he failed to notice one tiny seed floating down and settling at the bottom ... When the backfilling was done, the barber stamped fiercely up and down on the earth to seal in the dreadful secret. He skipped all the way back to Gordium, headed straight for his favourite tavern and ordered a flagon of the house's best wine. He could drink now without fear that the wine might loosen his tongue. It was as if he were Atlas and the sky had finally been lifted from his shoulders. Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, back in the remote field by the stream that tiny seed, warmed by the soft breath of Gaia below, began to germinate. Soon, a delicate little reed was shouldering its way through the topsoil and pushing its delicate head into the air. As the breeze caught the reed it softly whispered 'Midas has ass's ears.' The faint words reached the rushes and sedges that fringed the riverbank. |
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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. 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. |
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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. It is all, I am well aware, confusing and probably irritating to anyone but a scholar or a Greek citizen. There is the map to consult, but otherwise I really hope you don't bust a boiler trying to work it all out. Goodness knows I bust mine often enough and I wouldn't wish the same confusion and worry on you. Sources Ancient To retell Greek mythical stories is to tread in the footsteps of giants. In the Foreword to this book I shared Edith Hamilton's observation that Greek myth is 'the creation of great poets'. While its deepest origins lie in prehistory and unrecorded folklore, in preparing material for this book I have been able, as any one of us can, to consult the very first poets of the Western tradition, who just happened to be Greek and whose subject matter just happened to be myth. |
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The twentieth century was dominated by the matchless Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942), which is still happily in print, and by Bernard Evslin's evergreen Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths (1967). British equivalents include Charles Lamb's The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) and L. S. Hyde's Favourite Greek Myths (1905), this last being a great favourite of mine when I was a boy. Estimable as all of these were, and still are, they tend shyly to skirt round or bowdlerize the erotic and violent episodes that form such an essential part of the Greek mythic world. The poet and novelist Robert Graves had no such compunctions, but his two eccentrically structured and narrated volumes of The Greek Myths (1955), while meticulous, scholarly and inspiring, chart a more literary and mythographical course often with a view to highlighting his obsession with cults of a 'white goddess'. The approaches of James Frazer and those who came after, including Joseph Campbell, valuable as they are, also have other, less specifically Greek and more academic, psychological, comparative and anthropological, fish to fry. Online these days there are plenty of sites devoted to helping the young 'find' Greek myth though you may feel like a lie-down after reading those that describe Cadmus as 'a homie', Hermes as 'cool' and Hades as 'a dude with issues'. The one website I would most heartily recommend is theoi. com a simply magnificent resource entirely dedicated to Greek myth. |
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Kleberg and Boxerbaum were confused by only one significant difference in the two descriptions. The first man was described as having a full, neatly trimmed mustache. The second was described as having a three-day growth of beard but no mustache. Boxerbaum smiled. "I guess between the first time and the second he shaved it off." At the Central Police Station in downtown Columbus, Detective Nikki Miller, assigned to the Sexual Assault Squad, checked in for the second shift at three o'clock. Wednesday, October 26. She had just returned from a two-week vacation in Las Vegas, feeling and looking refreshed, her tan complementing her brown eyes and feathercut sandy hair. Detective Gram-lich of the first shift told her he was transporting a young rape victim to University Hospital. Since it would be Millers case, Gramlich gave her the few details he had. Polly Newton, a twenty-one-year-old student at Ohio State, had been abducted behind her apartment near the university campus at about eight o'clock that morning. After she parked her boyfriend's blue Corvette, she was forced back inside and told to drive out to an isolated area in the countryside, where she was raped. Her assailant then made her drive back to Columbus to cash two checks, before having her drive him back to the campus area. Then he suggested that she cash another check, stop payment, and keep the money herself. Because Nikki Miller had been on vacation, she hadn't read of the university Campus Rapist or seen the composites. |
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D. number, checked it against the record and wrote down, "William S. Milligan." It was an old mug shot. She then slipped the identified photograph three quarters of the way back in a tray Polly Newton had not yet looked through. She, Boxerbaum, a detective named Brush and Officer Bessell went into the room to join Polly. Nikki Miller felt Polly must have known they were waiting for her to pick out one of the photographs in that tray. Polly fingered the cards, flipping them carefully, and when she reached the halfway point, Miller found herself growing tense. If Polly picked out the same mug shot, they had the Campus Rapist. Polly stopped at Milligans picture, then went past it. Miller felt the tension in her own shoulders and arms. Then Polly turned the photos back and looked again at the young man with the muttonchop whiskers. "Boy, that sure looks like him," she said, "but I can't say for sure." Boxerbaum was hesitant about filing for a warrant for Milligan's arrest. Even though Donna West had made a positive identification, it bothered him that the picture was three years old. He wanted to wait for the fingerprint check. Detective Brush took Milligans I. D. down to the first-floor Bureau of Criminal Identification to match his fingerprints against the ones lifted from Polly's car. Nikki Miller was annoyed at the delay. She felt they had a good start on the man, and she wanted to go after him. But since her victim, Polly Newton, hadn't made a positive identification, she had no alternative but to wait. |
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Under red chair — Smith & Wesson 9mm with clip and six live rounds. under seat of brown chair — clip with fifteen live rounds and a plastic bag containing fifteen live rounds. Back at the Central Police Station, Nikki Miller took the evidence to the clerk of courts, had it notarized and turned it over to the property room. "There's enough here to go to trial with," she said. Milligan cringed in the corner of the tiny cell, shaking violently. Suddenly, after a slight choking sound, he fainted. A minute later, he opened his eyes and stared around in astonishment at the walls, the toilet, the bunk. "Oh God, no!" he shouted. "Not again!" He sat on the floor, staring dully into space. Then he saw cockroaches in the corner and his expression blanked and changed. Crossing his legs, he hunched up close, his chin cupped in his hands, and smiled childishly as he studied them running in circles. ( 2 ) Milligan was awake a few hours later when they came to transfer him. He was handcuffed to a huge black man in a line of prisoners, which was led out of the lobby, down the stairs and out the back door to the parking area. They marched to the van bound for the Franklin County Jail. The van drove to the center of the Columbus shopping area, to a futuristic fortress in the heart of the city. Its concrete walls jutted up two stories at an inward slope, massive and window-less. Above the second story, it loomed upward as a modem office building. The patio of the Franklin County Jail was presided over by a statue of Benjamin Franklin. |
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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. |
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"Let me put it this vay. In different circumstances, spot is ruled by me or by Arthur, depending on situation. In prison I control spot — decide who goes on, who stays off — because is dangerous place. As protector, I have full power and command. In situations vere is no danger and vere intelligence and logic are more important, then Arthur dominates spot." "Who controls the spot now?" Gary asked, aware that he had lost all professional detachment and had become totally curious, totally involved in this incredible phenomenon. 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. |
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"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. |
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Harding was away at a psychiatric meeting in Chicago. Judy Stevenson and Dorothy Turner, who had followed the police car to Harding Hospital, knew what a terrible blow it would be to Danny to be taken back to jail. Dr. Shoemaker, a staff physician, agreed to take personal charge of the patient until Dr. Harding returned, and the sheriff's deputy signed his prisoner over. Judy and Dorothy walked with Danny to Wakefield Cottage, a locked psychiatric unit with facilities for fourteen difficult patients requiring constant observation and personal attention. A bed was found and prepared, and Danny was assigned to one of two "special care" rooms whose heavy oak doors had peepholes for around-the-clock observation. A psychiatric aide (called "psych-tech" at Harding Hospital) brought him a lunch tray, and both women stayed with him while he ate. After lunch, Dr. Shoemaker and three nurses joined them. Turner — feeling it was important for the staff to see the multiple personality syndrome for themselves — suggested to Danny that Arthur come out and meet some of the people who would be working with him. Nurse . Adrienne McCann, the unit coordinator, had been briefed as part of the therapy team, but the other two nurses were taken completely by surprise. 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. |
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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. |
| 441 |
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. He had discussed with them the complexities of multiple personality. When some of the staff admitted openly that they didn't believe in the diagnosis, he listened to them patiently, spoke of his own skepticism and asked them to assist him in fulfilling the charge of the court. |
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They would ah have to keep open minds and work together to get an insight into William Stanley Milligan. Dr. Perry Ayres gave Milligan a physical examination the day after Dr. Harding returned. Ayres wrote in the medical history that frequently Milligans lips moved and his eyes were diverted to the right, usually before responding to a question. Ayres noted that when he asked the patient why he did that, he responded that he was talking to some of the others, especially Arthur, to get the answers to the questions. "But you're supposed to call us Billy," Milligan said, "so no one will think we're crazy. I'm Danny. It was Allen that filled out that form. But I'm not supposed to talk about the others." Dr. Ayres quoted this in his report and added: We agreed early that we would try to talk only about Billy, with the understanding that Danny would give us the health information related to all of them. It was his inability to stick to this agreement that led to the disclosure of the other names. The only ailment he recalls is the hernia repair when Billy was 9 — "Davids always been 9," and it was David who had the hernia repair. Allen has tunnel vision, but everyone" else has normal vision ... Note: Before going into the examining room, I discussed with him the nature of the examination contemplated, describing it in detail. I emphasized that it would be important to check his hernia repair and his prostate by rectal examination, the latter because of the urinary abnormality pyuria. |
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Rosalie was struggling hard to keep an open mind. When Milligan seated himself at the end of the table; apart from the others, Rosalie Drake told him that the mini-group patients had decided the day before to make collages that would say something about themselves to someone they loved. "I don't have anyone I love to make one for," he said. "Then do it for us," Rosalie said. "Everyone is doing it." She held up a sheet of construction paper she was working on. "Nick and I are doing them too." Rosalie watched from a distance as Milligan took a sheet of eight-by-eleven construction paper and started cutting photographs from magazines. She had heard of Milligans artistic ability, and now, looking at the shy, quiet patient, she was curious to see what he would do. He worked silently, calmly. When he was done, she walked over and looked at it. His collage startled her. It showed a frightened, tearful child looking out of the center of the page, and beneath him the name morrison. Looming over him was an angry man and, in red, the word danger. In the lower right comer was a skull. She was touched by its simplicity of statement, the depth of emotion. She hadn't asked for anything like this, and it wasn't what she'd expected. It revealed, she felt, a painful history. She shivered when she looked at it, and right then and there she knew she was hooked. No matter what doubts the others in the hospital might have about him, this, she knew, was not the product of an unfeeling sociopath. Nick Cicco agreed. |
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Dr. George (so called by staff and patients to distinguish him from his father, Dr. George Harding, Sr.) began to read the relevant psychiatric journals and discovered that the disease known as multiple personality seemed to be on the increase. The doctor made calls to various psychiatrists, and all of them said much the same thing: "We'll share with you the little we know, but this is an area we don't understand. You'll have to blaze your own trail." It was going to take much more time and effort than Dr. George had first imagined, and he wondered if he had done the right thing accepting this patient in the middle of a fundraising campaign and expansion program for the hospital. He reassured himself that it was important to Billy Milligan, and important to the profession, to help psychiatry probe the limits of knowledge about the human mind. Before he could provide the court with an evaluation, he would have to learn Billy Milligans history. Considering the massive amnesia, that posed a serious problem. On Thursday, March 23, Gary Schweickart and Judy Stevenson visited their client for an hour, going over his vague memory of events, comparing his story with those of the three victims, planning alternative legal strategies, depending on Dr. Hardings report to the court. Both attorneys found Milligan more at ease, though he complained about being locked up in special care and having to wear "special precaution" clothes. "Dr. George says I can be treated just like the other patients here, but nobody here trusts me. |
| 445 |
The other patients are allowed to go off the grounds in the van on excursions, but not me. I have to stay here. And I just get furious when they insist on calling me Billy." They tried to calm him, to explain that Dr. George had gone out on a limb for him, and that he had to be careful not to try the doctors patience. Judy sensed he was Allen, but she didn't ask, always afraid he might be insulted that she didn't know him. Gary said, "I think you should try to cooperate with the staff here. It's your only chance to stay out of jail." As they left, both agreed that they were relieved he was safe and that the day-to-day responsibility and worry were off their backs for a while. Later that day the first therapy session was a strained fifty-minute hour for Dr. Harding. Milligan sat on the chair facing the window in the interview room at Wakefield, but he would not, at first, make eye contact. He seemed to remember very little of his past, although he talked freely of the abuse by his adoptive father. Dr. Harding knew he was being overcautious in his approach. Dr. Wilbur had told him to find out as soon as possible how many personalities there were, to establish their identities. The alternates needed to be encouraged to tell why they existed and to be permitted to relive the specific situations that had caused their creation. Then all of the alternates had to be encouraged to know one another, to communicate and to help one another with their different problems, sharing things instead of being separated. |
| 446 |
He had the most schizoid characteristics and the least concern for others. Ragen showed the most potential for violent acting out. Arthur she found strongly intellectual, and she felt he relied on this to maintain his position of direction over the others. He also appeared to her to maintain a compensatory feeling of superiority to the world at large, but had feelings of uneasiness and was threatened by emotionally stimulating situations. Emotionally, Allen appeared to be an almost detached personality. She found some things in common: evidence of a feminine identity and of a strong superego, which anger threatened to override. She did not find evidence of psychotic process, nor of schizophrenic thought disorder. When Rosalie Drake and Nick Cicco announced that the mini-group would be doing trust exercises on April 19, Arthur allowed Danny to take the spot. The staff had prepared the rec room with tables, chairs, couches and boards, turning it into an obstacle course. Knowing Milligans fear of men, Nick had suggested that Rosalie blindfold and lead him through. "You've got to work with me, Billy," she said. "It's the only way to build enough confidence in other people so you can live in the real world." He finally allowed her to blindfold him. "Now hold my hand," she said, leading him into the room. "I'm going to take you over and around the obstacle course, and I'll keep you from being hurt." As she led him, she could see and feel his uncontrolled terror at not knowing where he was moving or what he might crash into. |
| 447 |
When she told him he was interfering with the staff and the patients, he became upset. "I'm not responsible for things that are done by my other people," he said. "We can't relate to your other people," Yaeger said, "only to Billy." He shouted, "Dr. Harding isn't treating me the way Dr. Wilbur told him to. This treatment is no good." He demanded to read his chart, and when Yaeger refused, he said he knew he could make the hospital allow him access to his records. He was certain, he said, that the staff was not recording his changes of behavior and that he wouldn't be able to account for his lost time. That evening, after a visit by Dr. George, Tommy announced to the staff that he was firing his doctor. Later Allen came out of his room and said he was reinstating him. After she was given permission to visit, Milligans mother, Dorothy Moore, came almost every week, often with her daughter, Kathy. Her sons reactions were unpredictable. Sometimes after her visit he would be happy and outgoing. Other times he would be depressed. Joan Winslow, the psychiatric social worker, reported in the team meeting that she had interviewed Dorothy after each of her visits. Winslow found her a warm and giving person, but speculated that her shy and dependent nature had prevented her from interfering with the reported abuses. Dorothy had told her she always felt there were two Billys — one a kind and loving boy, the other someone who didn't care if he hurt peoples feelings. It was Nick Cicco who noted on the chart that after a visit from Mrs. |
| 448 |
Moore on April 18, Milligan seemed very upset and isolated himself in his room with a pillow over his head. By the end of April, with six of the twelve weeks gone, Dr. George felt things were going too slowly. He needed some way to establish lines of communication between the personalities and the original personality, the core Billy. But first he had to break through and reach Billy, whom he had not seen since that Sunday when Dr. Wilbur had convinced Ragen to let him come out. It occurred to Dr. George that it might be effective to confront the core personality and the alter egos with videotaped records of their speech and behavior. Dr. George told Allen about his idea and how important it was for the personalities to communicate with one another and with Billy. Allen agreed to it. Latei; Allen told Rosalie he was very pleased about the videotape they were'going to make of him. He was nervous about it, but Dr. George had convinced him that he would learn a lot about himself Dr. George held the first videotaped session on May 1. Dorothy Turner was present because he knew Billy felt at ease with her and because he intended to try to bring out Adalana. Though he had at first resisted bringing out new people, he realized it was necessary to understand the significance of this female aspect of Milligans personality. He repeated several times how helpful it would be if Adalana would come out and talk to them. Finally, after several switches to the others, Milligan's face changed to a soft, tearful expression. |
| 449 |
Dr. Cornelia Wilbur had lectured there in the summer of 1955, but this was different. 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. |
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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. |
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Through constant suggestion, Billy was able to remain on the spot longer and longer. The fusing was to be done in stages. Those people who were similar or who had compatible qualities would be fused first, in pairs, and then the results of those pairings would be fused, by intensive suggestion, until all would be merged into the core Billy. Because Allen and Tommy were most alike, they were to be fused first. Hours of argument and analysis with Dr. George were followed, Allen reported, by even more hours of internal discussion with Arthur and Ragen. Allen and Tommy worked hard with Dr. George on fusing, but it was difficult because Tommy had fears that Allen didn't have. Allen loved baseball, for example, but Tommy was afraid to play it because once when he was younger and played second base, he had made mistakes and was beaten for them. Dr. George suggested that Nick Cicco, Allen and the other people should help Tommy by talking to him about his fear and by encouraging him to play baseball. Art therapy would continue, including oil painting. The younger ones, Allen said, were unable to understand the concept of fusion until Arthur explained it to them through an analogy. Arthur compared it to Kool-Aid, something the children knew about, and explained that Kool-Aid powder is made up of individual crystals, each grain separate. When you added water, they dissolved. But if the mixture was allowed to stand, the water would evaporate, leaving a solid mass. Nothing had been added or lost. |
| 452 |
"Can we win with an insanity plea?" Judy asked. Gary lit his pipe and puffed away at it. "If Karolin, Turner, Kocan, Harding and Wilbur will testify that Billy was legally insane at the time of the crimes, under the Ohio definition, I think we've got a pretty good shot at it." "But you're the one who told me no multiple personality has ever been found not guilty by reason of insanity for a major crime." "Well, then," Gary said, grinning through his beard, "William Stanley Milligan will be the first." ( 7 ) Dr. George Harding, Jr., now found himself struggling with his conscience. There was no doubt in his mind that Billy was fused or close to fusion now and probably could be fused enough to stand trial. That wasn't the problem. As Dr. George lay awake nights in late August, going over the material for the report to Judge Flowers, he wondered if it was morally right to use the diagnosis of multiple personality as a defense against these major crimes. He was deeply concerned with the issue of criminal responsibility. It troubled him that his words might be misused, bringing discredit to the multiple personality diagnosis, to other patients who had this syndrome, to the profession and to psychiatric testimony. If Judge Flowers accepted his judgment that this dissociative disorder, classified thus far as a neurosis, was reason to find a patient not guilty by reason of insanity, he knew it would set legal precedent in Ohio, and perhaps in the country. Dr. George believed Billy Milligan had not had control over his actions on those three fateful days last October. |
| 453 |
Gary and Judy informed Judge Flowers, who decided the story should be released to the Columbus Dispatch as well. The public defenders agreed to comment on the report, since it had been leaked already. They allowed photographers to take pictures of the paintings Gary had brought back from the hospital — Moses about to break the tablet containing the Ten Commandments, a Jewish musician playing a horn, a landscape and the portrait of Adalana. The newspaper stories upset Billy, and he was depressed during his final session with Dr. Kocan. He was afraid of what other prisoners might do to him now that the word was out that he had a lesbian personality. He told her, "If they find me guilty and send me back to Lebanon, I know I'll have to die." "Then Chalmer will have won." "Well, what do I do? I have all this hate bottled up inside me. I can't handle it." Although she rarely gave advice or instructions, preferring the nondirective method of allowing the patient to lead the way, she knew there was no time for such therapy. "You could put hate to positive use," she suggested. "You suffered from child abuse. You could defeat those horrible memories, and the man you say inflicted them, by dedicating your life to the fight against child abuse. Alive, you can work for a cause and win. If you die, then the man who abused you wins, and you lose." Later that day, talking to Donna Egar in his room, Billy reached under his bed and pulled out the razor blade Tommy had taped to the slat nearly seven months earlier. |
| 454 |
He hit it so hard we thought he had perhaps broken an arm, and took him to a doctor to have him checked out." But Ragen had not hurt himself. On October 24, Judge Flowers again ordered Southwest Community Mental Health Center to examine Milligan and submit a report on his competency to stand trial. Dr. George Harding, Jr., could, at his discretion, attend the defendant. The judge also ordered Milligan immediately transferred from prison to the Central Ohio Psychiatric Hospital. On November 15, Marion J. Koloski, director of the Court Assistance Program of Southwest's Forensic Psychiatric Center, reported that when Dr. Stella Karolin and Dorothy Turner last saw him, they had found Milligan competent to stand trial and capable of assisting his attorney in his defense, but added: "His mental condition is viewed as being very fragile, however, and it is possible that at any given time there could be a disintegration of the present fused personality into the dissociated personalities which have been evidenced previously." On November 29, the Dayton Daily News and the Columbus Dispatch published Chalmer Milligan's denials of the widely circulated report that he had sexually abused his stepson. The following Associated Press story appeared in the Columbus Dispatch: Stepfather Says He Didn't Abuse Young Milligan Chalmers sic Milligan says he has become "very upset" by published reports that he physically and sexually abused his stepson William S. Milligan, whom doctors say has 10 personalities. |
| 455 |
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. Caul would accept Billy as a patient at the Athens Mental Health Center. Though Judy had heard Cauls name before and had written him in July for information about multiple personality, she had not mentioned Billy's name. |
| 456 |
Now she phoned to ask if he would accept Billy Milligan as a patient and if he could come to Columbus on Friday to attend the meeting. Caul said he would have to check with the hospital superintendent, Sue Foster, who would discuss it with her superiors in the state Department of Mental Health. Caul said he would consider accepting Milligan as a patient, and he agreed to drive to Columbus on Friday to attend the meeting. On December 1, Judy waited impatiently for Dr. Caul. The lobby outside Judge Metcalf's chambers was filling up with the others who had become involved in the case, including Dr. George Harding, Dr. Stella Karolin, Dorothy Turner and Ber-nie Yavitch. Shortly after ten o'clock, she saw the receptionist point her out to a middle-aged, fat little man. His oliveskinned, fleshy face was fringed with gray hair. His fierce, penetrating eyes were the eyes of an eagle. She introduced him to Gary and the others, and led him into Judge Metcalf's chambers. Dr. David Caul settled back in the second row and listened as the attorneys discussed how the new law applied to the Milligan case. A short while later, Judge Flowers entered the chambers and, together with Judge Metcalf, summarized the case and the procedures up to this point. Bemie Yavitch spoke of the professional information that had been assembled and agreed that it would be difficult to refute the evidence regarding Milligans condition at the time of the offenses. He would not challenge the reports by Southwest and Harding. |
| 457 |
As he drove back to Athens, Dr. Caul mulled over what he had seen and heard at the meeting, and it occurred to him that almost everyone there, even the prosecutor Yavitch, accepted the fact that Milligan was a multiple personality. He knew that if it went at the trial as it seemed to be going at that meeting, Milligan was about to become the first multiple personality charged with major crimes ever to be declared not guilty by reason of insanity. He realized the meeting he had just attended foreshadowed the making of legal and psychiatric history on Monday in that courtroom. ( 2 ) When Billy Milligan awoke on December 4, the morning they were to take him from the Columbus Ohio Psychiatric Hospital back to the Franklin County Courthouse, and looked into the mirror, he was startled to see that his mustache was gone. But he didn't remember shaving it y and he wondered who had done it. The mustache had been shaved off between the first and second rapes, and he had grown it back. Now he had lost time again. He had the same odd sensation he had known in those last days at Harding and in the Franklin County Jail — that somehow Ragen and Arthur had stood apart, and they couldn't or wouldn't fuse until they were sure he wouldn't be sent to prison. Well, he was partially fused, enough to stand trial. He would continue to answer to the name Billy, though he knew he was neither the core Billy nor a completely fused Billy. He was somewhere in between. He wondered, as they walked to the police van, what it would feel like if he was ever completely fused. |
| 458 |
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. |
| 459 |
As the van turned the comer, some of the hot coffee spilled onto his new suit, and he threw the cup down behind the seat. He felt lousy, and the feeling was getting worse and worse. He had no idea what the Athens Mental Health Center would be like. It might be a prison for all he knew. He had to remember that the torment was far from over, that a lot of people still wanted to put him behind bars. He knew the Adult Parole Authority had notified Gary that because of the guns, he was in violation of his parole and probation, and as soon as he was cured they would send him back to prison. Not Lebanon, he imagined. Because of his violent behavior, probably a hell called Lucasville. Where was Arthur? And Ragen? Would they ever join the fusion? They drove along snow-covered Route 33, passing through Lancaster, where he's been raised, gone to school and tried to kill himself. It was too much to bear. He was very tired and he had to let go. He closed his eyes and let it all slip away ... Seconds later, Danny looked around and wondered where he was being taken. He was cold and lonely, and afraid. It was nearly dark when they reached Athens and turned off the highway. The mental hospital was a complex of Victorian buildings on a snowy hill overlooking the campus of Ohio University. When they crossed the wide avenue and turned up the narrow, curving road, Danny began to tremble. The two officers led him out of the van and up the steps to the ancient red brick building with its thin white pillars. |
| 460 |
It also published a sworn statement submitted to the Dispatch by Chalmer Milligan and his attorney: I, Chalmer J. Milligan, married the mother of William Stanley Milligan in October of 1963.1 adopted William, along with his brother and sister shortly thereafter. William has accused me of threatening, abusing and sodomizing him, particularly over the period of the year when he was 8 or 9 years old. This accusation is completely false. Furthermore, none of the psychiatrists or psychologists, who examined William for the report prepared for Judge Flowers, interviewed me prior to that document's preparation and release. There is no doubt in my mind that William has lied repeatedly and extensively to those who have been examining him. During my 10 years of marriage to his mother, William was a habitual liar. I feel that William is continuing a pattern of lying which he established many years ago. The accusations by William and their subsequent publication by numerous newspapers and magazines have caused me extreme embarrassment, mental anguish and suffering. I make this statement in order to set the record straight and clear my good name. One morning a week after Milligans arrival, Dr. Caul stopped by again. "I thought you and I ought to begin your therapy today. Let's go to my office." Danny followed him, frightened. Caul pointed to a comfortable chair and sat across from him, clasping his hands across his potbelly. "I want you to understand that I know a great deal about you from your case files. |
| 461 |
One of his children had been jumped in school because his dad had defended Milligan. All during the case he had wondered how many of his other clients were being cheated out of the time and effort that he and Judy couldn't give them because Billy Milligan had been so complicated and had taken priority. As Judy had put it, "The fear that you might be slighting someone else makes you work ten times as hard so you won't short-change the others. Our homes and families paid the price." Gary looked up at the huge, ugly Victorian building as he got into the car, and he nodded. Now Billy Milligan was someone else's care and responsibility. ( 5 ) Billy awoke on December 23, nervous at the thought of talking to the writer. There was so little he could actually remember of his early years, just bits and pieces, the things he had picked up from others. How could he tell the writer the story of his After breakfast, he walked to the end of the lobby, filled a second cup of coffee from the urn and sat in an armchair to wait for him. Last week his new lawyer, Alan Goldsberry, represented him on the book, and they had signed contracts with the writer and the publisher. That had been hard enough. But now panic was setting in. "Billy, you have a visitor." Norma Dishong's voice startled him, and he jumped up, splashing coffee on his jeans. He saw the writer coming through the door of the ward, down the steps into the corridor. God, what had he gotten himself into? "Hi," the writer said, smiling. |
| 462 |
The doctor put the tape cartridge into the recorder, adjusted the sound and then settled back to watch his patient's reactions. Billy, smiling self-consciously, watched himself on the monitor. When he saw the image of his jiggling legs and noticed he was still doing it, he put his hands on both knees to stop them. And when the monitor showed his lips moving silently, he put his hand to his mouth, eyes wide, not really comprehending. Then came Ragens face, looking exactly like his own, and Ragens voice, for the first time not in his own head but out there on the screen. And the words: "You have made quite a few enemies, Dr. Caul." To this moment Billy had accepted on faith what others had told him — that he was a multiple personality — even though nothing inside him made him feel that was true. All he had known until now was that occasionally he heard voices and he lost time. He had believed what the doctors told him, but he never felt it. Now for the first time he saw it with his own eyes, and for the first time he understood. He watched in fearful fascination as Ragen spoke of the twenty-four names on the paper and of the undesirables. His mouth stayed open as Ragen spoke of the Teacher, who had taught everyone all they knew. But who was the Teacher? "The Teacher is Billy all in one piece. Billy does'not know he is Teacher," Ragen said from the screen. Caul watched as Billy went limp. He looked weak. He was sweating. Billy walked out of the medical microwave room and took the stairs up to the third floor. |
| 463 |
Dorothy became pregnant, for the third time, a year after Billy was bom. Johnny suggested an abortion in Cuba. She refused, she told her children years later, because it was a mortal sin. Kathy Jo was bom on New Years Eve, December 31, 1956. Meeting the medical expenses overwhelmed Johnny. He borrowed more, gambled more, drank more, and Dorothy learned he was into the loan sharks for six thousand dollars. She argued with him. He beat her. Johnny was hospitalized for acute alcoholism and depression in the fall of 1956, but was allowed home from the hospital on October 19 for Jimbo s fifth birthday party, which was to be the next day. When Dorothy returned late that night from work, she found him slumped over the table, half a bottle of Scotch and an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the floor. ( 2 ) The Teacher remembered that Billy s first inner friend had no name. One day four months before his fourth birthday when Jimbo wouldn't play with him, Kathy was still too little and Daddy was too busy reading a book, Billy sat alone in his room with his toys, feeling lonely and bored. Then he saw a little boy with black hair and dark eyes who sat across from him and just stared. Billy pushed a toy soldier toward him. The boy picked it up, put it into the truck and moved it back and forth, back and forth. They didn't speak, but even without talking, it was better than being all alone. That night Billy and the little boy with no name saw his father go to the medicine cabinet and take out a bottle of pills. |
| 464 |
At first she thought the boy in the other bed might be Billy, but everyone called him Jimbo, so she knew he was the older brother. Her own name was Christene, but since everyone called her Billy, she learned to answer to it. She loved Kathy very much, and as the months went by, she played with her, taught her words, watched as she learned to walk. She knew when Kathy was hungry and what foods Kathy liked. She knew when something was hurting Kathy and she told Dorothy if anything was wrong. They played house together, and she enjoyed playing dress-up with Kathy when her mommy wasn't there. They'd put on Dorothy's clothes and shoes and hats and pretend they were singing in the nightclub. Most of all, Christene liked to draw pictures for Kathy, but she didn't do it on the walls anymore. Dorothy got her lots of paper and crayons, and everyone said how good Billy was at making pictures. Dorothy was worried when Johnny came home from the hospital. He seemedjme when he played with the children or tried to work up new songs and routines for the show, but when her back was turned, he'd be on the phone with the bookies. She tried to stop him, but he turned on her, cursed her and hit her. He moved out to the Midget Mansions Motel, missing Christmas with the children and Kathy's third birthday on New Year's Eve. On January 18, Dorothy was awakened by a call from the police department. Johnny's body had been found in his station wagon, parked outside the motel, with a hose leading from the tailpipe into the back window. |
| 465 |
He'd left an eight-page suicide note attacking Dorothy and giving instructions to pay a few personal debts from the insurance money. When Dorothy told the children that Johnny had gone to heaven, Jimbo and Billy went to the window and looked up at the sky. The following week the loan sharks said she'd better pay up Johnny's six-thousand-dollar debt or something would happen to her and the kids. She fled with the children, first to the home of her sister Jo Ann Bussy in Key Largo and then back to Circleville, Ohio. There she met her ex-husband, Dick Jonas, again. After a few dates and promises that he would change, she remarried him. ( 3 ) Billy was almost five when he went into the kitchen one morning and reached on tiptoe to get the dishtowel from the counter. Suddenly the cookie jar standing on it came crashing to the floor. He tried to put the pieces together, but they wouldn't stick. Hearing someone coming, he began trembling. He didn't want to be punished. He didn't want to be hurt. He knew he had done something bad, but he didn't want to know what was going to happen, didn't want to hear Mommy screaming at him. He closed his eyes and went to sleep ... "Shawn" opened his eyes and looked around. 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. |
| 466 |
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. |
| 467 |
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. He knew he was here to be punished for something. But what? She moved her mouth, but he couldn't hear what she was saying. He just cringed and stared at her red, angry face. She grabbed his left hand, lifted her ruler and brought it down on his palm silently over and over again. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and again he wondered why he was here to be punished for something he hadn't done. |
| 468 |
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. 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. |
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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. |
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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. According to Dorothy, Chalmer had become enraged after he saw her talking to a black coworker on the job at a nearby bench. She had been operating a tape-controlled punch drill, and when she noticed the man was starting to doze on the assembly line, she went over, shook him and told him it was dangerous. He smiled and thanked her. As she went back to her work table, she saw Chalmer glaring at her. All the way home he was silent, sulking. In the house she finally said to him, "Whats the matter? You want to talk about it?" "You and that nigger," Chalmer said. "What's going on?" "Going on? What in God's name are you talking about?" He hit her. The children watched from the living room as he beat her. Billy stood there, terrified, wanting to help her, wanting to stop Chalmer from hurting his mother. But he smelled the liquor and he was afraid Chalmer would kill him and bury him and tell her he ran away. Billy ran to his room, slammed the door shut with his back against it and covered his ears with his hands. |
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But he couldn't shut out his mothers screaming. Crying, he slowly slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor. He closed his eyes tight, and in Shawn's deafness everything went silent... That was the first of the bad mix-up times, the Teacher recalled. Life became tangled as Billy wandered about, losing time, not knowing the day or week or month. His fourth-grade teachers noticed his odd behavior, and when one of the personalities, not knowing what was going on, would say something strange or get up and wander around the room, Billy would be sent to stand in the comer. Three-year-old Christene was the one who kept her face to the wall. She could stay there for a long time and not say anything, keeping Billy out of trouble. Mark, who had a short attention span for anything but manual labor, would have wandered away. Tommy would have rebelled. David would have suffered. "Jason," the pressure valve, would have screamed. "Bobby" would have gotten lost in a fantasy. "Samuel," who was Jewish, like Johnny Morrison, would have prayed. Any one of them or the others might have done something wrong and gotten Billy into a worse mess. Only Christene, who never got older than three, could stand there patiently and say nothing. Christene was the comer child. She was also the first to hear one of the others. She was on the way to school one morning and stopped to pick a bunch of wildflowers in the field. She found sumac and mulberries and tried to put them into a bunch. If she brought them to her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. |
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He picked up a pencil and quickly went down the paper, doing the problems in his head and writing in the answers. When he was done, he put the paper into the book, crossed his arms and stared into space. This was all so very elementary. Out in the schoolyard the rowdy children annoyed him, and he closed his eyes ... After recess the teacher said, "Take your papers out of your books now." Billy looked up, startled. What was he doing in class? How had he gotten here? He remembered getting up in the morning, but not getting dressed or coming to school. He had no idea what had happened between waking up at home and now. "You may check your answers before turning in the math papers." What math papers? He had no idea what was going on, but he decided if she asked him why he didn't have his math, he'd tell her he forgot it or lost it outside. He'd have to tell her something. He opened his book and stared in disbelief. There was the test paper with all the answers written in — to all fifty problems. He noticed that it wasn't his handwriting — similar, but as if it had been written very quickly. He'd often found papers in his possession and just assumed they were his. But he knew there was no way in the world someone as bad as he was in math could have done those problems. He peeked over at the desk next to his and saw a girl working on the same test. He shrugged, picked up a pencil and wrote "Bill Milligan" at the top. He had no intention of checking it. How could he doublecheck the answers if he didn't know how to work the problems? |
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He hid it. Somehow he kept the secret. It was in the spring of 1969, the Teacher recalled, when Billy was fourteen and in eighth grade, that Chalmer took him to the farm, out beyond the cornfield, handed him a shovel and told him to start digging ... Dr. Stella Karolin was later to describe this alleged event in her statement read into the court record: "His stepfather abused Billy sexually and threatened to bury him alive if he told his mother. He even buried the child, leaving a pipe over his face for air ... Before he shoveled the dirt off the child, he urinated through the pipe onto the child's face" (Newsweek, December 18, 1978). ... from that day, Danny feared the earth. He would never again lie in the grass, touch the ground or paint a landscape. ( 5 ) Several days later Billy went into his room and reached over to switch on his bedside lamp. Nothing happened. He clicked it again and again. Still nothing. He shuffled out to the kitchen, got a new bulb and came back to change it as he had seen his mother do. He got a shock that sent him back against the wall... "Tommy" opened his eyes and looked around, not knowing what to expect. He saw the light bulb on the bed, picked it up, peered under the lampshade and started to screw it in. As he touched the metal collar he got a shock. Son of a bitch! What the hell was that? He pulled off the lampshade and looked into the hole. He touched it and felt the shock again. He sat there trying to puzzle it out. Where was this shit coming from? |
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When he was done, he stood back and looked at it. Pretty damned good for a beginner. The next morning he got up early and painted a landscape with the moon showing, even though it was a day scene. ( 6 ) Billy loved flowers and poetry and helping his mother around the house, but he knew that Chalmer called him "a sissy" and "a little queer." So he stopped helping his mother and writing poetry. "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. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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Arthur visualized it until it came into focus, and then, with a tremendous effort, he was able to see it through Allen's eyes. He discovered, however, that it worked only when he paid attention and when he was awake, even though not out in the consciousness. He had achieved his first intellectual triumph of mind over matter. Arthur realized that because of his knowledge, he had become responsible for a large, diverse family. They were all involved with the same body, and something had to be done to create order out of what was proving to be a chaotic situation. Since he was the only one capable of handling the task unemotionally, he would put his mind to it and come up with something that would be fair, workable and — above all — logical. The kids at school teased Billy when he wandered around the halls in a daze. They saw him talking to himself behaving at times like a little girl, and they picked on him. One cold afternoon during recess, some of the boys started taunting him in the schoolyard. Someone threw a rock at him, hitting him in the side. At first he didn't know what had happened, but he knew he wasn't permitted to show anger or Chalmer would punish him. Ragen turned and glared at the laughing boys. Another boy picked up a rock and threw it, but Ragen caught it and whipped it back swiftly hitting the boy in the head. Astonished, the boys backed off as Ragen pulled a switchblade out of his pocket and approached them. They fled. Ragen stood looking around, trying to understand where he was and how he had come to be there. |
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He closed the knife, put it into his pocket and walked off He had no idea what was going on. But Arthur observed him, his swiftness, his angei; and he deduced why Ragen was there. He realized that Ragens sudden emotional outbursts would have to be dealt with. But it would be necessary to study and understand him before he introduced himself. What surprised him most of all was that Ragen was thinking in a Slavic accent. Arthur felt the Slavs had been the first barbarians. In dealing with Ragen, he was dealing with a barbarian. Dangerous, but the kind of person who might prove necessary in times of danger, a power to be harnessed. Arthur would bide his time and approach him when he felt it was right. Several weeks later "Kevin" joined some tough boys in a dirt-clod fight against kids from another neighborhood. The battleground was a mound of dirt behind a big pit where a housing development was under construction. Kevin was feeling rough and tough, tossing the clods, laughing as he missed, watching them explode like dirt bombs. Then he heard a strange voice from somewhere beside him say, "Lowah. Trow dem lowah!" He stopped and looked around, but no one was close by. Then he heard it again: "Lowah ... lowah ... trow dem tings lowah." It was a voice like the Brooklyn soldiers in the war movie he had seen on TV. "Y' should trow dem damned doit clods lowah!" Kevin was baffled. He stopped throwing and sat down on the dirt pile, to figure out who was talking to him. "Where are you?" Kevin asked. |
| 480 |
He frequently states that Bill and his mother were responsible for the natural father's suicide (mother's statement). John W. Young, principal of Stanbery Junior High, discovered that Billy Milligan frequently cut class and sat on the steps outside his office or at the rear of the auditorium. Young would always sit beside the boy and talk with him. Sometimes Billy spoke of his dead father and said he would like to be an entertainer when he grew up. He spoke of how bad things were at home. But often, Principal Young realized, the boy was in a trance. He would lead Billy to his car and take him home. After a great many of these episodes, Principal Young referred him to the Fairfield County Clinic for Guidance and Mental Health. Dr. Harold T. Brown, psychiatrist and director, first saw Billy Milligan on March 6, 1970. Brown, a slight man with gray muttonchops and a receding chin, gazed at the boy through black-rimmed glasses. He saw a neat-looking, slender fifteen-year-old in apparent good health, sitting passively, neither tense nor anxious, but avoiding looking him in the eyes. "His voice is soft," Dr. Brown wrote in his notes, "with little modulation, almost trancelike." Billy stared at him. "What are your feelings?" Brown asked him. "Like a dream that comes and goes. My dad hates me. I hear him screaming. I have a red light in my room. I see a garden and a road — flowers, water, trees and nobody there to yell at me. I see lots of things that aren't real. There's a door with all the locks on it, and someone is pounding to get out. |
| 481 |
His peer group relations were superficial on his part and his peers were mistrusting of him due to his constant lies. Staff Recommendations: The patients behavior became increasingly disruptive to the ward program, therefore the patient is being discharged with the recommendation to seek outpatient treatment for the patient and counseling for the parents. Medication at lime of Release: Thorazine 25 mg t. i. d. Back home, in a deep depression, Danny painted a nine-bytwelve still life — a withering yellow flower in a cracked drinking glass against a black and dark-blue background. He brought it upstairs to show Billy's mother what he had done, but then he froze. Chalmer was there. Chalmer took it from him, looked at it and threw it on the floor. "You're a liar," he said. "You didn't do that." Danny picked it up and fought back the tears as he took it down to the painting room. Then, for the first time, he signed it: "Danny '70." On the back of the canvas board, he filled in the information it called for: artist Danny subject Dyeing Alone date 1970 From that time, unlike Tommy and Allen, who continued to seek approval for their painting, Danny never volunteered to show his still lifes to anyone again. In the fall of 1970, Billy entered Lancaster High School, the rambling glass-and-concrete complex of modem buildings on the north side of Lancaster. Billy did not do well in his classes. He hated his teachers and he hated school. Arthur cut many of his high school classes to study medical books at the library and became especially fascinated by the study of hematology. |
| 482 |
"Get in before I beat your ass." Danny scrambled into the seat and looked straight ahead. But he could haear Chalmer popping the top of a can of beer, and as he smelled it, a cold fear went through him. When they got to the farm, Danny was relieved that he was put right to work raking leaves. Chalmer mowed and Danny was afraid when the tractor came too close to him. He'd been terrorized by tractors before. Chalmers new yellow one frightened him. He switched to David and then to Shawn, switching back and forth until the work was done and Chalmer finally shouted, "Get them boards outta the truck. Let's go!" Danny stumbled forward, still terrified of the tractor, and used all his strength to pull the heavy planks out of the truck. With the planks in place, Chalmer backed the tractor up onto the truck bed. After he hauled the planks back in, Danny waited while Chalmer popped another can of beer, finishing it before he was ready to take off. Tommy, who had seen what happened, took the spot. That sonofabitchin' tractor frightened Danny. That tractor had to go. Quickly, while Chalmers head was turned, Tommy climbed up into the truck bed, pulled the U-pin out and popped the clutch into neutral. As Chalmer went around to the driver's seat, Tommy jumped down and flipped the U-pin into the bushes. Then he got in the front, stared straight ahead and waited. He knew the minute Chalmer made one of his jack-rabbit starts, that new yellow tractor of his would be gone. Chalmer started out slowly and drove without a stop into Bremen. |
| 483 |
Nothing happened. Tommy thought it would go after they stopped in front of the General Mills plant. But Chalmer pulled away real easy and drove all the way into Lancaster. All right, thought Tommy, it'll happen the first time he stops for a red light. It happened in Lancaster. When the light turned green, Chalmer took off squealing his tires, and Tommy knew the tractor was gone. He tried to keep his face straight, but he couldn't. He looked away, toward the window, so the old fart wouldn't see his grin. When he glanced back, he saw the little yellow tractor tumbling back down the street, end over end. Then he saw Chalmer looking in his rear-view mirror, his mouth wide open. He jammed the brakes, stopped the truck, jumped out and started running back, picking up pieces of metal scattered on the street. Tommy broke up with laughter. "Goddamn you," he said. "That tractor'll never hurt Danny or David again." Double revenge with one blow. He had gotten the machine, and at the same time he got Chalmer. Most of the grades sent home on Billy's report cards were C s, D's and F's. In all his school years he got an A only once: the third quarter in tenth-grade biology. Arthur, who had developed an interest in the subject, started paying attention in class and doing the homework. Knowing people would laugh if he spoke, he had Allen answer for him. He amazed the teacher by his sudden change, his brilliance. Though Arthur never lost his interest in biology, things at home got so bad that the spot kept changing. |
| 484 |
Much to the regret of the biology teacher, the flame died out and the last two quarters were failures. Arthur drifted off to study on his own, and the final report card registered a D. Arthur was having his hands full with the others coming and going on and off the spot more and more frequently. He diagnosed this period of mental instability as "a mix-up time." When the school had to be evacuated because of a bomb scare, everyone suspected it was Billy Milligan, though no one could prove it. Tommy denied making the bomb. It wasn't a real one anyway, though it might have been if the liquid in the flask had been nitro instead of water. Tommy hadn't lied about not making it. He would never have lied. Though he had taught one of the other boys how to do it, even drew the diagram, he had never touched it himself. He wasn't that stupid. Tommy enjoyed the excitement and the chagrin on the principals face. Principal Moore looked like a man with a lot of problems, like someone who couldn't solve all the things that were bothering him. He solved one of them by expelling Milligan, the troublemaker. So, five weeks after Billy Milligan turned seventeen — a week before Jim was to leave for the Air Force — Tommy and Allen joined the Navy. On March 23, 1972, Allen went with Dorothy to the recruiting office, and he and Tommy signed the enlistment papers. Dorothy had mixed feelings about letting her younger son join the Navy, but she knew it was important to get nim out of the house, away from Chalmer. |
| 485 |
He got on a bus, took it as far as it went, then transferred to another bus and another, looking at the houses and the people but not knowing where he was going or what he was searching for. He got off at a shopping mall and wandered. In to middle of the mall he saw a wishing fountain. He flipped a couple of coins. As he started to toss a third quarter in, he felt a tugging at his sleeve. A little black boy was looking up at him with big pleading eyes. "Oh shit," Philip said, flipping him the coin. The boy grinned and ran. Philip picked up the duffel bag. The depression began to eat -at his gut with such a feeling of pain that he stood there for a few moments, shuddered and left the spot... David staggered under the weight of the duffel bag and dropped it. That was too heavy for an eight-year-old — almost nine — to carry. 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. |
| 486 |
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. |
| 487 |
I didn't want it." "Well, at least it didn't cost us nothing." Four days later, on July 8, 1972, Sam Garrison and Allen went to the sheriff's office in Circleville to answer some questions. Both were immediately arrested for kidnapping, rape and assault with a deadly weapon. When the judge in Pickaway County heard the facts at pretrial, he dismissed the charge of kidnapping and set a bond of two thousand dollars. Dorothy raised two hundred dollars for the bondsman's fee, and took her son back home. Chalmer argued to have him sent back to jail but Dorothy arranged with her sister to take Billy into her home in Miami, Florida, until his October hearing before the Pickaway County Juvenile Court. With Billy and Jim away, the girls began to work on Dorothy. Kathy and Challa gave her an ultimatum: If she didn't start divorce proceedings against Chalmer, they were both going to leave home. Dorothy finally agreed that Chalmer had to go. In Florida, Allen went to school and did well. He got a job at a paint supply store and impressed the owner with his organizational ability. "Samuel," the religious Jew, learned Billy's father had been Jewish. Along with many of the other Jewish residents in Miami, he was outraged at the killing of the eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Village. Samuel went to Friday night services to pray for their souls and the soul of Billy's father. He also asked God to have the court find Allen innocent. When he came back to Pickaway County on October 20, Milligan was turned over to the Ohio Youth Commission for evaluation. |
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Center bottom: Dorothy Billy in 1965 at age ten Billy at the Dayton Forensic Center, February 20, 1981 Arthur decided that the younger ones should be on the spot at the Zanesville Youth Camp. After all, it would give them experiences every child should have: hiking, swimming, horseback riding, camping, sports. He approved of Dean Hughes, the tall black recreation director with the flattop haircup and the Vandyke beard. He seemed like a sympathetic and trustworthy young man. All in all, there seemed to be no danger here. Ragen agreed. But Tommy bitched about the rules. He didn't like having his hair cut, having to wear state-issue clothing. He didn't like being here with thirty juvenile delinquents. Charlie Jones, the social worker, explained the setup to the new boys. The camp was divided into four progress zones, and they were expected to move through a zone each month. Zones 1 and 2 were the dormitories in the left wing of the T-shaped building. Zones 3 and 4 were in the right wing. Zone 1, he admitted, was "the pits." Everyone dumped on you, and you had to wear your hair cropped close. In zone 2, the boys could wear their hair longer. In zone 3, they could wear their own clothes instead of state-issue clothes after their daily work assignments. In zone 4, instead of living in a dorm, they could have their own private cubicles. Zone 4 boys didn't have to do regularly scheduled events. Most of them were trusties, and they didn't even have to go to the Scioto Village Girls Camp for the dances. |
| 489 |
People came by and watched, and Hughes sold them some of the artwork. Hughes took Milligan out again the next day, and by Sunday night they had sold four hundred dollars' worth of paintings. On Monday morning the director called Hughes into the office and informed him that since Milligan was a ward of the state, it was against policy for him to be selling artwork. He had to contact the people, return their money and get the paintings back. Hughes hadn't known of the policy, and he agreed to refund the money. On the way out, he asked, "How'd you find out about the sales?" "People have been calling here," the director said. "They want more of Milligans paintings." April passed quickly. As the weather warmed, Christene played in the garden. David chased butterflies. Ragen worked out in the gym. Danny, who was still afraid of the outdoors from having been buried alive, stayed indoors and painted still lifes. Christopher, who was thirteen, rode horseback. Arthur spent most of his time in the library reading law statutes in the Ohio Revised Code, saying he would get on a horse only if he were playing polo. They were all happy to move to zone 2. Milligan and Gordy Kane were assigned to work in the laundry, where Tommy enjoyed tinkering with the old washer and the gas-fired dryer. He was looking forward to moving to zone 3, where he would be allowed to wear his own clothes in the evenings. One afternoon Frank Jordan, the musclebound bully, walked in with a load of laundry. "I want these washed right away. |
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Tommy and Kane piled on, punching away. Ragen watched as Tommy fought to be sure he was in no danger. Had there been a real threat, he would have intervened. He would not have swung wildly and in anger, as Tommy did. He would have moved in, planning where to hit and what bones to break. This was none of his affair and he wasn't needed. The next morning Allen decided they'd better tell Mr. Jones what had happened before Frank Jordan gave a damaging version of the incident. "You can see Vito's head, swelled up where Frank hit him without provocation," Allen said to the social worker. "He's been taking advantage of a system that gives him authority over kids like Vito. Like we said the other day, it's wrong and potentially dangerous to put that kind of power into the hands of criminals." On Wednesday, Mr. Jones announced that henceforth the reduction of merits would be done only by the professional staff. The merits that Frank Jordan had unjustly removed from others were to be paid back out of his own account. Jordan was bumped all the way back to zone 1. Vito, Kane and Milligan now had enough merits to move on to zone 3. ( 3 ) One of the privileges of zone 4 was being allowed to go home on trial visit. Tommy looked forward to his furlough. When the time came, he packed his bag and waited for Dorothy to pick him up. But the more he thought about leaving, the more confused he felt. He liked the place, but he still wanted to be back at Spring Street, knowing that Chalmer would never be there again. |
| 491 |
Allen got a job at Lancaster Electro-Plating on September 11, 1973. It didn't pay much and it was dirty work, not the kind of employment Arthur had in mind. It was Tommy who did the boring work as a zinc-tank operator, pulling the cage that hung from the overhead moving chain and lowering it into the acid for the plating. He moved from one square tank to the next; they were lined up the length of a bowling alley. Lower it, wait, raise it, move it, lower it, wait. Sneering at such menial labor, Arthur turned his attention to other matters. He had to prepare his people to move out on their own. All during Zanesville, he had been studying the behavior of those he allowed to come on the spot, and he was beginning to understand that the key to survival in society was self-control. Without rules there would be chaos, endangering them all. It occurred to him that the mles at the youth camp had a salutary effect. The constant threat of being bumped back to zone 1 or 2 had kept all those unruly lads in check. That is what would be needed when they were on their own. He explained his code of behavior to Ragen. "Because someone became involved with women of ill repute," Arthur said, "we were accused of rape by those two women in Pickaway County — a crime we did not commit — and they sent us to prison. It must never happen again." "How you vill prevent it?" Arthur paced. "I can usually prevent someone from taking the spot. And I have observed your ability to bump someone off immediately after the vulnerable moment of switching. |
| 492 |
Between us, we ought to control the consciousness. I have decided that certain undesirable individuals should be permanently banished from the spot. The rest of us will be required to live by a code of conduct. We are like a family. We must be strict. A single infraction will result in someone being classified as undesirable." With Ragen s agreement, Arthur communicated the rules to all the others: first: Never lie. All their lives they had been accused unjustly of being pathological liars for denying knowledge of things one of the others had done. second: Behave properly to ladies and children. This included avoiding foul language and adhering to proper etiquette, such as opening doors. The children were to sit straight at table, with napkins across laps. Women and children must be protected at all times, and everyone should come to their defense. If any one saw a woman or a child being hurt by a man, he or she must step off the spot immediately and let Ragen deal with the situation. (If one of their own were in personal physical danger, that would not be necessary, since Ragen would take the spot automatically.) third: Be celibate. Never again should the males be placed in a position where they could be accused of rape. fourth: Spend all your time on self-improvement. No one was to waste time with comic books or television, but each should study in his or her own specialty. fifth: Respect the private property of each member of the family. This was to be most stricdy enforced with regard to the selling of paintings. |
| 493 |
Christene had stayed three years old and constantly embarrassed them. Yet Ragen insisted, and it was agreed that since she had been the first and was still "the baby" of the family, she would never be removed or classified as undesirable. She might even prove useful at times when it was necessary to have someone on the spot who couldn't communicate and wouldn't know what was going on. But she, too, was expected to work at her own goals. With Arthurs help, she was to learn to read and write and struggle to overcome her dyslexia. Tommy was to pursue his interest in electronics and strengthen his mechanical abilities. Though he could pick locks and crack vaults, the techniques he had learned were to be used for only one purpose — not to penetrate, but to escape. 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. |
| 494 |
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. |
| 495 |
Martin was annoyed when he saw how crowded the next tee was, and he complained loudly that slow play was ruining the game for better players like himself. "I'm from New York," he said to a middle-aged man with a group of four ahead of him, "and I'm used to private clubs that are much more exclusive than this and particular about the class of people they allow to play." When the man looked flustered, Martin stepped forward. "You don't mind if I play through, do you?" And without waiting for an answer, he stepped up, teed off, put his ball in the right rough and zoomed ahead in his golf cart. He played through the next threesome as well, but then hit his ball into a water hazard. He parked the golf cart near the pond to see if he could retrieve it. Unable to find it, he hit a second ball across the pond and returned to the cart, but he cracked his knee against the side as he jumped in. David came to take the pain, wondering where he was and why he was in this little car. When the pain subsided, David sat there playing with the steering wheel, making engine noises with his mouth and kicking the foot pedals. The brake released and the cart rolled down, sinking the front wheels into the pond. Frightened, David left and Martin returned, wondering what had happened. It took him nearly half an hour, rocking the cart back and forth, to free the front wheels from the mud, and he was furious as group after group played through. When the cart was back on dry land, Arthur took the spot and told Ragen he was banishing Martin as undesirable. |
| 496 |
They had to move out. A few days later, Allen found a cheap two and a half room apartment in a white frame house at 808 Broad Street, just a short drive east of where Dorothy lived. It was a rundown place, but it had a refrigerator and a stove. He added a mattress, a couple of chairs and a table. Dorothy let him buy a Pontiac Grand Prix in her name with the understanding that he would make the payments on it. Ragen bought a .30-caliber carbine with a nine-shot clip and a .25-caliber semiautomatic. At first, the freedom of having his own apartment was exhilarating. He could paint when he wanted, with no one hassling him. Arthur made sure aspirin and other medication were purchased in bottles with child-proof caps so that the little ones wouldn't get into them. He even insisted that Ragen find a child-proof cap that could be adapted to fit his vodka bottle, and he reminded him to make sure his guns were always under lock and key. A rivalry developed between Adalana and "April" in the kitchem, and though Arthur sensed there was going to be trouble, he decided not to take sides. He had little enough time for his own study, research and planning for the future, so he tried not to pay attention to the women constantly haranguing and arguing in the back of his mind. When the nagging got too bad, he suggested that Adalana do the cooking and April do the sewing and washing, and let it go at that. Arthur had been quite taken by the thin, black-haired, brown-eyed April when he first descovered her along with the others. |
| 497 |
Several of Barry Hart's friends dropped by that afternoon for dope, but Allen didn't know what they were talking about. 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. |
| 498 |
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. |
| 499 |
He stayed home alone painting for a few days. Then one day Ragen took his guns and drove out into the woods for target practice. By this time Ragen had bought himself quite a few guns. In addition to the .30-caliber carbine, the .25-caliber semiautomatic and the .38 Smith and Wesson, he had a .375 magnum, an M-14, a .44 magnum and an M-16. He liked his Israeli grease gun because of its compactness and quietness. He'd also bought a .45 Thompson barrel clip, which he thought of as a collectors item. When the mix-up time reached its peak, Kevin asked Gordy Kane for an introduction to his connection. Kevin was ready to deal drugs full-time. Kane called an hour later and gave him directions to Blacklick Woods, near Reynoldsburg, east of Columbus. "I told him about you. He wants to see you alone so he can size you up. If he likes you, you've got it made. He goes under the name of Brian Foley." Kevin drove out, following instructions carefully. He had never been in this area, but he reached the appointed location near a culvert ten minutes early. He parked and waited in the car. Nearly a half-hour later, a Mercedes drove up and two men got out. One was tall, with a pitted face and a brown leather jacket. The other was of medium height, with a beard and a pinstriped suit. Someone was watching from the back of the car. Kevin didn't like it — not at all. He sat behind the wheel, sweating, wondering what he had gotten himself into and whether or not he should drive off. The tall guy with the pitted face leaned over and looked at him. |
| 500 |
There were several hecklers standing around, and Ragen asked the couple if he could help them. "Are you sympathetic to our cause?" the woman asked. "Yes," Ragen said. "I am communist. I have seen slave labor in sweatshops and factories." The man handed him a stack of leaflets describing the philosophy of the Communist party and attacking the United States for supporting dictatorships. Ragen walked up and down Broad Street, pushing them into the hands of passers-by. When he was down to the last leaflet, he decided to keep it for himself. He looked around for the old couple, but they were gone. He wandered for several blocks looking for them. If only he could find out where the meetings were held, he would join the Communist party. He had watched Tommy and Allen at Lancaster Electro-Plating and knew that the only way to improve the lot of the down-trodden masses was through the peoples revolution. Then he saw the bumper sticker on his car: workers of the world unite! The old couple must have put it there. The words sent a thrill through him. He kneeled, and in the lower right-hand comer of the sticker, he saw the name of a Columbus silkscreen company. Someone there might be able to tell him where the local communist group was meeting. He looked up the address in the telephone directory and discovered that the silkscreen company wasn't far. He drove there and watched the store from the car for a few minutes. Then he drove to the phone booth up the block and, using his cable cutters, snipped the wires. |
| 501 |
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. |
| 502 |
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. It was not a major project, he realized, but someone had to do it. He was deep in thought, driving slowly and carefully, when a truck passing him swerved back into the lane, drove a car ahead of him off the road, and kept going. The car hit the guardrail and went into the ditch end over end. Arthur pulled quickly off onto the berm. He got out calmly and climbed down. |
| 503 |
A woman was moving, crawling out of the car. "I say, don't move any more," he said. "Let me help you." She was bleeding, and he used direct pressure to stop it. She began to gag — he could see her teeth had been knocked out and she was choking. Discarding the idea of performing a tracheotomy, he decided to create an airway instead. Searching through his pockets, he found a plastic bail-point pen. He pulled out the ink sheath and, using his pipe lighter, softened the plastic shell and bent it. Then he slipped it into her throat to help her breathe, turning her head to the side to allow the blood to run out of her mouth. A brief examination tpld him that her jaw was broken, as was her wrist. Her side was lacerated and he suspected her ribs were crushed. She must have hit the steering wheel when she went forward. When the ambulance arrived, he quickly told the driver what had happened and what he had done. Then he walked off into the gathering crowd. He discarded the idea of going to the Hoover Dam. It was getting rather late, and he really should be getting home before dark. He did not like the idea of driving on the wrong side of the road at night. Arthur found himself growing increasingly irritated with the way things were going. Allen had been fired from his latest job — filling invoices and loading trucks at the J. C. Penney distribution center — when David came on the spot unexpectedly and crashed a forklift into a steel pillar. Tommy wandered around Lancaster and Columbus looking, unsuccessfully, for a new j, ob. |
| 504 |
Everyone liked the place. Allen liked the gray, weathered fence that hid the apartments from view of the parking area and the highway. Tommy had a room of his own for his electronic equipment, and there was a separate room for a studio. Ragen had a walk-in closet that he could lock in one of the bedrooms upstairs, where he kept all his guns except the 9-millimeter automatic. He kept that on top of the refrigerator, back where none of the children would see or reach it. Marlene came to the apartment every evening after her job at Hecks department store. When he worked the second shift, she would wait for him to get home around midnight, and she would stay most of the night. Before morning, she would always go back to her parents' home. Marlene was finding Billy moodier and more unpredictable than ever before. At times he would storm around the apartment, smashing things. He would stare at the walls in a trance, or he would go to the easel and paint in a fury. Always, he was a soft-spoken, considerate lover. Tommy didn't tell her that he was getting shaky. He was missing work. And he was missing time. Things seemed to be happening closer and closer together; they were moving into another bad mix-up time. Arthur should have been in control, but for some reason he was losing domination. No one was minding the store. Arthur blamed the confusion on Marlene and insisted that the relationship be broken off. Tommy felt his heart jump. He wanted to protest, but he was too afraid of Arthur to tell him that he had fallen in love with Marlene. |
| 505 |
They'd been arguing. He was acting weird and she thought he was on drugs. He was lying on the floor, really mad at her about something — she had no idea what it was. He had his gun in his hand, turning it on his finger, pointing it at his head. He never pointed the gun at her and she wasn't frightened for herself, only for him. She saw him staring at a fish-cord lamp he had brought home one evening; then he jumped up, fired at the lamp, and it exploded. There was a hole in the wall. He put the gun down on the bar, and when he turned away, she grabbed it, running out of the apartment. She got down the stairs and into the car before he caught up to her. Just as she pulled away from the curb, he jumped on the hood and glared at her through the windshield with a look of rage in his face. 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. |
| 506 |
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. |
| 507 |
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. It was news time, and he thought he might find out what day it was. Before the news was over, he fell asleep ... Allen woke up, wondering how he had gotten out of the closet. He felt his head. Just a slight bump. Well, what the hell, he might as well paint that portrait of Billy's sister, Kathy, that he'd been planning. He started into the studio, then realized he'd forgotten to eat. Back at the bar, he poured himself a Coke and looked for his sandwich. He was sure he'd left it on the bar. Then he saw it on the counter. The damned bag looked crumpled. What the hell? The sandwich was all messy, with the aluminum foil shredded and tom and tomato sauce all over the place. What kind of Stromboli sandwich was that? He picked up the phone, dialed Grillis and, yhen he got the manager, blasted him. |
| 508 |
He estimated the drugs would bring in thirty to thirty-five thousand on the street, and he saw their faces change from curiosity to greed. As the night wore on, they all got high, and each of the men secretly approached Kevin, suggesting the two of them team up to rip off the third partner. By morning, when both Bailey and Luft were out cold, Kevin stuffed the money and the drugs into two suitcases and took off for Columbus on his own. Neither one, he knew, would have the guts to stand up to him. They were afraid of him. Time and again they had talked about how crazy he was, how he had put his fist through a door and used a Thompson machine gun to shoot up a guy's car. They'd tip off the police. He expected that. But once he got i rid of the dope, there was nothing they could do. The pharmacist had seen their faces, not his. There was nothing to tie him in with the robbery. When Marlene picked up the Lancaster Eagle-Gazette the next day and read of the Gray Drug Store robbery, she had a sinking feeling. A few days later, Tommy came to meet her for lunch. She was surprised to see that he had painted the old Dodge black — and so sloppily. "You did it, didn't you?" she whispered. "What, painted the car?" Tommy asked innocently. "You did the Gray Drug Store robbery." "Oh, for crying out loud! Now you're calling me a criminal? Marlene, I don't know a thing about it. I swear!" She was confused. Something told her he was guilty, but he seemed truly . upset at being accused. Unless he was the worlds greatest actor, his denial had to be real. |
| 509 |
The first of the two remote-controlled doors hissed open, then closed behind him. It reminded Allen of Chalmers hiss, and the fear in his stomach exploded. He never got to the second door ... Ragen heard a hiss as the second door opened. He nodded and shuffled along to the cell block in the line of handcuffed prisoners. Now Arthur no longer had dominance. Here, Ragen knew, he would finally rule. He and only he would decide who came on and off the spot for the next two to five years. Ragen Vadascovinich heard a loud clang as the iron door closed behind them. Ragen found Lebanon an improvement over Mansfield Reformatory. It was newer, cleaner, brighter. At the first day's orientation session, he listened to the lectures on rules and regulations, the descriptions of the prison schools and jobs. A big man with heavy jowls and a football player's neck got up and, arms crossed, rocked back and forth. "All right," he said. "Ah'm Cap'n Leach. So you guys think you're hot shit? Well, now you're mine! You done fucked up on the street, but you mess up down here, Ah'm gonna bust your heads. The hell with civil rights, human rights, everything else rights. Down here you all nothing but a piece of meat. You get outta line, Ah'm gonna grind you ..." He hammered away at them for fifteen minutes. Ragen decided the man was trying to whip them into line with words, just blowing hot air. Then Ragen noticed that the psychologist, a thin, sandyhaired man with glasses, took the same tack. "You men are nothing now. |
| 510 |
He kept pyramiding his barter. Along with what his mother and Marlene sent or brought him, he was able to buy food form the commissary and thus avoid the dining room in the evenings. He would plug his sink with a rubber stopper borrowed from the lab, fill it with hot water and let a can of chicken and dumplings, soup or beef stew heat up until it was warm enough to be palatable. He wore his green uniform proudly, delighted at the privilege of being allowed to walk and even run down the main corridor instead of moving like a cockroach against the walls. He enjoyed being called "Doc," and he sent Marlene the names of some medical books to buy for him. Arthur was serious about studying medicine. When Tommy learned that many of the other prisoners had their girl friends on the visitors' list as common-law wives so they would be allowed to visit the prison, he told Ragen he wanted Marlene down as his wife. Arthur was opposed at first, but Ragen overruled him. As Milligans wife, she could bring things to the prison. "Write to her," Ragen said, "to bring oranges. But first to use hypodermic and inject vodka. Is very good." "Lee" took the spot for the first time in Lebanon. Comedian, wit, practical joker, he exemplified Arthur's theory that laughter was a safety valve appreciated by most inmates. The teasing by other inmates that had a first frightened Danny and angered Ragen was now practiced by Lee. Ragen had heard of Billy's father, the stand-up comic and M. C. who had billed himself as "half music and half wit." Ragen had decided that Lee had a role to play in prison. |
| 511 |
"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. |
| 512 |
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. I am getting this letter to you in case the inmates take over. No mail will get out if they do. The screaming and glass breaking is getting louder. I would be killed if I try to get food off the cart — Someone started a fire! but they got it put out. Guards are dragging people out right and left. The movement is slow but the inmates will probably take over by the middle of next week. I told you so!!! They are standing outside with shot guns but that still won't stop these guys. I miss you Marvene! I just want to die. Things are getting bad. In the next few days this thing may get on the 6 oclock news. Right now its just on the Cinci radio. If it becomes a full scale don't come around. I know there will be thousands of people out side, you wouldn't get in the front gate. I love you Marvene and miss you. Do me a favor. The guys around me told me to send this to my Home town radio. They need public support to get what they want. Sent it to W. H. O. K. Thank you from all the guys. Well Marv I love you veiry verry verry much take care. Love Bill If things are ok bring cocoa. "Bobby" scratched his name on the steel bunk in solitary confinement. |
| 513 |
One day he was asked to do one for the front lobby, and Tommy painted a huge canvas that was to be hung behind the admissions desk. He made the mistake of signing his own name to it, but before he presented it, Allen discovered the error, blacked out the name and signed it "Milligan." Most of these paintings did not satisfy him. They were for trading or selling quickly. But one day he became involved in a painting that was very important to him, adapted from a painting he saw in an art book. Allen, Tommy and Danny took turns working on "The Grace of Cathleen." It was originally planned to be a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady holding a mandolin. Allen worked on the face and hands. Tommy worked on the background. Danny painted the details. When the time came to put the mandolin in her hands, Danny realized he didn't know how to paint one, so he painted in a piece of sheet music instead. For forty-eight hours, without stopping, they took turns working on it. And when they were done, Milligan collapsed in his bunk and slept. "Steve" had not spent much time on the spot before Lebanon. An expert and daring driver, he had been behind the wheel a few times when he was younger, and boasted of being the best driver in the world. Ragen allowed him on the spot in Lebanon after Lee was banished, because Steve, too, had the ability to make people laugh. He was, Steve liked to brag, one of the best mimics alive. He could imitate anyone and send an audience of inmates into spasms of laughter. |
| 514 |
Finally, Billy grabbed his clothes and most of his stuff and stormed out of the house. ( 2 ) Bev Thomas was now living with Steve Love, who had been evicted from his own trailer. When Bev heard about Billy's hassles at home, she invited him to move in with them. Billy checked with his parole officer and got the okay. Bev enjoyed living with two men. No one would believe there was nothing sexual going on, that they were just three best friends who went everywhere together, did everything together and had more fun together than she'd ever had before. Billy was great with Michelle and Brian. He always took them swimming, or got ice cream for them, or took them to the zoo. He cared about those kids as if they were his own. And Bev was impressed that when she came home from work, he'd have the place cleaned up, all except the dishes. He never did the dishes. Sometimes he acted so feminine that she and Steve wondered if he was gay. Often Bev and Billy would sleep in the same bed, but he never touched her. When she asked him about it one day, he told her he was impotent. It didn't matter to her. She cared about him. And she loved the things they all did together, like going to Burr Oak Lodge for three days, camping out and spending fifty dollars on junk food. Or hiking through the woods at Clear Creek in the middle of the night, Billy holding the one flashlight and playing James Bond, trying to find secret caches of marijuana. It was fun the way he would talk with his British accent, giving the Latin names of all the plants. |
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He would, Del Moore assured Wymer, make an excellent maintenance man. Unable to check the two personal references — Dr. Steinberg and Mr. Reinert — because Milligan had neglected to give their addresses, Wymer let it go. Since the job was limited to outdoor work, he had enough to go on with the excellent reference from his last employer. But he did instruct his secretary to run the standard police check made on all new employees. When Milligan came in for a second interview, Wymer's first impressions were confirmed. He hired him for outdoor maintenance at the Williamsburg Square Apartments, adjacent to the Channingway Apartments, both of which were managed by Kelly and Lemmon. He could begin right away. After Milligan left, Wymer handed his secretary the application and W-2 form to file. He did not notice that on both, Milligan had entered the day and the year — "15-77" and "18-77" — but had left off the month of August. John Wymer had hired him, but Sharon Roth — a young woman with pale skin and long black hair — was Milligans supervisor. She found the new employee an intelligent, handsome fellow. She introduced him to the other "rental girls" and explained the procedure to him. Each day he would come to the office in Williamsburg Square and pick up the work orders filled out by her, Carol or Cathy. When the job was finished, Milligan was to sign the order and return it to Sharon. Milligan worked well the fjrst week, putting up shutters, repairing fences and walks, and doing lawn work. |
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Everyone agreed that he was an eager, ambitious worker. He slept at the Williamsburg Square apartment of Ned Adkins, one of the other young maintenance men. One morning during the second week, Milligan dropped by the personnel office to see John Wymer about renting an apartment. Wymer thought about it, and recalling Milligans description of his strong background and qualifications in electrical, plumbing, and appliance repair, he decided to try him as an inside maintenance man on twenty-four-hour call. He would have to live on the premises to be available for night and emergency calls. A rent-free apartment came with the job. "You can pick up a set of master keys from Sharon or Carol," Wymer said. His new apartment was beautiful. It had a fireplace in the living room, a bedroom, dinette and kitchen, and it faced a patio. Tommy took one of the walk-in closets for his electronic equipment, keeping it locked to prevent the children from getting into it. Allen set up a studio in the small dinette area feeing the rear. Adalana kept the place clean and did the cooking. Ragen jogged around the neighborhood to keep fit. Life at the apartment and on the job was well-organized. Arthur approved of the situation, pleased that they were finally settled. Now he could turn his attention to his medical books and research. Through an oversight on someone's part, the police check was never completed on Billy Milligan. ( 4 ) Two weeks after the move to Channingway, Ragen was jogging through the nearby poor neighborhood when he saw two black children without shoes playing on the sidewalk. |
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"As the . keeper of hate, you know what a destructive force you possess. Though hate can conquer much through violence, it is unmanageable. Now, if one wants to keep the physical power of hate but remove its evil side, one will still have hatred* with some bad traits. Our mind wanted to control your violence, to keep the anger selective and manageable. Getting rid of your evil, so that you could be strong without being angry, led to shaving off some of your evil, and thus to the creation of Philip and Kevin." "They-are same as me?" "They are criminals. As long as they have your guns, they would not hesitate to put fear into people to achieve their aims. But only with weapons. Their sense of power derives from weapons. This, they feel, brings them to your level. They're very vengeful people and certainly commit crimes against property. I declared them undesirable after Zanesville because they committed unnecessary crimes. But you know what happens during the mix-up times ... Ragen, though you have shown goodness, you still have an evil aspect to your nature. There is no way to completely cleanse hate. It is the price we pay for maintaining strength and aggressiveness." "Vould not be mix-up times," Ragen said, "if you controlled spot properly. Vas better in prison." "There were mix-up times in prison, even when you were dominant, thought you were often not aware of them until afterward. Philip and Kevin and some of the other undesirables stole time in prison. Its most important now that they not get in touch with their old criminal friends from Columbus or Lancaster. |
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"You can report to the police that you were robbed, then stop payment on the check," he said as he drove away. "Tell them you were forced to cash it. That way it'll be the bank that gets ripped off." When they arrived downtown at Broad and High streets, the car got caught in heavy traffic. "Take over and drive," he said. "If you go to the police, don't give them my description. If I see anything in the newspapers, I won't come myself, but someone else will take care of your family or you." . Then he opened the door and walked quickly away, disappearing instantly into the crowd. Ragen looked around, expecting to find himself in the Ohio State University parking lot, but instead he was walking past Lazarus' Department Store in the. middle of the afternoon. Where had the time gone? He reached into his pocket and found a roll of money. Well, he must have done it. He must have robbed someone and not remembered it. He took an eastbound bus to Reynoldsburg. Back at Channingway, he put the money and the Master Charge card on the closet shelf and went to sleep. Half an hour later, Arthur awoke, refreshed, wondering why he had slept so late. He showered, and as he changed into fresh underwear, he noticed the money on the closet shelf. Now, where in the world had that come from? Someone had been busy. Well, as long as it was there, he might as well get some groceries and pay some bills. The car payment was most important. Arthur pushed the eviction notice aside. Now that the boys had been fired, John Wymer was demanding rent for the apartment. |
| 519 |
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. |
| 520 |
"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. Behind him, he noticed the sign on the modem concrete-and-glass building opposite the lot — upham hall. A short, chubby nurse stepped through the doorway. |
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I'm going to die. She felt her face bum, her blood vessels constrict, sick deep down. Oh Christ, why hadn't she called Sidney before she left? Well, at least he knew she was supposed to call him. Maybe he'd notify the police. Her abductor reached behind the seat and picked up her purse. He took out her wallet and looked at her drivers license. "Well, Donna, drive to Interstate 71 north." He took the ten dollars out of her wallet. She had the impression he was making a big show of taking it, conspicuously folding the bills and slipping them into his shirt pocket. Then he took a cigarette out of her pack and pushed it toward her lips. "I bet you want a smoke," he said, and lit it with her car lighter. She noticed his hands had some kind of stain all over them and under the fingernails, not dirt or grime or oil, but something. Ostentatiously, he wiped his fingerprints off the lighter. That terrified Donna — it meant he was probably a professional with a police record. He noticed her startled reaction. "I'm a member of a group," he said. "Some of us are involved in political activites." Her first impression was that he was alluding to the Weathermen, thought he hadn't actually mentioned that name. She assumed, since he was making her take 1-71 north, that he was headed for Cleveland to make his escape. He was, she decided, an urban guerrilla. She was surprised when he told her to get off 1-71 at the Delaware County area and made her drive on a back road. She saw him relax, as if he knew the area, and when they were out of sight of all cars, he told her to park. |
| 522 |
The nurses and mental health technicians knew that the young women were playing up to him, competing with each other for his attention. Nurse Pat Perry noticed that Mary, a former anthropology student, came out of her depression when Billy was around and talked to her. Billy admired Marys intelligence, often asking her advice, as she asked his. He missed her when she was discharged in January, but she promised to come back to visit him. When he wasn't talking to Mary, Dr. Caul or the writer, the Teacher would find himself bored and irritated by the confinement, and he would drop down to the level of Danny, David or the unfused Billy. It was easier for him to relate to the other patients this way. Some of the staff who had become close to Billy noticed that when he was Danny or David, he had a special empathy for other patients. He knew when they were upset, hurting or feeling fear. When one of the young women would leave the open ward in a state of panic or hysteria, Billy could often tell the staff where to find her. "David and Danny are the parts of me that have empathy," the Teacher explained to the writer. "They can feel where the hurt is coming from. When someone leaves and is upset, it's like a beacon around where they are, and Danny or David will just point in the right direction." One evening after dinner, David was sitting in the living room when suddenly he imagined one of the female patients rushing toward the stairway railing outside the ward door — a steep three-floor drop down the center staircase. |
| 523 |
Ragen, who always thought David was weird for thinking these kinds of things, realized that what David was seeing was probably happening. He took the spot, dashing down the corridor and up the steps, slamming open the door and running out into the hallway. Katherine Gillott, the mental health technician who had been sitting in the office near the exit, jumped up from her desk and ran after him. She reached the corridor in time to see him grab the girl, who had already gone over the railing. He held on and pulled her up. When Gillott brought her back inside, Ragen slipped away ... 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. |
| 524 |
Other patients — many showing less improvement than he — were allowed to spend weekends at home with relatives. Dr. Caul agreed that his behavior, his insight, the long period of stability, indicated that he was ready. Billy was allowed to take a series of weekends at Kathy's house in Logan, twenty-five miles northwest of Athens. He was overjoyed. One weekend, Billy pressed Kathy to show him a copy of Johnny Morrison's suicide note, which he knew she had gotten from the public defender's office. She had resisted showing it to him up to this point, afraid it would upset him, but hearing Billy talk of Dorothy's suffering, what a rotten father Johnny Morrison had been, Kathy became annoyed. All her life Kathy had worshiped Johnny's memory. It was time for Billy to know, the truth. "Here," she said, tossing a bulky envelope on the coffee table. Then she left him alone. The envelope contained a letter to Gary Schweickart from the Office of the Medical Examiner in Dade County, Florida, along with several documents: four separate pages of instruction addressed to four different people, an eight-page letter to Mr. Herb Rau, reporter for the Miami News, and a two-page note, found tom but subsequently pieced together by the police. This appeared to be part of a second note to Rau, which had never been completed. The instructions concerned payment of outstanding debts and loans, the smallest of which was twenty-seven dollars and the largest one hundred eighty dollars. A note to "Louise" ended with "one last joke. |
| 525 |
Little Boy: Mama whats a werewolf? Mother: Shut up and comb your face." The note to "Miss Dorothy Vincent" began with instructions for payment of debts to be made from his insurance, and ended: "My final request is to be cremated — I couldn't stand your dancing over my grave." The photocopy of the letter to Mr. Herb Rau of the Miami News was unreadable in spots, indicated here by asterisks: Mr. Herb Rau Miami News Dear Sir: Writing this is not an easy task. It might seem the cowardly way out, but as my entire world has collapsed about me there is nothing left. The only hope for temporary security for my 3 children, James, William and Kathy Jo can be derived from what little insurance I have. If it is possible, can you see that their mother, Dorothy Vincent, does not get her hands on it! She is mixed up with a crowd that hangs around where she works, Place Pigalle on Miami Beach, that will gladly share it with her! Procurers, Shylocks, etc. These are the people she has broken up the home for, and believe me I did all in my power to hold it together. The story is sordid enough — The children I love with all my heart, & the fact that they are bom without the benefit of marriage, is something she wants to use as a "gimmick" to get some publicity she thinks will further her career! As follows — Since before our first child was bom, I tried several times to get her to marry me, (this is after she accused me of making her pregnant when we 1st met,) but she always found one excuse after another to avoid it. |
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(all this and the following can be proven by a deposition given my lawyer M. H. Rosenhaus of Miami) I introduced her to my family as my wife and so that when the baby arrived I had planned to go to some small town, marry her and legitimatize the baby. By this time I was so much in love with the little boy *** Again she found one excuse after another — "Somebody might read the marriage column that knows us" etc — Well eventually the second boy arrived & for the 1st 2 weeks it was touch & go whether he lived or not, but God was with us & he is now fine & healthy — As if that were a warning I suggested marriage again. By this time she had other excuses, and was getting entirely out of line — Drinking continually, disappearing from the club, & when she was in these conditions the children weren't safe with her. More than once when she hit the children it was with her arm instead of the flat of her hand — I had to threaten her with a beating to get her to stop. Believe me my life was a living hell. It began to show up in my work — I was slipping fast — I knew if this kept up I would eventually kill her — I wanted * ** but she begged me to have patience. We put the children in a wonderful nursery in Tampa, Fla. went on the road and agein with me she was able to work decent Night Clubs & Theaters. Then the little girl was on the way. We came back to Miami, and after the 3rd baby was bom she hired a woman to take care of the children and on her oath she wouldn't mix with the customers. |
| 527 |
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. As a last request, please have this looked into by the various agencys that can protect my children. And may God Have Mercy on my Soul Johnny Morrison Billy was stunned by his fathers suicide letter. He read it over and over, trying to be skeptical about it, but the more he read it, the more he wanted to know Billy later told the writer of his attempt to check it out. Before he left his sisters house in Logan, Billy phoned the Florida Bar Association to track down Johnny Morrison's lawyer, only to discover that the lawyer was dead. He called the hall of records and found there was no record of a marriage license for Johnny Morrison or Johnny Sohraner. He kept making calls until he reached the former owner of a nightclub at which Johnny had worked. The man was retired now but had a boat in Key Biscayne and still brought seafood to the club. He said he had known that someday one of Johnny's kids would be asking about him. He'd fired Billy's mother from the nightclub, he said, because of the caliber of people she was bringing in. Johnny had tried to keep her away from the people she was associating with, but it was an impossible task. He said he had never seen a woman push a man around like that. Billy said he found somebody else — a man who had worked at the Midget Motel and who remembered his father. He recalled that the phone calls during that Christmas holiday had depressed Johnny. |
| 528 |
He might also be declared a probation violator and then be forced to serve a consecutive six- to twenty-five-year sentence on the roadside-rest assaults. L. Alan Goldsberry and Steve Thompson, his Athens attorneys, filed motions in Fairfield County court to have his pleas of guilty dismissed. They argued that in 1975, unknown to the court, he had been a multiple personality, and because he had been insane and unable to assist in his own defense at that time, there had been "manifest justice." Goldsberry and Thompson held out the hope that if the judge in Lancaster would vacate the guilty plea, Billy would be a free man after he was cured. He lived on that hope. At about the same time, Billy was delighted to learn that Kathy and her longtime sweetheart, Rob Baumgardt, had decided to marry in the fall. Billy liked Rob, and he began to plan for the wedding. As he walked the hospital grounds and saw the signs of spring, he began to feel the bad times had passed. He was getting better. On weekend leave, staying at Kathys house, he started painting a mural on her wall. Dorothy Moore denied the allegations in the suicide note and agreed to its publication. Johnny Morrison had been mentally ill before he died, she said. He'd been involved with another woman — a stripper — and he had probably confused this woman with her when he wrote about the people she'd been hanging around with. Billy made his peace with his mother. On Friday afternoon, March 30, back in the ward, Billy noticed unusual glances, hushed talking and a general sense of uneasiness. |
| 529 |
Two state legislators, Claire "Buzz" Ball, Jr., of Athens, and Mike Stinziano, of Columbus, criticized the hospital and Dr. Caul, and began to press for hearings to reconsider the statute under which Milligan had been sent to Athens in the first place. They also demanded a change in the "not guilty by reason of insanity" laws. Some of Billy's enemies on the hospital staff, outraged that he was making money by selling his paintings, leaked stories to the Columbus Dispatch, the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the Dayton Daily News about the large sums of money he had at his disposal. When he used some of the money from the sale of "The Grace of Cathleen" to buy a compact Mazda to help carry his paintings, it hit the headlines. Representatives Stinziano and Ball demanded an investigative hearing at the Athens hospital. Mounting attacks and criticism stirred up by almost daily articles and front-page headlines forced Dr. Caul and Superintendent Sue Foster to ask Milligan to give up his furloughs and his privilege of leaving the grounds unattended until the furor died down. Billy was unprepared for this. He had obeyed the hospital rules, kept his word and broken no laws since his illness had been diagnosed and treated. Yet now his privileges had been taken away. Saddened, the Teacher gave up and left the spot. When Mike Rupe came on duty at eleven o'clock, Milligan was sitting in a brown vinyl chair, huddled and rubbing his hands as if frightened. Mike wondered if he should approach him. |
| 530 |
Suddenly, he noticed some pretty little white flowers. He picked a few, but saw that on the higher ground the blossoms were larger. Following the flowers up the hill and around the gate, he found himself near a small cemetery. The markers had no names — only numbers — and he wondered why. The memory of being buried alive when he was nine years old made him tremble, and he backed away. There would have been neither a name nor a number on his grave. Danny saw that the blossoms were largest at the top of the hill, so he kept climbing until he reached a cliff that dropped off sharply. He moved to the edge and braced himself against a tree as he looked at the road below, the river and the houses. Suddenly he heard cars screeching and saw flashing lights in the curved road beneath him. Looking down made him dizzy. Very dizzy. He started to sway forward when he heard a voice behind him say, "Billy, come down." He looked around. Why were all these people surrounding him? Why wasn't Arthur or Ragen here to protect him? His foot slipped and pebbles under his feet bounced down the cliffside. Then a man reached for his hand. Danny took it and held on as the man pulled him back to safety. The nice man walked back with him to the big building with the pillars on it. "Were you going to jump, Billy?" someone asked him. He looked up at a strange lady. Arthur had told him never to talk to strangers. But he could tell there was a lot of excitement in the ward, and people were looking at him and talking about him, and he decided to go to sleep and let someone else have the spot... |
| 531 |
He tried slowing the flow of blood to keep the Thorazine from going to his brain. Then he felt himself being lifted by six pairs of hands and dragged out of his room, down into the elevator, out onto the second floor and Ward 5. He saw curious faces peering into his. Someone stuck out his tongue. Someone talked to a wall. Someone urinated on the floor. The smell of vomit and feces was overwhelming. They threw him into a small bare room with a plastic-covered mattress, and locked the door. When Ragen heard the door slam, he got up to break it down, but Arthur froze him. Samuel took the spot, dropping to his knees, wailing, "Oy vey! God, why have you forsaken me?" Philip cursed and threw himself to the floor; David felt the pain. Lying on the mattress, Christene wept; Adalana felt her face wet in the pool of tears. Christopher sat up and played with his shoes. Tommy started to check the door to see if he could unlock it, but Arthur yanked him off the spot. Allen started calling for his lawyer. April, filled with desire for revenge, saw the place burning. Kevin cursed. Steve mocked him. Lee laughed. Bobby fantasized that he could fly out the window. Jason threw a tantrum. Mark, Walter, Martin and Timothy raved wildly in the locked room. Shawn made a buzzing sound. Arthur no longer controlled the undesirables. Through the observation window, the young Ward 5 attendants watched Milligan bang into walls, spin around, babble in different voices and accents, laugh, cry, fall to the ground and get up again. |
| 532 |
I'm gonna kill you!" After that, Dr. Caul always looked around carefully before getting into his car, and he slept with a loaded revolver on the bedside table. The following week, the Dispatch reported Stinzianos protests against the attempt by the Athens Mental Health Center and hospital superintendent Sue Foster to find a new hospital for Milligan. Stinziano Doubts Athens Aides on Milligan Transfer State Rep. Mike Stinziano, D-Columbus, is skeptical about efforts by Athens Mental Health Center officials to down play the possibility that William S. Milligan could be transferred to another institution. The Columbus Democrat is convinced that newspaper publicity early last week stopped state officials from quietly transferring the 24-year-old mentally ill rapist and robber. "Frankly, without the publicity, I feel certain he (Milligan) would have been transferred out of state or to Lima (State Hospital)," Stinziano said ... During the Wednesday press conference in Athens, Mrs. Foster said, "Treatment of Billy Milligan has been compromised by the press and his reaction to the press." The superintendent referred to the numerous reports which followed The Dispatch's revelation that Milligan had been allowed on unsupervised leaves from the Athens Hospital. Mrs. Foster's comment brought a rebuff from Stinziano. "Blaming the press for reporting the facts is irresponsible," he said ... When Stinziano and Ball demanded that the Ohio Mental Health Department call in outside experts to evaluate Milligans treatment, Dr. |
| 533 |
Cornelia Wilbur agreed to come to Athens. Her report praised Dr. Cauls treatment program. Setbacks like this, she explained, occurred often with multiple personalities. The Columbus Dispatch reported on April 28, 1979: Sybil's Psychiatrist Approves of Leaves in Milligan Therapy By Melissa Widner The psychiatrist asked by the Ohio Department of Mental Health ... to consult on the case of mental patient A William Milligan has recommended that no major changes be made in his treatment. In her report to the department, made public Friday, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur supported Milligan's therapy, which until recently included frequent furloughs from the Athens Mental Health Center, where he is a patient. ... Dr. Wilbur said he is no longer dangerous after 13 months of therapy in state and private mental institutions. She suggested his treatment at the Athens facility be continued. She said the unchaperoned leaves as part of his treatment were well conceived, but publicity about those leaves had had a negative effect... The following article appeared in the Columbus Citizen-Journal on May 3, 1979: Milligan Doctor's Objectivity Questioned State Rep. Mike Stinziano, D-Columbus, is questioning the objectivity of a psychiatrist who recommended treatments for William Milligan ... In a letter to Myers Kurtz sic, acting director of the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation, Stinziano said Dr. Cornelia Wilbur should not give advice on the Milligan case "since she was originally responsible for the placement of William Milligan in Athens." Stinziano said the selection of Dr. |
| 534 |
We have work to do. Your story is important." Billy nodded. "That's what I want now," he said. "For the world to know." As therapy went forward, outside pressure on the hospital administration continued. Billy's two-week contract with the staff was renewed. Privileges were slowly restored. The Columbus Dispatch continued to run hostile Milligan stories. The state legislators, in response to the newspaper reports, pressed on with hearings. When Stinziano and Ball learned : hat a book on Milligan was being written, they introduced House Bill 557 to prevent offenders — including those found lot guilty by reason of insanity — from keeping any of the noney they might make from the stories of their lives or from *evelations about the crimes they commited. The hearings on his bill before the state Judiciary Committee were to begin in wo months. ( 4 ) 3y June, despite the ongoing newspaper attacks and upheavals hey caused in his living conditions and treatment, Billy renamed stable. He was once again allowed to sign himself out o exercise on the hospital grounds (but not to go to town inattended). His therapy sessions with Dr. Caul continued, ie started painting again. But now both the writer and Dr. Haul agreed that there was a noticeable change in the Teacher, iis memory was less accurate. He was becoming as manipulate as Allen and as antisocial as Tommy, Kevin and Phillip. The Teacher told the writer that one day, when he'd been vorking with Tommy's CB equipment, he'd heard himself say loud, "Hey, what am I doing? |
| 535 |
As he walked down the steps witf the uniformed men Billy saw the officers staring through the window of the security office. He tried to keep from smiling while he was driven off by what must have looked like i military escort. * * * Billy told the writer of disturbing changes he was noticing in himself. Without switching to Tommy, he opened locked doors without keys. He rode his new motorcycle without switching to Ragen, yet he rode it as Ragen would have, up steep hills. He felt the pulsating adrenaline, as Ragen had felt it, physically aware of himself every muscle working well to do the things he was now able to do, though he himself had never been on a bike before. He also found himself becoming antisocial, annoyed at the other inmates, impatient with the staff. He had the strange sense of wanting desperately to get a six-foot metal rod with a hook at the end and go down to the electric terminal. He knew where the U-80 current transformer was. By pulling it down, he could turn the juice off. He argued with himself that it was wrong. If the pole lights went off in the street, someone might have a wreck. But why did he want to do it? Then he remembered one night when his mother and Chalmer had been arguing. Unable to stand it, Tommy had gone off on his bicycle down Spring Street. He'd ridden to the terminal, crawled in and knocked the electricity out. Tommy knew that when the lights went out, people got calmer. They'd have to stop fighting. Three streets had lost power — Hubert Avenue, Methoff Drive and Spring Street. |
| 536 |
When he got back it was dark, but the argument was over, and Dorothy and Chalmer were sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee by candlelight. That's what had made him want to do it again now. He'd heard from Kathy that Dorothy had been having some bad arguments with Del. Billy smiled as he looked up at the power xansformer. Just a case of sociopathic deja vu. He also suspected there was something else wrong with him iow, because he had little interest in sex. He'd had opportunities. Twice when he was supposed to be on leave at his sister's louse, he had checked into motels in Athens with young vomen who had shown interest in him, but both times, seeing fie police cars watching him from the road, he had given it up. 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. |
| 537 |
Billy worked on the electrical box from the inside. "Do you know any poems?" he asked her. "I know the Bible." "Recite some psalms for me," he said. They talked about the Bible fur nearly half an hour. When the elevator maintenance man finally got it moving, and they came out on the third floor, the girl looked up at Billy and said, "Can I have a can of pop now?" The following Saturday, Billy rose early. Though he felt good about his art exhibit, he was upset about the Dispatch article that described the exhibit, rehashing — as they always did — the ten personalities and calling him a "multi-personality rapist." He had to get used to handling mixed emotions. It was a new kind of feeling — confusing but necessary to his mental stability. This morning he decided to jog to the Ohio University Inn, adjacent to the hospital grounds, and get a pack of cigarettes. He knew he shouldn't be smoking. In the old days only Allen had smoked cigarettes. But he needed it. There would be time enough to give up the habit when he was cured. He walked down the front steps of the hospital and noticed two men in a car parked opposite the entrance. He assumed they were visiting someone. But when he crossed the road, the car passed him. Coming around the building to a secondary road, he saw it again. He cut across the freshly mowed field, walked toward the footbridge over the creek that bordered the hospital property, and saw the car for the fourth time, turning up Dairy Lane, the road between the creek and the inn, the road he would have to pass after he crossed the footbridge. |
| 538 |
If he won, and Dr- Caul sent him to Kentucky, he knew Dr. Wilbur could help him. But what if Judge Jackson ruled against him? What if he were destined to spend the rest of his life in mental hospitals and prisons? The state was sending him hospital bills now at the rate of over a hundred dollars a day. They wanted all his money. They wanted him broke. He couldn't sleep Saturday night. At about three in the morning, Ragen went outside, wheeling his motorcycle silently from the house. A fog was drifting into the valley, and he felt like riding until early light. He started down the road toward Logan Dam. He loved the fog best in the dark of night, and often he would wander out into the densest, deepest fog, whether in the middle of the forest or the center of a lake, watching the foreground blend into nothing. Three in the morning was his favorite hour. As he approached the top ledge of Logan Dam, a narrow ridge just wide enough for his cycle wheel, he turned his headlight off; its reflection in the fog would blind him. With the headlight out, he could see black on two sides and the light strip of the ridge down the middle. He kept his wheel centered. It was dangerous, but he needed the danger. He needed, once again, to conquer something. It didn't have to be something illegal, but every now and then he had to do something dangerous, had to feel the adrenaline pumping. He needed to be a victor. He had never ridden the dam ridge before. He didn't know how long it was. He couldn't see that far ahead. |
| 539 |
Goldsberry and Thompson had provided the court with depositions from Drs. George Harding, Cornelia Wilbur, Stella Karolin and David Caul, and Psychologist Dorothy Turner, all agreeing that there was "a reasonable medical certainty" that Billy Milligan had been a mentally ill multiple personality when the roadside-rest assaults and the Gray Drug Store robbery were committed in December 1974 and January 1975. 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. |
| 540 |
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. Back on the ward, Billy sat in the lobby and thought about how he couldn't do anything right anymore. He felt like a dunce because he was losing all the things his other personalities had given him: Arthur's intelligence, Ragens strength, Allen's smooth talking, Tommy's electronics knowledge. He was feeling more and more stupid, pressures were building and building. The stress and the fear were getting to him. Noises were amplified, colors became unbearably intense. He wanted to go into his room, slam the door, and scream and scream and scream ... The following day, Wanda Pancake was finishing her lunch in the coffee room when a friend jumped out of his chair and ran to the window. Wanda turned and peered through the rain to see what he was staring at. "I saw somebody," he said, pointing. "A guy in a tan trench coat ran across the Richland Avenue bridge and then went under it." "Where?" She stood on tiptoe, stretching her short, stocky frame, but all she could see through the rain-streaked window was a car parked on the bridge. The driver got out, looked over the side of the bridge wall, went back to his car and then to the wall, looking down as if watching something or someone below. |
| 541 |
Billy would not be allowed to leave to attend her wedding the next day. The story was leaked to the newspapers, and the following appeared in the Columbus Citizen-Journal on October 3, 1979: Milligan Financed Rum Party, Patrol Will Reveal — Stinziano By Eric Rosenman William S. Milligan, the alleged multiple personality rapist, was one of four patients who engaged in a "rum and Coke party" on the grounds of the Athens Mental Health Center last week, a state legislator claimed Wednesday. Rep. Mike Stinziano of Columbus said a secret Ohio Highway Patrol investigation will conclude Milligan provided two women patients with money to buy rum and then the women, Milligan and a second male patient held a "rum and Coke" party... . The representative said the story indicates that "there appears to be little control over activities at the center." "As I understand it, the report will not be able to prove the women were raped," Stinziano said Wednesday. "But it will say the two women were given money by Milligan to buy liquor, went off the grounds to make the purchase and then returned with rum ..." Last Friday, Lt. Richard Wilcox, head of the patrol's investigation section, said tests to determine whether the women had been raped or had been intoxicated were incomplete and would not be made public until the investigation was over. Stinziano said he was certain of his sources who supplied the tale of the party. The same day, the writer was permitted to visit Ward 5. Milligan did not recognize him until the writer prompted him. |
| 542 |
W. O. L. attempt... . The two, Milligan and Holston, proceeded to the parking lot, where Milligan had a vehicle which was brought back from an A. W. L., proceeded to unlock the car and enter the car ..." Milligan, he said, was prevented from entering the car, and Milligan and Holston then ran over the hill. Three men were able to subdue Milligan and take him back to Ward 5. After hearing Chief Cremeans' evidence, Judge Jones granted the motion of the attorney general's office that Milligan be sent to Lima. At two o'clock, on October 4, 1979, Billy was handcuffed and belt-shackled, and with no time to say good-by to anyone but Dr. Caul, he was driven 180 miles away to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Columbus Dispatch, October 5, 1979: Top Officials Seen Spurring Milligan Transfer By Robert Ruth Direct intervention by top state mental health officials prompted the transfer Thursday of multipersonality rapist William S. Milligan to Lima State Hospital, a maximum security facility, a reliable source reports. The transfer order came after top officials in the Ohio Mental Health and Mental Retardation s Columbus headquarters made several phone calls Wednesday to the Athens Mental Health Center where Milligan had been confined for 10 months, the source said. Mental Health Director Timothy Moritz made at least one of the calls, the source added... . Two state legislators — Reps. Mike Stinziano D-Columbus, and Claire Mr. Ball, Jr., R-Athens — repeatedly have complained about what they charged was lenient treatment given the rapist. |
| 543 |
( 2 ) A week later, at the Allen County Courthouse, where the referee would hear Goldsberry s motion to return Milligan to Athens, the writer saw Billy in handcuff's for the first time. It was the Teacher, and he smiled sheepishly. Alone in the room with Goldsberry and the writer, the Teacher spoke of his treatment at Lima during the past week. Dr. Lindner, the clinical director, had diagnosed him as a pseudo-psychopathic schizophrenic, and he prescribed Stelazine, one of the psychotropic drugs in the same family as Thorazine, the drug that made the splitting so much worse. They talked until the bailiff informed them the referee, was ready to begin. Goldsberry and Billy asked that the writer be allowed to sit at the table with them, across from Assistant Attorney General David Belinky and his witness for the state of Ohio, Dr. Lewis Lindner, a thin man with a pinched face, metal-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard. He looked across the room at Milligan with an undisguised sneer. After several more minutes of conferences between the attorneys and the referee, the referee made the decision — on the basis of law only, with no testimony — that since Judge Jones had ruled the appropriate place for hospitalization was Lima State Hospital, and since by the end of November Milligan would have the right to present evidence at his ninety-day review, the hearing was moot. The court would decide in six weeks whether or not Milligan was still mentally ill, and whether or not to keep him at Lima. |
| 544 |
"I don't wish to discuss it any further," Lindner said, and hung up. When the writer asked to join a group tour of the Lima State Hospital facility the day before the November hearing, it was granted at first by the public relations department. The day before the tour, however, he received a call telling him that his visit had been canceled by Dr. Lindner and Superintendent Hubbard, and that the Security Department had been told the writer was to be barred from the hospital grounds permanently. When the writer inquired as to the reason, Assistant Attorney General David Belinky said he had been advised by hospital officials that the writer was suspected of having smuggled drugs to Milligan. Later the reason was changed to "not therapeutically advisable." ( 3 ) November 30 was cold; the first snow lay on the ground. The Allen County Courthouse in Lima, Ohio, was an old building, and though Courtroom 3 was large enough to seat about fifty people, most of the chairs were empty. The Milligan review hearing had been closed to the public and the media, but the TV cameras were waiting outside. The Teacher sat, in handcuffs, between his attorneys. In addition to the attorneys, only Dorothy, Del Moore and the writer were admitted as observers by the court. Also present were James O'Grady, assistant prosecutor for Franklin County, William Jan Hans, a representative of the Ohio Adult Parole Authority, and Ann Henldner, an attorney observer for Southwest Community Mental Health Center in Columbus. |
| 545 |
The expressionless men that wore drooling towels like bibs walked even slower but the burly attendents hurried them with a stinging crack of the wide leather belts, allowing them no dignity whatsoever. Thorazine, Prolixion, Haldol and any other psychotropic drug on the market maintained and assured obedience of the strictest kind, so it was fed like candy. No humanity, but I almost forgot. We are not human. Clank! Every joint in my body seemed to stiffen and freeze as I stepped in claustrophobically ridden 8 by 10 room and pulled the door. Clank. Edging over to sit on my bed is becoming more of a chore but I did adjust myself on the plastic mattress. With the mass of nothingness I decided to use my imagination on the chipping paint on the opposite wall. I could conjure up silhouette images for my own amusement and try to identify them. Today, only faces, old, ugly and ravaged demonic faces seemed to hallucinate from the chips of an aging institution. It was scary but I allowed it. The wall was laughing at me. 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. |
| 546 |
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. |
| 547 |
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. I am not a mental basket case. I still had some fight in me. I have not lost but I have not won. I broke a window and I don't even know why. Hie writer received a letter, dated January 30, from another patient at Lima: Dear Sir, Let me get to the main point. Within twenty four hours of Bill's visit by his attorney, Bill was transferred from I. T. U. 5 to I. T. U. 9. Nine is a stronger ward than five. The decision for the transfer was made by the "team personnel" in the daily team meeting. |
| 548 |
The judge ordered that Billy remain at Lima. During most of 1979, the Ohio legislature had been considering changes in the existing laws regarding persons found lot guilty by reason of insanity. Before such an individual : ould be transferred to a less restrictive environment (as the aw required), the county prosecutor would have the right to lemand a hearing in the jurisdiction in which the crime had ieen committed. The patients right to a review would be banged from every 90 days to every 180 days, and would also )e open to the public, the press and TV. This soon came to be : alled by many, "the Columbus Dispatch law" or "the Milligan aw." Bernie Yavitch, who had been the prosecutor on the Milligan case, later told me he had worked on the subcommittee of he Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association that drafted the lew law. Yavitch said: "The group was meeting, I guess, in esponse to the outcry that was going on over the Milligan ituation 55 The new law, Senate Bill 297, was passed, effective May 20, .980. 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. |
| 549 |
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. |
| 550 |
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. 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. |
| 551 |
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. |
| 552 |
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. |
| 553 |
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... |
| 554 |
. One of Gilmore s concerns centered around an incident several weeks ago when Milligan ... reportedly ordered a bologna sandwich at 2:30 a. m. He said the hospital staff then had to prepare sandwiches for everyone in Milligans ward ... Tanda tried for weeks to find a preacher, minister, priest, or judge who would perform the ceremony. Finally, she found a young Methodist minister, director of the city's new transient "open shelter," who agreed to marry them. Gary Witte had hoped to remain anonymous, fearing that the publicity might harm his work at the shelter. However, a Columbus Dispatch reporter recognized and identified him. "My personal philosophy," the young minister told him, "is that I've always been for the underdog. ... I did the ceremony because nobody else would do it..." The marriage took place on December 22, 1981, with only the minister, an officer of the probate court who had brought the marriage license, and myself present. Dr. Box had already left for Australia. It was the Teacher who placed the ring on Tanda's finger, and kissed her. Since Ohio does not have conjugal visits, there would be no possibility for them to be alone together unless he was transferred to a minimum security or a civil-mental hospital. After the wedding, Tanda faced the dozens of waiting reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen at a brief press conference. She told them she had met most of the personalities and they had accepted her. She said a day would come when they would live a normal life. |
| 555 |
But Dr. Jay Davis testified, "He's at the baseline level... He is fragmented. I could name the personality sitting there right now, and its not Billy." He pointed out to Judge Flowers why Columbus was not the place for Milligan. "Maximum security facilities obstruct the therapy of multiple personality patients." If he stayed at the Columbus facility, Davis explained, the treatment was likely to be nonproductive. Dr. Harry Eisel, a clinical psychologist, testified that he had administered the "Hand" test to several of the aggressive personalities to determine whether or not they might be dangerous. The "Hand" test, a series of pictures of hands in many different positions, about which the patient makes judgments, is a projective technique to evaluate the individual s potential for violent behavior. Eisel testified that none of the personalities he had tested (I later learned they were Philip, Kevin, and Ragen) were dangerous to any significant degree. Although a social worker testified for the prosecutor that Milligan had threatened him and his family, under crossexamination he admitted he was threatened often by mental patients, but that nothing had ever come of them. Dr. Caul testified that he would accept Milligan for treatment and would abide by any restrictions imposed by the court. On April 8, 1982, Judge Jay Flowers ordered the Department of Mental Health to transfer Billy Milligan back to the Athens Mental Health Center. He ordered that the patient be allowed to paint and do woodworking, but he also suggested close supervision off the ward. |
| 556 |
Before Milligan could be permitted to leave the hospital grounds, the court must be notified. "People say he deserves another chance," Judge Flowers said. "Lets give him another chance." At eleven o'clock, on the morning of April 15, 1982, after two and a half years in three Ohio maximum security hospitals, Billy Milligan was returned to Athens. I visit him regularly, and speak with Tommy or Allen. According to both of them, there has been no coconsciousness among the "people" for a long time. Allen hears the voices in his head — the British and Yugoslav accents — but neither he nor Tommy can get through to them, or to each other. There is no communication inside. There is much lost time. The Teacher has not, at this writing, returned. Tommy is painting landscapes. Danny is painting still lifes. Allen is painting portraits, and making notes of the incredible experiences at Lima, Dayton, and Columbus, and how his people coped and survived. Dr. David Caul has begun the difficult task of undoing the damage of the past two and a half years, and of trying to put pieces back together again. No one knows how long it will take. Although Billy Milligans return to Athens stirred up controversy in Columbus that upset him, he was pleased when he read a copy of the Ohio University student newspaper. The Post had published an editorial on April 12th, anticipating the transfer: "... Milligan, who has certainly not been given a fair shake in life, has come to Athens to be treated by the experts here. |
| 557 |
Well, now, how do you do that — homestead an autumn landscape that won't stand still, all whispers, shadows, and dousing rains? It all began the day I was born. Oh my god, I can hear you say, here comes the flim-flam. No, no, I say, here comes a consequential truth: I remember being born. Can't be done, you counter. Never happened. Did, is my response. I found out many, many years later the reason for my remembrance: I was a ten-month baby. Which means what? That snugged away for an extra twenty-eight or thirty days I had a serene opportunity to develop my sight, hearing, and taste. I came forth wide-eyed, aware of everything I saw and felt. Especially the dreadful shock of being propelled out into a cooler environment, leaving my old home forever, to be surrounded by strangers. All because I had lingered for that extra month and sharpened my senses. You must admit that gave me an advantage few other humans have had, to emerge with my retina in full register to recall from Instant One a lifetime of metaphors, large and small. From that moment on I can recollect my life. When I was three my mother, a maniac for silent movies, toted me to the cinema to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney riding the bells and raining hot liquid lead on the villains below the church. I did not encounter the Hunchback again until I was seventeen, when some unholy friends took me to a theatre in Hollywood for a late-on-in-life review. Before we entered I told my friends I remembered the entire film, last seen when I was three. |
| 558 |
Some ate sugar cane, gnawing away at the outer bark until it split down and they pulled it off in great hunks to get at the succulent pulp, and the juicy sinews on which to suck. In all, there were fifty people. "Joe," said Marie behind him, holding his arm. It was no ordinary package the first man in the procession carried on his head, balanced delicately as a chicken-plume. It was covered with silver satin and silver fringe and silver rosettes. And he held it gently with one brown hand, the other hand swinging free. This was a funeral and the little package was a coffin. Joseph glanced at his wife. She was the color of fine, fresh milk. The pink color of the bath was gone. Her heart had sucked it all down to some hidden vacuum in her. She held fast to the french doorway and watched the traveling people go, watched them eat fruit, heard them talk gentle, laugh gently. She forgot she was naked. He said, "Some little girl or boy gone to a happier place." "Where are they taking — her?" She did not think it unusual, her choice of the feminine pronoun. Already she had identified herself with that tiny fragment parceled like an unripe variety of fruit. Now, in this moment, she was being carried up the hill within compressing darkness, a stone in a peach, silent and terrified, the touch of the father against the coffin material outside; gentle and noiseless and firm inside. "To the graveyard, naturally; that's where they're taking her," he said, the cigarette making a filter of smoke across his casual face. |
| 559 |
"So in this way you get them for twenty pesos a year, year after year, for maybe thirty years. If they don't pay, you threaten to stand mama-cita or little nino in the catacomb." "We must live," said the little man. Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three. Marie counted in the center of the long corridor, the standing dead on all sides of her. They were screaming. They looked as if they had leaped, snapped upright in their graves, clutched hands over their shriveled bosoms and screamed, jaws wide, tongues out, nostrils flared. And been frozen that way. All of them had open mouths. Theirs was a perpetual screaming. They were dead and they knew it. In every raw fiber and evaporated organ they knew it. She stood listening to them scream. They say dogs hear sounds humans never hear, sounds so many decibels higher than normal hearing that they seem nonexistent. The corridor swarmed with screams. Screams poured from terror-yawned lips and dry tongues, screams you couldn't hear because they were so high. Joseph walked up to one standing body. "Say 'ah,'" he said. Sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, counted Marie, among the screams. "Here is an interesting one," said the proprietor. They saw a woman with arms flung to her head, mouth wide, teeth intact, whose hair was wildly flourished, long and shimmery on her head. Her eyes were small pale white-blue eggs in her skull. "Sometimes, this happens. This woman, she is a cataleptic. One day she falls down upon the earth, but is really not dead, for, deep in her, the little drum of her heart beats and beats, so dim one cannot hear. |
| 560 |
Naked bodies. Long ago the clothes had whispered away. The fat women's breasts were lumps of yeasty dough left in the dust. The men's loins were indrawn, withered orchids. "Mr. Grimace and Mr. Gape," said Joseph. He pointed his camera at two men who seemed in conversation, mouths in mid-sentence, hands gesticulant and stiffened over some long-dissolved gossip. Joseph clicked the shutter, rolled the film, focused the camera on another body, clicked the shutter, rolled the film, walked on to another. Eighty-one, eight-two, eighty-three. Jaws down, tongues out like jeering children, eyes pale brown-irised in upclenched sockets. Hairs, waxed and prickled by sunlight, each sharp as quills embedded on the lips, the cheeks, the eyelids, the brows. Little beards on chins and bosoms and loins. Flesh like drumheads and manuscripts and crisp bread dough. The women, huge ill-shaped tallow things, death-melted. The insane hair of them, like nests made and unmade and remade. Teeth, each single, each fine, each perfect, in jaw. Eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight. A rushing of Marie's eyes. Down the corridor, flicking. Counting, rushing, never stopping. On! Quick! Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three! Here was a man, his stomach open, like a tree hollow where you dropped your child love letters when you were eleven! Her eyes entered the hole in the space under his ribs. She peeked in. He looked like an Erector set inside. The spine, the pelvic plates. The rest was tendon, parchment, bone, eye, beardy jaw, ear, stupefied nostril. |
| 561 |
"Quiero — no!" She stopped. She started again. "Americano — uh — maggah-zeenas?" "Oh, no, senorita!" Her hands opened wide at her waist, then closed, like mouths. Her mouth opened and closed. The shop had a veil over it, in her eyes. Here she was and here were these small baked adobe people to whom she could say nothing and from whom she could get no words she understood, and she was in a town of people who said no words to her and she said no words to them except in blushing confusion and bewilderment. And the town was circled by desert and time, and home was far away, far away in another life. She whirled and fled. Shop following shop she found no magazines save those giving bullfights in blood on their covers or murdered people or lace-confection priests. But at last three poor copies of the Post were bought with much display and loud laughter and she gave the vendor of this small shop a handsome tip. Rushing out with the Posts eagerly on her bosom in both hands she hurried along the narrow walk, took a skip over the gutter, ran across the street, sang la-la, jumped onto the further walk, made another little scamper with her feet, smiled an inside smile, moving along swiftly, pressing the magazines tightly to her, half-closing her eyes, breathing the charcoal evening air, feeling the wind watering past her ears. 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. |
| 562 |
I've shaved every morning for thirty goddamn mornings and put on a tie and had a crease in my pants. From now on, no pants, no ties, no shaving, no nothing." He yanked the covers over his ears so violently that he pulled the blankets off one of his naked legs. The leg hung upon the rim of the bed, warm white in the sunlight, each little black hair — perfect. Her eyes widened, focused, stared upon it. She put her hand over her mouth, tight. He went in and out of the hotel all day. He did not shave. He walked along the plaza tiles below. He walked so slowly she wanted to throw a lightning bolt out of the window and hit him. He paused and talked to the hotel manager below, under a drum-cut tree, shifting his shoes on the pale blue plaza tiles. He looked at birds on trees and saw how the State Theater statues were dressed in fresh morning gilt, and stood on the corner, watching the traffic carefully. There was no traffic! He was standing there on purpose, taking his time, not looking back at her. Why didn't he run, lope down the alley, down the hill to the garage, pound on the doors, threaten the mechanics, lift them by their pants, shove them into the car motor! He stood instead, watching the ridiculous traffic pass. A hobbled swine, a man on a bike, a 1927 Ford, and three half-nude children. Go, go, go, she screamed silently, and almost smashed the window. He sauntered across the street. He went around the corner. All the way down to the garage he'd stop at windows, read signs, look at pictures, handle pottery. |
| 563 |
Maybe he'd stop in for a beer. God, yes, a beer. She walked in the plaza, took the sun, hunted for more magazines. She cleaned her fingernails, burnished them, took a bath, walked again in the plaza, ate very little, and returned to the room to feed upon her magazines. She did not lie down. She was afraid to. Each time she did she fell into a half-dream, half-drowse in which all her childhood was revealed in a helpless melancholy. 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. |
| 564 |
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. |
| 565 |
Maxfield Parrish's rediscovery left Mr. Garvey in the north pasture. Overnight, everyone agreed, "Beer's intellectual. What a shame so many idiots drink it." In short, his friends vanished. Alexander Pape, it was rumored, for a lark, was even considering hot water for his cold-water flat. This ugly canard was quashed, but not before Alexander Pape suffered a comedown among the cognoscenti. Garvey sweated to anticipate the shifting taste! He increased the free food output, foresaw the swing back to the Roaring Twenties by wearing hairy knickers and displaying his wife in a tube dress and boyish bob long before anyone else. But, the vultures came, ate, and ran. Now that this frightful Giant, TV, strode the world, they were busily re-embracing radio. Bootlegged 1935 transcriptions of Vic and Sade and Pepper Young's Family were fought over at intellectual galas. At long last, Garvey was forced to turn to a series of miraculous tours de force, conceived and carried out by his panic-stricken inner self. The first accident was a slammed car door. Mr. Garvey's little fingertip was neatly cut off! In the resultant chaos, hopping about, Garvey stepped on, then kicked the fingertip into a street drain. By the time they fished it out, no doctor would bother sewing it back on. A happy accident! Next day, strolling by an oriental shop, Garvey spied a beautiful objet d'art. His peppy old subconscious, considering his steadily declining box office and his poor audience-rating among the avant-garde, forced him into the shop and dragged out his wallet. |
| 566 |
Here luminous portraits of the long, the short, the large, the small bones. Mr. Harris must be aware of his position, his problem! M. Munigant's hand tapped, rattled, whispered, scratched at faint nebulae of flesh in which hung ghosts of cranium, spinal-cord, pelvis, lime, calcium, marrow, here, there, this, that, these, those, and others! Look! Harris shuddered. The X-rays and the paintings blew in a green and phosphorescent wind from a land peopled by the monsters of Dali and Fuseli. M. Munigant whistled quietly. Did Mr. Harris wish his bones — treated? "That depends," said Harris. Well, M. Munigant could not help Harris unless Harris was in the proper mood. Psychologically, one had to need help, or the doctor was useless. But (shrugging) M. Munigant would "try." Harris lay on a table with his mouth open. The lights were switched off, the shades drawn. M. Munigant approached his patient. Something touched Harris's tongue. He felt his jawbones forced out. They creaked and made faint cracking noises. One of those skeleton charts on the dim wall seemed to quiver and jump. A violent shudder seized Harris. Involuntarily, his mouth snapped shut. M. Munigant shouted. His nose had almost been bitten off! No use, no use! Now was not the time! M. Munigant whispered the shades up, dreadfully disappointed. When Mr. Harris felt he could cooperate psychologically, when Mr. Harris really needed help and trusted M. Munigant to help him, then maybe something could be done. M. Munigant held out his little hand. |
| 567 |
In the meantime, the fee was only two dollars. Mr. Harris must begin to think. Here was a sketch for Mr. Harris to take home and study. It would acquaint him with his body. He must be tremblingly aware of himself. He must be on guard. Skeletons were strange, unwieldy things. M. Munigant's eyes glittered. Good day to Mr. Harris. Oh, and would he care for a breadstick? M. Munigant proffered a jar of long hard salty breadsticks to Harris, taking one himself, saying that chewing breadsticks kept him in — ah — practice. Good day, good day, to Mr. Harris! Mr. Harris went home. The next day, Sunday, Mr. Harris discovered innumerable fresh aches and pains in his body. He spent the morning, his eyes fixed staring with new interest at the small, anatomically perfect painting of a skeleton M. Munigant had given him. His wife, Clarisse, startled him at dinner when she cracked her exquisitely thin knuckles, one by one, until he clapped his hands to his ears and cried, "Stop!" The rest of the afternoon he quarantined himself in his room. Clarisse played bridge in the parlor laughing and chatting with three other ladies while Harris, hidden away, fingered and weighed the limbs of his body with growing curiosity. After an hour he suddenly rose and called: "Clarisse!" She had a way of dancing into any room, her body doing all sorts of soft, agreeable things to keep her feet from ever quite touching the nap of a rug. She excused herself from her friends and came to see him now, brightly. She found him re-seated in a far corner and she saw that he was staring at the anatomical sketch. |
| 568 |
He wanted to leave the office, get into business for himself. He had more than a little talent for ceramics and sculpture. As soon as possible he'd head for Arizona, borrow that money from Mr. Creldon, build a kiln and set up shop. It was a worry. What a case he was. But luckily he had contacted M. Munigant, who seemed eager to understand and help him. He would fight it out with himself, not go back to either Munigant or Dr. 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. |
| 569 |
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. Weighing himself on a penny scale he saw the slow gliding red arrow point to: 165. He groaned. Why, I've weighed 175 for years. I can't have lost ten pounds! He examined his cheeks in the fly-dotted mirror. Cold, primitive fear rushed over him in odd little shivers. You, you! I know what you're about, you! He shook his fist at his bony face, particularly addressing his remarks to his superior maxillary, his inferior maxillary, to his cranium and to his cervical vertebrae. "You damn thing, you! Think you can starve me, make me lose weight, eh? Peel the flesh off, leave nothing, but skin on bone. Trying to ditch me, so you can be supreme, ah? No, no!" He fled into a cafeteria. Turkey, dressing, creamed potatoes, four vegetables, three desserts, he could eat none of it, he was sick to his stomach. He forced himself. His teeth began to ache. Bad teeth, is it? he thought angrily. I'll eat in spite of every tooth clanging and banging and rattling so they fall in my gravy. His head blazed, his breath jerked in and out of a constricted chest, his teeth raged with pain, but he knew one small victory. |
| 570 |
He swallowed all the aspirin he could find, in an effort to stave off the assault; but when the doorbell finally rang an hour later, he could not move; he lay weak and exhausted, panting, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Come in! Come in, for God's sake!" M. Munigant came in. Thank God the door was unlocked. Oh, but Mr. Harris looked terrible. M. Munigant stood in the center of the living room, small and dark. Harris nodded. The pains rushed through him, hitting him with large iron hammers and hooks. M. Munigant's eyes glittered as he saw Harris' protuberant bones. Ah, he saw that Mr. Harris was now psychologically prepared for aid. Was it not so? Harris nodded again, feebly, sobbing. M. Munigant still whistled when he talked; something about his tongue and the whistling. No matter. Through his shimmering eyes Harris seemed to see M. Munigant shrink, get smaller. Imagination, of course. Harris sobbed out his story of the Phoenix trip. M. Munigant sympathized. This skeleton was a — a traitor! They would fix him for once and for all! "Mr. Munigant," sighed Harris, faintly, "I — I never noticed before. Your tongue. Round, tube-like. Hollow? My eyes. Delirious. What do I do?" M. Munigant whistled softly, appreciatively, coming closer. If Mr. Harris would relax in his chair, and open his mouth? The lights were switched off. M. Munigant peered into Harris' dropped jaw. Wider, please? It had been so hard, that first visit, to help Harris, with both body and bone in revolt. Now, he had cooperation from the flesh of the man, anyway, even if the skeleton protested. |
| 571 |
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. |
| 572 |
Then the wave gave me back to the sky, the sand, the children yelling. I came out of the lake and the world was waiting for me, having hardly moved since I went away. I ran up on the beach. Mama swabbed me with a furry towel. "Stand there and dry," she said. I stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms. I replaced them with goose-pimples. "My, there's a wind," said Mama. "Put on your sweater." "Wait'll I watch my goose-bumps," I said. "Harold," said Mama. I put the sweater on and watched the waves come up and fall down on the beach. But not clumsily. On purpose, with a green sort of elegance. Even a drunken man could not collapse with such elegance as those waves. It was September. In the last days when things are getting sad for no reason. The beach was so long and lonely with only about six people on it. The kids quit bouncing the ball because somehow the wind made them sad, too, whistling the way it did, and the kids sat down and felt autumn come along the endless shore. All of the hot-dog stands were boarded up with strips of golden planking, sealing in all the mustard, onion, meat odors of the long, joyful summer. It was like nailing summer into a series of coffins. One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. 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. |
| 573 |
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. |
| 574 |
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. "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. |
| 575 |
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. |
| 576 |
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. It was not quite as late in the year as that day so many years before, but the first evidences of desertion were coming upon the beach. People were thinning out, several of the hot-dog stands had been shuttered and nailed, and the wind, as always, waited there to sing for us. |
| 577 |
On Saturday, Sunday and Monday she baked Martin orange-iced cupcakes, brought him library books about dinosaurs and cavemen. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday some-how he beat her at dominoes, somehow she lost at checkers, and soon, she cried, he'd defeat her handsomely at chess. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday they talked and never stopped talking, and she was so young and laughing and handsome and her hair was a soft, shining brown like the season outside the window, and she walked clear, clean and quick, a heart-beat warm in the bitter afternoon when he heard it. Above all, she had the secret of signs, and could read and interpret Dog and the symbols she searched out and plucked forth from his coat with her miraculous fingers. Eyes shut, softly laughing, in a gypsy's voice, she divined the world from the treasures in her hands. And on Monday afternoon, Miss Haight was dead. Martin sat up in bed, slowly. "Dead?" he whispered. Dead, said his mother, yes, dead, killed in an auto accident a mile out of town. Dead, yes, dead, which meant cold to Martin, which meant silence and whiteness and winter come long before its time. Dead, silent, cold, white. The thoughts circled round, blew down, and settled in whispers. Martin held Dog, thinking; turned to the wall. The lady with the autumn-colored hair. The lady with the laughter that was very gentle and never made fun and the eyes that watched your mouth to see everything you ever said. The-other-half-of-autumn-lady, who told what was left untold by Dog, about the world. |
| 578 |
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! |
| 579 |
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. 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! |
| 580 |
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. |
| 581 |
It is marked on their faces, hidden like — like tattoos, you might say, on the inner rather than the outer skin. A murderer passing one of these accident-prones, these wishers-after-death, would see the invisible markings, turn, and follow them, in-stinctively, to the nearest alley. With luck, a potential victim might not happen to cross the tracks of a potential murderer for fifty years. Then — one afternoon — fate! These people, these death-prones, touch all the wrong nerves in passing strangers; they brush the murder in all our breasts." Mrs. Shrike mashed her cigarette in a dirty saucer, very slowly. Foxe shifted his cane from one trembling hand to the other. "So it was that a year ago we decided to try to find people who needed help. These are always the people who don't even know they need help, who'd never dream of going to a psychiatrist. At first, I said, we'll make dry-runs. Shaw was always against it, save as a hobby, a harmless little quiet thing between ourselves. I suppose you'd say I'm a fool. Well, we've just completed a year of dry-runs. We watched two men, studied their environmental factors, their work, marriages, at a discreet distance. None of our business, you say? But each time, the men came to a bad end. One killed in a bar-room. Another pushed out a window. A woman we studied, run down by a streetcar. Coincidence? What about that old man accidentally poisoned? Didn't turn on the bathroom light one night. What was there in his mind that wouldn't let him turn the light on? |
| 582 |
A room floated around her in an effluvium of hysteria. Sharp instruments hovered and there were voices, and people in sterile white masks. My name, she thought, what is it? Alice Leiber. It came to her. David Leiber's wife. But it gave her no comfort. She was alone with these silent, whispering white people and there was great pain and nausea and death-fear in her. I am being murdered before their eyes. These doctors, these nurses don't realize what hidden thing has happened to me. David doesn't know. Nobody knows except me and — the killer, the little murderer, the small assassin. I am dying and I can't tell them now. They'd laugh and call me one in delirium. They'll see the murderer and hold him and never think him responsible for my death. But here I am, in front of God and man, dying, no one to believe my story, everyone to doubt me, comfort me with lies, bury me in ignorance, mourn me and salvage my destroyer. Where is David? she wondered. In the waiting room, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to the long tickings of the very slow clock? Sweat exploded from all of her body at once, and with it an agonized cry. Now. Now! Try and kill me, she screamed. Try, try, but I won't die! I won't! There was a hollowness. A vacuum. Suddenly the pain fell away. Exhaustion, and dusk came around. It was over. Oh, God! She plummeted down and struck a black nothingness which gave way to nothingness and nothingness and another and still another... . Footsteps. Gentle, approaching footsteps. |
| 583 |
She, in turn, took long walks, gained strength, played an occasional light game of badminton. She rarely burst out any more. She seemed to have rid herself of her fears. Except on one certain midnight when a sudden summer wind swept around the house, warm and swift, shaking the trees like so many shining tambourines. Alice wakened, trembling, and slid over into her husband's arms, and let him console her, and ask her what was wrong. She said, "Something's here in the room, watching us." He switched on the light. "Dreaming again," he said. 'You're better, though. Haven't been troubled for a long time." She sighed as he clicked off the light again, and suddenly she slept. He held her, considering what a sweet, weird creature she was, for about half an hour. He heard the bedroom door sway open a few inches. There was nobody at the door. No reason for it to come open. The wind had died. He waited. It seemed like an hour he lay silently, in the dark. Then, far away, wailing like some small meteor dying in the vast inky gulf of space, the baby began to cry in his nursery. It was a small, lonely sound in the middle of the stars and the dark and the breathing of this woman in his arms and the wind beginning to sweep through the trees again. Leiber counted to one hundred, slowly. The crying continued. Carefully disengaging Alice's arm he slipped from bed, put on his slippers, robe, and moved quietly from the room. He'd go downstairs, he thought, fix some warm milk, bring it up, and — The blackness dropped out from under him. |
| 584 |
His foot slipped and plunged. Slipped on something soft. Plunged into nothingness. He thrust his hands out, caught frantically at the railing. His body stopped falling. He held. He cursed. The "something soft" that had caused his feet to slip, rustled and thumped down a few steps. His head rang. His heart hammered at the base of his throat, thick and shot with pain. Why do careless people leave things strewn about a house? He groped carefully with his fingers for the object that had almost spilled him headlong down the stairs. His hand froze, startled. His breath went in. His heart held one or two beats. The thing he held in his hand was a toy. A large cumber-some, patchwork doll he had bought as a joke, for For the baby. Alice drove him to work the next day. She slowed the car halfway downtown; pulled to the curb and stopped it. Then she turned on the seat and looked at her husband. "I want to go away on a vacation. I don't know if you can make it now, darling, but if not, please let me go alone. We can get someone to take care of the baby, I'm sure. But I just have to get away. I thought I was growing out of this — this feeling. But I haven't. I can't stand being in the room with him. He looks up at me as if he hates me, too. I can't put my finger on it; all I know is I want to get away before something happens." He got out on his side of the car, came around, motioned to her to move over, got in. "The only thing you're going to do is see a good psychiatrist. And if he suggests a vacation, well, okay. |
| 585 |
The white colonial front of the house looked unnaturally silent and uninhabited, and then, quietly, he remembered this was Thursday, and the hired help they were able to obtain from time to time were all gone for the day. He took a deep breath of air. A bird sang behind the house. Traffic moved on the boulevard a block away. He twisted the key in the door. The knob turned under his fingers, oiled, silent. The door opened. He stepped in, put his hat on the chair with his briefcase, started to shrug out of his coat, when he looked up. Late sunlight streamed down the stairwell from the window near the top of the hall. Where the sunlight touched it took on the bright color of the patchwork doll sprawled at the bottom of the stairs. But he paid no attention to the toy. He could only look, and not move, and look again at Alice. Alice lay in a broken, grotesque, pallid gesturing and angling of her thin body, at the bottom of the stairs, like a crumpled doll that doesn't want to play any more, ever. Alice was dead. The house remained quiet, except for the sound of his heart. She was dead. He held her head in his hands, he felt her fingers. He held her body. But she wouldn't live. She wouldn't even try to live. He said her name, out loud, many times, and he tried, once again, by holding her to him, to give her back some of the warmth she had lost, but that didn't help. He stood up. He must have made a phone call. He didn't remember. He found himself, suddenly, upstairs. He opened the nursery door and walked inside and stared blankly at the crib. |
| 586 |
Just enough to crawl around a little, a few months ahead of schedule. Just enough to listen all the time. Just enough to cry late at night. That's enough, more than enough." Jeffers tried ridicule. "Call it murder, then. But murder must be motivated. What motive had the child?" Leiber was ready with the answer. "What is more at peace, more dreamfully content, at ease, at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered, than an unborn child? Nothing. It floats in a sleepy, timeless wonder of nourishment and silence. Then, suddenly, it is asked to give up its berth, is forced to vacate, rushed out into a noisy, uncaring, selfish world where it is asked to shift for itself, to hunt, to feed from the hunting, to seek after a vanishing love that once was its unquestionable right, to meet confusion instead of inner silence and conservative slumber! And the child resents it! Resents the cold air, the huge spaces, the sudden departure from familiar things. And in the tiny filament of brain the only thing the child knows is selfishness and hatred because the spell has been rudely shattered. Who is responsible for this disenchantment, this rude breaking of the spell? The mother. So here the new child has someone to hate with all its unreasoning mind. The mother has cast it out, rejected it. And the father is no better, kill him, too! He's responsible in his way!" Jeffers interrupted. "if what you say is true, then every woman in the world would have to look on her baby as something to dread, something to wonder about." "And why not? |
| 587 |
David Leiber slept. Very early the next morning, Dr. Jeffers drove up to the house. It was a good morning, and he was here to drive Leiber to the country for a rest. Leiber would still be asleep upstairs. Jeffers had given him enough sedative to knock him out for at least fifteen hours. He rang the doorbell. No answer. The servants were probably not up. Jeffers tried the front door, found it open, stepped in. He put his medical kit on the nearest chair. Something white moved out of sight at the top of the stairs. Just a suggestion of a movement. Jeffers hardly noticed it. The smell of gas was in the house. Jeffers ran upstairs, crashing into Leiber's bedroom. Leiber lay motionless on the bed, and the room billowed with gas, which hissed from a released jet at the base of the wall near the door. Jeffers twisted it off, then forced up all the windows and ran back to Leiber's body. The body was cold. It had been dead quite a few hours. Coughing violently, the doctor hurried from the room, eyes watering. Leiber hadn't turned on the gas himself. He couldn't have. Those sedatives had knocked him out, he wouldn't have wakened until noon. It wasn't suicide. Or was there the faintest possibility? Jeffers stood in the hall for five minutes. Then he walked to the door of the nursery. It was shut. He opened it. He walked inside and to the crib. The crib was empty. He stood swaying by the crib for half a minute, then he said something to nobody in particular. "The nursery door blew shut. You couldn't get back into your crib where it was safe. |
| 588 |
He struggled to remain aware and then the crowd faces hemmed in upon him, hung over him like the large glowing leaves of down-bent trees. They were a ring of shifting, compressing, changing faces over him, looking down, looking down, reading the time of his life or death by his face, making his face into a moondial, where the moon cast a shadow from his nose out upon his cheek to tell the time of breathing or not breathing any more ever. How swiftly a crowd comes, he thought, like the iris of an eye compressing in out of nowhere. A siren. A police voice. Movement. Blood trickled from his lips and he was being moved into an ambulance. Someone said, "Is he dead?" And someone else said, "No, he's not dead." And a third person said, "He won't die, he's not going to die." And he saw the faces of the crowd beyond him in the night, and he knew by their expressions that he wouldn't die. And that was strange. He saw a man's face, thin, bright, pale; the man swallowed and bit his lips, very sick. There was a small woman, too, with red hair and too much red on her cheeks and lips. And a little boy with a freckled face. Others' faces. An old man with a wrinkled upper lip, an old woman, with a mole upon her chin. They had all come from — where? Houses, cars, alleys, from the immediate and the accident-shocked world. Out of alleys and out of hotels and out of streetcars and seemingly out of nothing they came. The crowd looked at him and he looked back at them and did not like them at all. There was a vast wrongness to them. |
| 589 |
He could not say. His sight returned defeated, to the lawn, the steps, his hands trembling on the pane. He turned to eat his tasteless apricots, alone with his mother in the vast and echoing breakfast room. Five thousand mornings at this table, this window, and no movement beyond the trees. The two of them ate silently. She was the pale woman that no one but the birds saw in old country houses in fourth-floor cupola windows, each morning at six, each afternoon at four, each evening at nine, and also passing by one minute after midnight, there she would be, in her tower, silent and white, high and alone and quiet. It was like passing a deserted greenhouse in which one last wild white blossom lifted its head to the moonlight. And her child, Edwin, was the thistle that one breath of wind might unpod in a season of thistles. His hair was silken and his eyes were of a constant blue and feverish temperature. He had a haunted look, as if he slept poorly. He might fly apart like a packet of ladyfinger firecrackers if a certain door slammed. His mother began to talk, slowly and with great caution, then more rapidly, and then angrily, and then almost spitting at him. "Why must you disobey every morning? I don't like your staring from the window, do you hear? What do you want? Do you want to see them?" she cried, her fingers twitching. She was blazingly lovely, like an angry white flower. "Do you want to see the Beasts that run down paths and crush people like strawberries?" Yes, he thought, I'd like to see the Beasts, horrible as they are. |
| 590 |
For the first time he stood high over the windy chestnuts and elms and as far as he could see was green grass, green trees, and white ribbons on which beetles ran, and the other half of the world was blue and endless, with the sun lost and dropping away in an incredible deep blue room so vast he felt himself fall with it, screamed, and clutched the tower ledge, and beyond the trees, beyond the white ribbons where the beetles ran he saw things like fingers sticking up, but he saw no Dali-Picasso terrors, he saw only some small red-and-white-and-blue handkerchiefs fluttering high on great white poles. He was suddenly sick; he was sick again. Turning, he almost fell flat down the stairs. He slammed the forbidden door, fell against it. "You'll go blind." He crushed his hands to his eyes. "You shouldn't have seen, you shouldn't, you shouldn't!" He fell to his knees, he lay on the floor twisted tight, covered up. He need wait but a moment — the blindness would come. Five minutes later he stood at an ordinary Highlands window, looking out at his own familiar Garden World. He saw once more the elms and hickory trees and the stone wall, and that forest which he had taken to be an endless wall itself, beyond which lay nothing but nightmare nothingness, mist, rain, and eternal night. Now it was certain, the Universe did not end with the forest. There were other worlds than those contained in Highland or Lowland. He tried the forbidden door again. Locked. Had he really gone up? Had he really discovered those half-green, half-blue vastnesses? |
| 591 |
No, hardly that! He twisted the toy in his sweating hands. Last year, when things began to tremble and quiver, hadn't Mother advanced his birthday several months, too? Yes, oh, yes, yes. Think of something else. God. God building cold midnight cellar, sun-baked attic, and all miracles between. Think of the hour of his death, crushed by some monstrous beetle beyond the wall. Oh, how the worlds must have rocked with His passing! Edwin moved the Jack-in-the-Box to his face, whispered against the lid. "Hello! Hello! Hello, hello ..." No answer save the sprung-tight coiled-in tension there. I'll get you out, thought Edwin. Just wait, just wait. It may hurt, but there's only one way. Here, here ... And he moved from bed to window and leaned far out, looking down to the marbled walk in the moonlight. He raised the box high, felt the sweat trickle from his armpit, felt his fingers clench, felt his arm jerk. He flung the box out, shouting. The box tumbled in the cold air, down. It look a long time to strike the marble pavement. Edwin bent still further over, gasping. "Well?" he cried. "Well?" and again, "You there!" and "You!" The echoes faded. The box lay in the forest shadows. He could not see if the crash had broken it wide. He could not see if the Jack had risen, smiling, from its hideous jail or if it bobbed upon the wind now this way, that, this way, that, its silver bells jingling softly. He listened. He stood by the window for an hour staring, listening, and at last went back to bed. |
| 592 |
Morning. Bright voices moved near and far, in and out the Kitchen World and Edwin opened his eyes. Whose voices, now whose could they be? Some of God's workmen? The Dali people? But Mother hated them; no. The voices faded in a humming roar. Silence. And from a great distance, a running, running grew louder and still louder until the door burst open. "Happy Birthday!" They danced, they ate frosted cookies, they bit lemon ices, they drank pink wines, and there stood his name on a snowpowdered cake as Mother chorded the piano into an avalanche of sound and opened her mouth to sing, then whirled to seize him away to more strawberries, more wines, more laughter that shook chandeliers into trembling rain. Then, a silver key flourished, they raced to unlock the fourteenth forbidden door. "Ready! Hold on!" The door whispered into the wall. "Oh," said Edwin. For, disappointingly enough, this fourteenth room was nothing at all but a dusty dull-brown closet. It promised nothing as had the rooms given him on other anniversaries! His sixth birthday present, now, had been the schoolroom in the Highlands. On his seventh birthday he had opened the play-room in the Lowlands. Eighth, the music room; Ninth, the miraculous hell-fired kitchen! Tenth was the room where phonographs hissed in a continuous exhalation of ghosts singing on a gentle wind. Eleventh was the vast green diamond room of the Garden with a carpet that had to be cut instead of swept! "Oh, don't be disappointed; move!" Mother, laughing, pushed him in the closet. |
| 593 |
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. |
| 594 |
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. 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. |
| 595 |
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. "Teacher!" His shoes slipped on the animal droppings and he stared far down the motionless tunnel, blindly. The path moved under, the trees moved over him. "Teacher!" He walked slowly but steadily. He turned. Behind him lay his World and its very new silence. It was diminished, it was small! How strange to see it less than it had been. It had always and forever seemed so large. He felt his heart stop. He stepped back. But then, afraid of that silence in the World, he turned to face the forest path ahead. Everything before him was new. Odors filled his nostrils, colors, odd shapes, incredible sizes filled his eyes. If I run beyond the trees I'll die, he thought, for that's what Mother said. You'll die, you'll die. But what's dying? Another room? A blue room, a green room, far larger than all the rooms that ever were! But where's the key? |
| 596 |
Ain't none of us ever goin' to." Molly's hand tightened on his wrist. He turned and saw her eyes. He saw the eyes of Susie and little Drew, looking at him. Slowly all the stiffness went out of his neck and his back. His face got loose and blank, shapeless like a thing that has been beaten too hard and too long. He got out of the car and went up the path to the house. He walked uncertainly, like a man who is sick, or nearly blind. The door of the house was open. Drew knocked three times. There was nothing inside but silence, and a white window curtain moving in the slow, hot air. He knew it before he went in. He knew there was death in the house. It was that kind of silence. He went through a small, clean living room and down a little hall. He wasn't thinking anything. He was past thinking. He was going toward the kitchen, unquestioning, like an animal. Then he looked through an open door and saw the dead man. He was an old man, lying out on a clean white bed. He hadn't been dead long; not long enough to lose the last quiet look of peace. He must have known he was going to die, because he wore his grave clothes — an old black suit, brushed and neat, and a clean white shirt and a black tie. A scythe leaned against the wall beside the bed. Between the old man's hands there was a blade of wheat, still fresh. A ripe blade, golden and heavy in the tassel. Drew went into the bedroom, walking soft. There was a coldness on him. He took off his broken, dusty hat and stood by the bed, looking down. |
| 597 |
Molly gasped. They lived in the house. They buried the old man on a hill and said some words over him, and came back down and swept the house and unloaded the car and had something to eat, because there was food, lots of it, in the kitchen; and they did nothing for three days but fix the house and look at the land and lie in the good beds, and then look at one another in surprise that all this was happening this way, and their stomachs were full and there was even a cigar for him to smoke in the evenings. There was a small barn behind the house and in the barn a bull and three cows; and there was a well-house, a springhouse, under some big trees that kept it cool. And inside the well-house were big sides of beef and bacon and pork and mutton, enough to feed a family five times their size for a year, two years, maybe three. There was a churn and a box of cheese there, and big metal cans for the milk. On the fourth morning Drew Erickson lay in bed looking at the scythe, and he knew it was time for him to work because there was ripe grain in the long field; he had seen it with his eyes, and he did not want to get soft. Three days sitting were enough for any man. He roused himself in the first fresh smell of dawn and took the scythe and held it before him as he walked out into the field. He held it up in his hands and swung it down. It was a big field of grain. Too big for one man to tend, and yet one man had tended it. At the end of the first day of work, he walked in with the scythe riding his shoulder quietly, and there was a look on his face of a puzzled man. |
| 598 |
He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and sat down and tried to roll another cigarette and got mad at the mixings and threw it all away with a muttering. He had a feeling as if a third arm had been cut off of him, or he had lost something of himself. It had to do with his hands and his arms. He heard the wind whisper in the field. By one o'clock he was going in and out of the house, getting underfoot, thinking about digging an irrigation ditch, but all the time really thinking about the wheat and how ripe and beautiful it was, aching to be cut. "Damn it to hell!" He strode into the bedroom, took the scythe down off its wall-pegs. He stood holding it. He felt cool. His hands stopped itching. His head didn't ache. The third arm was returned to him. He was intact again. It was instinct. Illogical as lightning striking and not hurting. Each day the grain must be cut. It had to be cut. Why? Well, it just did, that was all. He laughed at the scythe in his big hands. Then, whistling, he took it out to the ripe and waiting field and did the work. He thought himself a little mad. Hell, it was an ordinary-enough wheat field, really, wasn't it? Almost. The days loped away like gentle horses. Drew Erickson began to understand his work as a sort of dry ache and hunger and need. Things built in his head. One noon, Susie and little Drew giggled and played with the scythe while their father lunched in the kitchen. He heard them. He came out and took it away from them. He didn't yell at them. |
| 599 |
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. |
| 600 |
Until the flames died and smoke coughed up, and the new day came slowly; and there was nothing but embering ashes and an acid smoldering. Disregarding the heat fanning from the leveled frames, Drew walked into the ruin. It was still too dark to see much. Red light glowed on his sweating throat. He stood like a stranger in a new and different land. Here — the kitchen. Charred tables, chairs, the iron stove, the cupboards. Here — the hall. Here the parlor and then over here was the bedroom where — Where Molly was still alive. She slept among fallen timbers and angry-colored pieces of wire spring and metal. She slept as if nothing had happened. Her small white hands lay at her sides, flaked with sparks. Her clam face slept with a flaming lath across one cheek. Drew stopped and didn't believe it. In the ruin of her smoking bedroom she lay on a glittering bed of sparks, her skin intact, her breast rising, falling, taking air. "Molly!" Alive and sleeping after the fire, after the walls had roared down, after ceilings had collapsed upon her and flame had lived all about her. His shoes smoked as he pushed through piles of fuming litter. It could have seared his feet off at the ankles, he wouldn't have known. "Molly ..." He bent over her. She didn't move or hear him, and she didn't speak. She wasn't dead. She wasn't alive. She just lay there with the fire surrounding her and not touching her, not harming her in any way. Her cotton nightgown was streaked with ashes, but not burnt. Her brown hair was pillowed on a tumble of red-hot coals. |
| 601 |
He looked down upon the children. The job had to be done every day and every day with never a stopping but going on, with never a pause, but always the harvesting, forever and forever and forever. All right, he thought. All right. I'll use the scythe. He didn't say good-by to his family. He turned with a slow-feeding anger and found the scythe and walked rapidly, then he began to trot, then he ran with long jolting strides into the field, raving, feeling the hunger in his arms, as the wheat whipped and flailed his legs. He pounded through it, shouting. He stopped. "Molly!" he cried, and raised the blade and swung it down. "Susie!" he cried. "Drew!" And swung the blade down again. Somebody screamed. He didn't turn to look at the fire-ruined house. And then, sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain again and again and hewed to left and right and to left and to right and to left and to right. Over and over and over! Slicing out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, over and over, swearing, laughing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling in the sun with a singing whistle! Down! Bombs shattered London, Moscow, Tokyo. The blade swung insanely. And the kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire. The blade sang, crimson wet. And mushrooms vomited out blind suns at White Sands, Hiroshima, Bikini, and up, through, and in continental Siberian skies. The grain wept in a green rain, falling. Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled; Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night... |
| 602 |
They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings. Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he'd always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration. But now he could not fly at night. On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. "I'll be all right," he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then — crack out of the sky — A high-tension tower. Like a netted duck! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell. His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky. Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark. There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky. |
| 603 |
Mr. Koberman's sleeping habits made it necessary for Douglas to be quiet. This was unbearable. So, whenever Grandma visited down the street, Douglas stomped up and down stairs beating a drum, bouncing golf balls, or just screaming for three minutes outside Mr. Koberman's door, or flushing the toilet seven times in succession. Mr. Koberman never moved. His room was silent, dark. He did not complain. There was no sound. He slept on and on. It was very strange. Douglas felt a pure white flame of hatred burn inside himself with a steady, unflickering beauty. Now that room was Koberman Land. Once it had been flowery bright when Miss Sadlowe lived there. Now it was stark, bare, cold, clean, everything in its place, alien and brittle. Douglas climbed upstairs on the fourth morning. Halfway to the second floor was a large sun-filled window, framed by six-inch panes of orange, purple, blue, red and burgundy glass. In the enchanted early mornings when the sun fell through to strike the landing and slide down the stair banister, Douglas stood entranced at this window peering at the world through the multicolored windows. Now a blue world, a blue sky, blue people, blue streetcars and blue trotting dogs. He shifted panes. Now — an amber world! Two lemonish women glided by, resembling the daughters of Fu Manchu! Douglas giggled. This pane made even the sunlight more purely golden. It was eight A. M. Mr. Koberman strolled by below, on the sidewalk, returning from his night's work, his cane looped over his elbow, straw hat glued to his head with patent oil. |
| 604 |
It's all empty from the weeks with nothing but sunshine. It echoes if you talk. The only sound you can hear standing down there is an auto passing above. Far up above. The whole cistern is like a dry, hollow camel bone in a desert, waiting." She lifted her hand, pointing, as if she herself were down in the cistern, waiting. "Now, a little trickle. It comes down on the floor. It's like something was hurt and bleeding up in the outer world. There's some thunder! Or was it a truck going by?" She spoke a little more rapidly now, but held her body relaxed against the window, breathing out, and in the next words: "It seeps down. Then, into all the other hollows come other seepages. Little twines and snakes. Tobacco-stained water. Then it moves. It joins others. It makes snakes and then one big constrictor which rolls along on the flat, papered floor. From everywhere, from the north and south, from other streets, other streams come and they join and make one hissing and shining coil. And the water writhes into those two little dry niches I told you about. It rises slowly around those two, the man and the woman, lying there like Japanese flowers." She clasped her hands, slowly, working finger into finger, interlacing. "The water soaks into them. First, it lifts the woman's hand. In a little move. Her hand's the only live part of her. Then her arm lifts and one foot. And her hair ..." she touched her own hair as it hung about her shoulders "... unloosens and opens out like a flower in the water. |
| 605 |
But, no, he was the imperfect one, the sick one. He was even — he shivered and drew the candle flame closer — afraid of the dark. His brothers snorted at him. Bion and Leonard and Sam. They laughed at him because he slept in a bed. With Cecy it was different; her bed was part of her comfort for the composure necessary to send her mind abroad to hunt. But Timothy, did he sleep in the wonderful polished boxes like the others? He did not! Mother let him have his own bed, his own room, his own mirror. No wonder the family skirted him like a holy man's crucifix. If only the wings would sprout from his shoulder blades. He bared his back, stared at it. And sighed again. No chance. Never. Downstairs were exciting and mysterious sounds, the slithering black crape going up in all the halls and on the ceilings and doors. The sputter of burning black tapers in the banistered stair well. Mother's voice, high and firm. Father's voice, echoing from the damp cellar. Bion walking from outside the old country house lugging vast two-gallon jugs. "I've just got to go to the party, Spid," said Timothy. The spider whirled at the end of its silk, and Timothy felt alone. He would polish cases, fetch toadstools and spiders, hang crape, but when the party started he'd be ignored. The less seen or said of the imperfect son the better. All through the house below, Laura ran. "The Homecoming!" she shouted gaily. "The Homecoming!" Her footsteps everywhere at once. Timothy passed Cecy's room again, and she was sleeping quietly. |
| 606 |
But Cecy was present. You saw her peering, now from Bion's eyes, now Samuel's, now Mother's, and you felt a movement and now she was in you, fleetingly and gone. Timothy prayed to the Dark One with a tightened stomach. "Please, please, help me grow up, help me be like my sisters and brothers. Don't let me be different. If only I could put the hair in the plastic images as Ellen does, or make people fall in love with me as Laura does with people, or read strange books as Sam does, or work in a respected job like Leonard and Bion do. Or even raise a family one day, as Mother and Father have done... ." At midnight a storm hammered the house. Lightning struck outside in amazing, snow-white bolts. There was a sound of an approaching, probing, sucking tornado, funneling and nuzzling the moist night earth. Then the front door, blasted half off its hinges, hung stiff and discarded, and in trooped Grandmama and Grandpapa, all the way from the old country! From then on people arrived each hour. There was a flutter at the side window, a rap on the front porch, a knock at the back. There were fey noises from the cellar; autumn wind piped down the chimney throat, chanting. Mother filled the large crystal punch bowl with a scarlet fluid poured from the jugs Bion had carried home. Father swept from room to room lighting more tapers. Laura and Ellen hammered up more wolfsbane. And Timothy stood amidst this wild excitement, no expression to his face, his hands trembling at his sides, gazing now here, now there. |
| 607 |
Upstairs, Timothy lay wearily thinking, trying to like the darkness. There was so much you could do in darkness that people couldn't criticize you for, because they never saw you. He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking: sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion. In the cellar, mahogany doors sealed downward, drawn in by pale hands. In corners, certain relatives circled three times to lie, heads on paws, eyelids shut. The sun rose. There was a sleeping. Sunset. The revel exploded like a bat nest struck full, shrieking out, fluttering, spreading. Box doors banged wide. Steps rushed up from cellar damp. More late guests, kicking on front and back portals, were admitted. It rained, and sodden visitors laid their capes, their water-pelleted hats, their sprinkled veils upon Timothy who bore them to a closet. The rooms were crowd-packed. The laughter of one cousin, shot from one room, angled off the wall of another, ricocheted, banked and returned to Timothy's ears from a fourth room, accurate and cynical. A mouse ran across the floor. "I know you, Niece Leibersrouter!" exclaimed Father, around him but not to him. The dozens of towering people pressed in against him, elbowed him, ignored him. Finally, he turned and slipped away up the stairs. He called softly. "Cecy. Where are you now, Cecy?" She waited a long while before answering. "In the Imperial Valley," she murmured faintly. "Beside the Saltan Sea, near the mud pots and the steam and the quiet. I'm inside a farmer's wife. |
| 608 |
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. |
| 609 |
"Why?" That question forever lived with those of us who had seen the glints of genius in his piebald works. One night a few weeks ago, musing off the erosion of the years, finding each others' faces somewhat more pouched and our hairs more conspicuously in absence, we became enraged over the typical citizen's ignorance of Dudley Stone. At least, we muttered, Thomas Wolfe had had a full measure of success before he seized his nose and jumped off the rim of Eternity. At least the critics gathered to stare after his plunge into darkness as after a meteor that made much fire in its passing. But who now remembered Dudley Stone, his coteries, his frenzied followers of the twenties? "Pass the hat," I said. "I'll travel three hundred miles, grab Dudley Stone by the pants and say: 'Look here, Mr. Stone, why did you let us down so badly? Why haven't you written a book in twenty-five years?'" The hat was lined with cash; I sent a telegram and took a train. I do not know what I expected. Perhaps to find a doddering and frail praying mantis, whisping about the station, blown by seawinds, a chalk-white ghost who would husk at me with the voices of grass and reeds blown in the night. I clenched my knees in agony as my train chuffed into the station. I let myself down into a lonely country-side, a mile from the sea, like a man foolishly insane, wondering why I had come so far. On a bulletin board in front of the boarded-up ticket office I found a cluster of announcements, inches thick, pasted and nailed one upon another for uncountable years. |
| 610 |
It was very clear," said Dudley Stone. "Writing was always so much mustard and gallweed to me; fidgeting words on paper, experiencing vast depressions of heart and soul. Watching the greedy critics graph me up, chart me down, slice me like sausage, eat me at midnight breakfasts. Work of the worst sort. I was ready to fling the pack. My trigger was set. Boom! There was John Oatis! Look here." He rummaged in the desk and brought forth hand-bills and posters. "I had been writing about living. Now I wanted to live. Do things instead of tell about things. I ran for the board of education. I won. I ran for alderman. I won. I ran for mayor. I won! Sheriff! Town librarian! Sewage disposal official. I shook a lot of hands, saw a lot of life, did a lot of things. We've lived every way there is to live, with our eyes and noses and mouths, with our ears and hands. We've climbed hills and painted pictures, there are some on the wall! We've been three times around the world! I even delivered our baby son, unexpectedly. He's grown and married now — lives in New York! We've done and done again." Stone paused and smiled. "Come on out in the yard; we've set up a telescope, would you like to see the rings of Saturn?" We stood in the yard, and the wind blew from a thousand miles at sea and while we were standing there, looking at the stars through the telescope, Mrs. Stone went down into the midnight cellar after a rare Spanish wine. It was noon the next day when we reached the lonely station after a hurricane trip across the jouncing meadows from the sea. |
| 611 |
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. |
| 612 |
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. Sorrow no more sleeps near the fireplace. The men helping you, Will and Scully, never live the night here because their master does not allow it. You remember them, how they would not take orders from you until Sir makes them? He could do that since they are exchange for land under lease from Sir. |
| 613 |
Lina says Sir has a clever way of getting without giving. I know it is true because I see it forever and ever. Me watching, my mother listening, her baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the whole amount he owes to Sir. Sir saying he will take instead the woman and the girl, not the baby boy and the debt is gone. A minha mae begs no. Her baby boy is still at her breast. Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me. Sir agrees and changes the balance due. As soon as tobacco leaf is hanging to dry Reverend Father takes me on a ferry, then a ketch, then a boat and bundles me between his boxes of books and food. The second day it becomes hurting cold and I am happy I have a cloak however thin. Reverend Father excuses himself to go elsewhere on the boat and tells me to stay exact where I am. A woman comes to me and says stand up. I do and she takes my cloak from my shoulders. Then my wooden shoes. She walks away. Reverend Father turns a pale red color when he returns and learns what happens. He rushes all about asking where and who but can find no answer. Finally he takes rags, strips of sailcloth lying about and wraps my feet. Now I am knowing that unlike with Senhor, priests are unlove here. A sailor spits into the sea when Reverend Father asks him for help. Reverend Father is the only kind man I ever see. When I arrive here I believe it is the place he warns against. The freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe forever. |
| 614 |
But that was years ago and the decision was null before he could act on it. An uncle he had never met from the side of his family that had abandoned him died and left him one hundred and twenty acres of a dormant patroonship in a climate he much preferred. One with four distinct seasons. Yet this mist, hot and rife with gnats, did not dampen his spirits. Despite the long sail in three vessels down three different bodies of water, and now the hard ride over the Lenape trail, he took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation, never failed to invigorate him. Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking. The lies of the Company about the easy profit awaiting all comers did not surprise or discourage him. In fact it was hardship, adventure, that attracted him. His whole life had been a mix of confrontation, risk and placating. Now here he was, a ratty orphan become landowner, making a place out of no place, a temperate living from raw life. He relished never knowing what lay in his path, who might approach with what intention. A quick thinker, he flushed with pleasure when a crisis, large or small, needed invention and fast action. Rocking in the poorly made saddle, he faced forward while his eyes swept the surroundings. He knew the landscape intimately from years ago when it was still the old Swedish Nation and, later, when he was an agent for the Company. |
| 615 |
Still later when the Dutch took control. During and after that contest, there had never been much point in knowing who claimed this or that terrain; this or another outpost. Other than certain natives, to whom it all belonged, from one year to another any stretch might be claimed by a church, controlled by a Company or become the private property of a royal's gift to a son or a favorite. Since land claims were always fluid, except for notations on bills of sale, he paid scant attention to old or new names of towns or forts: Fort Orange; Cape Henry; Nieuw Amsterdam; Wiltwyck. In his own geography he was moving from Algonquin to Sesquehanna via Chesapeake on through Lenape since turtles had a life span longer than towns. When he sailed the South River into the Chesapeake Bay, he disembarked, found a village and negotiated native trails on horseback, mindful of their fields of maize, careful through their hunting grounds, politely asking permission to enter a small village here, a larger one there. He watered his horse at a particular stream and avoided threatening marshland fronting the pines. Recognizing the slope of certain hills, a copse of oak, an abandoned den, the sudden odor of pine sap — all of that was more than valuable; it was essential. 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. |
| 616 |
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. |
| 617 |
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. He had never seen a house like it. The wealthiest men he knew built in wood, not brick, riven clapboards with no need for grand pillars suitable for a House of Parliament. Grandiose, he thought, but easy, easy to build in that climate. Soft southern wood, creamy stone, no caulking needed, everything designed for breeze, not freeze. |
| 618 |
A third of his cargo had died of ship fever. Fined five thousand pounds of tobacco by the Lord Proprietarys' magistrate for throwing their bodies too close to the bay; forced to scoop up the corpses — those they could find (they used pikes and nets, D'Ortega said, a purchase which itself cost two pounds, six) — and ordered to burn or bury them. He'd had to pile them in two drays (six shillings), cart them out to low land where saltweed and alligators would finish the work. Does he cut his losses and let his ship sail on to Barbados? No, thought Jacob. A sloven man, stubborn in his wrongheadedness like all of the Roman faith, he waits in port for another month for a phantom ship from Lisbon carrying enough cargo to replenish the heads he has lost. While waiting to fill his ship's hold to capacity, it sinks and he has lost not only the vessel, not only the original third, but all, except the crew who were unchained, of course, and four unsalable Angolans red-eyed with anger. Now he wanted more credit and six additional months to pay what he had borrowed. Dinner was a tedious affair made intolerable by the awkwardness Jacob felt. His rough clothes were in stark contrast to embroidered silk and lace collar. His normally deft fingers turned clumsy with the tableware. There was even a trace of raccoon blood on his hands. Seeded resentment now bloomed. Why such a show on a sleepy afternoon for a single guest well below their station? Intentional, he decided; a stage performance to humiliate him into a groveling acceptance of D'Ortega's wishes. |
| 619 |
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. |
| 620 |
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. 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. |
| 621 |
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. |
| 622 |
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. He would do the selling. Pounds? Spanish sovereigns? He would arrange transportation, hire the handler. Stomach turning, nostrils assailed, Jacob grew angry. This is a calamity, he thought. Unresolved, it would lead to years in a lawsuit in a province ruled by the king's judges disinclined to favor a distant tradesman over a local Catholic gentleman. The loss, while not unmanageable, struck him as unforgivable. And to such a man. D'Ortega's strut as they had walked the property disgusted him. Moreover, he believed the set of that jaw, the drooping lids, hid something soft, as if his hands, accustomed to reins, whips and lace, had never held a plow or axed a tree. There was something beyond Catholic in him, something sordid and overripe. |
| 623 |
Out here in wilderness dependent on paid guards nowhere in sight this Sunday. He felt like laughing. Where else but in this disorganized world would such an encounter be possible? Where else could rank tremble before courage? Jacob turned away, letting his exposed, unarmed back convey his scorn. It was a curious moment. Along with his contempt, he felt a wave of exhilaration. Potent. Steady. An inside shift from careful negotiator to the raw boy that once prowled the lanes of town and country. He did not even try to mute his chuckling as he passed the cookhouse and glanced again at the woman standing in its door. Just then the little girl stepped from behind the mother. On her feet was a pair of way-too-big woman's shoes. Perhaps it was that feeling of license, a newly recovered recklessness along with the sight of those little legs rising like two bramble sticks from the bashed and broken shoes, that made him laugh. A loud, chest-heaving laugh at the comedy, the hopeless irritation, of the visit. His laughter had not subsided when the woman cradling the small boy on her hip came forward. Her voice was barely above a whisper but there was no mistaking its urgency. "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter." Jacob looked up at her, away from the child's feet, his mouth still open with laughter, and was struck by the terror in her eyes. His laugh creaking to a close, he shook his head, thinking, God help me if this is not the most wretched business. "Why yes. Of course," said D'Ortega, shaking off his earlier embarrassment and trying to re-establish his dignity. |
| 624 |
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. |
| 625 |
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. On his second draft, a fiddler and a piper entered for their merriment and their money and, the piper having played less well than himself, raised Jacob's spirits enough for him to join in the singing. When two women came in, the men called out their names with liquored glee. The bawds flounced a bit before choosing a lap to sit in. Jacob demurred when approached. He'd had enough, years ago, of brothels and the disorderly houses kept by wives of sailors at sea. The boyish recklessness that flooded him at Jublio did not extend to the sweet debauchery he had sought as a youth. Seated at a table cluttered with the remains of earlier meals, he listened to the talk around him, which was mostly sugar, which was to say, rum. Its price and demand becoming greater than tobacco's now that glut was ruining that market. The man who seemed to know most about kill-devil, the simple mechanics of its production, its outrageous prices and beneficial effects, was holding forth with the authority of a mayor. |
| 626 |
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. His father, who hailed from Amsterdam, left him with a name easily punned and a cause of deep suspicion. The shame the Dutch had visited on the English was everywhere, especially during his stint in a poorhouse before the luck of being taken on as a runner for a law firm. The job required literacy and led to his being signed up by the Company. Inheriting land softened the chagrin of being both misborn and disowned. Yet he continued to feel a disturbing pulse of pity for orphans and strays, remembering well their and his own sad teeming in the markets, lanes, alleyways and ports of every region he traveled. Once before he found it hard to refuse when called on to rescue an unmoored, unwanted child. A decade ago now, a sawyer asked him to take off his hands a sullen, curly-headed girl he had found half dead on a riverbank. Jacob agreed to do it, provided the sawyer forgive the cost of the lumber he was buying. Unlike now, at that time his farm really did need more help. Rebekka was pregnant then, but no previous sons had lived. His farm was sixty cultivated acres out of one hundred and twenty of woodland that was located some seven miles from a hamlet founded by Separatists. The patroonship had lain dormant for years when so many Dutch (except for the powerful and wealthy ones) left or were expelled from the region. |
| 627 |
The land was still isolated except for the Separatists. Jacob soon learned that they had bolted from their brethren over the question of the Chosen versus the universal nature of salvation. His neighbors favored the first and situated themselves inland beyond fur posts and wars. When Jacob, a small-scale trader for the Company with a side line in fur and lumber, found himself an heir of sorts, he relished the thought of becoming a landowning, independent farmer. He didn't change his mind about that. He did what was necessary: secured a wife, someone to help her, planted, built, fathered... He had simply added the trading life. Otherwise he would have to prefer settled farm life and communion with people whose religion dumbfounded him although the seven-mile distance made their blasphemy irrelevant. Yet his land belonged to a traveling man who knew very well that it was not wise to have male labor all over the place during his long absences. His preference for steady female labor over dodgy males was based on his own experience as a youth. A frequently absent master was invitation and temptation — to escape, rape or rob. The two men he used as occasional help presented no threat at all. In the right environment, women were naturally reliable. He believed it now with this ill-shod child that the mother was throwing away, just as he believed it a decade earlier with the curly-haired goose girl, the one they called Sorrow. And the acquisition of both could be seen as rescue. Only Lina had been purchased outright and deliberately, but she was a woman, not a child. |
| 628 |
Walking in the warm night air, he went as far as possible, until the alehouse lights were gem stones fighting darkness and the voices of carousing men were lost to the silk-rustle of surf. 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. |
| 629 |
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. |
| 630 |
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. 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. |
| 631 |
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. |
| 632 |
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. 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. |
| 633 |
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. |
| 634 |
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. 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. |
| 635 |
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. |
| 636 |
"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. 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. |
| 637 |
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. |
| 638 |
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. They were helpless when black flies descended in scarves, disabling cattle, the horse, and forcing them to take refuge indoors. |
| 639 |
She prepared the most powerful remedy she knew: devil's bit, mugwort, Saint-John's-wort, maidenhair and periwinkle; boiled it, strained it and spooned it between Mistress' teeth. She considered repeating some of the prayers she learned among the Presbyterians, but since none had saved Sir, she thought not. He went quickly. Screaming at Mistress. Then whispering, begging to be taken to his third house. The big one, useless now that there were no children or children's children to live in it. No one to stand in awe at its size or to admire the sinister gate that the smithy took two months to make. Two copper snakes met at the top. When they parted it for Sir's last wish, Lina felt as though she were entering the world of the damned. But if the blacksmith's work was a frivolous waste of a grown man's time, his presence was not. He brought one girl to womanhood and saved the life of another. Sorrow. Vixen-eyed Sorrow with black teeth and a head of never groomed woolly hair the color of a setting sun. Accepted, not bought, by Sir, she joined the household after Lina but before Florens and still had no memory of her past life except being dragged ashore by whales. "Not whales," Mistress had said. "Certainly not. She was treading water in the North River in Mohawk country, half drowned, when two young sawyers trawled her in. 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. |
| 640 |
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. 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. |
| 641 |
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. |
| 642 |
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. 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. |
| 643 |
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. 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. |
| 644 |
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. |
| 645 |
As Florens grew, she learned quickly, was eager to know more and would have been the perfect one to find the blacksmith if only she had not been crippled with worship of him. When Mistress insisted on unhinging herself by staring at her face in the mirror, Lina closed her eyes against that reckless solicitation of bad luck and left the room. A heap of chores beckoned and, as always, Sorrow was not to be found. Pregnant or not, she could at least have mucked out the stalls. Lina entered the cowshed and glanced at the broken sleigh where, in cold weather, she and Florens slept. At the sight of cobwebs strung from blade to bed, Lina sighed, then caught her breath. Florens' shoes, the rabbit skin ones she had made for her ten years ago, lay under the sleigh — lonely, empty like two patient coffins. Shaken, she left the shed and stood still at the door. Where to go? She couldn't endure the self-pity that drove Mistress to tempt harmful spirits, so she decided to look for Sorrow down by the river where she often went to talk to her dead baby. The river gleamed under a sun departing slowly like a bride reluctant to leave the marriage feast. No Sorrow anywhere, but Lina caught the delicious smell of fire and followed it. Cautiously she moved toward the odor of smoke. Soon she heard voices, several, carefully, deliberately low. Creeping a hundred yards or so toward the sound she saw figures lit by a small fire dug deep in the ground. A boy and several adults camped in wintergreen beneath two hawthorns. |
| 646 |
Well, Lina mused, deathbreath was a prime creator, a great changer of minds and collector of hearts. Any decision made while inhaling it was as unreliable as it was fierce. Reason in moments of crisis was rare. Yet, what about Florens? Look what she did when things changed abruptly: chose to go her own route once the others had crept away. Correctly. Bravely. But could she manage? Alone? She had Sir's boots, the letter, food and a desperate need to see the blacksmith. But will she return, with him, after him, without him, or not at all? Night is thick no stars anyplace but sudden the moon moves. 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. |
| 647 |
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. |
| 648 |
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. 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. |
| 649 |
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. |
| 650 |
"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. |
| 651 |
Fourteen or so, stone-faced she was, and it took a while for trust between them. Perhaps because both were alone without family, or because both had to please one man, or because both were hopelessly ignorant of how to run a farm, they became what was for each a companion. A pair, anyway, the result of the mute alliance that comes of sharing tasks. Then, when the first infant was born, Lina handled it so tenderly, with such knowing, Rebekka was ashamed of her early fears and pretended she'd never had them. Now, lying in bed, her hands wrapped and bound against self-mutilation, her lips drawn back from her teeth, she turned her fate over to others and became prey to scenes of past disorder. The first hangings she saw in the square amid a happy crowd attending. She was probably two years old, and the death faces would have frightened her if the crowd had not mocked and enjoyed them so. With the rest of her family and most of their neighbors, she was present at a drawing and quartering and, although she was too young to remember the details, her nightmares were made permanently vivid by years of retelling and redescribing by her parents. She did not know what a Fifth Monarchist was, then or now, but it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king's parade. Brawls, knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather. The very year she stepped off the ship a mighty settlers-versus-natives war two hundred miles away was over before she heard of it. |
| 652 |
The intermittent skirmishes of men against men, arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that she heard of could not match the gore of what she had seen since childhood. The pile of frisky, still living entrails held before the felon's eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames; fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame. 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. |
| 653 |
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. |
| 654 |
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. 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. |
| 655 |
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. |
| 656 |
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. 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. |
| 657 |
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. |
| 658 |
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. The range of baggage, clothes, speech and attitude spoke clearly of who they were long before their confessions. One, Anne, had been sent away in disgrace by her family. Two, Judith and Lydia, were prostitutes ordered to choose between prison or exile. Lydia was accompanied by her daughter, Patty, a ten-year-old thief. Elizabeth was the daughter, or so she said, of an important Company agent. Another, Abigail, was quickly transferred to the captain's cabin and one other, Dorothea, was a cutpurse whose sentence was the same as the prostitutes'. Rebekka alone, her passage prepaid, was to be married. The rest were being met by relatives or craftsmen who would pay their passage — except the cutpurse and the whores whose costs and keep were to be borne by years and years of unpaid labor. Only Rebekka was none of these. It was later, huddled 'tween decks and walls made of trunks, boxes, blankets hanging from hammocks, that Rebekka learned more about them. The prepubescent girl thief-in-training had the singing voice of an angel. The agent's "daughter" was born in France. By the time they were fourteen the two mature prostitutes had been turned out of their family homes for lewd behavior. |
| 659 |
Let's have tea." The oil lamp sputtered, threatening to throw them back into a darkness only travelers in steerage can know. Rocking forever sideways, trying not to vomit before reaching the tub, safer on knees than feet — all was just bearable if there were even a handspan of light. The women scooted toward Rebekka and suddenly, without urging, began to imitate what they thought were the manners of queens. Judith spread her shawl on the lid of a box. Elizabeth retrieved from her trunk a kettle and a set of spoons. Cups were varied — pewter, tin, clay. Lydia heated water in the kettle over the lamp, protecting the flame with her palm. It did not surprise them that no one had any tea, but both Judith and Dorothea had rum hidden in their sacks. With the care of a butler, they poured it into the tepid water. Rebekka set the cheese in the middle of the shawl and surrounded it with biscuits. Anne offered grace. Breathing quietly, they sipped warm, spirited water and munched stale biscuits, daintily brushing away the flakes. Patty sat between her mother's knees, and Lydia tipped her cup with one hand and smoothed her daughter's hair with the other. Rebekka recalled how each of them, including the ten-year-old, lifted her little finger and angled it out. Remembered also how ocean slap exaggerated the silence. Perhaps they were blotting out, as she was, what they fled and what might await them. Wretched as was the space they crouched in, it was nevertheless blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon. |
| 660 |
Women of and for men, in those few moments they were neither. And when finally the lamp died, swaddling them in black, for a long time, oblivious to the footsteps above them, or the lowing behind them, they did not stir. 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. |
| 661 |
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. |
| 662 |
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. 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. |
| 663 |
Nor proof of His power — everyone accepted that. He wanted simply to catch His eye. To be recognized not as worthy or worthless, but to be noticed as a life-form by the One who made and unmade it. Not a bargain; merely a glow of the miraculous. But then Job was a man. Invisibility was intolerable to men. What complaint would a female Job dare to put forth? And if, having done so, and He deigned to remind her of how weak and ignorant she was, where was the news in that? What shocked Job into humility and renewed fidelity was the message a female Job would have known and heard every minute of her life. No. Better false comfort than none, thought Rebekka, and listened carefully to her shipmates. "He knifed me, blood everywhere. I grabbed my waist and thought, No! No swooning, my girl. Steady..." When the women faded, it was the moon that stared back like a worried friend in a sky the texture of a fine lady's ball gown. Lina snored lightly on the floor at the foot of the bed. At some point, long before Jacob's death, the wide untrammeled space that once thrilled her became vacancy. A commanding and oppressive absence. She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still. When Jacob was away. When neither Patrician nor Lina was enough. When the local Baptists tired her out with talk that never extended beyond their fences unless it went all the way to heaven. Those women seemed flat to her, convinced they were innocent and therefore free; safe because churched; tough because still alive. |
| 664 |
A new people remade in vessels old as time. Children, in other words, without the joy or the curiosity of a child. They had even narrower definitions of God's preferences than her parents. Other than themselves (and those of their kind who agreed), no one was saved. The possibility was open to most, however, except children of Ham. In addition there were Papists and the tribes of Judah to whom redemption was denied along with a variety of others living willfully in error. Dismissing these exclusions as the familiar restrictions of all religions, Rebekka held a more personal grudge against them. Their children. Each time one of hers died, she told herself it was anti-baptism that enraged her. But the truth was she could not bear to be around their undead, healthy children. More than envy she felt that each laughing red-cheeked child of theirs was an accusation of failure, a mockery of her own. Anyway, they were poor company and of no help to her with the solitude without prelude that could rise up and take her prisoner when Jacob was away. She might be bending in a patch of radishes, tossing weeds with the skill of a pub matron dropping coins into her apron. Weeds for the stock. Then as she stood in molten sunlight, pulling the corners of her apron together, the comfortable sounds of the farm would drop. Silence would fall like snow floating around her head and shoulders, spreading outward to wind-driven yet quiet leaves, dangling cowbells, the whack of Lina's axe chopping firewood nearby. |
| 665 |
Or maybe age, illness, had softened her to benign, toothless malice. Confined to bed now, her question was redirected. "And me? How do I look? What lies in my eyes now? Skull and crossbones? Rage? Surrender?" All at once she wanted it — the mirror Jacob had given her which she had silently rewrapped and tucked in her press. It took a while to convince her, but when Lina finally understood and fixed it between her palms, Rebekka winced. "Sorry," she murmured. "I'm so sorry." Her eyebrows were a memory, the pale rose of her cheeks collected now into buds of flame red. She traveled her face slowly, gently apologizing. "Eyes, dear eyes, forgive me. Nose, poor mouth. Poor, sweet mouth, I'm sorry. Believe me, skin, I do apologize. Please. Forgive me." Lina, unable to pry the mirror away, was pleading with her. "Miss. Enough. Enough." Rebekka refused and clung to the mirror. Oh, she had been so happy. So hale. Jacob home and busy with plans for the new house. The evenings when he was exhausted and she picked his hair clean; the mornings when she tied it. She loved his voracious appetite and the pride he took in her cooking. The blacksmith, who worried everybody except herself and Jacob, was like an anchor holding the couple in place in untrustworthy waters. Lina was afraid of him. Sorrow grateful as a hound to him. And Florens, poor Florens, she was completely smitten. Of the three, only she could be counted on to get to him. Lina would have begged off, unwilling to leave her patient, of course, but, more than that, despising him. |
| 666 |
Pregnant stupid Sorrow could not have. Rebekka had confidence in Florens because she was clever and because she had a strong reason to succeed. And she felt a lot of affection for her, although it took some time to develop. Jacob probably believed giving her a girl close to Patrician's age would please her. In fact, it insulted her. Nothing could replace the original and nothing should. So she barely glanced at her when she came and had no need to later because Lina took the child so completely under her wing. In time, Rebekka thawed, relaxed, was even amused by Florens' eagerness for approval. "Well done." "It's fine." However slight, any kindness shown her she munched like a rabbit. Jacob said the mother had no use for her which, Rebekka decided, explained her need to please. Explained also her attachment to the blacksmith, trotting up to him for any reason, panicked to get his food to him on time. Jacob dismissed Lina's glower and Florens' shine: the blacksmith would soon be gone, he said. No need to worry, besides the man was too skilled and valuable to let go, certainly not because a girl was mooning over him. Jacob was right, of course. The smithy's value was without price when he cured Sorrow of whatever had struck her down. Pray to God he could repeat that miracle. Pray also Florens could persuade him. They'd stuffed her feet in good strong boots. Jacob's. And folded a clarifying letter of authority inside. And her traveling instructions were clear. It would all be all right. |
| 667 |
Just as the pall of childlessness coupled with bouts of loneliness had disappeared, melted like the snow showers that signaled it. Just as Jacob's determination to rise up in the world had ceased to trouble her. She decided that the satisfaction of having more and more was not greed, was not in the things themselves, but in the pleasure of the process. Whatever the truth, however driven he seemed, Jacob was there. With her. Breathing next to her in bed. Reaching for her even as he slept. Then suddenly, he was not. Were the Anabaptists right? Was happiness Satan's allure, his tantalizing deceit? Was her devotion so frail it was merely bait? Her stubborn self-sufficiency outright blasphemy? Is that why at the height of her contentedness, once again death turned to look her way? And smile? Well, her shipmates, it seemed, had got on with it. As she knew from their visits, whatever life threw up, whatever obstacles they faced, they manipulated the circumstances to their advantage and trusted their own imagination. The Baptist women trusted elsewhere. Unlike her shipmates, they neither dared nor stood up to the fickleness of life. On the contrary, they dared death. Dared it to erase them, to pretend this earthly life was all; that beyond it was nothing; that there was no acknowledgment of suffering and certainly no reward; they refused meaninglessness and the random. What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. |
| 668 |
Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men. Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms. Some, like Lina, who had experienced both deliverance and destruction at their hands, withdrew. Some, like Sorrow, who apparently was never coached by other females, became their play. Some like her shipmates fought them. Others, the pious, obeyed them. And a few, like herself, after a mutually loving relationship, became like children when the man was gone. Without the status or shoulder of a man, without the support of family or well-wishers, a widow was in practice illegal. But was that not the way it should be? Adam first, Eve next, and also, confused about her role, the first outlaw? The Anabaptists were not confused about any of this. Adam (like Jacob) was a good man but (unlike Jacob) he had been goaded and undermined by his mate. They understood, also, that there were lines of acceptable behavior and righteous thought. Levels of sin, in other words, and lesser peoples. Natives and Africans, for instance, had access to grace but not to heaven — a heaven they knew as intimately as they knew their own gardens. Afterlife was more than Divine; it was thrill-soaked. Not a blue and gold paradise of twenty-four-hour praise song, but an adventurous real life, where all choices were perfect and perfectly executed. How had the churchwoman she spoke to described it? |
| 669 |
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. |
| 670 |
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. 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. |
| 671 |
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. |
| 672 |
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. 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. |
| 673 |
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. |
| 674 |
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. 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? |
| 675 |
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. |
| 676 |
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. 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. |
| 677 |
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. |
| 678 |
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. 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. |
| 679 |
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. |
| 680 |
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. 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. |
| 681 |
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. |
| 682 |
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. The man looks at me, looks again at the letter, back at me back at the letter. Again at me, once more at the letter. You see, says the Widow. He ignores her and turns to two women whispering to them. They point me to a door that opens onto a storeroom and there, standing among carriage boxes and a spinning wheel, they tell me to take off my clothes. Without touching they tell me what to do. To show them my teeth, my tongue. They frown at the candle burn on my palm, the one you kissed to cool. |
| 683 |
They look under my arms, between my legs. They circle me, lean down to inspect my feet. Naked under their examination I watch for what is in their eyes. No hate is there or scare or disgust but they are looking at me my body across distances without recognition. Swine look at me with more connection when they raise their heads from the trough. The women look away from my eyes the way you say I am to do with the bears so they will not come close to love and play. Finally they tell me to dress and leave the room shutting the door behind them. I put on my clothes. I hear the quarreling. The little girl is back, not sobbing now but saying it scares me it scares me. A woman's voice asks would Satan write a letter. Lucifer is all deceit and trickery says another. But a woman's life is at stake says the Widow, who will the Lord punish then? The man's voice booms. We will relay this to the others he says. We will study on it, consult and pray and return with our answer. It is not clear it seems whether or no I am the Black Man's minion. I step into the room and the little girl screams and flails her arms. The women surround her and rush out. The man says not to leave the house. He takes the letter with him. The Widow follows him down the path pleading, pleading. She returns to say they are wanting time to discuss more among themselves. She has hope because of the letter. Daughter Jane laughs. Widow Ealing kneels to pray. She prays a long time then stands saying I have to see someone. |
| 684 |
I need his witness and his help. Who, asks Daughter Jane. The sheriff says the Widow. Daughter Jane curls her mouth behind her mother's back as she leaves. I am hung with fear watching Daughter Jane attend her leg wounds. The sun is high and still the Widow does not return. We wait. By and by the sun slows down. Daughter Jane boils duck eggs and when cool wraps them in a square of cloth. She folds a blanket and hands it to me, motions with one finger to follow. We leave the house, scurry around to the back. All manner of fowl cluck and fly from our feet. We run through the pasture. The nanny goat turns to look. The billy does not. A bad sign. We squeeze between the fence slats and run into the wood. Now we walk, softly, Daughter Jane leading the way. The sun empties itself, pouring what is left through tree shadow. Birds and small animals eat and call to one another. We come to a stream, dry mostly, muddy elsewhere. Daughter Jane hands me the cloth of eggs. She explains how I am to go, where the trail will be that takes me to the post road that takes me to the hamlet where I hope you are. 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. |
| 685 |
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. |
| 686 |
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. 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. |
| 687 |
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. She kept at it a few more days, until the housewife threw up her hands and put her to simple cleaning tasks — none of which proved satisfactory. But the pleasure of upbraiding an incompetent servant outweighed any satisfaction of a chore well done and the housewife raged happily at every unswept corner, poorly made fire, imperfectly scrubbed pot, carelessly weeded garden row and badly plucked bird. Sorrow concentrated on mealtimes and the art of escape for short walks with Twin, playtimes between or instead of her tasks. |
| 688 |
On occasion she had secret company other than Twin, but not better than Twin, who was her safety, her entertainment, her guide. The housewife told her it was monthly blood; that all females suffered it and Sorrow believed her until the next month and the next and the next when it did not return. Twin and she talked about it, about whether it was instead the result of the goings that took place behind the stack of clapboard, both brothers attending, instead of what the housewife said. Because the pain was outside between her legs, not inside where the housewife said was natural. The hurt was still there when the sawyer asked Sir to take her away, saying his wife could not keep her. Sir asked, "Where is she?" and Sorrow was summoned into the mill. "How old?" When the sawyer shook his head, Sorrow spoke up. "I believe I have eleven years now." Sir grunted. "Don't mind her name," said the sawyer. "You can name her anything you want. My wife calls her Sorrow because she was abandoned. She is a bit mongrelized as you can see. However be that, she will work without complaint." As he spoke Sorrow saw the side smile on his face. She rode behind Sir's saddle for miles with one stop on the way. Since it was her first time astride a horse, the burning brought her to tears. Swaying, bumping, clinging to Sir's coat, finally she threw up on it. He reined in, then, and lifted her down, letting her rest while he wiped his coat with a leaf of coltsfoot. She accepted his water pouch, but the first gulp spewed out along with whatever was left in her stomach. |
| 689 |
"Sorrow, indeed," mumbled Sir. She was grateful when they got close to his farm and he took her down so she could walk the rest of the way. He looked around every few furlongs to make sure she had not fallen or sickened again. Twin smiled and clapped her hands when they glimpsed the farm. All along the trail riding behind Sir, Sorrow had looked around with a fright that would have been even deeper had she not been suffering nausea as well as pain. Miles of hemlock towered like black ship masts, and when they fell away cathedral pine, thick as the horse was long, threw shadows over their heads. No matter how she tried, she never saw their tops that, for all she knew, broke open the sky. Now and again a hulking pelted shape standing among the trees watched them ride by. Once when an elk crossed their path, Sir had to swerve and turn the horse around four times before it would go forward again. So when she followed Sir's horse into a sun-drenched clearing and heard the cackle of ducks neither she nor Twin could have been more relieved. 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. |
| 690 |
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. |
| 691 |
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. 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. |
| 692 |
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. |
| 693 |
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. |
| 694 |
When he left the room, Lina followed. Sorrow, too, but not before turning back for a last look. That was when she saw Mistress toss off the bedsheet and go down on her knees. Sorrow watched as she used her teeth to loosen the wrappings on her hands, then press her palms together. Glancing around the room she was usually forbidden to enter, Sorrow noticed the clumps of hair stuck in the pillow's damp; noticed too how helpless-looking were the soles of Mistress' pale feet, protruding from the hem of her nightdress. On her knees, her head bowed, she seemed completely alone in the world. Sorrow understood that servants, however many, would not make a difference. Somehow their care and devotion did not matter to her. So Mistress had no one — no one at all. Except the One she was whispering to: "Thank you my Lord for the saving grace you have shown me." Sorrow tiptoed away, out into the yard where pine-scented air erased the odor of the sickroom. Somewhere a woodpecker tapped. When hares bounded into the radish patch Sorrow thought to chase them but, exhausted by her weight, decided not to. Instead she sat down on the grass in the shade of the house, stroking the movements in her protruding stomach. Above her through the kitchen window she could hear the clatter of a knife, the shift of a cup or plate as the blacksmith ate. She knew Lina was there too, but she did not speak until the sound of a chair scraping announced that the smithy stood. Then Lina asked the questions Mistress had not. |
| 695 |
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. |
| 696 |
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. Sorrow, repeating "thank you" with every breath, declined. She wanted to rest and would make her own way. Willard slapped Scully on the back of his head, laughing. "Right fine midwife, I'd say." "No question," answered Scully as they waded back to their raft. Following the expulsion of afterbirth, Sorrow wrapped her infant in the blanket and dozed off and on for hours. At some point before sunset she roused to a cry and squeezed her breasts until one delivered. Although all her life she had been saved by men — Captain, the sawyers' sons, Sir and now Will and Scully — she was convinced that this time she had done something, something important, by herself. |
| 697 |
The smell of fire and ash trembles me but it is the glee in your eyes that kicks my heart over. You are asking me how and how long and laughing at my clothes and the scratches everyplace. But when I answer your why, you frown. We settle, you do, and I agree because there is no other way. You will ride at once to Mistress but alone. I am to wait here you say. I cannot join you because it is faster without me. And there is another reason, you say. You turn your head. My eyes follow where you look. This happens twice before. The first time it is me peering around my mother's dress hoping for her hand that is only for her little boy. The second time it is a pointing screaming little girl hiding behind her mother and clinging to her skirts. Both times are full of danger and I am expel. 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. |
| 698 |
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. |
| 699 |
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. 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. |
| 700 |
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. |
| 701 |
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. 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. |
| 702 |
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. |
| 703 |
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. 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. |
| 704 |
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. |
| 705 |
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. Mainly he missed what he never saw elsewhere: uncovered female hair, aggressive, seductive, black as witchcraft. Seeing its wet cling and sway on her back was a quiet joy. Now, no more. Wherever, if ever, she bathed he was convinced she was about to burst. Mistress had changed as well. The mourning, said Willard, the illness — the effects of all of that were plain as daylight. Her hair, the brassy strands that once refused her cap, had become pale strings drifting at her temples, adding melancholy to her newly stern features. Rising from her sickbed, she had taken control, in a manner of speaking, but avoided as too tiring tasks she used to undertake with gusto. She laundered nothing, planted nothing, weeded never. She cooked and mended. Otherwise her time was spent reading a Bible or entertaining one or two people from the village. "She'll marry again, I reckon," said Willard. "Soon." "Why soon?" "She's a woman. |
| 706 |
How else keep the farm?" "Who to?" Willard closed one eye. "The village will provide." He coughed up a laugh recalling the friendliness of the deacon. Sorrow's change alone seemed to them an improvement; she was less addle-headed, more capable of handling chores. But her baby came first and she would postpone egg-gathering, delay milking, interrupt any field chore if she heard a whimper from the infant always somewhere nearby. Having helped with her delivery, they assumed godfather status, even offering to mind the baby if Sorrow needed them to. She declined, not because she did not trust them; she did, but out of a need to trust herself. Strangest was Florens. The docile creature they knew had turned feral. When they saw her stomping down the road two days after the smithy had visited Mistress' sickbed and gone, they were slow to recognize her as a living person. First because she was so blood-spattered and bedraggled and, second, because she passed right by them. Surely a sudden burst of sweating men out of roadside trees would have startled a human, any human, especially a female. But this one neither glanced their way nor altered her pace. Both men, breathless and still spooked from a narrow escape, leaped out of her path. In their frightened minds anything could be anything. Both were running as fast as they could back to the livestock under their care before the hogs ate their litter. Much of the morning they had spent hiding from an insulted bear, a harrowing incident they agreed was primarily Willard's fault. |
| 707 |
The netted partridge hanging from the older man's waist was supplement enough for two meals each. It was reckless to press their good fortune and linger just so he could rest beneath a beech and puff his pipe. Both knew what a whiff of smoke could do in woods where odor was decisive: to flee, attack, hide or, as in the case of a sow bear, investigate. When the laurel hell that had yielded the partridges suddenly crackled, Willard stood up, holding his hand out to Scully for silence. Scully touched his knife and stood also. After a moment of uncanny quiet — no birdcalls or squirrel chatter — the smell washed over them at the same moment the sow crashed through the laurel clicking her teeth. 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. |
| 708 |
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. |
| 709 |
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. 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. |
| 710 |
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. |
| 711 |
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. |
| 712 |
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. 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. |
| 713 |
Yet, when possible and in secret, he tried to soften or erase the hurt Mistress inflicted. He prepared a box for Sorrow's baby, lined it with sheepskin. He even tore down the advertisement posted in the village (but missed the one in the meetinghouse). Lina, however, was unapproachable, asking nothing and reluctant to accept whatever was offered. The hogshead cheese he and Willard had made was still wrapped in cloth in the toolshed where she now slept. Such were the ravages of Vaark's death. And the consequences of women in thrall to men or pointedly without them. Or so he concluded. He had no proof of what was in their minds, but based on his own experience he was certain betrayal was the poison of the day. Sad. They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone's guess. One thing was certain, courage alone would not be enough. Minus bloodlines, he saw nothing yet on the horizon to unite them. Nevertheless, remembering how the curate described what existed before Creation, Scully saw dark matter out there, thick, unknowable, aching to be made into a world. Perhaps their wages were not as much as the blacksmith's, but for Scully and Mr. Bond it was enough to imagine a future. I walk the night through. Alone. It is hard without Sir's boots. Wearing them I could cross a stony riverbed. |
| 714 |
Move quickly through forests and down hills of nettles. What I read or cipher is useless now. Heads of dogs, garden snakes, all that is pointless. But my way is clear after losing you who I am thinking always as my life and my security from harm, from any who look closely at me only to throw me away. 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. |
| 715 |
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. 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. |
| 716 |
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. |
| 717 |
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. 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. |
| 718 |
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. |
| 719 |
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. 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. |
| 720 |
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. |
| 721 |
I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song — all of it cooked together in the color of my skin. So it was as a black that I was purchased by Senhor, taken out of the cane and shipped north to his tobacco plants. A hope, then. But first the mating, the taking of me and Bess and one other to the curing shed. Afterwards, the men who were told to break we in apologized. Later an overseer gave each of us an orange. And it would have been all right. It would have been good both times, because the results were you and your brother. But then there was Senhor and his wife. I began to tell Reverend Father but shame made my words nonsense. He did not understand or he did not believe. He told me not to despair or be faint of heart but to love God and Jesus Christ with all my soul; to pray for the deliverance that would be mine at judgment; that no matter what others may say, I was not a soulless animal, a curse; that Protestants were in error, in sin, and if I remained innocent in mind and deed I would be welcomed beyond the valley of this woeful life into an everlasting one, amen. But you wanted the shoes of a loose woman, and a cloth around your chest did no good. You caught Senhor's eye. After the tall man dined and joined Senhor on a walk through the quarters, I was singing at the pump. A song about the green bird fighting then dying when the monkey steals her eggs. I heard their voices and gathered you and your brother to stand in their eyes. One chance, I thought. |
| 722 |
But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning — yes, meaning — something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity. And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the center, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth. (The sheet, incidentally, is stained too, with three drops of old, faded redness. As the Quran tells us: Recite, in the name of the Lord thy Creator, who created Man from clots of blood.) One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. |
| 723 |
And his nose had started to itch. To reveal the secret of my grandfather's altered vision: he had spent five years, five springs, away from home. (The tussock of earth, crucial though its presence was as it crouched under a chance wrinkle of the prayer-mat, was at bottom no more than a catalyst.) Now, returning, he saw through travelled eyes. Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt — inexplicably — as though the old place resented his educated, stethoscoped return. Beneath the winter ice, it had been coldly neutral, but now there was no doubt; the years in Germany had returned him to a hostile environment. Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up. On the morning when the valley, gloved in a prayer-mat, punched him on the nose, he had been trying, absurdly, to pretend that nothing had changed. So he had risen in the bitter cold of four-fifteen, washed himself in the prescribed fashion, dressed and put on his father's astrakhan cap; after which he had carried the rolled cheroot of the prayer-mat into the small lakeside garden in front of their old dark house and unrolled it over the waiting tussock. |
| 724 |
Not of those who have incurred Your wrath, Nor of those who have gone astray." My grandfather bent his forehead towards the earth. Forward he bent, and the earth, prayer-mat-covered, curved up towards him. And now it was the tussock's time. At one and the same time a rebuke from Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid-Heidelberg as well as valley-and-God, it smote him upon the point of the nose. Three drops fell. There were rubies and diamonds. And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole. The young, newly-qualified Doctor Aadam Aziz stood facing the springtime lake, sniffing the whiffs of change; while his back (which was extremely straight) was turned upon yet more changes. His father had had a stroke in his absence abroad, and his mother had kept it a secret. His mother's voice, whispering stoically: "... Because your studies were too important, son." This mother, who had spent her life housebound, in purdah, had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone business (turquoises, rubies, diamonds) which had put Aadam through medical college, with the help of a scholarship; so he returned to find the seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain ... |
| 725 |
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. |
| 726 |
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. It would have dominated less dramatic faces than his easily; even on him, it is what one sees first and remembers longest. |
| 727 |
But I mustn't reveal all my secrets at once. (Tai is getting nearer. He, who revealed the power of the nose, and who is now bringing my grandfather the message which will catapult him into his future, is stroking his shikara through the early morning lake ...) Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen Lakes ... for ever. As far as anyone knew. He lived somewhere in the insanitary bowels of the old wooden-house quarter and his wife grew lotus-roots and other curious vegetables on one of the many "floating gardens" lilting on the surface of the spring and summer water. Tai himself cheerily admitted he had no idea of his age. Neither did his wife — he was, she said, already leathery when they married. His face was a sculpture of wind on water: ripples made of hide. He had two golden teeth and no others. In the town, he had few friends. Few boatmen or traders invited him to share a hookah when he floated past the shikara moorings or one of the lakes' many ramshackle, waterside provision-stores and tea-shops. The general opinion of Tai had been voiced long ago by Aadam Aziz's father the gemstone merchant: "His brain fell out with his teeth." (But now old Aziz Sahib sat lost in bird tweets while Tai simply, grandly, continued.) It was an impression the boatman fostered by his chatter, which was fantastic, grandiloquent and ceaseless, and as often as not addressed only to himself. |
| 728 |
Sound carries over water, and the lake people giggled at his monologues; but with undertones of awe, and even fear. Awe, because the old half-wit knew the lakes and hills better than any of his detractors; fear, because of his claim to an antiquity so immense it defied numbering, and moreover hung so lightly round his chicken's neck that it hadn't prevented him from winning a highly desirable wife and fathering four sons upon her ... and a few more, the story went, on other lakeside wives. The young bucks at the shikara moorings were convinced he had a pile of money hidden away somewhere — a hoard, perhaps, of priceless golden teeth, rattling in a sack like walnuts. Years later, when Uncle Puffs tried to sell me his daughter by offering to have her teeth drawn and replaced in gold, I thought of Tai's forgotten treasure ... and, as a child, Aadam Aziz had loved him. He made his living as a simple ferryman, despite all the rumors of wealth, taking hay and goats and vegetables and wood across the lakes for cash; people, too. When he was running his taxi-service he erected a pavilion in the center of the shikara, a gay affair of flowered-patterned curtains and canopy, with cushions to match; and deodorized his boat with incense. The sight of Tai's shikara approaching, curtains flying, had always been for Doctor Aziz one of the defining images of the coming of spring. Soon the English sahibs would arrive and Tai would ferry them to the Shalimar Gardens and the King's Spring, chattering and pointy and stooped. |
| 729 |
"But how old are you really, Taiji?" (Doctor Aziz, adult, red-bearded, slanting towards the future, remembers the day he asked the unaskable question.) For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall. The monologue, interrupted. Slap of oar in water. He was riding in the shikara with Tai, squatting amongst goats, on a pile of straw, in full knowledge of the stick and bathtub waiting for him at home. He had come for stories — and with one question had silenced the storyteller. "No, tell, Taiji, how old, truly?" And now a brandy bottle, materializing from nowhere: cheap liquor from the folds of the great warm chugha-coat. Then a shudder, a belch, a glare. Glint of gold. And — at last! — speech. "How old? You ask how old, you little wet-head, you nosey ..." Tai, forecasting the fisherman on my wall, pointed at the mountains. "So old, nakkoo!" Aadam, the nakkoo, the nosey one, followed his pointing finger. "I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen Emperors die. Listen. Listen, nakkoo ..." — the brandy bottle again, followed by brandy-voice, and words more intoxicating than booze — "... I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year. Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can't read." Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. |
| 730 |
The itching sent him wild; but the damn fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little witch when the army went home. He became — what? — a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think of that?" ... Doctor Aziz in 1915, whom rubies and diamonds have turned into a half-and-halfer, remembers this story as Tai enters hailing distance. His nose is itching still. He scratches, shrugs, tosses his head; and then Tai shouts. "OhE! Doctor Sahib! Ghani the landowner's daughter is sick." The message, delivered curtly, shouted unceremoniously across the surface of the lake although boatman and pupil have not met for half a decade, mouthed by woman's lips that are not smiling in longtime-no-see greeting, sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement ... ... "Just think, son," Aadam's mother is saying as she sips fresh lime water, reclining on a takht in an attitude of resigned exhaustion, "how life does turn out. For so many years even my ankles were a secret, and now I must be stared at by strange persons who are not even family members." ... While Ghani the landowner stands beneath a large oil painting of Diana the Huntress, framed in squiggly gold. He wears thick dark glasses and his famous poisonous smile, and discusses art. "I purchased it from an Englishman down on his luck, Doctor Sahib. Five hundred rupees only — and I did not trouble to beat him down. |
| 731 |
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. |
| 732 |
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. |
| 733 |
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. |
| 734 |
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. In 1918, Doctor Aziz's father, deprived of his birds, died in his sleep; and at once his mother, who had been able to sell the gemstone business thanks to the success of Aziz's practice, and who now saw her husband's death as a merciful release for her from a life filled with responsibilities, took to her own deathbed and followed her man before the end of his own forty-day mourning period. |
| 735 |
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. |
| 736 |
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. |
| 737 |
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. 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. |
| 738 |
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? |
| 739 |
Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I'm keen to get my parents together, too.) It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. "I have lived twice as long as I should have," the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, "and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the Devil's work." It was, indeed, a resilient virus — the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth. |
| 740 |
Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk ... Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found his whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances. (And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.) Astride his bicycle, leather attachE attached to carrier, my grandfather whistled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humor was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum. The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. "Magician turned conjurer," the newspapermen wrote, "Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians' ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India's hundred million Muslims." The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation's second annual assembly was about to take place. |
| 741 |
My grandfather, fifty-two-years-old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan. Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children ... and, in another time and place, told his friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: "I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much of a Muslim, but I'm all for Abdullah. He's fighting my fight." His eyes were still the blue of Kashmiri sky ... he arrived home, and although his eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother. She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch's nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. 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. |
| 742 |
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. |
| 743 |
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. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the children ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted him to choose his food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. |
| 744 |
"India isn't full enough of starving people?" the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lid-less eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. "Full enough, whatsitsname?" she crowed. "Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not." But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz's death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it. "Fall ill, why don't you?" — Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter's decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a business. |
| 745 |
But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes ... here, Brigadier Dodson, the town's military commander, stifling with heat ... and here, his A. D. C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj. Memory of a mildewing photograph (perhaps the work of the same poor brained photographer whose life-size blow-ups so nearly cost him his life): Aadam Aziz, aglow with optimism-fever, shakes hands with a man of sixty or so, an impatient, sprightly type with a lock of white hair falling across his brow like a kindly scar. It is Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird. ("You see, Doctor Sahib, I keep myself fit. You wish to hit me in the stomach? Try, try. I'm in tiptop shape." ... In the photographs, folds of a loose white shirt conceal the stomach, and my grandfather's fist is not clenched, but swallowed up by the hand of the ex-conjurer.) And behind them, looking benignly on, the Rani of Cooch Naheen, who was going white in blotches, a disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale shortly after Independence ... "I am the victim," the Rani whispers, through photographed lips that never move, "the hapless victim of my cross-cultural concerns. My skin is the outward expression of the internationalism of my spirit." Yes, there is a conversation going on in this photograph, as like expert ventriloquists the optimists meet their leader. |
| 746 |
Not — I believe — because he saw it as his poetic duty to get close to the center of events and transmute them into literature. Nor because he wanted fame for himself. No: but Nadir had one thing in common with my grandfather, and it was enough. He, too, suffered from the optimism disease. Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League. ("That bunch of toadies!" the Rani cried in her silvery voice, swooping around the octaves like a skier. "Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now that the Congress refuses to do it!" It was the year of the "Quit India" resolution. "And what's more," the Rani said with finality, "they are mad. Otherwise why would they want to partition India?") Mian Abdullah, the Hummingbird, had created the Free Islam Convocation almost single-handedly. He invited the leaders of the dozens of Muslim splinter groups to form a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and vested interests of the Leaguers. It had been a great conjuring trick, because they had all come. That was the first Convocation, in Lahore; Agra would see the second. The marquees would be filled with members of agrarian movements, urban laborers' syndicates, religious divines and regional groupings. It would see confirmed what the first assembly had intimated: that the League, with its demand for a partitioned India, spoke on nobody's behalf but its own. |
| 747 |
Then — Allah, then! — the knives began to sing and Abdullah sang louder, humming high-high like he'd never hummed before. His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib, but the others quickly became stained with red. But now — listen! — Abdullah's humming rose out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town. In Agra there are maybe eight thousand four hundred and twenty pie-dogs. On that night, it is certain that some were eating, others dying; there were some who fornicated and others who did not hear the call. Say about two thousand of these; that left six thousand four hundred and twenty of the curs, and all of these turned and ran for the University, many of them rushing across the railway tracks from the wrong side of town. It is well known that this is true. Everyone in town saw it, except those who were asleep. They went noisily, like an army, and afterwards their trail was littered with bones and dung and bits of hair ... and all the time Abdullahji was humming, humming-humming, and the knives were singing. And know this: suddenly one of the killers' eyes cracked and fell out of its socket. Afterwards the pieces of glass were found, ground into the carpet!" They say, "When the dogs came Abdullah was nearly dead and the knives were blunt ... they came like wild things, leaping through the window, which had no glass because Abdullah's hum had shattered it ... they thudded against the door until the wood broke ... |
| 748 |
On Cornwallis Road, it was a warm night. A coal-brazier stood empty by the deserted rickshaw rank. The paan-shop was closed and the old men were asleep on the roof, dreaming of tomorrow's game. An insomniac cow, idly chewing a Red and White cigarette packet, strolled by a bundled street-sleeper, which meant he would wake in the morning, because a cow will ignore a sleeping man unless he's about to die. Then it nuzzles at him thoughtfully. Sacred cows eat anything. My grandfather's large old stone house, bought from the proceeds of the gemstone shops and blind Ghani's dowry settlement, stood in the darkness, set back a dignified distance from the road. There was a walled-in garden at the rear and by the garden door was the low outhouse rented cheaply to the family of old Hamdard and his son Rashid the rickshaw boy. In front of the outhouse was the well with its cow-driven waterwheel, from which irrigation channels ran down to the small cornfield which lined the house all the way to the gate in the perimeter wall along Cornwallis Road. Between house and field ran a small gully for pedestrians and rickshaws. In Agra the cycle-rickshaw had recently replaced the kind where a man stood between wooden shafts. There was still trade for the horse-drawn tongas, but it was dwindling ... Nadir Khan ducked in through the gate, squatted for a moment with his back to the perimeter wall, reddening as he passed his water. Then, seemingly upset by the vulgarity of his decision, he fled to the cornfield and plunged in. |
| 749 |
The assassins were never identified, nor were their pay-masters named. My grandfather was called to the campus by Major Zulfikar, Brigadier Dodson's A. D. C., to write his friend's death certificate. Major Zulfikar promised to call on Doctor Aziz to tie up a few loose ends; my grandfather blew his nose and left. At the maidan, tents were coming down like punctured hopes; the Convocation would never be held again. The Rani of Cooch Naheen took to her bed. After a lifetime of making light of her illnesses she allowed them to claim her, and lay still for years, watching herself turn the color of her bedsheets. Meanwhile, in the old house on Cornwallis Road, the days were full of potential mothers and possible fathers. You see, Padma: you're going to find out now. Using my nose (because, although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has acquired other, compensatory gifts) — turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house in those days after the death of India's humming hope; and wafting down to me through the years comes a curious mElange of odors, filled with unease, the whiff of things concealed mingling with the odors of burgeoning romance and the sharp stink of my grandmother's curiosity and strength ... while the Muslim League rejoiced, secretly of course, at the fall of its opponent, my grandfather could be found (my nose finds him) seated every morning on what he called his "thunderbox," tears standing in his eyes. |
| 750 |
While my grandfather's astonished sphincter relaxed, his ears heard a request for sanctuary, a request muffled by linen, dirty underwear, old shirts and the embarrassment of the speaker. And so it was that Aadam Aziz resolved to hide Nadir Khan. Now comes the scent of a quarrel, because Reverend Mother Naseem is thinking about her daughters, twenty-one-year-old Alia, black Mumtaz, who is nineteen, and pretty, flighty Emerald, who isn't fifteen yet but has a look in her eyes that's older than anything her sisters possess. In the town, among spittoon-hitters and rickshaw-wallahs, among film-poster-trolley pushers and college students alike, the three sisters are known as the "Teen Batti," the three bright lights ... and how can Reverend Mother permit a strange man to dwell in the same house as Alia's gravity, Mumtaz's black, luminous skin and Emerald's eyes? ... "You are out of your mind, husband; that death has hurt your brain." But Aziz, determinedly: "He is staying." In the cellars ... because concealment has always been a crucial architectural consideration in India, so that Aziz's house has extensive underground chambers, which can be reached only through trap-doors in the floors, which are covered by carpets and mats ... Nadir Khan hears the dull rumble of the quarrel and fears for his fate. My God (I sniff the thoughts of the clammy-palmed poet), the world is gone insane ... are we men in this country? Are we beasts? And if I must go, when will the knives come for me? ... |
| 751 |
The children spoke in whispers at first, and then fell quiet: while in the cornfield, Rashid the rickshaw boy yelled his silent "yell of hate," and kept his own vow of silence, which he had sworn upon his mother's hairs. Into this bog of muteness there came, one evening, a short man whose head was as flat as the cap upon it; whose legs were as bowed as reeds in the wind; whose nose nearly touched his up-curving chin; and whose voice, as a result, was thin and sharp — it had to be, to squeeze through the narrow gap between his breathing apparatus and his jaw ... a man whose short sight obliged him to take life one step at a time, which gained him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, and endeared him to his superiors by enabling them to feel well-served without feeling threatened; a man whose starched, pressed uniform reeked of Blanco and rectitude, and about whom, despite his appearance of a character out of a puppet-show, there hung the unmistakable scent of success: Major Zulfikar, a man with a future, came to call, as he had promised, to tie up a few loose ends. Abdullah's murder, and Nadir Khan's suspicious disappearance, were much on his mind, and since he knew about Aadam Aziz's infection by the optimism bug, he mistook the silence in the house for a hush of mourning, and did not stay for long. (In the cellar, Nadir huddled with cockroaches.) Sitting quietly in the drawing-room with the five children, his hat and stick beside him on the Telefunken radiogram, the life-size images of the young Azizes staring at him from the walls, Major Zulfikar fell in love. |
| 752 |
Alia's face acquired a weightiness at this time, a jowly pessimistic quality which she was never entirely to lose. ("Now then," Padma reproves me, "that's no way to describe your respected motherji.") One more thing: Alia had inherited her mother's tendency to put on fat. She would balloon outwards with the passing years. And Mumtaz, who had come out of her mother's womb black as midnight? Mumtaz was never brilliant; nor as beautiful as Emerald; but she was good, and dutiful, and alone. She spent more time with her father than any of her sisters, fortifying him against the bad temper which was being exaggerated nowadays by the constant itch in his nose; and she took upon herself the duties of caring for the needs of Nadir Khan, descending daily into his underworld bearing trays of food, and brooms, and even emptying his personal thunderbox, so that not even a latrine cleaner could guess at his presence. When she descended, he lowered his eyes; and no words, in that dumb house, were exchanged between them. What was it the spittoon hitters said about Naseem Aziz? "She eavesdropped on her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were up to." Yes, there's no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that — Reverend Mother began to dream her daughters' dreams. (Padma accepts this without blinking; but what others will swallow as effortlessly as a laddoo, Padma may just as easily reject. |
| 753 |
No audience is without its idiosyncrasies of belief.) So, then: asleep in her bed at night, Reverend Mother visited Emerald's dreams, and found another dream within them — Major Zulfikar's private fantasy, of owning a large modern house with a bath beside his bed. This was the zenith of the Major's ambitions; and in this way Reverend Mother discovered, not only that her daughter had been meeting her Zulfy in secret, in places where speech was possible, but also that Emerald's ambitions were greater than her man's. And (why not?) in Aadam Aziz's dreams she saw her husband walking mournfully up a mountain in Kashmir with a hole in his stomach the size of a fist, and guessed that he was falling out of love with her, and also foresaw his death; so that years later, when she heard, she said only, "Oh, I knew it, after all." ... It could not be long now, Reverend Mother thought, before our Emerald tells her Major about the guest in the cellar; and then I shall be able to speak again. But then, one night, she entered the dreams of her daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman, and realized the trouble would not stop there; because Mumtaz Aziz — like her admirer under the carpets — was also falling in love. There was no proof. The invasion of dreams — or a mother's knowledge, or a woman's intuition, call it what you like — is not something that will stand up in court, and Reverend Mother knew that it was a serious business to accuse a daughter of getting up to hanky-panky under her father's roof. |
| 754 |
Like Shah Jehan and his Mumtaz, Nadir and his dark lady lay side by side, and lapis lazuli inlay work was their companion, because the bedridden, dying Rani of Cooch Naheen had sent them, as a wedding gift, a wondrously-carved, lapis-inlaid, gemstone-crusted silver spittoon. In their comfortable lamplit seclusion, husband and wife played the old men's game. Mumtaz made the paans for Nadir but did not like the taste herself. She spat streams of nibu-pani. His jets were red and hers were lime. It was the happiest time of her life. And she said afterwards, at the ending of the long silence, "We would have had children in the end; only then it wasn't right, that's all." Mumtaz Aziz loved children all her life. Meanwhile, Reverend Mother moved sluggishly through the months in the grip of a silence which had become so absolute that even the servants received their instructions in sign language, and once the cook Daoud had been staring at her, trying to understand her somnolently frantic signalling, and as a result had not been looking in the direction of the boiling pot of gravy which fell upon his foot and fried it like a five-toed egg; he opened his mouth to scream but no sound emerged, and after that he became convinced that the old hag had the power of witchery, and became too scared to leave her service. He stayed until his death, hobbling around the courtyard and being attacked by the geese. They were not easy years. The drought led to rationing, and what with the proliferation of meatless days and riceless days it was hard to feed an extra, hidden mouth. |
| 755 |
He bellowed for his wife, his daughters, his sons. His lungs were strong and the noise reached Nadir Khan in the cellar. It would not have been difficult for him to guess what the fuss was about. The family assembled in the drawing-room around the radiogram, beneath the ageless photographs. Aziz carried Mumtaz into the room and set her down on a couch. His face looked terrible. Can you imagine how the insides of his nose must have felt? Because he had this bombshell to drop: that, after two years of marriage, his daughter was still a virgin. It had been three years since Reverend Mother had spoken. "Daughter, is this thing true?" The silence, which had been hanging in the corners of the house like a torn cobweb, was finally blown away; but Mumtaz just nodded: Yes. True. Then she spoke. She said she loved her husband and the other thing would come right in the end. He was a good man and when it was possible to have children he would surely find it possible to do the thing. She said a marriage should not depend on the thing, she had thought, so she had not liked to mention it, and her father was not right to tell everyone out loud like he had. She would have said more; but now Reverend Mother burst. Three years of words poured out of her (but her body, stretched by the exigencies of storing them, did not diminish). My grandfather stood very still by the Telefunken as the storm broke over him. Whose idea had it been? Whose crazy fool scheme, whatsitsname, to let this coward who wasn't even a man into the house? |
| 756 |
Nowadays, the cities are full of modern, fashionable, dupatta-less misses; but back then the old men clicked their tongues in sorrow, because a woman without a dupatta was a woman without honor, and why had Emerald Bibi chosen to leave her honor at home? The old ones were baffled, but Emerald knew. She saw, clearly, freshly in the after-the-rain air, that the fountainhead of her family's troubles was that cowardly plumpie (yes, Padma) who lived underground. If she could get rid of him everyone would be happy again ... Emerald ran without pausing to the Cantonment district. The Cantt, where the army was based; where Major Zulfikar would be! Breaking her oath, my aunt arrived at his office. Zulfikar is a famous name amongst Muslims. It was the name of the two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad. It was a weapon such as the world had never seen. Oh, yes: something else was happening in the world that day. A weapon such as the world had never seen was being dropped on yellow people in Japan. But in Agra, Emerald was using a secret weapon of her own. It was bandylegged, short, flat-headed; its nose almost touched its chin; it dreamed of a big modern house with a plumbed-in bath right beside the bed. Major Zulfikar had never been absolutely sure whether or not he believed Nadir Khan to have been behind the Hummingbird's murder; but he itched for the chance to find out. When Emerald told him about Agra's subterranean Taj, he became so excited that he forgot to be angry, and rushed to Cornwallis Road with a force of fifteen men. |
| 757 |
They arrived in the drawing-room with Emerald at their head. My aunt: treason with a beautiful face, no dupatta and pink loose-pajamas. Aziz watched dumbly as the soldiers rolled back the drawing-room carpet and opened the big trap-door as my grandmother attempted to console Mumtaz. "Women must marry men," she said. "Not mice, whatsitsname! There is no shame in leaving that, whatsitsname, worm." But her daughter continued to cry. Absence of Nadir in his underworld! Warned by Aziz's first roar, overcome by the embarrassment which flooded over him more easily than monsoon rain, he vanished. A trap-door flung open in one of the toilets — yes, the very one, why not, in which he had spoken to Doctor Aziz from the sanctuary of a washing-chest. A wooden "thunderbox" — a "throne" — lay on one side, empty enamel pot rolling on coir matting. The toilet had an outside door giving out on to the gully by the cornfield; the door was open. It had been locked from the outside, but only with an Indian-made lock, so it had been easy to force ... and in the soft lamplit seclusion of the Taj Mahal, a shining spittoon, and a note, addressed to Mumtaz, signed by her husband, three words long, six syllables, three exclamation marks: Talaaq! Talaaq! Talaaq! The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu, and anyway you know what it means. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. Nadir Khan had done the decent thing. O awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found the bird had flown! This was the color he saw: red. |
| 758 |
O anger fully comparable to my grandfather's fury, though expressed in petty gestures! Major Zulfy, at first, hopped up and down in helpless fits of temper; controlled himself at last; and rushed out through bathroom, past throne, alongside cornfield, through perimeter gate. No sign of a running, plump, longhair, rhymeless poet. Looking left: nothing. And right: zero. Enraged Zulfy made his choice, pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street. Urchins, dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins' skill. What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch. A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. O even more unfortunate; because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running, had unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy's day ... slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it over, into the dust. He jumped on it — once! twice! again! — flattening it, and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. Then, with some dignity, he limped away, back to the car parked outside my grandfather's house. The old ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape. "Now that I'm getting married," Emerald told Mumtaz, "it'll be very rude of you if you don't even try to have a good time. |
| 759 |
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 ... |
| 760 |
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 ... he walked (with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move. |
| 761 |
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. |
| 762 |
Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zohra told him, coquettishly, "You must diet, cousinji, or we won't be able to reach you to kiss!" But it did no good ... and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible ... she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of ... and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish hair.) You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other's view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighborhoods which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting circles, facing inwards. |
| 763 |
There was no greenery and the cows kept away, knowing they weren't sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly. And above their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers: Come all you greats-O, eat a few dates-O! To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of the footsteps of Mr. Mustapha Kemal and Mr. S. P. Butt; and also the insistent rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum. When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away. Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes; meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant cousin Zohra. Feet clacked past fruit salesmen and hand-holding loafers; my mother overheard: "... You newlyweds, I can't stop coming to see, cho chweet I can't tell you!" While feet approached, my father actually colored. In those days he was in the high summer of his charm; his lower lip really didn't jut so much, the line between his eyebrows was still only faint ... and Amina, stirring khichri, heard Zohra squeal, "Oh look, pink! But then you are so fair, cousinji! ..." And he was letting her listen to All-India Radio at the table, which Amina was not allowed to do; Lata Mangeshkar was singing a waily love-song as "Just like me, don'tyouthink," Zohra went on. |
| 764 |
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. |
| 765 |
So, with a sense of high expectation, I follow the pointing finger in the sky and look down on my parents' neighborhood, upon bicycles, upon street-vendors touting roasted gram in twists of paper, upon the hip-jutting, hand-holding street loafers, upon flying scraps of paper and little clustered whirlwinds of flies around the sweetmeat stalls ... all of it foreshortened by my high-in-the-sky point of view. And there are children, swarms of them, too, attracted into the street by the magical rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum and his voice, "Dunya dekho," see the whole world! Boys without shorts on, girls without vests, and other, smarter infants in school whites, their shorts held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped snake-buckles, fat little boys with pudgy fingers; all flocking to the black box on wheels, including this one particular girl, a girl with one long hairy continuous eyebrow shading both eyes, the eight-year-old daughter of that same discourteous Sindhi who is even now raising the flag of the still-fictional country of Pakistan on his roof, who is even now hurling abuse at his neighbor, while his daughter rushes into the street with her chavanni in her hand, her expression of a midget queen, and murder lurking just behind her lips. What's her name? I don't know; but I know those eyebrows. Lifafa Das: who has by an unfortunate chance set up his black peepshow against a wall on which someone has daubed a swastika (in those days you saw them everywhere; the extremist R. |
| 766 |
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 ... |
| 767 |
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. |
| 768 |
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. My mother lost her city eyes and the newness of what she was seeing made her flush, newness like a hailstorm pricking her cheeks. Look, my God, those beautiful children have black teeth! Would you believe ... girl children baring their nipples! How terrible, truly! And, Allah-tobah, heaven forfend, sweeper women with — no! — how dreadful! — collapsed spines, and bunches of twigs, and no caste marks; untouchables, sweet Allah! ... and cripples everywhere, mutilated by loving parents to ensure them of a lifelong income from begging ... |
| 769 |
Yes, beggars in boxcars, grown men with babies' legs, in crates on wheels, made out of discarded roller-skates and old mango boxes; my mother cries out, "Lifafa Das, turn back!" ... but he is smiling his beautiful smile, and says, "We must walk from here." Seeing that there is no going back, she tells the taxi to wait, and the bad-tempered driver says, "Yes, of course, for a great lady what is there to do but wait, and when you come I must drive my car in reverse all the way back to main-road, because here is no room to turn!" ... Children tugging at the pallu of her sari, heads everywhere staring at my mother, who thinks, It's like being surrounded by some terrible monster, a creature with heads and heads and heads; but she corrects herself, no, of course not a monster, these poor poor people — what then? A power of some sort, a force which does not know its strength, which has perhaps decayed into impotence through never having been used ... No, these are not decayed people, despite everything. "I'm frightened," my mother finds herself thinking, just as a hand touches her arm. Turning, she finds herself looking into the face of — impossible! — a white man, who stretches out a raggedy hand and says in a voice like a high foreign song, "Give something, Begum Sahiba ..." arid repeats and repeats like a stuck record while she looks with embarrassment into a white face with long eyelashes and a curved patrician nose — embarrassment, because he was white, and begging was not for white people. |
| 770 |
... 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. |
| 771 |
Padma, it's true: you've never been there, never stood in the twilight watching straining, resolute, furry creatures working at the stones, pulling and rocking, rocking and pulling, working the stones loose one at a time ... every day the monkeys send stones rolling down the walls, bouncing off angles and outcrops, crashing down into the ditches below. One day there will be no Old Fort; in the end, nothing but a pile of rubble surmounted by monkeys screaming in triumph ... and here is one monkey, scurrying along the ramparts — I shall call him Hanuman, after the monkey god who helped Prince Rama defeat the original Ravana, Hanuman of the flying chariots ... Watch him now as he arrives at this turret — his territory; as he hops chatters runs from corner to corner of his kingdom, rubbing his rear on the stones; and then pauses, sniffs something that should not be here ... Hanuman races to the alcove here, on the topmost landing, in which the three men have left three soft gray alien things. And, while monkeys dance on a roof behind the post office, Hanuman the monkey dances with rage. Pounces on the gray things. Yes, they are loose enough, won't take much rocking and pulling, pulling and rocking ... watch Hanuman now, dragging the soft gray stones to the edge of the long drop of the outside wall of the Fort. See him tear at them: rip! rap! rop! ... Look how deftly he scoops paper from the insides of the gray things, sending it down like floating rain to bathe the fallen stones in the ditch! |
| 772 |
... Paper falling with lazy, reluctant grace, sinking like a beautiful memory into the maw of the darkness; and now, kick! thump! and again kick! the three soft gray stones go over the edge, downdown into the dark, and at last there comes a soft disconsolate plop. Hanuman, his work done, loses interest, scurries away to some distant pinnacle of his kingdom, begins to rock on a stone. ... While, down below, my father has seen a grotesque figure emerging from the gloom. Not knowing a thing about the disaster which has taken place above, he observes the monster from the shadow of his ruined room: a ragged-pajama'd creature in the headdress of a demon, a papier-machE devil-top which has faces grinning on every side of it ... the appointed representative of the Ravana gang. The collector. Hearts thumping, the three businessman watch this specter out of a peasant's nightmare vanish into the stairwell leading to the landing; and after a moment, in the stillness of the empty night, hear the devil's perfectly human oaths. "Mother-sleepers! Eunuchs from somewhere!" ... Uncomprehending, they see their bizarre tormentor emerge, rush away into the darkness, vanish. His imprecations ... "Sodomizers of asses! Sons of pigs! Eaters of their own excrement!" ... linger on the breeze. And up they go now, confusion addling their spirits; Butt finds a torn fragment of gray cloth; Mustapha Kemal stoops over a crumpled rupee; and maybe, yes, why not, my father sees a dark flurry of monkey out of the corner of an eye ... |
| 773 |
— did Ramram become stiff — eyes rolling upwards until they were white as eggs — did he, in a voice as strange as a mirror, ask, "You permit, Madam, that I touch the place?" — while cousins fell as silent as sleeping vultures — and did my mother, just as strangely, reply, "Yes, I permit," so that the seer became only the third man to touch her in her life, apart from her family members? — and was it then, at that instant, that a brief sharp jolt of electricity passed between pudgy fingers and maternal skin? And my mother's face, rabbit-startled, watching the prophet in the check shirt as he began to circle, his eyes still egg-like in the softness of his face; and suddenly a shudder passing through him and again that strange high voice as the words issued through his lips (I must describe those lips, too — but later, because now ...) "A son." Silent cousins — monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter — cobras coiled in baskets — and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Beginning, "A son ... such a son!" And then it comes, "A son, Sahiba, who will never be older than his motherland — neither older nor younger." And now, real fear amongst snake-charmer mongoose-dancer bone-setter and peepshow-wallah, because they have never heard Ramram like this, as he continues, sing-song, high-pitched: "There will be two heads — but you shall see only one — there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees." Nose and knees and knees and nose ... |
| 774 |
Our Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight." Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all kinds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by announcing my coming and who repaid her by leading her to too much prophecy, and spoke to him evenly, without rancor. "So you're back," she said, "Well, let me tell you this: I wish I'd understood what your cousinji meant — about blood, about knees and nose. Because who knows? I might have had a different son." Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corridor in a blind man's house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was. good at seeing ghosts. ... But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads; why, then, can't I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother? ... What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer's stomach? And memory — my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else — answers: soft; squashy as cornflour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interrogate this memory of mine: what of his hair? The reply: thinning; dark; lank; worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the ultimate question ... |
| 775 |
"Let me go, big sirs," he pleaded, "I am a little man; do not keep me here ..." but by then their backs were moving away from him, towards the fire. He watched them as they ran, clutching their rupees that were stained by tomatoes and dogshit; open-mouthed he stared at the burning godown, at the clouds in the night sky, and like everyone else on the scene he was obliged to breathe air filled with leathercloth and matchsticks and burning rice. With his hands over his eyes, watching through his fingers, the little taxi-driver with his incompetent moustache saw Mr. Kemal, thin as a demented pencil, lashing and kicking at the sleeping bodies of night-watchmen; and he almost gave up his fare and drove off in terror at the instant when my father shouted, "Look out!" ... but, staying despite it all, he saw the godown as it burst apart under the force of the licking red tongues, he saw pouring out of the godown an improbable lava flow of molten rice lentils chick-peas waterproof jackets matchboxes and pickle, he saw the hot red flowers of the fire bursting skywards as the contents of the warehouse spilled on to the hard yellow ground like a black charred hand of despair. Yes, of course the godown was burned, it fell on their heads from the sky in cinders, it plunged into the open mouths of the bruised, but still snoring, watchmen ... "God save us," said Mr. Butt, but Mustapha Kemal, more pragmatically, answered: "Thank God we are well insured." "It was right then," Ahmed Sinai told his wife later, "right at that moment that I decided to get out of the leathercloth business. |
| 776 |
Sell the office, the goodwill, and forget everything I know about the reccine trade. Then — not before, not afterwards — I made up my mind, also, to think no more about this Pakistan claptrap of your Emerald's Zulfy. In the heat of that fire," my father revealed — unleashing a wifely tantrum — "I decided to go to Bombay, and enter the property business. Property is dirt cheap there now," he told her before her protests could begin, "Narlikar knows." (But in time, he would call Narlikar a traitor.) In my family, we always go when we're pushed — the freeze of '48 being the only exception to this rule. The boatman Tai drove my grandfather from Kashmir; Mercurochrome chased him out of Amritsar; the collapse of her life under the carpets led directly to my mother's departure from Agra; and many-headed monsters sent my father to Bombay, so that I could be born there. At the end of that January, history had finally, by a series of shoves, brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready for me to make my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I stepped on to the scene ... the mystery, for example, of Shri Ramram's most enigmatic remark: "There will be a nose and knees: knees and a nose." The insurance money came; January ended; and in the time it took to close down their affairs in Delhi and move to the city in which — as Doctor Narlikar the gynecologist knew — property was temporarily as cheap as dirt, my mother concentrated on her segmented scheme for learning to love her husband. |
| 777 |
But then, the Portuguese named the place Bom Bahia for its harbor, and not for the goddess of the pomfret folk ... the Portuguese were the first invaders, using the harbor to shelter their merchant ships and their men-of-war; but then, one day in 1633, an East India Company Officer named Methwold saw a vision. This vision — a dream of a British Bombay, fortified, defending India's West against all comers — was a notion of such force that it set time in motion. History churned ahead; Methwold died; and in 1660, Charles II of England was betrothed to Catharine of the Portuguese House of Braganza — that same Catharine who would, all her life, play second fiddle to orange-selling Nell. But she has this consolation — that it was her marriage dowry which brought Bombay into British hands, perhaps in a green tin trunk, and brought Methwold's vision a step closer to reality. After that, it wasn't long until September 21st, 1668, when the Company at last got its hands on the island ... and then off they went, with their Fort and land-reclamation, and before you could blink there was a city here, Bombay, of which the old tune sang: Prima in Indis, Gateway to India, Star of the East With her face to the West. Our Bombay, Padma! It was very different then, there were no night-clubs or pickle factories or Oberoi-Sheraton Hotels or movie studios; but the city grew at breakneck speed, acquiring a cathedral and an equestrian statue of the Mahratta warrior-king Sivaji which (we used to think) came to life at night and galloped awesomely through the city streets — right along Marine Drive! |
| 778 |
Ganesh's day is a rain-making ceremony, it makes the monsoon possible, and it, too, was celebrated in the days before my arrival at the end of the ticktock countdown — but where is Mumbadevi's day? It is not on the calendar. Where the prayers of pomfret folk, the devotions of crab-catchers? ... Of all the first inhabitants, the Koli fishermen have come off worst of all. Squashed now into a tiny village in the thumb of the hand-like peninsula, they have admittedly given their name to a district — Colaba. But follow Colaba Causeway to its tip — past cheap clothes shops and Irani restaurants and the second-rate flats of teachers, journalists and clerks — and you'll find them, trapped between the naval base and the sea. And sometimes Koli women, their hands stinking of pomfret guts and crabmeat, jostle arrogantly to the head of a Colaba bus-queue, with their crimson (or purple) saris hitched brazenly up between their legs, and a smarting glint of old defeats and dispossessions in their bulging and somewhat fishy eyes. A fort, and afterwards a city, took their land; pile-drivers stole (tetrapods would steal) pieces of their sea. But there are still Arab dhows, every evening, spreading their sails against the sunset ... in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of fishing-nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no dominion is everlasting. And on June 19th, two weeks after their arrival by Frontier Mail, my parents entered into a curious bargain with one such departing Englishman. |
| 779 |
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? In every room here there are talking budgies, and in the almirahs I find moth-eaten dresses and used brassiEres!" ... And Nussie is telling Amina, "Goldfish, Allah, I can't stand the creatures, but Methwold Sahib comes himself to feed ... and there are half-empty pots of Bovril he says I can't throw ... it's mad, Amina sister, what are we doing like this?" ... |
| 780 |
"Even if we're sitting in the middle of all this English garbage," my mother was beginning to think, "this is still India, and people like Ramram Seth know what they know." In this way the scepticism of her beloved father was replaced by the credulity of my grandmother; and, at the same time, the adventurous spark which Amina had inherited from Doctor Aziz was being snuffed out by another, and equally heavy, weight. By the time the rains came at the end of June, the fetus was fully formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book — perhaps an encyclopedia — even a whole language ... which is to say that the lump in the middle of my mother grew so large, and became so heavy, that while Warden Road at the foot of our two-storey hillock became flooded with dirty yellow rainwater and stranded buses began to rust and children swam in the liquid road and newspapers sank soggily beneath the surface, Amina found herself in a circular first-floor tower room, scarcely able to move beneath the weight of her leaden balloon. Endless rain. Water seeping in under windows in which stained-glass tulips danced along leaded panes. Towels, jammed against window-frames, soaked up water until they became heavy, saturated, useless. |
| 781 |
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. |
| 782 |
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. But she is asleep. And in these days of her boulder-like pregnancy, an enigmatic dream of flypaper has been plaguing her sleeping hours ... |
| 783 |
In which she wanders now, as before, in a crystal sphere filled with dangling strips of the sticky brown material, which adhere to her clothing and rip it off as she stumbles through the impenetrable papery forest; and now she struggles, tears at paper, but it grabs at her, until she is naked, with the baby kicking inside her, and long tendrils of flypaper stream out to seize her by her undulating womb, paper glues itself to her hair nose teeth breasts thighs, and as she opens her mouth to shout a brown adhesive gag falls across her parting lips ... "Amina Begum!" Musa is saying. "Wake up! Bad dream, Begum Sahiba!" Incidents of those last few hours — the last dregs of my inheritance: when there were thirty-five hours to go, my mother dreamed of being glued to brown paper like a fly. And at the cocktail hour (thirty hours to go) William Methwold visited my father in the garden of Buckingham Villa. Center-parting strolling beside and above big toe, Mr. Methwold reminisced. Tales of the first Methwold, who had dreamed the city into existence, filled the evening air in that penultimate sunset. And my father — aping Oxford drawl, anxious to impress the departing Englishman — responded with, "Actually, old chap, ours is a pretty distinguished family, too." Methwold listening: head cocked, red rose in cream lapel, wide-brimmed hat concealing parted hair, a veiled hint of amusement in his eyes ... Ahmed Sinai, lubricated by whisky, driven on by self-importance, warms to his theme. "Mughal blood, as a matter of fact." To which Methwold, "No! |
| 784 |
Really? You're pulling my leg." And Ahmed, beyond the point of no return, is obliged to press on. "Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal, certainly." That was how, thirty hours before my birth, my father demonstrated that he, too, longed for fictional ancestors ... how he came to invent a family pedigree that, in later years, when whisky had blurred the edges of his memory and djinn-bottles came to confuse him, would obliterate all traces of reality ... and how, to hammer his point home, he introduced into our lives the idea of the family curse. "Oh yes," my father said as Methwold cocked a grave unsmiling head, "many old families possessed such curses. In our line, it is handed down from eldest son to eldest son — in writing only, because merely to speak it is to unleash its power, you know." Now Methwold: "Amazing! And you know the words?" My father nods, lip jutting, toe still as he taps his forehead for emphasis. "All in here; all memorized. Hasn't been used since an ancestor quarrelled with the Emperor Babar and put the curse on his son Humayun ... terrible story, that — every schoolboy knows." And the time would come when my father, in the throes of his utter retreat from reality, would lock himself in a blue room and try to remember a curse which he had dreamed up one evening in the gardens of his house while he stood tapping his temple beside the descendant of William Methwold. Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born ... |
| 785 |
India, the new myth — a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of this collective dream; but for the moment, I shall turn away from these generalized, macrocosmic notions to concentrate upon a more private ritual; I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of the divided Punjab (where the partitioned nations are washing themselves in one another's blood, and a certain Punchinello-faced Major Zulfikar is buying refugee property at absurdly low prices, laying the foundations of a fortune that will rival the Nizam of Hyderabad's); I shall avert my eyes from the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi. Selfish? Narrow-minded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion. After all, one is not born every day. Twelve hours to go. Amina Sinai, having awakened from her flypaper nightmare, will not sleep again until after ... Ramram Seth is filling her head, she is adrift in a turbulent sea in which waves of excitement alternate with deep, giddying, dark, watery hollows of fear. But something else is in operation, too. Watch her hands — as, without any conscious instructions, they press down, hard, upon her womb; watch her lips, muttering without her knowledge: "Come on, slowpoke, you don't want to be late for the newspapers!" Eight hours to go ... at four o'clock that afternoon, William Methwold drives up the two-storey hillock in his black 1946 Rover. |
| 786 |
He parks in the circus-ring between the four noble villas; but today he visits neither goldfish-pond nor cactus-garden; he does not greet Lila Sabarmati with his customary, "How goes the pianola? Everything tickety-boo?" — nor does he salute old man Ibrahim who sits in the shade of a ground-floor verandah, rocking in a rocking-chair and musing about sisal; looking neither towards Catrack nor Sinai, he takes up his position in the exact center of the circus-ring. Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest, center-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight ahead, past clocktower and Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy's map-shaped pool, across the golden four o'clock waves, and salutes; while out there, above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea. Six hours to go. The cocktail hour. The successors of William Methwold are in their gardens — except that Amina sits in her tower-room, avoiding the mildly competitive glances being flung in her direction by Nussie-next-door, who is also, perhaps, urging her Sonny down and out between her legs; curiously they watch the Englishman, who stands as still and stiff as the ramrod to which we have previously compared his center-parting; until they are distracted by a new arrival. A long, stringy man, wearing three rows of beads around his neck, and a belt of chicken-bones around his waist; his dark skin stained with ashes, his hair loose and long — naked except for beads and ashes, the sadhu strides up amongst the red-tiled mansions. |
| 787 |
And the city of Lahore, too, is burning. The wiry serious man is getting to his feet. Anointed with holy water from the Tanjore River, he rises; his forehead smeared with sanctified ash, he clears his throat. Without written speech in hand, without having memorized any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins: "... Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge — not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially ..." It is two minutes to twelve. At Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home, the dark glowing doctor, accompanied by a midwife called Flory, a thin kind lady of no importance, encourages Amina Sinai: "Push! Harder! ... I can see the head! ..." while in the neighboring room one Doctor Bose — with Miss Mary Pereira by his side — presides over the terminal stages of Vanita's twenty-four-hour labor ... "Yes; now; just one last try, come on; at last, and then it will be over! ..." Women wail and shriek while in another room men are silent. Wee Willie Winkie — incapable of song — squats in a corner, rocking back and forth, back and forth ... and Ahmed Sinai is looking for a chair. But there are no chairs in this room; it is a room designated for pacing; so Ahmed Sinai opens a door, finds a chair at a deserted receptionist's desk, lifts it, carries it back into the pacing room, where Wee Willie Winkie rocks, rocks, his eyes as empty as a blind man's ... will she live? won't she? ... and now, at last, it is midnight. The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying, "... |
| 788 |
"Go, go," she said to poor Flory, "see if you can help. I can do all right here." And when she was alone — two babies in her hands — two lives in her power — she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this, as she changed name-tags on the two huge infants, giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich-born child to accordions and poverty ... "Love me, Joseph!" was in Mary Pereira's mind, and then it was done. On the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes as blue as Kashmiri sky — which were also eyes as blue as Methwold's — and a nose as dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfather's — which was also the nose of grandmother from France — she placed this name: Sinai. Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own ... Mary took the child of my mother's womb, who was not to be her son, another ten-chip pomfret, but with eyes which were already turning brown, and knees as knobbly as Ahmed Sinai's, wrapped it in green, and brought it to Wee Willie Winkie — who was staring at her blind-eyed, who hardly saw his new son, who never knew about center-partings ... Wee Willie Winkie, who had just learned that Vanita had not managed to survive her childbearing. At three minutes past midnight, while doctors fussed over broken toe, Vanita had hemorrhaged and died. So I was brought to my mother; and she never doubted my authenticity for an instant. |
| 789 |
On August 20th, Nussie Ibrahim followed my mother into the Pedder Road clinic, and little Sonny followed me into the world — but he was reluctant to emerge; forceps were obliged to reach in and extract him; Doctor Bose, in the heat of the moment, pressed a little too hard, and Sonny arrived with little dents beside each of his temples, shallow forcep-hollows which would make him as irresistibly attractive as the hairpiece of William Methwold had made the Englishman. Girls (Evie, the Brass Monkey, others) reached out to stroke his little valleys ... it would lead to difficulties between us. But I've saved the most interesting snippet for the last. So let me reveal now that, on the day after I was born, my mother and I were visited in a saffron and green bedroom by two persons from the Times of India (Bombay edition). I lay in a green crib, swaddled in saffron, and looked up at them. There was a reporter, who spent his time interviewing my mother; and a tall, aquiline photographer who devoted his attentions to me. The next day, words as well as pictures appeared in newsprint ... Quite recently, I visited a cactus-garden where once, many years back, I buried a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape; and extracted from its insides the things I had placed there all those years ago. Holding them in my left hand now, as I write, I can still see — despite yellowing and mildew — that one is a letter, a personal letter to myself, signed by the Prime Minister of India; but the other is a newspaper cutting. |
| 790 |
Did somebody see? ... As for me, as I grew up, I didn't quite accept my mother's explanation, either; but it lulled me into a sense of false security; so that, even though something of Mary's suspicions had leaked into me, I was still taken by surprise when ... Perhaps the fisherman's finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun ... an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city's dispossessed. Or maybe — and this idea makes me feel a little shivery despite the heat — it was a finger of warning, its purpose to draw attention to itself; yes, it could have been, why not, a prophecy of another finger, a finger not dissimilar from itself, whose entry into my story would release the dreadful logic of Alpha and Omega ... 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. |
| 791 |
"It's as if," Amina whispered to Mary, "he's decided to put our minds at rest." There was one more serious problem. Amina and Mary took a few days to notice it. Busy with the mighty, complex processes of turning themselves into a two-headed mother, their vision clouded by a fog of stenchy underwear, they failed to notice the immobility of my eyelids. Amina, remembering how, during her pregnancy, the weight of her unborn child had held time as still as a dead green pond, began to wonder whether the reverse might not be taking place now — whether the baby had some magical power over all the time in his immediate vicinity, and was speeding it up, so that mother-and-ayah never had enough time to do everything that needed doing, so that the baby could grow at an apparently fantastic rate; lost in such chronological daydreams, she didn't notice my problem. Only when she shrugged the idea off, and told herself I was just a good strapping boy with a big appetite, an early developer, did the veils of maternal love part sufficiently for her and Mary to yelp, in unison: "Look, baap-re-baap! Look, Madam! See, Mary! The little chap never blinks!" The eyes were too blue: Kashmiri-blue, changeling-blue, blue with the weight of unspilled tears, too blue to blink. When I was fed, my eyes did not flutter; when virginal Mary set me across her shoulder, crying, "Oof, so heavy, sweet Jesus!" I burped without nictating. When Ahmed Sinai limped splint-toed to my crib, I yielded to jutting lips with keen and batless gaze ... |
| 792 |
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. |
| 793 |
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. |
| 794 |
And whisky, too: Ahmed Sinai blurred the edges of himself by drinking the green bottles and red labels of his servants. The poor, having little else to peddle, sold their identities on little pieces of pink paper; and my father turned them into liquid and drank them down. At six o'clock every evening, Ahmed Sinai entered the world of the djinns; and every morning, his eyes red, his head throbbing with the fatigue of his night-long battle, he came unshaven to the breakfast table; and with the passage of the years, the good mood of the time before he shaved was replaced by the irritable exhaustion of his war with the bottled spirits. After breakfast, he went downstairs. He had set aside two rooms on the ground floor for his office, because his sense of direction was as bad as ever, and he didn't relish the notion of getting lost in Bombay on the way to work; even he could find his way down a flight of stairs. Blurred at the edges, my father did his property deals; and his growing anger at my mother's preoccupation with her child found a new outlet behind his office door — Ahmed Sinai began to flirt with his secretaries; After nights in which his quarrel with bottles would sometimes erupt in harsh language — "What a wife I found! I should have bought myself a son and hired a nurse — what difference?" And then tears, and Amina, "Oh, janum — don't torture me!" which, in turn, provoked, "Torture my foot! You think it's torture for a man to ask his wife for attention? God save me from stupid women!" — my father limped downstairs to make googly eyes at Colaba girls. |
| 795 |
Perhaps because he was afraid of missing yet another turning; perhaps for the fellowship of games of shatranj; or maybe it was Narlikar's plausibility — "Your capital and my contacts, Ahmed bhai, what problem can there be? Every great man in this city has a son brought into the world by me; no doors will close. You manufacture; I will get the contract! Fifty-fifty; fair is fair!" But, in my view, there is a simpler explanation. My father, deprived of wifely attention, supplanted by his son, blurred by whisky and djinn, was trying to restore his position in the world; and the dream of tetrapods offered him the chance. Whole-heartedly, he threw himself into the great folly; letters were written, doors knocked upon, black money changed hands; all of which served to make Ahmed Sinai a name known in the corridors of the Sachivalaya — in the passageways of the State Secretariat they got the whiff of a Muslim who was throwing his rupees around like water. And Ahmed Sinai, drinking himself to sleep, was unaware of the danger he was in. * * * Our lives, at this period, were shaped by correspondence. The Prime Minister wrote to me when I was just seven days old — before I could even wipe my own nose I was receiving fan letters from Times of India readers; and one morning in January Ahmed Sinai, too, received a letter he would never forget. Red eyes at breakfast were followed by the shaven chin of the working day; footsteps down the stairs; alarmed giggles of Coca-Cola girl. The squeak of a chair drawn up to a desk topped with green leathercloth. |
| 796 |
Religious leaders described the snake escape as a warning — the good Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation's official renunciation of its deities. ("We are a secular State," Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) And one day, when Mary had been asking, "How are we going to live now, Madam?" Homi Catrack introduced us to Doctor Schaapsteker himself. He was eighty-one years old; his tongue flicked constantly in and out between his papery lips; and he was prepared to pay cash rent for a top-floor apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea. Ahmed Sinai, in those days, had taken to his bed; the icy cold of the freeze impregnated his bedsheets; he downed vast quantities of whisky for medicinal purposes, but it failed to warm him up ... so it was Amina who agreed to let the upper storey of Buckingham Villa to the old snake-doctor. At the end of February, snake poison entered our lives. Doctor Schaapsteker was a man who engendered wild stories. The more superstitious orderlies at his Institute swore that he had the capacity of dreaming every night about being bitten by snakes, and thus remained immune to their bites. Others whispered that he was half-snake himself, the child of an unnatural union between a woman and a cobra. His obsession with the venom of the banded krait — bungarus fasciatus — was becoming legendary. There is no known antivenene to the bite of bungarus; but Schaapsteker had devoted his life to finding one. |
| 797 |
So that finally the day came when Amina, who had been watching me play incompetently with toy horses of sandalwood in the bath, inhaling the sweet odors of sandalwood which the bathwater released, suddenly rediscovered within herself the adventurous streak which was her inheritance from her fading father, the streak which had brought Aadam Aziz down from his mountain valley; Amina turned to Mary Pereira and said, "I'm fed up. If nobody in this house is going to put things right, then it's just going to be up to me!" Toy horses galloped behind Amina's eyes as she left Mary to dry me and marched into her bedroom. Remembered glimpses of Mahalaxmi Racecourse cantered in her head as she pushed aside saris and petticoats. The fever of a reckless scheme flushed her cheeks as she opened the lid of an old tin trunk ... filling her purse with the coins and rupee notes of grateful patients and wedding-guests, my mother went to the races. With the Brass Monkey growing inside her, my mother stalked the paddocks of the racecourse named after the goddess of wealth; braving early-morning sickness and varicose veins, she stood in line at the Tote window, putting money on three-horse accumulators and long-odds outsiders. Ignorant of the first thing about horses, she backed mares known not to be stayers to win long races; she put her money on jockeys because she liked their smiles. Clutching a purse full of the dowry which had lain untouched in its trunk since her own mother had packed it away, she took wild flutters on stallions who looked fit for the Schaapsteker Institute ... |
| 798 |
Verrucas plagued her feet, although Purushottam the sadhu, who sat under our garden tap until dripping water created a bald patch amid the luxuriantly matted hair on his head, was a marvel at charming them away; but throughout the snake winter and the hot season, my mother fought her husband's fight. 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. |
| 799 |
"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 ... |
| 800 |
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. Amina's brother Hanif had not gone to Pakistan. Following the childhood dream which he had whispered to Rashid the rickshaw-boy in an Agra cornfield, he had arrived in Bombay and sought employment in the great film studios. Precociously confident, he had not only succeeded in becoming the youngest man ever to be given a film to direct in the history of the Indian cinema; he had also wooed and married one of the brightest stars of that celluloid heaven, the divine Pia, whose face was her fortune, and whose saris were made of fabrics whose designers had clearly set out to prove that it was possible to incorporate every color known to man in a single pattern. Reverend Mother did not approve of the divine Pia, but Hanif of all my family was the one who was free of her confining influence; a jolly, burly man with the booming laugh of the boatman Tai and the explosive, innocent anger of his father Aadam Aziz, he took her to live simply in a small, un-filmi apartment on Marine Drive, telling her, "Plenty of time to live like Emperors after I've made my name." She acquiesced; she starred in his first feature, which was partly financed by Homi Catrack and partly by D. W. Rama Studios (Pvt.) Ltd — it was called The Lovers of Kashmir; and one evening in the midst of her racing days Amina Sinai went to the premiere. |
| 801 |
The cinema audience (which would, nowadays, cheer raucously at the sight of a young couple diving behind a bush, which would then begin to shake ridiculously — so low have we sunk in our ability to suggest) watched, riveted to the screen, as the love of Pia and Nayyar, against a background of Dal Lake and ice-blue Kashmiri sky, expressed itself in kisses applied to cups of pink Kashmiri tea; by the foundations of Shalimar they pressed their lips to a sword ... but now, at the height of Hanif Aziz's triumph, the serpent refused to wait; under its influence, the house-lights came up. Against the larger-than-life figures of Pia and Nayyar, kissing mangoes as they mouthed to playback music, the figure of a timorous, inadequately bearded man was seen, marching on to the stage beneath the screen, microphone in hand. The Serpent can take most unexpected forms; now, in the guise of this ineffectual house-manager, it unleashed its venom. Pia and Nayyar faded and died; and the amplified voice of the bearded man said: "Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news." His voice broke — a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth! — and then continued. "This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed. Some madman shot him in the stomach, ladies and gentlemen — our Bapu is gone!" The audience had begun to scream before he finished; the poison of his words entered their veins — there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! |
| 802 |
"Take, Ismail, now that he's up we have to be quick and careful!" And sitting dutifully beside her mother in the evenings, "Yes, of course you're right, and Ahmed will be getting so rich soon, you'll just see!" And endless delays in court; and envelopes, emptying; and the growing baby, nearing the point at which Amina will not be able to insert herself behind the driving-wheel of the 1946 Rover; and can her luck hold?; and Musa and Mary, quarrelling like aged tigers. 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? |
| 803 |
The racing season is over. A pale blue clocktower: squat, peeling, inoperational. It stood on black-tarred concrete at the end of the circus-ring — the flat roof of the upper storey of the buildings along Warden Road, which abutted our two-storey hillock, so that if you climbed over Buckingham Villa's boundary wall, flat black tar would be under your feet. And beneath black tar, Breach Candy Kindergarten School, from which, every afternoon during term, there rose the tinkling music of Miss Harrison's piano playing the unchanging tunes of childhood; and below that, the shops, Reader's Paradise, Fatbhoy Jewellery, Chimalker's Toys and Bombelli's, with its windows filled with One Yards of Chocolates. The door to the clocktower was supposed to be locked, but it was a cheap lock of a kind Nadir Khan would have recognized: made in India. And on three successive evenings immediately before my first birthday, Mary Pereira, standing by my window at night, noticed a shadowy figure floating across the roof, his hands full of shapeless objects, a shadow which filled her with an unidentifiable dread. After the third night, she told my mother; the police were summoned; and Inspector Vakeel returned to Methwold's Estate, accompanied by a special squad of crack officers — "all deadeye shots, Begum Sahiba; just you leave it all to us!" — who, disguised, as sweepers, with guns concealed under their rags, kept the clocktower under surveillance while sweeping up the dust in the circus-ring. Night fell. |
| 804 |
Brothers of cockroaches! Sons of transvestites!" ... what, flick-tongued, dies while Vakeel races on to tarred roof? And inside the clocktower door? What weight, falling, created such an almighty crash? Whose hand wrenched a door open; in whose heel are visible the two red, flowing holes, filled with a venom for which there is no known antivenene, a poison which has killed stablefuls of worn-out horses? Whose body is carried out of the tower by plain-clothes men, in a dead march, coffinless, with imitation sweepers for pallbearers. Why, when the moonlight falls upon the dead face, does Mary Pereira fall like a sack of potatoes to the floor, eyes rolling upwards in their sockets, in a sudden and dramatic faint? And lining the interior walls of the clocktower: what are these strange mechanisms, attached to cheap time-pieces — why are there so many bottles with rags stuffed into their necks? "Damn lucky you called my boys out, Begum Sahiba," Inspector Vakeel is saying. "That was Joseph D'Costa — on our Most Wanted list. Been after him for a year or thereabouts. Absolute black-hearted badmaash. You should see the walls inside that clocktower! Shelves, filled from floor to ceiling with home-made bombs. Enough explosive power to blow this hill into the sea!" Melodrama piling upon melodrama; life acquiring the coloring of a Bombay talkie; snakes following ladders, ladders succeeding snakes; in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed. |
| 805 |
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 ... 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. |
| 806 |
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. |
| 807 |
In the washing-chest, I was like Nadir Khan in his underworld, safe from all pressures, concealed from the demands of parents and history ... ... My father, pulling me into his squashy belly, speaking in a voice choked with instant emotion: "All right, all right, there, there, you're a good boy; you can be anything you want; you just have to want it enough! Sleep now ..." And Mary Pereira, echoing him in her little rhyme: "Anything you want to be, you can be; You can be just what-all you want!" It had already occurred to me that our family believed implicitly in good business principles; they expected a handsome return for their investment in me. Children get food shelter pocketmoney longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. "There are no strings on me!" they sing; but I, Pinocchio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive — nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness. Don't misunderstand me. I didn't mind. I was, at that time, a dutiful child. I longed to give them what they wanted, what soothsayers and framed letters had promised them; I simply did not know how. Where did greatness come from? How did you get some? When? ... When I was seven years old, Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother came to visit us. On my seventh birthday, dutifully, I permitted myself to be dressed up like the boys in the fisherman picture; hot and constricted in the outlandish garb, I smiled and smiled. |
| 808 |
"See, my little piece-of-the-moon!" Amina cried cutting a cake covered with candied farmyard animals, "So chweet! Never takes out one tear!" Sandbagging down the floods of tears lurking just beneath my eyes, the tears of heat discomfort and the absence of One Yard Of Chocolates in my pile of presents, I took a slice of cake to Reverend Mother, who was ill in bed. I had been given a doctor's stethoscope; it was around my neck. She gave me permission to examine her; I prescribed more exercise. "You must walk across the room, to the almirah and back, once a day. You may lean on me; I am the doctor." Stethoscoped English milord guided witchmoled grandmother across the room; hobblingly, creakingly, she obeyed. After three months of this treatment, she made a full recovery. The neighbors came to celebrate, bearing rasgullas and gulab-jamans and other sweets. Reverend Mother, seated regally on a takht in the living-room, announced: "See my grandson? He cured me, whatsitsname. Genius! Genius, whatsitsname: it is a gift from God." Was that it, then? Should I stop worrying? Was genius something utterly unconnected with wanting, or learning how, or knowing about, or being able to? Something which, at the appointed hour, would float down around my shoulders like an immaculate, delicately worked pashmina shawl? Greatness as a falling mantle: which never needed to be sent to the dhobi. One does not beat genius upon a stone ... That one clue, my grandmother's one chance sentence, was my only hope; and, as it turned out, she wasn't very far wrong. |
| 809 |
What was really at the bottom of my mother's guilt? I mean really, beneath verrucas and djinns and confessions? It was an unspeakable malaise, an affliction which could not even be named, and which no longer confined itself to dreams of an underworld husband ... my mother had fallen (as my father would soon fall) under the spell of the telephone. * * * In the afternoons of that summer, afternoons as hot as towels, the telephone would ring. When Ahmed Sinai was asleep in his room, with his keys under his pillow and umbilical cords in his almirah, telephonic shrilling penetrated the buzzing of the heat insects; and my mother, verruca-hobbled, came into the hall to answer. And now, what expression is this, staining her face the color of drying blood? ... Not knowing that she's being observed, what fish-like flutterings of lips are these, what strangulated mouthings? ... And why, after listening for a full five minutes, does my mother say, in a voice like broken glass, "Sorry: wrong number"? Why are diamonds glistening on her eyelids? ... The Brass Monkey whispered to me, "Next time it rings, let's find out." Five days later. Once more it is afternoon; but today Amina is away, visiting Nussie-the-duck, when the telephone demands attention. "Quick! Quick or it'll wake him!" The Monkey, agile as her name, picks up the receiver before Ahmed Sinai has even changed the pattern of his snoring ... "Hullo? Yaas? This is seven zero five six one; hullo?" We listen, every nerve on edge; but for a moment there is nothing at all. |
| 810 |
(Because this time, you see, she gave me proof.) And now, at last, it is time for dirty laundry. Mary Pereira was fond of telling me, "If you want to be a big man, baba, you must be very clean. Change clothes," she advised, "take regular baths. Go, baba, or I'll send you to the washerman and he'll wallop you on his stone." She also threatened me with bugs: "All right, stay filthy, you will be nobody's darling except the flies'. They will sit on you while you sleep; eggs they'll lay under your skin!" In part, my choice of hiding-place was an act of defiance. Braving dhobis and houseflies, I concealed myself in the unclean place; I drew strength and comfort from sheets and towels; my nose ran freely into the stone-doomed linens; and always, when I emerged into the world from my wooden whale, the sad mature wisdom of dirty washing lingered with me, teaching me its philosophy of coolness and dignity-despite-everything and the terrible inevitability of soap. 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 ... |
| 811 |
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. 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!" ... |
| 812 |
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 ... |
| 813 |
Even the Monkey: "O God, Saleem, all this tamasha, all this performance, for one of your stupid cracks?" And worse than the Monkey was Mary Pereira: "Christ Jesus! Save us, Lord! Holy Father in Rome, such blasphemy I've heard today!" And worse than Mary Pereira was my mother Amina Sinai: Black Mango concealed now, her own unnameable names still warm upon her lips, she cried, "Heaven forfend! The child will bring down the roof upon our heads!" (Was that my fault, too?) And Amina continued: "You black man! Goonda! O Saleem, has your brain gone raw? What has happened to my darling baby boy — are you growing into a madman — a torturer!?" And worse than Amina's shrieking was my father's silence; worse than her fear was the wild anger sitting on his forehead; and worst of all was my father's hand, which stretched out suddenly, thick-fingered, heavy-jointed, strong-as-an-ox, to fetch me a mighty blow on the side of my head, so that I could never hear properly in my left ear after that day; so that I fell sideways across the startled room through the scandalized air and shattered a green tabletop of opaque glass; so that, having been certain of myself for the first time in my life, I was plunged into a green, glass-cloudy world filled with cutting edges, a world in which I could no longer tell the people who mattered most about the goings-on inside my head; green shards lacerated my hands as I entered that swirling universe in which I was doomed, until it was far too late, to be plagued by constant doubts about what I was for. |
| 814 |
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) ... |
| 815 |
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. 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. |
| 816 |
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. |
| 817 |
The taste of detergent lingered on my tongue for many weeks, reminding me of the need for secrecy. Even the Brass Monkey was satisfied by my show of contrition — in her eyes, I had returned to form, and was once more the goody-two-shoes of the family. To demonstrate her willingness to re-establish the old order, she set fire to my mother's favorite slippers, and regained her rightful place in the family doghouse. Amongst outsiders, what's more — displaying a conservatism you'd never have suspected in such a tomboy — she closed ranks with my parents, and kept my one aberration a secret from her friends and mine. In a country where any physical or mental peculiarity in a child is a source of deep family shame, my parents, who had become accustomed to facial birthmarks, cucumber-nose and bandy legs, simply refused to see any more embarrassing things in me; for my part, I did not once mention the buzzing in my ear, the occasional ringing bells of deafness, the intermittent pain. I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing. But imagine the confusion inside my head! Where, behind the hideous face, above the tongue tasting of soap, hard by the perforated eardrum, lurked a not-very-tidy mind, as full of bric-a-brac as nine-year-old pockets ... imagine yourself inside me somehow, looking out through my eyes, hearing the noise, the voices, and now the obligation of not letting people know, the hardest part was acting surprised, such as when my mother said Hey Saleem guess what we're going for a picnic to the Aarey Milk Colony and I had to go Ooo, exciting! |
| 818 |
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 ... and inevitably, through the random processes of my mind-hopping, I discovered politics. At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire ... at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign; also the thoughts of a Keralan peasant who had decided to vote Communist. My daring grew: one afternoon I deliberately invaded the head of our own State Chief Minister, which was how I discovered, over twenty years before it became a national joke, that Morarji Desai "took his own water" daily ... I was inside him, tasting the warmth as he gurgled down a frothing glass of urine. |
| 819 |
And finally I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gap-toothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres ... the high life is a heady thing. "Look at me!" I exulted silently. "I can go any place I want!" In that tower which had once been filled choc-a-block with the explosive devices of Joseph D'Costa's hatred, this phrase (accompanied by appropriate ticktock sound effects) plopped fully-formed into my thoughts: "I am the bomb in Bombay ... watch me explode!" Because the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen ... which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. "I can find out any damn thing!" I triumphed, "There isn't a thing I cannot know!" Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-aggrandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-preservation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their massed identities would have annihilated mine ... |
| 820 |
This is the story that got back to Methwold's Estate: Doctor Narlikar had been visiting friends near Marine Drive; at the end of the visit, he had resolved to stroll down to Chowpatty Beach and buy himself some bhel-puri and a little coconut milk. As he strolled briskly along the pavement by the sea-wall, he overtook the tail-end of a language march, which moved slowly along, chanting peacefully. Doctor Narlikar neared the place where, with the Municipal Corporation's permission, he had arranged for a single, symbolic tetrapod to be placed upon the sea-wall, as a kind of icon pointing the way to the future; and here he noticed a thing which made him lose his reason. A group of beggar-women had clustered around the tetrapod and were performing the rite of puja. They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one of them had painted the OM-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chanting prayers as they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash. Technological miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor Narlikar, the opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in which it seemed to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, procreative India had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-century concrete ... sprinting along, he shouted his abuse at the worshipping women, gleaming fiercely in his rage; reaching them, he kicked away their little dia-lamps; it is said he even tried to push the women. And he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers. |
| 821 |
Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious. From Doctor Narlikar's own bearer I learned that the death had, by swallowing large quantities of the sea, taken on the qualities of water: it had become a fluid thing, and looked happy, sad or indifferent according to how the light hit it. Homi Catrack's gardener interjected: "It is dangerous to look too long at death; otherwise you come away with a little of it inside you, and there are effects." We asked: effects? what effects? which effects? how? And Purushottam the sadhu, who had left his place under the Buckingham Villa garden tap for the first time in years, said: "A death makes the living see themselves too clearly; after they have been in its presence, they become exaggerated." This extraordinary claim was, in fact, borne out by events, because afterwards Toxy Catrack's nurse Bi-Appah, who had helped to clean up the body, became shriller, more shrewish, more terrifying than ever; and it seemed that everyone who saw the death of Doctor Narlikar as it lay in state was affected, Nussie Ibrahim became even sillier and more of a duck, and Lila Sabarmati, who lived upstairs from the death and had helped to arrange its room, afterwards gave in to a promiscuity which had always been lurking within her, and set herself on a road at whose end there would be bullets, and her husband Commander Sabarmati conducting the Colaba traffic with a most unusual baton ... |
| 822 |
I loved Evie for perhaps six months of my life; two years later, she was back in America, knifing an old woman and being sent to reform school. A brief expression of my gratitude is in order at this point: if Evie had not come to live amongst us, my story might never have progressed beyond tourism-in-a-clocktower and cheating in class ... and then there would have been no climax in a Widows' Hostel, no clear proof of my meaning, no coda in a fuming factory over which there presides the winking, saffron-and-green dancing figure of the neon goddess Mumbadevi. But Evie Burns (was she snake or ladder? The answer's obvious: both) did come, complete with the silver bicycle which enabled me not only to discover the midnight children, but also to ensure the partition of the state of Bombay. To begin at the beginning: her hair was made of scarecrow straw, her skin was peppered with freckles and her teeth lived in a metal cage. These teeth were, it seemed, the only things on earth over which she was powerless — they grew wild, in malicious crazy-paving overlaps, and stung her dreadfully when she ate ice-cream. (I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.) Racked by toothaches, my Evie rose magnificently above the pain. Refusing to be ruled by bone and gums, she ate cake and drank Coke whenever they were going; and never complained. A tough kid, Evie Burns: her conquest of suffering confirmed her sovereignty over us all. |
| 823 |
It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out. Once, I shyly gave her a necklace of flowers (queen-of-the-night for my lily-of-the-eve), bought with my own pocket-money from a hawker-woman at Scandal Point. "I don't wear flowers," Evelyn Lilith said, and tossed the unwanted chain into the air, spearing it before it fell with a pellet from her unerring Daisy air-pistol. Destroying flowers with a Daisy, she served notice that she was not to be manacled, not even by a necklace: she was our capricious, whirligig Lill-of-the-Hill. And also Eve. The Adam's-apple of my eye. How she arrived: Sonny Ibrahim, Eyeslice and Hairoil Sabarmati, Cyrus Dubash, the Monkey and I were playing French cricket in the circus-ring between Methwold's four palaces. A New Year's Day game: Toxy clapping at her barred window; even Bi-Appah was in a good humor and not, for once, abusing us. Cricket — even French cricket, and even when played by children — is a quiet game: peace anointed in linseed oil. The kissing of leather and willow; sprinkled applause; the occasional cry — "Shot! Shot, sir!" — "Owzatt??" but Evie on her bicycle was having none of that. "Hey, you! Alla you! Hey, whassamatter? You all deaf or what?" I was batting (elegantly as Ranji, powerfully as Vinoo Mankad) when she charged up the hill on her two-wheeler, straw hair flying, freckles ablaze, mouth-metal flashing semaphore messages in the sunlight, a scarecrow astride a silver bullet ... |
| 824 |
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. |
| 825 |
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. Although she was believed to speak the languages of birds and cats, the soft words of lovers roused in her an almost animal rage; but Sonny was too simple to be warned off. For months now, he had been pestering her with statements such as, "Saleem's sister, you're a pretty solid type!" or, "Listen, you want to be my girl? We could go to the pictures with your ayah, maybe ..." And for an equal number of months, she had been making him suffer for his love — telling tales to his mother; pushing him into mud-puddles accidentally-on-purpose; once even assaulting him physically, leaving him with long raking claw-marks down his face and an expression of sad-dog injury in his eyes; but he would not learn. |
| 826 |
And so, at last, she had planned her most terrible revenge. The Monkey attended Walsingham School for Girls on Nepean Sea Road; a school full of tall, superbly muscled Europeans, who swam like fish and dived like submarines. In their spare time, they could be seen from our bedroom window, cavorting in the map-shaped pool of the Breach Candy Club, from which we were, of course, barred ... and when I discovered that the Monkey had somehow attached herself to these segregated swimmers, as a sort of mascot, I felt genuinely aggrieved with her for perhaps the first time ... but there was no arguing with her; she went her own way. Beefy fifteen-year-old white girls let her sit with them on the Walsingham school bus. Three such females would wait with her every morning at the same place where Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great and I awaited the bus from the Cathedral School. One morning, for some forgotten reason, Sonny and I were the only boys at the stop. Maybe there was a bug going round or something. The Monkey waited until Mary Pereira had left us alone, in the care of the beefy swimmers; and then suddenly the truth of what she was planning flashed into my head as, for no particular reason, I tuned into her thoughts; and I yelled "Hey!" — but too late. The Monkey screeched, "You keep out of this!" and then she and the three beefy swimmers had jumped upon Sonny Ibrahim, street-sleepers and beggars and bicycling clerks were watching with open amusement, because they were ripping every scrap of clothing off his body ... |
| 827 |
One night I awoke on the stroke of twelve to find my grandfather's dream inside my head, and was therefore unable to avoid seeing him as he saw himself — as a crumbling old man in whose center, when the light was right, it was possible to discern a gigantic shadow. As the convictions which had given strength to his youth withered away under the combined influence of old age, Reverend Mother and the absence of like-minded friends, an old hole was reappearing in the middle of his body, turning him into just another shrivelled, empty old man, over whom the God (and other superstitions) against which he'd fought for so long was beginning to reassert His dominion ... meanwhile, Reverend Mother spent the entire fortnight finding little ways of insulting my uncle Hanif's despised film-actress wife. And that was also the time when I was cast as a ghost in a children's play, and found, in an old leather attachE-case on top of my grandfather's almirah, a sheet which had been chewed by moths, but whose largest hole was man-made: for which discovery I was repaid (you will recall) in roars of grandparental rage. But there was one achievement. I was befriended by Rashid the rickshaw-wallah (the same fellow who had, in his youth, screamed silently in a corn field and helped Nadir Khan into Aadam Aziz's toilet): taking me under his wing — and without telling my parents, who would have forbidden it so soon after my accident — he taught me how to ride a bicycle. By the time we left, I had this secret tucked away with all my others: only I didn't intend this one to stay secret for very long. |
| 828 |
I am warming over all this cold history, these old dead struggles between the barren angularity of Marathi which was born in the arid heat of the Deccan and Gujarati's boggy, Kathiawari softness, to explain why, on the day in February 1957 immediately following our return from Agra, Methwold's Estate was cut off from the city by a stream of chanting humanity which flooded Warden Road more completely than monsoon water, a parade so long that it took two days to pass, and of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji had come to life to ride stonily at its head. The demonstrators carried black flags; many of them were shopkeepers on hartal; many were striking textile-workers from Mazagaon and Matunga; but on our hillock, we knew nothing about their jobs; to us children, the endless ant-trail of language in Warden Road seemed as magnetically fascinating as a light-bulb to a moth. It was a demonstration so immense, so intense in its passions, that it made all previous marches vanish from the mind as if they had never occurred — and we had all been banned from going down the hill for even the tiniest of looks. So who was the boldest of us all? Who urged us to creep at least half-way down, to the point where the hillock-road swung round to face Warden Road in a steep U-bend? Who said, "What's to be scared of? We're only going halfway for a peek"? ... Wide-eyed, disobedient Indians followed their freckled American chief. ("They killed Doctor Narlikar — marchers did," Hairoil warned us in a shivery voice. |
| 829 |
Then with my few pice I have taken a bus into the country to dig for herbs, with which your manhood could be awakened from its sleep ... imagine, mister, I have spoken magic with these words: 'Herb thou hast been uprooted by Bulls!' Then I have ground herbs in water and milk and said, 'Thou potent and lusty herb! 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? |
| 830 |
Began on Friday, February 18th, 3102 B. C.; and will last a mere 432,000 years! Already feeling somewhat dwarfed, I should add nevertheless that the Age of Darkness is only the fourth phase of the present Maha-Yuga cycle which is, in total, ten times as long; and when you consider that it takes a thousand Maha-Yugas to make just one Day of Brahma, you'll see what I mean about proportion. A little humility at this point (when I'm trembling on the brink of introducing the Children) does not, I feel, come amiss. Padma shifts her weight, embarrassed. "What are you talking?" she asks, reddening a little. "That is brahmin's talk; what's it to do with me?" ... Born and raised in the Muslim tradition, I find myself overwhelmed all of a sudden by an older learning; while here beside me is my Padma, whose return I had so earnestly desired ... my Padma! The Lotus Goddess; the One Who Possesses Dung; who is Honey-Like, and Made of Gold; whose sons are Moisture and Mud ... "You must be fevered still," she expostulates, giggling. "How made of gold, mister? And you know I have no chil ..." ... Padma, who along with the yaksa genii, who represent the sacred treasure of the earth, and the sacred rivers, Ganga Yamuna Sarasvati, and the tree goddesses, is one of the Guardians of Life, beguiling and comforting mortal men while they pass through the dream-web of Maya ... Padma, the Lotus calyx, which grew out of Vishnu's navel, and from which Brahma himself was born; Padma the Source, the mother of Time! |
| 831 |
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. |
| 832 |
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. |
| 833 |
For some time after that Sundari was obliged to have a rag placed across her face; until an old and ruthless great-aunt took her into her bony arms and slashed her face nine times with a kitchen knife. At the time when I became aware of her, Sundari was earning a healthy living, because nobody who looked at her could fail to pity a girl who had clearly once been too beautiful to look at and was now so cruelly disfigured; she received more alms than any other member of her family. Because none of the children suspected that their time of birth had anything to do with what they were, it took me a while to find it out. At first, after the bicycle accident (and particularly once language marchers had purged me of Evie Burns), I contented myself with discovering, one by one, the secrets of the fabulous beings who had suddenly arrived in my mental field of vision, collecting them ravenously, the way some boys collect insects, and others spot railways trains; losing interest in autograph books and all other manifestations of the gathering instinct, I plunged whenever possible into the separate, and altogether brighter reality of the five hundred and eighty-one. (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 ... |
| 834 |
Even Purushottam, the dejected sadhu under the garden tap, looks embarrassed. My fading father ... for almost ten years he had always been in a good mood at the breakfast-table, before he shaved his chin; but as his facial hairs whitened along with his fading skin, this fixed point of happiness ceased to be a certainty; and the day came when he lost his temper at breakfast for the first time. That was the day on which taxes were raised and tax thresholds simultaneously lowered; my father flung down the Times of India with a violent gesture and glared around him with the red eyes I knew he only wore in his tempers. "It's like going to the bathroom!" he exploded, cryptically; egg toast tea shuddered in the blast of his wrath. "You raise your shirt and lower your trousers! Wife, this government is going to the bathroom all over us!" And my mother, blushing pink through the black, "Janum, the children, please," but he had stomped off, leaving me with a clear understanding of what people meant when they said the country was going to pot. In the following weeks my father's morning chin continued to fade, and something more than the peace of the breakfast-table was lost: he began to forget what sort of man he'd been in the old days before Narlikar's treason. The rituals of our home life began to decay. He began to stay away from the breakfast-table, so that Amina could not wheedle money out of him; but, to compensate, he became careless with his cash, and his discarded clothes were full of rupee notes and coins, so that by picking his pockets she could make ends meet. |
| 835 |
But a more depressing indication of his withdrawal from family life was that he rarely told us bedtime stories any more, and when he did we didn't enjoy them, because they had become ill-imagined and unconvincing. Their subject-matter was still the same, princes goblins flying horses and adventures in magic lands, but in his perfunctory voice we could hear the creaks and groans of a rusting, decayed imagination. My father had succumbed to abstraction. It seems that Narlikar's death and the end of his tetrapod dream had shown Ahmed Sinai the unreliable nature of human relationships; he had decided to divest himself of all such ties. He took to rising before dawn and locking himself with his current Fernanda or Flory in his downstairs office, outside whose windows the two evergreen trees he planted to commemorate my birth and the Monkey's had already grown tall enough to keep out most of the daylight when it arrived. Since we hardly ever dared disturb him, my father entered a deep solitude, a condition so unusual in our overcrowded country as to border on abnormality; he began to refuse food from our kitchen and to live on cheap rubbish brought daily by his girl in a tiffin-carrier, lukewarm parathas and soggy vegetable samosas and bottles of fizzy drinks. A strange perfume wafted out from under his office door; Amina took it for the odor of stale air and second-rate food; but it's my belief that an old scent had returned in a stronger form, the old aroma of failure which had hung about him from the earliest days. |
| 836 |
He sold off the many tenements or chawls which he'd bought cheaply on his arrival in Bombay, and on which our family's fortunes had been based. Freeing himself from all business connections with human beings — even his anonymous tenants in Kurla and Worli, in Matunga and Mazagaon and Mahim — he liquefied his assets, and entered the rarefied and abstract air of financial speculation. Locked in his office, in those days, his one contact with the outside world (apart from his poor Fernandas) was his telephone. He spent his day deep in conference with this instrument, as it put his money into suchandsuch shares or soandso stocks, as it invested in government bonds or bear market equities, selling long or short as he commanded ... and invariably getting the best price of the day. In a streak of good fortune comparable only to my mother's success on the horses all those years previously, my father and his telephone took the stock exchange by storm, a feat made more remarkable by Ahmed Sinai's constantly-worsening drinking habits. Djinn-sodden, he nevertheless managed to ride high on the abstract undulations of the money market, reacting to its emotional, unpredictable shifts and changes the way a lover does to his beloved's slightest whim ... he could sense when a share would rise, when the peak would come; and he always got out before the fall. This was how his plunge into the abstract solitude of his telephonic days was disguised, how his financial coups obscured his steady divorce from reality; but under cover of his growing riches, his condition was getting steadily worse. |
| 837 |
Eventually the last of his calico-skirted secretaries quit, being unable to tolerate life in an atmosphere so thin and abstract as to make breathing difficult; and now my father sent for Mary Pereira and coaxed her with, "We're friends, Mary, aren't we, you and I?", to which the poor woman replied, "Yes, Sahib, I know; you will look after me when I'm old," and promised to find him a replacement. The next day she brought him her sister, Alice Pereira, who had worked for all kinds of bosses and had an almost infinite tolerance of men. Alice and Mary had long made up their quarrel over Joe D'Costa; the younger woman was often upstairs with us at the end of the day, bringing her qualities of sparkle and sauciness into the somewhat oppressive air of our home. I was fond of her, and it was through her that we learned of my father's greatest excesses, whose victims were a budgerigar and a mongrel dog. By July Ahmed Sinai had entered an almost permanent state of intoxication; one day, Alice reported, he had suddenly gone off for a drive, making her fear for his life, and returned somehow or other with a shrouded bird-cage in which, he said, was his new acquisition, a bulbul or Indian nightingale. "For God knows how long," Alice confided, "he tells me all about bulbuls; all fairy stories of its singing and what-all; how this Calipha was captivated by its song, how the singing could make longer the beauty of the night; God knows what the poor man was babbling, quoting Persian and Arabic, I couldn't make top or bottom of it. |
| 838 |
Sherri came too. We promenaded, wearing puzzled expressions, up and down the Vellard, and then he said, "Get in the car, all of you." Only he wouldn't let Sherri in ... as the Rover accelerated away with my father at the wheel she began to chase after us, while the Monkey yelled Daddydaddy and Amina pleaded Janumplease and I sat in mute horror, we had to drive for miles, almost all the way to Santa Cruz airport, before he had his revenge on the bitch for refusing to succumb to his sorceries ... she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow. The Brass Monkey (who didn't even like dogs) cried for a week; my mother became worried about dehydration and made her drink gallons of water, pouring it into her as if she were a lawn, Mary said; but I liked the new puppy my father bought me for my tenth birthday, out of some flicker of guilt perhaps: her name was the Baroness Simki von der Heiden, and she had a pedigree chock-full of champion Alsatians, although in time my mother discovered that that was as false as the mock-bulbul, as imaginary as my father's forgotten curse and Mughal ancestry; and after six months she died of venereal disease. We had no pets after that. My father was not the only one to approach my tenth birthday with his head lost in the clouds of his private dreams; because here is Mary Pereira, indulging in her fondness for making chutneys, kasaundies and pickles of all descriptions, and despite the cheery presence of her sister Alice there is something haunted in her face. |
| 839 |
"Hullo, Mary!" Padma — who seems to have developed a soft spot for my criminal ayah — greets her return to center-stage. "So what's eating her?" This, Padma: plagued by her nightmares of assaults by Joseph D'Costa, Mary was finding it harder and harder to get sleep. Knowing what dreams had in store for her, she forced herself to stay awake; dark rings appeared under her eyes, which were covered in a thin, filmy glaze; and gradually the blurriness of her perceptions merged waking and dreaming into something very like each other ... a dangerous condition to get into, Padma. Not only does your work suffer but things start escaping from your dreams ... Joseph D'Costa had, in fact, managed to cross the blurred frontier, and now appeared in Buckingham Villa not as a nightmare, but as a full-fledged ghost. Visible (at this time) only to Mary Pereira, he began haunting her in all the rooms of our home, which, to her horror and shame, he treated as casually as if it were his own. She saw him in the drawing-room amongst cut-glass vases and Dresden figurines and the rotating shadows of ceiling-fans, lounging in soft armchairs with his long raggedy legs sprawling over the arms; his eyes were filled up with egg-whites and there were holes in his feet where the snake had bitten him. Once she saw him in Amina Begum's bed in the afternoon, lying down cool as a cucumber right next to my sleeping mother, and she burst out, "Hey, you! Go on out from there! What do you think, you're some sort of lord?" — but she only succeeded in awaking my puzzled mother. |
| 840 |
Where have they gone? What have we done?" On my tenth birthday, old man Ibrahim announced his support for the Maha Gujarat Parishad; as far as possession of the city of Bombay was concerned, he nailed his colors to the losing side. On my tenth birthday, my suspicions aroused by a blush, I spied on my mother's thoughts; and what I saw there led to my beginning to follow her, to my becoming a private eye as daring as Bombay's legendary Dom Minto, and to important discoveries at and in the vicinity of the Pioneer CafE. On my tenth birthday, I had a party, which was attended by my family, which had forgotten how to be gay, by classmates from the Cathedral School, who had been sent by their parents, and by a number of mildly bored girl swimmers from the Breach Candy Pools, who permitted the Brass Monkey to fool around with them and pinch their bulging musculatures; as for adults, there were Mary and Alice Pereira, and the Ibrahims and Homi Catrack and Uncle Hanif and Pia Aunty, and Lila Sabarmati to whom the eyes of every schoolboy (and also Homi Catrack) remained firmly glued, to the considerable irritation of Pia. But the only member of the hilltop gang to attend was loyal Sonny Ibrahim, who had defied an embargo placed upon the festivities by an embittered Evie Burns. He gave me a message: "Evie says to tell you you're out of the gang." On my tenth birthday, Evie, Eyeslice, Hairoil and even Cyrus-the-great stormed my private hiding-place; they occupied the clocktower, and deprived me of its shelter. |
| 841 |
Why, at this crucial instant, when all manner of things were waiting to be described — when the Pioneer CafE was so close, and the rivalry of knees and nose — did I introduce a mere condiment into the conversation? (Why do I waste time, in this account, on a humble preserve, when I could be describing the elections of 1957 — when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote?) Because I sniffed the air; and scented, behind the solicitous expressions of my visitors, a sharp whiff of danger. I intended to defend myself; but I required the assistance of chutney ... I have not shown you the factory in daylight until now. This is what has remained undescribed: through green-tinged glass windows, my room looks out on to an iron catwalk and then down to the cooking-floor, where copper vats bubble and seethe, where strong-armed women stand atop wooden steps, working long-handled ladles through the knife-tang of pickle fumes; while (looking the other way, through a green-tinged window on the world) railway tracks shine dully in morning sun, bridged over at regular intervals by the messy gantries of the electrification system. In daylight, our saffron-and-green neon goddess does not dance above the factory doors; we switch her off to save power. But electric trains are using power: yellow-and-brown local trains clatter south towards Churchgate Station from Dadar and Borivli, from Kurla and Bassein Road. Human flies hang in thick white-trousered clusters from the trains; I do not deny that, within the factory walls, you may also see some flies. |
| 842 |
But there are also compensating lizards, hanging stilly upside-down on the ceiling, their jowls reminiscent of the Kathiawar peninsula ... sounds, too have been waiting to be heard: bubbling of vats, loud singing, coarse imprecations, bawdy humor of fuzz-armed women; the sharp-nosed, thin-lipped admonitions of overseers; the all-pervasive clank of pickle-jars from the adjacent bottling-works; and rush of trains, and the buzzing (infrequent, but inevitable) of flies ... while grasshopper-green chutney is being extracted from its vat, to be brought on a wiped-clean plate with saffron and green stripes around the rim, along with another plate piled high with snacks from the local Irani shop; while what-has-now-been-shown goes on as usual, and what-can-now-be-heard fills the air (to say nothing of what can be smelled), I, alone in bed in my office, realize with a start of alarm that outings are being suggested. "... When you are stronger," someone who cannot be named is saying, "a day at Elephanta, why not, a nice ride in a motor-launch, and all those caves with so-beautiful carvings; or Juhu Beach, for swimming and coconut-milk and camel-races; or Aarey Milk Colony, even! ..." And Padma: "Fresh air, yes, and the little one will like to be with his father." And someone, patting my son on his head: "There, of course, we will all go. Nice picnic; nice day out. Baba, it will do you good ..." As chutney arrives, bearer-borne, in my room, I hasten to put a stop to these suggestions. "No," I refuse. |
| 843 |
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. All machines, it seemed, were won over by the innocent delight with which he caressed their moving parts; no contraption could resist his ministrations. To put it another way: Sonny Ibrahim had become (out of a spirit of pure inquiry) an expert at picking locks. Now offered a chance of demonstrating his loyalty to me, his eyes brightened. "Jus' show me the lock, man! |
| 844 |
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 ... |
| 845 |
For half an hour each morning, when D. W. Rama Studios and Filmistan Talkies and R K Films were taking their pick, the Pioneer was the focus of all the city's ambitions and hopes; then the studio scouts left, accompanied by the day's lucky ones, and the CafE emptied into its habitual, neon-lit torpor. Around lunchtime, a different set of dreams walked into the CafE, to spend the afternoon hunched over cards and Lovely Lassi and rough biris — different men with different hopes: I didn't know it then, but the afternoon Pioneer was a notorious Communist Party hangout. It was afternoon; I saw my mother enter the Pioneer CafE; not daring to follow her, I stayed in the street, pressing my nose against a spider-webbed corner of the grubby window-pane; ignoring the curious glances I got — because my whites, although boot-stained, were nevertheless starched; my hair, although boot-rumpled, was well-oiled; my shoes, scuffed as they were, were still the plimsolls of a prosperous child — I followed her with my eyes as she went hesitantly and verruca-hobbled past rickety tables and hard-eyed men; I saw my mother sit down at a shadowed table at the far end of the narrow cavern; and then I saw the man who rose to greet her. The skin on his face hung in folds which revealed that he had once been overweight; his teeth were stained with paan. He wore a clean white kurta with Lucknow-work around the buttonholes. He had long hair, poetically long, hanging lankly over his ears; but the top of his head was bald and shiny. |
| 846 |
Forbidden syllables echoed in my ears: Na. Dir. Nadir. I realized that I wished desperately that I'd never resolved to come. Once upon a time there was an underground husband who fled, leaving loving messages of divorce; a poet whose verses didn't even rhyme, whose life was saved by pie-dogs. After a lost decade he emerged from goodness-knows-where, his skin hanging loose in memory of his erstwhile plumpness; and, like his once-upon-a-time wife, he had acquired a new name ... Nadir Khan was now Qasim Khan, official candidate of the official Communist Party of India. Lai Qasim. Qasim the Red. Nothing is without meaning: not without reason are blushes red. My uncle Hanif said, "Watch out for the Communists!" and my mother turned scarlet; politics and emotions were united in her cheeks ... through the dirty, square, glassy cinema-screen of the Pioneer CafE's window, I watched Amina Sinai and the no-longer-Nadir play out their love scene; they performed with the ineptitude of genuine amateurs. On the reccine-topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express 555. Numbers, too, have significance: 420, the name given to frauds; 1001, the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities — a number beloved of poets and detested by politicians, for whom all alternative versions of the world are threats; and 555, which for years I believed to be the most sinister of numbers, the cipher of the Devil, the Great Beast, Shaitan himself. (Cyrus-the-great told me so, and I didn't contemplate the possibility of his being wrong. |
| 847 |
Answers: I did not; I did not; I did not. What I did: when she went on "shopping trips," I lodged myself in her thoughts. No longer anxious to gain the evidence of my own eyes, I rode in my mother's head, up to the north of the city; in this unlikely incognito, I sat in the Pioneer CafE and heard conversations about the electoral prospects of Qasim the Red; disembodied but wholly present, I trailed my mother as she accompanied Qasim on his rounds, up and down the tenements of the district (were they the same chawls which my father had recently sold, abandoning his tenants to their fate?), as she helped him to get water-taps fixed and pestered landlords to initiate repairs and disinfections. Amina Sinai moved amongst the destitute on behalf of the Communist Party — a fact which never failed to leave her amazed. Perhaps she did it because of the growing impoverishment of her own life; but at the age of ten I wasn't disposed to be sympathetic; and in my own way, I began to dream dreams of revenge. The legendary Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid, is said to have enjoyed moving incognito amongst the people of Baghdad; I, Saleem Sinai, have also travelled in secret through the byways of my city, but I can't say I had much fun. Matter of fact descriptions of the outrE and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday — these techniques, which are also attitudes of mind, I have lifted — or perhaps absorbed — from the most formidable of the midnight children, my rival, my fellow-changeling, the supposed son of Wee Willie Winkie: Shiva-of-the-knees. |
| 848 |
They were techniques which, in his case, were applied entirely without conscious thought, and their effect was to create a picture of the world of startling uniformity, in which one could mention casually, in passing as it were, the dreadful murders of prostitutes which began to fill the gutter-press in those days (while the bodies filled the gutters), while lingering passionately on the intricate details of a particular hand of cards. 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. |
| 849 |
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. |
| 850 |
(I was particularly interested to learn that the murderer had his own curious "signature." The corpses of the ladies of the night were all strangled to death; there were bruises on their necks, bruises too large to be thumbprints, but wholly consistent with the marks which would be left by a pair of giant, preternaturally powerful knees.) But I digress. 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. |
| 851 |
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. We saw Evie Burns appear from the direction of the Versailles Villa kitchens; she was blowing the smoke away from the barrel of her gun. "You Indians c'n thank your stars you got me around," Evie declared, "or you'd just've got eaten by these cats!" We saw Evie fall silent as she saw the thing sitting tensely in the Monkey's eyes; and then like a blur the Monkey descended on Evie and a battle began which lasted for what seemed like several hours (but it can only have been a few minutes). Shrouded in the dust of the circus-ring they rolled kicked scratched bit, small tufts of hair flew out of the dust-cloud and there were elbows and feet in dirtied white socks and knees and fragments of frock flying out of the cloud; grown-ups came running, servants couldn't pull them apart, and in the end Homi Catrack's gardener turned his hose on them to separate them ... the Brass Monkey stood up a little crookedly and shook the sodden hem of her dress, ignoring the cries of retribution proceeding from the lips of Amina Sinai and Mary Pereira; because there in the hose-wet dirt of the circus-ring lay Evie Burns, her tooth-braces broken, her hair matted with dust and spittle, her spirit and her dominion over us broken for once and for all. |
| 852 |
A few weeks later her father sent her home for good, "To get a decent education away from these savages," he was heard to remark; I only heard from her once, six months later, when right out of the blue she wrote me the letter which informed me that she had knifed an old lady who had objected to her assault on a cat. "I gave it to her all right," Evie wrote, "Tell your sister she just got lucky." I salute that unknown old woman: she paid the Monkey's bill. More interesting than Evie's last message is a thought which occurs to me now, as I look back down the tunnel of time. Holding before my eyes the image of Monkey and Evie rolling in the dirt, I seem to discern the driving force behind their battle to the death, a motive far deeper than the mere persecution of cats: they were fighting over me. Evie and my sister (who were, in many ways, not at all dissimilar) kicked and scratched, ostensibly over the fate of a few thirsty strays; but perhaps Evie's kicks were aimed at me, perhaps they were the violence of her anger at my invasion of her head; and then maybe the strength of the Monkey was the strength of sibling-loyalty, and her act of war was actually an act of love. Blood, then, was spilled in the circus-ring. Another rejected title for these pages — you may as well know — was "Thicker Than Water." In those days of water shortages, something thicker than water ran down the face of Evie Burns; the loyalties of blood motivated the Brass Monkey; and in the streets of the city, rioters spilled each other's blood. |
| 853 |
There were bloody murders, and perhaps it is not appropriate to end this sanguinary catalogue by mentioning, once again, the rushes of blood to my mother's cheeks. Twelve million votes were colored red that year, and red is the color of blood. More blood will flow soon: the types of blood, A and O, Alpha and Omega — and another, a third possibility — must be kept in mind. Also other factors: zygosity, and Kell antibodies, and that most mysterious of sanguinary attributes, known as rhesus, which is also a type of monkey. Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form. But before blood has its day, I shall take wing (like the parahamsa gander who can soar out of one element into another) and return, briefly, to the affairs of my inner world; because although the fall of Evie Burns ended my ostracism by the hilltop children, still I found it difficult to forgive; and for a time, holding myself solitary and aloof, I immersed myself in the events inside my head, in the early history of the association of the midnight children. To be honest: I didn't like Shiva. I disliked the roughness of his tongue, the crudity of his ideas; and I was beginning to suspect him of a string of terrible crimes — although I found it impossible to find any evidence in his thoughts, because he, alone of the children of midnight, could close off from me any part of his thoughts he chose to keep to himself — which, in itself, increased my growing dislike and suspicion of the rat-faced fellow. |
| 854 |
However, I was nothing if not fair; and it would not have been fair to have kept him apart from the other members of the Conference. I should explain that as my mental facility increased, I found that it was possible not only to pick up the children's transmissions; not only to broadcast my own messages; but also (since I seem to be stuck with this radio metaphor) to act as a sort of national network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the children I could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through me. So, in the early days of 1958, the five hundred and eighty-one children would assemble, for one hour, between midnight and one a. m., in the lok sabha or parliament of my brain. We were as motley, as raucous, as undisciplined as any bunch of five hundred and eighty-one ten-year-olds; and on top of our natural exuberance, there was the excitement of our discovery of each other. After one hour of top-volume yelling jabbering arguing giggling, I would fall exhausted into a sleep too deep for nightmares, and still wake up with a headache; but I didn't mind. Awake I was obliged to face the multiple miseries of maternal perfidy and paternal decline, of the fickleness of friendship and the varied tyrannies of school; asleep, I was at the center of the most exciting world any child had ever discovered. Despite Shiva, it was nicer to be asleep. Shiva's conviction that he (or he-and-I) was the natural leader of our group by dint of his (and my) birth on the stroke of midnight had, I was bound to admit, one strong argument in its favor. |
| 855 |
"They can't stop us, man! We can bewitch, and fly, and read minds, and turn them into frogs, and make gold and fishes, and they will fall in love with us, and we can vanish through mirrors and change our sex ... how will they be able to fight?" I won't deny I was disappointed. I shouldn't have been; there was nothing unusual about the children except for their gifts; their heads were full of all the usual things, fathers mothers money food land possessions fame power God. Nowhere, in the thoughts of the Conference, could I find anything as new as ourselves ... but then I was on the wrong track, too; I could not see any more clearly than anyone else; and even when Soumitra the time-traveller said, "I'm telling you — all this is pointless — they'll finish us before we start!" we all ignored him; with the optimism of youth — which is a more virulent form of the same disease that once infected my grandfather Aadam Aziz — we refused to look on the dark side, and not a single one of us suggested that the purpose of Midnight's Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed. For the sake of their privacy, I am refusing to distinguish the voices from one another; and for other reasons. For one thing, my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-rounded personalities; for another, the children, despite their wondrously discrete and varied gifts, remained, to my mind, a sort of many-headed monster, speaking in the myriad tongues of Babel; they were the very essence of multiplicity, and I see no point in dividing them now. |
| 856 |
That is, it happened at school. Saleem's assailant: handsome, frenetic, with a barbarian's shaggy moustache: I present the leaping, hair-tearing figure of Mr. Emil Zagallo, who taught us geography and gymnastics, and who, that morning, unintentionally precipitated the crisis of my life. Zagallo claimed to be Peruvian, and was fond of calling us jungle-Indians, bead-lovers; he hung a print of a stern, sweaty soldier in a pointy tin hat and metal pantaloons above his blackboard and had a way of stabbing a finger at it in times of stress and shouting, "You see heem, you savages? Thees man eez civilization! You show heem respect: he's got a sword!" And he'd swish his cane through the stone-walled air. We called him Pagal-Zagal, crazy Zagallo, because for all his talk of llamas and conquistadores and the Pacific Ocean we knew, with the absolute certainty of rumor, that he'd been in a Mazagaon tenement and his Goanese mother had been abandoned by a decamped shipping agent; so he was not only an "Anglo" but probably a bastard as well. Knowing this, we understood why Zagallo affected his Latin accent, and also why he was always in a fury, why he beat his fists against the stone walls of the classroom; but the knowledge didn't stop us being afraid. And this Wednesday morning, we knew we were in for trouble, because Optional Cathedral had been cancelled. The Wednesday morning double period was Zagallo's geography class; but only idiots and boys with bigoted parents attended it, because it was also the time when we could choose to troop off to St. |
| 857 |
I arrived at the Social with the nurse's bandage still on my head. I was late, because it hadn't been easy to persuade my mother to let me come; so by the time I stepped into the Assembly Hall, beneath streamers and balloons and the professionally suspicious gazes of bony female chaperones, all the best girls were already box-stepping and Mexican-Hatting with absurdly smug partners. Naturally, the prefects had the pick of the ladies; I watched them with passionate envy, Guzder and Joshi and Stevenson and Rushdie and Talyarkhan and Tayabali and Jussawalla and WaglE and King; I tried butting in on them during excuse-mes but when they saw my bandage and my cucumber of a nose and the stains on my face they just laughed and turned their backs ... hatred burgeoning in my bosom, I ate potato chips and drank Bubble-Up and Vimto and told myself, "Those jerks; if they knew who I was they'd get out of my way pretty damn quick!" But still the fear of revealing my true nature was stronger than my somewhat abstract desire for the whirling European girls. "Hey, Saleem, isn't it? Hey, man, what happened to you?" I was dragged out of my bitter, solitary reverie (even Sonny had someone to dance with; but then, he had his forcep-hollows, and he didn't wear underpants — there were reasons for his attractiveness) by a voice behind my left shoulder, a low, throaty voice, full of promises — but also of menace. A girl's voice. I turned with a sort of jump and found myself staring at a vision with golden hair and a prominent and famous chest ... |
| 858 |
On his billboard, the Kolynos Kid is grinning, the eternal pixie grin of the boy in the green chlorophyll cap, the lunatic grin of the timeless Kid, who endlessly squeezes an inexhaustible tube of toothpaste on to a bright green brush: Keep Teeth Kleen And Keep Teeth Brite, Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White! ... and you may wish to think of me, too, as an involuntary Kolynos Kid, squeezing crises and transformations out of a bottomless tube, extruding time on to my metaphorical toothbrush; clean, white time with green chlorophyll in the stripes. This, then, was the beginning of my first exile. (There will be a second, and a third.) I bore it uncomplainingly. I had guessed, of course, that there was one question I must never ask; that I had been loaned out, like a comic-book from the Scandal Point Second Hand Library, for some indefinite period; and that when my parents wanted me back, they would send for me. When, or even if: because I blamed myself not a little for my banishment. Had I not inflicted upon myself one more deformity to add to bandylegs cucumbernose horn-temples staincheeks? Was it not possible that my mutilated finger had been (as my announcement of my voices had nearly been), for my long-suffering parents, the last straw? That I was no longer a good business risk, no longer worth the investment of their love and protection? ... I decided to reward my uncle and aunt for their kindness in taking in so wretched a creature as myself, to play the model nephew and await events. |
| 859 |
There were times when I wished that the Monkey would come and see me, or even call me on the phone; but dwelling on such matters only punctured the balloon of my equanimity, so I did my best to put them out of my mind. Besides, living with Hanif and Pia Aziz turned out to be exactly what my uncle had promised: lots of fun. They made all the fuss of me that children expect, and accept graciously, from childless adults. Their flat overlooking Marine Drive wasn't large, but there was a balcony from which I could drop monkey-nut shells on to the heads of passing pedestrians; there was no spare bedroom, but I was offered a deliciously soft white sofa with green stripes (an early proof of my transformation into the Kolynos Kid); ayah Mary, who had apparently followed me into exile, slept on the floor by my side. By day, she filled my stomach with the promised cakes and sweetmeats (paid for, I now believe, by my mother); I should have grown immensely fat, except that I had begun once again to grow in other directions, and at the end of the year of accelerated history (when I was only eleven and a half) I had actually attained my full adult height, as if someone had grasped me by the folds of my puppy-fat and squeezed them harder than any toothpaste-tube, so that inches shot out of me under the pressure. Saved from obesity by the Kolynos effect, I basked in my uncle and aunt's delight at having a child around the house. When I spilt 7-Up on the carpet or sneezed into my dinner, the worst my uncle would say was "Hai-yo! |
| 860 |
Black man!" in his booming steamship's voice, spoiling the effect by grinning hugely. Meanwhile, my aunty Pia was becoming the next in the long series of women who have bewitched and finally undone me good and proper. (I should mention that, while I stayed in the Marine Drive apartment, my testicles, forsaking the protection of pelvic bone, decided prematurely and without warning to drop into their little sacs. This event, too, played its part in what followed.) My mumani — my aunty — the divine Pia Aziz: to live with her was to exist in the hot sticky heart of a Bombay talkie. In those days, my uncle's career in the cinema had entered a dizzy decline, and, for such is the way of the world, Pia's star had gone into decline along with his. In her presence, however, thoughts of failure were impossible. Deprived of film roles, Pia had turned her life into a feature picture, in which I was cast in an increasing number of bit-parts. I was the Faithful Body-Servant: Pia in petticoats, soft hips rounding towards my desperately-averted eyes, giggling while her eyes, bright with antimony, flashed imperiously — "Come on, boy, what are you shy for, hold these pleats in my sari while I fold." I was her Trusted Confidant, too. While my uncle sat on chlorophyll-striped sofa pounding out scripts which nobody would ever film, I listened to the nostalgic soliloquy of my aunt, trying to keep my eyes away from two impossible orbs, spherical as melons, golden as mangoes: I refer, you will have guessed, to the adorable breasts of Pia mumani. |
| 861 |
While she, sitting on her bed, one arm flung across her brow, declaimed: "Boy, you know, I am great actress: I have interpreted several major roles! But look, what fate will do! Once, boy, goodness knows who would beg absolutely to come to this flat; once the reporters of Filmfare and Screen Goddess would pay black-money to get inside! Yes, and dancing, and I was well-known at Venice restaurant — all of those great jazzmen came to sit at my feet, yes, even that Braz. Boy, after Lovers of Kashmir, who was a bigger star? Not Poppy; not Vyjayantimala; not one person!" And I, nodding emphatically, no-naturally-nobody, while her wondrous skin-wrapped melons heaved and ... With a dramatic cry, she went on: "But even then, in the time of our world-beating fame, every picture a golden jubilee movie, this uncle of yours wants to live in a two-room flat like a clerk! So I make no fuss; I am not like some of your cheap-type actresses; I live simply and ask for no Cadillacs or air-conditioners or Dunlopillo beds from England; no swimming pools shaped like bikinis like that Roxy Vishwanatham's! Here, like a wife of the masses, I have stayed; here, now, I am rotting! Rotting, absolutely. But I know this: my face is my fortune; after that, what riches do I need?" And I, anxiously agreeing: "Mumani, none; none at all." She shrieked wildly; even my slap-deafened ear was penetrated. "Yes, of course, you also want me to be poor! All the world wants Pia to be in rags! Even that one, your uncle, writing his boring-boring scripts! |
| 862 |
Hanif Aziz was to be found during the day on the striped sofa, pencil and exercise book in hand, writing his pickle epic. He wore his usual lungi wound loosely around his waist and fastened with an enormous safety-pin; his legs protruded hairily from its folds. His fingernails bore the stains of a lifetime of Gold Flakes; his toenails seemed similarly discolored. I imagined him smoking cigarettes with his toes. Highly impressed by the vision, I asked him if he could, in fact, perform this feat; and without a word, he inserted Gold Flake between big toe and its sidekick and wound himself into bizarre contortions. I clapped wildly, but he seemed to be in some pain for the rest of the day. I ministered to his needs as a good son should, emptying ashtrays, sharpening pencils, bringing water to drink; while he, who after his fabulist beginnings had remembered that he was his father's son and dedicated himself against everything which smacked of the unreal, scribbled out his ill-fated screenplay. "Sonny Jim," he informed me, "this damn country has been dreaming for five thousand years. It's about time it started waking up." Hanif was fond of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes, against, in fact, the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the temple of illusions, he had become the high priest of reality; while I, conscious of my miraculous nature, which involved me beyond all mitigation in the (Hanif-despised) myth-life of India, bit my lip and didn't know where to look. |
| 863 |
She began, in these Marine Drive days, to fear that he would become visible to others besides herself, and reveal, during her absence, the awful secrets of what happened at Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on Independence night. So each morning she left the apartment in a state of jelly-like worry, arriving at Buckingham Villa in near-collapse; only when she found that Joe had remained both invisible and silent did she relax. But after she returned to Marine Drive, laden with samosas and cakes and chutneys, her anxiety began to mount once again ... but as I had resolved (having troubles enough of my own) to keep out of all heads except the Children's, I did not understand why. Panic attracts panic; on her journeys, sitting in jam-packed buses (the trams had just been discontinued), Mary heard all sorts of rumors and tittle-tattle, which she relayed to me as matters of absolute fact. According to Mary, the country was in the grip of a sort of supernatural invasion. "Yes, baba, they say in Kurukshetra an old Sikh woman woke up in her hut and saw the old-time war of the Kurus and Pandavas happening right outside! It was in the papers and all, she pointed to the place where she saw the chariots of Arjun and Karna, and there were truly wheel-marks in the mud! Baap-re-baap, such so-bad things: at Gwalior they have seen the ghost of the Rani of Jhansi; rakshasas have been seen many-headed like Ravana, doing things to women and pulling down trees with one finger. I am good Christian woman, baba; but it gives me fright when they tell that the tomb of Lord Jesus is found in Kashmir. |
| 864 |
When my aunt's hand wrapped itself around mine, paper passed from palm to palm. I felt her stiffen, silently; then, although I snuggled up closer closer closer, she was lost to me; she was reading in the dark, and the stiffness of her body was increasing; and then suddenly I knew that I had been tricked, that Catrack was my enemy; and only the threat of policemen prevented me from telling my uncle. (At school, the next day, I was told of Jimmy Kapadia's tragic death, suddenly at home, of a heart seizure. It is possible to kill a human being by dreaming his death? My mother always said so; and, in that case, Jimmy Kapadia was my first murder victim. Homi Catrack was to be the next.) When I returned from my first day back at school, having basked in the unusual sheepishness of Fat Perce and Glandy Keith ("Lissen, yaar, how did we know your finger was in the ... hey, man, we got free tickets for a picture tomorrow, you want to come?") and my equally unexpected popularity ("No more Zagallo! Solid, man! You really lost your hair for something good!"), Aunty Pia was out. I sat quietly with Uncle Hanif while, in the kitchen, Mary Pereira prepared dinner. It was a peaceful little family scene; but the peace was shattered, abruptly, by the crash of a slamming door. Hanif dropped his pencil as Pia, having slammed the front door, flung open the living-room door with equal force. Then he boomed cheerfully, "So, wife: what's the drama?" ... But Pia was not to be defused. "Scribble," she said, her hand slicing air, "Allah, don't stop for me! |
| 865 |
"Yaaaouuuu!" I scream with the pain; and my aunt, snapping out of the macabre spell of those few moments, pushes me off her and delivers a resounding wallop to my face. Fortunately, it is the left cheek; there is no danger of damage to my remaining good ear. "Badmaash!" my aunty screams, "A family of maniacs and perverts, woe is me, what woman ever suffered so badly?" There is a cough in the doorway. I am standing up now, shivering with pain. Pia is standing, too, her hair dripping off her head like tears. Mary Pereira is in the doorway, coughing, scarlet confusion all over her skin, holding a brown paper parcel in her hands. "See, baba, what I have forgotten," she finally manages to say, "You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers." After I got so indiscreetly carried away while trying to cheer up my aunt, it became difficult for me to remain in the apartment on Marine Drive. Long intense telephone calls were made regularly during the next few days; Hanif persuading someone, while Pia gesticulated, that perhaps now, after five weeks ... and one evening after I got back from school, my mother picked me up in our old Rover, and my first exile came to an end. Neither during our drive home, nor at any other time, was I given any explanation for my exile. I decided, therefore, that I would not make it my business to ask. I was wearing long pants now; I was, therefore, a man, and must bear my troubles accordingly. I told my mother: "The finger is not so bad. |
| 866 |
My sister spoke highly of gentle Jesus meek and mild; my mother smiled vaguely and patted her on the head. She went around the house humming hymns; my mother took up the tunes and sang along. She requested a nun's outfit to replace her favorite nurse's dress; it was given to her. She threaded chick-peas on a string and used them as a rosary, muttering Hail-Mary-full-of-grace, and my parents praised her skill with her hands. Tormented by her failure to be punished, she mounted to extremes of religious fervor, reciting the Our Father morning and night, fasting in the weeks of Lent instead of during Ramzan, revealing an unsuspected streak of fanaticism which would, later, begin to dominate her personality; and still, it appeared, she was tolerated. Finally she discussed the matter with me. "Well, brother," she said, "looks like from now on I'll just have to be the good guy, and you can have all the fun." She was probably right; my parents' apparent loss of interest in me should have given me a greater measure of freedom; but I was mesmerized by the transformations which were taking place in every aspect of my life, and fun, in such circumstances, seemed hard to have. 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. |
| 867 |
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. |
| 868 |
Do not permit the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labor, them-and-us to come between us! We," I cried passionately, "must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfill the promise of our birth!" I had supporters, and none greater than Parvati-the-witch; but I felt them slipping away from me, each distracted by his or her own life ... just as, in truth, I was being distracted by mine. It was as though our glorious congress was turning out to be no more than another of the toys of childhood, as though long trousers were destroying what midnight had created ... "We must decide on a program," I pleaded, "our own Five Year Plan, why not?" But I could hear, behind my anxious broadcast, the amused laughter of my greatest rival; and there was Shiva in all our heads, saying scornfully, "No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me-against-the-world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule the world; look at Birla, and Tata, and all the powerful: they make things. For things, the country is run. Not for people. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry. When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight." The Children, listening fascinatedly as we fought ... |
| 869 |
Or perhaps not, perhaps even our dialogue failed to hold their interest. And now I: "But people are not things; if we come together, if we love each other, if we show that this, just this, this people-together, this Conference, this children-sticking-together-through-thick-and-thin, can be that third way ..." But Shiva, snorting: "Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-humanity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing." And I, Saleem, crumbling: "But ... free will ... hope ... the great soul, otherwise known as mahatma, of mankind ... and what of poetry, and art, and ..." Whereupon Shiva seized his victory: "You see? I knew you'd turn out to be like that. Mushy, like overcooked rice. Sentimental as a grandmother. Go, who wants your rubbish? We all have lives to live. Hell's bells, cucumber-nose, I'm fed up with your Conference. It's got nothing to do with one single thing." You ask: these are ten-year-olds? I reply: Yes, but. You say: did ten-year-olds, or even almost-elevens, discuss the role of the individual in society? And the rivalry of capital and labor? Were the internal stresses of agrarian and industrialized zones made explicit? And conflicts in socio-cultural heritages? Did children of less than four thousand days discuss identity, and the inherent conflicts of capitalism? Having got through fewer than one hundred thousand hours, did they contrast Gandhi and Marxlenin, power and impotence? Was collectivity opposed to singularity? |
| 870 |
Was God killed by children? Even allowing for the truth of the supposed miracles, can we now believe that urchins spoke like old men with beards? I say: maybe not in these words; maybe not in words at all, but in the purer language of thought; but yes, certainly, this is what was at the bottom of it all; because children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us. Poison, and after a gap of many years, a Widow with a knife. In short: after my return to Buckingham Villa, even the salt of the midnight children lost its savor; there were nights, now, when I did not even bother to set up my nationwide network; and the demon lurking inside me (it had two heads) was free to get on with its devilment. (I never knew about Shiva's guilt or innocence of whore-murders; but such was the influence of Kali-Yuga that I, the good guy and natural victim, was certainly responsible for two deaths. First came Jimmy Kapadia; and second was Homi Catrack.) If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered. We all had our troubles in those days. Homi Catrack had his idiot Toxy, and the Ibrahims had other worries: Sonny's father Ismail, after years of bribing judges and juries, was in danger of being investigated by the Bar Commission; and Sonny's uncle Ishaq, who ran the second-rate Embassy Hotel near Flora Fountain, was reputedly deep in debt to local gangsters, and worried constantly about being "bumped off" (in those days, assassinations were becoming as quotidian as the heat) ... |
| 871 |
So perhaps it isn't surprising that we had all forgotten about the existence of Professor Schaapsteker. (Indians grow larger and more powerful as they age; but Schaapsteker was a European, and his kind unfortunately fade away with the years, and often completely disappear.) But now, driven, perhaps, by my demon, my feet led me upstairs to the top floor of Buckingham Villa, where I found a mad old man, incredibly tiny and shrunken, whose narrow tongue darted constantly in and out between his lips — flicking, licking: the former searcher after antivenes, assassin of horses, Sharpsticker Sahib, now ninety-two and no longer of his eponymous Institute, but retired into a dark top-floor apartment filled with tropical vegetation and serpents pickled in brine. Age, failing to draw his teeth and poison-sacs, had turned him instead into the incarnation of snakehood; like other Europeans who stay too long, the ancient insanities of India had pickled his brains, so that he had come to believe the superstitions of the Institute orderlies, according to whom he was the last of a line which began when a king cobra mated with a woman who gave birth to a human (but serpentine) child ... it seems that all my life I've only had to turn a corner to tumble into yet another new and fabulously transmogrified world. Climb a ladder (or even a staircase) and you find a snake awaiting you. The curtains were always drawn; in Schaapsteker's rooms, the sun neither rose nor set, and no clocks ticked. Was it the demon, or our mutual sense of isolation which drew us together? |
| 872 |
"Be wise, child. Imitate the action of the snake. Be secret; strike from the cover of a bush." Once he said: "You must think of me as another father. Did I not give you your life when it was lost?" With this statement he proved that he was as much under my spell as I under his; he had accepted that he, too, was one of that endless series of parents to whom I alone had the power of giving birth. And although, after a time, I found the air in his chambers too oppressive, and left him once more to the isolation from which he would never again be disturbed, he had shown me how to proceed. Consumed by the two-headed demon of revenge, I used my telepathic powers (for the first time) as a weapon; and in this way I discovered the details of the relationship between Homi Catrack and Lila Sabarmati. Lila and Pia were always rivals in beauty; it was the wife of the heir-apparent to the title of Admiral of the Fleet who had become the film magnate's new fancy-woman. While Commander Sabarmati was at sea on manoeuvres, Lila and Homi were performing certain maneuvers of their own; while the lion of the seas awaited the death of the then-Admiral, Homi and Lila, too, were making an appointment with the Reaper. (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. |
| 873 |
I was secret; I struck from the cover of a bush. What drove me? Hands at the Pioneer CafE; wrong-number telephone calls; notes slipped to me on balconies, and passed under cover of bedsheets; my mother's hypocrisy and Pia's inconsolable grief: "Hai! Ai-hai! Ai-hai-hai!" ... Mine was a slow poison; but three weeks later, it had its effect. It emerged, afterwards, that after receiving my anonymous note Commander Sabarmati had engaged the services of the illustrious Dom Minto, Bombay's best-known private detective. (Minto, old and almost lame, had lowered his rates by then.) He waited until he received Minto's report. And then: That Sunday morning, six children sat in a row at the Metro Cub Club, watching Francis The Talking Mule And The Haunted House. You see, I had my alibi; I was nowhere near the scene of the crime. Like Sin, the crescent moon, I acted from a distance upon the tides of the world ... while a mule talked on a screen, Commander Sabarmati visited the naval arsenal. He signed out a good, long-nosed revolver; also ammunition. He held, in his left hand, a piece of paper on which an address had been written in a private detective's tidy hand; in his right hand, he grasped the unholstered gun. By taxi, the Commander arrived at Colaba Causeway. He paid off the cab, walked gun-in-hand down a narrow gully past shirt-stalls and toyshops, and ascended the staircase of an apartment block set back from the gully at the rear of a concrete courtyard. He rang the doorbell of apartment 18C; it was heard in 18B by an Anglo-Indian teacher giving private Latin tuition. |
| 874 |
When Commander Sabarmati's wife Lila answered the door, he shot her twice in the stomach at point-blank range. She fell backwards; he marched past her, and found Mr. Homi Catrack rising from the toilet, his bottom unwiped, pulling frantically at his trousers. Commander Vinoo Sabarmati shot him once in the genitals, once in the heart and once through the right eye. The gun was not silenced; but when it had finished speaking, there was an enormous silence in the apartment. Mr. Catrack sat down on the toilet after he was shot and seemed to be smiling. Commander Sabarmati walked out of the apartment block with the smoking gun in his hand (he was seen, through the crack of a door, by a terrified Latin tutor); he strolled along Colaba Causeway until he saw a traffic policeman on his little podium. Commander Sabarmati told the policeman, "I have only now killed my wife and her lover with this gun; I surrender myself into your ..." But he had been waving the gun under the policeman's nose; the officer was so scared that he dropped his traffic-conducting baton and fled. Commander Sabarmati, left alone on the policeman's pedestal amid the sudden confusion of the traffic, began to direct the cars, using the smoking gun as a baton. This is how he was found by the posse of twelve policemen who arrived ten minutes later, who sprang courageously upon him and seized him hand and foot, and who removed from him the unusual baton with which, for ten minutes, he had expertly conducted the traffic. |
| 875 |
Ai-hai!" And repeated an earlier observation: "Amina sister, that good man going to prison — I tell you, it is the end of the world!" A confession, trembling just beyond my lips: "It was all my doing, Amma; I wanted to teach you a lesson. Amma, do not go to see other men, with Lucknow-work on their shirt; enough, my mother, of teacup-kissery! I am in long trousers now, and may speak to you as a man." But it never spilled out of me; there was no need, because I heard my mother answering a wrong-number telephone call — and with a strange, subdued voice, speak into the mouthpiece as follows: "No, nobody by that name here; please believe what I am telling you, and never call me again." Yes, I had taught my mother a lesson; and after the Sabarmati affair she never saw her Nadir-Qasim in the flesh, never again, not as long as she lived; but, deprived of him, she fell victim to the fate of all women in our family, namely the curse of growing old before her time; she began to shrink, and her hobble became more pronounced, and there was the emptiness of age in her eyes. My revenge brought in its wake a number of unlooked-for developments; perhaps the most dramatic of these was the appearance in the gardens of Methwold's Estate of curious flowers, made out of wood and tin, and hand-painted with bright red lettering ... the fatal signboards erected in all the gardens except our own, evidence that my powers exceeded even my own understanding, and that, having once been exiled from my two-storey hillock, I had now managed to send everyone else away instead. |
| 876 |
The signboards nodded in the gardens, which were losing their memories of goldfish and cocktail-hours and invading cats; and who took them down? Who were the heirs of the heirs of William Methwold? ... They came swarming out of what had once been the residence of Doctor Narlikar: fat-bellied and grossly competent women, grown fatter and more competent than ever on their tetrapod-given wealth (because those were the years of the great land reclamations). The Narlikar women — from the Navy they bought Commander Sabarmati's flat, and from the departing Mrs. Dubash her Cyrus's home; they paid Bi-Appah in used banknotes, and the Ibrahims' creditors were appeased by Narlikar cash. My father, alone of all the residents, refused to sell; they offered him vast sums, but he shook his head. They explained their dream — a dream of razing the buildings to the ground and erecting on the two-storey hillock a mansion which would soar thirty stories into the skies, a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future; Ahmed Sinai, lost in abstractions, would have none of it. They told him, "When you're surrounded by rubble you'll have to sell for a song"; he (remembering their tetrapodal perfidy) was unmoved. Nussie-the-duck said, as she left, "I told you so, Amina sister — the end! The end of the world!" This time she was right and wrong; after August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end. Padma — did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? |
| 877 |
Cyrus-the-great, Born on a plate, In nineteen hundred and forty-eight — Cyrus the school prodigy — Cyrus as St. Joan in Shaw's play — all these Cyruses, to whom we had grown accustomed, with whom we had grown up, now disappeared; in their place there emerged the overblown, almost bovinely placid figure of Lord Khusro Khusrovand. At the age of ten, Cyrus vanished from the Cathedral School, and the meteoric rise of India's richest guru began. (There are as many versions of India as Indians; and, when set beside Cyrus's India, my own version seems almost mundane.) Why did he let it happen? Why did posters cover the city, and advertisements fill the newspapers, without a peep out of the child genius? ... Because Cyrus (although he used to lecture us, not unmischievously, on the Parts of a Wooman's Body) was simply the most malleable of boys, and would not have dreamed of crossing his mother. For his mother, he put on a sort of brocade skirt and a turban; for the sake of filial duty, he permitted millions of devotees to kiss his little finger. In the name of maternal love, he truly became Lord Khusro, the most successful holy child in history; in no time at all he was being hailed by crowds half a million strong, and credited with miracles; American guitarists came to sit at his feet, and they all brought their check-books along. Lord Khusrovand acquired accountants, and tax havens, and a luxury liner called the Khusrovand Starship, and an aircraft — Lord Khusro's Astral Plane. And somewhere inside the faintly-smiling, benediction-scattering boy ... |
| 878 |
Did nobody else see it? In all those years, did no person understand that what Mrs. Dubash had done was to rework and reinvent the most potent of all modern myths — the legend of the coming of the superman? I saw the hoardings trumpeting the coming of Lord Khusro Khusrovand Bhagwan; and found myself obliged, yet again, to accept responsibility for the events of my turbulent, fabulous world. How I admire the leg-muscles of my solicitous Padma! There she squats, a few feet from my table, her sari hitched up in fisherwoman-fashion. Calf-muscles show no sign of strain; thigh-muscles, rippling through sari-folds, display their commendable stamina. Strong enough to squat forever, simultaneously defying gravity and cramp, my Padma listens unhurriedly to my lengthy tale; O mighty pickle-woman! What reassuring solidity, how comforting an air of permanence, in her biceps and triceps ... for my admiration extends also to her arms, which could wrestle mine down in a trice, and from which, when they enfold me nightly in futile embraces, there is no escape. Past our crisis now, we exist in perfect harmony: I recount, she is recounted to; she ministers, and I accept her ministrations with grace. I am, in fact, entirely content with the uncomplaining thews of Padma Mangroli, who is, unaccountably, more interested in me than my tales. Why I have chosen to expound on Padma's musculature: these days, it's to those muscles, as much as to anything or -one (for instance, my son, who hasn't even learned to read as yet), that I'm telling my story. |
| 879 |
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. "You should think you're lucky," this cocky cousin told my sister, "My father is a big man in Pakistan." But although Zafar had inherited his father's looks, the dust had clogged up the Monkey's spirits, and she didn't have the heart to fight him. Meanwhile my aunt Alia spread her ancient, dusty disappointment through the air and my most absurd relatives, the family of my uncle Mustapha, sat sullenly in corners and were forgotten, as usual; Mustapha Aziz's moustache, proudly waxed and upturned at the tips when he arrived, had long since sagged under the depressive influence of the dust. And then, on the twenty-second day of the mourning period, my grandfather, Aadam Aziz, saw God. He was sixty-eight that year — still a decade older than the century. |
| 880 |
But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll; his eyes were still blue, but his back was bent. Shuffling around Buckingham Villa in embroidered skull-cap and full-length chugha-coat — coated, too, in a thin film of dust — he munched aimlessly on raw carrots and sent thin streaks of spittle down the grizzled white contours of his chin. And as he declined, Reverend Mother grew larger and stronger; she, who had once wailed pitifully at the sight of Mercurochrome, now appeared to thrive on his weakness, as though their marriage had been one of those mythical unions in which succubi appear to men as innocent damsels, and, after luring them into the matrimonial bed, regain their true, awful aspect and begin to swallow their souls ... my grandmother, in those days, had acquired a moustache almost as luxuriant as the dustily-sagging hair on the upper lip of her one surviving son. She sat cross-legged on her bed, smearing her lip with a mysterious fluid which set hard around the hairs and was then ripped off by a sharp, violent hand; but the remedy only served to exacerbate the ailment. "He has become like a child again, whatsitsname," Reverend Mother told my grandfather's children, "and Hanif has finished him off." She warned us that he had begun to see things. "He talks to people who are not there," she whispered loudly while he wandered through the room sucking his teeth, "How he calls out, whatsitsname! In the middle of the night!" And she mimicked him: "Ho, Tai? Is it you?" She told us children about the boatman, and the Hummingbird, and the Rani of Cooch Naheen. |
| 881 |
But a crack-death can be slow; and it was a long time before we knew about the other cracks, about the disease which was nibbling at his bones, so that finally his skeleton disintegrated into powder inside the weatherbeaten sack of his skin. Padma is looking suddenly panicky. "What are you saying? You, mister: are you telling that you also ... what nameless thing can eat up any man's bones? Is it ..." No time to pause now; no time for sympathy or panic; I have already gone further than I should. Retreating a little in time, I must mention that something also leaked into Aadam Aziz from me; because on the twenty-third day of the mourning period, he asked the entire family to assemble in the same room of glass vases (no need to hide them from my uncle now) and cushions and immobilized fans, the same room in which I had announced visions of my own ... Reverend Mother had said, "He has become like a child again"; like a child, my grandfather announced that, three weeks after he had heard of the death of a son whom he had believed to be alive and well, he had seen with his own eyes the God in whose death he had tried all his life to believe. And, like a child, he was not believed. Except by one person ... "Yes, listen," my grandfather said, his voice a weak imitation of his old booming tones, "Yes, Rani? You are here? And Abdullah? Come, sit, Nadir, this is news — where is Ahmed? Alia will want him here ... God, my children; God whom I fought all my life. Oskar? Ilse? — No, of course I know they are dead. |
| 882 |
I may as well finish my grandfather's story here and now; I've gone this far, and the opportunity may not present itself later on ... somewhere in the depths of my grandfather's senility, which inevitably reminded me of the craziness of Professor Schaapsteker upstairs, the bitter idea took root that God, by his offhand attitude to Hanif's suicide, had proved his own culpability in the affair; Aadam grabbed General Zulfikar by his military lapels and whispered to him: "Because I never believed, he stole my son!" And Zulfikar: "No, no, Doctor Sahib, you must not trouble yourself so ..." But Aadam Aziz never forgot his vision; although the details of the particular deity he had seen grew blurred in his mind, leaving behind only a passionate, drooling desire for revenge (which lust is also common to us both) ... at the end of the forty-day mourning period, he would refuse to go to Pakistan (as Reverend Mother had planned) because that was a country built especially for God; and in the remaining years of his life he often disgraced himself by stumbling into mosques and temples with his old man's stick, mouthing imprecations and lashing out at any worshipper or holy man within range. In Agra, he was tolerated for the sake of the man he had once been; the old ones at the Cornwallis Road paan-shop played hit-the-spittoon and reminisced with compassion about the Doctor Sahib's past. Reverend Mother was obliged to yield to him for this reason if for no other — the iconoclasm of his dotage would have created a scandal in a country where he was not known. |
| 883 |
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. |
| 884 |
... No time to explain, because Mary Pereira has begun to talk, gabbling out a secret which has been hidden for over eleven years, pulling us all out of the dream-world she invented when she changed name-tags, forcing us into the horror of the truth. And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning ... as I was ... that they were not ...) ... It was just after midnight and in the streets there were fireworks and crowds, the many-headed monster roaring, I did it for my Joseph, Sahib, but please don't send me to jail, look the boy is a good boy, Sahib, I am a poor woman, Sahib, one mistake, one minute in so many years, not jailkhana Sahib, I will go, eleven years I gave but I will go now, Sahib, only this is a good boy, Sahib, you must not send him, Sahib, after eleven years he is your son ... O, you boy with your face like the sun coming out, O Saleem my piece-of-the-moon, you must know that your father was Winkie and your mother is also dead ... Mary Pereira ran out of the room. Ahmed Sinai said, in a voice as faraway as a bird: "That, in the corner, is my old servant Musa, who tried to rob me once." (Can any narrative stand so much so soon? I glance towards Padma; she appears to be stunned, like a fish.) Once upon a time there was a servant who robbed my father; who swore he was innocent; who called down upon himself the curse of leprosy if he should prove a liar; and who was proved to be lying. He had left in disgrace; but I told you then he was a time-bomb, and he had returned to explode. |
| 885 |
But I was afraid of Shiva. Most ferocious and powerful of the Children, he would penetrate where others could not go ... At any rate, I avoided my fellow-Children; and then suddenly it was too late, because, having exiled Shiva, I found myself hurled into an exile from which I was incapable of contacting my more-than-five-hundred colleagues: I was flung across the Partition-created frontier into Pakistan. Late in September 1958, the mourning period of my uncle Hanif Aziz came to an end; and, miraculously, the dust-cloud which had enveloped us was settled by a merciful shower of rain. When we had bathed and put on newly-washed clothes and switched on the ceiling-fans, we emerged from bathrooms filled, briefly, with the illusory optimism of freshly-soaped cleanliness; to discover a dusty, unwashed Ahmed Sinai, whisky-bottle in his hand, his eyes rimmed with blood, swaying upstairs from his office in the manic grip of djinns. 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. |
| 886 |
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? |
| 887 |
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 ... I remember it as a low, anonymous town; army barracks, fruitshops, a sports goods industry; tall military men in the streets; Jeeps; furniture carvers; polo. A town in which it was possible to be very, very cold. And in a new and expensive housing development, a vast house surrounded by a high wall which was topped by barbed wire and patrolled by sentries: General Zulfikar's home. There was a bath next to the double bed in which the General slept; there was a house catch-phrase: "Let's get organized!"; the servants wore green military jerseys and berets; in the evenings the odors of bhang and charas floated up from their quarters. The furniture was expensive and surprisingly beautiful; Emerald could not be faulted on her taste. It was a dull, lifeless house, for all its military airs; even the goldfish in the tank set in the dining-room wall seemed to bubble listlessly; perhaps its most interesting inhabitant was not even human. |
| 888 |
General Zulfikar flung his peaked cap in the air. "Damn marvellous!" he cried in the thin voice which squeezed between his nose and chin, "The old lady can smell the mines!" Bonzo was drafted forthwith into the armed forces as a four-legged mine-detector with the courtesy rank of sergeant-major. I mention Bonzo's achievement because it gave the General a stick with which to beat us. We Sinais — and Pia Aziz — were helpless, nonproductive members of the Zulfikar household, and the General did not wish us to forget it: "Even a damn hundred-year-old beagle bitch can earn her damn living," he was heard to mutter, "but my house is full of people who can't get organized into one damn thing." But before the end of October he would be grateful for (at least) my presence ... and the transformation of the Monkey was not far away. We went to school with cousin Zafar, who seemed less anxious to marry my sister now that we were children of a broken home; but his worst deed came one weekend when we were taken to the General's mountain cottage in Nathia Gali, beyond Murree. I was in a state of high excitement (my illness had just been declared cured): mountains! The possibility of panthers! Cold, biting air! — so that I thought nothing of it when the General asked me if I'd mind sharing a bed with Zafar, and didn't even guess when they spread the rubber sheet over the mattress ... I awoke in the small hours in a large rancid pool of lukewarm liquid and began to yell blue murder. The General appeared at our bedside and began to thrash the living daylights out of his son. |
| 889 |
With the fate of the nation in my hands, I shifted condiments and cutlery, capturing empty biriani-dishes with water-glasses, stationing saltcellars, on guard, around water-jugs. And when General Zulfikar stopped talking, the march of the table-service also came to an end. Ayub Khan seemed to settle down in his chair; was the wink he gave me just my imagination? — at any rate, the Commander-in-Chief said, "Very good, Zulfikar; good show." In the movements performed by pepperpots etcetera, one table-ornament remained uncaptured: a cream-jug in solid silver, which, in our tabletop coup, represented the Head of State, President Iskander Mirza; for three weeks, Mirza remained President. An eleven-year-old boy cannot judge whether a President is truly corrupt, even if gongs-and-pips say he is; it is not for eleven-year-olds to say whether Mirza's association with the feeble Republican Party should have disqualified him from high office under the new rEgime. Saleem Sinai made no political judgments; but when, inevitably at midnight, on November 1st, my uncle shook me awake and whispered, "Come on, sonny, it's time you got a taste of the real thing!," I leaped out of bed smartly; I dressed and went out into the night, proudly aware that my uncle had preferred my company to that of his own son. Midnight. Rawalpindi speeding past us at seventy m. p. h. Motorcycles in front of us beside us behind us. "Where are we going Zulfy-uncle?" Wait and see. Black smoked-windowed limousine pausing at darkened house. |
| 890 |
Sentries guard the door with crossed rifles; which part, to let us through. I am marching at my uncle's side, in step, through half-lit corridors; until we burst into a dark room with a shaft of moonlight spotlighting a four-poster bed. A mosquito net hangs over the bed like a shroud. There is a man waking up, startled, what the hell is going ... But General Zulfikar has a long-barrelled revolver; the tip of the gun is forced mmff between the man's parted teeth. "Shut up," my uncle says, superfluously. "Come with us." Naked overweight man stumbling from his bed. His eyes, asking: Are you going to shoot me? Sweat rolls down ample belly, catching moonlight, dribbling on to his soo-soo; but it is bitterly cold; he is not perspiring from the heat. He looks like a white Laughing Buddha; but not laughing. Shivering. My uncle's pistol is extracted from his mouth. "Turn. Quick march!" ... And gun-barrel pushed between the cheeks of an overfed rump. The man cries, "For God's sake be careful; that thing has the safety off!" Jawans giggle as naked flesh emerges into moonlight, is pushed into black limousine ... That night, I sat with a naked man as my uncle drove him to a military airfield; I stood and watched as the waiting aircraft taxied, accelerated, flew. What began, active-metaphorically, with pepperpots, ended then; not only did I overthrow a government — I also consigned a president to exile. Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots ... |
| 891 |
Not even in this could my unseen hand be said to have moved; except, perhaps, metaphorically: the status quo was preserved in India; in my life, nothing changed either. Then, on September 1st, 1962, we celebrated the Monkey's fourteenth birthday. By this time (and despite my uncle's continued fondness for me) we were well-established as social inferiors, the hapless poor relations of the great Zulfikars; so the party was a skimpy affair. The Monkey, however, gave every appearance of enjoying herself. "It's my duty, brother," she told me. I could hardly believe my ears ... but perhaps my sister had an intuition of her fate; perhaps she knew the transformation which lay in store for her; why should I assume that I alone have had the powers of secret knowledge? Perhaps, then, she guessed that when the hired musicians began to play (shehnai and vina were present; sarangi and sarod had their turns; tabla and sitar performed their virtuosic cross-examinations), Emerald Zulfikar would descend on her with callous elegance, demanding, "Come on, Jamila, don't sit there like a melon, sing us a song like any good girl would!" And that with this sentence my emerald-icy aunt would have begun, quite unwittingly, my sister's transformation from monkey into Singer; because although she protested with the sullen clumsiness of fourteen-year-olds, she was hauled unceremoniously on to the musicians' dais by my organizing aunt; and although she looked as if she wished the floor would open up beneath her feet, she clasped her hands together; seeing no escape, the Monkey began to sing. |
| 892 |
I have not, I think, been good at describing emotions — believing my audience to be capable of joining in; of imagining for themselves what I have been unable to re-imagine, so that my story becomes yours as well ... but when my sister began to sing, I was certainly assailed by an emotion of such force that I was unable to understand until, much later, it was explained to me by the oldest whore in the world. Because, with her first note, the Brass Monkey sloughed off her nick-name; she, who had talked to birds (just as, long ago in a mountain valley, her great-grandfather used to do), must have learned from songbirds the arts of song. With one good ear and one bad ear, I listened to her faultless voice, which at fourteen was the voice of a grown woman, filled with the purity of wings and the pain of exile and the flying of eagles and the lovelessness of life and the melody of bulbuls and the glorious omnipresence of God; a voice which was afterwards compared to that of Muhammed's muezzin Bilal, issuing from the lips of a somewhat scrawny girl. What I did not understand must wait to be told; let me record here that my sister earned her name at her fourteenth birthday party, and was known after that as Jamila Singer; and that I knew, as I listened to "My Red Dupatta Of Muslin" and "Shahbaz Qalandar," that the process which had begun during my first exile was nearing completion in my second; that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever. |
| 893 |
Those Chinkies are too little to beat our jawans. Better you drink your Coke; nothing is going to change." In the end he wore her out; she stayed with him, finally, only because she demanded and received large pay increases, and sent much of the money to Goa, for the support of her sister Mary; but on September 1st, she, too, succumbed to the blandishments of the telephone. By then, she spent as much time on the instrument as her employer, particularly when the Narlikar women called up. The formidable Narlikars were, at that time, besieging my father, telephoning him twice a day, coaxing and persuading him to sell, reminding him that his position was hopeless, flapping around his head like vultures around a burning go-down ... on September 1st, like a long-ago vulture, they flung down an arm which slapped him in the face, because they bribed Alice Pereira away from him. Unable to stand him any more, she cried, "Answer your own telephone! I'm off." That night, Ahmed Sinai's heart began to bulge. Overfull of hate resentment self-pity grief, it became swollen like a balloon, it beat too hard, skipped beats, and finally felled him like an ox; at the Breach Candy Hospital the doctors discovered that my father's heart had actually changed shape — a new swelling had pushed lumpily out of the lower left ventricle. It had, to use Alice's word, "booted." Alice found him the next day, when, by chance, she returned to collect a forgotten umbrella; like a good secretary, she enlisted the power of telecommunications, telephoning an ambulance and telegramming us. |
| 894 |
Owing to censorship of the mails between India and Pakistan, the "heartboot cable" took a full week to reach Amina Sinai. "Back-to-Bom!" I yelled happily, alarming airport coolies. "Back-to-Bom!" I cheered, despite everything, until the newly-sober Jamila said, "Oh, Saleem, honestly, shoo!" Alice Pereira met us at the airport (a telegram had alerted her); and then we were in a real Bombay black-and-yellow taxi, and I was wallowing in the sounds of hot-channa-hot hawkers, the throng of camels bicycles and people people people, thinking how Mumbadevi's city made Rawalpindi look like a village, rediscovering especially the colors, the forgotten vividness of gulmohr and bougainvillaea, the livid green of the waters of the Mahalaxmi Temple "tank," the stark black-and-white of the traffic policemen's sun umbrellas and the blue-and-yellowness of their uniforms; but most of all the blue blue blue of the sea ... only the gray of my father's stricken face distracted me from the rainbow riot of the city, and made me sober up. Alice Pereira left us at the hospital and went off to work for the Narlikar women; and now a remarkable thing happened. My mother Amina Sinai, jerked out of lethargy and depression and guilt-fogs and verruca-pain by the sight of my father, seemed miraculously to regain her youth; with all her old gifts of assiduity restored, she set about the rehabilitation of Ahmed, driven by an unstoppable will. She brought him home to the first-floor bedroom in which she had nursed him through the freeze; she sat with him day and night, pouring her strength into his body. |
| 895 |
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. |
| 896 |
(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. In the clutches of the optimism disease, students burned Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai in effigy; with optimism-fever on their brows, mobs attacked Chinese shoemakers, curio dealers and restauranteurs. Burning with optimism, the Government even interned Indian citizens of Chinese descent — now "enemy aliens" — in camps in Rajasthan. |
| 897 |
The numbers marching one two three. Hiss of released gas. The numbers crushing me four five six. Faces swimming in fog. And still the tumultuous numbers, I was crying, I think, the numbers pounding seven eight nine. Ten. "Good God, the boy's still conscious. Extraordinary. We'd better try another — can you hear me? Saleem, isn't it? Good chap, just give me another ten!" Can't catch me. Multitudes have teemed inside my head. The master of the numbers, me. Here they go again 'leven twelve. But they'll never let me up until ... thirteen fourteen fifteen ... O God O God the fog dizzy and falling back back back, sixteen, beyond war and pepperpots, back back, seventeen eighteen nineteen. Twen There was a washing-chest and a boy who sniffed too hard. His mother undressed and revealed a Black Mango. Voices came, which were not the voices of Archangels. A hand, deafening the left ear. And what grew best in the heat: fantasy, irrationality, lust. There was a clocktower refuge, and cheatery-in-class. And love in Bombay caused a bicycle-accident; horn-temples entered forcep-hollows, and five hundred and eighty-one children visited my head. Midnight's children: who may have been the embodiment of the hope of freedom, who may also have been freaks-who-ought-to-be-finished-off. Parvati-the-witch, most loyal of all, and Shiva, who became a principle of life. There was the question of purpose, and the debate between ideas and things. There were knees and nose and nose and knees. Quarrels began, and the adult world infiltrated the children's; there was selfishness and snobbishness and hate. |
| 898 |
And the impossibility of a third principle; the fear of coming-to-nothing-after-all began to grow. And what nobody said: that the purpose of the five hundred and eighty-one lay in their destruction; that they had come, in order to come to nothing. Prophecies were ignored when they spoke to this effect. And revelations, and the closing of a mind; and exile, and four-years-after return; suspicions growing, dissension breeding, departures in twenties and tens. And, at the end, just one voice left; but optimism lingered — what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering what-forced-us-apart. 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. |
| 899 |
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. |
| 900 |
"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. We left Bombay, finally, in February 1963; and on the day of our departure I took an old tin globe down to the garden and buried it amongst the cacti. Inside it: a Prime Minister's letter, and a jumbo-sized front-page baby-snap, captioned "Midnight's Child" ... They may not be holy relics — I do not presume to compare the trivial memorabilia of my life with the Hazratbal hair of the Prophet, or the body of St. Francis Xavier in the Cathedral of Bom Jesus — but they are all that has survived of my past: a squashed tin globe, a mildewed letter, a photograph. Nothing else, not even a silver spittoon. Apart from a Monkey-crushed planet, the only records are sealed in the closed books of heaven, Sidjeen and Illiyun, the Books of Evil and Good; at any rate, that's the story. ... Only when we were aboard S. S. Sabarmati, and anchored off the Rann of Kutch, did I remember old Schaapsteker; and wondered, suddenly, if anyone had told him we were going. |
| 901 |
I didn't dare to ask, for fear that the answer might be no; so as I thought of the demolition crew getting to work, and pictured the machines of destruction smashing into my father's office and my own blue room, pulling down the servants' spiral iron staircase and the kitchen in which Mary Pereira had stirred her fears into chutneys and pickles, massacring the verandah where my mother had sat with the child in her belly like a stone, I also had an image of a mighty, swinging ball crashing into the domain of Sharpsticker Sahib, and of the old crazy man himself, pale wasted flick-tongued, being exposed there on top of a crumbling house, amid falling towers and red-tiled roof, old Schaapsteker shrivelling ageing dying in the sunlight which he hadn't seen for so many years. But perhaps I'm dramatizing; I may have got all this from an old film called Lost Horizon, in which beautiful women shrivelled and died when they departed from Shangri-La. For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake. We arrived in Karachi on February 9th — and within months, my sister Jamila had been launched on the career which would earn her the names of "Pakistan's Angel" and "Bulbul-of-the-Faith"; we had left Bombay, but we gained reflected glory. And one more thing: although I had been drained — although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again — there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell. |
| 902 |
The spirit of the buried cord inspired the workmen; but although the foundations were dug very deep, they would not prevent the house from failing down before we ever lived in it. What I surmised about umbilical cords: although they possessed the power of growing houses, some were evidently better at the job than others. The city of Karachi proved my point; clearly constructed on top of entirely unsuitable cords, it was full of deformed houses, the stunted hunchback children of deficient life-lines, houses growing mysteriously blind, with no visible windows, houses which looked like radios or air-conditioners or jail-cells, crazy top-heavy edifices which fell over with monotonous regularity, like drunks; a wild proliferation of mad houses, whose inadequacies as living quarters were exceeded only by their quite exceptional ugliness. The city obscured the desert; but either the cords, or the infertility of the soil, made it grow into something grotesque. Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi, and adolescence — understanding, of course, that the subcontinent's new nations and I had all left childhood behind; that growing pains and strange awkward alterations of voice were in store for us all. Drainage censored my inner life; my sense of connection remained undrained. Saleem invaded Pakistan armed only with a hypersensitive nose; but, worst of all, he invaded from the wrong direction! All successful conquests of that part of the world have begun in the north; all conquerors have come by land. |
| 903 |
Sailing ignorantly against the winds of history, I reached Karachi from the south-east, and by sea. What followed should not, I suppose, have surprised me. With hindsight, the advantages of sweeping down from the north are self-evident. From the north came the Umayyad generals, Hajjaj bin Yusuf and Muhammad bin Qasim; also the Ismailis. (Honeymoon Lodge, where it is said Aly Khan sojourned with Rita Hayworth, overlooked our plot of umbilicized earth; rumor has it that the film-star created much scandal by wandering in the grounds dressed in a series of fabulous, gauzy, Hollywood negligEes.) O ineluctable superiority of northernness! From which direction did Mahmud of Ghazni descend upon these Indus plains, bringing with him a language boasting no fewer than three forms of the letter S? The inescapable answer: sE, sin and swad were northern intruders. And Muhammad bin Sam Ghuri, who overthrew the Ghaznavids and established the Delhi Caliphate? Sam Ghuri's son, too, moved southwards on his progress. And Tughlaq, and the Mughal Emperors ... but I've made my point. It remains only to add that ideas, as well as armies, swept south south south from the northern heights: the legend of Sikandar But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley (establishing a precedent for my grandfather), travelled down from the hills to the river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail. |
| 904 |
"I say!" Uncle Puffs whispered, "Darn fine, eh?" What I could smell, Jamila could sing. Truth beauty happiness pain: each had its separate fragrance, and could be distinguished by my nose; each, in Jamila's performances, could find its ideal voice. My nose, her voice: they were exactly complementary gifts; but they were growing apart. While Jamila sang patriotic songs, my nose seemed to prefer to linger on the uglier smells which invaded it: the bitterness of Aunt Alia, the hard unchanging stink of my fellow-students' closed minds; so that while she rose into the clouds, I fell into the gutter. Looking back, however, I think I was already in love with her, long before I was told ... is there proof of Saleem's unspeakable sister-love? There is. Jamila Singer had one passion in common with the vanished Brass Monkey; she loved bread. Chapatis, parathas, tandoori nans? Yes, but. Well then: was yeast preferred? It was; my sister — despite patriotism — hankered constantly after leavened bread. And, in all Karachi, what was the only source of quality, yeasty loaves? Not a baker's; the best bread in the city was handed out through a hatch in an otherwise blind wall, every Thursday morning, by the sisters of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia. Each week, on my Lambretta scooter, I brought my sister the warm fresh loaves of nuns. Despite long snaking queues; making light of the overspiced, hot, dung-laden odor of the narrow streets around the nunnery; ignoring all other calls upon my time, I fetched the bread. |
| 905 |
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. |
| 906 |
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. In the quarters of Jamila Singer's party, too, happiness reigned supreme. |
| 907 |
Evening approached at the palace; the convoy of cars bringing General and Begum Zulfikar, their son Zafar, and friends, approached, too. But now the wind changed, and began to blow from the north: a cold wind, and also an intoxicating one, because in the north of Kif were the best hashish fields in the land, and at this time of year the female plants were ripe and in heat. The air was filled with the perfume of the heady lust of the plants, and all who breathed it became doped to some extent. The vacuous beatitude of the plants affected the drivers in the convoy, which only reached the palace by great good fortune, having overturned a number of street-side barber-stalls and invaded at least one tea-shop, leaving the Kifis wondering whether the new horseless carriages, having stolen the streets, were now going to capture their homes as well. The wind from the north entered the enormous and highly sensitive nose of Saleem, Jamila's brother, and made him so drowsy that he fell asleep in his room; so that he missed the events of an evening during which, he afterwards learned, the hashashin wind had transformed the behavior of the guests at the engagement ceremony, making them giggle convulsively and gaze provocatively at one another through heavy-lidded eyes; braided Generals sat splay-legged on gilded chairs and dreamed of Paradise. The mehndi ceremony took place amid a sleepy contentment so profound that nobody noticed when the bridegroom relaxed so completely that he wet his pants; and even the quarreling badmaashes from the C. |
| 908 |
The new Prime Minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri, another member of that generation of politicians who seemed to have been pickled in immortality; in the case of Shastri, however, this was only maya, illusion. Nehru and Shastri have both fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of the others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let it move ... in Pakistan, however, the clocks ticked and tocked. Reverend Mother did not overtly approve of my sister's career; it smacked too much of film-stardom. "My family, whatsitsname," she sighed to Pia mumani, "is even less controllable than the price of gas." Secretly, however, she may have been impressed, because she respected power and position and Jamila was now so exalted as to be welcome in the most powerful and best-placed houses in the land ... my grandmother settled in Rawalpindi; however, with a strange show of independence, she chose not to live in the house of General Zulfikar. She and my aunt Pia moved into a modest bungalow in the old part of town; and by pooling their savings, purchased a concession on the long-dreamed-of petrol pump. Naseem never mentioned Aadam Aziz, nor would she grieve over him; it was almost as though she were relieved that my querulous grandfather, who had in his youth despised the Pakistan movement, and who in all probability blamed the Muslim League for the death of his friend Mian Abdullah, had by dying permitted her to go alone into the Land of the Pure. Setting her face against the past, Reverend Mother concentrated on gasoline and oil. |
| 909 |
The pump was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road; it did very well. Pia and Naseem took it in turns to spend the day in the manager's glass booth while attendants filled up cars and Army trucks. They proved a magical combination. Pia attracted customers with the beacon of a beauty which obstinately refused to fade; while Reverend Mother, who had been transformed by bereavement into a woman who was more interested in other people's lives than her own, took to inviting the pump's customers into her glass booth for cups of pink Kashmiri tea; they would accept with some trepidation, but when they realized that the old lady did not propose to bore them with endless reminiscences, they relaxed, loosened collars and tongues, and Reverend Mother was able to bathe in the blessed oblivion of other people's lives. The pump rapidly became famous in those parts, drivers began to go out of their way to use it — often on two consecutive days, so that they could both feast their eyes on my divine aunt and tell their woes to my eternally patient grandmother, who had developed the absorbent properties of a sponge, and always waited until her guests had completely finished before squeezing out of her own lips a few drops of simple, firm advice — while their cars were filled up with petrol and polished by pump-attendants, my grandmother would recharge and polish their lives. She sat in her glass confessional and solved the problems of the world; her own family, however, seemed to have lost importance in her eyes. |
| 910 |
On those increasingly rare occasions when brother and sister found themselves in the same room they would jump, startled, half an inch off the floor, and then, landing, stare furiously at the spot over which they had leaped, as if it had suddenly become as hot as a bread-oven. At other times, too, they indulged in behavior whose meaning would have been transparently obvious, were it not for the fact that each occupant of the house had other things on his or her mind: Jamila, for instance, took to keeping on her gold-and-white travelling veil indoors until she was sure her brother was out, even if she was dizzy with heat; while Saleem — who continued, slave-fashion, to fetch leavened bread from the nunnery of Santa Ignacia — avoided handing her the loaves himself; on occasion he asked his poisonous aunt to act as intermediary. Alia looked at him with amusement and asked, "What's wrong with you, boy — you haven't got an infectious disease?" Saleem blushed furiously, fearing that his aunt had guessed about his encounters with paid women; and maybe she had, but she was after bigger fish. ... He also developed a penchant for lapsing into long broody silences, which he interrupted by bursting out suddenly with a meaningless word: "No!" or, "But!" or even more arcane exclamations, such as "Bang!" or "Whaam!" Nonsense words amidst clouded silences: as if Saleem were conducting some inner dialogue of such intensity that fragments of it, or its pain, boiled up from time to time past the surface of his lips. |
| 911 |
This inner discord was undoubtedly worsened by the curries of disquiet which we were obliged to eat; and at the end, when Amina was reduced to talking to invisible washing-chests and Ahmed, in the desolation of his stroke, was capable of little more than dribbles and giggles, while I glowered silently in my own private withdrawal, my aunt must have been well-pleased with the effectiveness of her revenge upon the Sinai clan; unless she, too, was drained by the fulfilment of her long-nurtured ambition; in which case she, too, had run out of possibilities, and there were hollow overtones in her footsteps as she stalked through the insane asylum of her home with her chin covered in hair-plasters, while her niece jumped over suddenly-hot patches of floor and her nephew yelled "Yaa!" out of nowhere and her erstwhile suitor sent spittle down his chin and Amina greeted the resurgent ghosts of her past: "So it's you again; well, why not? Nothing ever seems to go away." Tick, tock ... In January 1965, my mother Amina Sinai discovered that she was pregnant again, after a gap of seventeen years. When she was sure, she told her good news to her big sister Alia, giving my aunt the opportunity of perfecting her revenge. What Alia said to my mother is not known; what she stirred into her cooking must remain a matter for conjecture; but the effect on Amina was devastating. She was plagued by dreams of a monster child with a cauliflower instead of a brain; she was beset by phantoms of Ramram Seth, and the old prophecy of a child with two heads began to drive her wild all over again. |
| 912 |
To sum up the ruination of Amina Brand Towels: Ahmed Sinai began treating his workers as peremptorily as once, in Bombay, he had mistreated servants, and sought to inculcate, in master weavers and assistant packers alike, the eternal verities of the master-servant relationship. As a result his work-force walked out on him in droves, explaining, for instance, "I am not your latrine-cleaner, sahib; I am qualified Grade One weaver," and in general refusing to show proper gratitude for his beneficence in having employed them. In the grip of the befuddling wrath of my aunt's packed lunches, he let them all go, and hired a bunch of ill-favored slackers who pilfered cotton spools and machine parts but were willing to bow and scrape whenever required to do so; and the percentage of defective towels rocketed alarmingly, contracts were not fulfilled, re-orders shrank alarmingly. Ahmed Sinai began bringing home mountains — Himalayas! — of reject towelling, because the factory warehouse was full to overflowing of the sub-standard product of his mismanagement; he took to drink again; and by the summer of that year the house in Guru Mandir was awash in the old obscenities of his battle against the djinns, and we had to squeeze sideways past the Everest and Nanga-Parbats of badly-made terry-cloth which lined the passages and hall. We had delivered ourselves into the lap of my fat aunt's long-simmered wrath; with the single exception of Jamila, who was least affected owing to her long absences, we all ended up with our geese well and truly cooked. |
| 913 |
What the surrendering Indian soldiers said, within my cousin's hearing: "Anyway, these border posts were unmanned; we just saw them empty and came inside." The mystery of the deserted border posts did not, at first, seem like a puzzle to the young Pakistani soldiers who were required to occupy them until new border guards were sent; my cousin Lieutenant Zafar found his bladder and bowels voiding themselves with hysterical frequency for the seven nights he spent occupying one of the posts with only five jawans for company. During nights filled with the shrieks of witches and the nameless slithery shufflings of the dark, the six youngsters were reduced to so abject a state that nobody laughed at my cousin any more, they were all too busy wetting their own pants. One of the jawans whispered in terror during the ghostly evil of their last-but-one night: "Listen, boys, if I had to sit here for a living, I'd bloody well run away, too!" In a state of utter jelly-like breakdown the soldiers sweated in the Rann; and then on the last night their worst fears came true, they saw an army of ghosts coming out of the darkness towards them; they were in the border post nearest the sea-shore, and in the greeny moonlight they could see the sails of the ghost-ships, of phantom dhows; and the ghost-army approached, relentlessly, despite the screams of the soldiers, specters bearing moss-covered chests and strange shrouded litters piled high with unseen things; and when the ghost-army came in through the door, my cousin Zafar fell at their feet and began to gibber horribly. |
| 914 |
The first phantom to enter the outpost had several missing teeth and a curved knife stuck in his belt; when he saw the soldiers in the hut his eyes blazed with a vermilion fury. "God's pity!" the ghost chieftain said, "What are you mother-sleepers here for? Didn't you all get properly paid off?" Not ghosts; smugglers. The six young soldiers found themselves in absurd postures of abject terror, and although they tried to redeem themselves, their shame was engulfingly complete ... and now we come to it. In whose name were the smugglers operating? Whose name fell from the lips of the smuggler-chief, and made my cousin's eyes open in horror? Whose fortune, built originally on the miseries of fleeing Hindu families in 1947, was now augmented by these spring-and-summer smugglers' convoys through the unguarded Rann and thence into the cities of Pakistan? Which Punch-faced General, with a voice as thin as a razor-blade, commanded the phantom troops? ... But I shall concentrate on facts. In July 1965, my cousin Zafar returned on leave to his father's house in Rawalpindi; and one morning he began to walk slowly towards his father's bedroom, bearing on his shoulders not only the memory of a thousand childhood humiliations and blows; not only the shame of his life-long enuresis; but also the knowledge that his own father had been responsible for what-happened-at-the-Rann, when Zafar Zulfikar was reduced to gibbering on a floor. My cousin found his father in his bedside bath, and slit his throat with a long, curved smuggler's knife. |
| 915 |
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. 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. |
| 916 |
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? |
| 917 |
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! Lame men loaded their pockets with grenades, pulled out the pins, flung themselves beneath advancing Indian tanks; toothless old ladies disembowelled Indian babus with pitch-forks! Down to the last man and child, they died; but they saved the city, holding off the Indians until air support arrived! Martyrs, Padma! Heroes, bound for the perfumed garden! Where the men would be given four beauteous houris, untouched by man or djinn; and the women, four equally virile males! Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny? What a thing this holy war is, in which with one supreme sacrifice men may atone for all their evils! No wonder Lahore was defended; what did the Indians have to look forward to? Only reincarnation — as cockroaches, maybe, or scorpions, or green-medicine-wallahs — there's really no comparison. But did it or didn't it? Was that how it happened? Or was All-India Radio — great tank battle, huge Pak losses, 450 tanks destroyed — telling the truth? |
| 918 |
She was being visited, that night, by the Nawab of Kif and his mulishly unmaturing daughter; who was also spared the necessity of becoming an adult woman. In Karachi, three bombs were also enough. The Indian planes, reluctant to come down low, bombed from a great height; the vast majority of their missiles fell harmlessly into the sea. One bomb, however, annihilated Major (Retired) Alauddin Latif and all his seven Puffias, thus releasing me from my promise for ever; and there were two last bombs. Meanwhile, at the front, Mutasim the Handsome emerged from his tent to go to the toilet; a noise like a mosquito whizzed (or did not whiz) towards him, and he died with a full bladder under the impact of a sniper's bullet. And still I must tell you about two-last-bombs. Who survived? Jamila Singer, whom bombs were unable to find; in India, the family of my uncle Mustapha, with whom bombs could not be bothered; but my father's forgotten distant relative Zohra and her husband had moved to Amritsar, and a bomb sought them out as well. And two-more-bombs demand to be told. ... While I, unaware of the intimate connection between the war and myself, went foolishly in search of bombs; after the curfew-hour I rode, but vigilante bullets failed to find their target ... and sheets of flame rose from a Rawalpindi bungalow, perforated sheets at whose center hung a mysterious dark hole, which grew into the smoke-image of an old wide woman with moles on her cheeks ... and one by one the war eliminated my drained, hopeless family from the earth. |
| 919 |
But now Padma's lips are parting, and there is no time to linger on the angrily-opposed images of Mr. Z. A. Bhutto and Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman; exhaled air begins to issue invisibly from her mouth, and the dream-faces of the leaders of the Pakistan People's Party and the Awami League shimmer and fade out; the gusting of her emptying lungs paradoxically stills the breeze blowing the pages of my calendar, which comes to rest upon a date late in 1970, before the election which split the country in two, before the war of West Wing against East Wing, P. P. P. against Awami League, Bhutto against Mujib ... before the election of 1970, and far away from the public stage, three young soldiers are arriving at a mysterious camp in the Murree Hills.) Padma has regained her self-control. "Okay, okay," she expostulates, waving an arm in dismissal of her tears, "Why you're waiting? Begin," the lotus instructs me loftily, "Begin all over again." The camp in the hills will be found on no maps; it is too far from the Murree road for the barking of its dogs to be heard, even by the sharpest-eared of motorists. Its wire perimeter fence is heavily camouflaged; the gate bears neither symbol nor name. Yet it does, did, exist; though its existence has been hotly denied — at the fall of Dacca, for instance, when Pakistan's vanquished Tiger Niazi was quizzed on this subject by his old chum, India's victorious General Sam Manekshaw, the Tiger scoffed: "Canine Unit for Tracking and Intelligence Activities? |
| 920 |
"Vegetarians, I swear, yaar ... how are they going to beat beefy types like us?" But Farooq is long and stringy. Shaheed Dar whispers, "But what did he mean: man-dog?" ... Morning. In a hut with a blackboard, Brigadier Iskandar polishes knuckles on lapels while one Sgt.-Mjr. Najmuddin briefs new recruits. Question-and-answer format; Najmuddin provides both queries and replies. No interruptions are to be tolerated. While above the blackboard the garlanded portraits of President Yahya and Mutasim the Martyr stare sternly down. And through the (closed) windows, the persistent barking of dogs ... Najmuddin's inquiries and responses are also barked. What are you here for? — Training. In what field? — Pursuit-and-capture. How will you work? — In canine units of three persons and one dog. What unusual features? — Absence of officer personnel, necessity of taking own decisions, concomitant requirement for high Islamic sense of self-discipline and responsibility. Purpose of units? — To root out undesirable elements. Nature of such elements? — Sneaky, well-disguised, could-be-anyone. Known intentions of same? — To be abhorred: destruction of family life, murder of God, expropriation of landowners, abolition of film-censorship. To what ends? — Annihilation of the State, anarchy, foreign domination. Accentuating causes of concern? — Forthcoming elections; and subsequently, civilian rule. (Political prisoners have been are being freed. All types of hooligans are abroad.) Precise duties of units? |
| 921 |
How often did Brigadier Iskandar — "Smell this! That's the stink of subversion!" — unleash the war-hounds of unity? There are things which took place on the night of March 25th which must remain permanently in a state of confusion. Futility of statistics: during 1971, ten million refugees fled across the borders of East Pakistan-Bangladesh into India — but ten million (like all numbers larger than one thousand and one) refuses to be understood. Comparisons do not help: "the biggest migration in the history of the human race" — meaningless. Bigger than Exodus, larger than the Partition crowds, the many-headed monster poured into India. On the border, Indian soldiers trained the guerrillas known as Mukti Bahini; in Dacca, Tiger Niazi ruled the roost. And Ayooba Shaheed Farooq? Our boys in green? How did they take to battling against fellow meat-eaters? Did they mutiny? Were officers — Iskandar, Najmuddin, even Lala Moin — riddled with nauseated bullets? They were not. Innocence had been lost; but despite a new grimness about the eyes, despite the irrevocable loss of certainty, despite the eroding of moral absolutes, the unit went on with its work. The buddha was not the only one who did as he was told ... while somewhere high above the struggle, the voice of Jamila Singer fought anonymous voices singing the lyrics of R. Tagore: "My life passes in the shady village homes filled with rice from your fields; they madden my heart with delight." Their hearts maddened, but not with delight, Ayooba and company followed orders; the buddha followed scent-trails. |
| 922 |
Into the heart of the city, which has turned violent maddened bloodsoaked as the West Wing soldiers react badly to their knowledge-of-wrongdoing, goes Number 22 Unit; through the blackened streets, the buddha concentrates on the ground, sniffing out trails, ignoring the ground-level chaos of cigarette-packs cow-dung fallen-bicycles abandoned-shoes; and then on other assignments, out into the countryside, where entire villages are being burned owing to their collective responsibility for harboring Mukti Bahini, the buddha and three boys track down minor Awami League officials and well-known Communist types. Past migrating villagers with bundled possessions on their heads; past torn-up railway tracks and burnt-out trees; and always, as though some invisible force were directing their footsteps, drawing them into a darker heart of madness, their missions send them south south south, always nearer to the sea, to the mouths of the Ganges and the sea. And at last — who were they following then? Did names matter any more? — they were given a quarry whose skills must have been the equal-and-opposite of the buddha's own, otherwise why did it take so long to catch him? At last — unable to escape their training, pursue-relentlessly-arrest-remorselessly, they are in the midst of a mission without an end, pursuing a foe who endlessly eludes them, but they cannot report back to base empty-handed, and on they go, south south south, drawn by eternally-receding scent-trail; and perhaps by something more: because, in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand. |
| 923 |
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. |
| 924 |
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. And flitting through the night-forest went the wraiths of their hopes; these, however, they were unable to see clearly, or to grasp. The buddha, however, was not granted nostalgia at first. He had taken to sitting cross-legged under a sundri-tree; his eyes and mind seemed empty, and at night, he no longer awoke. |
| 925 |
But finally the forest found a way through to him; one afternoon, when rain pounded down on the trees and boiled off them as steam, Ayooba Shaheed Farooq saw the buddha sitting under his tree while a blind, translucent serpent bit, and poured venom into, his heel. Shaheed Dar crushed the serpent's head with a stick; the buddha, who was head-to-foot numb, seemed not to have noticed. His eyes were closed. After this, the boy soldiers waited for the man-dog to die; but I was stronger than the snake-poison. For two days he became as rigid as a tree, and his eyes crossed, so that he saw the world in mirror-image, with the right side on the left; at last he relaxed, and the look of milky abstraction was no longer in his eyes. I was rejoined to the past, jolted into unity by snake-poison, and it began to pour out through the buddha's lips. As his eyes returned to normal, his words flowed so freely that they seemed to be an aspect of the monsoon. The child-soldiers listened, spellbound, to the stories issuing from his mouth, beginning with a birth at midnight, and continuing unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories, all the myriad complex processes that go to make a man. Open-mouthed, unable to tear themselves away, the child-soldiers drank his life like leaf-tainted water, as he spoke of bed-wetting cousins, revolutionary pepperpots, the perfect voice of a sister ... Ayooba Shaheed Farooq would have (once upon a time) given anything to know that those rumors had been true; but in the Sundarbans, they didn't even cry out. |
| 926 |
Dismounting before we fell off, we entered the terrible field. There was a scavenging peasant moving about, whistling as he worked, with an outsize gunny sack on his back. The whitened knuckles of the hand which gripped the sack revealed his determined frame of mind; the whistling, which was piercing but tuneful, showed that he was keeping his spirits up. 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. |
| 927 |
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? Is precious stone? You give; I give radio, camera, almost working order, my sir! Is a damn good deals, my friend. For one spittoon only, is damn fine. Ho yes. Ho yes, my sir, life must go on; trade must go on, my sir, not true?" "Tell me more," the buddha said, "about the soldier with the knees." But now, once again, a bee buzzes; in the distance, at the far end of the field, somebody drops to his knees; somebody's forehead touches the ground as if in prayer; and in the field, one of the crops, which had been alive enough to shoot, also becomes very still. Shaheed Dar is shouting a name: "Farooq! Farooq, man!" But Farooq refuses to reply. Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking bone-marrow towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached Farooq's praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field's greatest secret. There was a small pyramid in the middle of the field. Ants were crawling over it, but it was not an anthill. The pyramid had six feet and three heads and, in between, a jumbled area composed of bits of torso, scraps of uniforms, lengths of intestine and glimpses of shattered bones. The pyramid was still alive. One of its three heads had a blind left eye, the legacy of a childhood argument. |
| 928 |
Another had hair that was thickly plastered down with hair oil. The third head was the oddest: it had deep hollows where the temples should have been, hollows that could have been made by a gynecologist's forceps which had held it too tightly at birth ... it was this third head which spoke to the buddha: "Hullo, man," it said, "What the hell are you here for?" Shaheed Dar saw the pyramid of enemy soldiers apparently conversing with the buddha; Shaheed, suddenly seized by an irrational energy, flung himself upon me and pushed me to the ground, with, "Who are you? — Spy? Traitor? What? — Why do they know who you — ?" While Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, flapped pitifully around us, "Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God." Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to reunite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads; and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch. When Shaheed calmed down and got off me, the pyramid was no longer capable of speech. Later that afternoon, we resumed our journey towards the capital. Deshmukh, the vendor of notions, called cheerfully after us: "Ho sirs! |
| 929 |
Afterwards, in the muezzin's roost, he told the buddha, "So strange, Allah — the pomegranate — in my head, just like that, bigger an' brighter than ever before — you know, buddha, like a light-bulb — Allah, what could I do, I looked!" — And yes, it was there, hanging above his head, the grenade of his dreams, hanging just above his head, falling falling, exploding at waist-level, blowing his legs away to some other part of the city. When I reached him, Shaheed was conscious, despite bisection, and pointed up, "Take me up there, buddha, I want to I want," so I carried what was now only half a boy (and therefore reasonably light) up narrow spiral stairs to the heights of that cool white minaret, where Shaheed babbled of light-bulbs while red ants and black ants fought over a dead cockroach, battling away along the trowel-furrows in the crudely-laid concrete floor. Down below, amid charred houses, broken glass and smoke-haze, ant-like people were emerging, preparing for peace; the ants, however, ignored the ant-like, and fought on. And the buddha: he stood still, gazing milkily down and around, having placed himself between the top half of Shaheed and the eyrie's one piece of furniture, a low table on which stood a gramophone connected to a loudspeaker. The buddha, protecting his halved companion from the disillusioning sight of this mechanized muezzin, whose call to prayer would always be scratched in the same places, extracted from the folds of his shapeless robe a glinting object: and turned his milky gaze upon the silver spittoon. |
| 930 |
Lost in contemplation, he was taken by surprise when the screams began; and looked up to see an abandoned cockroach. (Blood had been seeping along trowel-furrows; ants, following this dark viscous trail, had arrived at the source of the leakage, and Shaheed expressed his fury at becoming the victim of not one, but two wars.) Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war. After a few moments, silence. Shaheed's head slumped forward. And the buddha, fearing discovery, put away his spittoon and descended into the city as the Indian Army arrived; leaving Shaheed, who no longer minded, to assist at the peace-making banquet of the ants, I went into the early morning streets to welcome General Sam. In the minaret, I had gazed milkily at my spittoon; but the buddha's mind had not been empty. It contained three words, which Shaheed's top half had also kept repeating, until the ants: the same three which once, reeking of onions, had made me weep on the shoulder of Ayooba Baloch — until the bee, buzzing ... "It's not fair," the buddha thought, and then, like a child, over and over, "It's not fair," and again, and again. Shaheed, fulfilling his father's dearest wish, had finally earned his name; but the buddha could still not remember his own. How the buddha regained his name: Once, long ago, on another independence day, the world had been saffron and green. |
| 931 |
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. |
| 932 |
In a cramped wash-room, were name-tags not switched around? Alone in a washing-chest with a drawstring up one nostril, did he not glimpse a Black Mango and sniff too hard, turning himself and his upper cucumber into a kind of supernatural ham radio? Hemmed in by doctors, nurses and anesthetic masks, did he not succumb to numbers and, having suffered drainage-above, move into a second phase, that of nasal philosopher and (later) tracker supreme? Squashed, in a small abandoned hut, beneath the body of Ayooba Baloch, did he not learn the meaning of fair-and-unfair? Well, then — trapped in the occult peril of the basket of invisibility, I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon, but also by another transformation: in the grip of that awful disembodied loneliness, whose smell was the smell of graveyards, I discovered anger. Something was fading in Saleem and something was being born. Fading: an old pride in baby-snaps and framed Nehru-letter; an old determination to espouse, willingly, a prophesied historical role; and also a willingness to make allowances, to understand how parents and strangers might legitimately despise or exile him for his ugliness; mutilated fingers and monks' tonsures no longer seemed like good enough excuses for the way in which he, I, had been treated. The object of my wrath was, in fact, everything which I had, until then, blindly accepted: my parents' desire that I should repay their investment in me by becoming great; genius-like-a-shawl; the modes of connection themselves inspired in me a blind, lunging fury. |
| 933 |
(And I, with my distances and self-absorption, like a husband?) Of late, in spite of my stoic fatalism about the spreading cracks, I have smelled, on Padma's breath, the dream of an alternative (but impossible) future; ignoring the implacable finalities of inner fissures, she has begun to exude the bitter-sweet fragrance of hope-for-marriage. My dung-lotus, who remained impervious for so long to the sneer-lipped barbs hurled by our workforce of downy-forearmed women; who placed her cohabitation with me outside and above all codes of social propriety, has seemingly succumbed to a desire for legitimacy ... in short, although she has not said a word on the subject, she is waiting for me to make an honest woman of her. The perfume of her sad hopefulness permeates her most innocently solicitous remarks — even at this very moment, as she, "Hey, mister, why not — finish your writery and then take rest; go to Kashmir, sit quietly for some time — and maybe you will take your Padma also, and she can look after ... ?" Behind this burgeoning dream of a Kashmiri holiday (which was once also the dream of Jehangir, the Mughal Emperor; of poor forgotten Ilse Lubin; and, perhaps, of Christ himself), I nose out the presence of another dream; but neither this nor that can be fulfilled. Because now the cracks, the cracks and always the cracks are narrowing my future towards its single inescapable fullpoint; and even Padma must take a back seat if I'm to finish my tales. Today, the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth of Mrs. |
| 934 |
Indira Gandhi; but when I returned to India, concealed in a wicker basket, "The Madam" was basking in the fullness of her glory. Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down, how I — how she — how it happened that — no, I can't say it, I must tell it in the proper order, until there is no option but to reveal ... On December 16th, 1971,1 tumbled out of a basket into an India in which Mrs. Gandhi's New Congress Party held a more-than-two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. In the basket of invisibility, a sense of unfairness turned into anger; and something else besides — transformed by rage, I had also been overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was not only my twin-in-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so that what happened to either of us, happened to us both. If I, snot-nosed stain-faced etcetera, had had a hard time of it, then so had she, my subcontinental twin sister; and now that I had given myself the right to choose a better future, I was resolved that the nation should share it, too. I think that when I tumbled out into dust, shadow and amused cheers, I had already decided to save the country. (But there are cracks and gaps ... had I, by then, begun to see that my love for Jamila Singer had been, in a sense, a mistake? Had I already understood how I had simply transferred on to her shoulders the adoration which I now perceived to be a vaulting, all-encompassing love of country? |
| 935 |
It was in the clutches of this magnificent fantasy that I told Parvati-the-witch, "I must be off; great matters are afoot!" And, seeing the hurt in her suddenly-inflamed cheeks, consoled her: "I will come and see you often. Often often." But she was not consoled ... high-mindedness, then, was one motive for abandoning those who had helped me; but was there not something meaner, lowlier, more personal? There was. Parvati had drawn me secretly aside behind a tin-and-cratewood shack; where cockroaches spawned, where rats made love, where flies gorged themselves on pie-dog dung, she clutched me by the wrist and became incandescent of eye and sibilant of tongue; hidden in the putrid underbelly of the ghetto, she confessed that I was not the first of the midnight children to have crossed her path! And now there was a story of a Dacca procession, and magicians marching alongside heroes; there was Parvati looking up at a tank, and there were Parvati-eyes alighting on a pair of gigantic, prehensile knees ... knees bulging proudly through starched-pressed uniform; there was Parvati crying, "O you! O you ..." and then the unspeakable name, the name of my guilt, of someone who should have led my life but for a crime in a nursing home; Parvati and Shiva, Shiva and Parvati, fated to meet by the divine destiny of their names, were united in the moment of victory. "A hero, man!" she hissed proudly behind the shack. "They will make him a big officer and all!" And now what was produced from a fold of her ragged attire? |
| 936 |
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. |
| 937 |
Parvati-the-witch was waiting for me on the pavement; I did not tell her that there was a sense in which I'd been glad of the interruption, because as I kissed her in the dark of that illicit midnight I had seen her face changing, becoming the face of a forbidden love; the ghostly features of Jamila Singer replaced those of the witch-girl; Jamila who was (I know it!) safely hidden in a Karachi nunnery was suddenly also here, except that she had undergone a dark transformation. She had begun to rot, the dreadful pustules and cankers of forbidden love were spreading across her face; just as once the ghost of Joe D'Costa had rotted in the grip of the occult leprosy of guilt, so now the rancid flowers of incest blossomed on my sister's phantasmal features, and I couldn't do it, couldn't kiss touch look upon that intolerable spectral face, I had been on the verge of jerking away with a cry of desperate nostalgia and shame when Sonia Aziz burst in upon us with electric light and screams. And as for Mustapha, well, my indiscretion with Parvati may also have been, in his eyes, no more than a useful pretext for getting rid of me; but that must remain in doubt, because the black folder was locked — all I have to go on is a look in his eye, a smell of fear, three initials on a label — because afterwards, when everything was finished, a fallen lady and her labia-lipped son spent two days behind locked doors, burning files; and how can we know whether-or-not one of them was labelled M. C. |
| 938 |
A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder, as surely and completely as my father had once turned white, so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. Down with the rule of uncooperative box-wallah uncles and their beloved leaders! Full of thoughts of direct-communication-with-the-masses, I settled into the magicians' colony, scraping a living by amusing foreign and native tourists with the marvellous perspicacities of my nose, which enabled me to smell out their simple, touristy secrets. Picture Singh asked me to share his shack. I slept on tattered sackcloth amongst baskets sibilant with snakes; but I did not mind, just as I found myself capable of tolerating hunger thirst mosquitoes and (in the beginning) the bitter cold of a Delhi winter. This Picture Singh, the Most Charming Man In The World, was also the ghetto's unquestioned chieftain; squabbles and problems were resolved beneath the shade of his ubiquitous and enormous black umbrella; and I, who could read and write as well as smell, became a sort of aide-de-camp to this monumental man who invariably added a lecture on socialism to his serpentine performances, and who was famous in the main streets and alleys of the city for more than his snake-charmer's skills. I can say, with utter certainty, that Picture Singh was the greatest man I ever met. One afternoon during the chaya, the ghetto was visited by another copy of that labia-lipped youth whom I'd seen at my Uncle Mustapha's. |
| 939 |
Labia-lips is crying: "What are you doing? Trying to kill me to death?" And Picture Singh, ignoring him, his umbrella furled now, plays on, more and more furiously, and the snake uncoils, faster faster Picture Singh plays until the flute's music fills every cranny of the slum and threatens to scale the walls of the mosque, and at last the great snake, hanging in the air, supported only by the enchantment of the tune, stands nine feet long out of the basket and dances on its tail ... Picture Singh relents. Nagaraj subsides into coils. The Most Charming Man In The World offers the flute to the Congress youth: "Okay, captain," Picture Singh says agreeably, "you give it a try." But labia-lips: "Man, you know I couldn't do it!" Whereupon Picture Singh seizes the cobra just below the head, opens his own mouth wide wide wide, displaying an heroic wreckage of teeth and gums; winking left-eyed at the Congress youth, he inserts the snake's tongue-flicking head into his hideously yawning orifice! A full minute passes before Picture Singh returns the cobra to its basket. Very kindly, he tells the youth: "You see, captain, here is the truth of the business: some persons are better, others are less. But it may be nice for you to think otherwise." Watching this scene, Saleem Sinai learned that Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was. |
| 940 |
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. 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. |
| 941 |
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. |
| 942 |
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. Two young jugglers conceived the notion that she might have begun grieving for her deceased father all over again, and applied themselves to the task of drawing his portrait on a shred of old tarpaulin, which they hung above her sackcloth mat. Triplets made jokes, and Picture Singh, greatly distressed, made cobras tie themselves in knots; but none of it worked, because if Parvati's thwarted love was beyond her own powers to cure, what hope could the others have had? The power of Parvati's pout created, in the ghetto, a nameless sense of unease, which all the magicians' animosity towards the unknown could not entirely dispel. And then Resham Bibi hit upon an idea. "Fools that we are," she told Picture Singh, "we don't see what is under our noses. The poor girl is twenty-five, baba — almost an old woman! She is pining for a husband!" Picture Singh was impressed. "Resham Bibi," he told her approvingly, "your brain is not yet dead." After that, Picture Singh applied himself to the task of finding Parvati a suitable young man; many of the younger men in the ghetto were coaxed bullied threatened. A number of candidates were produced; but Parvati rejected them all. On the night when she told Bismillah Khan, the most promising fire-eater in the colony, to go somewhere else with his breath of hot chillies, even Picture Singh despaired. |
| 943 |
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. |
| 944 |
And certainly there were children. The spawn of illicit midnights. Beautiful bouncing infants secure in the cradles of the rich. Strewing bastards across the map of India, the war hero went his way; but (and this, too, is what he told Parvati) he suffered from the curious fault of losing interest in anyone who became pregnant; no matter how beautiful sensuous loving they were, he deserted the bedrooms of all who bore his children; and lovely ladies with red-rimmed eyes were obliged to persuade their cuckolded husbands that yes, of course it's your baby, darling, life-of-mine, doesn't it look just like you, and of course I'm not sad, why should I be, these are tears of joy. One such deserted mother was Roshanara, the child-wife of the steel magnate S. P. Shetty; and at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse in Bombay, she punctured the mighty balloon of his pride. He had been promenading about the paddock, stooping every few yards to return ladies' shawls and parasols, which seemed to acquire a life of their own and spring out of their owners' hands as he passed; Roshanara Shetty confronted him here, standing squarely in his path and refusing to budge, her seventeen-year-old eyes filled with the ferocious pique of childhood. He greeted her coolly, touching his Army cap, and attempted to pass; but she dug her needle-sharp nails into his arm, smiling dangerously as ice, and strolled along beside him. As they walked she poured her infantile poison into his ear, and her hatred and resentment of her former lover gave her the skill to make him believe her. |
| 945 |
On May 15th, 1974, Major Shiva returned to his regiment in Delhi; he claimed that, three days later, he was suddenly seized by a desire to see once more the saucer-eyed beauty whom he had first encountered long ago in the conference of the Midnight Children; the pony-tailed temptress who had asked him, in Dacca, for a single lock of his hair. Major Shiva declared to Parvati that his arrival at the magicians' ghetto had been motivated by a desire to be done with the rich bitches of Indian high society; that he had been besotted by her pouting lips the moment he laid eyes on them; and that these were the only reasons for asking her to go away with him. But I have already been over-generous to Major Shiva — in this, my own personal version of history, I have allowed his account too much space; so I insist that, whatever the knock-kneed Major might have thought, the thing that drew him into the ghetto was quite simply and straightforwardly the magic of Parvati-the-witch. Saleem was not in the ghetto when Major Shiva arrived by motorcycle; while nuclear explosions rocked the Rajasthani wastes, out of sight, beneath the desert's surface, the explosion which changed my life also took place out of my sight. When Shiva grasped Parvati by the wrist, I was with Picture Singh at an emergency conference of the city's many red cells, discussing the ins and outs of the national railway strike; when Parvati, without demurring, took her place on the pillion of a hero's Honda, I was busily denouncing the government's arrests of union leaders. |
| 946 |
In short, while I was preoccupied with politics and my dream of national salvation, the powers of Parvati's witchcraft had set in motion the scheme which would end with hennaed palms, and songs, and the signing of a contract. ... I am obliged, perforce, to rely on the accounts of others; only Shiva could tell what had befallen him; it was Resham Bibi who described Parvati's departure to me on my return, saying, "Poor girl, let her go, so sad she has been for so long, what is to blame?"; and only Parvati could recount to me what befell her while she was away. Because of the Major's national status as a war hero, he was permitted to take certain liberties with military regulations; so nobody took him to task for importing a woman into what were not, after all, married men's quarters; and he, not knowing what had brought about this remarkable alteration in his life, sat down as requested in a cane chair, while she took off his boots, pressed his feet, brought him water flavored with freshly-squeezed limes, dismissed his batman, oiled his moustache, caressed his knees and after all that produced a dinner of biriani so exquisite that he stopped wondering what was happening to him and began to enjoy it instead. Parvati-the-witch turned those simple Army quarters into a palace, a Kailasa fit for Shiva-the-god; and Major Shiva, lost in the haunted pools of her eyes, aroused beyond endurance by the erotic protrusion of her lips, devoted his undivided attentions to her for four whole months: or, to be precise, for one hundred and seventeen nights. |
| 947 |
On September 12th, however, things changed: because Parvati, kneeling at his feet, fully aware of his views on the subject, told him that she was going to have his child. The liaison of Shiva and Parvati now became a tempestuous business, filled with blows and broken plates: an earthly echo of that eternal marital battle-of-the-gods which their namesakes are said to perform atop Mount Kailasa in the great Himalayas ... Major Shiva, at this time, began to drink; also to whore. The whoring trails of the war hero around the capital of India bore a strong resemblance to the Lambretta-travels of Saleem Sinai along the spoors of Karachi streets; Major Shiva, unmanned in the company of the rich by the revelations of Roshanara Shetty, had taken to paying for his pleasures. And such was his phenomenal fecundity (he assured Parvati while beating her) that he ruined the careers of many a loose woman by giving them babies whom they would love too much to expose; he sired around the capital an army of street-urchins to mirror the regiment of bastards he had fathered on the begums of the chandeliered salons. Dark clouds were gathering in political skies as well: in Bihar, where corruption inflation hunger illiteracy landlessness ruled the roost, Jaya-Prakash Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the governing Indira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were burned, and Morarji Desai went on a fast-unto-death to bring down the corrupt government of the Congress (under Chimanbhai Patel) in that drought-ridden state ... |
| 948 |
But I shall only describe, and leave analysis to posterity. On a cold day in January, when the muezzin's cries from the highest minaret of the Friday Mosque froze as they left his lips and fell upon the city as sacred snow, Parvati returned. She had waited until there could be no possible doubt about her condition; her inner basket bulged through the clean new garments of Shiva's now-defunct infatuation. Her lips, sure of their coming triumph, had lost their fashionable pout; in her saucer eyes, as she stood on the steps of the Friday Mosque to ensure that as many people as possible saw her changed appearance, there lurked a silvered gleam of contentment. That was how I found her when I returned to the chaya of the mosque with Picture Singh. I was feeling disconsolate, and the sight of Parvati-the-witch on the steps, hands folded calmly over her swollen belly, long rope-of-hair blowing gently in the crystal air, did nothing to cheer me up. Pictureji and I had gone into the tapering tenement streets behind the General Post Office, where memories of fortune-tellers peep-show-men healers hung in the breeze; and here Picture Singh had performed an act which was growing more political by the day. His legendary artistry drew large good-natured crowds; and he made his snakes enact his message under the influence of his weaving flute music. While I, in my role of apprentice, read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of the gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in dumbshow, the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. |
| 949 |
And then there was Parvati, with her altered profile, in the harsh clarity of the winter day. It was — or am I wrong? I must rush on; things are slipping from me all the time — a day of horrors. It was then — unless it was another day — that we found old Resham Bibi dead of cold, lying in her hut which she had built out of Dalda Vanaspati packing-cases. She had turned bright blue, Krishna-blue, blue as Jesus, the blue of Kashmiri sky, which sometimes leaks into eyes; we burned her on the banks of the Jamuna amongst mudflats and buffalo, and she missed my wedding as a result, which was sad, because like all old women she loved weddings, and had in the past joined in the preliminary henna-ceremonies with energetic glee, leading the formal singing in which the bride's friends insulted the groom and his family. On one occasion her insults had been so brilliant and finely calculated that the groom took umbrage and cancelled the wedding; but Resham had been undaunted, saying that it wasn't her fault if young men nowadays were as fainthearted and inconstant as chickens. I was absent when Parvati went away; I was not present when she returned; and there was one more curious fact ... unless I have forgotten, unless it was on another day ... it seems to me, at any rate, that on the day of Parvati's return, an Indian Cabinet Minister was in his railway carriage, at Samastipur, when an explosion blew him into the history books; that Parvati, who had departed amid the explosions of atom bombs, returned to us when Mr. |
| 950 |
Parvati — just as she had planned, I'm sure — accepted me at once, said yes as easily and as often as she had said no in the past; and after that the Republic Day celebrations acquired the air of having been staged especially for our benefit, but what was in my mind was that once again destiny, inevitability, the antithesis of choice had come to rule my life, once again a child was to be a born to a father who was not his father, although by a terrible irony the child would be the true grandchild of his father's parents; trapped in the web of these interweaving genealogies, it may even have occurred to me to wonder what was beginning, what was ending, and whether another secret countdown was in progress, and what would be born with my child. Despite the absence of Resham Bibi, the wedding went off well enough. Parvati's formal conversion to Islam (which irritated Picture Singh, but on which I found myself insisting, in another throwback to an earlier life) was performed by a red-bearded Haji who looked ill-at-ease in the presence of so many teasing, provocative members of the ungodly; under the shifting gaze of this fellow who resembled a large and bearded onion she intoned her belief that there was no God but God and that Muhammad was his prophet; she took a name which I chose for her out of the repository of my dreams, becoming Laylah, night, so that she too was caught up in the repetitive cycles of my history, becoming an echo of all the other people who have been obliged to change their names ... |
| 951 |
And at the valima, the consummation ceremony (at which, on this occasion, no bloodstained sheets were held up, with or without perforations, since I had spent our nuptial night with my eyes shut tight and my body averted from my wife's, lest the unbearable features of Jamila Singer come to haunt me in the bewilderment of the dark), the magicians surpassed their efforts of the wedding-night. But when all the excitement had died down, I heard (with one good and one bad ear) the inexorable sound of the future stealing up upon us: tick, tock, louder and louder, until the birth of Saleem Sinai — and also of the baby's father — found a mirror in the events of the night of the 25th of June. While mysterious assassins killed government officials, and narrowly failed to get rid of Mrs. Gandhi's personally-chosen Chief Justice, A. N. Ray, the magicians' ghetto concentrated on another mystery: the ballooning basket of Parvati-the-witch. While the Janata Morcha grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until it embraced Maoist Communists (such as our very own contortionists, including the rubber-limbed triplets with whom Parvati had lived before our marriage — since the nuptials, we had moved into a hut of our own, which the ghetto had built for us as a wedding present on the site of Resham's hovel) and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists and conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks ... while the People's Front expanded in this grotesque manner, I, Saleem, wondered incessantly about what might be growing behind the expanding frontage of my wife. |
| 952 |
While public discontent with the Indira Congress threatened to crush the government like a fly, the brand-new Laylah Sinai, whose eyes had grown wider than ever, sat as still as a stone while the weight of the baby increased until it threatened to crush her bones to powder; and Picture Singh, in an innocent echo of an ancient remark, said, "Hey, captain! It's going to be big big: a real ten-chip whopper for sure!" And then it was the twelfth of June. History books newspapers radio-programs tell us that at two p. m. on June 12th, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was found guilty, by Judge Jag Mohan Lai Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, of two counts of campaign malpractice during the election campaign of 1971; what has never previously been revealed is that it was at precisely two p. m. that Parvati-the-witch (now Laylah Sinai) became sure she had entered labor. The labor of Parvati-Laylah lasted for thirteen days. On the first day, while the Prime Minister was refusing to resign, although her convictions carried with them a mandatory penalty barring her from public office for six years, the cervix of Parvati-the-witch, despite contractions as painful as mule-kicks, obstinately refused to dilate; Saleem Sinai and Picture Singh, barred from the hut of her torment by the contortionist triplets who had taken on the duties of midwives, were obliged to listen to her useless shrieks until a steady stream of fire-eaters card-sharpers coal-walkers came up and slapped them on the back and made dirty jokes; and it was only in my ears that the ticking could be heard ... |
| 953 |
Gandhi that she need not resign until her appeal, but must neither vote in the Lok Sabha nor draw a salary, and while the Prime Minister in her exultation at this partial victory began to abuse her opponents in language of which a Koli fishwife would have been proud, my Parvati's labor entered a phase in which despite her utter exhaustion she found the energy to issue a string of foul-smelling oaths from her color-drained lips, so that the cesspit stink of her obscenities filled our nostrils and made us retch, and the three contortionists fled from the hut crying that she had become so stretched, so colorless that you could almost see through her, and she would surely die if the baby did not come now, and in my ears ticktock the pounding ticktock until I was sure, yes, soon soon soon, and when the triplets returned to her bedside in the evening of the thirteenth day they screamed Yes yes she has begun to push, come on Parvati, push push push, and while Parvati pushed in the ghetto, J. 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 ... |
| 954 |
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. |
| 955 |
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! 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. |
| 956 |
— No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts, as remembered. To the best of one's ability. The way it was: Begin. — No choice? — None; when was there ever? There are imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are things-done-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever a choice? When options? When a decision freely-made, to be this or that or the other? No choice; begin. — Yes. Listen: Endless night, days weeks months without the sun, or rather (because it's important to be precise) beneath a sun as cold as a stream-rinsed plate, a sun washing us in lunatic midnight light; I'm talking about the winter of 19756. In the winter, darkness; and also tuberculosis. Once, in a blue room overlooking the sea, beneath the pointing finger of a fisherman, I fought typhoid and was rescued by snake-poison; now, trapped in the dynastic webs of recurrence by my recognition of his sonship, our Aadam Sinai was also obliged to spend his early months battling the invisible snakes of a disease. The serpents of tuberculosis wound themselves around his neck and made him gasp for air ... but he was a child of ears and silence, and when he spluttered, there were no sounds; when he wheezed, no raspings issued from his throat. In short, my son fell ill, and although his mother, Parvati or Laylah, went in search of the herbs of her magical gift — although infusions of herbs in well-boiled water were constantly administered, the wraith-like worms of tuberculosis refused to be driven away. |
| 957 |
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. |
| 958 |
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. |
| 959 |
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. "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. |
| 960 |
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 ... |
| 961 |
Parvati or Laylah, disobeying orders, is at my side now, saying, "My God, what are they — ," and at this moment a new and more formidable assault is unleashed upon the slum: troops are sent in against magicians, women and children. Once, conjurers card-tricksters puppeteers and mesmerists marched triumphantly beside a conquering army; but all that is forgotten now, and Russian guns are trained on the inhabitants of the ghetto. What chance do Communist wizards have against socialist rifles? They, we, are running now, every which way, Parvati and I are separated as the soldiers charge, I lose sight of Picture Singh, there are rifle-butts beating pounding, I see one of the contortionist triplets fall beneath the fury of the guns, people are being pulled by the hair towards the waiting yawning vans; and I, too, am running, too late, looking over my shoulder, stumbling on Dalda-cans empty crates and the abandoned sacks of the terrified illusionists, and over my shoulder through the murky night of the Emergency I see that all of this has been a smoke-screen, a side-issue, because hurtling through the confusion of the riot comes a mythical figure, an incarnation of destiny and destruction: Major Shiva has joined the fray, and he is looking only for me. Behind me, as I run, come the pumping knees of my doom ... ... The picture of a hovel comes into my mind: my son! And not only my son: a silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis lazuli! Somewhere in the confusion of the ghetto a child has been left alone ... |
| 962 |
Somewhere a talisman, guarded for so long, has been abandoned. The Friday Mosque watches impassively as I swerve duck run between the tilting shacks, my feet leading me towards flap-eared son and spittoon ... but what chance did I have against those knees? The knees of the war hero are coming closer closer as I flee, the joints of my nemesis thundering towards me, and he leaps, the legs of the war hero fly through the air, closing like jaws around my neck, knees squeezing the breath out of my throat, I am falling twisting but the knees hold tight, and now a voice — the voice of treachery betrayal hate! — is saying, as knees rest on my chest and pin me down in the thick dust of the slum: "So, little rich boy: we meet again, Salaam." I spluttered; Shiva smiled. O shiny buttons on a traitor's uniform! Winking blinking like silver ... why did he do it? Why did he, who had once led anarchistic apaches through the slums of Bombay, become the warlord of tyranny? Why did midnight's child betray the children of midnight, and take me to my fate? For love of violence, and the legitimizing glitter of buttons on uniforms? For the sake of his ancient antipathy towards me? Or — I find this most plausible — in exchange for immunity from the penalties imposed on the rest of us ... yes, that must be it; O birthright-denying war hero! O mess-of-pottage-corrupted rival ... But no, I must stop all this, and tell the story as simply as possible: while troops chased arrested dragged magicians from their ghetto, Major Shiva concentrated on me. |
| 963 |
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? |
| 964 |
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. (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. |
| 965 |
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. |
| 966 |
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. 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. |
| 967 |
One of us can eat metal; his head is jammed in a brace, unlocked only at mealtimes ... 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! |
| 968 |
— 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! |
| 969 |
Children, children, I'm sorry. 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. |
| 970 |
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. Let Widow's Hand do Widow's work but after, after ... |
| 971 |
Drainage below: it was not a reversible operation Who were we? Broken promises; made to be broken. And now I must tell you about the smell. Yes, you must have all of it: however overblown, however Bombay-talkie-melodramatic, you must let it sink in, you must see! What Saleem smelled in the evening of January 18th, 1977: something frying in an iron skillet, soft unspeakable somethings spiced with turmeric coriander cumin and fenugreek ... the pungent inescapable fumes of what-had-been-excised, cooking over a low, slow fire. When four-hundred-and-twenty suffered ectomies, an avenging Goddess ensured that certain ectomized parts were curried with onions and green chillies, and fed to the pie-dogs of Benares. (There were four hundred and twenty-one ectomies performed: because one of us, whom we called Narada or Markandaya, had the ability of changing sex; he, or she, had to be operated on twice.) No, I can't prove it, not any of it. Evidence went up in smoke: some was fed to pie-dogs, and later, on March 20th, files were burned by a mother with particolored hair and her beloved son. But Padma knows what I can no longer do; Padma, who once, in her anger, cried out: "But what use are you, my God, as a lover?" That part, at least, can be verified: in the hovel of Picture Singh, I cursed myself with the lie of impotence; I cannot say I was not warned, because he told me: "Anything could happen, captain." It did. Sometimes I feel a thousand years old: or (because I cannot, even now, abandon form), to be exact, a thousand and one. |
| 972 |
The steel magnate's wife drew from her handbag the enormous German pistol owned by her husband, and shot the war hero through the heart. Death, as they say, was instantaneous. The Major died without knowing that once, in a saffron-and-green nursing home amid the mythological chaos of an unforgettable midnight, a tiny distraught women had changed baby-tags and denied him his birthright, which was that hillock-top world cocooned in money and starched white clothes and things things things — a world he would dearly have loved to possess. And Saleem? No longer connected to history, drained above-and-below, I made my way back to the capital, conscious that an age, which had begun on that long-ago midnight, had come to a sort of end. How I traveled: I waited beyond the platform at Benares or Varanasi station with nothing but a platform-ticket in my hand, and leaped on to the step of a first-class compartment as the mail-train pulled out, heading west. And now, at least, I knew how it felt to clutch on for dear life, while particles of soot dust ash gritted in your eyes, and you were obliged to bang on the door and yell, "OhE, maharaj! Open up! Let me in, great sir, maharaj!" While inside, a voice uttered familiar words: "On no account is anyone to open. Just fare-dodgers, that's all." In Delhi: Saleem asks questions. Have you seen where? Do you know if the magicians? Are you acquainted with Picture Singh? A postman with the memory of snake-charmers fading in his eyes points north. And, later, a black-tongued paanwallah sends me back the way I came. |
| 973 |
Love does not conquer all, except in the Bombay talkies; rip tear crunch will not be defeated by a mere ceremony; and optimism is a disease. "On your birthday, how about?" she is suggesting. "At thirty-one, a man is a man, and is supposed to have a wife." How am I to tell her? How can I say, there are other plans for that day, I am have always been in the grip of a form-crazy destiny which enjoys wreaking its havoc on numinous days ... in short, how am I to tell her about death? I cannot; instead, meekly and with every appearance of gratitude, I accept her proposal. I am, this evening, a man newly affianced; let no one think harshly of me for permitting myself — and my betrothed lotus — this last, vain, inconsequential pleasure. Padma, by proposing a marriage, revealed her willingness to dismiss everything I've told her about my past as just so much "fancy talk"; and when I returned to find Picture Singh beaming in the shadow of a railway bridge, it rapidly became clear that the magicians, too, were losing their memories. Somewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had mislaid their powers of retention, so that now they had become incapable of judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that happened. Even the Emergency was rapidly being consigned to the oblivion of the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with the monomania of snails. Nor did they notice that they had changed; they had forgotten that they had ever been otherwise. |
| 974 |
It was as though he had decided to permit me to reach my private, and now-very-near, finishing line. Mute autocracy of a less-than-two-year-old infant: Aadam did not tell us when he was hungry or sleepy or anxious to perform his natural functions. He expected us to know. The perpetual attention he required may be one of the reasons why I managed, in spite of all indications to the contrary, to stay alive ... incapable of anything else in those days after my release from captivity, I concentrated on watching my son. "I tell you, captain, it's lucky you came back," Picture Singh joked, "otherwise this one would have turned us all into ayahs." I understood once again that Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of their wills. Looking into the eyes of the child who was simultaneously not-my-son and also more my heir than any child of my flesh could have been, I found in his empty, limpid pupils a second mirror of humility, which showed me that, from now on, mine would be as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster: the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales ... I wondered if all over the country the bastard sons of Shiva were exerting similar tyrannies upon hapless adults, and envisaged for the second time that tribe of fearsomely potent kiddies, growing waiting listening, rehearsing the moment when the world would become their plaything. |
| 975 |
(How these children may, in the future, be identified: their bimbis stick out instead of in.) But it's time to get things moving: a taunt, a last railway-train heading south south south, a final battle ... on the day following the weaning of Aadam, Saleem accompanied Picture Singh to Connaught Place, to assist him in his snake-charming. Durga the dhoban agreed to take my son with her to the dhobighat: Aadam spent the day observing how power was thrashed out of the clothes of the well-to-do and absorbed by the succubus-woman. On that fateful day, when the warm weather was returning to the city like a swarm of bees, I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed silver spittoon. Picture Singh had provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the magicians' colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon. Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to practice the artforms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan's underworld into a second Taj Majal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in washing-chests, ghost-visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. |
| 976 |
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. |
| 977 |
I could not help but ask, "Why ..."To which she, simply: "I am blind; and besides, nobody who comes here wants to be seen. Here you are in a world without faces or names; here people have no memories, families or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now." And the darkness engulfed us; she guided us through that nightmare pit in which light was kept in shackles and bar-fetters, that place outside time, that negation of history ... "Sit here," she said, "The other snake-man will come soon. When it is time, one light will shine on you; then begin your contest." We sat there for — what? minutes, hours, weeks? — and there were the glowing eyes of blind women leading invisible guests to their seats; and gradually, in the dark, I became aware of being surrounded by soft, amorous susurrations, like the couplings of velvet mice; I heard the chink of glasses held by twined arms, and gentle brushings of lips; with one good ear and one bad ear, I heard the sounds of illicit sexuality filling the midnight air ... but no, I did not want to know what was happening; although my nose was able to smell, in the susurrating silence of the Club, all manner of new stories and beginnings, of exotic and forbidden loves, and little invisible contretemps and who-was-going-too-far, in fact all sorts of juicy tit-bits, I chose to ignore them all, because this was a new world in which I had no place. My son, Aadam, however, sat beside me with ears burning with fascination; his eyes shone in the darkness as he listened, and memorized, and learned ... |
| 978 |
And then there was light. A single shaft of light spilled into a pool on the floor of the Midnite-Confidential Club. From the shadows beyond the fringe of the illuminated area, Aadam and I saw Picture Singh sitting stiffly, cross-legged, next to a handsome Brylcreemed youth; each of them was surrounded by musical instruments and the closed baskets of their art. A loudspeaker announced the beginning of that legendary contest for the title of Most Charming Man In The World; but who was listening? Did anyone even pay attention, or were they too busy with lips tongues hands? This was the name of Pictureji's opponent: the Maharaja of Cooch Naheen. (I don't know: it's easy to assume a title. But perhaps, perhaps he really was the grandson of that old Rani who had once, long ago, been a friend of Doctor Aziz; perhaps the heir to the supporter-of-the-Hummingbird was pitted, ironically, against the man who might have been the second Mian Abdullah! It's always possible; many maharajas have been poor since the Widow revoked their civil-list salaries.) How long, in that sunless cavern, did they struggle? Months, years, centuries? I cannot say: I watched, mesmerized, as they strove to outdo one another, charming every kind of snake imaginable, asking for rare varieties to be sent from the Bombay snake-farm (where once Doctor Schaapsteker ...); and the Maharaja matched Picture Singh snake for snake, succeeding even in charming constrictors, which only Pictureji had previously managed to do. |
| 979 |
In that infernal Club whose darkness was another aspect of its proprietor's obsession with the color black (under whose influence he tanned his skin darker darker every day at the Sun 'n' Sand), the two virtuosi goaded snakes into impossible feats, making them tie themselves in knots, or bows, or persuading them to drink water from wine-glasses, and to jump through fiery hoops ... defying fatigue, hunger and age, Picture Singh was putting on the show of his life (but was anyone looking? Anyone at all?) — and at last it became clear that the younger man was tiring first; his snakes ceased to dance in time to his flute; and finally, through a piece of sleight-of-hand so fast that I did not see what happened, Picture Singh managed to knot a king cobra around the Maharaja's neck. What Picture said: "Give me best, captain, or I'll tell it to bite." That was the end of the contest. The humiliated princeling left the Club and was later reported to have shot himself in a taxi. And on the floor of his last great battle, Picture Singh collapsed like a falling banyan tree ... blind attendants (to one of whom I entrusted Aadam) helped me carry him from the field. But the Midnite-Confidential had one trick left up its sleeve. Once a night — just to add a little spice — a roving spotlight searched out one of the illicit couples, and revealed them to the hidden eyes of their fellows: a touch of luminary Russian roulette which, no doubt, made life more thrilling for the city's young cosmopolitans ... |
| 980 |
And who was the chosen victim that night? Who, horn-templed stain-faced cucumber-nosed, was drowned in scandalous light? Who, made as blind as female attendants by the voyeurism of lightbulbs, almost dropped the legs of his unconscious friend? Saleem returned to the city of his birth to stand illuminated in a cellar while Bombayites tittered at him from the dark. Quickly now, because we have come to the end of incidents, I record that, in a back room in which light was permitted, Picture Singh recovered from his fainting fit; and while Aadam slept soundly, one of the blind waitresses brought us a congratulatory, reviving meal. On the thali of victory: samosas, pakoras, rice, dal, puris; and green chutney. Yes, a little aluminum bowl of chutney, green, my God, green as grasshoppers ... and before long a puri was in my hand; and chutney was on the puri; and then I had tasted it, and almost imitated the fainting act of Picture Singh, because it had carried me back to a day when I emerged nine-fingered from a hospital and went into exile at the home of Hanif Aziz, and was given the best chutney in the world ... the taste of the chutney was more than just an echo of that long-ago taste — it was the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away ... in a frenzy of excitement, I grabbed the blind waitress by the arm; scarcely able to contain myself, I blurted out: "The chutney! Who made it?" I must have shouted, because Picture, "Quiet, captain, you'll wake the boy ... |
| 981 |
Braganza, was of course my erstwhile ayah, the criminal of midnight, Miss Mary Pereira, the only mother I had left in the world. Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offense at my voyeurism, calls: "Watch this!" and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. "Fifteen inches!" he calls, "How long can you make yours?" Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I'm disconnected, unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: "Seven on a good day," and forget him. Tomorrow. Or the day after. The cracks will be waiting for August 15th. There is still a little time: I'll finish tomorrow. Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism ... 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. |
| 982 |
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. |
| 983 |
I, however, have pickled chapters. Tonight, by screwing the lid firmly on to a jar bearing the legend Special Formula No. 30: "Abracadabra," I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfection. These days, I manage the factory for Mary. Alice — "Mrs. Fernandes" — controls the finances; my responsibility is for the creative aspects of our work. (Of course I have forgiven Mary her crime; I need mothers as well as fathers, and a mother is beyond blame.) Amid the wholly-female workforce of Braganza Pickles, beneath the saffron-and-green winking of neon Mumbadevi, I choose mangoes tomatoes limes from the women who come at dawn with baskets on their heads. Mary, with her ancient hatred of "the mens," admits no males except myself into her new, comfortable universe ... myself, and of course my son. Alice, I suspect, still has her little liaisons; and Padma fell for me from the first, seeing in me an outlet for her vast reservoir of pent-up solicitude; I cannot answer for the rest of them, but the formidable competence of the Narlikar females is reflected, on this factory floor, in the strong-armed dedication of the vat-stirrers. 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. |
| 984 |
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? |
| 985 |
That they are, despite everything, acts of love. One empty jar ... how to end? Happily, with Mary in her teak rocking-chair and a son who has begun to speak? Amid recipes, and thirty jars with chapter-headings for names? In melancholy, drowning in memories of Jamila and Parvati and even of Evie Burns? Or with the magic children ... but then, should I be glad that some escaped, or end in the tragedy of the disintegrating effects of drainage? (Because in drainage lie the origins of the cracks: my hapless, pulverized body, drained above and below, began to crack because it was dried out. Parched, it yielded at last to the effects of a life-time's battering. And now there is rip tear crunch, and a stench issuing through the fissures, which must be the smell of death. Control: I must retain control as long as possible.) Or with questions: now that I can, I swear, see the cracks on the backs of my hands, cracks along my hairline and between my toes, why do I not bleed? Am I already so emptied desiccated pickled? Am I already the mummy of myself? Or dreams: because last night the ghost of Reverend Mother appeared to me, staring down through the hole in a perforated cloud, waiting for my death so that she could weep a monsoon for forty days ... and I, floating outside my body, looked down on the foreshortened image of my self, and saw a gray-haired dwarf who once, in a mirror, looked relieved. No, that won't do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. |
| 986 |
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. |
| 987 |
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. 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. |
| 988 |
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. |
| 989 |
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. Julia had had to go to hospital, could have died, and Frances had to acknowledge at last how much she relied on her. Suppose there was no Julia, what would she do, what would they all do? Meanwhile, everyone referred to her as the old woman, she too until recently. Not Andrew, though. And she had noticed that Colin had begun to call her Julia. The three rooms above hers, over where she stood now, below Julia' s, were inhabited by Andrew the elder son, and Colin the younger, her and Johnny Lennox's sons. She had three rooms, bedroom and study and another, always needed for someone staying the night, and she had heard Rose Trimble say, 'What does she need three rooms for, she's just selfish.' No one said, Why does Julia need four rooms? |
| 990 |
As she put it. Now the table was always at full stretch with sometimes sixteen or twenty chairs and stools around it. The basement flat was large and often Frances did not know who was camping out there. Sleeping bags and duvets littered the floor like detritus after a storm. She felt like a spy going down there. Apart from insisting they kept it clean and tidy they were taken by occasional fits of 'tidying up' which it was hard to see made much difference she did not interfere. Julia had no such inhibitions, and would descend the little stairs and stand surveying the scene of sleepers, sometimes still in their beds at midday or later, the dirty cups on the floors, the piles of records, the radios, clothes lying about in tangles, and then turn herself around slowly, a severe figure in spite of the little veils and gloves that might have a rose pinned at a wrist, and, having seen from the rigidity of a back, or a nervously raised head that her presence had been noted, she would go slowly up the stairs, leaving behind her on the stale air the odours of flowers and expensive face powder. Frances leaned out of the window to see if light was spilling down the steps from the kitchen: yes, they were all there then, and waiting for supper. Who, tonight? She would soon find out. At that moment Johnny's little Beetle appeared from around the corner, parked itself neatly, and out stepped Johnny. And, at once, three days of foolish dreams dissolved, while she thought, I've been mad, I've been crazy. |
| 991 |
What made me imagine anything was going to change? If there was in fact a film, then there wouldn't be any money for her and the boys, as usual... but he had said the contract was signed? In the time it took her to walk slowly, stopping at the desk to look at the two fateful letters, reaching the door, still taking her time, beginning to descend the stairs, it was as if the last three days had not happened. She was not going to be in the play, not enjoy the dangerous intimacy of the theatre with Tony Wilde, and she was pretty sure that tomorrow she would write to The Defender and accept their job. Slowly, collecting herself, down the stairs, and then, smiling, she stood in the open door of the kitchen. Against the window, standing with his arms spread to take his weight on the sill, stood Johnny, all bravado and though he was not aware of that -apology. Around the table sat an assortment of youngsters, and Andrew and Colin were both there. All were looking towards Johnny, who had been holding forth about something, and all admiringly, except for his sons. They smiled, like the others, but the smiles were anxious. They, like herself, knew that the money promised for today had vanished into the land of dreams. (Why on earth had she told them? Surely she knew better!) It had all happened before. And they knew, like her, that he had come here now, when the kitchen would be full of young people, so he could not be greeted by rage, tears, reproaches but that was the past, long ago. |
| 992 |
Not much, but her own. And the days and nights dragged by, and she was as far from the glamorous life she had been enjoying as ifshe had never left her parents' home in Kent. The last two years of the war were hard, poor, frightening. The food was bad. Bombs that seemed to have been designed to wreck people's nerves affected hers. Clothes were hard to find, and ugly. She had no friends, only met other mothers of small children. She was afraid above all that when Johnny came home he would be disappointed in her, an overweight tired young mother, nothing like the smart girl in uniform he had been madly in love with. And that is what happened. Johnny had done well in the war, and had been noticed. No one could say he wasn't clever and quick, and his politics were unremarkable for that time. He was offered good jobs in the London reshaping itself after the war. He refused them. He wasn't going to be bought by the capitalist system: not by an iota had he changed his mind, his faith. Comrade Johnny Lennox, back in civvies, was preoccupied only by The Revolution. Colin was born in 1945. Two small children, in a wretched flat in Notting Hill, then a run-down and poor part of London. Johnny was not often at home. He was working for the Party. By now it is necessary to explain that by the Party was meant the Communist Party, and what was meant to be heard was the party. When two strangers met it might go like this: 'Are you in the Party too?' 'Yes, of course.'I thought you must be.' Meaning: You are a good person, I like you, and so you must, like me, be in the Party. |
| 993 |
Now here she was, and it was a final capitulation: what to other people was 'such a sensible arrangement' was defeat. She was no longer herself, she was an appendage of the Lennox family. As far as Johnny was concerned, he had done as much as could be expected of him. When his mother told him he should support his sons, get a job that paid him a salary, he shouted at her that she was a typical member of an exploiting class, thinking only of money, while he was working for the future of the whole world. They quarrelled, frequently and noisily. Listening, Colin would go white, silent, and leave the house for hours or for days. Andrew preserved his airy, amused smile, his poise. He was often at home these days, and even brought friends. Meanwhile Johnny and Frances had divorced because he had married properly, and formally, with a wedding that the comrades attended, and Julia too. Her name was Phyllida, and she was not a comrade, but he said she was good material and he would make a communist of her. This little history was the reason why Frances was keeping her back to the others, stirring a stew that didn't really need a stir. Delayed reaction: her knees trembled, her mouth seemed full of acid, for now her body was taking in the bad news, rather later than her mind. She was angry, she knew, and had the right to be, but she was angrier with herself than with Johnny. If she had allowed herself to spend three days inside a lunatic dream, fair enough but how could she have involved the boys? |
| 994 |
Just go away, she was mentally urging him. Just leave. She had cooked a large, filling, winter stew of beef and chestnuts, from a recipe of Elizabeth David, whose French Country Cooking was lying open somewhere in the kitchen. (Years later she would say, Good Lord, I was part of a culinary revolution and didn't know it.) She was convinced that these youngsters did not eat 'properly' unless it was at this table. Andrew was dispensing mashed potatoes flavoured with celeriac. Sophie ladled out stew. Creamed spinach and buttered carrots were being allotted by Colin. Johnny stood watching, silenced for the moment because no one was looking at him. Why didn't he leave? Around the table this evening were what she thought of as the regulars: or at least some of them. On her left was Andrew, who had served himself generously, but now sat looking down at the food as if he didn't recognise it. Next to him was Geoffrey Bone, Colin's schoolfriend, who had spent all his holidays with them since she could remember. He did not get on with his parents, Colin said. (But who did, after all?) Beside him Colin had already turned his round flushed face towards his father, all accusing anguish, while his knife and fork rested in his hands. Next to Colin, was Rose Trimble, who had been Andrew's girlfriend, if briefly: an obligatory flutter with Marxism had taken him to a weekend seminar entitled, 'Africa Bursts Its Chains!', and there Rose had been. Their affair (had it been that? she was sixteen) had ended, but Rose still came here, seemed in fact to have moved in. |
| 995 |
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? |
| 996 |
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. Julia never lost her faith in her love and in Philip. He was wounded, twice, and in devious ways she heard about it and wept for him. It did not matter, cried Julia's heart, how badly he was wounded, she would love him for ever. He was demobbed in 1919. She was waiting for him, knowing he was coming to claim her, when into the room where five years before they had flirted came a man she felt she ought to know. An empty sleeve was pinned up on his chest, and his face was taut and lined. She was now nearly twenty. He saw a tall young woman she had grown some inches with fair hair piled on top of her head, held with a big jet arrow, and wearing heavy black for two dead brothers. A third brother, a boy he was not yet twenty had been wounded and sat, still in his uniform, a stiff leg propped before him on a stool. The two so recent enemies, stared at each other. Then Philip, not smiling, went forward with an outstretched hand. The youth made an involuntary movement of turning away, with a grimace, but he recovered himself and civilisation was reinstated as he smiled, and the two men shook hands. This scene, which after all has repeated itself in various forms since then, did not then have as much weight on it as it would now. |
| 997 |
Irony, which celebrates that element which we persist in excluding from our vision of things, would have been too much for them to bear: we have become coarser-fibred. And now these two lovers who would not have recognised each other passing in a street, had to decide whether their dreams of each other for all those terrible years were strong enough to carry them through into marriage. Nothing was left of the enchanting prim little girl, nor of the sentimental man who had, until it crumbled away, carried a dead red rose next to his heart. The great blue eyes were sad, and he tended to lapse into silences, just like her younger brother, when remembering things that could be understood only by other soldiers. These two married quietly: hardly the time for a big German-English wedding. In London war fever was abating, though people still talked about the Boche and the Hun. People were polite to Julia. For the first time she wondered if choosing Philip had not been a mistake, yet she believed they loved each other, and both were pretending they were serious people by nature and not saddened beyond curing. And yet the war did recede and the worst of the war hatreds passed. Julia, who had suffered in Germany for her English love, now tried to become English, in an act of will. She had spoken English well enough, but took lessons again, and soon spoke as no English person ever did, an exquisite perfect English, every word separate. She knew her manners were formal, and tried to become more casual. |
| 998 |
And Julia supposed she must be getting old and boring, because she did not enjoy parties as much as she had. But there were dinner parties and, often, important people, and she was pleased she did it all so well, and that Philip was proud of her. She went home to Germany for visits. Her parents, who were getting old, were so glad to see their daughter, and she liked her brother, now her only brother. But going home was troubling, even frightening. Poverty and unemployment, and the communists and then the Nazis were everywhere, and gangs roamed the streets. Then there was Hitler. The von Arnes despised in equal measure the communists and Hitler, and believed that both unpleasant phenomena would simply go away. This was not their Germany, they said. It was certainly not what Julia remembered as her Germany, that is, ofcourse, ifshe forgot the vicious rumourmongering during the war. A spy, they had said she was. Not serious people, of course, not educated people... well, yes, there were one or two. She decided she did not much like visiting Germany these days, and it was easier not to, when her parents died. The English were sensible people, after all, she had to agree to that. One couldn't imagine allowing battles between communists and fascists in the streets well, there were some scuffles, but one mustn't exaggerate, there was nothing like Hitler. A letter arrived from Eton saying that Jolyon had disappeared, leaving behind a note saying that he was off to the Spanish Civil War, signed, Comrade Johnny Lennox. |
| 999 |
Philip used every influence to find out where their son was. The International Brigade? Madrid? Catalonia? No one seemed to know. Julia tended to sympathise with her son, for she had been shocked at the treatment of the elected government in Spain, by Britain and the French. Her husband, who was a diplomat after all, defended his government and his country but alone with her said he was ashamed. He did not admire the policies he was defending and conducting. Months passed. Then a telegram arrived from their son, asking for money: address, a house in the East End of London. Julia at once saw this meant he was wanting them to visit him, otherwise he would have designated a bank where he could pick up the money. Together she and Philip went to a house in a poor street, and found Jolyon being nursed by a decent sort of woman of the kind Julia at once thought of as a possible servant. He was in an upstairs room, ill with hepatitis, caught, presumably, in Spain. Then talking with this woman, who called herselfComrade Mary, it slowly became evident she knew nothing of Spain, and then that Jolyon had not been in Spain, but had been here, in this house, ill. 'Took me a bit of time to see he was having a bit of a breakdown,' said Comrade Mary. These were poor people. Philip wrote out a fair-sized cheque, and was told, politely enough, that they did not have a bank account, with the only just sarcastic implication that bank accounts were for the well off. Since they did not have that kind of money on them, Philip said that money would be delivered, next day, and it was. |
| 1000 |
She remembered the smell of soap, and baby powder. She remembered sniffing at Jolyon's little head with such pleasure... Frances was thinking, It's unbelievable. She is unbelievable, and derision was in danger of making her burst out in raucous laughter. Julia stood there in the middle of the room, in her neat wool crepe grey suit, that had not a wrinkle, not a bulge. It was buttoned up to her throat where a silk scarf provided a hint of mauve. Her hands were in dove-grey kid gloves, and even though thoroughly protected from the unwashed surfaces around her, were making anxious little movements of rejection, and fussy disapproval. Her shoes were like shiny blackbirds, with brass buckles that seemed to Frances to be locks, as if making sure those feet couldn't fly off, or even to begin to try out a few prim dance steps. Her grey hat was fenced with a little net veil that did not conceal her horrified eyes, and it, too, was caught with a metal buckle. She was a woman in a cage, and to Frances, under such pressures of loneliness, poverty, anxiety, her appearance in that room, which she loathed, and wished only to escape from, was like a deliberate taunting, an insult. 'What am I to tell Jolyon?' 'Who? oh, yes. But...'And now Frances energetically sat herself up, one hand cupping the baby's head, the other holding the cloth over her exposed breast. 'Don't tell me Johnny asked you to come here?' 'Well, yes, he did.' Now the two women shared a moment: it was incredulity, and their eyes actually did engage, in a query. |
| 1001 |
His father had not left him anything, it had all gone to Julia. He had planned to live in this house and to fill it with comrades needing a home. Everyone was poor, living from hand to mouth, after the war, and he was subsisting on the proceeds of work for the Party, some of it illegal. He had been furious with Frances for refusing to accept an allowance from Julia. When Frances had said, 'But, Johnny, I don't understand, how can you want to take money from the class enemy?' Johnny had hit her, for the only time in their lives. She hit him back, harder. She had not meant her question as a taunt or a criticism, she genuinely wanted to have it explained to her. Julia was well off, but not rich. Paying for the two lots of school fees, Andrew's and Colin's, was within her scope, but if Frances had not agreed to move in, she had planned to let part of the house. Now she was economising in ways that would have made Frances laugh, if she had known. Julia did not buy new clothes. She dismissed the housekeeper who had been living in the basement, depended on a woman who came in twice a week, and did a good bit of her own housework. (This woman, Mrs Philby, had to be coaxed and flattered and given presents to go on working when Frances and her ill-bred ways arrived.) She no longer bought food at Fortnum's, but she discovered now, when Philip was dead, that her own tastes were frugal, and that the standards required of a wife married to a Foreign Office official had never really been hers. |
| 1002 |
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... Pensions, benefits, the behaviour of officials, medical problems... but a doctor answered those. These more common letters were dealt with by this secretary, signing Aunt Vera, and it was a flourishing new department of The Defender. |
| 1003 |
Frances's job was to scan these letters, and find a theme or concern that predominated, and then use it for a serious article, a long one, which would have a prominent place in the paper. Frances could write her articles and do her research at home. She would be of The Defender but not in it, and for this she was grateful. When she got out of the Underground, coming home from the newspaper, she bought food, and walked down the hill, laden. Julia was standing at her high window, looking down, when she saw Frances approaching. At least this smart coat was an improvement, not the usual duffel-coat: perhaps one could look forward to her wearing something other than the eternal jeans and jerseys? She was walking heavily, making Julia think of a donkey with panniers. Near the house she stopped, and Julia could see that Frances's hair had been done, the blondeish hair falling straight as straw on either side of a parting, as was the mode. From some of the houses she had passed, the music pounded and beat, as loud as an angry heart, but Julia had said she would not tolerate loud music, she could not bear it, so while music was played, it was soft. From Andrew's room usually came the muted tones of Palestrina or Vivaldi, from Colin's traditional jazz, from the sitting-room where the television was, broken music and voices, from the basement, the throb, throb, throb, that 'the kids' needed. The whole big house was lit up, not a dark window, and it seemed to shed light from walls as well as windows: it exuded light and music. |
| 1004 |
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. |
| 1005 |
Once seen it was obvious, but the thought then had to be faced: how could people unable to organise their own lives, who lived in permanent disarray, build anything worthwhile? This seditious thought and it was years in advance of its time, at least in any circles she had been introduced to lived side by side with an emotion she hardly knew was there. She thought Johnny was... no need to spell that out... she had become very clear about what she thought, but at the same time she relied on an aura of hopeful optimism that surrounded him, the comrades, everything they did. She did believe but hardly knew she did that the world was going to get better and better, that they were all on an escalator of Progress, and that present ills would slowly dissolve away, and everyone in the world would find themselves in a happy healthy time. And when she stood in the kitchen, producing dishes of food for 'the kids', seeing all those young faces, listening to their irreverent confident voices, she felt that she was guaranteeing this future for them, in a silent promise. Where had this promise originated? From Johnny, she had absorbed it from Comrade Johnny, and while her mind was set in criticising him, more and more every day, she relied emotionally without knowing it on Johnny and his brave sweet new worlds. In a few hours she would sit down and write her article and say what? If she had not taken a stand against stealing, in her own home, and even when she had come most strongly to disapprove, then what right had she to tell other people what to do? |
| 1006 |
The waves of refugees who washed into London, escaping from Hitler, and then from Stalin, were bone-poor, often threadbare, and lived as they could on a translation here, a book review, language lessons. They worked as hospital porters, on building sites, did housework. There were a few cafes and restaurants as poor as they were, catering for their nostalgic need to sit and drink coffee and talk politics and literature. They were from universities all over Europe, and were intellectuals, a word guaranteed to incite waves of suspicion in the breasts of the xenophobic philistine British, who did not necessarily think it a commendation when they admitted that these newcomers were so much better educated than they were. One cafe in particular served goulash and dumplings and heavy soups and other filling items to these storm-tossed immigrants who would soon would be adding value and lustre in so many ways to native culture. By the late Fifties, early Sixties, they were editors, writers, journalists, artists, a Nobel Prize winner, and a stranger walking into the Cosmo would judge that this must be the trendiest place in north London, for everyone was in the current uniform of non-conformity, polo necks and expensive jeans, Mao jackets and leather jackets, shaggy hair or the ever-popular Roman Emperor haircut. There were women there, a few, in mini-skirts, mostly girlfriends, absorbing attractive foreign ways as they drank the best coffee in London and ate cream cakes inspired by Vienna. |
| 1007 |
They argued about Freud, and Jung, about Trotsky, Bukarin, about Arthur Koestler and the Spanish Civil War. And Frances, whose ears shut tight when Johnny began on one ofhis harangues, found it all rather restful, though she did not actively listen. It is true that a noisy cafe full of cigarette smoke (then an indispensable accompaniment to intellectual activity) is more private than a home where individuals drop in for a chat. Andrew liked it there. So did Colin: they said it had good energy, not to mention positive vibes. Johnny used it a lot, but then he was in Cuba, so she was safe. Frances was not the only one from The Defender. A man was there who wrote political articles, to whom she had been introduced by Julie Hackett thus, 'This is our chief politico, Rupert Boland. He's an egghead but he's not a bad sort of person, even if he is a man.' He was not a person you would notice at once, normally, but here he did stand out, because he wore a rather dull brown suit and a tie. He had a pleasant face. He was writing, or making notes, with a biro, just as she was. They smiled and nodded, and at that moment she saw a tall man in a Mao jacket stand up to leave. Good Lord, it was Johnny. He shrugged on a long Afghan coat, dyed blue, the last word in Carnaby Street, and went out. And there a few tables away, in a corner, obviously trying not to be seen (probably by Johnny) was Julia. She was in conversation with... he was certainly an intimate friend. Her boyfriend? Frances had recently been acknowledging that Julia was not much over sixty. |
| 1008 |
Frances herself, obedient girl, had gone to school, was punctual, sat exams, and would have gone to university if the war and Johnny had not intervened. She could not understand what the problem was. 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. |
| 1009 |
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. |
| 1010 |
Johnny, invited to sit, said he would just have a glass of wine he had brought a bottle. Where Andrew and Sylvia had sat, minutes before, now sat Comrades Mo and Johnny, and the two men put on their plates all that was left of the pie, and the vegetables. Frances was angry to the point where one is dispirited with it: what was the point, ever, of being angry with Johnny? It was obvious he had not eaten for days, he was cramming in bread, taking great mouthfuls of wine, refilling his glass and Comrade Mo's, in between forkfuls from his plate. The youngsters were seeing appetites even greater than their own. 'I'll serve the pudding,' said Frances, her voice dull with rage. On to the table now went plates of sticky delights from the Cypriot shops, concoctions of honey and nuts and filo pastry, and dishes of fruit, and her chocolate pudding, made especially for 'the kids'. Colin, having stared at his father, and then at his mother: Why did you let him sit down? Why do you let him...? now got up, scraping back his chair, and pushing it back against the wall with a bang. He went out. 'I feel this is a real home from home,' said Comrade Mo, consuming chocolate pudding. 'And I do not know these cakes? Are they like some cakes we have from the Arab cuisine?' 'Cypriot,' said Johnny, 'almost certainly influenced from the East...' and began a lecture on the cuisines of the Mediterranean. They were all listening, fascinated: no one could say that Johnny was dull when not talking about politics, but it was too good to last. |
| 1011 |
He would find himself as if by magic in Nairobi's main street... there he would run into Comrade Mo... be one of a group of loving comrades where he would soon be a leader, making fiery speeches. And, since he was seventeen, there would be a girl. How did he imagine this girl? Black? White? She had no idea. James went on talking about his father's memories of Kenya. The grim truths of war had been erased, and all that remained were high blue skies, and all that space and a good chap (corrected to a good type) who had saved his father's life. A black man. An Askari, risking his life for the British soldier. What had been Frances's equivalent dream at, not sixteen, she had been a busy schoolgirl; but nineteen? Yes, she was pretty sure she had had fantasies, because of Johnny's immersion in the Spanish Civil War, of nursing soldiers. Where? In a rocky landscape, with wine, and olives. But where? Teenage dreams do not need map points. 'You can't go to Kenya,' said Rose. 'Your parents will stop you.' Brought down, James reached for his glass and emptied it. 'Since the subject has come up,' said Frances, 'I want to talk about Christmas?' Faced with already apprehensive faces, Frances found herself unable to go on. They knew what they were going to hear, because Andrew had already warned them. Now he said, 'You see, there isn't going to be a Christmas here this year. I am going to Phyllida for Christmas lunch. She rang me and said she hasn't heard from my... from Johnny, and she says she dreads Christmas. |
| 1012 |
There was a dish of fruit Frances had not tasted and scarcely knew the names of, Cape gooseberries, lychees, passion fruit, guavas. There was a slice of Stilton. Little bottles of champagne, burgundy and port fenced the feast. These days there would be nothing remarkable in the witty little spread, which paid homage to the Christmas meal, while it mocked, but then it was a glimpse of a vision from celestial fields, a swallow visiting from the plenitudes of the future. Frances could not eat it, it would be a crime. She sat down and looked at it and thought that Julia must care for her, after all. Frances wept. At Christmas one weeps. It is obligatory. She wept because of her mother-in-law's kindness to her and to her sons, and because of the charm of the meal, sparking off its invitations, and because of her incredulity at what she had managed to live through, and then, really getting down to it, she wept at the miseries of Christmasses past. Oh my God, those Christmasses when the boys were small, and they were in those dreadful rooms, and everything so ugly, and they were often cold. Then she dried her eyes and sat on, alone. An hour, two hours. Not a soul in the house... that radio was downstairs, not next door, but she chose to ignore it. It might have been left on, after all. Four o' clock. The gas boards and electricity would be relieved that once again they had coped with the national Christmas lunch. Tired and cross women from Land's End to the Orkneys would be sitting down and saying, 'Now, you wash up. |
| 1013 |
The company around the table looked like a chorus for a musical, because they were all wearing tunics striped horizontally in blue and white, over tight black legs. Frances wore black and white stripes, feeling that this might do something to assert a difference. The boys wore the same stripes over jeans. Their hair was, had to be, well below their ears, a statement of their independence, and the girls all had Evansky haircuts. An Evansky haircut, that was the heart's desire of every with-it girl, and by hook, or most likely by crook, they had achieved it. This cut was between a 1920s bob, and the shingle, with a fringe to the eyebrows. Straight, it went without saying. Curly hair out. Even Rose's hair, the mass of crinkly black, was Evansky. Little neat heads, little-ickle cutesy girls, little bitsey things and the boys like shaggy ponies, and all in the blue and white stripes that had originated in matelot shirts, matching the blue and white mugs they used for breakfast. When the geist speaks, the zeit must obey. Here they were, the girls and the boys of the sexual revolution, though they didn't know yet that was what they would be famed for. There was one exception to the Evansky imperative, every bit as strong as Vidal Sassoon's. Mrs Evansky, a decided lady, had refused to cut Sophie's hair. She had stood behind the girl, lifting those satiny black masses, letting them slide through her fingers, and then had pronounced: 'I am sorry, I can't do it.'And then, as Sophie protested, 'Besides you've a long face. |
| 1014 |
Something wonderful had happened to her. She often walked down the hill to Primrose Hill and then through Regent's Park, to dancing and singing lessons. There in a grassy glade full of flowerbeds is a statue of a young woman, with a little goat, and it is called 'The Protector of the Defenceless'. This girl in stone drew Sophie to her. She found herselflaying a leafon the pedestal, then a flower, then a little posy. Soon she would bring a bit of biscuit, and stood back to watch sparrows or a blackbird flyup to the statue's feet to carry off crumbs. Once she put a wreath around the little goat's head. Then, one day on the pedestal, was a booklet called The Language of Flowers, and tied to it with a ribbon was a bouquet of lilac and red roses. She could not see anyone likely nearby, only some people strolling in the garden. She was alarmed, knowing she had been watched. At the supper table she told the story, laughing at herself because of her love for the stone girl, and produced The Language of Flowers for everyone to pass around and look at. Lilac meant First Emotions of Love, and a red rose, Love. 'You're not going to answer him?' demanded Rose, furious. 'Lovely Rose,' said Colin, 'of course she's going to answer.'And they all pored over the book to work out a suitable message. But what Sophie wanted to say was, 'Yes, I am interested but don't jump to conclusions. 'Nothing in the book seemed suitable. In the end they all decided on snowdrops, for Hope but they had already come and gone, and periwinkle, Early Friendship. |
| 1015 |
But at what age do such insecurely-based children no longer need a parent to be there, always? This was their mother, taking off for the weekend with a man, and they knew it. If she had ever done anything like it before... but how obedient she had always been to their situation, their needs, as ifshe was making up for Johnny's lacks. 'As if'? she had tried to make up for Johnny. On the Saturday Frances crept out of the house knowing that Andrew would be on the look-out, for he was a restless sleeper, and Colin might have decided to wake earlier than his usual mid-morning. She glanced up at the front of the house, dreading to see Andrew's face, Colin's but there were no faces at the windows. It was seven in the morning of a wonderful summer's day, and her spirits, in spite of her guilt, were threatening to shoot her up into an empyrean of irresponsibility, and here he was, her beau, her date, smiling, obviously enjoying what he saw, this blonde woman (she had had her hair done) in her green linen dress, settling herself beside him, and turning to him to share a laugh at this adventure. They drove comfortably through the suburbs of London, and were in the country, and she was enjoying his enjoyment of her, and her pleasure in him, this handsome sandy man, and meanwhile she combated thoughts of the helpless unhappy faces of her sons. Dear Aunt Vera, I am divorced and I bring up two boys. I am tempted to have an affair but I am afraid of upsetting my sons. They watch me like hawks. |
| 1016 |
Which they did, and went off to a place where lying on a grassy hill he told her that here, where they were, landscapes rolling away in all directions, that this was the very heart of England. And then, and she understood it absolutely, he wept, this big man, face on his arm, on the grass, he wept for his lost dream, and she thought, We suit each other so well, but we won't be together again. It was the ending of something. For him. And for her too: what am I doing prancing around the heart of England with a man heartbroken because of well, not because of me? In the late afternoon she asked him to set her down where she could take a taxi, because she could not face being seen with him, outside the house with its jealous hungry eyes. They kissed, full of regrets. He saw her step into a taxi, and they drove off in different directions. Up the steps ran Frances, lightly, full of the energy of love-making, and went straight to her bathroom, afraid she smelled too much of sex. Then she went up to Julia's, and knocked, and waited for the close cool inspection which she got. Then, because it was not unfriendly, but kind, she sat and said nothing, only smiled at Julia, her lips trembling. 'It's hard,' said Julia, and she sounded as if she knew how hard. She went to a cupboard, full of interesting bottles, poured a cognac, and brought it to Frances. 'I shall stink of alcohol,' said Frances. 'Never mind,' said Julia, and lit the flame of her little coffee-maker. She stood by it, with her back to Frances, who knew it was tact, because of how much Frances needed to cry. |
| 1017 |
It was all Frances's fault, sometimes he thought he was the only sane person in the house, but it was he who had to go to the Maystock to be tortured by Doctor David. Listening to Colin, as he stood and orated, taking his heavy black-rimmed glasses off, putting them back on, waving his hands about, stamping around, she was hearing what no human being should ever have to hear another person's uncensored thoughts. (No one except Doctor David and his ilk, that is.) They were thoughts not dissimilar probably to many people's, when hot and lava-like. Just as well people were not able to hear what people thought of them, as she now had to, with Colin. The tirade of misery went on for an hour, the time he would have spent with Doctor David. Then he would say, in a quite friendly, normal voice, 'Now I have to go and catch my train.' Or, 'I'll stay the night and catch the first train in the morning.'And the Colin she knew was back, even smiling, though in a puzzled, frustrated sort of way. He must be absolutely exhausted after that outpouring. 'You don't have to go to the Maystock,' she reminded him. 'You can say no. Do you want me to tell them you've decided not to?' But Colin did not want to stop coming to London twice a week, to the Maystock Clinic, to her, she knew, because without the frustration of the hour with the analyst he would not be able to shout and rave at her, to say what he had been thinking so long but had not said, never been able to let out. After an hour of being shouted at, Frances was so tired that she went off to bed, or sat slumped in a chair. |
| 1018 |
Johnny had been active: a tricky business, because while on the one hand obviously the Labour Party was a greater threat to the working masses than the Tories (confusing minds with incorrect formulations), on the other, tactical considerations had ordained that it should be supported. James was listening to the ins and outs of this as ifto favourite music. Johnny had greeted him with a comradely nod and a hand laid on his shoulder, but now he was concentrating on the newcomer, still to be won, Franklin. He delivered a short history of the colonial policy towards Zimlia, recounted the crimes of colonial policy in Kenya, with particular relish for whenever Britain had behaved badly, and began exhorting Franklin to fight for the freedom of Zimlia. 'The nationalist movements of Zimlia are not as developed as the Mau Mau, but it is up to young people like you to free your people from oppression.' Johnny had a glass in one hand, the left, and was leaning forward, eyes holding Franklin's, while he shook the forefinger of his right hand at him, as if targeting him with a revolver. Franklin was shifting about, smiling uncomfortably, and then he said, 'Excuse me,' and went out to the toilet as it happened, but it looked like running away, and when he came back he smiled, and handed his plate to Frances for a second helping, and did not look at Johnny, who had been waiting for him to return. 'Your generation in Africa has more responsibility laid on your shoulders by history than any other has had. |
| 1019 |
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. Neither Rose nor Franklin ever let the other into the lurid poisonous scenes in their minds. But they liked to be with each other. It took him a long time to sort out what people were to each other, their relationships, and if they were related. It was not surprising to him that so many sat around that table to eat, though he had to go back for a comparison, to his village, where he was familiar with people being made welcome, expecting to be fed, given a place to sleep. |
| 1020 |
In his father's and mother's little house at the mission, not much more than a meagre room and a kitchen, there was no room for the kind of casual hospitality of the village. When Franklin stayed with his grandparents for the school holidays, around the great log that smouldered all night in the middle of the hut, people lay wrapped in blankets to sleep whom he had not known before and might never see again: distant relatives passing through. Or relations down on their luck came for refuge. Yet this kindly warmth went with a poverty that he was ashamed of and worse could no longer understand. When he went back home after all this, would he be able to bear it? he thought, seeing Rose's clothes heaped on her bed, seeing what the children at school had: there was no end to what they possessed, what they expected to have. And he had a few carefully guarded clothes, which had cost his parents so much to buy for him. And then, the books upstairs. At the mission were a Bible and prayer books and The Pilgrim's Progress, which he read over and over again. He had read newspapers weeks old that he found stacked for lining shelves or drawers in the mission pantry. He treasured an Arthur Mee Children's Encyclopaedia that he had found thrown on to a rubbish heap discarded by a white family. Now he felt as if dreams that had been with him since childhood had come to life in those walls of books in the sitting-room. He took down this book, turned over the pages, and the precious thing pulsed in his hands. |
| 1021 |
The kitchen filled with youngsters already hung-over and needing more to drink, and by the time everyone sat around the great table and the vast bird sat before them ready to carve, the company had already slipped into that state of excess that means sleep is imminent. And in fact James nodded over his plate and had to be roused. Franklin, smiling again, looked down at his heaped plate, thought of his poor village, silently said grace, and ate. And ate. The girls, and even Sylvia, did well, and the noise was incredible, for 'the kids' had returned to being adolescents, though Andrew, 'the old man', remained his age, and so did Colin, though he tried hard to get into the spirit of it all. But Colin would always be on the outside looking in, or on, no matter how much he attempted to clown, to be one of them and he knew it. The Christmas pudding arrived in its brandy flames into a room darkened for it, and by then it was four o' clock and Frances said that the room upstairs must be aired and clean for Julia's tea. Tea? Who could eat another mouthful? Groans as hands went out to gather in just another crumb or two of pudding, a lick of custard, a mince pie. The girls went up to the sitting-room, and piled sleeping bags in a corner. They opened every window, because the room in fact stank. They carried down empty bottles that had spent the night under chairs or in corners, and suggested that perhaps Julia could be persuaded to have her party an hour later, let's say, at six? But that was out of the question. |
| 1022 |
In this he joined, with relief, and with pleasure, one of them. It seemed there was going to be supper, though everyone joked it would be impossible to eat a thing. Rather late, about ten, the turkey carcass appeared again, and all kinds of stuffings and relishes, and there was a big tray ofroast potatoes. They were all sitting around, drinking, tired, pleased with themselves and with Christmas, when there was a knock on the front door. Frances peered through the window, and saw a woman on the pavement, uncertain whether to knock again or go off. Colin came to stand by his mother. Both were afraid that it might be Phyllida. 'I'll go,' said Colin, and went out, and Frances saw him talking to the stranger, who was swaying a little. He put his hand on her shoulder to steady her, and then brought her in, with an arm right around her. She had been wandering in the dark or half-lit streets and now stood blinking at the bright hall light. Frances appeared. The stranger said to her, 'Are you the darling ofmy heart?' She seemed middle-aged, but it was hard to say, because her face was grimy, so were the rather beautiful white hands that clutched at Colin. She looked like someone rescued from a fire or a catastrophe. Colin's face was wrenched with pain, the tender-hearted youth was in tears. 'Mother,' he said in appeal, and Frances went to the other side, and together she and Colin took the poor stray up the stairs and into the living-room, which was empty now, and tidy. 'What a lovely room,' said the woman, and nearly fell. |
| 1023 |
Johnny would have liked to join the big American battles, he yearned after them like a child not invited to a party, but he could not get a visa. He allowed it to be understood that was because of his Spanish Civil War record. But soon there was France, and he was on each battlefront as it came into the news. But the events of '68 were in fact chastening for him. Everywhere were new young heroes, and their bibles were new ones too. Johnny had had to do a lot of reading. He was not the only Old Guard who found himself returning to refresh himself at the pages of the Communist Manifesto. 'Now that's revolutionary writing,' he might murmur. In France every hero had a group of girls who served him, they were all sleeping together, because of the new plank in the revolutionary platform sexual freedom. There were no girls courting Johnny. He was seen not only as English, but as elderly. Nineteen sixty-eight, which would be remembered by hundreds of thousands of politicos who had taken part in the street fighting, the confrontations with the police, the stone-throwing, the running battles, the building of barricades, the sexual free-for-all, as the glittering peak of their youthful achievements, was not a year that Johnny was going to enjoy thinking about. Seeing that Stella had no intention of coming back to him, he had returned to the flat vacated by Phyllida, which became a kind of commune, home for revolutionaries from everywhere, some dodging the Vietnam War, many from South America, and he usually had African politicians staying with him. |
| 1024 |
He was looking so much older well, they were both nearly fifty. The Mao jacket seemed loose on him. By his dejected air she knew things were not going well for him in Paris. He's past it, she thought. And so am I. She was wrong about both of them. Just ahead lay the Seventies, which from one end of the world to the other (the non-communist world) bred a race of Che Guavara clones, and the universities, particularly the London ones, were an almost continuous celebration of Revolution, with demonstrations, riots, sit-ins, lock-outs, battles ofall kinds. Everywhere you looked were these young heroes, and Johnny had become a grand old man, and the fact that he was an almost entirely unrepentant Stalinist had a certain limited chic among these youngsters who mostly believed that if Trotsky had won the battle for power with Stalin then communism would have worn a beatific face. And he had another disability, which meant that his entourage was usually young men, and not eager girls. His style was all wrong. The right one was when Comrade Tommy or Billy or Jimmy summoned some girl with a contemptuous flick of the fingers, and said to her, 'You are bourgeois scum.'And, by implication, leave all you have and come with me.(Rather, give all you have to me.) And this goes on to this day. Irresistible. And there was worse. If cleanliness had once been next to Godliness, then dirt and smelliness was now as good as a Party card. Smelly embraces: these Johnny could not provide, having been brought up by Julia or, rather, her servants. |
| 1025 |
I must tell you... I am at my wit's end.'And now the gravity, the high seriousness of his manner, his style, broke down, and before them they saw a humbled old man, with tears running into his beard. 'It will be no secret to you that I am very fond of Julia. It is hard to see her so ... so...'And he went out. 'Excuse me, you must excuse me.' Frances said, 'And who is going to say first, I'm not going to look after that dog?' Wilhelm arrived with a tiny terrier that he had already named Stuckschel a scrap, a little thing and as a joke had put a blue ribbon around its neck. Julia's immediate reaction was to back away from it, as it yapped around her skirts, and then, seeing her old friend's anxiety that she like it, made herself pat the dog and try to calm it. She put on a good enough act to make Wilhelm think that she might learn to like the creature, but when he went, and she had to see to the dog's food, its toilet arrangements, she sat trembling on her chair and thought: He's my best friend and he knows so little about me he thinks I want a dog. There followed unpleasant days: food for the dog, messes on her floors, smells and the restless little creature who yapped and drove Julia to tears. How could he? she muttered, and when Wilhelm arrived to see how things went, her efforts to be nice told him what a bad mistake he had made. 'But, my dear, it would be good for you to take him for a walk. What have you called him? Fuss! I see. 'And he went off, wounded, so now she had to worry about him too. |
| 1026 |
Fuss, who knew this mistress hated him, found his way to Colin, who liked the creature because it made him laugh. Fuss became Vicious, because of the absurdity of this minute thing growling and defending itself, and snapping with its jaws the size of Julia's sugar tongs. Its paws were like puffs of cotton wool, its eyes like little black pawpaw seeds, its tail a twist of silvery silk. Vicious now went everywhere with Colin, and so the dog that had been meant to be good for Julia became good for Colin, who had no friends, went for solitary walks around the Heath, and was drinking too much. Nothing serious but enough for Frances to tell him she was worried. He flared up with, 'I don't like being spied on.' The real trouble was that he hated being dependent on Julia and his mother. He had written two novels, which he knew were no good, and was at work on a third, with Wilhelm Stein as a mentor. He was pleased that Andrew had returned to the condition of being dependent. Having done well in his exams, Andrew had left home to set himself up with a group of lawyers, but decided he wanted to do international law. He came home, and was going to Oxford, Brasenose, for a two-year course. Sylvia had become a junior doctor, much younger than most, and was working as hard as they do. When she did come home she walked in a trance of exhaustion up the stairs, not seeing anyone, or anything; she was already in her mind in her bed, able to sleep at last. She might sleep the clock around, then take a bath and was off. |
| 1027 |
Tilly's mouth, it was her father's, pink and delicate. Pink and delicate would do to describe him, Comrade Alan, a hero, well let them think it. She had married two communist heroes, first one, and then the other. What was the matter with her, then? (This until now uncharacteristic self-criticism was soon to take her into the Via Dolorosa of psychotherapy and from there into a new life.) When Tilly came down to tell her of the legacy, was that boasting? A taunt? But Phyllida's sense of justice told her it was not so. Sylvia was full of airs and graces and she hated her mother, but Phyllida had never known her spiteful. Sylvia woke with a start and thought she was in a nightmare. Her mother's face, coarse, red, with wild accusing eyes, was just above her, and in a moment that voice would start, as it always did, talking at her, shouting at her. You have ruined my life. If I hadn't had you my life would have been... You are my curse, my millstone... Sylvia cried out and pushed her mother away, and sat up. She saw her letter in Phyllida's hand, and snatched it. She stood up and said, 'Now listen, mother, but don't say anything, don't say anything, please, it's unfair he gave me all the money, I'll give you half. I'll tell the lawyer. And she ran out of the room, with her hands over her ears. Sylvia informed the lawyers, having consulted with Andrew, and the arrangements were made. Giving Phyllida halfmeant that a substantial legacy became a useful sum, enough to buy a good house, insurance security. |
| 1028 |
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. |
| 1029 |
Roars of agreement; the industrial-military complex groans and boos; lackeys, jackals, capitalist exploiters, sell-outs, fascists. It was hard to hear, the roars ofagree-ment were so loud. And there was James, so much the public man, large and affable, who had become a cockney, and there was a black man beside Johnny she was sure she knew. A lot of people up there on the platform. Every face was alive and elated with conceit and self-righteousness and triumph. How well she did know all that, how it frightened her. They swaggered about up there, under strong lights, spilling out their phrases which she could anticipate, each one, before it arrived. And the audience was a unit, it was whole, it was a mob, it could kill or run riot, and it was aflame with hatred, yes that is what it was. Yet strip off the stupid cliches, and she was agreeing with them, she was on their side; how could she be, when they were foul, they were frightful; yet the violence of war was everything she hated most. She was finding it hard to keep upright she was standing against a wall, and surrounded by Yahoos who might as well be carrying clubs. She took a long last look up at the platform, saw her son had recognised her, and that his stare was both triumphant and hostile. If she did not leave he might be making her a target for his sarcasms. She pushed her way through the crowd back to the door. Luckily she was not far away from it. Her hat was knocked awry, Julia believed deliberately. She was right. |
| 1030 |
For years Frances had wondered if Colin and Sophie... but they went for walks together, he was always at her first nights, and she came to weep on his shoulder when Roland was again being impossible. Mates. Siblings. So they said. The same practical thoughts were making their way through the two women's minds. Andrew was going abroad to work, probably to New York, and Sophie was an increasingly well-considered actress in London. Was she planning to throw up her career for his? Women did: they did, too often, when they should not. And both were thinking that Sophie was unsuitable as the consort of a public man, being so emotional and dramatic. 'Well, thanks,' said Andrew at last. 'Sorry,' said his mother. 'It's the surprise, that's all.' Julia was thinking of those years spent apart from her love, Philip, waiting for him. And had it all been worth it? This seditious little thought more and more often presented itself, fair and square, and was not refused admittance. The fact was, and Julia was prepared to think so now, Philip should have married that English girl, so right for him, and she but her mind went into panic when she contemplated what she might have done instead, with Germany in such ruins, such disaster, and then the politics, and then the Second World War. No. Her conclusion was, had been for some time now, that she was right to have married Philip, but that he should not have married her. At last she said, 'You must see it's a shock. She is so close to Colin.' 'I know,' said Andrew. |
| 1031 |
Julia and Frances were pleased to do this. They might, they felt, easily break down themselves. By now there were half a dozen young men and a couple of girls, one being Rosemary. She knew that a disaster major? minor? had occurred, and was being tactful, making conversation. A charming young woman, thought Julia: pretty, clever certainly a good cook. She was in law, like Andrew. Surely they would be just right for each other? The young men and women were talking about what they had done during the long summer holidays: they were all still at university. It sounded as if between them they had visited most of the countries of the world. They talked about how things were in Nicaragua, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Finland, Kenya. They had all had a thoroughly good time, but they had also been in search ofinformation, were serious travellers. Frances was thinking how well they contrasted with what had gone on in Julia's house ten or more years ago. These people seemed much happier was that the word to use? She looked back on strain, difficulty, on damaged creatures. Not these. Well, of course these were older... but even so. Julia would say, of course, that these were none of them war children: the shadows ofwar were a long way behind them. This half hour, which could have been agreeable, was spoiled by the worry over Andrew, who came in briefly to say that he had ordered a taxi for them. They must forgive him. From the way the others looked at him, surprised, the women could see that they were not used to debonair Andrew in disorder. |
| 1032 |
Julia fended off the situation, with jokes to the effect that at least they were not yearning like teenagers for a bed. To which he replied that there was more to a bed than sex. He seemed to remember cuddles, and conversations in the dark, about the ways of the world. Julia did wonder about sharing a bed after so many years as a widow, but increasingly saw his point. She always felt bad, staying comfortably in her room, when he had to go home, through whatever weather there was. His home was a very large flat, where once his wife, who was dead long ago, and two children, now in America, had lived. He was hardly ever in this flat. He was not a poor man, but it was not sensible, keeping up his flat with its doorman and the little garden, while there was this big house of Julia's. They discussed, then argued, then bickered about how things could be arranged. For Wilhelm to live with Julia in the four little rooms that were enough for her out of the question. And what would he do with his books? He had thousands of them, some of them part of his stock as a book dealer. Colin had taken over the floor beneath Julia, had colonised Andrew's room. He could not be asked to move why should he? Of all the people in this house, except Julia herself, he needed most his place, his little secure place in the world. Below Colin was Frances in two good rooms and a little one. And on that floor was the room that was Sylvia's, even if she only came back to it once a month. It was her home and must remain so. |
| 1033 |
After all, Frances had fallen for Johnny's windy rhetoric, been charmed out of her wits by the great dream, and her life had been set by it ever since. She simply had not been able to get free. And now she was working for two or three days a week with a woman for whom The Defender played the same role as the Party had done for her parents, who were still orthodox communists and proud of it. Some people have come to think that our the human being's greatest need is to have something or somebody to hate. For decades the upper classes, the middle class, had fulfilled this useful function, earning (in communist countries) death, torture and imprisonment, and in more equable countries like Britain, merely obloquy, or irritating obligations, like having to acquire a cockney accent. But now this creed showed signs of wearing thin. The new enemy, men, was even more useful, since it encompassed half the human race. From one end of the world to the other, women were sitting in judgement on men, and when Frances was with The Defender women, she felt herselfto be part ofan all-female jury that has just passed a unanimous verdict of Guilty. They sat about, in leisure moments, solidly in the right, telling little anecdotes of this man's crassness or that man's delinquency, they exchanged glances of satirical comment, they compressed their lips and arched their brows, and when men were present, they watched for evidence of incorrect thought and then they pounced like cats on sparrows. Never have there been smugger, more self-righteous, unself-critical people. |
| 1034 |
It was a fascist militaristic state, and its lack of freedom and true democracy was attacked continually in articles and speeches by people who went there for holidays, sent their children to American universities, and took trips across 'the pond' to take part in demos, riots, marches and meetings. A certain naive youth, joining The Defender because of his admiration for its great and honourable history of free and fair thought, rashly argued that it was a mistake to call Stephen Spender a fascist for campaigning against the Soviet Union and trying to make people accept 'the truth' which phrase meant the opposite of what the communists meant by it. This young man argued that since everyone knew about the rigged elections, the show trials, the slave camps, the use of prison labour, and that Stalin was demonstrably worse than Hitler, then surely it was right to say so. There was shouting, screaming, tears, a scene that almost came to blows. The youth left and was described as a C I A plant. Frances was not the only one who longed to leave this prickly dishonest place. Rupert Boland, her good friend, was another. Their secret dislike of the institution they worked for was what first united them, and then when both could have left to get work on other newspapers, they stayed because of the other. Which neither knew, for it was not confessed for a long time. Frances had found she was in danger of loving this man, but then when it was too late, she did. And why not? Things progressed in an unhurried but satisfying way. |
| 1035 |
Wilhelm had brought her a drafted letter, saying the von Arnes were an old German family which had never had connections with the Nazis. She asked him to forget it, not to send it. She was wrong: it should have been sent, to ease her heart, if nothing else. And she was wrong, too, about Rose Trimble. Carelessness and indifference to history yes, she was like her generation, but it was an immediate hatred of the Lennoxes that inspired her, the need to 'get back at them'. She had forgotten what had brought her to their house in the first place, or that she had ever claimed Andrew had made her pregnant. No, it was that house, the ease of it, the way they took everything for granted, and looked after each other. Sylvia, that prissy little bitch; Frances, the shitty old queen bee, wasp, rather; Julia bossing everyone. And the men, complacent bastards. Her article had been written from the wells of bile and malice that forever churned and seethed inside Rose, which could be mollified if only temporarily, when she was able to write words directed straight to the hearts of her victims. She imagined, as she wrote, how they gasped and writhed as they read. She imagined them crying out in pain. That was why Julia was dying before her time. She felt she had suddenly been attacked by malignity. She sat against her pillows in a room where light fell from the window, and moved from floor to bed to wall, and back around the walls to the window, such a feeble answer to the dark that was descending from invisible inimical forces, and which enclosed her. |
| 1036 |
It had been much read and some poems were underlined. They were the 'terrible' poems. Andrew said no, too painful to read those. 'No worst there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief..." No. He chose The Caged Skylark, which she had liked, for there was a pencil line beside it, and then the poem Spring and Fall , to a young child, beginning, Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? This had a line beside it too, but it was the dark poems that had the double, triple heavy black lines beside them, and jagged exclamation marks too. So the family felt they were betraying Julia, choosing the softer poems. And, too, they had to tell themselves that they had not known Julia, could never have guessed at those deep black lines beside I wake and feel the fell ofdark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent... There ought to be some German poetry but Wilhelm was not there to advise. Andrew read the poems. His voice was light, but strong enough for the occasion: there were few people there, apart from the family. Mrs Philby stood well away from them, in blackest black, from her hat, kept for funerals, to her boots, that shone, a reproach to them: she continued in her role which was to shame the sloppy ways of the family. None of them was in black, only her. Her face was vindictive with righteousness. She wept, though, at the end. 'Mrs Lennox was my oldest friend,' she told Frances, in severe reproach. 'I shall not be coming to you again. I only came because of her. |
| 1037 |
' Halfway through the proceedings a gaunt figure, his white locks and loose clothes fluttering in a wind that blew through the gravestones, appeared and wandered uncertainly towards the funeral group. It was Johnny, sombre, unhappy, and looking much older than he should. He stood well apart from any of them, half turned away, as if ready to run off. The words of the service were an affront to him, it was evident. At the end his sons and Frances went towards him, to ask him back to the house, but he only nodded, and stalked off. At the limits of the graveyard he turned and gave them a salute with his open right hand, palm towards them, at shoulder level. Sylvia was not at the funeral. The telephone lines to St Luke's Mission were down, because of a bad storm. Meanwhile Frances's life with Rupert was not going as they had expected. She was virtually living in his place, though her books and papers were at Julia's. It was not a big flat. The sitting-room, which was also where they ate, with a tiny kitchen through a hatch, was a third of the size of Julia's. The big bedroom was adequate. The two small rooms were for the two children, Margaret and William, who came at weekends. When Meriel had gone off to live with a new man, Jaspar, there had been plans to buy something bigger. Frances liked the children well enough and believed they did not dislike her: they were polite and obedient. From their mother's flat they went off to school, and with their mother and Jaspar went for holidays. |
| 1038 |
They even were reassured by this conforming boy, who was turning out surely to be easier than Margaret? Sylvia stood in Senga airport's Arrivals, which accommodated the luggage carousel, Immigration, Customs, and all the people off the plane, who at one glance could be defined as black, and in thick three-piece suits, and white, in jeans and T-shirts, with sweaters they had left London in tied around their hips. The blacks were exuberant, manoeuvring refrigerators, stoves, televisions and furniture into positions where they could be offered to Customs' approval, which was being given, for the officials were congratulatory, only too happy to be generous with their scrawls of red chalk as each vast crate arrived before them. Sylvia had a hold-all, for her personal possessions, and two large suitcases for the medical supplies and items Father McGuire had asked for: lists had been arriving in London, each accompanied by: Don't feel yourself obliged to bring these, if it is a trouble. On the plane Sylvia had heard whites discuss Customs, its unpredictability, its partiality to the blacks who were allowed to bring in whole households of furniture. Next to Sylvia had been sitting a silent man, dressed like others in jeans and T-shirt, but he had a silver cross on a chain around his neck. Not knowing if this was a fashion statement, she timidly enquired if he were a priest, heard he was Brother Jude from the something mission the unfamiliar name slid past her ears and asked if she might expect trouble with her big cases. |
| 1039 |
A little chest of drawers, of the kind that once hotels all had, had washed up here. Above her bed was a small crucifix. The walls were of brick, the floors of brick, and the ceiling of split cane. Rebecca said she would bring tea, and went off. Sylvia sank on to a chair, in the grip of a feeling she did not know how to identify. Yes, new impressions: yes, she had expected them, had known she would feel alien, out of place. But what was this? waves of bitter emptiness attacked her, and when she looked at the crucifix, to get her bearings, felt only that Christ Himself must be surprised to find Himself there. But surely she Sylvia was not surprised to find Christ in a place of such poverty? What was it then? Outside doves cooed, and chickens kept up their talk. I'm just a spoiled brat, Sylvia told herself the word surfacing from somewhere deep in her childhood. Westminster Cathedral yes; a brick shack, apparently, no. Dust was blowing past the window. Judging from her outside view of it, this house could not have more than three or four rooms. Where was Father McGuire's room? Where did Rebecca sleep? She could make no sense of anything, and when Rebecca brought the tea, Sylvia said she had a headache, and would lie down. 'Yes, doctor, you lie down, and you'll be better soon,' said Rebecca, her cheerfulness recognisable as Christian: the children of God smile and are ready for anything. (Like Flower Children.) Rebecca was drawing the curtains, of black and white mattress ticking, which Sylvia suspected would be found the last word in chic in certain circles in London. |
| 1040 |
'I'll call you for lunch.' Lunch. Sylvia felt that it must be already evening, the day had been going on for so long. It was only just eleven. She lay, her hand over her eyes, saw the light define her thin fingers, fell asleep, and was woken by Rebecca half an hour later with more tea and an apology from Father McGuire who said he was detained at the school, and would see her for lunch, and he suggested she should take it easy till tomorrow. This counsel having been transmitted, Rebecca remarked that the patient from the Pyne farm was waiting to see the doctor, and there were other people waiting, and perhaps the doctor could... Sylvia was putting on a white overall, which action Rebeccca seemed merely to be observing, but in a way that made Sylvia ask, 'What should I wear, then?' Rebecca at once said that the overall wouldn't stay white long and perhaps the doctor had an old dress she could wear. Sylvia did not wear dresses. She had on her oldest jeans, for travelling. She tied her hair back in a scarf, which made her like Rebecca, in her kerchief. She went down a path indicated by Rebecca, who retired to her kitchen. Along the dusty path grew hibiscus, oleander, plumbago, all dusty, but looking as if they were in their own right places, in dry heat and under a sun in a sky that had not a cloud in it. The path turned down a rocky slope and in front of her were some grass roofs on supporting poles stuck in reddish earth, and a shed, whose door was half open. A hen emerged from it. |
| 1041 |
She made a quick tour of her patients, lying about here and there, but it was sometimes hard to tell them from their friends or relatives who were with them. A dislocated shoulder. She put it back there and then, told the young man to stay and rest, not to use it for a bit, but he staggered off into the bush. Some cuts festering. Another malaria, or she thought so. A leg swollen up like a bolster, the skin seemingly about to burst. She went back to her room, returned with a lancet, soap, a bandage, a basin got from Rebecca, and, squatting, lanced the leg, from which large amounts of pus soaked into the dust, making, no doubt, a fine new source of infection. This patient was groaning with gratitude; a young woman whose two children sat near her, one sucking at the breast, though he seemed to be at least four years old, the other clinging to her neck. Rebecca bandaged the leg, hoping to keep some of the dust out, told the woman not to do too much, although this was probably absurd, and examined a pregnant woman, near her time. The baby was in the wrong position. She collected her instruments, and the basin and said she had to talk to Father McGuire. She asked Aaron what he and the malaria patient planned to eat. He said that perhaps Rebecca would be kind to them and give them some sadza. Sylvia found Father McGuire at the table in the front room, eating his lunch. He was a large man, in a shabby robe, with a generous crop of white hair, dark sympathetic eyes, and an air of jovial welcome. |
| 1042 |
A new hut had been built, with grass walls and grass roof, a big one, with holes cut in the walls to let in light. It was cool and fresh inside. The floor was of stamped earth. In it the really sick people could shelter. Sylvia had cured cases of long-standing deafness, caused by nothing worse than old impacted wax. She had cured cataracts. She had got medicines from Senga and was able to do something for the malaria cases, but most of them were old sufferers. She set limbs and cauterized wounds and sewed them up, and gave out medicines for sore throats and coughs, sometimes using, when they ran out, old wives' cures remembered by Father McGuire from Ireland. She had a maternity clinic, and delivered babies. All this was satisfactory enough, but she was in permanent frustration because she was not a surgeon. She needed to be. Bad and urgent cases could be driven to a hospital twenty miles away but sometimes delays were damaging, or fatal. She ought to be able to do caesareans and appendixes, amputate a hand, or open up a badly fractured knee. There was a shadowy area where it was hard to say if she was on the right side of the law or not: she might slice an arm to get at an ulcer, open up a suppurating wound to clean it, using surgeons' instruments. If only she had known how badly she would need a surgeon's skills then, when she was taking all kinds of courses that were not useful to her now... She was also doing the kind of work that did not come the way of doctors in Europe. |
| 1043 |
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. |
| 1044 |
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. On the wall in Sylvia's room was tacked, straight on to the brick, a large reproduction of Leonardo 's Virgin of the Rocks, and some other smaller Virgins. |
| 1045 |
Geoffrey had been an expert on Africa for some years. His enterprise had caused hundreds of the latest most elaborate tractors donated to an ex-colony up north to lie rotting and rusting around the edges of as many fields: spare parts, know-how and fuel had been lacking, quite apart from the agreement of the local people, who would have liked something less grandiose. He had also caused coffee to be planted in parts of Zimlia where it instantly failed. In Kenya millions of pounds disbursed by him had vanished into greedy pockets. He was disbursing millions here, in Zimlia, which were suffering the same fate. These errors had in no way set back his career, as might have happened in less sophisticated times. He was deputy head of CI, in constant discussion with G M. Next to him was his ever-faithful admirer Daniel whose shock of red hair was as much of a beacon as it ever was: Daniel was rewarded for his decades of devotion by a starry job as Geoffrey's secretary. James Patton, now Labour MP for Shortlands in the Midlands, was here on a fact-finding trip, but really because Comrade Mo, visiting London, had run into him at Johnny's, and said, 'Why don't you come and visit us?' This did not mean that Comrade Mo was now a Zimlian, more than a citizen of any other part of Africa. But he knew Comrade Matthew of course, as he seemed to know every new president and when he was at Johnny's he would issue invitations as from some generic Africa, a benevolent burgeoning place with ever-open arms. |
| 1046 |
This wretched little room offended him, and precisely because it was a challenge. When he talked Global Money, dispensed Global Money, was a fount of ever-unfailing largesse, this was what it was all about -wasn't it? But this was a mission, for God's sake! This was the Roman Catholic Church, wasn't it? Weren't they supposed to be rich? There was a rent in the cretonne curtain which was attempting to exclude the glare from a sun that had only just climbed high enough not to strike it direct. Tiny black ants crawled over the floor. The black woman brought him a glass of orange juice. Warm. No ice? The kitchen where the black woman was, opened to his right. Another door, standing ajar, was on his left. On the door a dressing-gown hung from a nail: he knew it was Sylvia's, he remembered it. He went into the room. The bare red brick floor, the brick walls, the gleaming pale reed ceiling which now was to Sylvia like a second skin, seemed to him offensively meagre. So small, this room was, so bare. On the little chest of drawers were photographs, in silver frames. There was Julia, and there, Frances. And one of him, aged about twenty-five, debonair, whimsical, smiling straight back at him. It hurt, his younger self he turned away, unconsciously passing his hands down over his face, as if to restore that confident unmarked face, that innocent face. He thought, mocking the surroundings, so inimical to him that little crucifix that he had not then eaten of the fruit of good and evil. |
| 1047 |
The three sat. Andrew was so discommoded by what he saw as his social gaffe, that he was silent. The black woman, whom he knew was Rebecca, now served the lunch. There was chicken, the one that had died that morning from dehydration. It was tough. The priest said to Rebecca that there was no point in cooking a chicken just dead, but she said she wanted to cook something nice for the visitor. She had made a jelly, and Father McGuire, tucking in, said they should have visitors more often. Sylvia knew that Andrew was watching, and tried to eat the chicken and spooned in the jelly as if it were medicine. He wanted to know the history of the hospital. He had been shocked by it, and by Sylvia's being there. How could such a wretched thing be called a hospital? His dislike of the place, his suspicion, were being communicated, being felt, by Sylvia, by the priest and by Rebecca, who stood with her back to her kitchen, hands folded, listening. He did not like Rebecca. And he thoroughly distrusted Sylvia's looking like her the native-style top, certain mannerisms, ways with the face and the eyes which Sylvia was unconscious of. Andrew spent most of his time with people of colour — and what could you call Sylvia, looking like that, almost as dark as Rebecca? He knew he did not suffer from race prejudice. No, but it was class prejudice, and the two are often confused. What was Sylvia doing, letting herself go like this? These thoughts, all visible on his face, though he smiled and was his delightful social self, were putting the three against him. |
| 1048 |
There was sometimes one textbook for the whole class. 'How can we do our homework, sir? How can we study?' There was not a globe, nor an atlas, in the whole school. When he had asked, the children did not know what they were. Harassed and frustrated young teachers took him aside to beg him to get them books to teach them how to teach. They were eighteen or twenty years old themselves, without hardly any qualifications and certainly none to enable them to teach. Andrew had never seen a more depressing place: school it was not. Father McGuire had escorted him from building to building, striding through dust to get out of the sun and back into patches ofshade, introducing him as a friend of Zimlia. His fame as Global Money though Father McGuire had not mentioned the magic name had permeated the whole school. He was greeted with cries of welcome and with songs, and everywhere he looked were expectant faces. The priest had said: 'I shall tell you the history of this place. We, the Mission, ran a school here for years since the colony began. It was a good school. We had no more than fifty pupils. Some of them are in government now. Did you know that most of the African leaders came from mission schools? During the war Comrade President Matthew promised every child in the country a good secondary education. The schools were rushed up everywhere, are multiplying now. There are not the teachers, there are not the books, there are no exercise books. When the government took over our school that was the end. |
| 1049 |
They found excuses not to go, and Father McGuire did not insist: the fact was, they were pretty useless. Gentility was what they had chosen, not suppurating limbs. By the time Sylvia arrived the enmity between them and Joshua was such that every time they saw him they said they would pray for him, and he taunted, insulted and cursed them in return. They did wash bandages and dressings while complaining they were dirty and disgusting, but their energies really went into the church which was as pretty and well-kept as the churches that had beckoned them to become nuns when they were girls. Those churches had been the cleanest and finest buildings for miles and now this one at St Luke's Mission, like those, never had a speck of dust, because it was swept several times a day, and the statues of Christ and the Virgin were polished and gleaming, and when dust swirled the nuns were up shutting doors and windows and sweeping it up before it even settled. The good sisters were serving the church and Father McGuire, and, said Joshua, mimicking them, they clucked like chickens whenever he came near. They were often sick, because then they could return to Senga and their mother house. Joshua sat all day under the big acacia tree while sunlight and shadow sifted over him, and watched what went on at the hospital, but often through eyes that distorted what he saw. He was smoking dagga almost continually. His little boy Clever was always with Sylvia, and then there were two children, Clever and Zebedee. |
| 1050 |
The sunlight dazzled off Sister Molly's cross, shone off her strong brown legs. Healthy, that was the word for her. And healthy was this scene, everything strong and vigorous, newly-washed trees and bushes and a good-natured crowd disappearing into official cars and lowly buses. Sylvia felt herself again. Her visit to London had not been a success, except for her boxes of books. But that experience snapped shut behind her. London seemed unreal to her: this was real. The back seat of Sister Molly's old car sank under the weight of the big cases. She at once began to talk, with the news that there had been scandals. Ministers had been accused of taking bribes and of stealing. She spoke with the relish that confirms a satisfaction in everything going on as expected. 'And Father McGuire said there was trouble of some kind at the Mission. St Luke's has been accused of theft.' 'That's nonsense.' 'Nonsense can be very powerful.'And Sylvia thought that this nun's she was that, after all look at her was too admonitory a warning? for the occasion. There was something wrong. It did not do to dismiss anything she said. This was a very accomplished young woman. She ran a scheme that brought teachers from America and from Europe to teach for a couple of years in Zimlia, because of the shortage of black teachers, and this was -so far welcomed by the black government because it saved on teachers' wages. Some teachers were in schools in remote areas, and Sister Molly was almost permanently on her rounds to see how her charges did. |
| 1051 |
There was a spell on the cases she used the English word, and then added, 'The n'ganga said bad things would happen to anyone who stole anything from the hospital. 'And now she got up, and said it was time to get Father McGuire's lunch, and she hoped Sylvia was hungry, because she had cooked some special rice pudding. While Rebecca had sat opposite, and in their minds had been Tenderai and the other children, dead and living, between the two women had been an absolute openness and trust. But now Sylvia knew that Rebecca would not tell her more, for on this subject Rebecca knew she would not understand. Sylvia sat on her bed surrounded by brick walls, and looked at the Leonardo women, whom she felt were welcoming her home. Then she turned to the crucifix behind her bed, with a deliberate intention of affirming certain ideas that had been growing clamorous in her mind. 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. |
| 1052 |
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. The floor was polished red, and on it were scattered low tables and dogs and some cats. Cedric Pyne sat gulping tea, while he stroked the head of his favourite dog, a ridgeback bitch called Lusaka. Edna Pyne, smart in her slacks and shirt, her skin glistening with sun-creams, sat by the tea tray, her dog, Lusaka's sister Sheba, as close as she could get by her chair. She listened to her husband holding forth about the deficiencies of the black government. Sylvia drank tea and listened too. If she had had to hear Sister Molly out on the subject of the Pope and his inveterate maleness; had had to listen every day to Father McGuire saying he was an old man and he was no longer up to it, he was going back to Ireland; if she had had to listen to Colin lament his situation with Sophie, now she had to bide her time again before she could introduce her own concerns. |
| 1053 |
The bones of the situation the white farmers were easy to understand. They were the main targets of the blacks' hate, were heaped with abuse every time the Leader opened his mouth, but they earned the foreign currency which kept the country going, mainly to pay the interest on loans insisted on by... in her mind's eye Sylvia saw Andrew, a smiling debonair fellow holding out a large cheque with lines of noughts on it, while accepting with the other hand another cheque with an equal number of noughts. This was the visual shorthand she had devised to explain the machinery of Global Money to Rebecca, who had giggled, sighed and said 'Okay.' Because of the Leader's socialism, acquired late in life with all the force of a conversion, various policies he believed essential to Marxism had acquired the force of commandments. One was that no worker could be sacked, and that meant that every employer carried a dead weight of workers who, knowing they were safe, drank, did not work, lay about in the sun and stole everything -just like their betters. This was one item on the litany ofcomplaints that Sylvia had heard so often. Another was that they could not buy spare parts for machines which broke down, and it was impossible to buy new machines. Those that were imported went straight to the Ministers and their families. These complaints, the most frequent, were of less importance than the main one, which like so many main, crucial, basic facts, was seldom mentioned simply because it was too obviously important to need saying. |
| 1054 |
The boy's physical dislike was sometimes so strong, waves of pure murder rose up in him, and he contained them, trembling, his eyes burning. He was a silent boy. At first he read devotional books, and then a pupil from a fellow mission came on a Retreat and Matthew fell under the spell ofan ebullient joky personality, but even more, of his opinions. This boy, older than him, was political in the unformed way of that time long before the national movements and gave him black authors to read, from America, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and the pamphlets of a black religious sect that advocated killing all the whites as the devil's progeny. Matthew, still brilliant, still silent, went to college, leaving Father Paul behind, and there he was described long after, when he had become the Leader, as 'a silent observing youth, an ascetic, always reading political books, clever, not able to make friends a loner'. When the national movements exploded, Matthew found his place, and quickly, as a leader of his local group. Because he did not find it easy to join in argument and discussion, because he often sat rather out of things, really longing to be like the others, so easy and companionable, he acquired a reputation for cool judgement and political nous, and, of course, for information, since he had read so much. Then he was leader of the Party, after a nasty little jostle for power. The end justifies the means: his favourite saying. The Liberation War began and he was head of one of the rebellious armies. |
| 1055 |
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. And Zimlia, ill-governed before on ill-digested Marxism and tigs and tags of dogma, or remembered sentences from textbooks on economics, now rapidly plunged into corruption. |
| 1056 |
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. The doctors of her Faith would say to her, Disregard it, it is nothing, seasons of dryness come to us all. But she didn't need these experts on the soul, she did not need Father McGuire, she could diagnose herself. So why then did she need a spiritual mentor at all, if she was not going to tell him, simply because she knew what he would say? |
| 1057 |
And what made her think he was equipped to write about Africa? Or that he knew people who would care? He knew no one in that world, newspapers, journals, television; he stuck pretty close to his last, writing his books... but wait, he knew just the person, yes, he did. During that long time when he had frequented pubs and talked to people on park benches, with the little dog, he had acquired a crony, a boon companion. The Seventies: Fred Cope was spending his young life as was de rigueur then, demonstrating, assaulting policemen, shouting slogans and generally making himself noticed but when with Colin, who despised all that, could be persuaded at least sometimes to criticise it too. Both young men knew that the other was an aspect of himself kept on a leash. After all, if his judgement had not forbidden, Colin's temperament was one to enjoy noisy confrontation. As for Fred Cope, he discovered responsibility and sobriety in the Eighties. He married. He had a house. Ten years before he had mocked Colin for living in Hamp-stead: the word was being used as a pejorative by anyone aspiring to be in tune with the times. The Hampstead socialists, the Hamp-stead novel, Hampstead as a place, these were always good for a sneer, but as soon as they could afford it, these critics bought houses in Hampstead. And so had Fred Cope. He was now the editor of a newspaper, The Monitor, and sometimes the two met for a drink. Has there ever been a generation that has not watched, amazed though surely by now it has to be expected? |
| 1058 |
This kind of jeering, derision, this ridicule, came from her deepest self, and matched a generation of similar people. It was as ifsomething ugly and cruel had been exposed in England, something that had been hidden before, but was now like a beggar pulling aside rags to show ulcers. What had been respected was now scorned; decency, a respect for others, was now ridiculous. The world was being presented to readers through a coarse screen that got rid of anything pleasant or likeable: the tone was set by Rose Trimble and her kind who could never believe that anyone did anything except for self-interest. 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. |
| 1059 |
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. |
| 1060 |
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. She put her forearm beside his, to claim her rights, but he did not budge, and to keep her arm there meant she had to concentrate, or it would slide off. He did remove it when he demanded from the attendant who was offering drinks a whisky, threw it to the back of his throat at once, asked for another. Rose admired his authoritative handling of the attendant, whose smiles were false, Rose knew. She asked for a whisky and took it in a swallow, not to be outdone, and sat with the glass in her hand, waiting for a refill. 'Bloody skivers,' said this man, whom Rose knew was her enemy as a woman. 'They think they can get away with murder.' Rose did not know what he was complaining of, and only said, in an all-purpose formula, 'They're all the same.' 'Right on. Nothing to choose between any of them.' Now Rose saw two black men, who had been at the back of the plane, being waved forward by an attendant through to Club Class or perhaps even First. |
| 1061 |
We must never forget that our Zimlia is the focus for attempts at de-stabilisation of our successful socialist country. Viva Zimlia.' Frank Diddy, she discovered, regarded this kind of thing as a sop thrown out to appease the government watchdogs who suspected him and his colleagues of 'writing lies' about the country's progress. The journalists of The Post had not had an easy time of it since Liberation. They had been arrested, kept without charges, released, rearrested, threatened, and the heavies of the secret police, known in the offices of The Post simply as 'The Boys', dropped in to the newspaper'soffices and the journalists' homes threatening arrest and imprisonment at the slightest signs ofrecalci-trance. As for the rest, the truth about Zimlia, she heard the same as at Barry Angleton's and at Bill Case's. She was trying to get an interview with Franklin, not daunted, though she intended to ask him something like, They are saying you own four hotels, five farms, and a forest of hardwoods, which you are illegally cutting down. Is this true? She felt the worm of truth must come wriggling out of the knotholes of concealment. She was equal to him. He was a friend, wasn't he? Though she always boasted of this friendship, in fact she had not seen him for some years. In the matey days of early Liberation she had arrived in Zimlia, telephoned and was invited to meet him, though never alone, because he was with friends, colleagues, secretaries, and on one occasion his wife, a shy woman who merely smiled and never once opened her mouth. |
| 1062 |
She had told them she would come from one to half past two and supervise classes. She would have said from twelve, but she knew Father McGuire would not let her skip lunch. But she did not need to sleep, after all. Within a couple of weeks something like sixty books were transforming the village in the bush where children went to school but did not get an education, and where most adults might have done four or five years at school. Sylvia had driven herself to the Pynes who were going into Senga, had gone with them, and bought a quantity ofexercise books, biros, pencils, an atlas, a little globe, and some textbooks on how to teach. After all, she had no idea how a professional would go about it, and the teachers in the school on the rise where the dust these days was lying in heaps or blowing about in clouds had had no training in how to teach either. She had also gone to the depot to find her sewing machines, but they had not been heard of. She sat outside Rebecca's hut, where a tall tree threw deep shade in the middle of the day, and taught up to sixty people, as well as she could, hearing them read, setting writing models, and propped the atlas on a shelf on a tree trunk to illustrate geography lessons. Among her pupils might be the teachers from the school who helped her, but were learning as they did. The doves cooed in the trees. It was the sleepy time of the day for all of them, and Sylvia's need for sleep dragged down her lids, but she would not sleep, she would not. |
| 1063 |
Rebecca handed around water in stainless steel and aluminium basins stolen from the abandoned hospital. Not much water: the drought was biting, women were getting up at three and four in the morning to walk to a further river, the near one having run low and foetid, carrying jugs and cans on their heads. Not much washing was going on: clothes were certainly not being washed. It was as much as the women could do, to keep enough water for drinking and cooking. The smell from the crowd was strong. Sylvia now associated that smell with patience, with long-suffering, and with contained anger. When she took a sip from Rebecca's stolen basins she felt as she should do, but did not, when she drank the blood of Christ at Communion. The faces of the crowd, of all ages from children to old men and women, were rapt, hushed, attentive to every word. Education, this was education, for which most had hungered all their lives, and had expected to get when it had been promised by their government. At two thirty Sylvia called up from the crowd some boy or girl more advanced than the others, set them to read some paragraphs from Enid Blyton a great favourite: from Tarzan another; from the Jungle Book, which was more difficult, but liked: or from the prize of them all, Animal Farm which was their own story, as they said. Or the atlas was passed around at a page they had just done, to hammer in what they knew. She visited the village anyway, every morning after making sure her hospital was going well. |
| 1064 |
The object known to be most dangerous among the stolen goods was the dentist's chair that had once been in the middle of the village, where children played over it, but it had been taken away and thrown into a gulley, to get rid of its malign influences. Vervet monkeys played over it, without harm, and once Sylvia had seen an old baboon sitting in it, a piece of grass between his lips, looking around him in a contemplative way, like a grandfather sitting out his days on a porch. Edna Pyne got into the old lorry to drive to the Mission because she was being pursued by what she called her black dog, which even had a name. 'Pluto is snapping at my heels again,' she might say, claiming that the two house dogs Sheba and Lusaka knew when this shadowy haunter was present and growled at it. Cedric would not laugh at this little fantasy when she made a joke of it all, but said she was getting as bad as the blacks with their superstitious nonsense. Even five years ago Edna had had women friends, on nearby farms, whom she could drive over to visit when she was down, but now none was left. They were farming in Perth (Australia), in Devon; they had 'taken the gap' to South Africa they had gone. She hungered for women's talk, feeling she was in a desert ofmaleness, her husband, the men working in the house and garden, the people coming to the house, government inspectors, surveyors, contour ridge experts, and the new black busybodies always imposing more and more regulations. All were men. |
| 1065 |
Invited to sit down for lunch, Edna was going to, but Sylvia said she had to get down to the village, Edna mustn't take it personally. So Edna, a woman who liked her food, let the priest make her a sandwich of some tomato slices between unbuttered bread yes, butter was hard to get at the moment, with the drought and she followed Sylvia. She did not know what to expect, and was impressed. Everyone knew who Mrs Pyne was, of course, and smiles of welcome came her way. They brought her a stool, and forgot she was there. She sat with the sandwich pushed into her bag, because she suspected some of those present would be hungry, and she could not eat in front of them. Good Lord, she thought. Who could ever believe that I'd see a couple of bits of dry bread and a slice of tomato as a wicked luxury? She listened to Sylvia reading, in English, slowly pronouncing every word, from an African writer she had never heard of, though she did know that blacks wrote novels, while the people listened as if... God, they might be in church. Then Sylvia invited a young man, and then a girl, to tell the others what the story was about. They got it right, and Edna realised she was relieved that they did: she wanted this enterprise to be a success and was pleased with herself that she did. Sylvia was asking an old woman to tell them all about a drought she remembered when she was a little girl. The old woman spoke a jolting fumbling English, and Sylvia told a young woman to repeat it in better English. |
| 1066 |
At the rare cabinet meetings he appeared, made his views known and departed: not a comradely man, the Comrade Leader. The Under Minister had been for some time wanting an opportunity to discuss certain things with the Boss, hoped for even a few words tonight. Besides, he was secretly in love with the fascinating Gloria. Who was not? This big exuberant irrepressible sexy woman with her face like an invitation... where was she? Where were they, the Comrade President and the Mother of the Nation? 'I wonder if you know anything about a hospital in Kwadere?' Rose was saying was repeating, for he had not heard her the first time. Now this was a solecism indeed. In the first place, at his level he could not be expected to know about individual hospitals, and then this was an official reception, it was not the place or the time. But as it happened he did know about Kwadere. The files had been on his desk that day, three hospitals, begun but not finished, because the funds had been not to mince words stolen. (No one could regret more than he did that these things happened, but then, one had to expect mistakes.) For two of the hospitals, angry and by now cynical donors had put forward a plan that if they, the original benefactors, raised half the necessary sums, then the government would have to match them. Otherwise, too bad, no go, goodbye hospitals. In Kwadere the original donor had sent a delegation out to the derelict hospital and then said, no, they did not propose to fund it. |
| 1067 |
' The general style and attack of this piece was right for the papers she liked to use as a receptacle for her inspirations in Britain, but she decided to show it to Bill Case, and then Frank Diddy. Both men knew the origin of the famous deportee, but did not tell her. They did not like her. She had long ago outstayed her welcome. Besides, they did like the idea of this famous Smith being injected with new life, to provide an evening or two's amusement in the cafe. The piece was in The Post, which was not likely to notice one inflammatory paragraph among so many. She sent it to World Scandals, and it reached Colin, under the rule that if anything unpleasant is printed about one then it will be sent you by some well-wisher. Colin at once sued the paper for a hefty sum and an apology, but as is the way with such newspapers, the correction was put in tiny print where few people were likely to notice it. Julia was again branded as a Nazi; the suggestion that Sylvia was a spy seemed to Colin too ludicrous to bother with. Father McGuire saw the paragraph in The Post, but did not show it to Sylvia. It found its way to Mr Mandizi, who put it in the file for St Luke's Mission. Something happened that Sylvia had been dreading all the years she had been at the Mission. A girl who had acute appendicitis was carried up to her from the village by Clever and Zebedee. Father McGuire had taken the car to visit the Old Mission. Sylvia could not telephone the Pynes; either their telephone or the Mission's was not working. |
| 1068 |
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... |
| 1069 |
'When Mr Phiri arrived to take possession of the two farms, the garden of the house was black and fouled and the house well was full of rubbish. Along this road eight years ago Sylvia had been driven, dazed and dazzled by the strangeness of the bush, the alien magnificence, listening to Sister Molly warn her against the intransigence of the male world: 'That Kevin now, he hasn't caught on that the world has changed around him.' By this road, not far from here, in a hilly area full of caves and rocky clefts and baobabs, is a place where the Comrade Leader was summoned at intervals by spirit healers (n'gangas, witchdoctors, shamans) to night sessions where men (and a woman or two), who may be working in a kitchen or a factory, painted, wearing animal skins and monkey hair, danced themselves into a trance and informed him that he must kill or throw out the whites or he will displease the ancestors. He grovelled, wept, promised to do better then was driven back to town to take up his residence again in his fortress house, to plan for his next trip to meet the world's leaders, or a conference with the World Bank. The bus came. It was old, and it rattled and shook and emitted clouds of black greasy smoke that trailed for miles behind it, marking the road. It was full, yet a space appeared and admitted Sylvia and her two what were they, servants? but the people on the bus, prepared to be critical of this white woman travelling with them she was the only white among them saw her put her arms around the lads, who pressed up close to her, like children. |
| 1070 |
But 'culture shock' was hardly appropriate when that useful phrase may describe an agreeable dislocation felt travelling from London to Paris. No, it was not possible to imagine what depths of shock Clever and Zebedee had suffered, and therefore no notice should be taken of faces like tragic masks and tragic eyes. Haunted eyes? There was something that the new friends had no conception of, and could not have understood: the boys knew that Sylvia had died because of Joshua's curse. Had she been there to laugh at them, and to say, 'Oh, how can you think such nonsense?' they might not have believed her, but the guilt would have been less. As it was, they were being crushed by guilt, and they could not bear it. And so, as we all do with the worst and deepest pain, they began to forget. Clear in their minds was every minute of the long days while they waited for Sylvia to return from Senga to rescue them, while Rebecca died and Joshua lay waiting to die until Sylvia came. The long agony of anxiety they did not forget that, nor that moment when Sylvia reappeared like a little white ghost, to embrace them and whisk them away with her. After that the blur began, Joshua's bony grip on Sylvia's wrist and his murderous words, the frightening aeroplane, the arrival in this strange house, Sylvia's death... no, all that dimmed and soon Sylvia had become a friendly protective presence whom they remembered kneeling in the dust to splint up a leg, or sitting on the edge of the verandah between them, teaching them to read. |
| 1071 |
'Yes, that's what I'd really like. Or I could be like Thoreau and live by myself, near a lake and write about Nature.' Sylvia had died intestate, and so, the lawyers said, her money would go to her mother, as the next of kin. A good sum it was, well able to see the boys through their education. Andrew was appealed to, as Phyllida's old mate, and, dropping into or through London, he went to see Phyllida, where this conversation ensued. 'Sylvia would have wanted her money to educate the two African boys she seems to have adopted.' 'Oh yes, the black boys, I have heard about them.' 'I'm here formally to ask you to relinquish that money, because we are sure that is what she would have wished.' 'I don't remember her saying anything to me about it.' 'But, Phyllida, how could she?' Phyllida gave a little toss ofher head, with a small triumphant smile, that was amused, too, like someone applauding the vagaries ofFate, having won a fortune in the sweepstake, perhaps. 'Finders keepers,' she said. 'And anyhow, something nice is owed to me, that's how I see it.' There was a family discussion. Rupert, though a senior editor in his newspaper, and adequately paid, knew that even when he had finished paying for Margaret's school fees (Frances now paid for William) he would have to keep Meriel. Colin's intelligent novels, described by Rose Trimble as 'elite novels for the chattering classes', were not going to provide for more than the child, and Sophie, who as an actress was often resting. He spent so little on himself he hardly counted. |
| 1072 |
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 ain't 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. |
| 1073 |
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 wasn't 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 wasn't rite eather. He said what does it remind you of pretend its something. |
| 1074 |
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. |
| 1075 |
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. 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. |
| 1076 |
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. |
| 1077 |
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 wasn't 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. I was laffing because I thot it was going to be a hard thing for a mouse to do. |
| 1078 |
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. |
| 1079 |
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 wasn't. 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. |
| 1080 |
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 ain't 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. I got my rabits foot and my luky penny and my horshoe. Dr Strauss said don't be so superstishus Charlie. This is sience. I don't no what sience is but they all keep saying it so mabye its something that helps you have good luk. Anyway I'm keeping my rabits foot in one hand and my luky penny in the other hand with the hole in it. |
| 1081 |
The penny I meen. I wish I coud take the horshoe with me to but its hevy so I'll just leeve it in my jaket. Joe Carp from the bakery brot me a chokilat cake from Mr Donner and the folks at the bakery and they hope I get better soon. At the bakery they think I'm sick becaus that's what Prof Nemur said I shoud tell them and nothing about an operashun for getting smart. that's a secrit until after in case it don't werk or something goes wrong. Then Miss Kinnian came to see me and she brout me some magizenes to reed, and she lookd kind of nervus and skared. She fixd up the flowres on my tabel and put evrything nice and neet not messd up like I made it. And she fixd the pilow under my hed. She likes me alot becaus I try very hard to lern evrything not like some of the pepul at the adult center who don't reely care. She wants me to get smart. I know. Then Prof Nemur said I cant have any more visiters becaus I got to rest. I askd Prof Nemur if I coud beet Algernon in the race after the operashun and he sayd mabye. If the operashun werks good I'll show that mouse I can be as smart as he is even smarter. Then I'll be abel to reed better and spell the werds good and know lots of things and be like other pepul. Boy that woud serprise everyone. If the operashun werks and I get smart mabye I'll be abel to find my mom and dad and sister and show them. Boy woud they be serprised to see me smart just like them and my sister. Prof Nemur says if it werks good and its perminent they will make other pepul like me smart also. |
| 1082 |
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. |
| 1083 |
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 ain't 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. 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. |
| 1084 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1085 |
I like to sit and wach the collidge boys and girls. They fool around somtimes but mostly they talk about all kinds of things just like the bakers do at Donners bakery. Burt says its about art and polatics and riligon. I don't know what those things are about but I know riligon is god. Mom use to tell me all about him and the things he done to make the werld. She said I shoud always love god and prey to him. I don't remembir how to prey to him but I think mom use to make me prey to him a lot when I was a kid that he shoud make me get better and not be sick. I don't rimember how I was sick. I think it was about me not being smart. Anyway Burt says if the experimint werks I'll be able to understand all those things the studints are talking about and I said do you think I'll be smart like them and he laffed and said those kids arent so smart you'll pass them as if their standing still. He interduced me to alot of the studints and some of them look at me funny like I don't belong in a collidge. 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. |
| 1086 |
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. 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. |
| 1087 |
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. |
| 1088 |
you'll never have to go back to that Warren home. I ain't 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. 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. |
| 1089 |
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 wasn't 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1090 |
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. 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. |
| 1091 |
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 ain't true and I wantid to lern. 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. |
| 1092 |
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. |
| 1093 |
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. 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. |
| 1094 |
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. |
| 1095 |
He was fat and it was hard for him to get a job because he use to paint pepuls houses and he got very slow going up and down the ladder. When I once tolld my mom I wantid to be a painter like Uncle Herman my sister Norma said yeah Charlies going to be the artist of the family. And dad slappd her face and tolld her not to be so goddam nasty to her brother. I don't no what a artist is but if Norma got slappd for saying it I gess its not a nice thing. I always feeled bad when Norma got slappd for being meen to me. When I get smart I'll go visit her. March 30 Tonite after werk Miss Kinnian came to the teeching room near the labatory. She looked glad to see me but nervus. She looks yunger then I remembired her. I tolld her I was trying very hard to be smart. She said I have confidense in you Charlie the way you strugled so much to reed and rite better then all the others. I know you can do it. At werst you will have it all for a little wile and your doing somthing for other retarded pepul. We startid to reed a very hard book. I never red such a hard book before. Its called Robinson Crusoe about a man who gets merooned on a dessert iland. he's smart and figgers out all kinds of things so he can have a house and food and he's a good swimmer. Only I feel sorry for him because he's all alone and he has no frends. But I think their must be somebody else on the iland because theres a picture of him with his funny umbrela looking at feetprints. I hope he gets a frend and not be so lonely. |
| 1096 |
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. 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. |
| 1097 |
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 wasn't 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1098 |
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. Now that makes me feel bad because I would never of hurt the baby. When I go to Dr Straus office I got to tell him about that. April 6 Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isn't in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I don't, see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it, But, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,, April 7 I used the comma wrong. its punctuation. Miss Kinnian told me to look up long words in the dictionary to learn to spell them. I said whats the difference if you can read it anyway. She said its part of your education so from now on I'll look up all the words I'm not sure how to spell. |
| 1099 |
I like to look up all the hard words in the dictionary and I remember them. And I try to write these progress reports very careful but that's hard to do. I am reading a lot now, and Miss Kinnian says I read very fast. And I even understand a lot of the things I'm reading about, and they stay in my mind. There are times when I can close my eyes and think of a page and it all comes back like a picture. But other things come into my head too. Sometimes I close my eyes and I see a clear picture. Like this morning just after I woke up, I was laying in bed with my eyes open. It was like a big hole opened up in the walls of my mind and I can just walk through. I think its far back... a long time ago when I first started working at Donner's Bakery. I see the street where the bakery is. Fuzzy at first and then it gets patchy with some things so real they are right here now in front of me, and other things stay blurred, and I'm not sure... A little old man with a baby carriage made into a pushcart with a charcoal burner, and the smell of roasting chestnuts, and snow on the ground. A young fellow, skinny with wide eyes and a scared look on his face looking up at the store sign. What does it say? Blurred letters in a way that don't make sense. I know now that the sign says donner's bakery, but looking back in my memory at the sign I can't read the words through his eyes. None of the signs make sense. I think that fellow with the scared look on his face is me. Bright neon lights. Christmas trees and sidewalk peddlers. |
| 1100 |
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. |
| 1101 |
We just sit there, and I talk, and Dr. Strauss listens. It's called therapy, and that means talking about things will make me feel better. I told him one of the things that bothers me is about women. Like dancing with that girl Ellen got me all excited. So we talked about it and I got a funny feeling while I was talking, cold and sweaty, and a buzzing inside my head and I thought I was going to throw up. Maybe because I always thought it was dirty and bad to talk about that. But Dr. Strauss said what happened to me after the party was a wet dream, and it's a natural thing that happens to boys. So even if I'm getting intelligent and learning a lot of new things, he thinks I'm still a boy about women. It's confusing, but I'm going to find out all about my life. April 15 I'm reading a lot these days and almost everything is staying in my mind. Besides history and geography and arithmetic, Miss Kinnian says I should start learning foreign languages. Prof. Nemur gave me some more tapes to play while I sleep. I still don't know how the conscious and unconscious mind works, but Dr. Strauss says not to worry yet. He made me promise that when I start learning college subjects in a couple of weeks I won't read any books on psychology — that is, until he gives me permission. He says it will confuse me and make me think about psychological theories instead of about my own ideas and feelings. But it's okay to read novels. This week I read The Great Gatsby, An American Tragedy, and Look Homeward, Angel. |
| 1102 |
I never knew about men and women doing things like that. April 16 I feel a lot better today, but I'm still angry that all the time people were laughing and making fun of me. When I become intelligent the way Prof. Nemur says, with much more than twice my I. Q. of 70, then maybe people will like me and be my friends. I'm not sure what I. Q. is anyway. Prof. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were — like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I. Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I. Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff. When I asked Burt Seldon, who gives me my intelligence tests and works with Algernon, he said that some people would say both of them were wrong and according to the things he's been reading up on, the I. Q. measures a lot of different things including some of the things you learned already and it really isn't a good measure of intelligence at all. So I still don't know what I. Q. is, and everybody says it's something different. Mine is about a hundred now, and it's going to be over a hundred and fifty soon, but they'll still have to fill me up with the stuff. I didn't want to say anything, but I don't see how if they don't know what'll is, or where it is — how they know how much of it you've got. Prof Nemur says I have to take a Rorschach Test the day after tomorrow. |
| 1103 |
I wonder what that is. April 17 I had a nightmare last night, and this morning, after I woke up, I free-associated the way Dr. Strauss told me to do when I remember my dreams. Think about the dream and just let my mind wander until other thoughts come up in my mind. I keep on doing that until my mind goes blank. Dr. Strauss says that it means I've reached a point where my subconscious is trying to block my conscious from remembering. It's a wall between the present and the past. Sometimes the wall stays up and sometimes it breaks down and I can remember what's behind it. Like this morning. The dream was about Miss Kinnian reading my progress reports. In the dream I sit down to write but I can't write or read any more. It's all gone. I get frightened so I ask Gimpy at the bakery to write for me. But when Miss Kinnian reads the report she gets angry and tears the pages up because they've got dirty words in them. When I get home Prof. Nemur and Dr. Strauss are waiting for me and they give me a beating for writing dirty things in the progress report. When they leave me I pick up the torn pages but they turn into lace valentines with blood all over them. It was a horrible dream but I got out of bed and wrote it all down and then I started to free associate. Bakery... baking... the urn... someone kicking me... fall down... bloody all over... writing... big pencil on a red valentine... a little gold heart... a locket... a chain... all covered with blood... and he's laughing at me... |
| 1104 |
The chain is from a locket... spinning around... flashing the sunlight into my eyes. And I like to watch it spin... watch the chain... all bunched up and twisting and spinning... and a little girl is watching me. Her name is Miss Kin — I mean Harriet. "Harriet. .. Harriet... we all love Harriet." And then there's nothing. It's blank again. Miss Kinnian reading my progress reports over my shoulder. Then we're at the Adult Center for the Retarded, and she's reading over my shoulder as I write my composishuns compositions. School changes into P. S. 13 and I'm eleven years old and Miss Kinnian is eleven years old too, but now she's not Miss Kinnian. She's a little girl with dimples and long curls and her name is Harriet. We all love Harriet. It's Valentines Day. I remember... I remember what happened at P. S. 13 and why they had to change my school and send me to P. S. 222. It was because of Harriet. I see Charlie — eleven years old. He has a little gold-color locket he once found in the street. There's no chain, but he has it on a string, and he likes to twirl the locket so that it bunches up the string, and then watch it unwind, spinning around with the sun flicking into his eyes. Sometimes when the kids play catch they let him play in the middle and he tries to get the ball before one of them catches it. He likes to be in the middle — even if he never catches the ball — and once when Hymie Roth dropped the ball by mistake and he picked it up they wouldn't let him throw it but he had to go in the middle again. |
| 1105 |
"Now watch me," says Frank, and he repeats Gimpy's performance. Charlie is confused. There are differences. Gimpy holds his elbows out as he rolls the dough, like a bird's wings, but Frank keeps his arms close to his sides. Gimpy keeps his thumbs together with the rest of his fingers as he kneads the dough, but Frank works with the flat of his palms, keeping thumbs apart from his other fingers and up in the air. Worrying about these things makes it impossible for Charlie to move when Gimpy says, "Go ahead, try it." Charlie shakes his head. "Look, Charlie, I'm gonna do it again slow. Now you watch everything I do, and do each part along with me. Okay? But try to remember everything so then you'll be able to do the whole thing alone. Now come on — like this." Charlie frowns as he watches Gimpy pull off a section of dough and roll it into a ball. He hesitates, but then he picks up the knife and slices off a piece of dough and sets it down in the center of the table. Slowly, keeping his elbows out exactly as Gimpy does, he rolls it into a ball. He looks from his own hands to Gimpy's, and he is careful to keep his fingers exactly the same way, thumbs together with the rest of his fingers — slightly cupped. He has to do it right, the way Gimpy wants him to do it. There are echoes inside him that say, do it right and they will like you. And he wants Gimpy and Frank to like him. When Gimpy has finished working his dough into a ball, he stands back, and so does Charlie. "Hey, that's great. |
| 1106 |
Would he ever learn to read what was in the balloons? If they gave him enough time — if they didn't rush him or push him too fast — he would get it. But nobody has time. Charlie pulls his legs up and opens the comic book to the first page where the Batman and Robin are swinging up a long rope to the side of a building. Someday, he decides, he is going to read. And then he will be able to read the story. He feels a hand on his shoulder and he looks up. It is Gimpy holding out the brass disc and chain, letting it swing and twirl around so that it catches the light. "Here," he says gruffly, tossing it into Charlie's lap, and then he limps away... I never thought about it before, but that was a nice thing for him to do. Why did he? Anyway, that is my memory of the time, clearer and more complete than anything I have ever experienced before. Like looking out of the kitchen window early when the morning light is still gray. I've come a long way since then, and I owe it all to Dr. Strauss and Professor Nemur, and the other people here at Beekman. But what must Frank and Gimpy think and feel now, seeing how I've changed? April 22 People at the bakery are changing. Not only ignoring me. I can feel the hostility. Donner is arranging for me to join the baker's union, and I've gotten another raise. The rotten thing is that all of the pleasure is gone because the others resent me. In a way, I can't blame them. They don't understand what has happened to me, and I can't tell them. People are not proud of me the way I expected — not at all. |
| 1107 |
I left without waiting for the outcome. It was dark, and I walked for a long time trying to figure out why I was so frightened. I was seeing them clearly for the first time — not gods or even heroes, but just two men worried about getting something out of their work Yet, if Nemur is right and the experiment is a success, what does it matter? Theres so much to do, so many plans to make. I'll wait until tomorrow to ask them about taking Miss Kinnian to a movie to celebrate my raise. April 26 I know I shouldn't hang around the college when I'm thorough at the lab, but seeing the young men and women going back and forth carrying books and hearing them talk about all the things they're learning in their classes excites me. I wish I could sit and talk with them over coffee in the Campus Bowl Luncheonette when they get together to argue about books and politics and ideas. It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy — about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind. Sometimes I listen in on the conversations at the tables around me, and pretend I'm a college student, even though I'm a lot older than they are. I carry books around, and I've started to smoke a pipe. It's silly, but since I belong at the lab I feel as if I'm a part of the university. I hate to go home to that lonely room. April 27 I've made friends with some of the boys at the Campus Bowl. |
| 1108 |
They were arguing about whether or not Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare's plays. One of the boys — the fat one with the sweaty face — said that Marlowe wrote all of Shakespeare's plays. But Lenny, the short kid with the dark glasses, didn't believe that business about Marlowe, and he said that everyone knew that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays because Shakespeare had never been to college and never had the education that shows up in those plays. That's when the one with the freshman beanie said he had heard a couple of guys in the men's room talking about how Shakespeare's plays were really written by a lady. And they talked about politics and art and God. I never before heard anyone say that there might not be a God. That frightened me, because for the first time I began to think about what God means. Now I understand one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you've believed in all your life aren't true, and that nothing is what it appears to be. All the time they talked and argued, I felt the excitement bubble up inside me. This was what I wanted to do — go to college and hear people talk about important things. I spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I'm not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now — Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner — everything I can get my hands on — feeding a hunger that can't be satisfied. |
| 1109 |
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. |
| 1110 |
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. 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? |
| 1111 |
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. |
| 1112 |
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. But I turned away so that I would not see what Gimpy rang up on the cash register. I wanted to know the truth, and yet I was afraid of what I might learn. "Two forty-five, Mrs. Wheeler," he said. The ring of the sale. |
| 1113 |
The counting of change. The slam of the drawer. "Thank you, Mrs. Wheeler." I turned just in time to see him putting his hand into his pocket, and I heard the faint clink of coins. How many times had he used me as a go-between to deliver packages to her, undercharging her so that later they could split the difference? Had he used me all these years to help him steal? I couldn't take my eyes off Gimpy as he clomped around behind the counter, perspiration streaming down from under his paper cap. He seemed animated and good-natured, but looking up he caught my eye, frowned and turned away. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to go behind the counter and smash his face in. I don't remember ever hating anyone before — but this morning I hated Gimpy with all my heart. Pouring this all out on paper in the quiet of my room has not helped. Every time I think of Gimpy stealing from Mr. Donner I want to smash something. Fortunately, I don't think I'm capable of violence. I don't think I ever hit anyone in my life. But I still have to decide what to do. Tell Donner that his trusted employee has been stealing from him all these years? Gimpy would deny it, and I could never prove it was true. And what would it do to Mr. Donner? I don't know what to do. May 9 I can't sleep. This has gotten to me. I owe Mr. Donner too much to stand by and see him robbed this way. I'd be as guilty as Gimpy by my silence. And yet, is it my place to inform on him? The thing that bothers me most is that when he sent me on deliveries he used me to help him steal from Donner. |
| 1114 |
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... |
| 1115 |
What has he done wrong? And feeling the wetness in his trousers and the trickling down his leg, he sits there waiting for the slap he knows will come when his mother returns. The scene fades, but from that time Norma spent all her free moments with her friends, or playing alone in her room. She kept the door to her room closed, and I was forbidden to enter without her permission. I recall once overhearing Norma and one of her girl friends playing in her room, and Norma shouting: "He is not my real brother! He's just a boy we took in because we felt sorry for him. My mamma told me, and she said I can tell everyone now that he's not really my brother at all." I wish this memory were a photograph so that I could tear it up and throw it back into her face. I want to call back across the years and tell her I never meant to stop her from getting her dog. She could have had it all to herself, and I wouldn't have fed it, or brushed it, or played with it — and I would never have made it like me more than it liked her. I only wanted her to play games with me the way we used to. I never meant to do anything that would hurt her at all. June 6 My first real quarrel with Alice today. My fault. I wanted to see her. Often, after a disturbing memory or dream, talking to her — just being with her — makes me feel better. But it was a mistake to go down to the Center to pick her up. I had not been back to the Center for Retarded Adults since the operation, and the thought of seeing the place was exciting. |
| 1116 |
It's on Twenty-third Street, east of Fifth Avenue, in an old schoolhouse that has been used by the Beekman University Clinic for the last five years as a center for experimental education — special classes for the handicapped. The sign outside on the doorway, framed by the old spiked gateway, is just a gleaming brass plate that says C. R. A. Beekman Extension. Her class ended at eight, but I wanted to see the room where — not so long ago — I had struggled over simple reading and writing and learned to count change of a dollar. I went inside, slipped up to the door, and, keeping out of sight, I looked through the window. Alice was at her desk, and in a chair beside her was a thin-faced woman I didn't recognize. She was frowning that open frown of unconcealed puzzlement, and I wondered what Alice was trying to explain. Near the blackboard was Mike Dorni in his wheelchair, and there in his usual first-row first-seat was Lester Braun, who, Alice said, was the smartest in the group. Lester had learned easily what I had struggled over, but he came when he felt like it, or he stayed away to earn money waxing floors. I guess if he had cared at all — if it had been important to him as it was to me — they would have used him for this experiment. There were new faces, too, people I didn't know. Finally, I got up the nerve to go in. "It's Charlie!" said Mike, whirling his wheelchair around. I waved to him. Bernice, the pretty blonde with empty eyes, looked up and smiled dully. "Where ya been, Charlie? |
| 1117 |
My confused feeling for her had been holding me back, and I had clung to her out of my fear of being forced out on my own, and cut adrift. But with the freedom came a sadness. I wanted to be in love with her. I wanted to overcome my emotional and sexual fears, to marry, have children, settle down. Now it's impossible. I am just as far away from Alice with an I. Q. of 185 as I was when I had an I. Q. of 70. And this time we both know it. June 8 What drives me out of the apartment to prowl through the city? I wander through the streets alone — not the relaxing stroll of a summer night, but the tense hurry to get — where? Down alleyways, looking into doorways, peering into half-shuttered windows, wanting someone to talk to and yet afraid to meet anyone. Up one street, and down another, through the endless labyrinth, hurling myself against the neon cage of the city. Searching... for what? I met a woman in Central Park. She was sitting on a bench near the lake, with a coat clutched around her despite the heat. She smiled and motioned for me to sit beside her. We looked at the bright skyline on Central Park South, the honeycomb of lighted cells against the blackness, and I wished I could absorb them all. Yes, I told her, I was from New York. No, I had never been to Newport News, Virginia. That's where she was from, and where she had married this sailor who was at sea now, and she hadn't seen him in two and a half years. She twisted and knotted a handkerchief, using it from time to time to wipe the beaded sweat from her forehead. |
| 1118 |
Even in the dim light reflected from the lake, I could see that she wore a great deal of make-up, but she looked attractive with her straight dark hair loose to her shoulders — except that her face was puffy and swollen as if she had just gotten up from sleep. She wanted to talk about herself, and I wanted to listen. Her father had given her a good home, an education, everything a wealthy shipbuilder could give his only daughter — but not forgiveness. He would never forgive her elopement with the sailor. She took my hand as she spoke, and rested her head on my shoulder. "The night Gary and I were married," she whispered, "I was a terrified virgin. And he just went crazy. First, he had to slap me and beat me. And then he took me with no love-making. That was the last time we were ever together. I never let him touch me again." She could probably tell by the trembling of my hand that I was startled. It was too violent and intimate for me. Feeling my hand stir, she gripped it tighter as if she had to finish her story before she could let me go. It was important to her, and I sat quietly as one sits before a bird that feeds from your palm. "Not that I don't like men," she assured me with wide-eyed openness. "I've been with other men. Not him, but lots of others. Most men are gentle and tender with a woman. They make love slowly, with caresses and kisses first." She looked at me meaningfully, and let her open palm brush back and forth against mine. It was what I had heard about, read about, dreamed about. |
| 1119 |
Finally, when it became apparent that nothing could be done about it, he accepted the fact that we would have to spend our first night in Chicago at the Independence. As it turned out, most of the younger psychologists were staying at the Independence, and that was where the big first-night parties were. Here, people had heard about the experiment, and most of them knew who I was. Wherever we went, someone came up and asked my opinions on everything from the effects of the new tax to the latest archaeological discoveries in Finland. It was challenging, and my storehouse of general knowledge made it easy for me to talk about almost anything. But after a while I could see that Nemur was annoyed at all the attention I was getting. When an attractive young clinician from Falmouth College asked me if I could explain some of the causes of my own retardation, I told her that Professor Nemur was the man to answer that. It was the chance he had been waiting for to show his authority, and for the first time since we'd known each other he put his hand on my shoulder. "We don't know exactly what causes the type of phenylketonuria that Charlie was suffering from as a child — some unusual biochemical or genetic situation, possibly ionizing radiation or natural radiation or even a virus attack on the fetus — whatever it was resulted in a defective gene which produces a, shall we say, 'maverick enzyme' that creates defective biochemical reactions. And, of course, newly produced amino acids compete with the normal enzymes causing brain damage." The girl frowned. |
| 1120 |
Until you've had a woman like her riding you, don't think you can understand the man who has." I didn't say anything, and I could see he wanted to get back to the hotel. 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. |
| 1121 |
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. |
| 1122 |
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. |
| 1123 |
At that moment Burt took the cage for his demonstration. He explained the complexity of the shifting lock, and the problem-solving required each time the lock was to be opened. (Thin plastic bolts fell into place in varying patterns and had to be controlled by the mouse, who depressed a series of levers in the same order.) As Algernon's intelligence increased, his problem-solving speed increased — that much was obvious. But then Burt revealed one thing I had not known. At the peak of his intelligence, Algernon's performance had become variable. There were times, according to Burt's report, when Algernon refused to work at all — even when apparently hungry — and other times when he would solve the problem but, instead of taking his food reward, would hurl himself against the walls of his cage. When someone from the audience asked Burt if he was suggesting that this erratic behavior was directly caused by increased intelligence, Burt ducked the question. "As far as I am concerned," he said, "there's not enough evidence to warrant that conclusion. There are other possibilities. It is possible that both the increased intelligence and the erratic behavior at this level were created by the original surgery, instead of one being a function of the other. It's also possible that this erratic behavior is unique to Algernon. We didn't find it in any of the other mice, but then none of the others achieved as high a level of intelligence nor maintained it for as long as Algernon has." I realized immediately that this information had been withheld from me. |
| 1124 |
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. |
| 1125 |
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. |
| 1126 |
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. At first, he was lost against the damask tablecloth, a blur of white on white, until a woman at the table screamed, knocking her chair backwards as she leaped to her feet. |
| 1127 |
Y., denied any knowledge of her brother's whereabouts. Miss Gordon said, "We haven't seen him or heard from him in more than seventeen years." Miss Gordon says she believed her brother dead until last March, when the head of the psychology department at Beekman University approached her for permission to use Charlie in an experiment. "My mother told me he had been sent to the Warren place," (Warren State Home and Training School, in Warren, Long Island) said Miss Gordon, "and that he died there a few years later. I had no idea then that he was still alive." Miss Gordon requests that anyone who has any news about her brother's whereabouts communicate with the family at their home address. The father, Matthew Gordon, who is not living with his wife and daughter, now operates a barbershop in the Bronx. I stared at the news story for a while, and then I turned back and looked at the picture again. How can I describe them? I can't say I remember Rose's face. Although the recent photograph is a clear one, I still see it through the gauze of childhood. I knew her, and I didn't know her. Had we passed on the street, I would not have recognized her, but now, knowing she is my mother, I can make out the faint details — yes! Thin, drawn into exaggerated lines. Sharp nose and chin. And I can almost hear her chatter and bird-screech. Hair done up in a bun, severely. Piercing me with her dark eyes. I want her to take me into her arms and tell me I am a good boy, and at the same time I want to turn away to avoid a slap. |
| 1128 |
There on the bed, Charlie did not understand what they were saying, but now it hurts. If I could reach out into the past of my memories, I would make her see how much she was hurting me. This is no time to go to her. Not until I've had time to work it out for myself. Fortunately, as a precaution, I withdrew my savings from the bank as soon as I arrived in New York Eight hundred and eighty-six dollars won't last long, but it will give me time to get my bearings. I've checked into the Camden Hotel on 4lst Street, a block from Times Square. New York! All the things I've read about it! Gotham... the melting pot... Baghdad-on-the-Hudson. City of light and color. Incredible that I've lived and worked all my life just a few stops away on the subway and been to Times Square only once — with Alice. It's hard to keep from calling her. I've started and stopped myself several times. I've got to keep away from her. So many confusing thoughts to get down. I tell myself that as long as I keep taping my progress reports, nothing will be lost; the record will be complete. Let them be in the dark for a while; I was in the dark for more than thirty years. But I'm tired now. Didn't get to sleep on the plane yesterday, and I can't keep my eyes open. I'll pick up at this point tomorrow. June 16 Called Alice, but hung up before she answered. Today I found a furnished apartment. Ninety-five dollars a month is more than I planned to spend, but it's on Forty-third and Tenth Avenue and I can get to the library in ten minutes to keep up with my reading and study. |
| 1129 |
The apartment is on the fourth floor, four rooms, and there's a rented piano in it. The landlady says that one of these days the rental service will pull it out, but maybe by that time I can learn to play it. Algernon is a pleasant companion. At mealtimes he takes his place at the small gateleg table. He likes pretzels, and today he took a sip of beer while we watched the ball game on TV. I think he rooted for the Yankees. I'm going to move most of the furniture out of the second bedroom and use the room for Algernon. I plan to build him a three-dimensional maze out of scrap plastic that I can pick up cheaply downtown. There are some complex maze variations I'd like him to learn to be sure he keeps in shape. But I'm going to see if I can find some motivation other than food. There must be other rewards that will induce him to solve problems. Solitude gives me a chance to read and think, and now that the memories are coming through again — to rediscover my past, to find out who and what I really am. If anything should go wrong, I'll have at least that. June 19 Met Fay Lillman, my neighbor across the hall. "When I came back with an armful of groceries, I discovered I had locked myself out, and I remembered that the front fire escape connected my living room window and the apartment directly across the hall. The radio was on loud and brassy, so I knocked — softly at first, and then louder. "Come on in! Door's open!" I pushed the door, and froze, because standing in front of an easel, painting, was a slender blonde in pink bra and panties. |
| 1130 |
What I hadn't noticed before was that the part of the wall behind me had been cleared away — all the furniture pushed to one side of the room or the center, so that the far wall (the plaster of which had been torn off to expose the brick) served as an art gallery. Paintings were crowded to the ceiling and others were stacked against each other on the floor. Several of them were self-portraits, including two nudes. The painting she had been working on when I came in, the one on the easel, was a half-length nude of herself, showing her hair long (not the way she wore it now, up in blonde braids coiled around her head like a crown) down to her shoulders with part of her long tresses twisted around the front and resting between her breasts. She had painted her breasts uptilted and firm with the nipples an unrealistic lollipop-red. When I heard her coming back with the beer, I spun away from the easel quickly, stumbled over some books, and pretended to be interested in a small autumn landscape on the wall. I was relieved to see that she had slipped into a thin ragged housecoat — even though it had holes in all the wrong places — and I could look directly at her for the first time. Not exactly beautiful, but her blue eyes and pert snub nose gave her a catlike quality that contrasted with her robust, athletic movements. She was about thirty-five, slender and well proportioned. She set the beers on the hardwood floor, curled up beside them in front of the sofa, and motioned for me to do the same. |
| 1131 |
Her voice, her eyes — everything about her was an invitation. And she lived out the window and just a fire escape away. June 20 Perhaps I should have waited before going to see Matt; or not gone to see him at all. I don't know. Nothing turns out the way I expect it to. With the clue that Matt had opened a barbershop somewhere in the Bronx, it was a simple matter to find him. I remembered he had sold for a barber supply company in New York. That led me to Metro Barber Shop Supplies who had a barbershop account under the name of Gordons Barber Shop on Went-worth Street in the Bronx. Matt had often talked about a barbershop of his own. How he hated selling! What battles they had about it! Rose screaming that a salesman was at least a dignified occupation, but she would never have a barber for a husband. And oh, wouldn't Margaret Phinney snicker at the "barber's wife." And what about Lois Meiner whose husband was a claims examiner for the Alarm Casualty Company? Wouldn't she stick her nose up in the air! During the years he worked as a salesman, hating every day of it (especially after he saw the movie version of Death of a Salesman) Matt dreamed that he would someday become his own boss. That must have been in his mind in those days when he talked about saving money and gave me my haircuts down in the basement. They were good haircuts too, he boasted, a lot better than I'd get in that cheap barbershop on Scales Avenue. When he walked out on Rose, he walked out on selling too, and I admired him for that. |
| 1132 |
I was excited at the thought of seeing him. Memories were warm ones. Matt had been willing to take me as I was. Before Norma: the arguments that weren't about money or impressing the neighbors were about me — that I should be let alone instead of being pushed to do what other kids did. And after Norma: that I had a right to a life of my own even though I wasn't like other children. Always defending me. I couldn't wait to see the expression on his face. He was someone I'd be able to share this with. Wentworth Street was a rundown section of the Bronx. Most of the stores on the street had "For Rent" signs in the windows, and others were closed for the day. But halfway down the block from the bus stop there was a barber pole reflecting a candy cane of light from the window. The shop was empty except for the barber reading a magazine in the chair nearest the window. When he looked up at me, I recognized Matt — stocky, red-cheeked, a lot older and nearly bald with a fringe of gray hair bordering the sides of his head — but still Matt. Seeing me at the door, he tossed the magazine aside. "No waiting. You're next." I hesitated, and he misunderstood. "Usually not open at this hour, mister. Had an appointment with one of my regulars, but he didn't show. Just about to close. Lucky for you I sat down to rest my feet. Best haircut and shave in the Bronx." As I let myself be drawn into the shop, he bustled around, pulling out scissors and combs and a fresh neckcloth. "Everything sanitary, as you can see, which is more than I can say for most barbershops in this neighborhood. |
| 1133 |
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. |
| 1134 |
Now I can see that unknowingly I joined them in laughing at myself. That hurts most of all. I have often reread my early progress reports and seen the illiteracy, the childish naivete, the mind of low intelligence peering from a dark room, through the keyhole, at the dazzling light outside. In my dreams and memories I've seen Charlie smiling happily and uncertainly at what people around him were saying. Even in my dullness I knew I was inferior. Other people had something I lacked — something denied me. In my mental blindness, I had believed it was somehow connected with the ability to read and write, and I was sure that if I could get those skills I would have intelligence too. Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men. A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger. This day was good for me. I've got to stop this childish worrying about myself — my past and my future. Let me give something of myself to others. I've got to use my knowledge and skills to work in the field of increasing human intelligence. Who is better equipped? Who else has lived in both worlds? Tomorrow, I'm going to get in touch with the board of directors at the Welberg Foundation and ask for permission to do some independent work on the project. If they'll let me, I may be able to help them. I have some ideas. There is so much that can be done with this technique, if it is perfected. If I could be made into a genius, what about the more than five million mentally retarded in the United States? |
| 1135 |
That's what I discovered about myself last night. I told myself I was wandering around like a lost soul, and then I saw that I was lost. "Somehow I've become separated emotionally from everyone and everything. And what I was really searching for out there in the dark streets — the last damned place I could ever find it — was a way to make myself a part of people again emotionally, while still retaining my freedom intellectually. I've got to grow up. For me it means everything. ..." I talked on and on, spewing out of myself every doubt and fear that bubbled to the surface. She was my sounding board and she sat there hypnotized. I felt myself grow warm, feverish, until I thought my body was on fire. I was burning out the infection in front of someone I cared about, and that made all the difference. But it was too much for her. What had started as trembling became tears. The picture over the couch caught my eye — the cringing, red-cheeked maiden — and I wondered what Alice was feeling just then. I knew she would give herself to me, and I wanted her, but what about Charlie? Charlie might not interfere if I wanted to make love to Fay. He would probably just stand in the doorway and watch. But the moment I came close to Alice, he panicked. Why was he afraid to let me love Alice? She sat on the couch, looking at me, waiting to see what I would do. And what could I do? I wanted to take her in my arms and... As I began to think of it, the warning came. "Are you all right, Charlie? You're so pale." I sat down on the couch beside her. |
| 1136 |
I don't give a damn any more. And his eyes went wide as he watched. June 29 Before I go back to the lab I'm going to finish the projects I've started since I left the convention. I phoned Landsdoff at the New Institute for Advanced Study, about the possibility of utilizing the pair-production nuclear photoeffect for exploratory work in biophysics. At first he thought I was a crackpot, but after I pointed out the flaws in his article in the New Institute Journal he kept me on the phone for nearly an hour. He wants me to come to the Institute to discuss my ideas with his group. I might take him up on it after I've finished my work at the lab — if there is time. That's the problem, of course. I don't know how much time I have. A month? A year? The rest of my life? That depends on what I find out about the psychophysical side-effects of the experiment. June 30 I've stopped wandering the streets now that I have Fay. I've given her a key to my place. She kids me about my locking the door, and I kid her about the mess her place is in. She's warned me not to try to change her. Her husband divorced her five years ago because she couldn't be bothered about picking things up and taking care of her home. That's the way she is about most things that seem unimportant to her. She just can't or won't bother. The other day I discovered a stack of parking tickets in a corner behind a chair — there must have been forty or fifty of them. When she came in with the beer, I asked her why she was collecting them. |
| 1137 |
Two days later the girl found the two hundred and thirty-two dollars that Fay kept in her dresser drawer, and disappeared with the money. Fay hadn't reported it to the police — and as it turned out, she didn't even know the girl's last name. "What good would it do to notify the police?" she wanted to know. "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. |
| 1138 |
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. |
| 1139 |
The roadside sign said 15 mph, so I drove slowly past the blocks of buildings looking for the administrative offices. A tractor came across the meadow in my direction, and in addition to the man at the wheel there were two others hanging on the rear. I stuck out my head and called: "Can you tell me where Mr. Winslow's office is?" The driver stopped the tractor and pointed to the left and ahead. "Main Hospital. Turn left and bear to your right." I couldn't help noticing the staring young man riding at the rear of the tractor, hanging on to a handrail. He was unshaven, and there was the trace of an empty smile. He had on a sailor's hat with the brim pulled down childishly to shield his eyes, although there was no sun out. I caught his glance for a moment — his eyes wide, inquiring — but I had to look away. When the tractor started forward again, I could see in the rear view mirror that he was looking after me, curiously. It upset me... because he reminded me of Charlie. I was startled to find the head psychologist so young, a tall, lean man with a tired look on his face. But his steady blue eyes suggested a strength behind the youthful expression. He drove me around the grounds in his own car, ana pointed out the recreation hall, hospital, school, administrative offices, and the two-story brick buildings he called cottages where the patients lived. "I didn't notice a fence around Warren," I said. "No, only a gate at the entrance and hedges to keep out curiosity seekers." "But how do you keep... |
| 1140 |
If I come back here to stay, and he finds out the whole story, I'm sure he'll understand. He's the kind of man who would. As I drove out of Warren, I didn't know what to think. The feeling of cold grayness was everywhere around me — a sense of resignation. There had been no talk of rehabilitation, of cure, of someday sending these people out into the world again. No one had spoken of hope. The feeling was of living death — or worse, of never having been fully alive and knowing. Souls withered from the beginning, and doomed to stare into the time and space of every day. I wondered about the house-mother with her red-blotched face, and the stuttering shop teacher, and the motherly principal, and youthful tired-looking psychologist, and wished I knew how they had found their way here to work and dedicate themselves to these silent minds. Like the boy who held the younger one in his arms, each had found a fulfillment in giving away a part of himself to those who had less. And what about the things I wasn't shown? I may soon be coming to Warren, to spend the rest of my life with the others... waiting. July 15 I've been putting off a visit to my mother. I want to see her and I don't. Not until I'm sure what is going to happen to me. Let's see first how the work goes and what I discover. Algernon refuses to run the maze any more; general motivation has decreased. I stopped off again today to see him, and this time Strauss was there too. Both he and Nemur looked disturbed as they watched Burt force-feed him. |
| 1141 |
Strange to see the little puff of white clamped down on the worktable and Burt forcing the food down his throat with an eye-dropper. If it keeps up this way, they'll have to start feeding him by injection. Watching Algernon squirm under those tiny bands this afternoon, I felt them around my own arms and legs. I started to gag and choke, and I had to get out of the lab for fresh air. I've got to stop identifying with him. I went down to Murray's Bar and had a few drinks. And then I called Fay and we made the rounds. Fay is annoyed that I've stopped taking her out dancing, and she got angry and walked out on me last night. She has no idea of my work and no interest in it, and when I do try to talk to her about it she makes no attempt to hide her boredom. She just can't be bothered, and I can't blame her. She's interested in only three things that I can see: dancing, painting, and sex. And the only thing we really have in common is sex. It's foolish of me to try to interest her in my work. So she goes dancing without me. She told me that the other night she dreamed she had come into the apartment and set fire to all my books and notes, and that we went off dancing around the flames. I've got to watch out. She's becoming possessive. I just realized tonight that my own place is starting to resemble her apartment — a mess. I've got to cut down on the drinking. July 16 Alice met Fay last night. I'd been concerned about what would happen if they came face to face. Alice came to see me after she found out about Algernon from Burt. |
| 1142 |
She knows what it may mean, and she still feels responsible for having encouraged me in the first place. We had coffee and we talked late. I knew that Fay had gone out dancing at the Stardust Ballroom, so I didn't expect her home so early. But at about one forty-five in the morning we were startled by Fay's sudden appearance on the fire-escape. She tapped, pushed open the half-open window and came waltzing into the room with a bottle in her hand. "Crashing the party," she said. "Brought my own refreshments." I had told her about Alice working on the project at the university, and I had mentioned Fay to Alice earlier — so they weren't surprised to meet. But after a few seconds of sizing each other up, they started talking about art and me, and for all they cared I could have been anywhere else in the world. They liked each other. "I'll get the coffee," I said, and wandered out to the kitchen to leave them alone. When I came back, Fay had taken off her shoes and was sitting on the floor, sipping gin out of the bottle. She was explaining to Alice that as far as she was concerned there was nothing more valuable to the human body than sunbathing, and that nudist colonies were the answer to the world's moral problems. Alice was laughing hysterically at Fay's suggestion that we all join a nudist colony, and she leaned over and accepted a drink that Fay poured for her. We sat and talked until dawn, and I insisted on seeing Alice home. When she protested that it wasn't necessary, Fay insisted that she would be a fool to go out alone in the city at this hour. |
| 1143 |
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. |
| 1144 |
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. 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. |
| 1145 |
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? I took a drink and wandered around the big room. There were little knots of people sitting in conversation groups, the kind I find it impossible to join. Finally, Mrs. Nemur cornered me and introduced me to Hyram Harvey, one of the board members. Mrs. Nemur is an attractive woman, early forties, blonde hair, lots of make-up and long red nails. |
| 1146 |
Soon there will be signs of emotional instability and forgetfulness, the first symptoms of the burnout. Will I recognize these in myself? All I can do now is keep recording my mental state as objectively as possible, remembering that this psychological journal will be the first of its kind, and possibly the last. This morning Nemur had Burt take my report and the statistical data down to Hallston University to have some of the top men in the field verify my results and the application of my formulas. All last week they had Burt going over my experiments and methodological charts. I shouldn't really be annoyed by their precautions. After all, I'm just a Charlie-come-lately, and it is difficult for Nemur to accept the fact that my work might be beyond him. 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. |
| 1147 |
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. 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. |
| 1148 |
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. |
| 1149 |
I pushed again. The hook gave way and, unprepared for the sudden yielding, I fell into the vestibule, off balance. My hand was bleeding from the glass I had broken, and not knowing what else to do, I put my hand into my pocket to prevent the blood from staining her freshly scrubbed linoleum. I started in, past the stairs I had seen so often in my nightmares. I had often been pursued up that long, narrow staircase by demons who grabbed at my legs and pulled me down into the cellar below, while I tried to scream without voice, strangling on my tongue and gagging in silence. Like the silent boys at Warren. The people who lived on the second floor — our landlord and landlady, the Meyers — had always been kind to me. They gave me sweets and let me come to sit in their kitchen and play with their dog. I wanted to see them, but without being told I knew they were gone and dead and that strangers lived upstairs. That path was now closed to me forever. At the end of the hallway, the door through which Rose had fled was locked, and for a moment I stood — undecided. "Open the door." The answer was the high-pitched yapping of a small dog. It took me by surprise. "All right," I said. "I don't intend to hurt you or anything, but I've come a long way, and I'm not leaving without talking to you. If you don't open the door, I'm going to break it down." I heard her saying: "Shhhh, Nappie... Here, into the bedroom you go." A moment later I heard the click of the lock. The door opened and she stood there staring at me. |
| 1150 |
I've been doing that a lot since I've stopped playing the piano. It isn't right to keep it going all hours, but I do it to keep myself awake. I know I should sleep, but I begrudge every second of waking time. It's not just because of the nightmares; it's because I'm afraid of letting go. I tell myself there'll be time enough to sleep later, when it's dark. Mr. Vernor in the apartment below never used to complain, but now he's always banging on the pipes or on the ceiling of his apartment so that I hear the pounding beneath my feet. I ignored it at first, but last night he came up in his bathrobe. We quarreled, and I slammed the door in his face. An hour later he was back with a policeman who told me I couldn't play records that loudly at 4 a. m. The smile on Vernor's face so enraged me that it was all I could do to keep from hitting him. When they left I smashed all the records and the machine. I've been kidding myself anyway. I don't really like that kind of music any more. October 4 Strangest therapy session I ever had. Strauss was upset. It was something he hadn't expected either. What happened — I don't dare call it a memory — was a psychic experience or a hallucination. I won't attempt to explain or interpret it, but will only record what happened. I was touchy when I came into his office, but he pretended not to notice. I lay down on the couch immediately, and he, as usual, took his seat to one side and a little behind me — just out of sight — and waited for me to begin the ritual of pouring out all the accumulated poisons of the mind. |
| 1151 |
I'll beat it into him until he learns." Run Jack run... run Jack run. .. run Jack run... run Jack run... And then looking up from the table, it seems to me I saw myself, through Charlie's eyes, holding Paradise Lost, and I realized I was breaking the binding with the pressure of both hands as if I wanted to tear the book in half. I broke the back of it, ripped out a handful of pages, and flung them and the book across the room to the corner where the broken records were. I let it lay there and its torn white tongues were laughing because I couldn't understand what they were saying. I've got to try to hold onto some of the things I've learned. Please, God, don't take it all away. October 10 Usually at night I go out for walks, wander around the city. I don't know why. To see faces, I guess. Last night I couldn't remember where I lived. A policeman took me home. I have the strange feeling that this has all happened to me before — a long time ago. I don't want to write it down, but I keep reminding myself that I'm the only one in the world who can describe what happens when it goes this way. Instead of walking I was floating through space, not clear and sharp, but with a gray film over everything. I know what's happening to me, but there is nothing I can do about it. I walk, or just stand on the sidewalk and watch people go by. Some of them look at me, and some of them don't but nobody says anything to me — except one night a man came up and asked if I wanted a girl. He took me to a place. |
| 1152 |
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. 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? |
| 1153 |
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. When she went to the bedroom and cried I felt bad about it and I told her it was all my fault. I don't deserve someone as good as her. Why can't I control myself just enough to keep on loving her? Just enough. October 19 Motor activity impaired. I keep tripping and dropping things. At first I didn't think it was me. I thought she was changing things around. The wastebasket was in my way, and so were the chairs, and I thought she had moved them. Now I realize my coordination is bad. I have to move slowly to get things right. And it's increasingly difficult to type. Why do I keep blaming Alice? And why doesn't she argue? That irritates me even more because I see the pity in her face. My only pleasure now is the TV set. I spend most of the day watching the quiz programs, the old movies, the soap operas, and even the kiddie shows and cartoons. And then I can't bring myself to turn it off. Late at night there are the old movies, the horror pictures, the late show, and the late-late show, and even the little sermon before the channel signs off for the night, and the "Star-Spangled Banner" with the flag waving in the background, and finally the channel test pattern that stares back at me through the little square window with its unclosing eye... |
| 1154 |
I was on a down escalator now. If I stood still I'd go all the way to the bottom, but if I started to run up maybe I could at least stay in the same place. The important thing was to keep moving upward no matter what happened. So I went to the library and got out a lot of books to read. I've been reading a lot now. 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. |
| 1155 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1156 |
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. 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. |
| 1157 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1158 |
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. 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. |
| 1159 |
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. |
| 1160 |
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. |
| 1161 |
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. "Lennie!" he said sharply. "Lennie, for God' sakes don't drink so much." Lennie continued to snort into the pool. |
| 1162 |
Crooks' bunk was a long box filled with straw, on which his blankets were flung. On the wall by the window there were pegs on which hung broken harness in process of being mended; strips of new leather; and under the window itself a little bench for leather-working tools, curved knives and needles and balls of linen thread, and a small hand riveter. On pegs were also pieces of harness, a split collar with the horsehair stuffing sticking out, a broken hame, and a trace chain with its leather covering split. Crooks had his apple box over his bunk, and in it a range of medicine bottles, both for himself and for the horses. There were cans of saddle soap and a drippy can of tar with its paint brush sticking over the edge. And scattered about the floor were a number of personal possessions; for, being alone, Crooks could leave his things about, and being a stable buck and a cripple, he was more permanent than the other men, and he had accumulated more possessions than he could carry on his back. Crooks possessed several pairs of shoes, a pair of rubber boots, a big alarm clock and a single-barreled shotgun. And he had books, too; a tattered dictionary and a mauled copy of the California civil code for 1905. There were battered magazines and a few dirty books on a special shelf over his bunk. A pair of large gold-rimmed spectacles hung from a nail on the wall above his bed. This room was swept and fairly neat, for Crooks was a proud, aloof man. He kept his distance and demanded that other people keep theirs. |
| 1163 |
His body was bent over to the left by his crooked spine, and his eyes lay deep in his head, and because of their depth seemed to glitter with intensity. His lean face was lined with deep black wrinkles, and he had thin, pain-tightened lips which were lighter than his face. It was Saturday night. Through the open door that led into the barn came the sound of moving horses, of feet stirring, of teeth champing on hay, of the rattle of halter chains. In the stable buck's room a small electric globe threw a meager yellow light. Crooks sat on his bunk. His shirt was out of his jeans in back. In one hand he held a bottle of liniment, and with the other he rubbed his spine. Now and then he poured a few drops of the liniment into his pink-palmed hand and reached up under his shirt to rub again. He flexed his muscles against his back and shivered. Noiselessly Lennie appeared in the open doorway and stood there looking in, his big shoulders nearly filling the opening. For a moment Crooks did not see him, but on raising his eyes he stiffened and a scowl came on his face. His hand came out from under his shirt. Lennie smiled helplessly in an attempt to make friends. Crooks said sharply, "You got no right to come in my room. This here's my room. Nobody got any right in here but me." Lennie gulped and his smile grew more fawning. "I ain't doing nothing," he said. "Just come to look at my puppy. And I seen your light," he explained. "Well, I got a right to have a light. You go on get outa my room. |
| 1164 |
Old Candy lay down in the hay and covered his eyes with his arm. The deep green pool of the Salinas River was still in the late afternoon. Already the sun had left the valley to go climbing up the slopes of the Gabilan Mountains, and the hilltops were rosy in the sun. But by the pool among the mottled sycamores, a pleasant shade had fallen. A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shallows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically. A far rush of wind sounded and a gust drove through the tops of the trees like a wave. The sycamore leaves turned up their silver sides, the brown, dry leaves on the ground scudded a few feet. And row on row of tiny wind waves flowed up the pool's green surface. As quickly as it had come, the wind died, and the clearing was quiet again. The heron stood in the shallows, motionless and waiting. Another little water snake swam up the pool, turning its periscope head from side to side. Suddenly Lennie appeared out of the brush, and he came as silently as a creeping bear moves. The heron pounded the air with its wings, jacked itself clear of the water and flew off down river. The little snake slid in among the reeds at the pool's side. Lennie came quietly to the pool's edge. He knelt down and drank, barely touching his lips to the water. |
| 1165 |
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. Despite the misery and the utter skin-crawling horror of incarceration, he was breathing relief. Shadow tried not to talk too much. |
| 1166 |
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. 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. |
| 1167 |
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 ain't 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. |
| 1168 |
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. 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. |
| 1169 |
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. |
| 1170 |
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. 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. |
| 1171 |
Something feels weird, he told Laura. That wasn't 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. |
| 1172 |
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. |
| 1173 |
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. Up close, Patterson looked worse. His face was oblong, with gray hair cut into a military bristle cut. He smelled of Old Spice. Behind him was a shelf of books, each with the word Prison in the title; his desk was perfectly clean, empty but for a telephone and a tear-off-the-pages Far Side calendar. He had a hearing aid in his right ear. Please, sit down. Shadow sat down. Wilson stood behind him. The warden opened a desk drawer and took out a file, placed it on his desk. |
| 1174 |
Says here you were sentenced to six years for aggravated assault and battery. Youve served three years. You were due to be released on Friday. Were? Shadow felt his stomach lurch inside him. He wondered how much longer he was going to have to serveanother year? Two years? All three? All he said was Yes, sir. The warden licked his lips. What did you say? I said, Yes, sir. Shadow, were going to be releasing you later this afternoon. you'll be getting out a couple of days early. Shadow nodded, and he waited for the other shoe to drop. The warden looked down at the paper on his desk. This came from the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Eagle Point Your wife. She died in the early hours of this morning. It was an automobile accident. I'm sorry. Shadow nodded once more. Wilson walked him back to his cell, not saying anything. He unlocked the cell door and let Shadow in. Then he said, Its like one of them good news, bad news jokes, isn't it? Good news, were letting you out early, bad news, your wife is dead. He laughed, as if it were genuinely funny. Shadow said nothing at all. * * * Numbly, he packed up his possessions, gave most of them away. He left behind Low Keys Herodotus and the book of coin tricks, and, with a momentary pang, he abandoned the blank metal disks be had smuggled out of the workshop, which had served him for coins. There would be coins, real coins, on the outside. He shaved. He dressed in civilian clothes. He walked through door after door, knowing that he would never walk back through them again, feeling empty inside. |
| 1175 |
The rain had started to gust from the gray sky, a freezing rain. Pellets of ice stung Shadows face, while the rain soaked the thin overcoat and they walked toward the yellow ex-school bus that would take them to the nearest city. By the time they got to the bus they were soaked. Eight of them were leaving. Fifteen hundred still inside. Shadow sat on the bus and shivered until the heaters started working, wondering what he was doing, where he would go now. Ghost images filled his head, unbidden. In his imagination he was leaving another prison, long ago. He had been imprisoned in a lightless room for far too long: his beard was wild and his hair was a tangle. The guards had walked him down a gray stone stairway and out into a plaza filled with brightly colored things, with people and with objects. It was a market day and he was dazzled by the noise and the color, squinting at the sunlight that filled the square, smelling the salt-wet air and all the good things of the market, and on his left the sun glittered from the water The bus shuddered to a halt at a red light. 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. |
| 1176 |
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 wasn't 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1177 |
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. 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. |
| 1178 |
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. |
| 1179 |
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. 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. |
| 1180 |
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. |
| 1181 |
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. |
| 1182 |
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. (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. |
| 1183 |
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. |
| 1184 |
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. A great loss. Shadow nearly hit the man, then. Instead he took a deep breath. (Like I said, don't piss off those bitches in airports, said Johnnie Larch, in the back of his mind, or they'll haul your sorry ass back here before you can spit.) He counted to five. So was I, he said. The man shook his head. If it could but have been any other way, he said, and sighed. She died in a car crash, said Shadow. There are worse ways to die. The man shook his head, slowly. For a moment it seemed to Shadow as if the man was insubstantial; as if the plane had suddenly become more real, while his neighbor had become less so. |
| 1185 |
Take your time. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. I don't think so, said Shadow. I don't like you. I don't want to work with you. Like I say, said the man, without opening his eyes, don't rush into it. Take your time. The plane landed with a bump, and a few passengers got off. Shadow looked out of the window: it was a little airport in the middle of nowhere, and there were still two little airports to go before Eagle Point. Shadow transferred his glance to the man in the pale suitMr. Wednesday? He seemed to be asleep. Impulsively, Shadow stood up, grabbed his bag, and stepped off the plane, down the steps onto the slick, wet tarmac, walking at an even pace toward the lights of the terminal. A light rain spattered his face. Before he went inside the airport building, he stopped, and turned, and watched. No one else got off the plane. The ground crew rolled the steps away, the door was closed, and it took off. Shadow walked inside and he rented what turned out, when he got to the parking lot, to be a small red Toyota. Shadow unfolded the map theyd given him. He spread it out on the passengers seat. Eagle Point was about 250 miles away. The storms had passed, if they had come this far. It was cold and clear. Clouds scudded in front of the moon, and for a moment Shadow could not be certain whether it was the clouds or the moon that were moving. He drove north for an hour and a half. It was getting late. He was hungry, and when he realized how hungry he really was, he pulled off at the next exit and drove into the town of Nottamun (pop. |
| 1186 |
1301). He filled the gas tank at the Amoco and asked the bored woman at the cash register where he could get something to eat. Jacks Crocodile Bar, she told him. Its west on County Road N. Crocodile Bar? Yeah. Jack says they add character. She drew him a map on the back of a mauve flyer, which advertised a chicken roast for the benefit of a young girl who needed a new kidney. he's got a couple of crocodiles, a snake, one a them big lizard things. An iguana? that's him. Through the town, over a bridge, on for a couple of miles, and he stopped at a low, rectangular building with an illuminated Pabst sign. The parking lot was half empty. Inside the air was thick with smoke and Walking After Midnight was playing on the jukebox. Shadow looked around for the crocodiles, but could not see them. He wondered if the woman in the gas station had been pulling his leg. Whatll it be? asked the bartender. House beer, and a hamburger with all the trimmings. Fries. Bowl of chili to start? Best chili in the state. Sounds good, said Shadow. Wheres the rest room? The man pointed to a door in the corner of the bar. There was a stuffed alligator head mounted on the door. Shadow went through the door. It was a clean, well-lit rest room. Shadow looked around the room first; force of habit. (Remember, Shadow, you cant fight back whenyou're pissing, Low Key said, low key as always, in the back of his head.) He took the urinal stall on the left. Then he unzipped his fly and pissed for an age, feeling relief. |
| 1187 |
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. |
| 1188 |
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. 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. |
| 1189 |
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. |
| 1190 |
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. The truck brushed Robbies car and sent it spinning off the side of the road. Rescue crews pulled Robbie and Laura from the wreckage. They were both dead by the time they arrived at the hospital. Shadow folded the newspaper up once more and slid it back across the table, toward Wednesday, who was gorging himself on a steak so bloody and so blue it might never have been introduced to a kitchen flame. Here. Take it back, said Shadow. Robbie had been driving. He must have been drunk, although the newspaper account said nothing about this. Shadow found himself imagining Lauras face when she realized that Robbie was too drunk to drive. The scenario unfolded in Shadows mind, and there was nothing he could do to stop it: Laura shouting at Robbieshouting at him to pull off the road, then the thud of car against truck, and the steering wheel wrenching over the car on the side of the road, broken glass glittering like ice and diamonds in the headlights, blood pooling in rubies on the road beside them. |
| 1191 |
Two bodies being carried from the wreck, or laid neatly by the side of the road. Well? asked Mr. Wednesday. He had finished his steak, devoured it like a starving man. Now he was munching the french fries, spearing them with his fork. you're right, said Shadow. I don't have a job. Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand, giving it a wobble as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand. Call, he said. Why? asked Wednesday. I don't want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call. Heads, said Mr. Wednesday. Sorry, said Shadow, without even bothering to glance at the quarter. It was tails. I rigged the toss. Rigged games are the easiest ones to beat, said Wednesday, wagging a square finger at Shadow. Take another look at it. Shadow glanced down at it. The head was face up. I must have fumbled the toss, he said, puzzled. You do yourself a disservice, said Wednesday, and he grinned. I'm just a lucky, lucky guy. Then he looked up. Well I never. Mad Sweeney. Will you have a drink with us? Southern Comfort and Coke, straight up, said a voice from behind Shadow. I'll go and talk to the barman, said Wednesday. He stood up, and began to make his way toward the bar. Arent you going to ask what I'm drinking? called Shadow. I already know whatyou're drinking, said Wednesday, and then he was standing by the bar. Patsy Cline started to sing Walking After Midnight on the jukebox again. |
| 1192 |
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. |
| 1193 |
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. 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. |
| 1194 |
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. |
| 1195 |
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. 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? |
| 1196 |
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. |
| 1197 |
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. 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? |
| 1198 |
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. |
| 1199 |
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. For the sheer unholy fucken delight of it. Cant you feel the joy in your own veins, rising like the sap in the springtime? His lip was bleeding. So was Shadows knuckle. So howd you do the coin production? asked Shadow. He swayed back and twisted, took a blow on his shoulder intended for his face. I told you how I did it when first we spoke, grunted Sweeney. But theres none so blindow! Good one! as those who will not listen. Shadow jabbed at Sweeney, forcing him back into a table; empty glasses and ashtrays crashed to the floor. Shadow could have finished him off then. Shadow glanced at Wednesday, who nodded. Shadow looked down at Mad Sweeney. Are we done? he asked. Mad Sweeney hesitated, then nodded. Shadow let go of him, and took several steps backward. Sweeney, panting, pushed himself back up to a standing position. Not on yer ass! he shouted. It ain't over till I say it is! Then he grinned, and threw himself forward, swinging at Shadow. He stepped onto a fallen ice cube, and his grin turned to openmouthed dismay as his feet went out from under him, and he fell backward. |
| 1200 |
The back of his head hit the barroom floor with a definite thud. Shadow put his knee into Mad Sweeneys chest. For the second time, are we done fighting? he asked. We may as well be, at that, said Sweeney, raising his head from the floor, for the joys gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day. And he spat the blood from his mouth and closed his eyes and began to snore, in deep and magnificent snores. Somebody clapped Shadow on the back. Wednesday put a bottle of beer into his hand. It tasted better than mead. * * * Shadow woke up stretched out in the back of a sedan. The morning sun was dazzling, and his head hurt. He sat up awkwardly, rubbing his eyes. Wednesday was driving. He was humming tunelessly as he drove. He had a paper cup of coffee in the cup holder. They were heading along an interstate highway. The passenger seat was empty. How are you feeling, this fine morning? asked Wednesday, without turning around. What happened to my car? asked Shadow. It was a rental. Mad Sweeney took it back for you. It was part of the deal the two of you cut last night. After the fight. Conversations from the night before began to jostle uncomfortably in Shadows head. You got anymore of that coffee? The big man reached beneath the passenger seat and passed back an unopened bottle of water. Here. you'll be dehydrated. This will help more than coffee, for the moment. Well stop at the next gas station and get you some breakfast. you'll need to clean yourself up, too. |
| 1201 |
You look like something the goat dragged in. Cat dragged in, said Shadow. Goat, said Wednesday. Huge rank stinking goat with big teeth. Shadow unscrewed the top of the water and drank. Something clinked heavily in his jacket pocket. He put his hand into the pocket and pulled out a coin the size of a half-dollar. It was heavy, and a deep yellow in color. * * * In the gas station Shadow bought a Clean-U-Up Kit, which contained a razor, a packet of shaving cream, a comb, and a disposable toothbrush packed with a tiny tube of toothpaste. Then he walked into the mens rest room and looked at himself in the mirror. He had a bruise under one eyewhen he prodded it, experimentally, with one finger, he found it hurt deeply and a swollen lower lip. Shadow washed his face with the rest rooms liquid soap, then he lathered his face and shaved. He cleaned his teeth. He wet his hair and combed it back. He still looked rough. He wondered what Laura would say when she saw him, and then he remembered that Laura wouldn't say anything ever again and he saw his face, in the mirror, tremble, but only for a moment. He went out. I look like shit, said Shadow. Of course you do, agreed Wednesday. Wednesday took an assortment of snack food up to the cash register and paid for that and their gas, changing his mind twice about whether he was doing it with plastic or with cash, to the irritation of the gum-chewing young lady behind the till. Shadow watched as Wednesday became increasingly flustered and apologetic. |
| 1202 |
He seemed very old, suddenly. The girl gave him his cash back, and put the purchase on the card, and then gave him the card receipt and took his cash, then returned the cash and took a different card. Wednesday was obviously on the verge of tears, an old man made helpless by the implacable plastic march of the modern world. They walked out of the warm gas station, and their breath steamed in the air. On the road once more: browning grass meadows slipped past on each side of them. The trees were leafless and dead. Two black birds stared at them from a telegraph wire. Hey, Wednesday. What? The way I saw it in there, you never paid for the gas. Oh? The way I saw it, she wound up paying you for the privilege of having you in her gas station. You think she's figured it out yet? She never will. So what are you? A two-bit con artist? Wednesday nodded. Yes, he said. I suppose I am. Among other things. He swung out into the left lane to pass a truck. The sky was a bleak and uniform gray. Its going to snow, said Shadow. Yes. Sweeney. Did he actually show me how he did that trick with the gold coins? Oh, yes. I cant remember. Itll come back. It was a long night. Several small snowflakes brushed the windshield, melting in seconds. Your wifes body is on display at Wendells Funeral Parlor at present, said Wednesday. Then after lunch they will take her from there to the graveyard for the interment. How do you know? I called ahead while you were in the john. You know where Wendells Funeral Parlor is? |
| 1203 |
She wore a conservative blue suit he did not recognize. Her long brown hair was out of her eyes. It was his Laura and it was not: her repose, he realized, was what was unnatural. Laura was always such a restless sleeper. Audrey placed her sprig of summer violets on Lauras chest. Then she worked her mouth for a moment and spat, hard, onto Lauras dead face. The spit caught Laura on the cheek, and began to drip down toward her ear. Audrey was already walking toward the door. Shadow hurried after her. Audrey? he said. Shadow? Did you escape? Or did they let you out? He wondered if she were taking tranquilizers. 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. |
| 1204 |
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. |
| 1205 |
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. 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. |
| 1206 |
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. |
| 1207 |
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. 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. |
| 1208 |
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. |
| 1209 |
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. 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. |
| 1210 |
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. |
| 1211 |
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. |
| 1212 |
Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar line. I guess, said Laura, you're going to ask what I'm doing here. 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. |
| 1213 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1214 |
This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after youd gone away. 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1215 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1216 |
Laura? 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. |
| 1217 |
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 wasn'tor 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. |
| 1218 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1219 |
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. He placed Ymirs brains in the sky as clouds, and his salt blood became the seas we crossed. |
| 1220 |
If he made the world, do you not realize that he created this land as well? And if we die here as men, shall we not be received into his hall? And the men cheered and laughed. They set to, with a will, to build a hall out of split trees and mud, inside a small stockade of sharpened logs, although as far as they knew they were the only men in the new land. On the day that the hall was finished there was a storm: the sky at midday became as dark as night, and the sky was rent with forks of white flame, and the thunder-crashes were so loud that the men were almost deafened by them, and the ships cat they had brought with them for good fortune hid beneath their beached longboat. The storm was hard enough and vicious enough that the men laughed and clapped each other on the back, and they said, The thunderer is here with us, in this distant land, and they gave thanks, and rejoiced, and they drank until they were reeling. In the smoky darkness of their hall, that night, the bard sang them the old songs. He sang of Odin, the All-Father, who was sacrificed to himself as bravely and as nobly as others were sacrificed to him. He sang of the nine days that the All-Father hung from the world-tree, his side pierced and dripping from the spear-points wound, and he sang them all the things the All-Father had learned in his agony: nine names, and nine runes, and twice-nine charms. When he told them of the spear piercing Odins side, the bard shrieked in pain as the All-Father himself had called out in his agony, and all the men shivered, imagining his pain. |
| 1221 |
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. |
| 1222 |
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? 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. |
| 1223 |
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. |
| 1224 |
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 ain't. 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. * * * 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. |
| 1225 |
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. |
| 1226 |
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. 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. |
| 1227 |
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? |
| 1228 |
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. He looked out of the window, at the buildings across the street. Zorya Utrennyaya went out. Czernobog stared at her as she left. that's a good woman, he said. Not like her sisters. One of them is a harpy, the other, all she does is sleep. He put his slippered feet up on a long, low coffee table, a chess board inset in the middle, cigarette burns and mug rings on its surface. Is she your wife? asked Shadow. she's nobodys wife. |
| 1229 |
Zorya Utrennyaya carried in their coffee on a red wooden tray, in small brightly enameled cups. She gave them each a cup, then sat beside Czernobog. Zorya Vechernyaya is doing shopping, she said. She will be soon back. We met her downstairs, said Shadow. She says she tells fortunes. Yes, said her sister. In the twilight, that is the time for lies. I do not tell good lies, so I am a poor fortune-teller. And our sister, Zorya Polunochnaya, she cant tell no lies at all. The coffee was even sweeter and stronger than Shadow had expected. Shadow excused himself to use the bathrooma closet-like room, hung with several brown-spotted framed photographs of men and women in stiff Victorian poses. It was early afternoon, but already the daylight was beginning to fade. He heard voices raised from down the hall. He washed his hands in icy-cold water with a sickly-smelling sliver of pink soap. Czernobog was standing in the hall as Shadow came out. You bring trouble! he was shouting. Nothing but trouble! I will not listen! You will get out of my house! Wednesday was still sitting on the sofa, sipping his coffee, stroking the gray cat. Zorya Utrennyaya stood on the thin carpet, one hand nervously twining in and out of her long yellow hair. Is there a problem? asked Shadow. He is the problem! shouted Czernobog. He is! You tell him that there is nothing will make me help him! I want him to go! I want him out of here! Both of you go! Please, said Zorya Utrennyaya. Please be quiet, you wake up Zorya Polunochnaya. |
| 1230 |
You are like him, you want me to join his madness! shouted Czernobog. He looked as if he was on the verge of tears. A pillar of ash tumbled from his cigarette onto the threadbare hall carpet. Wednesday stood up, walked over to Czernobog. He rested his hand on Czernobogs shoulder. Listen, he said, peaceably. Firstly, its not madness. Its the only way. Secondly, everyone will be there. You would not want to be left out, would you? You know who I am, said Czernobog. You know what these hands have done. You want my brother, not me. And he's gone. A door in the hallway opened, and a sleepy female voice said, Is something wrong? Nothing is wrong, my sister, said Zorya Utrennyaya. Go back to sleep. Then she turned to Czernobog. See? See what you do with all your shouting? You go back in there and sit down. Sit! Czernobog looked as if he were about to protest; and then the fight went out of him. He looked frail, suddenly: frail, and lonely. The three men went back into the shabby sitting room. There was a brown nicotine ring around that room that ended about a foot from the ceiling, like the tide line in an old bathtub. It doesn't have to be for you, said Wednesday to Czernobog, unfazed. If it is for your brother, its for you as well. that's one place you dualistic types have it over the rest of us, eh? Czernobog said nothing. Speaking of Bielebog, have you heard anything from him? Czernobog shook his head. He looked up at Shadow. Do you have a brother? No, said Shadow. Not that I know of. |
| 1231 |
I have a brother. They say, you put us together, we are like one person, you know? When we are young, his hair, it is very blond, very light, his eyes are blue, and people say, he is the good one. And my hair it is very dark, darker than yours even, and people say I am the rogue, you know? I am the bad one. And now time passes, and my hair is gray. His hair, too, I think, is gray. And you look at us, you would not know who was light, who was dark. Were you close? asked Shadow. Close? asked Czernobog. No. How could we be? We cared about such different things. There was a clatter from the end of the hall, and Zorya Vechemyaya came in. Supper in one hour, she said. Then she went out. Czernobog sighed. She thinks she is a good cook, he said. She was brought up, there were servants to cook. Now, there are no servants. There is nothing. Not nothing, said Wednesday. Never nothing. You, said Czernobog. I shall not listen to you. He turned to Shadow. Do you play checkers? he asked. Yes, said Shadow. Good. You shall play checkers with me, he said, taking a wooden box of pieces from the mantelpiece and shaking them out onto the table. 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. |
| 1232 |
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. |
| 1233 |
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. 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. |
| 1234 |
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. |
| 1235 |
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. 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. |
| 1236 |
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. |
| 1237 |
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. 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. |
| 1238 |
* * * 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. 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. |
| 1239 |
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. |
| 1240 |
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? 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. |
| 1241 |
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. |
| 1242 |
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. Yes? Her white hair blew about her face in the chilly wind. Do I have to fight you? Or play checkers? he asked. You do not even have to kiss me, she told him. Just take the moon from me. How? Take the moon. I don't understand. Watch, said Zorya Polunochnaya. She raised her left hand and held it in front of the moon, so that her forefinger and thumb seemed to be grasping it. Then, in one smooth movement, she plucked at it. For a moment, it looked like she had taken the moon from the sky, but then Shadow saw that the moon shone still, and Zorya Polunochnaya opened her hand to display a silver Liberty-head dollar resting between finger and thumb. |
| 1243 |
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. |
| 1244 |
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. 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. |
| 1245 |
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! A pigeon ripe for the plucking, thinks Essie to herself, and she sits next to him, and tells him what a fine young man he is, and with one hand she begins to stroke his knee, while her other hand, more carefully, goes in search of his pocket watch. And then he looked her full in the face, and her heart leapt and sank as eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky before a storm gazed back into hers, and Master Bartholomew said her name. She was taken to Newgate and charged with returning from transportation. Found guilty, Essie shocked no one by pleading her belly, although the town matrons, who assessed such claims (which were usually spurious) were surprised when they were forced to agree that Essie was indeed with child; although who the father was, Essie declined to say. Her sentence of death was once more commuted to transportation, this time for life. She rode out this time on the Sea-Maiden. There were two hundred transportees on that ship, packed into the hold like so many fat hogs on their way to market. Fluxes and fevers ran rampant; there was scarcely room to sit, let alone to lie down; a woman died in childbirth in the back of the hold, and, the people being pushed in too tightly to pass her body forward, she and the infant were forced out of a small porthole in the back, directly into the choppy gray sea. |
| 1246 |
Within a year, she was delivered of another child, another boy, but as blond as his father and his half sister, and they named him John, after his father. The three children went to the local church to hear the traveling preacher on Sundays, and they went to the little school to learn their letters and their numbers with the children of the other small farmers; while Essie also made sure they knew the mysteries of the piskies, which were the most important mysteries there were: redheaded men, with eyes and clothes as green as a river and turned-up noses, funny, squinting men who would, if they got a mind to, turn you and twist you and lead you out of your way, unless you had salt in your pocket, or a little bread. When the children went off to school, they each of them carried a little salt in one pocket, a little bread in the other, the old symbols of life and the earth, to make sure they came safely home once more, and they always did. The children grew in the lush Virginia hills, grew tall and strong (although Anthony, her first son, was always weaker, paler, more prone to disease and bad airs) and the Richardsons were happy; and Essie loved her husband as best she could. They had been married a decade when John Richardson developed a toothache so bad it made him fall from his horse. They took him to the nearest town, where his tooth was pulled; but it was too late, and the blood poisoning carried him off, black-faced and groaning, and they buried him beneath his favorite willow tree. |
| 1247 |
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. |
| 1248 |
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. |
| 1249 |
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. |
| 1250 |
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. |
| 1251 |
His new boss, he decided, went through phases of extroversion followed by periods of intense quiet. So you arent American? asked Shadow. Nobodys American, said Wednesday. Not originally. that's my point. He checked his watch. We still have several hours to kill before the banks close. Good job last night with Czernobog, by the way. I would have closed him on coming eventually, but you enlisted him more wholeheartedly than I could ever have. Only because he gets to kill me afterward. Not necessarily. As you yourself so wisely pointed out, he's old, and the killing stroke might merely leave you, well, paralyzed for life, say. A hopeless invalid. So you have much to look forward to, should Mister Czernobog survive the coming difficulties. And there is some question about this? said Shadow, echoing Wednesdays manner, then hating himself for it. Fuck yes, said Wednesday. He pulled up in the parking lot of a bank. This, he said, is the bank I shall be robbing. They don't close for another few hours. Let's go in and say hello. He gestured to Shadow. Reluctantly, Shadow got out of the car. If the old man was going to do something stupid, Shadow could see no reason why his face should be on the camera. But curiosity pulled him and he walked into the bank. He looked down at the floor, rubbed his nose with his hand, doing his best to keep his face hidden. Deposit forms, maam? said Wednesday to the lone teller. Over there. Very good. And if I were to need to make a night deposit? Same forms. |
| 1252 |
Twelve cotton-candy inches of snow, creating a fairy-tale world, making everything unrecognizably beautiful Wednesday was talking to him. I'm sorry? said Shadow. I said were here, said Wednesday. You were somewhere else. I was thinking about snow, said Shadow. In Kinkos, Wednesday set about photocopying the deposit slips from the bank. He had the clerk instant-print him two sets of ten business cards. Shadows head had begun to ache, and there was an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades; he wondered if he had slept wrong, if the headache was an awkward legacy of the night befores sofa. Wednesday sat at the computer terminal, composing a letter, and, with the clerks help, making several large-sized signs. Snow, thought Shadow. High in the atmosphere, perfect, tiny crystals that form about a minute piece of dust, each a lacelike work of fractal art. And the snow crystals clump together into flakes as they fall, covering Chicago in their white plenty, inch upon inch Here, said Wednesday. He handed Shadow a cup of Kinkos coffee, a half-dissolved lump of nondairy creamer powder floating on the top, I think that's enough, don't you? Enough what? Enough snow. don't want to immobilize the city, do we? The sky was a uniform battleship gray. Snow was coming. Yes. I didn't really do that? said Shadow. I mean, I didn't. Did I? Drink the coffee, said Wednesday. Its foul stuff, but it will ease the headache. Then he said, Good work. Wednesday paid the Kinkos clerk, and he carried his signs and letters and cards outside. |
| 1253 |
He opened the trunk of his car, put the papers in a large black metal case of the kind carried by payroll guards, and closed the trunk. He passed Shadow a business card. Who, said Shadow, is A. Haddock, Director of Security, A1 Security Services? You are. A. Haddock? Yes. What does the A. stand for? Alfredo? Alphonse? Augustine? Ambrose? Your call entirely. Oh. I see. I'm James OGorman, said Wednesday. Jimmy to my friends. See? I've got a card too. They got back in the car. Wednesday said, If you can think A. Haddock as well as you thought snow, we should have plenty of lovely money with which to wine and dine my friends of tonight. I'm not going back to prison. You won't be. I thought we had agreed that I wouldn't be doing anything illegal. You arent. Possibly aiding and abetting, a little conspiracy to commit, followed of course by receiving stolen money, but, trust me, you'll come out of this smelling like a rose. Is that before or after your elderly Slavic Charles Atlas crushes my skull with one blow? His eyesights going, said Wednesday. Hell probably miss you entirely. Now, we still have a little time to killthe bank closes at midday on Saturdays, after all. Would you like lunch? Yes, said Shadow. I'm starving. I know just the place, said Wednesday. He hummed as he drove, some cheerful song that Shadow could not identify. Snowflakes began to fall, just as Shadow had imagined them, and he felt strangely proud. He knew, rationally, that he had nothing to do with the snow, just as he knew the silver dollar he carried in his pocket was not and never had been the moon. |
| 1254 |
But still They stopped outside a large shedlike building. A sign said that the all-U-can-eat lunch buffet was $4.99. I love this place, said Wednesday. Good food? asked Shadow. Not particularly, said Wednesday. But the ambience is unmissable. The ambience that Wednesday loved, it turned out, once lunch had been eatenShadow had the fried chicken, and enjoyed itwas the business that took up the rear of the shed: it was, the hanging flag across the center of the room announced, a Bankrupt and Liquidated Stock Clearance Depot. Wednesday went out to the car and reappeared with a small suitcase, which he took into the mens room. Shadow figured hed learn soon enough what Wednesday was up to, whether he wanted to or not, and so he prowled the liquidation aisles, staring at the things for sale: Boxes of coffee for use in airline filters only, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys and Xena: Warrior Princess harem dolls, teddy bears that played patriotic tunes on the xylophone when plugged in, cans of processed meat, galoshes and sundry overshoes, marshmallows, Bill Clinton presidential wristwatches, artificial miniature Christmas trees, salt and pepper shakers in the shapes of animals, body parts, fruit, and nuns, and, Shadows favorite, a just add real carrot snowman kit with plastic coal eyes, a corncob pipe, and a plastic hat. Shadow thought about how one made the moon seem to come out of the sky and become a silver dollar, and what made a woman get out of her grave and walk across town to talk to you. |
| 1255 |
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. |
| 1256 |
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. 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. |
| 1257 |
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. |
| 1258 |
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. So youve been to lots of other countries, then? Wednesday said nothing. Shadow glanced at him. No, said Wednesday, with a sigh. No. I never have. They stopped for gas, and Wednesday went into the rest room in his security guard jacket and his suitcase, and came out in a crisp, pale suit, brown shoes, and a knee-length brown coat that looked like it might be Italian. |
| 1259 |
So when we get to Madison, what then? Take Highway Fourteen west to Spring Green. Well be meeting everyone at a place called the House on the Rock. You been there? No, said Shadow. But I've seen the signs. The signs for the House on the Rock were all around that part of the world: oblique, ambiguous signs all across Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin, probably as far away as Iowa, Shadow suspected, signs alerting you to the existence of the House on the Rock. Shadow had seen the signs, and wondered about them. Did the House balance perilously upon the Rock? What was so interesting about the Rock? About the House? He had given it a passing thought, but then forgotten it. Shadow was not in the habit of visiting roadside attractions. They left the interstate at Madison, and drove past the dome of the capitol building, another perfect snow-globe scene in the falling snow, and then they were off the interstate and driving down country roads. After almost an hour of driving through towns with names like Black Earth, they turned down a narrow driveway, past several enormous, snow-dusted flower pots entwined with lizardlike dragons. The tree-lined parking lot was almost empty. they'll be closing soon, said Wednesday. So what is this place? asked Shadow, as they walked through the parking lot toward a low, unimpressive wooden building. This is a roadside attraction, said Wednesday. One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power. Come again? Its perfectly simple, said Wednesday. |
| 1260 |
Wednesday paid for their tickets in cash. Wheres the rock? asked Shadow. Under the house, said Wednesday. Wheres the house? Wednesday put his finger to his lips, and they walked forward. Farther in, a player piano was playing something that was intended to be Ravels Bolero. The place seemed to be a geometrically reconfigured 1960s bachelor pad, with open stone work, pile carpeting, and magnificently ugly mushroom-shaped stained-glass lampshades. Up a winding staircase was another room filled with knickknacks. They say this was built by Frank Lloyd Wrights evil twin, said Wednesday. Frank Lloyd Wrong. He chuckled at his joke. I saw that on a T-shirt, said Shadow. Up and down more stairs, and now they were in a long, long room, made of glass, that protruded, needlelike, out over the leafless black-and-white countryside hundreds of feet below them. Shadow stood and watched the snow tumble and spin. This is the House on the Rock? he asked, puzzled. More or less. This is the Infinity Room, part of the actual house, although a late addition. But no, my young friend, we have not scratched the tiniest surface of what the house has to offer. So according to your theory, said Shadow, Walt Disney World would be the holiest place in America. Wednesday frowned, and stroked his beard. Walt Disney bought some orange groves in the middle of Florida and built a tourist town on them. No magic there of any kind. I think there might be something real in the original Disneyland. There may be some power there, although twisted, and hard to access. |
| 1261 |
He folded the fortune up and put it in his inside pocket. They went farther in, down a red corridor, past rooms filled with empty chairs upon which rested violins and violas and cellos that played themselves, or seemed to, when fed a coin. Keys depressed, cymbals, crashed, pipes blew compressed air into clarinets and oboes. Shadow observed, with a wry amusement, that the bows of the stringed instruments, played by mechanical arms, never actually touched the strings, which were often loose or missing. He wondered whether all the sounds he heard were made by wind and percussion, or whether there were tapes as well. They had walked for what felt like several miles when they came to a room called the Mikado, one wall of which was a nineteenth-century pseudo-Oriental nightmare, in which beetle-browed mechanical drummers banged cymbals and drums while staring out from their dragon-encrusted lair. Currently, they were majestically torturing Saint-Saenss Danse Macabre. Czernobog sat on a bench in the wall facing the Mikado machine, tapping out the time with his fingers. Pipes fluted, bells jangled. Wednesday sat next to him. Shadow decided to remain standing. Czernobog extended his left hand, shook Wednesdays, shook Shadows. Well met, he said. Then he sat back, apparently enjoying the music. The Danse Macabre came to a tempestuous and discordant end. That all the artificial instruments were ever so slightly out of tune added to the otherworldliness of the place. A new piece began. How was your bank robbery? |
| 1262 |
They never gave me nothin like that, said Nancy. Best I could hope for was a pile of fruit to eat, maybe curried goat, something slow and cold and tall to drink, and a big old high-titty woman to keep me company. He grinned white teeth, and winked at Shadow. These days, said Czernobog, his expression unchanged, we have nothing. Well, I don't get anywhere near as much fruit as I used to, said Mr. Nancy, his eyes shining. But there still ain't nothin out there in the world for my money that can beat a big old high-titty woman. Some folk you talk to, they say its the booty you got to inspect at first, but I'm here to tell you that its the titties that still crank my engine on a cold mornin. 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. |
| 1263 |
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. Real creatures, imaginary creatures, and transformations of the two: each creature was different. He saw mermaid and merman, centaur and unicorn, elephants (one huge, one tiny), bulldog, frog and phoenix, zebra, tiger, manticore and basilisk, swans pulling a carriage, a white ox, a fox, twin walruses, even a sea serpent, all of them brightly colored and more than real: each rode the platform as the waltz came to an end and a new waltz began. The carousel did not even slow down. Whats it for? asked Shadow. I mean, okay, worlds biggest, hundreds of animals, thousands of lightbulbs, and it goes around all the time, and no one ever rides it. Its not there to be ridden, not by people, said Wednesday. Its there to be admired. Its there to be. Like a prayer wheel goin around and round, said Mr. Nancy. Accumulating power. So where are we meeting everyone? asked Shadow. I thought you said that we were meeting them here. But the place is empty. Wednesday grinned his scary grin. Shadow, he said. you're asking too many questions. You are not paid to ask questions. |
| 1264 |
Sorry. Now, stand over here and help us up, said Wednesday, and he walked over to the platform on one side, with a description of the carousel on it, and a warning that the carousel was not to be ridden. Shadow thought of saying something, but instead he helped them, one by one, up onto the ledge. Wednesday seemed profoundly heavy, Czernobog climbed up himself, only using Shadows shoulder to steady himself, Nancy seemed to weigh nothing at all. Each of the old men climbed out onto the ledge, and then, with a step and a hop, they walked out onto the circling carousel platform. Well? barked Wednesday. Arent you coming? Shadow, not without a certain amount of hesitation, and a hasty look around for any House on the Rock personnel who might be watching, swung himself up onto the ledge beside the Worlds Largest Carousel. Shadow was amused, and a little puzzled, to realize that he was far more concerned about breaking the rules by climbing onto the carousel than he had been aiding and abetting this afternoons bank robbery. Each of the old men selected a mount. Wednesday climbed onto a golden wolf. Czernobog climbed onto an armored centaur, its face hidden by a metal helmet. Nancy, chuckling, slithered up onto the back of an enormous, leaping lion, captured by the sculptor mid-roar. He patted the side of the lion. The Strauss waltz carried them around, majestically. Wednesday was smiling, and Nancy was laughing delightedly, an old mans cackle, and even the dour Czernobog seemed to be enjoying himself. |
| 1265 |
Shadow felt as if a weight were suddenly lifted from his back: three old men were enjoying themselves, riding the Worlds Largest Carousel. So what if they all did get thrown out of the place? wasn't it worth it, worth anything, to say that you had ridden on the Worlds Largest Carousel? wasn't it worth it to have traveled on one of those glorious monsters? Shadow inspected a bulldog, and a mer-creature, and an elephant with a golden howdah, and then he climbed on the back of a creature with an eagles head and the body of a tiger, and held on tight. The rhythm of the Blue Danube waltz rippled and rang and sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was to ride the carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the center of everything, and the world revolved around him. Shadow heard himself laugh, over the sound of the music. He was happy. It was as if the last thirty-six hours had never happened, as if the last three years had not happened, as if his life had evaporated into the daydream of a small child, riding the carousel in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, on his first trip back to the States, a marathon journey by ship and by car, his mother standing there, watching him proudly, and himself sucking his melting Popsicle, holding on tightly, hoping that the music would never stop, the carousel would never slow, the ride would never end. He was going around and around and around again Then the lights went out, and Shadow saw the gods. |
| 1266 |
He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil mustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beasts mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with blackflies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ocher leaf. 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. |
| 1267 |
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. |
| 1268 |
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. And then, as in a dream, they were no longer riding toward a distant hall. They were already there, and their mounts were tied in the shelter beside the hall. The hall was huge but primitive. The roof was thatched, the walls were wooden. There was a fire burning in the center of the hall, and the smoke stung Shadows eyes. We should have done this in my mind, not in his, muttered Mr. Nancy to Shadow. It would have been warmer there. Were in his mind? More or less. This is Valaskjalf. Its his old hall. Shadow was relieved to see that Nancy was now once more an old man wearing yellow gloves, although his shadow shook and shivered and changed in the flames of the fire, and what it changed into was not always entirely human. |
| 1269 |
And I said to him, Brother Tiger, you go for a swim, I'll look after your balls for you. He was so proud of his balls. So he got into the water hole for a swim, and I put his balls on, and left him my own little spider balls. And then, you know what I did? I ran away, fast as my legs would take me. I didn't stop till I got to the next town. And I saw Old Monkey there. You lookin mighty fine, Anansi, said Old Monkey. I said to him, You know what they all singin in the town over there? What are they singin? he asks me. They singin the funniest song, I told him. Then I did a dance, and I sings, Tigers balls, yeah, I ate Tigers balls Now ain't 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. 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. |
| 1270 |
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 ain't 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? |
| 1271 |
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. He paused. Now he stepped forward, and folded his arms across his chest. When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Kobolds and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean. The land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, only what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. |
| 1272 |
And to get by as best we could. So that's what weve done, gotten by out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely. We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods. Wednesday paused. He looked from one to another of his listeners, grave and statesmanlike. They stared back at him impassively, their faces masklike and unreadable. Wednesday cleared his throat, and he spat, hard into the fire. It flared and flamed, illuminating the inside of the hall. Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. They are aware of us, and they fear us, and they hate us, said Odin. You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise. They will destroy us, if they can. It is time for us to band together. It is time for us to act. The old woman in the red sari stepped into the firelight. On her forehead was a small dark blue jewel. She said, You called us here for this nonsense? And then she snorted, a snort of mingled amusement and irritation. |
| 1273 |
Wednesdays brows lowered. I called you here, yes. But this is sense, Mama-ji, not nonsense. Even a child could see that. So I am a child, am I? She wagged a finger at him. I was old in Kalighat before you were dreamed of, you foolish man. I am a child? Then I am a child, for there is nothing in your foolish talk to see. Again, a moment of double vision; Shadow saw the old woman, her dark face pinched with age and disapproval, but behind her he saw something huge, a naked woman with skin as black as a new leather jacket, and lips and tongue the bright red of arterial blood. Around her neck were skulls, and her many hands held knives, and swords, and severed heads. I did not call you a child, Mama-ji, said Wednesday, peaceably. But it seems self-evident The only thing that seems self-evident, said the old woman, pointing (as behind her, through her, above her, a black finger, sharp-taloned, pointed in echo), is your own desire for glory. 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. |
| 1274 |
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. |
| 1275 |
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. 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? |
| 1276 |
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. If you ask me, he wants a last stand. He wants us to go out in a blaze of glory. that's what he wants. And we are old enough, or stupid enough, that maybe some of us will say yes. Its not my job to ask questions, Mama-ji, said Shadow. The inside of the car filled with her tinkling laughter. The man in the backseatnot the peculiar-looking young man, the other onesaid something, and Shadow replied to him, but a moment later he was damned if he could remember what had been said. The peculiar-looking young man had said nothing, but now he started to hum to himself, a deep, melodic bass humming that made the interior of the car vibrate and rattle and buzz. The peculiar-looking man was of average height, but of an odd shape: Shadow had heard of men who were barrel-chested before, but had no image to accompany the metaphor. |
| 1277 |
This man was barrel-chested, and he had legs like, yes, like tree trunks, and hands like, exactly, ham hocks. He wore a black parka with a hood, several sweaters, thick dungarees, and, incongruously, in the winter and with those clothes, a pair of white tennis shoes, which were the same size and shape as shoeboxes. His fingers resembled sausages, with flat, squared-off fingertips. that's some hum you got, said Shadow from the drivers seat. Sorry, said the peculiar young man, in a deep, deep voice, embarrassed. He stopped humming. No, I enjoyed it, said Shadow. don't stop. The peculiar young man hesitated, then commenced to hum once more, his voice as deep and reverberant as before. This time there were words interspersed in the humming. Down down down, he sang, so deeply that the windows rattled. Down down down, down down, down down. Christmas lights were draped across the eaves of every house and building that they drove past. They ranged from discreet golden lights that dripped twinkles to giant displays of snowmen and teddy bears and multicolored stars. Shadow pulled up at the restaurant, a big, barnlike structure, and he let his passengers off by the front door. He drove the car to the back of the parking lot. He wanted to make the short walk back to the restaurant alone, in the cold, to clear his head. He parked the car beside a black truck. He wondered if it was the same one that had sped past him earlier. He closed the car door, and stood there in the parking lot, his breath steaming. |
| 1278 |
Inside the restaurant, Shadow could imagine Wednesday already sitting all his guests down around a big table, working the room. Shadow wondered whether he had really had Kali in the front of his car, wondered what he had been driving in the back Hey bud, you got a match? said a voice that was half familiar, and Shadow turned to apologize and say no, he didn't, but the gun barrel hit him over the left eye, and he started to fall. He put out an arm to steady himself as he went down. Someone pushed something soft into his mouth, to stop him from crying out, and taped it into position: easy, practiced moves, like a butcher gutting a chicken. Shadow tried to shout, to warn Wednesday, to warn them all, but nothing came out of his mouth but a muffled noise. 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. |
| 1279 |
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. 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. |
| 1280 |
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 wasn't 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? |
| 1281 |
Went to the House on the Rock. Went out for some food. You know the rest. Stone sighed, heavily. Wood shook his head, as if disappointed, and kicked Shadow in the kneecap. The pain was excruciating. Then Wood pushed a fist slowly into Shadows back, just above the right kidney, and knuckled it, hard, and the pain was worse than the pain in Shadows knee. I'm bigger than either of them, he thought. I can take them. But they were armed; and even if hesomehowkilled or subdued them both, hed still be locked in the cell with them. (But hed have a gun. Hed have two guns.) (No.) Wood was keeping his hands away from Shadows face. No marks. Nothing permanent: just fists and feet on his torso and knees. It hurt, and Shadow clutched the Liberty dollar tight in the palm of his hand, and waited for it to be over. And after far too long a time the beating ended. Well see you in a couple of hours, sir, said Stone. You know, Woody really hated to have to do that. Were reasonable men. Like I said, we are the good guys. you're on the wrong side. Meantime, why don't you try to get a little sleep? You better start taking us seriously, said Wood. Woodys got a point there, sir, said Stone. Think about it. The door slammed closed behind them. Shadow wondered if they would turn out the light, but they didn't, and it blazed into the room like a cold eye. Shadow crawled across the floor to the yellow foam-rubber pad and climbed onto it, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he closed his eyes, and he held onto nothing, and he held onto dreams. |
| 1282 |
Time passed. He was fifteen again, and his mother was dying, and she was trying to tell him something very important, and he couldn't understand her. 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. |
| 1283 |
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. |
| 1284 |
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. 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 wasn't 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? |
| 1285 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1286 |
Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south. Laura, he said, and hesitated. Do you know whats going on? 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1287 |
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 wasn't 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. The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadow of a hill, and a black bird the size of a small dog was picking at its side with a large, wicked beak, rending and tearing gobbets of red meat from the corpse. |
| 1288 |
The animals eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn spots were visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had died. The black bird cocked its head onto one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, You shadow man. I'm Shadow, said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawns rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close. Says he will see you in Kay-ro, tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odins ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn, Memory or Thought. Kay-ro? he asked. In Egypt. How am I going to go to Egypt? Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal. Look, said Shadow, I don't want to seem like I'm Jesus, look he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi. Okay. What I'm trying to say is I don't want mysteries. Mysteries, agreed the bird, helpfully. What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. Its a line from a bad spy thriller. Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro. So you said. I'd like a little more information than that. The bird half turned, and pulled another strip of raw venison from the fawns ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm. Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road? called Shadow. The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. |
| 1289 |
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. |
| 1290 |
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. You get over here this minute. |
| 1291 |
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. |
| 1292 |
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? The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. |
| 1293 |
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. |
| 1294 |
Thats 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. 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. |
| 1295 |
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? |
| 1296 |
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. 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. |
| 1297 |
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 wasn't. 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. |
| 1298 |
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. He just vanished. But he was only thirteen. It was the middle of last winter. My sister was pretty broken up about it. Were there any, any clues? He sounded like a TV cop. He tried again. Did they suspect foul play? |
| 1299 |
I don't think so. He wrote what hed been told. Its like, he's writing these histories. Andyou're mostly pretty good histories. Loads of weird little detailslike, did you know, in Egypt, if a particularly beautiful girl or the wife of a lord or whatever died, they wouldn't send her to the embalmer for three days? Theyd let her body spoil in the heat first. Why? Oh, hold on. Okay, I think I know why. Oh, that's disgusting. And therere battles in there, all sorts of normal things. And then there are the gods. Some guy is running back to report on the outcome of a battle and he's running and running, and he sees Pan in a glade. And Pan says, Tell them to build me a temple here. So he says okay, and runs the rest of the way back. And he reports the battle news, and then says, Oh, and by the way, Pan wants you to build him a temple. Its really matter-of-fact, you know? So there are stories with gods in them. What are you trying to say? That these guys had hallucinations? No, said Shadow. that's not it. She chewed a hangnail. I read some book about brains, she said. My roommate had it and she kept waving it around. It was like, how five thousand years ago the lobes of the brain fused and before that people thought when the right lobe of the brain said anything it was the voice of some god telling them what to do. 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. |
| 1300 |
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. |
| 1301 |
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. Theres always that, said Shadow. He stopped in El Paso, Illinois (pop. 2500), to let Sam out at a down-at-heel house on the edge of the town. A large wire-framed model of a reindeer covered in twinkling lights stood in the front yard. You want to come in? she asked. My aunt would give you a coffee. |
| 1302 |
No, he said. I've got to keep moving. She smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time, vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. you're fucked up, Mister. Butyou're cool. I believe that's what they call the human condition, said Shadow. Thanks for the company. No problem, she said. If you see any gods on the road to Cairo, you make sure and say hi to them from me. She got out of the car, and went to the door of the house. She pressed a doorbell and stood there at the door without looking back. Shadow waited until the door was opened and she was safely inside before he put his foot down and headed back for the highway. He passed through Normal, and Bloomington, and Lawndale. At eleven that night Shadow started shaking. He was just entering Middletown. He decided he needed sleep, or just not to drive any longer, and he pulled up in front of a Nights Inn, paid thirty-five dollars, cash in advance, for his ground-floor room, and went into the bathroom. A sad cockroach lay on its back in the middle of the tiled floor. Shadow took a towel and cleaned off the inside of the tub, then ran the water. In the main room he took off his clothes and put them on the bed. The bruises on his torso were dark and vivid. He sat in the tub, watching the color of the bathwater change. Then, naked, he washed his socks and briefs and T-shirt in the basin, wrung them out, and hung them on the clothesline that pulled out from the wall above the bathtub. He left the cockroach where it was, out of respect for the dead. |
| 1303 |
Shadow climbed into the bed. He wondered about watching an adult movie, but the pay-per-view device by the phone needed a credit card, and it was too risky. Then again, he was not convinced that it would make him feel any better to watch other people have sex that he wasn't having. He turned on the TV for company, pressed the sleep button on the remote three times, which would make the TV set turn itself off automatically in forty-five minutes. It was a quarter to midnight. The picture was motel-fuzzy, and the colors swam across the screen. He flipped from late show to late show in the televisual wasteland, unable to focus. Someone was demonstrating something that did something in the kitchen, and replaced a dozen other kitchen utensils, none of which Shadow possessed. Flip. A man in a suit explained that these were the end times and that Jesusa four or five-syllable word the way the man pronounced itwould make Shadows business prosper and thrive if Shadow sent him money. Flip. An episode of M*A*S*H ended and a Dick Van Dyke Show began. Shadow hadn't seen an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show for years, but there was something comforting about the 1965 black-and-white world it painted, and he put the channel changer down beside the bed, and turned off the bedside light. 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. |
| 1304 |
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. |
| 1305 |
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. 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. |
| 1306 |
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. |
| 1307 |
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 wasn't 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. A hawk launched itself from a dead tree and flew toward him, wings strobing in the sunlight like a series of stop-motion photographs. At some point he found himself heading into East St. Louis. |
| 1308 |
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. |
| 1309 |
On his first and only journey by subway he got lost and confused, and missed his appointment; now he takes taxis only when he has to, and the rest of the time he walks. He stumbles into overheated offices, his cheeks numb from the cold outside, sweating beneath his coat, shoes soaked by slush; and when the winds blow down the avenues (which run from north to south, as the streets run west to east, all so simple, and Salim always knows where to face Mecca) he feels a cold on his exposed skin that is so intense it is like being struck. 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? |
| 1310 |
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. |
| 1311 |
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. 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. |
| 1312 |
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. Horrible, cheap, foolish, ugly shit. The taxi driver wrenches the wheel to the right, swings around something, drives on. |
| 1313 |
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. |
| 1314 |
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. 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. |
| 1315 |
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. |
| 1316 |
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. 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. |
| 1317 |
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. |
| 1318 |
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. And he made a little noise as he said it, half smirk, half snort, which suggested that he had just uttered a well-honed phrase of which he was particularly fond. Ibis and Jacquel was a small, family-owned funeral home: one of the last truly independent funeral homes in the area, or so Mr. |
| 1319 |
Ibis maintained. Most fields of human merchandising value nationwide brand identities, he said. Mr. Ibis spoke in explanations: a gentle, earnest lecturing that put Shadow in mind of a college professor who used to work out at the Muscle Farm and who could not talk, could only discourse, expound, explain. Shadow had figured out within the first few minutes of meeting Mr. Ibis that his expected part in any conversation with the funeral director was to say as little as possible. This, I believe, is because people like to know what they are getting ahead of time. Thus, McDonalds, Wal-Mart, F. W. Woolworth (of blessed memory): store brands maintained and visible across the entire country. Wherever you go, you will get something that is, with small regional variations, the same. In the field of funeral homes, however, things are, perforce, different. You need to feel that you are getting smalltown personal service from someone who has a calling to the profession. You want personal attention to you and your loved one in a time of great loss. You wish to know that your grief is happening on a local level, not on a national one. But in all branches of industry and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about thatone makes ones money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing ones operations. Its not pretty, but its true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. |
| 1320 |
No, sir. Folks want to thinkyou're going to a family concern, somewhere they'll be treated with respect by someone wholl tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street. Mr. Ibis wore a hat. It was a sober brown hat that matched his sober brown blazer and his sober brown face. Small gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. In Shadows memory Mr. Ibis was a short man; whenever he would stand beside him, Shadow would rediscover that Mr. Ibis was well over six feet in height, with a cranelike stoop. Sitting opposite him now, across the shiny red table, Shadow found himself staring into the mans face. So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and its the finest embalming in the country, although nobody knows it but us. We don't do cremations, though. We could make more money if we had our own crematorium, but it goes against what were good at. What my business partner says is, if the Lord gives you a talent or a skill, you have an obligation to use it as best you can. 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. |
| 1321 |
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 wasn't 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? |
| 1322 |
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. 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. |
| 1323 |
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? 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. |
| 1324 |
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 wasn't 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1325 |
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. 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. |
| 1326 |
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. |
| 1327 |
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. 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. |
| 1328 |
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. |
| 1329 |
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. 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. |
| 1330 |
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. |
| 1331 |
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. 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. |
| 1332 |
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. |
| 1333 |
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 wasn't 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. 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. |
| 1334 |
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 ain't 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 wasn't quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. |
| 1335 |
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. 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. |
| 1336 |
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, wasn't 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. |
| 1337 |
He barely had time enough to turn out the bedside light and put his head down on the pillow before his eyes closed for the night. * * * Later he was never able to recollect the sequence and details of that dream: attempts to remember it produced nothing more than a tangle of dark images. There was a girl. He had met her somewhere, and now they were walking across a bridge. It spanned a small lake, in the middle of a town. 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. |
| 1338 |
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. |
| 1339 |
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. He heard the window hum closed, but the car remained where it was. |
| 1340 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1341 |
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. Just give me that first coin back. It didn't belong to me. |
| 1342 |
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. |
| 1343 |
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. Just a lousy twenty? Where can you go on a twenty dollar bus ticket? asked Shadow. I can get out of here, said Sweeney. I can get away before the storm hits. |
| 1344 |
It was the twenty-third of December, and Jacquel and Ibiss played host to a wake for Lila Goodchild. Bustling women filled the kitchen with tubs and with saucepans, and with skillets and with Tupperware, and the deceased was laid out in her casket in the funeral homes front room with hothouse flowers around her. There was a table on the other side of the room laden high with coleslaw and beans and cornmeal hush puppies and chicken and ribs and black-eyed peas, and by midafternoon the house was filled with people weeping and laughing and shaking hands with the minister, everything being quietly organized and overseen by the sober-suited Messrs. Jacquel and Ibis. The burial would be on the following morning. When the telephone in the hall rang (it was Bakelite and black and had an honest-to-goodness rotary dial on the front), Mr. Ibis answered. Then he took Shadow aside. That was the police, he said. Can you make a pickup? Sure. Be discreet. Here. He wrote down an address on a slip of paper, then passed it to Shadow, who read the address, written in perfect copperplate handwriting, and then folded it up and put it in his pocket. Therell be a police car, Ibis added. Shadow went out back and got the hearse. 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? |
| 1345 |
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. |
| 1346 |
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. So what if he's sitting on a gurney in the cellar, said Shadow, as he poured, on his way to a paupers grave. Tonight well toast him, and give him the wake he wanted. Shadow raised his glass to the empty place at the table. I only met Mad Sweeney twice, alive, he said. The first time I thought he was a world-class jerk with the devil in him. The second time I thought he was a major fuckup and I gave him the money to kill himself. He showed me a coin trick I don't remember how to do, gave me some bruises, and claimed he was a leprechaun. Rest in peace, Mad Sweeney. He sipped the whiskey, letting the smoky taste evaporate in his mouth. |
| 1347 |
Ibis told them in the kitchen that night. His shadow on the wall was stretched and birdlike, and as the whiskey flowed Shadow imagined it head of a huge waterfowl, beak long and curved, and it was somewhere in the middle of the second glass that Mad Sweeney himself began to throw both details and irrelevancies into Ibiss narrative (such a girl she was, with breasts cream-colored and spackled with freckles, with the tips of them the rich reddish pink of the sunrise on a day when itll be bucketing down before noon but glorious again by supper) and then Sweeney was trying, with both hands, to explain the history of the gods in Ireland, wave after wave of them as they came in from Gaul and from Spain and from every damn place, each wave of them transforming the last gods into trolls and fairies and every damn creature until Holy Mother Church herself arrived and every god in Ireland was transformed into a fairy or a saint or a dead King without so much as a by-your-leave Mr. 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. |
| 1348 |
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. |
| 1349 |
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. He smiled at Shadow when he saw him. Ah, Shadow mboy, good to seeyou're up. I thought you were going to sleep forever. Mad Sweeneys dead, said Shadow. So I heard, said Wednesday. A great pity. Of course it will come to all of us, in the end. He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin. Would you like some potato salad? I would not. |
| 1350 |
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. |
| 1351 |
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. 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. |
| 1352 |
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. |
| 1353 |
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! 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. |
| 1354 |
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. |
| 1355 |
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. 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. |
| 1356 |
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. 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. |
| 1357 |
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. |
| 1358 |
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. 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? |
| 1359 |
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. |
| 1360 |
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. Thanks, he said. Think of it as a Christmas bonus. Now, let me walk you down to the Greyhound. I shall wave to you as you ride the gray dog north. They walked outside the restaurant. Shadow found it hard to believe how much colder it had gotten in the last few hours. It felt too cold to snow, now. Aggressively cold. This was a bad winter. Hey. Wednesday. Both of the scams you were telling me aboutthe violin scam and the bishop one, the bishop and the cop He hesitated, trying to form his thought, to bring it into focus. What of them? Then he had it. you're both two-man scams. One guy on each side. Did you used to have a partner? Shadows breath came in clouds. He promised himself that when he got to Lakeside he would spend some of his Christmas bonus on the warmest, thickest winter coat that money could buy. Yes, said Wednesday. Yes. I had a partner. A junior partner. But, alas, those days are gone. Theres the gas station, and there, unless my eye deceives me, is the bus. It was already signaling its turn into the parking lot. Your address is on the key, said Wednesday. |
| 1361 |
If anyone asks, I am your uncle, and I shall be rejoicing in the unlikely name of Emerson Borson. Settle in, in Lakeside, nephew Ainsel. I'll come for you within the week. We shall be traveling together. Visiting the people I have to visit. In the meantime, keep your head down and stay out of trouble. My car? said Shadow. I'll take good care of it. Have a good time in Lakeside, said Wednesday. He thrust out his hand, and Shadow shook it. Wednesdays hand was colder than a corpses. Jesus, said Shadow. you're cold. Then the sooner I am making the two-backed beast with the little hotsy-totsy lass from the restaurant in a back room of the Motel 6, the better. And he reached out his other hand and squeezed Shadows shoulder. Shadow experienced a dizzying moment of double vision: he saw the grizzled man facing him, squeezing his shoulder, but he saw something else: so many winters, hundreds and hundreds of winters, and a gray man in a broad-brimmed hat walking from settlement to settlement, leaning on his staff, staring in through windows at the firelight and a joy and a burning life he would never be able to touch, never even be able to feel Go, said Wednesday, his voice a reassuring growl. All is well, and all is well, and all shall be well. Shadow showed his ticket to the driver. Hell of a day to be traveling, she said. And then she added, with a certain grim satisfaction, Merry Christmas. The bus was almost empty. When will we get into Lakeside? asked Shadow. Two hours. Maybe a bit more, said the driver. |
| 1362 |
They say theres a cold snap coming. She thumbed a switch and the doors closed with a hiss and a thump. Shadow walked halfway down the bus, put the seat back as far as it would go, and he started to think. The motion of the bus and the warmth combined to lull him, and before he was aware that he was becoming sleepy, he was asleep. * * * In the earth, and under the earth. The marks on the wall were the red of wet clay: handprints, fingermarks, and, here and there, crude representations of animals and people and birds. 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. |
| 1363 |
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. And then Shadow said, Except myself. I have myself, don't I? It seemed as if everything was holding its breath. I offer myself, he said. The response was immediate. The rocks and the earth that had surrounded him began to push down on Shadow, squeezed him so hard that the last ounce of air in his lungs was crushed out of him. The pressure became pain, pushing him on every side. He reached the zenith of pain and hung there, cresting, knowing that he could take no more, at that moment the spasm eased and Shadow could breathe again. The light above him had grown larger. He was being pushed toward the surface. As the next earth-spasm hit, Shadow tried to ride with it. This time he felt himself being pushed upward. The pain, on that last awful contraction, was impossible to believe, as he felt himself being squeezed, crushed, and pushed through an unyielding rock gap, his bones shattering, his flesh becoming something shapeless. As his mouth and ruined head cleared the hole he began to scream, in fear and pain. He wondered, as he screamed, whether, back in the waking world, he was also screamingif he was screaming in his sleep back on the darkened bus. And as that final spasm ended Shadow was on the ground, his fingers clutching the red earth. |
| 1364 |
He pulled himself into a sitting position, wiped the earth from his face with his hand and looked up at the sky. It was twilight, a long, purple twilight, and the stars were coming out, one by one, stars so much brighter and more vivid than any stars he had ever seen or imagined. Soon, said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods. A blast of air, shocking in its coldness, touched his face. It was like being doused in ice water. He could hear the drivers voice saying that they were in Pinewood, anyone who needs a cigarette or wants to stretch their legs, well be stopping here for ten minutes, then well be back on the road. Shadow stumbled off the bus. They were parked outside another rural gas station, almost identical to the one they had left. The driver was helping a couple of teenage girls onto the bus, putting their suitcases away in the luggage compartment. Hey, the driver said, when she saw Shadow. you're getting off at Lakeside, right? Shadow agreed, sleepily, that he was. Heck, that's a good town, said the bus driver. I think sometimes that if I were just going to pack it all in, I'd move to Lakeside. Prettiest town I've ever seen. Youve lived there long? My first visit. You have a pasty at Mabels for me, you hear? Shadow decided not to ask for clarification. |
| 1365 |
Tell me, said Shadow, was I talking in my sleep? If you were, I didn't hear you. She looked at her watch. Back on the bus. I'll call you when we get to Lakeside. The two girlshe doubted that either of them was much more than fourteen years oldwho had got on in Pinewood were now in the seat in front of him. 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! |
| 1366 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1367 |
He pocketed his keys. Store ain't 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. 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. |
| 1368 |
This is Tessie, the old man said. ain't 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. |
| 1369 |
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. So well go around the lake. Grand tour, said Hinzelmann. Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the wordas if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked. Hinzelmann pointed out the towns two restaurants as they passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as part Greek, part Norwegian, and a popover at every plate); he pointed out the bakery and the bookstore (What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless its got a bookstore, it knows its not fooling a soul). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorwayHinzelmann proudly called Shadows attention to them. Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess itll be the Lakeside Library now until the end of time. isn't it a dream? He couldn't have been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of a castle, and he said so. that's right, agreed Hinzelmann. Turrets and all. Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all the original pine shelving. |
| 1370 |
Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and modernize, but its on some register of historic places, and theres not a damn thing she can do. They drove around the south side of the lake. The town circled the lake, which was a thirty-foot drop below the level of the road. Shadow could see the patches of white ice dulling the surface of the lake with, here and there, a shiny patch of water reflecting the lights of the town. Looks like its freezing over, he said. Its been frozen over for a month now, said Hinzelmann. The dull spots are snowdrifts and the shiny spots are ice. It froze just after Thanksgiving in one cold night, froze smooth as glass. You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel? Never. Best thing a man can do. Its not the fish you catch, its the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day. I'll remember that. Shadow peered down at the lake through Tessies window. Can you actually walk on it already? You can walk on it. Drive on it too, but I wouldn't want to risk it yet. Its been cold up here for six weeks, said Hinzelmann. But you also got to allow that things freeze harder and faster up here in northern Wisconsin than they do most anyplace else there is. I was out hunting oncehunting for deer, and this was oh, thirty, forty years back, and I shot at a buck, missed him, and sent him running off through the woodsthis was over acrost the north end of the lake, up near where you'll be living, Mike. Now he was the finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. |
| 1371 |
The door to the apartment swung open. 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. |
| 1372 |
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. |
| 1373 |
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. |
| 1374 |
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. |
| 1375 |
He remembered, enviously, the chemical hand-and foot-warmers. He wished he had them now. Ten more minutes of walking, he guessed, and the bridge seemed to be no nearer. He was too cold to shiver. His eyes hurt. This was not simply cold: this was science fiction. This was a story set on the dark side of Mercury, back when they thought Mercury had a dark side. This was somewhere out on rocky Pluto, where the sun is just another star, shining only a little more brightly in the darkness. This, thought Shadow, is just a hair away from the places where air comes in buckets and pours just like beer. The occasional cars that roared past him seemed unreal: spaceships, little freeze-dried packages of metal and glass, inhabited by people dressed more warmly than he was. An old song his mother had loved, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, began to run through his head, and he hummed it through closed lips, kept pace to it as he walked. He had lost all sensation in his feet. He looked down at his black leather shoes, at the thin cotton socks, and began, seriously, to worry about frostbite. This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-screwed-up-big-time territory. His clothes might as well have been netting or lace: the wind blew through him, froze his bones and the marrow in his bones, froze the lashes of his eyes, froze the warm place under his balls, which were retreating into his pelvic cavity. Keep walking, he told himself. |
| 1376 |
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. wasn't 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. Let it happen in its own time. Can you just drop me off in the town center? wouldn't hear of it. |
| 1377 |
Long as you don't need me to drive a getaway car for your bank robbery I'll happily take you wherever you need to go. Think of it as the town welcome wagon. Where would you suggest we start? You only moved in last night. that's right. You eaten breakfast yet? Not yet. Well, that seems like a heck of a good starting place to me, said Mulligan. They were over the bridge now, and entering the northwest side of the town. This is Main Street, said Mulligan, and this, he said, crossing Main Street and turning right, is the town square. Even in the winter the town square was impressive, but Shadow knew that this place was meant to be seen in summer: it would be a riot of color, of poppies and irises and flowers of every kind, and the clump of birch trees in one corner would be a green and silver bower. Now it was colorless, beautiful in a skeletal way, the bandshell empty, the fountain turned off for the winter, the brownstone city hall capped by white snow. and this, concluded Chad Mulligan, bringing the car to a stop outside a high glass-fronted old building on the west of the square, is Mabels. He got out of the car, opened the passenger door for Shadow. The two men put their heads down against the cold and the wind, and hurried across the sidewalk and into a warm room, fragrant with the smells of new-baked bread, of pastry and soup and bacon. The place was almost empty. Mulligan sat down at a table and Shadow sat opposite him. He suspected that Mulligan was doing this to get a feel for the stranger in town. |
| 1378 |
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 wasn't in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheilas. |
| 1379 |
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. |
| 1380 |
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. Until I figure out what it is I really want to do. It was coming out of him with conviction, smooth as a snake. He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in that moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucys tits? asked a voice in his head). Mike Ainsel didn't have bad dreams, or believe that there was a storm coming. |
| 1381 |
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. |
| 1382 |
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. 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. |
| 1383 |
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? |
| 1384 |
Meantime, heres a pot for you. Maybe you'll like it. Whats a winter runaway? Mm. The old man pushed his woolen cap above his ears, rubbed his temple with a pink forefinger. Well, it ain't unique to Lakesidewere a good town, better than most, but were not perfect. Some winters, well, maybe a kid gets a bit stir crazy, when it gets so cold that you cant go out, and the snows so dry that you cant make so much as a snowball without it crumbling away They run off? The old man nodded, gravely. 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. |
| 1385 |
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. |
| 1386 |
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. 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. |
| 1387 |
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. |
| 1388 |
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. I can keep you out of sight here. By they you mean the black hats? Exactly. I'm afraid the House on the Rock is now out of bounds. Its a little difficult, but well cope. Now its just stamping our feet and flag-waving, caracole and saunter until the action startsa little later than any of us expected. I think they'll hold off until spring. Nothing big can happen until then. How come? Because they may babble on about micromilliseconds and virtual worlds and paradigm shifts and what-have-you, but they still inhabit this planet and are still bound by the cycle of the year. These are the dead months. A victory in these months is a dead victory. I have no idea whatyou're talking about, said Shadow. That was not entirely true. He had a vague idea, and he hoped it was wrong. Its going to be a bad winter, and you and I are going to use our time as wisely as we can. We shall rally our troops and pick our battleground. Okay, said Shadow. He knew that Wednesday was telling him the truth, or a part of a truth. War was coming. No, that was not it: the war had already begun. The battle was coming. |
| 1389 |
Mad Sweeney said that he was working for you when we met him that first night. He said that before he died. And would I have wanted to employ someone who could not even best a sad case like that in a bar fight? But never fear, youve repaid my faith in you a dozen times over. Have you ever been to Las Vegas? Las Vegas, Nevada? that's the one. No. Were flying in there from Madison later tonight, on a gentlemans red-eye, a charter plane for high rollers. I've convinced them that we should be on it. don't you ever get tired of lying? asked Shadow. He said it gently, curiously. Not in the slightest. Anyway, its true. We are playing for the highest stakes of all. It shouldn't take us more than a couple of hours to get to Madison, the roads are clear. So lock your door and turn off the heaters. It would be a terrible thing if you burned down the house in your absence. Who are we going to see in Las Vegas? Wednesday told him. Shadow turned off the heaters, packed some clothes into an overnight bag, then turned back to Wednesday and said, Look, I feel kind of stupid. I know you just told me who were going to see, but I dunno. I just had a brain-fart or something. Its gone. Who is it again? Wednesday told him once more. This time Shadow almost had it. The name was there on the tip of his mind. He wished hed been paying closer attention when Wednesday told him. He let it go. Whos driving? he asked Wednesday. You are, said Wednesday. They walked out of the house, down the wooden stairs and the icy path to where a black Lincoln Town Car was parked. |
| 1390 |
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. |
| 1391 |
He grins widely at her. you're looking a treat tonight, mdear, a fine sight for these poor old eyes, he says, and, scenting a large tip, she smiles broadly at him. The man in the light gray suit orders a Jack Daniels for himself and a Laphroaig and water for the man in the charcoal suit sitting beside him. You know, says the man in the light gray suit, when his drink arrives, the finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. 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? |
| 1392 |
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. |
| 1393 |
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. 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. |
| 1394 |
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. |
| 1395 |
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. 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. |
| 1396 |
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. |
| 1397 |
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. 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. |
| 1398 |
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. |
| 1399 |
Each ticket is five dollars, ten for forty, twenty for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we cant promise itll go down in your five minutes, but the person whos closest stands to win five hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times arent spoken for. You want to see the info sheet? Sure. Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied sheet. The klunker was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and when it was too thin to bear the cars weight the car would fall into the lake. The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the twenty-seventh (That was the winter of 1998. I don't think you could rightly call that a winter at all), the latest was May the first (That was 1950. Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody hammered a stake through its heart). The beginning of April appeared to be the most common time for the car to sinknormally in midafternoon. All of the midafternoons in April had already gone, marked off in Hinzelmanns lined notebook. Shadow bought a thirty-minute period on the morning of March 23, from 9:00 A. M. to 9:30 A. M. He handed Hinzelmann thirty dollars. I just wish everybody in town was as easy a sell as you are, said Hinzelmann. Its a thank-you for that ride you gave me that first night I was in town. |
| 1400 |
Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the window seat: In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half hours reading did not turn up anything more, and he could find no mention of eagle stones anywhere in the books indexes. Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was peeking at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was being watched once more. In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left hand into his right. The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered away, returning a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at Shadow suspiciously and said, Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him. Just a little prestidigitation, maam. Say, I never did say thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. Its warm as toast in there right now. that's good. Her icy expression had not begun to thaw. |
| 1401 |
Its a lovely library, said Shadow. Its a beautiful building. But the city needs something more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs? I wasn't planning on it. Well, you should. Its for a good cause. I'll make a point of getting down there. Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing you, Mister Ainsel. Call me Mike, he said. She said nothing, just took Leons hand and walked the boy over to the childrens section. But Mom, Shadow heard Leon say, It wasn't pressed igitation. It wasn't. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it. 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. |
| 1402 |
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. |
| 1403 |
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. 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. |
| 1404 |
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 wasn't 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! |
| 1405 |
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. Now, back then Leon was pretty small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy. wouldn't let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the househad a nice place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartment. He left town. Came back every six months to make everybody miserable. This went on for a few years. Hed come back, spend money on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing hed never come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired, said they couldn't take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasantat one point I had to go over there. Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing in the front yard shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying. I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do that. |
| 1406 |
I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, told him to shape up. That hed hurt her enough Next day he left town. Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. didn't get onto the school bus. Told his best friend that hed be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was bringing him a specially cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in Florida. Nobodys seen him since. Noncustodial kidnappings are the hardest. Its tough to find a kid who doesn't want to be found, ysee? Shadow said that he did. He saw something else as well. Chad Mulligan was in love with Marguerite Olsen himself. He wondered if the man knew how obvious it was. Mulligan pulled out once more, lights flashing, and pulled over some teenagers doing sixty. He didn't ticket them, just put the fear of God in them. * * * That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions, but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful and vague. Phrases like then vanish the penny in the usual way, occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was the usual way? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting Oh my god, look out! A mountain lion! and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audiences attention was diverted? He tossed his silver dollar into the air, caught it, remembering the moon and the woman who gave it to him, then he attempted the illusion. It didn't seem to work. He walked into the bathroom and tried it in front of the mirror, and confirmed that he was right. |
| 1407 |
The trick as written simply didn't work. He sighed, dropped the coins in his pocket and sat down on the couch. He spread the cheap throw rug over his legs and flipped open the Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 18721884. The type, in two columns, was so small as to be almost unreadable. He flipped through the book, looking at the reproductions of the photographs of the period, at the several incarnations of the Lakeside City Council therein: long side whiskers and clay pipes and battered hats and shiny hats, worn with faces that were, many of them, peculiarly familiar. 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. |
| 1408 |
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. |
| 1409 |
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. 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. |
| 1410 |
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. |
| 1411 |
Its almost hard to believe that this is in the same country as Lakeside, he said. Wednesday glared at him. Then he said, Its not. San Francisco isn't in the same country as Lakeside anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis. Is that so? said Shadow, mildly. Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiersmoney, a federal government, entertainmentits the same land, obviouslybut the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonalds. They were approaching a park at the end of the road. Be nice to the lady we are visiting. But not too nice. I'll be cool, said Shadow. They stepped onto the grass. A young girl, no older than fourteen, her hair dyed green and orange and pink, stared at them as they went by. She sat beside a dog, a mongrel, with a piece of string for a collar and a leash. She looked hungrier than the dog did. The dog yapped at them, then wagged its tail. Shadow gave the girl a dollar bill. She stared at it as if she was not sure what it was. Buy dog food with it, Shadow suggested. She nodded, and smiled. Let me put it bluntly, said Wednesday. You must be very cautious around the lady we are visiting. She might take a fancy to you, and that would be bad. Is she your girlfriend or something? Not for all the little plastic toys in China, said Wednesday, agreeably. His anger seemed to have dissipated, or perhaps to have been invested for the future. |
| 1412 |
Shadow suspected that anger was the engine that made Wednesday run. There was a woman sitting on the grass, under a tree, with a paper tablecloth spread in front of her, and a variety of Tupperware dishes on the cloth. She wasnot fat, no, far from fat: what she was, a word that Shadow had never had cause to use until now, was curvaceous. Her hair was so fair that it was white, the kind of platinum-blonde tresses that should have belonged to a long-dead movie starlet, her lips were painted crimson, and she looked to be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty. 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. |
| 1413 |
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. |
| 1414 |
What about the food? asked Wednesday. You cant just leave it here. She smiled at him, and pointed to the girl sitting by the dog, and then extended her arms to take in the Haight and the world. Let it feed them, she said, and she walked, with Wednesday and Shadow trailing behind her. Remember, she said to Wednesday, as they walked, I'm rich. I'm doing just peachy. Why should I help you? you're one of us, he said. you're as forgotten and as unloved and unremembered as any of us. Its pretty clear whose side you should be on. They reached a sidewalk coffeehouse, went inside, sat down. There was only one waitress, who wore her eyebrow ring as a mark of caste, and a woman making coffee behind the counter. The waitress advanced upon them, smiling automatically, sat them down, took their orders. Easter put her slim hand on the back of Wednesdays square gray hand. I'm telling you, she said, I'm doing fine. On my festival days they still feast on eggs and rabbits, on candy and on flesh, to represent rebirth and copulation. They wear flowers in their bonnets and they give each other flowers. They do it in my name. More and more of them every year. In my name, old wolf. And you wax fat and affluent on their worship and their love? he said, dryly. don't be an asshole. Suddenly she sounded very tired. She sipped her mochaccino. Serious question, mdear. Certainly I would agree that millions upon millions of them give each other tokens in your name, and that they still practice all the rites of your festival, even down to hunting for hidden eggs. |
| 1415 |
But how many of them know who you are? Eh? Excuse me, miss? This to their waitress. She said, You need another espresso? No, my dear. I was just wondering if you could solve a little argument we were having over here. My friend and I were disagreeing over what the word Easter means. Would you happen to know? The girl stared at him as if green toads had begun to push their way between his lips. Then she said, I don't know about any of that Christian stuff. I'm a pagan. The woman behind the counter said, I think its like Latin or something for Christ has risen, maybe. 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? |
| 1416 |
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. |
| 1417 |
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? 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. |
| 1418 |
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. 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. |
| 1419 |
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. |
| 1420 |
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. 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? |
| 1421 |
Perhaps she could see it in his face. She said I'm sorry. When you love something you just don't want to stop talking about it. What do you do, Mister Ainsel? My uncle buys and sells antiques all over the country. He uses me to move big, heavy things. Its a good job, but not steady work. A black cat, the bar mascot, wound between Shadows legs, rubbing its forehead with his boot. It leapt up beside him onto the bench and went to sleep. At least you get to travel, said Brogan. You do anything else? You got eight quarters on you? asked Shadow. Brogan fumbled for his change. He found five quarters, pushed them across the table to Shadow. Gallic Knopf produced another three quarters. He laid out the coins, four in each row. Then, with scarcely a fumble, he did the Coins Through the Table, appearing to drop half the coins through the wood of the table, from his left hand into his right. After that, he took all eight coins in his right hand, an empty water glass in his left, covered the glass with a napkin and appeared to make the coins vanish one by one from his right hand and land in the glass beneath the napkin with an audible clink. Finally he opened his right hand to show it was empty, then swept the napkin away to show the coins in the glass. He returned their coinsthree to Gallic, five to Broganthen took a quarter back from Brogans hand, leaving four coins. He blew on it, and it was a penny, which he gave to Brogan, who counted his quarters and was dumbfounded to find that he still had all five in his hand. |
| 1422 |
It was just, he guessed, that she had been told to smile when she gave somebody change. She told him to have a nice day. Then she turned to the woman with the full shopping cart behind him and began to unload and scan. Shadow took his milk and drove away, past the gas station and the klunker on the ice, and over the bridge and home. Coming to America 1778 There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting. That is the tale; the rest is detail. There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Lookhere is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: He is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showersmany people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews. There will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the earth is cleansed of its pests. |
| 1423 |
There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple. No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakesforming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? Theres not a chance youd mistake one for another, after a minutes close inspection), but still unique. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, casualties may rise to a million. With individual stories, the statistics become peoplebut even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the childs swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? |
| 1424 |
There was nothing untoward or unusual about their uncle selling the twins, although twins were considered magical beings, and their uncle was scared of them, scared enough that he did not tell them that they were to be sold in case they harmed his shadow and killed him. They were twelve years old. She was called Wututu, the messenger bird, he was called Agasu, the name of a dead king. They were healthy children, and, because they were twins, male and female, they were told many things about the gods, and because they were twins they listened to the things that they were told, and they remembered. Their uncle was a fat and lazy man. If he had owned more cattle, perhaps he would have given up one of his cattle instead of the children, but he did not. He sold the twins. Enough of him: he shall not enter further into this narrative. We follow the twins. They were marched, with several other slaves taken or sold in the war, for a dozen miles to a small outpost. Here they were traded, and the twins, along with thirteen others, were bought by six men with spears and knives who marched them to the west, toward the sea, and then for many miles along the coast. There were fifteen slaves now altogether, their hands loosely bound, tied neck to neck. Wututu asked her brother Agasu what would happen to them. I do not know, he said. Agasu was a boy who smiled often: his teeth were white and perfect, and he showed them as he grinned, his happy smiles making Wututu happy in her turn. He was not smiling now. |
| 1425 |
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. |
| 1426 |
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. 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. |
| 1427 |
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. |
| 1428 |
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. She nodded, and then her vision smeared and blurred with tears, and she wailed. Together they were twins, magical, powerful. Apart they were two children in pain. She never saw him again but once, and never in life. This is what happened to Agasu. First they took him to a seasoning farm, where they whipped him daily for the things he did and didn't do, they taught him a smattering of English and they gave him the name of Inky Jack, for the darkness of his skin. |
| 1429 |
The slaves on the sugar plantations of St. Domingue rarely lived more than a decade. The free time they were giventwo hours in the heat of noon and five hours in the dark of the night (from eleven until four)was also the only time they had to grow and tend the food they would eat (for they were not fed by their masters, merely given small plots of land to cultivate, with which to feed themselves), and it was also the time they had to sleep and to dream. Even so, they would take that time and they would gather and dance, and sing and worship. The soil of St. Domingue was a fertile soil and the gods of Dahomey and the Congo and the Niger put down thick roots there and grew lush and huge and deep, and they promised freedom to those who worshiped them at night in the groves. Hyacinth was twenty-five years of age when a spider bit the back of his right hand. The bite became infected and the flesh on the back of his hand was necrotic: soon enough his whole arm was swollen and purple, and the hand stank. 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. |
| 1430 |
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. 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. |
| 1431 |
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. |
| 1432 |
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. She knew more of the secrets than old Sanite Dede, who sold candies in front of the Cabildo, more than Marie Saloppe, who called herself the voodoo queen: both were free women of color, while Mama Zouzou was a slave, and would die a slave, or so her master had said. The young woman who came to her to find what had happened to her husband styled herself the Widow Paris. She was high-breasted and young and proud. She had African blood in her, and European blood, and Indian blood. Her skin was reddish, her hair was a gleaming black. Her eyes were black and haughty. Her husband, Jacques Paris, was, perhaps, dead. He was three-quarters white as these things were calculated, and the bastard of a once-proud family, one of the many immigrants who had fled from St. Domingo, and as free-born as his striking young wife. |
| 1433 |
My Jacques. Is he dead? asked the Widow Paris. She was a hairdresser who went from home to home, arranging the coiffures of the elegant ladies of New Orleans before their demanding social engagements. Mama Zouzou consulted the bones, then shook her head. He is with a white woman, somewhere north of here, she said. A white woman with golden hair. He is alive. This was not magic. It was common knowledge in New Orleans just with whom Jacques Paris had run off, and the color of her hair. Mama Zouzou was surprised to realize that the Widow Paris did not already know that her Jacques was sticking his quadroon little pipi into a pink-skinned girl up in Colfax every night. Well, on the nights that he was not so drunk that he could use it for nothing better than pissing. Perhaps she knew. Perhaps she had another reason for coming. The Widow Paris came to see the old slave woman one or two times a week. After a month she brought gifts for the old woman: hair ribbons, and a seedcake, and a black rooster. Mama Zouzou, said the girl, it is time for you to teach me what you know. Yes, said Mama Zouzou, who knew which way the wind blew. And besides, the Widow Paris had confessed that she had been born with webbed toes, which meant that she was a twin and she had killed her twin in the womb. What choice did Mama Zouzou have? She taught the girl that two nutmegs hung upon a string around the neck until the string breaks will cure heart murmurs, while a pigeon that has never flown, cut open and laid on the patients head, will draw a fever. |
| 1434 |
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. |
| 1435 |
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. She could have told you of her daughter, twelve years old and already eight months pregnant by an overseer, and how they dug a hole in the red earth to take her daughters pregnant belly, and then they whipped her until her back had bled. Despite the carefully dug hole, her daughter had lost her baby and her life on a Sunday morning, when all the white folks were in church Too much pain. Worship them, Mama Zouzou told the young Widow Paris in the bayou, one hour after midnight. They were both naked to the waist, sweating in the humid night, their skins given accents by the white moonlight. The Widow Pariss husband, Jacques (whose own death, three years later, would have several remarkable features), had told Marie a little about the gods of St. Domingo, but she did not care. Power came from the rituals, not from the gods. Together Mama Zouzou and the Widow Paris crooned and stamped and keened in the swamp. |
| 1436 |
They were singing in the blacksnakes, the free woman of color and the slave woman with the withered arm. There is more to it than just you prosper, your enemies fail, said Mama Zouzou. Many of the words of the ceremonies, words she knew once, words her brother had also known, these words had fled from her memory. She told pretty Marie Laveau that the words did not matter, only the tunes and the beats, and there, singing and tapping in the blacksnakes, in the swamp, she has an odd vision. She sees the beats of the songs, the Calinda beat, the Bamboula beat, all the rhythms of equatorial Africa spreading slowly across this midnight land until the whole country shivers and swings to the beats of the old gods whose realms she had left. And even that, she understands somehow, in the swamp, even that will not be enough. She turns to pretty Marie and sees herself through Maries eyes, a black-skinned old woman, her face lined, her bony arm hanging stiffly by her side, her eyes the eyes of one who has seen her children fight in the trough for food from the dogs. She saw herself, and she knew then for the first time the revulsion and the fear the younger woman had for her. Then she laughed, and crouched, and picked up in her good hand a blacksnake as tall as a sapling and as thick as a ships rope. Here, she said. Here will be our voudon. She dropped the unresisting snake into a basket that yellow Marie was carrying. And then, in the moonlight, the second sight possessed her for a final time, and she saw her brother Agasu. |
| 1437 |
He was not the twelve-year-old boy she had last seen in the Bridgeport market, but a huge man, bald and grinning with broken teeth, his back lined with deep scars. In one hand he held a machete. His right arm was barely a stump. She reached out her own good left hand. Stay, stay awhile, she whispered. I will be there. I will be with you soon. And Marie Paris thought the old woman was speaking to her. America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed. 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. |
| 1438 |
Thats 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. |
| 1439 |
He grabbed at a rock as he went past, and the obsidian snag ripped his leather glove as if it were paper. He came to rest at the bottom of the hill, between the mechanical spider and the bones. He put a hand down to push himself to his feet, and found himself touching what appeared to be a thighbone with the palm of his hand, and he was standing in the daylight, smoking a cigarette, and looking at his watch. There were cars all around him, some empty, some not. He was wishing he had not had that last cup of coffee, for he dearly needed a piss, and it was starting to become uncomfortable. One of the local law enforcement people came over to him, a big man with frost in his walrus mustache. He had already forgotten the mans name. I don't know how we could have lost them, says Local Law Enforcement, apologetic and puzzled. It was an optical illusion, he replies. You get them in freak weather conditions. The mist. It was a mirage. They were driving down some other road. We thought they were on this one. Local Law Enforcement looks disappointed. Oh. I thought it was maybe like an X-Files kinda thing, he says. Nothing so exciting, I'm afraid. He suffers from occasional hemorrhoids and his ass has just started itching in the way that signals that a flare-up is on the way. He wants to be back inside the Beltway. He wishes there was a tree to go and stand behind: the urge to piss is getting worse. He drops the cigarette and steps on it. Local Law Enforcement walks over to one of the police cars and says something to the driver. |
| 1440 |
Theyll 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. |
| 1441 |
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. 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. |
| 1442 |
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. |
| 1443 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1444 |
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. 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. |
| 1445 |
Theyll 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. |
| 1446 |
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. |
| 1447 |
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. |
| 1448 |
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. |
| 1449 |
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. |
| 1450 |
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. |
| 1451 |
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. |
| 1452 |
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. |
| 1453 |
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 wasn't 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? |
| 1454 |
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. |
| 1455 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1456 |
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. Shadow always had high hopes for haircuts, but they never lived up to his expectations. |
| 1457 |
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. |
| 1458 |
Thats the little road that starts acrost from the carpet store on Twentieth Avenue. No. Never have. Well, she said, its kind of pretty. It was extremely pretty. Shadow parked his car at the edge of town, and walked along the side of the road, a winding, country road that curled around the hills to the east of the town. Each of the hills was covered with leafless maple trees, bone-white birches, dark firs and pines. At one point a small dark cat kept pace with him beside the road. It was the color of dirt, with white forepaws. He walked over to it. It did not run away. Hey cat, said Shadow, unselfconsciously. The cat put its head on one side, looked up at him with emerald eyes. Then it hissednot at him, but at something over on the side of the road, something he could not see. Easy, said Shadow. The cat stalked away across the road, and vanished into a field of old unharvested corn. Around the next bend in the road Shadow came upon a tiny graveyard. The headstones were weathered, although several of them had sprays of fresh flowers resting against them. There was no wall about the graveyard, and no fence, only low mulberry trees, planted at the margins, bent over with ice and age. Shadow stepped over the piled-up ice and slush at the side of the road. There were two stone gateposts marking the entry to the graveyard, although there was no gate between them. 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. |
| 1459 |
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. |
| 1460 |
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. 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. |
| 1461 |
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 wasn't you, was it? No. You didn't want to see me. It wasn't 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. |
| 1462 |
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. He wanted things. He filled the space. She stopped, looked up at him, tipped her head a little to one side. I'm sorry. Did I hurt your feelings? He did not trust his voice not to betray him, so he simply shook his head. Good, she said. |
| 1463 |
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. |
| 1464 |
He doesn't feel like a worshiper, but money, good money that's passed from his hand to hers, that's an energy in its own rightbaraka, they called it, once on a timewhich she can use and frankly these days, every little helps. How much? he asks. Depends on what you want and how long you want it for, she says. And whether you can afford it. She can smell something smoky drifting out of the limo window. It smells like burning wires and overheating circuit boards. The door is pushed open from inside. I can pay for anything I want, says the John. She leans into the car and looks around. Theres nobody else in there, just the John, a puffy-faced kid who doesn't even look old enough to drink. Nobody else, so she gets in. Rich kid, huh? she says. Richer than rich, he tells her, edging along the leather seat toward her. He moves awkwardly. She smiles at him. Mm. Makes me hot, honey, she tells him. You must be one of them dot coms I read about? He preens then, puffs like a bullfrog. Yeah. Among other things. I'm a technical boy. The car moves off. So, he says. Tell me, Bilquis, how much just to suck my cock? What you call me? Bilquis, he says, again. And then he sings, in a voice not made for singing, You are an immaterial girl living in a material world. There is something rehearsed about his words, as if he's practiced this exchange in front of a mirror. She stops smiling, and her face changes, becomes wiser, sharper, harder. What do you want? I told you. Sweet loving. I'll give you whatever you want, she says. |
| 1465 |
She needs to get out of the limo. Its moving too fast for her to throw herself from the car, she figures, but shell do it if she cant talk her way out of this. Whatevers happening here, she doesn't like it. What I want. Yes. He pauses. His tongue runs over his lips. I want a clean world. I want to own tomorrow. I want evolution, devolution, and revolution. I want to move our kind from the fringes of the slipstream to the higher ground of the mainstream. You people are underground. that's wrong. We need to take the spotlight and shine. Front and center. You people have been so far underground for so long youve lost the use of your eyes. My names Ayesha, she says. I don't know whatyou're talking about. Theres another girl on that corner, her names Bilquis. We could go back to Sunset, you could have both of us Oh, Bilquis, he says, and he sighs, theatrically. Theres only so much belief to go around. you're reaching the end of what they can give us. The credibility gap. And then he sings, once again, in his tuneless nasal voice, You are an analog girl, living in a digital world. The limo takes a corner too fast, and he tumbles across the seat into her. The driver of the car is hidden behind tinted glass. An irrational conviction strikes her, that nobody is driving the car, that the white limo is driving through Beverly Hills like Herbie the Love Bug, under its own power. Then the John reaches out his hand and taps on the tinted glass. The car slows, and before it has stopped moving Bilquis has pushed open the door and she half jumps, half falls out onto the blacktop. |
| 1466 |
She's on a hillside road. To the left of her is a steep hill, to the right is a sheer drop. She starts to run down the road. The limo sits there, unmoving. It starts to rain, and her high heels slip and twist beneath her. She kicks them off, and runs, soaked to the skin, looking for somewhere she can get off the road. she's scared. She has power, true, but its hunger-magic, cunt-magic. It has kept her alive in this land for so long, but for everything else she uses her sharp eyes and her mind, her height and her presence. Theres a metal guardrail at knee height on her right, to stop cars from tumbling over the side of the hill, and now the rain is running down the hill road turning it into a river, and the soles of her feet have started to bleed. The lights of L. A. are spread out in front of her, a twinkling electrical map of an imaginary kingdom, the heavens laid out right here on earth, and she knows that all she needs to be safe is to get off the road. I am black but comely, she mouths to the night and the rain. I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. A fork of lightning burns greenly across the night sky. She loses her footing, slides several feet, skinning her leg and elbow, and she is getting to her feet when she sees the lights of the car descending the hill toward her. Its coming down too fast for safety and she wonders whether to throw herself to the right, where it could crush her against the hillside, or the left, where she might tumble down the gully. |
| 1467 |
Who else? Leon said that Auntie Sammy called when I was in the shower. We had a good talk. he's such a sweet kid. Yeah. I think I'll keep him. A moment of discomfort for both of them, barely a crackle of a whisper over the telephone lines. Then, Sammy, hows school? you're giving us a week off. Problem with the furnaces. How are things in your neck of the North Woods? Well, I've got a new next-door neighbor. He does coin tricks. The Lakeside News letter column currently features a blistering debate on the potential rezoning of the town land down by the old cemetery on the southeast shore of the lake and yours truly has to write a strident editorial summarizing the papers position on this without offending anybody or in fact giving anyone any idea what our position is. 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? |
| 1468 |
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. |
| 1469 |
He bought a carton of milk, which he would never drink, and a selection of fruit, which he would never eat. Then he drove over to Mabels and bought a single lunchtime pasty. Mabels face lit up when she saw him. Did Hinzelmann catch up with you? I didn't know he was looking for me. Yup. Wants to take you ice fishing. And Chad Mulligan wanted to know if I'd seen you around. His cousins here from out of state. His second cousin, what we used to call kissing cousins. Such a sweetheart. you'll love her, and she dropped the pasty into a brown paper bag, twisted the top over to keep the pasty warm. Shadow drove the long way home, eating one-handed, the pastry crumbs tumbling onto his jeans and onto the floor of the 4-Runner. He passed the library on the south shore of the lake. 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? |
| 1470 |
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. |
| 1471 |
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. He was a whole lot like you. Big and dumb. Wednesday stopped talking. He coughed. Whats wrong? said Shadow, for the second time. They got in touch. Who did? The opposition. And? They want to discuss a truce. Peace talks. Live and let fucking live. So what happens now? Now I go and drink bad coffee with the modern assholes in a Kansas City Masonic Hall. Okay. You going to pick me up, or shall I meet you somewhere? You stay there and you keep your head down. don't get into any trouble. You hear me? But There was a click, and the line went dead and stayed dead. There was no dial tone, but then, there never had been. Nothing but time to kill. The conversation with Wednesday had left Shadow with a sense of disquiet. He got up, intending to go for a walk, but already the light was fading, and he sat back down again. |
| 1472 |
Shadow picked up the Minutes of the LakesideCity Council 18721884 and turned the pages, his eyes scanning the tiny print, not actually reading it, occasionally stopping to scan something that caught his eye. In July 1874, Shadow learned, the city council was concerned about the number of itinerant foreign loggers arriving in the town. An opera house was to be built on the corner of Third Street and Broadway. It was to be expected that the nuisances attendant to the damming of the Mill-Creek would abate once the mill-pond had become a lake. The council authorized the payment of seventy dollars to Mr. Samuel Samuels, and of eighty-five dollars to Mr. Heikki Salminen, in compensation for their land and for the expenses incurred in moving their domiciles out of the area to be flooded. It had never occurred to Shadow before that the lake was manmade. Why call a town Lakeside, when the lake had begun as a dammed mill-pond? He read on, to discover that a Mr. Hinzelmann, originally of Hildemuhlen in Bavaria, was in charge of the lake-building project, and that the city council had granted him the sum of $370 toward the project, any shortfall to be made up by public subscription. Shadow tore off a strip of a paper towel and placed it into the book as a bookmark. He could imagine Hinzelmanns pleasure in seeing the reference to his grandfather. He wondered if the old man knew that his family had been instrumental in building the lake. Shadow flipped forward through the book, scanning for more references to the lake-building project. |
| 1473 |
They had dedicated the lake in a ceremony in the spring of 1876, as a precursor to the towns centennial celebrations. A vote of thanks to Mr. Hinzelmann was taken by the council. Shadow checked his watch. It was five-thirty. He went into the bathroom, shaved, combed his hair. He changed his clothes. Somehow the final fifteen minutes passed. He got the wine and the plant, arid he walked next door. The door opened as he knocked. Marguerite Olsen looked almost as nervous as he felt. She took the wine bottle and the potted plant, and said thank you. The television was on, The Wizard of Oz on video. It was still in sepia, and Dorothy was still in Kansas, sitting with her eyes closed in Professor Marvels wagon as the old fraud pretended to read her mind, and the twister-wind that would tear her away from her life was approaching. 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. |
| 1474 |
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. |
| 1475 |
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. There was crusty garlic bread, thick red sauce, good spicy meatballs. Shadow complimented Marguerite on it. Old family recipe, she told him, from the Corsican side of the family. I thought you were Native American. Dads Cherokee, said Sam. Mags moms father came from Corsica. Sam was the only person in the room who was actually drinking the cabernet. Dad left her when Mags was ten and he moved across town. Six months after that, I was born. Mom and Dad got married when the divorce came through. When I was ten he went away. I think he has a ten-year attention span. Well, he's been out in Oklahoma for ten years, said Marguerite. Now, my moms family were European Jewish, continued Sam, from one of those places that used to be communist and now are just chaos. |
| 1476 |
I think she liked the idea of being married to a Cherokee. Fry bread and chopped liver. She took another sip of the red wine. Sams moms a wild woman, said Marguerite, semi-approvingly. You know where she is now? asked Sam. Shadow shook his head. she's in Australia. She met a guy on the Internet who lived in Hobart. When they met in the flesh she decided he was actually kind of icky. But she really liked Tasmania. So she's living down there, with a womans group, teaching them to batik cloth and things like that. isn't that cool? At her age? Shadow agreed that it was, and helped himself to more meatballs. Sam told them how all the aboriginal natives of Tasmania had been wiped out by the British, and about the human chain they made across the island to catch them which trapped only an old man and a sick boy. She told him how the thylacinesthe Tasmanian tigershad been killed by farmers, scared for their sheep, how the politicians in the 1930s noticed that the thylacines should be protected only after the last of them was dead. She finished her second glass of wine, poured her third. So, Mike, said Sam, suddenly, her cheeks reddening, tell us about your family. What are the Ainsels like? She was smiling, and there was mischief in that smile. Were real dull, said Shadow. None of us ever got as far as Tasmania. Soyou're at school in Madison. Whats that like? You know, she said. I'm studying art history, womens studies, and casting my own bronzes. When I grow up, said Leon, I'm going to do magic. |
| 1477 |
Poof. Will you teach me, Mike Ainsel? Sure, said Shadow. If your mom doesn't mind. Sam said, After weve eaten, whileyou're putting Leon to bed, Mags, I think I'm going to get Mike to take me to the Buck Stops Here for an hour or so. Marguerite did not shrug. Her head moved, her eyebrow raised slightly. I think he's interesting, said Sam. And we have lots to talk about. Marguerite looked at Shadow, who busied himself in dabbing an imaginary blob of red sauce from his chin with a paper napkin. Well, you're grownups, she said, in a tone of voice that implied that they werent, and that even if they were they shouldn't be. After dinner Shadow helped Sam with the washing uphe dried and then he did a trick for Leon, counting pennies into Leons palm: each time Leon opened his hand and counted them there was one less coin than he had counted in. 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. |
| 1478 |
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. |
| 1479 |
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. I would. She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet right now. Its not easy to believe. I, she told him, can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe. Really? I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that arent true and I can believe things where nobody knows ifyou're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. |
| 1480 |
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyones ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day well all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankinds destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that its aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that theres a cat in a box somewhere whos alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it itll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. |
| 1481 |
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasnt done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know whats going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a womans right to choose, a babys right to live, that while all human life is sacred theres nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. 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? |
| 1482 |
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. |
| 1483 |
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. 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. |
| 1484 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1485 |
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. |
| 1486 |
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. He sat in the empty office, wishing he had something to distract him. Reluctantly, he picked up the Minutes once more, opened it to somewhere in the middle of the book, and began to read. An ordinance prohibiting expectoration on sidewalks and on the floors of public buildings, or throwing thereon tobacco in any form was introduced and passed, eight to four, in December of 1876. Lemmi Hautala was twelve years old and had, it was feared, wandered away in a fit of delirium on December 13, 1876. A search being immediately effected, but impeded by the snows, which are blinding. The council had voted unanimously to send the Hautala family their condolences. The fire at Olsens livery stables the following week was extinguished without any injury or loss of life, human or equine. Shadow scanned the closely printed columns. He found no further mention of Lemmi Hautala. |
| 1487 |
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. |
| 1488 |
For a moment they were out of focus, and then they became sharp once more. The man facing the camera got up and began to pace, like a bear on a chain. It was Wednesday. He looked as if, on some level, he was enjoying this. As they came into focus the sound came on with a pop. The man with his back to the screen was saying, we are offering is the chance to end this, here and now, with no more bloodshed, no more aggression, no more pain, no more loss of life. isn't that worth giving up a little? Wednesday stopped pacing and turned. His nostrils flared. First, he growled, you have to understand that you are asking me to speak for all of us. Which is manifestly nonsensical. Secondly, what on earth makes you think that I believe that you people are going to keep your word? The man with his back to the camera moved his head. You do yourself an injustice, he said. Obviously you people have no leaders. Butyou're the one they listen to. They pay attention to you. And as for keeping my word, well, these preliminary talks are being filmed and broadcast live, and he gestured back toward the camera. Some of your people are watching as we speak. Others will see videotapes. The camera does not lie. Everybody lies, said Wednesday. Shadow recognized the voice of the man with his back to the camera. It was Mr. World, the one who had spoken to Town on the cellphone while Shadow was in Towns head. You don't believe, said Mr. World, that we will keep our word? I think your promises were made to be broken and your oaths to be forsworn. |
| 1489 |
On Cheers, Coach assured his daughter that she was truly beautiful, just like her mother. The telephone rang, and Officer Liz sat up with a start. She picked it up. Said, Okay. Okay. Yes. Okay. Put the phone down. She got up from behind the counter, and said to Shadow, I'm going to have to put you in the cell. don't use the can. The Lafayette sheriffs department should be here to collect you soon. 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. |
| 1490 |
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. |
| 1491 |
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. They cost the county money. They walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car sat idling. It wasn't a sheriffs department car. It was a black town car. Another deputy, a grizzled white guy with a mustache, stood by the car, smoking a cigarette. He crushed it out underfoot as they came close, and opened the back door for Shadow. Shadow sat down, awkwardly, his movements hampered by the cuffs and the hobble. There was no grille between the back and the front of the car. The two deputies climbed into the front of the car. The black deputy started the motor. They waited for the sally port door to open. Come on, come on, said the black deputy, his fingers drumming against the steering wheel. Chad Mulligan tapped on the side window. The white deputy glanced at the driver, then he lowered the window. This is wrong, said Chad. I just wanted to say that. Your comments have been noted, and will be conveyed to the appropriate authorities, said the driver. The doors to the outside world opened. The snow was still falling, dizzying into the cars headlights. The driver put his foot on the gas, and they were heading back down the street and on to Main Street. |
| 1492 |
You heard about Wednesday? said the driver. His voice sounded different, now, older, and familiar. he's dead. Yeah. I know, said Shadow. I saw it on TV. Those fuckers, said the white officer. It was the first thing he had said, and his voice was rough and accented and, like the drivers, it was a voice that Shadow knew. I tell you, they are fuckers, those fuckers. Thanks for coming to get me, said Shadow. don't mention it, said the driver. In the light of an oncoming car his face already seemed to look older. He looked smaller, too. The last time Shadow had seen him he had been wearing lemon-yellow gloves and a check jacket. We were in Milwaukee. Had to drive like demons when Ibis called. You think we let them lock you up and send you to the chair, when I'm still waiting to break your head with my hammer? asked the white deputy gloomily, fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. His accent was Eastern European. The real shit will hit the fan in an hour or less, said Mr. Nancy, looking more like himself with each moment, when they really turn up to collect you. Well pull over before we get to Highway 53 and get you out of those shackles and back into your own clothes. Czernobog held up a handcuff key and smiled. I like the mustache, said Shadow. Suits you. Czernobog stroked it with a yellowed finger. Thank you. Wednesday, said Shadow. Is he really dead? This isn't some kind of trick, is it? He realized that he had been holding on to some kind of hope, foolish though it was. |
| 1493 |
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. |
| 1494 |
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. 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. |
| 1495 |
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. |
| 1496 |
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. Now the sky was dark, and Kalanu had not returned, but the night sky was alive with lights, knotting and flickering and winding, flux and pulse, white and green and violet and red. Atsula and her people had seen the northern lights before, but they were still frightened by them, and this was a display like they had never seen before. Kalanu returned to them, as the lights in the sky formed and flowed. Sometimes, she said to Atsula, I feel that I could simply spread my arms and fall into the sky. That is because you are a scout, said Atsula, the priestess. When you die, you shall fall into the sky and become a star, to guide us as you guide us in life. There are cliffs of ice to the east, high cliffs, said Kalanu, her raven-black hair worn long, as a man would wear it. We can climb them, but it will take many days. You shall lead us safely, said Atsula. I shall die at the foot of the cliff, and that shall be the sacrifice that takes you into the new lands. To the west of them, back in the lands from which they had come, where the sun had set hours before, there was a flash of sickly yellow light, brighter than lightning, brighter than daylight. |
| 1497 |
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. |
| 1498 |
Wednesday was your father? asked Shadow. He was the All-Father, said the man. His deep voice caught in his throat. 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. |
| 1499 |
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. |
| 1500 |
He's the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk. 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. |
| 1501 |
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. |
| 1502 |
You know we want it. And I know you want to get rid of it. So don't give me any shit. He hung up the telephone, came back to the table. Who was it? asked Shadow. didn't say. What did they want? They were offerin us a truce, while they hand over the body. They lie, said Czernobog. They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do, he added, with gloomy pride. Its on neutral territory, said Nancy. Truly neutral. Czernobog chuckled. It sounded like a metal ball rattling in a dry skull. I used to say that also. Come to a neutral place, I would say, and then in the night we would rise up and kill them all. Those were the good days. Mr. Nancy shrugged. He crunched down on his dark brown french fries, grinned his approval. Mm-mm. These are fine fries, he said. We cant trust those people, said Shadow. Listen, I'm older than you and I'm smarter than you and I'm better lookin than you, said Mr. Nancy, thumping the bottom of the ketchup bottle, blobbing ketchup over his burnt fries. I can get more pussy in an afternoon than you'll get in a year. I can dance like an angel, fight like a cornered bear, plan better than a fox, sing like a nightingale And your point here is? Nancys brown eyes gazed into Shadows. And they need to get rid of the body as much as we need to take it. Czernobog said, There is no such neutral place. Theres one, said Mr. Nancy. Its the center. * * * Determining the exact center of anything can be problematic at best. |
| 1503 |
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. |
| 1504 |
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. |
| 1505 |
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. |
| 1506 |
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. |
| 1507 |
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. |
| 1508 |
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. |
| 1509 |
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. |
| 1510 |
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. |
| 1511 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1512 |
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. He wore a long black coat and a peaked chauffeurs cap. Sorry about the delay, he said, hoarsely. |
| 1513 |
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. |
| 1514 |
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. 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. |
| 1515 |
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. |
| 1516 |
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 wasn't 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. 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? |
| 1517 |
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. |
| 1518 |
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. 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. |
| 1519 |
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. |
| 1520 |
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. 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. |
| 1521 |
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. |
| 1522 |
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. 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. |
| 1523 |
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. If anyone would like to say something, say it now. Not me, said Town. I never properly met the guy. And this whole thing makes me feel uncomfortable. Czernobog said, These actions will have consequences. You know that? This can only be the start of it all. The fat kid started to giggle, a high-pitched, girlish noise. He said, Okay. |
| 1524 |
Okay, I've got it. And then, all on one note, he recited: * Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold * And then he broke off, his brow creasing. He said, Shit. I used to know the whole thing, and he rubbed his temples and made a face and was quiet. And then they were all looking at Shadow. The wind was screaming now. He didn't know what to say. He said, This whole thing is pitiful. Half of you killed him or had a hand in his death. Nowyou're giving us his body. Great. He was an irascible old fuck but I drank his mead and I'm still working for him. that's all. Media said, In a world where people die every day, I think the important thing to remember is that for each moment of sorrow we get when people leave this world theres a corresponding moment of joy when a new baby comes into this world. That first wail iswell, its magic, isn't it? Perhaps its a hard thing to say, but joy and sorrow are like milk and cookies. that's how well they go together. I think we should all take a moment to meditate on that. And Mr. Nancy cleared his throat and said, So. I got to say it, because nobody else here will. We are at the center of this place: a land that has no time for gods, and here at the center it has less time for us than anywhere. It is a no-mans-land, a place of truce, and we observe our truces, here. We have no choice. So. You give us the body of our friend. We accept it. You will pay for this, murder for murder, blood for blood. |
| 1525 |
Town said, Whatever. You could save yourselves a lot of time and effort by going home and shooting yourselves in the heads. Cut out the middleman. Fuck you, said Czernobog. Fuck you and fuck your mother and fuck the fucking horse you fucking rode in on. You will not even die in battle. No warrior will taste your blood. No one alive will take your life. You will die a soft, poor death. You will die with a kiss on your lips and a lie in your heart. Leave it, old man, said Town. The blood-dimmed tide is loose, said the fat kid. I think that comes next. The wind howled. Okay, said Loki. he's yours. Were done. Take the old bastard away. He made a gesture with his fingers, and Town, Media, and the fat kid left the room. He smiled at Shadow. Call no man happy, huh, kid? he said. And then he, too, walked away. What happens now? asked Shadow. Now we wrap him up, said Anansi. And we take him away from here. They wrapped the body in the motel sheets, wrapped it well in its impromptu shroud, so there was no body to be seen, and they could carry it. The two old men walked to each end of the body, but Shadow said, Let me see something, and he bent his knees and slipped his arms around the white-sheeted figure, pushed him up and over his shoulder. 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. |
| 1526 |
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. |
| 1527 |
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. 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. |
| 1528 |
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. |
| 1529 |
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. There was another part of himmaybe it was Mike Ainsel, he thought, vanished off into nothing at the press of a button in the Lakeside Police Departmentwho was still trying to figure it all out, trying to see the big picture.. Hidden Indians, he said out loud. What? came Czernobogs irritated croak from the front seat. |
| 1530 |
He walked a little behind the bus, stretching his legs, jogging when the bus got too far in front of him, enjoying the sensation of moving his body. He had lost all sense of time on the drive from Kansas. Had they been driving for two days? Three days? He did not know. The body in the back of the bus did not seem to be rotting. He could smell ita faint odor of Jack Daniels, overlaid with something that might have been sour honey. But the smell was not unpleasant. From time to time he would take out the glass eye from his pocket and look at it: it was shattered deep inside, fractured from what he imagined was the impact of a bullet, but apart from a chip to one side of the iris the surface was unmarred. Shadow would run it through his hands, palming it, rolling it, pushing it along with his fingers. It was a ghastly souvenir, but oddly comforting: and he suspected that it would have amused Wednesday to know that his eye had wound up in Shadows pocket. The farmhouse was dark and shut up. The meadows were overgrown and seemed abandoned. The farm roof was crumbling at the back; it was covered in black plastic sheeting. They jolted over a ridge and Shadow saw the tree. 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. |
| 1531 |
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. |
| 1532 |
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! 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. |
| 1533 |
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. 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. |
| 1534 |
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. |
| 1535 |
Hey! he shouted at the storm. Hey! Its me! I'm here! He trapped some water between his bare shoulder and the trunk of the tree, and he twisted his head over and drank the trapped rainwater, sucking and slurping at it, and he drank more and he laughed, laughed with joy and delight, not madness, until he could laugh no more, until he hung there too exhausted to move. At the foot of the tree, on the ground, the rain had made the sheet partly transparent, and had lifted it and pushed it forward so that Shadow could see Wednesdays dead hand, waxy and pale, and the shape of his head, and he thought of the shroud of Turin and he remembered the open girl on Jacquels table in Cairo, and then, as if to spite the cold, he observed that he was feeling warm and comfortable, and the bark of the tree felt soft, and he slept once more, and if he dreamed any dreams this time he could not remember them. * * * 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. |
| 1536 |
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. |
| 1537 |
Do you remember? Of course I remember, darling. I would have made it too, if it wasn't 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. 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. |
| 1538 |
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. |
| 1539 |
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. 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? |
| 1540 |
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? |
| 1541 |
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. 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. |
| 1542 |
* * * 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. 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. |
| 1543 |
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. It was no longer a silver coin, though. Lady Liberty and her crown of spikes were gone. The face he saw on the coin was the indeterminate face of the moon in the summer sky. Shadow could not decide whether he was looking at a moon the size of a dollar, a foot above his head, or whether he was looking at a moon the size of the Pacific Ocean, many thousands of miles away. Nor whether there was any difference between the two ideas. Perhaps it was all a matter of the way you looked at it. He looked at the forking path ahead of him. Which path should I take? he asked. Which one is safe? Take one, and you cannot take the other, she said. But neither path is safe. Which way would you walkthe way of hard truths or the way of fine lies? Truths, he said. I've come too far for more lies. She looked sad. There, will be a price, then, she said. I'll pay it. Whats the price? Your name, she said. Your real name. You will have to give it to me. How? Like this, she said. |
| 1544 |
The money they could never prove he had taken: his share of the proceeds, and a little more, for they shouldn't have tried to rip him and Laura off like that. He was only the driver, but he had done his part, done everything that she had asked of him At the trial, nobody mentioned the bank robbery, although everybody wanted to. They couldn't prove a thing, as long as nobody was talking. And nobody was. The prosecutor was forced instead to stick to the bodily damage that Shadow had inflicted on Powers and West. He showed photographs of the two men on their arrival in the local hospital. Shadow barely defended himself in court; it was easier that way. Neither Powers nor West seemed able to remember what the fight had been about, but they each admitted that Shadow had been their assailant. Nobody talked about the money. Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted. Shadow wondered whether the path of comforting lies would have been a better one to walk. He walked away from that place, and followed the rock path down into what looked like a hospital room, a public hospital in Chicago, and he felt the bile rise in his throat. He stopped. He did not want to look. He did not want to keep walking. In the hospital bed his mother was dying again, as shed died when he was sixteen, and, yes, here he was, a large, clumsy sixteen-year-old with acne pocking his cream-and-coffee skin, sitting at her bedside, unable to look at her, reading a thick paperback book. Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to inspect it more closely. |
| 1545 |
He stood between the bed and the chair looking from the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in Gravitys Rainbow, trying to escape from his mothers death into London during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no excuse. His mothers eyes were closed in a morphine peace: what she had thought was just another sickle-cell crisis, another bout of pain to be endured, had turned out, they had discovered, too late, to be lymphoma. There was a lemonish-gray tinge to her skin. She was in her early thirties, but she looked much older. Shadow wanted to shake himself, the awkward boy that he once was, get him to hold her hand, talk to her, do something before she slipped away, as he knew that she would. But he could not touch himself, and he continued to read; and so his mother died while he sat in the chair next to her, reading a fat book. After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn't protect you from something like that? Shadow walked away from the hospital room, down the winding corridor, deep into the bowels of the earth. He sees his mother first and he cannot believe how young she is, not yet twenty-five he guesses, before her medical discharge. you're in their apartment, another embassy rental somewhere in Northern Europe. He looks around for something to give him a clue, and he sees himself: a shrimp of a kid, big pale gray eyes and dark hair. They are arguing. |
| 1546 |
Shadow knows without hearing the words whatyou're arguing about: it was the only thing they quarreled about, after all. Tell me about my father. he's dead. don't ask about him. But who was he? Forget him. Dead and gone and you ain't missed nothing. I want to see a picture of him. I ain't got a picture, shed say, and her voice would get quiet and fierce, and he knew that if he kept asking her questions she would shout, or even hit him, and he knew that he would not stop asking questions, so he turned away and walked on down the tunnel. 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. |
| 1547 |
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. |
| 1548 |
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. 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1549 |
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. |
| 1550 |
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. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothing left but essence. Something big splashed, quietly, in the distance, and the splash echoed into the vastness. He squinted, but could see nothing. It was too dark. And then, from the direction of the splashes, a ghost-light glimmered and the world took form: he was in a cavern, and in front of him, mirror-smooth, was water. The splashing noises came closer and the light became brighter, and Shadow waited on the shore. Soon enough a low, flat boat came into sight, a flickering white lantern burning at its raised prow, another reflected in the glassy black water several feet below it. The boat was being poled by a tall figure, and the splashing noise Shadow had heard was the sound of the pole being lifted and moved as it pushed the craft across the waters of the underground lake. Hello there! called Shadow. Echoes of his words suddenly surrounded him: he could imagine that a whole chorus of people were welcoming him and calling to him and each of them had his voice. |
| 1551 |
The person poling the boat made no reply. The boats pilot was tall, and very thin. Heif it was a hewore an unadorned white robe, and the pale head that topped it was so utterly inhuman that Shadow was certain that it had to be a mask of some sort: it was a birds head, small on a long neck, its beak long and high. Shadow was certain he had seen it before, this ghostly, birdlike figure. He grasped at the memory and then, disappointed, realized that he was picturing the clockwork penny-in-the-slot machine in the House on the Rock and the pale, birdlike, half-glimpsed figure that glided out from behind the crypt for the drunkards soul. Water dripped and echoed from the pole and the prow, and the ships wake rippled the glassy waters. The boat was made of reeds, bound and tied. The boat came close to the shore. The pilot leaned on its pole. Its head turned slowly, until it was facing Shadow. Hello, it said, without moving its long beak. The voice was male, and, like everything else in Shadows afterlife so far, familiar. Come on board. you'll get your feet wet, I'm afraid, but theres not a thing can be done about that. These are old boats, and if I come in closer I could rip out the bottom. Shadow took off his shoes and stepped out into the water. It came halfway up his calves, and was, after the initial shock of wetness, surprisingly warm. He reached the boat, and the pilot put down a hand and pulled him aboard. The reed boat rocked a little, and water splashed over the low sides of it, and then it steadied. |
| 1552 |
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. |
| 1553 |
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. |
| 1554 |
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. Anubis put Shadows heart on the other pan of the scales. Something moved in the shadows under the scale, something it made Shadow uncomfortable to examine too closely. It was a heavy feather, but Shadow had a heavy heart, and the scales tipped and swung worryingly. But they balanced, in the end, and the creature in the shadows skulked away, unsatisfied. So that's that, said Bast, wistfully. Just another skull for the pile. Its a pity. I had hoped that you would do some good, in the current troubles. Its like watching a slow-motion car crash and being powerless to prevent it. You won't be there? She shook her head. I don't like other people picking my battles for me, she said. There was silence then, in the vast hall of death, where it echoed of water and the dark. Shadow said, So now I get to choose where I go next? Choose, said Thoth. Or we can choose for you. No, said Shadow. Its okay. Its my choice. Well? roared Anubis. I want to rest now, said Shadow. that's what I want. I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end. you're certain? asked Thoth. Yes, said Shadow. Mr. Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing. Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy. |
| 1555 |
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. |
| 1556 |
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. |
| 1557 |
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. |
| 1558 |
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. |
| 1559 |
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. |
| 1560 |
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. |
| 1561 |
Three women sat on, an elderly couch, as if they had come as a matched set in some peculiar artistic exhibition. The couch was upholstered in threadbare velvet, a faded brown that might, once, a hundred years ago, have been a bright canary yellow. They followed her with their eyes as she entered the room, and they said nothing. Laura had not known they would be there. Something wriggled and fell in her nasal cavity. Laura fumbled in her sleeve for a tissue, and she blew her nose into it. She crumpled the tissue and flung it and its contents onto the coals of the fire, watched it crumple and blacken and become orange lace. She watched the maggots shrivel and brown and burn. This done, she turned back to the women on the couch. They had not moved since she had entered, not a muscle, not a hair. They stared at her. Hello. Is this your farm? she asked. The largest of the women nodded. Her hands were very red, and her expression was impassive. Shadowthats the guy hanging on the tree. he's my husbandhe said I should tell you that he wants you to give me water. Something large shifted in her bowels. It squirmed, and then was still. The smallest woman clambered off the couch. Her feet had not previously reached the floor. She scurried from the room. Laura could hear doors opening and closing, through the farmhouse. Then, from outside, she could hear a series of loud creaks. Each was followed by a splash of water. Soon enough, the small woman returned. She was carrying a brown earthenware jug of water. |
| 1562 |
Time rushed over her and into her, swirling like a dust devil. A thousand memories began to play at once: she was lost in a department store the week before Christmas and her father was nowhere to be seen; and now she was sitting in the bar at Chi-Chis, ordering a strawberry daiquiri and checking out her blind date, the big, grave man-child, and wondering how he kissed; and she was in the car as, sickeningly, it rolled and jolted, and Robbie was screaming at her until the metal post finally stopped the car, but not its contents, from moving The water of time, which comes from the spring of fate, Urds Well, is not the water of life. Not quite. It feeds the roots of the world tree, though. And there is no other water like it. When Laura woke in the empty farmhouse room, she was shivering, and her breath actually steamed in the morning air. There was a scrape on the back of her hand, and a wet smear on the scrape, the vivid red of fresh blood. And she knew where she had to go. She had drunk from the water of time, which comes from the spring of fate. She could see the mountain in her mind. She licked the blood from the back of her hand, marveling at the film of saliva, and she began to walk. * * * It was a wet March day, and it was unseasonably cold, and the storms of the previous few days had lashed their way across the southern states, which meant that there were very few real tourists at Rock City on Lookout Mountain. The Christmas lights had been taken down, the summer visitors were yet to start coming. |
| 1563 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1564 |
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. 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. |
| 1565 |
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. |
| 1566 |
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. Another night had come and gone, and nothing. The folk were still coming, by ones and twos. The last night had brought several creatures from the southwest, including two small boys each the size of an apple tree, and something that she had only glimpsed, but that had looked like a disembodied head the size of a VW bug. |
| 1567 |
They had disappeared into the trees at the base of the mountain. Nobody bothered them. Nobody from the outside world even seemed to have noticed they were there: she imagined the tourists at Rock City staring down at them through their insert-a-quarter binoculars, staring straight at a ramshackle encampment of things and people at the foot of the mountain, and seeing nothing but trees and bushes and rocks. She could smell the smoke from a cooking fire, a smell of burning bacon on the chilly dawn wind. Someone at the far end of the encampment began to play the harmonica, which made her, involuntarily, smile and shiver. She had a paperback book in her backpack, and she waited for the sky to become light enough for her to read. There were two dots in the sky, immediately below the clouds: a small one and a larger one. A spatter of rain brushed her face in the morning wind. A barefoot girl came out from the encampment, walking toward her. She stopped beside a tree, hitched up her skirts, and squatted. When she had finished, Easter hailed her. The girl walked over. Good morning, lady, she said. The battle will start soon now. The tip of her pink tongue touched her scarlet lips. She had a black crows wing tied with leather onto her shoulder, a crows foot on a chain around her neck. Her arms were blue-tattooed with lines and patterns and intricate knots. How do you know? The girl grinned. I am Macha, of the Morrigan. When war comes, I can smell it in the air. I am a war goddess, and I say, blood shall be spilled this day. |
| 1568 |
Oh, said Easter. Well. There you go. She was watching the smaller dot in the sky as it tumbled down toward them, dropping like a rock. And we shall fight them, and we shall kill them, every one, said the girl. And we shall take their heads as trophies, and the crows shall have their eyes and their corpses. The dot had become a bird, its wings outstretched, riding the gusty morning winds above them. Easter cocked her head on one side. Is that some hidden war goddess knowledge? she asked. The whole whos-going-to-win thing? Who gets whose head? No, said the girl, I can smell the battle, but that's all. But well win. won't we? We have to. I saw what they did to the All-Father. Its them or us. Yeah, said Easter. I suppose it is. The girl smiled again, in the half-light, and made her way back to the camp. Easter put her hand down and touched a green shoot that stabbed up from the earth like a knife blade. As she touched it it grew, and opened, and twisted, and changed, until she was resting her hand on a green tulip head. When the sun was high the flower would open. Easter looked up at the hawk. Can I help you? she said. The hawk circled about fifteen feet above Easters head, slowly, then it glided down to her, and landed on the ground nearby. It looked up at her with mad eyes. Hello, cutie, she said. Now, what do you really look like, eh? The hawk hopped toward her, uncertainly, and then it was no longer a hawk, but a young man. He looked at her, and then looked down at the grass. You? |
| 1569 |
He said. His glance went everywhere, to the grass, to the sky, to the bushes. Not to her. Me, she said. What about me? You. He stopped. He seemed to be trying to muster his thoughts; strange expressions flitted and swam across his face. He spent too long a bird, she thought. He has forgotten how to be a man. She waited patiently. Eventually, he said, Will you come with me? Maybe. Where do you want me to go? The man on the tree. He needs you. A ghost hurt, in his side. The blood came, then it stopped. I think he is dead. Theres a war on. I cant just go running away. The naked man said nothing, just moved from one foot to another as if he were uncertain of his weight, as if he were used to resting on the air or on a swaying branch, not on the solid earth. Then he said, If he is gone forever, it is all over. But the battle If he is lost, it will not matter who wins. He looked like he needed a blanket, and a cup of sweet coffee, and someone to take him somewhere he could just shiver and babble until he got his mind back. He held his arms stiffly against his sides. Where is this? Nearby? He stared at the tulip plant, and shook his head. Way away. Well, she said, I'm needed here. And I cant just leave. How do you expect me to get there? I cant fly, like you, you know. No, said Horus, You cant. Then he looked up, gravely, and pointed to the other dot that circled them, as it dropped from the darkening clouds, growing in size. He can. * * * Another several hours pointless driving, and by now Town hated the global positioning system almost as much as he hated Shadow. |
| 1570 |
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. |
| 1571 |
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. 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. |
| 1572 |
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? |
| 1573 |
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. 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. |
| 1574 |
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 ain't what youd call truth. There ain't 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. |
| 1575 |
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. 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? |
| 1576 |
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. |
| 1577 |
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. 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. |
| 1578 |
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. |
| 1579 |
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? 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? |
| 1580 |
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. |
| 1581 |
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. You okay? I'm fine, said Shadow. I just saw the hidden Indians. Not all of them. But I saw them anyhow. Probably Ho Chunk, then. Those guys never could hide worth a damn. He looked up at the sun. Time to go back, he said. He stood up. Its a two-man con, said Shadow. Its not a war at all, is it? Whiskey Jack patted Shadows arm. you're not so dumb, he said. They walked back to Whiskey Jacks shack. He opened the door. Shadow hesitated. I wish I could stay here with you, he said. This seems like a good place. There are a lot of good places, said Whiskey Jack. |
| 1582 |
Thats kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the lands still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn't going anywhere. And neither am I. Shadow closed the door. Something was pulling at him. He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun. And then the pain began. * * * Easter walked through the meadow, and spring flowers blossomed where she had passed. She walked by a place where, long ago, a farmhouse had stood. Even today several walls were still standing, jutting out of the weeds and the meadow grass like rotten teeth. A thin rain was falling. The clouds were dark and low, and it was cold. A little way beyond the place where the farmhouse had been there was a tree, a huge silver-gray tree, winter-dead to all appearances, and leafless, and in front of the tree, on the grass, were frayed clumps of colorless fabric. The woman stopped at the fabric, and bent down, and picked up something brownish-white: it was a much-gnawed fragment of bone which might, once, have been a part of a human skull. She tossed it back down onto the grass. Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly. They just arent as interesting naked, she said. Its the unwrapping that's half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs. The hawk-headed man who walked beside her looked down at his penis and seemed, for the first time; to become aware of his own nakedness. He said, I can look at the sun without even blinking. |
| 1583 |
Thats very clever of you, Easter told him, reassuringly. Now, lets get him down from there. The wet ropes that held Shadow to the tree had long ago weathered and rotted, and they parted easily as the two people pulled on them. The body on the tree slipped and slid down toward the roots. They caught him as he fell, and they took him up, carrying him easily, although he was a very big man, and they put him down in the gray meadow. The body on the grass was cold, and it did not breathe. There was a patch of dried black blood on its side, as if it had been stabbed with a spear. What now? Now, she said, we warm him. You know what you have to do. I know. I cannot. If you are not willing to help, then you should not have called me here. She reached out a white hand to Horus, and she touched his black hair. He blinked at her, intently. Then he shimmered, as if in a heat haze. The hawk eye that faced her glinted orange, as if a flame had just been kindled inside it; a flame that had been long extinguished. 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. |
| 1584 |
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. |
| 1585 |
I cant believe that. She sighed. Its true, Mack. I'm just not the woman he married anymore. Well, he told her, people change, and before he could think he was telling her everything he could tell her about his life, he was even telling her about Woody and Stoner, how the three of them were the three musketeers, and the two of them were killed, you think youd get hardened to that kind of thing in government work, but you never did. And she reached out one handit was cold enough that he turned up the cars heatingand squeezed his hand tightly in hers. Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town didn't care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm. 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. |
| 1586 |
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. 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. |
| 1587 |
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? |
| 1588 |
Nobody challenged her, although she passed several men and women on the path, in the rain. Many of them looked faintly artificial; several of them were translucent. She walked across a swinging rope bridge. She passed the white deer gardens, and pushed herself through the Fat Mans Squeeze, where the path ran between two rock walls. And, in the end, she stepped over a chain, with a sign on it telling her that this part of the attraction was closed, she went into a cavern, and she saw a man sitting on a plastic chair, in front of a diorama of drunken gnomes. He was reading the Washington Post by the light of a small electric lantern. When he saw her he folded the paper and placed it beneath his chair. He stood up, a tall man with close-cropped orange hair in an expensive raincoat, and he gave her a small bow. I shall assume that Mister Town is dead, he said. Welcome, spear-carrier. Thank you. I'm sorry about Mack, she said. Were you friends? Not at all. He should have kept himself alive, if he wanted to keep his job. But you brought his stick. He looked her up and down with eyes that glimmered like the orange embers of a dying fire. I am afraid you have the advantage of me. They call me Mister World, here at the top of the hill. I'm Shadows wife. Of course. The lovely Laura, he said. I should have recognized you. He had several photographs of you up above his bed, in the cell that once we shared. And, if you don't mind my saying so, you are looking lovelier than you have any right to look. |
| 1589 |
Shouldnt you be further along on the whole road-to-rot-and-ruin business by now? I was, she said simply. But those women, in the farm, they gave me water from their well. An eyebrow raised. Urds Well? Surely not. She pointed to herself. Her skin was pale, and her eye sockets were dark, but she was manifestly whole: if she was indeed a walking corpse, she was freshly dead. It won't last, said Mr. World. The Norns gave you a little taste of the past. It will dissolve into the present soon enough, and then those pretty blue eyes will roll out of their sockets and ooze down those pretty cheeks, which will, by then, of course, no longer be so pretty. 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. |
| 1590 |
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. In my dream, I was hunting you, said Shadow, his words ripped away by the wind. In my dream, I had to bring back a feather. Yes. The word was a static crackle in the radio of his mind. They came to us for feathers, to prove that they were men; and they came to us to cut the stones from our heads, to gift their dead with our lives. An image filled his mind then: of a thunderbirda female, he assumed, for her plumage was brown, not blacklying freshly dead on the side of a mountain. Beside it was a woman. She was breaking open its skull with a knob of flint. She picked through the wet shards of bone and the brains until she found a smooth clear stone the tawny color of garnet, opalescent fires flickering in its depths. Eagle stones, thought Shadow. She was going to take up her infant son, dead these last three nights, and she would lay it on his cold breast. By the next sunrise the boy would be alive and laughing, and the jewel would be gray and clouded and as dead as the bird it had been stolen from. |
| 1591 |
I understand, he said to the bird. The bird threw back its head and crowed, and its cry was the thunder. The world beneath them flashed past in one strange dream. * * * Laura adjusted her grip on the stick, and she waited for the man she knew as Mr. World to come to her. She was facing away from him, looking out at the storm, and the dark green hills below. In this sorry world, she thought, the symbol is the thing. Yes. She felt his hand close softly onto her right shoulder. Good, she thought. He does not want to alarm me. He is scared that I will throw his stick out into the storm, that it will tumble down the mountainside, and he will lose it. She leaned back, just a little, until she was touching his chest with her back. His left arm curved around her. It was an intimate gesture. His left hand was open in front of her. She closed both of her hands around the top of the stick, exhaled, concentrated. Please. My stick, he said, in her ears. Yes, she said. Its yours. And then, not knowing if it would mean anything, she said, I dedicate this death to Shadow, and she stabbed the stick into her chest, just below the breastbone, felt it writhe and change in her hands as the stick became a spear. The boundary between sensation and pain had diffused since she had died. She felt the spearhead penetrate her chest, felt it push out through her back. A moments resistanceshe pushed harder and the spear pushed into Mr. World. She could feel the warm breath of him on the cool skin of her neck, as he wailed in hurt and surprise, impaled on the spear. |
| 1592 |
She did not recognize the words he spoke, nor the language he said them in. She pushed the shaft of the spear farther in, forcing it through her body, into and through his. She could feel his hot blood spurting onto her back. Bitch, he said, in English. You fucking bitch. There was a wet gurgling quality to his voice. She guessed that the blade of the spear must have sliced a lung. Mr. World was moving now, or trying to move, and every move he made rocked her too: they were joined by the pole, impaled together like two fish on a single spear. 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. |
| 1593 |
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. |
| 1594 |
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. 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. |
| 1595 |
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. |
| 1596 |
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. 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. |
| 1597 |
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. |
| 1598 |
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. 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. |
| 1599 |
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. |
| 1600 |
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. 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. |
| 1601 |
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. |
| 1602 |
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. 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 wasn't 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. |
| 1603 |
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. 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. |
| 1604 |
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. |
| 1605 |
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? Nothing, she said. Just stuff. Did they win? I stopped the battle they were trying to start. My clever puppy, she said. That man, Mister World, he said he was going to put a stick through your eye. I didn't like him at all. he's dead. You killed him, hon. She nodded. She said, that's good. Her eyes closed. Shadows hand found her cold hand, and he held it in his. In time she opened her eyes again. Did you ever figure out how to bring me back from the dead? she asked. I guess, he said. I know one way, anyway. that's good, she said. She squeezed his hand with her cold hand. And then she said, And the opposite? What about that? The opposite? Yes, she whispered. I think I must have earned it. I don't want to do that. She said nothing. She simply waited. Shadow said, Okay. Then he took his hand from hers and put it to her neck. She said, that's my husband. She said it proudly. I love you, babes, said Shadow. Love you, puppy, she whispered. He closed his hand around the golden coin that hung around her neck. He tugged, hard, at the chain, which snapped easily. Then he took the gold coin between his finger and thumb, and blew on it, and opened his hand wide. The coin was gone. Her eyes were still open, but they did not move. He bent down then, and kissed her, gently, on her cold cheek, but she did not respond. |
| 1606 |
He did not expect her to. Then he got up and walked out of the cavern, to stare into the night. The storms had cleared. The air felt fresh and clean and new once more. Tomorrow, he had no doubt, would be one hell of a beautiful day. Part Four. Epilogue: Something That the Dead Are Keeping Back One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this. From the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis The two of them were in the VW bus, heading down to Florida on I-75. Theyd been driving since dawn; or rather, Shadow had driven, and Mr. Nancy had sat up front in the passenger seat and, from time to time, and with a pained expression on his face, offered to drive. Shadow always said no. Are you happy? asked Mr. Nancy, suddenly. He had been staring at Shadow for several hours. Whenever Shadow glanced over to his right, Mr. Nancy was looking at him with his earth-brown eyes. Not really, said Shadow. But I'm not dead yet. Huh? Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus. Mr. Nancy raised a white eyebrow, and he said, I'm not dead yet, and, mostly because I'm not dead yet, I'm happy as a clamboy. The Herodotus thing. It doesn't mean that the dead are happy, said Shadow. |
| 1607 |
It means that you cant judge the shape of someones life until its over and done. I don't even judge then, said Mr. Nancy. And as for happiness, theres a lot of different kinds of happiness, just as theres a hell of a lot of different kinds of dead. 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. |
| 1608 |
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. |
| 1609 |
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. Yes. They walked in silence to the end of the road. It wasn't 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. |
| 1610 |
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. |
| 1611 |
I am the land, he said. And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it. He heard something sizzling. 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. |
| 1612 |
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 wasn't talking about that at all, was he? Mr. Nancy frowned. You lost me. Its in the trunk, said Shadow. |
| 1613 |
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. |
| 1614 |
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. |
| 1615 |
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. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead when I found you on the ice back there. |
| 1616 |
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, wasn't 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. |
| 1617 |
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. 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. |
| 1618 |
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. |
| 1619 |
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? Its not the fish you bring home from a days fishing. Its the peace of mind. He extended the tip of the poker in Shadows direction: Shadow could feel the heat of it from a foot away. I could kill you, said Hinzelmann, I could fix it. I've done it before. you're not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligans father, he figured it out. |
| 1620 |
I fixed him, and I can fix you. Maybe, said Shadow. But for how long, Hinzelmann? Another year? Another decade? They have computers now, Hinzelmann. They arent stupid. They pick up on patterns. Every year a kids going to vanish. Sooner or later they'll come sniffing about here. Just like they'll come looking for me. Tell me-how old are you? He curled his fingers around a sofa cushion, and prepared to pull it over his head: it would deflect a first blow. Hinzelmanns face was expressionless. They were giving their children to me before the Romans came to the Black Forest, he said. I was a god before ever I was a kobold. Maybe its time to move on, said Shadow. He wondered what a kobold was. Hinzelmann stared at him. Then he took the poker, and pushed the tip of it back into the burning embers. Its not that simple. What makes you think I can leave this town, even if I want to, Shadow? I'm part of this town. You going to make me go, Shadow? You ready to kill me? So I can leave? Shadow looked down at the floor. There were still glimmers and sparks in the carpet, where the poker tip had rested. Hinzelmann followed the look with his own, and crushed the embers out with his foot, twisting. In Shadows mind came, unbidden, children, more than a hundred of them, staring at him with bone-blind eyes, the hair twisting slowly around their faces like fronds of seaweed. They were looking at him reproachfully. He knew that he was letting them down. He just didn't know what else to do. Shadow said, I cant kill you. |
| 1621 |
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. |
| 1622 |
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. 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. |
| 1623 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1624 |
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 wasn't 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. She helped him get me out of town. I was bringing attention he didn't need. I thought she liked me. They pulled up beside Shadows rental car. What are you going to do now? asked Shadow. I don't know, said Mulligan. His normally harassed face was starting to look more alive than it had at any point since Hinzelmanns den. |
| 1625 |
It also looked more troubled. I figure, I got a couple of choices. Either Illhe made a gun of his first two fingers, put the fingertips into his open mouth, and removed themput a bullet through my brain. Or I'll wait another couple of days until the ice is mostly gone, and tie a concrete block to my leg and jump off the bridge. Or pills. Sheesh. Maybe I should just drive a while, out to one of the forests. Take pills out there. I don't want to make one of my guys have to do the cleanup. Leave it for the county, huh? He sighed, and shook his head. You didn't kill Hinzelmann, Chad. He died a long time ago, a long way from here. Thanks for saying that, Mike. But I killed him. I shot a man in cold blood, and I covered it up. And if you asked me why I did it, why I really did it, I'm darned if I could tell you. Shadow put out a hand, touched Mulligan on the arm. Hinzelmann owned this town, he said. I don't think you had a lot of choice about what happened back there. I think he brought you there. He wanted you to hear what you heard. He set you up. I guess it was the only way he could leave. Mulligans miserable expression did not change. Shadow could see that the police chief had barely heard anything that he had said. He had killed Hinzelmann, and built him a pyre, and now, obeying the last of Hinzelmanns desires, he would commit suicide. Shadow closed his eyes, remembering the place in his head that he had gone when Wednesday had told him to make snow: that place that pushed, mind to mind, and he smiled a smile he did not feel and he said, Chad. |
| 1626 |
Let it go. There was a cloud in the mans mind, a dark, oppressive cloud, and Shadow could almost see it and, concentrating on it, imagined it fading away like a fog in the morning. Chad, he said, fiercely, trying to penetrate the cloud, this town is going to change now. Its not going to be the only good town in a depressed region anymore. Its going to be a lot more like the rest of this part of the world. Theres going to be a lot more trouble. People out of work. People out of their heads. More people getting hurt. More bad shit going down. They are going to need a police chief with experience. The town needs you. And then he said, Marguerite needs you. Something shifted in the storm cloud that filled the mans head. Shadow could feel it change. He pushed then, envisioning Marguerite Olsens practical brown hands and her dark eyes, and her long, long black hair. He pictured the way she tipped her head on one side and half smiled when she was amused. she's waiting for you, said Shadow, and he knew it was true as he said it. Margie? said Chad Mulligan. And at that moment, although he could never tell you how he had done it, and he doubted that he could ever do it again, Shadow reached into Chad Mulligans mind, easy as anything, and he plucked the events of that afternoon out from it as precisely and dispassionately as a raven picks an eye from roadkill. 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. |
| 1627 |
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. This paper, said Natalie, has another one of those articles in it. Is America Changing? Well, is it? They don't say. They say that maybe it is, but they don't know how and they don't know why, and maybe it isn't happening at all. Sam smiled broadly. Well, she said, that covers every option, doesn't it? |
| 1628 |
I guess. Natalies brow creased and she went back to her newspaper. Sam washed the dishcloth and folded it. I think its just that, despite the government and whatever, everything just feels suddenly good right now. Maybe its just spring coming a little early. It was a long winter, and I'm glad its over. Me too. A pause. It says in the article that lots of people have been reporting weird dreams. I haven't really had any weird dreams. Nothing weirder than normal. Sam looked around to see if there was anything she had missed. Nope. It was a good job well done. She took off her apron, hung it back in the kitchen. Then she came back and started to turn off the lights. I've had some weird dreams recently, she said. They got weird enough that I actually started keeping a dream journal. I write them down when I wake up. But when I read them, they don't mean anything at all. She put on her street coat and her one-size-fits-all gloves. I did some dream work, said Natalie. Natalie had done a little of everything, from arcane self-defense disciplines and sweat lodges to feng shui and jazz dancing. Tell me. I'll tell you what they mean. Okay. Sam unlocked the door and turned the last of the lights off. She let Natalie out, and she walked out onto the street and locked the door to the Coffee House firmly behind her. Sometimes I have been dreaming of people who fell from the sky. Sometimes I'm underground, talking to a woman with a buffalo head. And sometimes I dream about this guy I kissed in a bar last month. |
| 1629 |
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. 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. |
| 1630 |
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. 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. |
| 1631 |
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. |
| 1632 |
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. 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. |
| 1633 |
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. |
| 1634 |
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. 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. |
| 1635 |
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. |
| 1636 |
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. 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. |
| 1637 |
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. |
| 1638 |
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. |
| 1639 |
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. |
| 1640 |
He would bake, happily, with ten thousand chickens, in Grandmas kitchen. But nowa familiar task awaited him. One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents cupola, and in this sorcerers tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake before the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic. He stood at the open window in the dark, took a deep breath and exhaled. The street lights, like candles on a black cake, went out. He exhaled again and again and the stars began to vanish. Douglas smiled. He pointed a finger. There, and there. Now over here, and here... Yellow squares were cut in the dim morning earth as house lights winked slowly on. A sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country. Everyone yawn. Everyone up. The great house stirred below. Grandpa, get your teeth from the water glass! He waited a decent interval. Grandma and Great-grandma, fry hot cakes! The warm scent of fried batter rose in the drafty halls to stir the boarders, the aunts, the uncles, the visiting cousins, in their rooms. Street where all the Old People live, wake up! Miss Helen Loomis, Colonel Freeleigh, Miss Bentley! Cough, get up, take pills, move around! Mr. Jonas, hitch up your horse, get your junk wagon out and around! The bleak mansions across the town ravine opened baleful dragon eyes. Soon, in the morning avenues below, two old women would glide their electric Green Machine, waving at all the dogs. |
| 1641 |
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. 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. |
| 1642 |
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? 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. |
| 1643 |
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! |
| 1644 |
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 wasn't 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. 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! |
| 1645 |
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. |
| 1646 |
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! 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. |
| 1647 |
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. 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. |
| 1648 |
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. |
| 1649 |
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. 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. |
| 1650 |
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. |
| 1651 |
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... |
| 1652 |
The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with refraction, than the real part of you above water. Dad, said Douglas, its hard to explain. Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer. Douglas tried to get all this in words. Yes, said Father, but whats wrong with last years sneakers? Why cant you dig them out of the closet? Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes. The magic might die by the first of September, but now in late June there was still plenty of magic, and shoes like these could jump you over trees and rivers and houses. And if you wanted, they could jump you over fences and sidewalks and dogs. |
| 1653 |
Don't you see? said Douglas. I just cant use last years pair. For last years pair were dead inside. They had been fine when he started them out, last year. But by the end of summer, every year, you always found out, you always knew, you couldn't really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were dead. But this was a new year, and he felt that this time, with this new pair of shoes, he could do anything, anything at all. They walked up on the steps to their house. Save your money, said Dad. In five or six weeks Summerll be over! Lights out, with Tom asleep, Douglas lay watching his feet, far away down there at the end of the bed in the moonlight, free of the heavy iron shoes, the big chunks of winter fallen away from them. Reasons. I've got to think of reasons for the shoes. Well, as anyone knew, the hills around town were wild with friends putting cows to riot, playing barometer to the atmospheric changes, taking sun, peeling like calendars each day to take more sun. To catch those friends, you must run much faster than foxes or squirrels. As for the town, it steamed with enemies grown irritable with heat, so remembering every winter argument and insult. Find friends, ditch enemies! That was the Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot motto. Does the world run too fast? Want to catch up? Want to be alert, stay alert? Litefoot, then! Litefoot! He held his coin bank up and heard the faint small tinkling, the airy weight of money there. Whatever you want, he thought, you got to make your own way. |
| 1654 |
During the night now, lets find that path through the forest... Downtown, the store lights went out, one by one. A wind blew in the window. It was like a river going downstream and his feet wanting to go with it. In his dreams he heard a rabbit running running running in the deep warm grass. Old Mr. Sanderson moved through his shoe store as the proprietor of a pet shop must move through his shop where are kenneled animals from everywhere in the world, touching each one briefly along the way. Mr. Sanderson brushed his hands over the shoes in the window, and some of them were like cats to him and some were like dogs; he touched each pair with concern, adjusting laces, fixing tongues. Then he stood in the exact center of the carpet and looked around, nodding. There was a sound of growing thunder. One moment, the door to Sandersons Shoe Emporium was empty. The next, Douglas Spaulding stood clumsily there, staring down at his leather shoes as if these heavy things could not be pulled up out of the cement. The thunder had stopped when his shoes stopped. Now, with painful slowness, daring to look only at the money in his cupped hand, Douglas moved out of the bright sunlight of Saturday noon. He made careful stacks of nickels, dimes, and quarters on the counter, like someone playing chess and worried if the next move carried him out into sun or deep into shadow. don't say a word! said Mr. Sanderson. Douglas froze. First, I know just what you want to buy, said Mr. Sanderson. Second, I see you every afternoon at my window; you think I don't see? |
| 1655 |
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. |
| 1656 |
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. 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. |
| 1657 |
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! |
| 1658 |
Look at them, different from us. Look at us, different from them. Separate races, and never the twain shall meet. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Tom! Doug, you hit it, you hit it! that's right! that's exactly why we don't get along with Mom or Dad. Trouble, trouble, from sunrise to supper! Boy, you're a genius! Any time this next three months you see something done over and over, tell me. Think about it, and tell me that. Come Labor Day, well add up the summer and see what we got! I got a statistic for you right now. Grab your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I'll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! Think of it! Shadows running around in the air, muddying the waters you might say. If only we could figure a way to keep those dam five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because thered be no night! There you are; something old, something new. that's old and new, all right. Douglas licked the yellow Ticonderoga pencil, whose name he dearly loved. Say it again. Shadows are under five billion trees... Yes, summer was rituals, each with its natural time and place. The ritual of lemonade or ice-tea making, the ritual of wine, shoes, or no shoes, and at last, swiftly following the others, with quiet dignity, the ritual of the front-porch swing. On the third day of summer in the late afternoon Grandfather reappeared from the front door to gaze serenely at the two empty eye rings in the ceiling of the porch. |
| 1659 |
Moving to the geranium-pot-lined rail like Ahab surveying the mild mild day and mild-looking sky, he wet his finger to test the wind, and shucked his coat to see how shirt sleeves felt in the westering hours. He acknowledged the salutes of other captains on yet other flowered porches, out themselves to discern the gentle ground swell of weather, oblivious to their wives chirping or snapping like fuzzball hand dogs hidden behind black porch screens. 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. |
| 1660 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1661 |
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. |
| 1662 |
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. How have we used machines so far, to make people cry? Yes! Every time man and the machine look like they will get on all rightboom! Someone adds a cog, airplanes drop bombs on us, cars run us off cliffs. So is the boy wrong to ask? No! No... His voice faded as Leo Auffmann moved to the curb to touch his bicycle as if it were an animal. What can I lose? he murmured. A little skin off my fingers, a few pounds of metal, some sleep? I'll do it, so help me! Lee, said Grandfather, we didn't mean But Leo Auffmann was gone, pedaling off through the warm summer evening, his voice drifting back. I'll do it... You know, said Tom, in awe, I bet he will. Watching him cycle the brick streets of evening, you could see that Leo Auffmann was a man who coasted along, enjoying the way the thistles ticked in the hot grass when the wind blew like a furnace, or the way the electric power lines sizzled on the rain-wet poles. He was a man who did not suffer but pleasured in sleepless nights of brooding on the great clock of the universe running down or winding itself up, who could tell? But many nights, listening, he decided first one way and then the other... The shocks of life, he thought, biking along, what were they? |
| 1663 |
Getting born, growing up, growing old, dying. Not much to do about the first. Butthe other three? The wheels of his Happiness Machine spun whirling golden light spokes along the ceiling of his head. A machine, now, to help boys change from peach fuzz to briar bramble, girls from toadstool to nectarine. And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world... Papa! His six children, Saul, Marshall, Joseph, Rebecca, Ruth, Naomi, all ages from five to fifteen, came rushing across the lawn to take his bike, each touching him at once. We waited. We got ice cream! Moving toward the porch, he could feel his wifes smile there in the dark. Five minutes passed in comfortable eating silence, then, holding a spoonful of moon-colored ice cream up as if it were the whole secret of the universe to be tasted carefully he said, Lena? What would you think if I tried to invent a Happiness Machine? Somethings wrong? she asked quickly. Grandfather walked Douglas and Tom home. Halfway there, Charlie Woodman and John Huff and some other boys rushed by like a swarm of meteors, their gravity so huge they pulled Douglas away from Grandfather and Tom and swept him off toward the ravine. don't get lost, son! I wont... I wont... The boys plunged into darkness. |
| 1664 |
Tom and Grandfather walked the rest of the way in silence, except when they turned in at home and Tom said, boy, a Happiness Machinehot diggety! don't hold your breath, said Grandpa. The courthouse clock struck eight. The courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere and Tom feeling every mile of the long drop. 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. |
| 1665 |
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. |
| 1666 |
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. 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. |
| 1667 |
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. |
| 1668 |
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, wasn't 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. |
| 1669 |
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. 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. |
| 1670 |
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. |
| 1671 |
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! 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. |
| 1672 |
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. |
| 1673 |
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. 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. |
| 1674 |
It gives you confidence, Grandpa said. That lawn mower. Listen to it! won't be using the lawn mower much longer. Grandma set down a stack of wheat cakes. They got a new kind of grass Bill Forresters putting in this morning, never needs cutting. don't know what they call it, but it just grows so long and no longer. Grandpa stared at the woman. you're finding a poor! way to joke with me. Go look for yourself. Lands sake, said Grandma, it was Bill Forresters idea. The new grass is waiting in little flats by the side of the house. You just dig small holes here and there and put the new grass in spots. By the end of the year the new grass kills off the old, and you sell your lawn mower. Grandpa was up from his chair, through the hall, and out the front door in ten seconds. Bill Forrester left his machine and came over, smiling, squinting in the sun. that's right, he said. Bought the grass yesterday. Thought, while I'm on vacation I'd just plant it for you. Why wasn't I consulted about this? Its my lawn! cried Grandfather. Thought youd appreciate it, Mr. Spaulding. Well, I don't think I do appreciate it. Lets see this confounded grass of yours. They stood by the little square pads of new grass. Grandpa toed at it with one end of his shoe suspiciously. Looks like plain old grass to me. You sure some horse trader didn't catch you early in the morning when you werent fully awake? I've seen the stuff growing in California. Only so high and no higher. If it survives our climate itll save us getting out here next year, once a week, to keep the darned stuff trimmed. |
| 1675 |
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. |
| 1676 |
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 wasn't 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. I know! |
| 1677 |
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! |
| 1678 |
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. |
| 1679 |
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. |
| 1680 |
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? |
| 1681 |
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. |
| 1682 |
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! he protested. Try it once, you'll unpack, you'll stay! Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilatorwhose is that? |
| 1683 |
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. |
| 1684 |
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? 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. |
| 1685 |
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? Your Happiness Machine? Some year, said Leo Auffmann I'll figure it and tell you. Lena Auffmann, standing in the dark now, watched as the firemen ran in and out of the yard; the garage, roaring, settled upon itself. Leo, she said, it won't take a year to figure. |
| 1686 |
Look around. Think. Keep quiet a little bit. Then come tell me. I'll be in the house, putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper, suppers late, look how dark. Come, children, help Mama. When the firemen and the neighbors were gone Leo Auffmann was left with grandfather Spaulding and Douglas and Tom, brooding over the smoldering ruin. He stirred his foot in the wet ashes and slowly said what he had to say. The first thing you learn in life isyou're a fool. The last thing you learn in life isyou're the same fool. In one hour, I've done a lot of thinking. I thought, Leo Auffmann is blind!... You want to see the real Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good all the time, no! but it runs. Its been here all along. But the fire said Douglas. Sure, the fire, the garage! But like Lena said, it don't take a year to figure; what burned in the garage don't count! They followed him up the front-porch steps. Here, whispered Leo Auffmann, the front window. Quiet, and you'll see it. Hesitantly, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom peered through the large windowpane. And there, in small warm pools of lamplight, you could see what Leo Auffmann wanted you to see. There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the dining room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll dresses. Ruth was painting water colors. Joseph was running his electric train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast from the steaming oven. |
| 1687 |
Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass. You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working. Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom turned to look at Leo Auffmann, who gazed serenely through the window, the pink light on his cheeks. Sure, he murmured. There it is. And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of this house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again. The Happiness Machine, he said. The Happiness Machine. A moment later he was gone. Inside, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom saw him tinkering, making a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious, and ever-moving parts. Then smiling, they went down the steps into the fresh summer night. Twice a year they brought the big flapping rugs oui into the yard and laid them where they looked out of place and uninhabited, on the lawn. Then Grandma and Mother came from the house with what looked to be the back rungs of those beautiful looped wire chairs downtown in the soda-fountain place. 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. |
| 1688 |
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. |
| 1689 |
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. 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. |
| 1690 |
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. |
| 1691 |
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. |
| 1692 |
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. Her empty ice stick had fallen in a vanilla puddle on the porch floor. But of course I was eight, nine, ten years old, like all of you. The two girls gave a short, quickly-sealed-up laugh. Mrs. Bentleys eyes glittered. Well, I cant waste a morning arguing with ten-year-olds. Needless to say, I was ten myself once and just as silly. |
| 1693 |
The two girls laughed. Tom looked uneasy. you're joking with us, giggled Jane. You werent really ten ever, were you, Mrs. Bentley? You run on home! the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. I won't have you laughing. And your names not really Helen? Of course its Helen! Good-bye, said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade, Tom followed them slowly. Thanks for the ice cream! Once I played hopscotch! Mrs. Bentley cried after them, but they were gone. Mrs Bentley spent the rest of the day slamming teakettles about, loudly preparing a meager lunch, and from time to time going to the front door, hoping to catch those insolent fiends on their laughing excursions through the late day. But if they had appeared, what could she say to them, why should she worry about them? The idea! said Mrs. Bentley to her dainty, rose-clustered teacup. No one ever doubted I was a girl before. What a silly, horrible thing to do. I don't mind being oldnot reallybut I do resent having my childhood taken away from me. She could see the children racing off under the cavernous trees with her youth in their frosty fingers, invisible as air. After supper, for no reason at all, with a senseless certainty of motion, she watched her own hands, like a pair of ghostly gloves at a seance, gather together certain items in a perfumed kerchief. Then she went to her front porch and stood there stiffly for half an hour. As suddenly as night birds the children flew by, and Mrs. |
| 1694 |
Bentleys voice brought them to a fluttering rest. Yes, Mrs. Bentley? Come up on this porch! she commanded them, and the girls climbed the steps, Tom trailing after. Yes, Mrs. Bentley? They thumped the Mrs. like a bass piano chord, extra heavily, as if that were her first name. I've some treasures to show you. She opened the perfumed kerchief and peered into it as if she herself might be surprised. She drew forth a hair comb, very small and delicate, its rim twinkling with rhinestones. I wore this when I was nine, she said. Jane turned it in her hand and said, How nice. Lets see! cried Alice. And here is a tiny ring I wore when I was eight, said Mrs. Bentley. It doesn't fit my finger now. You look through it and see the Tower of Pisa ready to fall. Lets see it lean! The girls passed it back and forth between them until Tome fitted it to her hand. Why, its just my size! she exclaimed. And the comb fits my head! gasped Alice. Mrs. Bentley produced some jackstones. Here, she said. I once played with these. She threw them. They made a constellation on the porch. And here! In triumph she flashed her trump card, a postal picture of herself when she was seven years old, in a dress like a yellow butterfly, with her golden curls and blown blue-glass eyes and angelic pouting lips. 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. |
| 1695 |
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. |
| 1696 |
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. 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. |
| 1697 |
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. |
| 1698 |
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. 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. |
| 1699 |
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. |
| 1700 |
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 wasn't 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! 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. |
| 1701 |
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. |
| 1702 |
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. 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. |
| 1703 |
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. |
| 1704 |
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. |
| 1705 |
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... 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. |
| 1706 |
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. |
| 1707 |
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. 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. |
| 1708 |
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! |
| 1709 |
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 ain't 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. he's better than all the other machines. He talks, you listen. And the more he talks the more he gets you to peering around and noticing things. He tells youyou're riding on a very special train, by gosh, and sure enough, its hue. he's been down the track, and knows. And now here we come, you and me, along the same track, but further on, and so much looking and snuffing and handling things to do, you need old Colonel Freeleigh to shove and say look alive so you remember every second! Every darn thing there is to remember! So when kids come around whenyou're real old, you can do for them what the colonel once did for you. that's the way it is, Tom, I got to spend a lot of time visiting him and listening so I can go far-traveling with him as often as he can. |
| 1710 |
Tom was silent a moment. Then he looked over at Douglas there in the dark. Far-traveling. You make that up? Maybe yes and maybe no. Far-traveling- whispered Tom. Only one thing I'm sure of, said Douglas, closing his eyes. It sure sounds lonely. Bang! A door slammed. In an attic dust jumped off bureaus and bookcases. Two old women collapsed against the attic door, each scrabbling to lock it tight, tight. A thousand pigeons seemed to have leaped off the roof right over their heads. They bent as if burdened, ducked under the drum of beating wings. Then they stopped, their mouths surprised. What they heard was only the pure sound of panic, their hearts in their chests... Above the uproar, they tried to make themselves heard. Whatve we done! Poor Mister Quartermain! We mustve killed him. And someone mustve seen and followed us. Look... Miss Fern and Miss Roberta peered from the cobwebbed attic window. Below, as if no great tragedy had occurred, the oaks and elms continued to grow in fresh sunlight. A boy strolled by on the sidewalk, turned, strolled by again, looking up. In the attic the old women peered at each other as if trying to see their faces in a running stream. The police! But no one hammered the downstairs door and cried, In the name of the law! Whos that boy down there? Douglas, Douglas Spaulding! Lord, he's come to ask for a ride in our Green Machine. He doesn't know. Our pride has ruined us. Pride and that electrical contraption! That terrible salesman from Gumport Falls. |
| 1711 |
Thanks, I will have some iced tea. You could hear the cool liquid shock his stomach, in the silence. Then he turned his gaze upon the old ladies like a doctor with a small light, looking into their eyes and nostrils and mouths. Ladies, I knowyou're both vigorous. You look it. Eighty years-he snapped his fingersmean nothing to you! But there are times, mind, whenyou're so busy, busy, you need a friend indeed, a friend in need, and that is the two-seater Green Machine. He fixed his bright, stuffed-fox, green-glass-eyed gaze upon that wonderful merchandise. It stood, smelling new, in the hot sunlight, waiting for them, a parlor chair comfortably put to wheels. Quiet as a swans feather. They felt him breathe softly in their faces. Listen. They listened. The storage batteries are fully charged and ready now! Listen! Not a tremor, not a sound. Electric, ladies. You recharge it every night in your garage. It couldntthat is The younger sister gulped some iced tea. It couldn't electrocute us accidently? Perish the thought! He vaulted to the machine again, his teeth like those you saw in dental windows, alone, grimacing at you, as you passed by late at night. Tea parties! He waltzed the runabout in a circle. Bridge clubs. Soirees. Galas. Luncheons. Birthday gatherings! D. A. R. breakfasts. He purred away as if running off forever. He returned in a rubber-tired hush. Gold Star Mother suppers. He sat primly, corseted by his supple characterization of a woman. Easy steering. Silent, elegant arrivals and departures. |
| 1712 |
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. |
| 1713 |
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? 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? |
| 1714 |
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. |
| 1715 |
Hey! said Charlie. Where are we going? Last ride, said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. No more trolley. Bus starts to run tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So-a free ride for everyone! Watch out! He ricocheted the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away. Last day? asked Douglas, stunned. They cant do that! Its bad enough the Green Machine is gone, locked up in the garage, and no arguments. And bad enough my new tennis shoes are getting old and slowing down! Howll I get around? But... But... They cant take off the trolley! Why, said Douglas, no matter how you look at it, a bus ain't a trolley. don't make the same kind of noise. don't have tracks or wires, don't throw sparks, don't pour sand on the tracks, don't have the same colors, don't have a bell, don't let down a step like a trolley does! Hey, that's right, said Charlie. I always get a kick watching a trolley let down the step, like an accordion. Sure, said Douglas. And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessmans Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills. Heres where we turn around, said Charlie. Heres whereyou're wrong! Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch. |
| 1716 |
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. |
| 1717 |
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. The trolley sc slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far con wheeling, and vanished, gone away. School busses! Charlie walked to the curb. Won even give us a chance to be late to school. Come get you a your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over. But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had e run this way. He knew it would take as many years as could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he kn hed wake and, if he didn't go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm, in his bed, he would hear it, faint and far away. And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm and maple, it the quietness before the start of living, past his house h would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a doe the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of single immense dragonfly at dawn. |
| 1718 |
Like a merry-go-round like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolleys chime! The hiss like a sc fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination... Kick-the-can after supper? asked Charlie. Sure, said Douglas. Kick-the-can. The facts about John Huff aged twelve. are simple and soon stated. He could pathfind more trails than any Choctaw or Cherokee since time began, could leap from the sky like a chimpanzee from a vine, could live underwater two minutes and slide fifty yards downstream from where you last saw him. The baseballs you pitched him he hit in the apple trees, knocking down harvests. He could jump six-foot orchard walls, swing up branches faster and come down, fat with peaches, quicker than anyone else in the gang. He ran laughing. He sat easy. He was not a bully. He was kind. His hair was dark and curly and his teeth were white as cream. He remembered the words to all the cowboy songs and would teach you if you asked. He knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise and set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of. And right now he and Douglas were hiking out beyond town on another warm and marble-round day, the sky blue blown-glass reaching high, the creeks bright with mirror waters fanning over white stones. |
| 1719 |
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 ain't 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 ain't 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. |
| 1720 |
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? 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. |
| 1721 |
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. 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. |
| 1722 |
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. |
| 1723 |
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. 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. |
| 1724 |
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. |
| 1725 |
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. 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. |
| 1726 |
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. |
| 1727 |
Clara Goodwater, she murmured. Looked me right in the eye as I handed it over, said, Going to be a witch, first-class no doubt. Get my diploma in no time. Set up business. Hex crowds and individuals, old and young, big and small. Then she kinda laughed, put her nose in that book, and went in. Elmira stared at a bruise on her arm, carefully tongued a loose tooth in her jaw. A door slammed. Tom Spaulding, kneeling on Elmira Browns front lawn, looked up. He had been wandering about the neighborhood, seeing how the ants were doing here or there, and had found a particularly good hill with a big hole in which all kinds of fiery bright pismires were tumbling about scissoring the air and wildly carrying little packets of dead grasshopper and infinitesimal bird down into the earth. Now here was something else: Mrs. Brown, swaying on the edge of her porch as if shed just found out the world was falling through space at sixty trillion miles a second. Behind her was Mr. Brown, who didn't know the miles per second and probably wouldn't care if he did know. You, Tom! said Mrs. Brown. I need moral support and the equivalent of the blood of the Lamb with me. Come along! And off she rushed, squashing ants and kicking tops off dandelions and trotting big spiky holes in flower beds as she cut across yards. Tom knelt a moment longer studying Mrs. Browns shoulder blades and spine as she toppled down the street. He read the bones and they were eloquent of melodrama and adventure, a thing he did not ordinarily connect with ladies, even though Mrs. |
| 1728 |
Brown had the remnants of a pirates mustache. A moment later he was in tandem with her. Mrs. Brown, you sure look mad! You don't know what mad is, boy! Watch out! cried Tom. Mrs. Elmira Brown fell right over an iron dog lying asleep there on the green grass. 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 ain't 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. |
| 1729 |
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! ain't 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 ain't 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. |
| 1730 |
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. 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, ain't 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. |
| 1731 |
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 wasn't 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. |
| 1732 |
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. |
| 1733 |
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. |
| 1734 |
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. |
| 1735 |
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! |
| 1736 |
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. |
| 1737 |
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? wasn't 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. |
| 1738 |
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. |
| 1739 |
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. |
| 1740 |
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. |
| 1741 |
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. |
| 1742 |
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. |
| 1743 |
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... The old man sat on the floor. |
| 1744 |
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. |
| 1745 |
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 ain't 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. |
| 1746 |
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. And, while waiting, they turned slowly on their rotating stools. The silver spigots, the gleaming mirrors, the hushed whirl-around ceiling fans, the green shades over the small windows, the harp-wire chairs, passed under their moving gaze. |
| 1747 |
They stopped turning. Their eyes had touched upon the face and form of Miss Helen Loomis, ninety-five years old, ice-cream spoon in hand, ice cream in mouth. Young man, she said to Bill Forrester, you are a person of taste and imagination. Also, you have the will power of ten men; otherwise you would not dare veer away from the common flavors listed on the menu and order, straight out, without quibble or reservation, such an unheard-of thing as lime-vanilla ice. He bowed his head solemnly to her. Come sit with me, both of you, she said. Well talk of strange ice creams and such things as we seem to have a bent for. don't be afraid; I'll foot the bill. Smiling, they carried their dishes to her table and sat. You look like a Spaulding, she said to the boy. Youve got your grandfathers head. And you, you're William Forrester. You write for the Chronicle, a good enough column. I've heard more about you than I'd care to tell. I know you, said Bill Forrester. you're Helen Loomis. He hesitated, then continued. T was in love with you once, he said. Now that's the way I like a conversation to open. She dug quietly at her ice cream. that's grounds for another meeting. No-dont tell me where or when or how you were in love with me. Well save that for next time. Youve taken away my appetite with your talk. Look there now! Well, I must get home anyway. Sinceyou're a reporter, come for tea tomorrow between three and four; its just possible I can sketch out the history of this town, since it was a trading post, for you. |
| 1748 |
And, so well both have something for our curiosity to chew on, Mr. Forrester, you remind me of a gentleman I went with seventy, yes, seventy years ago. She sat across from them and it was like talking with a gray and lost quivering moth. The voice came from far away inside the grayness and the oldness, wrapped in the powders of pressed flowers and ancient butterflies. Well. She arose. Will you come tomorrow? I most certainly will, said Bill Forrester. And she went off into the town on business, leaving the young boy and the young man there, looking after her, slowly finishing their ice cream. William Forrester spent the next morning checking local news items for the paper, had time after lunch for some local news items for the paper, had time after lunch for some fishing in the river outside town, caught only some small fish which he threw back happily, and, without thinking about it, or at least not noticing that he had thought about it, at three oclock he found his car taking him down a certain street, He watched with interest as his hands turned the steering wheel and motored him up a vast circular drive where he stopped under an ivy-covered entry. Letting himself out, he was conscious of the fact that his car was like his pipe old, chewed-on, unkempt in this huge green garden by this freshly painted, three-story Victorian house. 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. |
| 1749 |
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. |
| 1750 |
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. 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? |
| 1751 |
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. |
| 1752 |
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. 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. |
| 1753 |
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. |
| 1754 |
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. 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. |
| 1755 |
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. |
| 1756 |
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. 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. |
| 1757 |
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. |
| 1758 |
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. 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. |
| 1759 |
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. |
| 1760 |
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. |
| 1761 |
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. 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. |
| 1762 |
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. |
| 1763 |
Feel that, sighed Charlie Woodman. What more could you ask? For the winter breath was exhaled again and again about them as they stood in the glary day, smelling the wet wood platform with the perpetual mist shimmering in rainbows down from the ice machinery above. They chewed icicles that froze their fingers so they had to grip the ice in handkerchiefs and suck the linen. All that steam, all that fog, whispered Tom. The Snow Queen. Remember that story? Nobody believes in that stuff, Snow Queens, now. So don't be surprised if this is where she came to hide out because nobody believes in her anymore. They looked and saw the vapors rise and drift in long swathes of cool smoke. No, said Charlie. You know who lives here? Only one guy. A guy who gives you goose-pimples just to think of him. Charlie dropped his voice very low. The Lonely One. The Lonely One? Born, raised and lives here! All that winter, Tom, all that cold, Doug Where else would he come from to make us shiver the hottest nights of the year? don't it smell like him? You know darn well it does. The Lonely One... the Lonely One... The mists and vapors curled in darkness. Tom screamed. Its okay, Doug. Charlie grinned. I just dropped a little bitty hunk of ice down Toms back, is all. The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded. Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. |
| 1764 |
It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion. Lavinia, you don't believe all that about the Lonely One, do you? Those women like to see their tongues dance. Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsells disappeared... Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet. But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say. They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark. Maybe we shouldn't go to the show tonight, said Francine. The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don't like that ravine. Look at it, will you! Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air. It won't be me coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; itll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there. Bosh! said Lavinia Nebbs. Itll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. |
| 1765 |
You all alone on the way back to your house. Lavinia, don't you get lonely living in that house? Old maids love to live alone. Lavinia pointed at the hot shadowy path leading down into the dark. Lets take the short cut. I'm afraid! Its early. Lonely One won't be out till late. Lavinia took the others arm and led her down and down the crooked path into the cricket warmth and frog sound and mosquito-delicate silence. They brushed through summer-scorched grass, burs prickling at their bare ankles. Lets run! gasped Francine. No! They turned a curve in the pathand there it was. In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, her hands at either side of her like the oars of a delicate craft, lay Elizabeth Ramsell! Francine screamed. don't scream! 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. |
| 1766 |
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. |
| 1767 |
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! 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? |
| 1768 |
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. |
| 1769 |
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. 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. |
| 1770 |
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. |
| 1771 |
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. I'll sit alone and go home alone. Lavinia, you're crazy; we cant let you do that They entered the theater. The first showing was over, intermission was on, and the dim auditorium was sparsely populated. The three ladies sat halfway down front, in the smell of ancient brass polish, and watched the manager step through the worn red velvet curtains to make an announcement. The police have asked us to close early tonight so everyone can be out at a decent hour. Therefore we are cutting our short subjects and running our feature again immediately. The show will be over at eleven. Everyone is advised to go straight home. don't linger on the streets. That means us, Lavinia! whispered Francine. The lights went out. The screen leaped to life. Lavinia, whispered Helen. What? As we came in, a man in a dark suit, across the street, crossed over. |
| 1772 |
He just walked down the aisle and is sitting in the row behind us. Oh, Helen! Right behind us? One by one the three women turned to look. They saw a white face there, flickering with unholy light from the silver screen. It seemed to be all mens faces hovering there in the dark. I'm going to get the manager! Helen was gone up the aisle. Stop the film! Lights! Helen, come back! cried Lavinia, rising. They tapped their empty soda glasses down, each with a vanilla mustache on their upper lip, which they found with their tongues, laughing. You see how silly? said Lavinia. All that riot for nothing. How embarrassing. I'm sorry, said Helen faintly. The clock said eleven-thirty now. They had come out of the dark theater, away from the Buttering rush of men and women hurrying everywhere, nowhere, on the street while laughing at Helen. Helen was trying to laugh at herself. Helen, when you ran up that aisle crying, Lights! I thought I'd die! That poor man! The theater managers brother from Racine! I apologized, said Helen, looking up at the great fan still whirling, whirling the warm late night air, stirring, restirring the smells of vanilla, raspberry, peppermint and Lysol. We shouldn't have stopped for these sodas. The police warned Oh, bosh the police, laughed Lavinia. I'm not afraid of anything. The Lonely One is a million miles away now. He won't be back for weeks and the policell get him then, just wait. wasn't the film wonderful? Closing up, ladies. The druggist switched off the lights in the cool white-tiled silence. |
| 1773 |
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. |
| 1774 |
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. 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. |
| 1775 |
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. |
| 1776 |
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. And only one lantern to see by. Three minutes from now, she thought, I'll be putting my key in my house door. Nothing can happen in just one hundred eighty seconds. She started down the long dark-green steps into the deep ravine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps, she counted in a whisper. She felt she was running, but she was not running. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty steps, she breathed. One fifth of the way! she announced to herself. The ravine was deep, black and black, black! And the world was gone behind, the world of safe people in bed, the locked doors, the town, the drugstore, the theater, the lights, everything was gone. Only the ravine existed and lived, black and huge, about her. Nothings happened, has it? No one around, is there? Twenty-four, twenty-five steps. Remember that old ghost story you told each other when you were children? She listened to her shoes on the steps. The story about the dark man coming in your house and you upstairs in bed. And now he's at the first step coming up to your room. |
| 1777 |
Another step, another echo. Every time I take a step, they take one. A step and an echo. Weakly she asked of the ravine, Officer Kennedy, is that you? The crickets were still. The crickets were listening. The night was listening to her. For a change, all of the far summer-night meadows and close summer-night trees were suspending motion; leaf, shrub, star, and meadow grass ceased their particular tremors and were listening to Lavinia Nebbss heart. 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! |
| 1778 |
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. 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 wasn't 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 ain't even alive! |
| 1779 |
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 ain't dead. |
| 1780 |
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. 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! |
| 1781 |
The Lonely One ain't 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. |
| 1782 |
But no, it was Great-grandma somehow transported, singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky! 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. |
| 1783 |
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. |
| 1784 |
But I'm not afraid. I'm truly curious. Death won't get a crumb by my mouth I won't keep and savor. So don't you worry over me. Now, all of you go, and let me find my sleep... Somewhere a door closed quietly. that's better. Alone she snuggled luxuriously down through the warm snowbank of linen and wool, sheet and cover, and the colors of the patchwork quilt were bright as the circus banners of old time. Lying there, she felt as small and secret as on those mornings eighty-some-odd years ago when, wakening, she comforted her tender bones in bed. A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born. And now? Now, let me see... She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought. Ninety years... how to take up the thread and the pattern of that lost dream again? She put out a small hand. There... Yes, that was it. She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with a serenity like a sea moving along an endless and self-refreshing shore. Now she let the old dream touch and lift her from the snow and drift her above the scarce-remembered bed. Downstairs, she thought, they are polishing the silver, and rummaging the cellar, and dusting in the halls. She could hear them living all through the house. Its all right, whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. Like everything else in this life, its fitting. |
| 1785 |
Now, waxen dead, she suffered the two boys approach. Douglas fingerprinted the glass. There she is. Its a wax dummy, said Tom. Why do you want me to see her? All the time asking why! yelled Douglas. Because, that's why, because! Because... the arcade lights dimmed... because... One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight! You laugh, you dance around, you shout. But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon. At the cowboy matinee last Saturday a man had dropped down dead on the white-hot screen. Douglas had cried out. For years he had seen billions of cowboys shot, hung, burned, destroyed. But now, this one particular man... Hell never walk, run, sit, laugh, cry, won't do anything ever, thought Douglas. Now he's turning cold. Douglass teeth chattered, his heart pumped sludge in his chest. He shut his eyes and let the convulsion shake him. He had to get away from these other boys because they werent thinking about death, they just laughed and yelled at the dead man as if he still lived. Douglas and the dead man were on a boat pulling away, with all the others left behind on the bright shore, running, jumping, hilarious with motion, not knowing that the boat, the dead man and Douglas were going, going, and now gone into darkness. Weeping, Douglas ran to the lemon-smelling mens room where, sick, it seemed a fire hydrant churned three times from his throat. And waiting for the sickness to pass he thought: All the people I know who died this summer! |
| 1786 |
Please, he thought, don't let the arcade fall apart, too. Bad enough that friends disappeared, people were killed and buried in the real world, but let the arcade run along the way it was, please, please... Now Douglas knew why the arcade had drawn him so steadily this week and drew him still tonight. For there was a world completely set in place, predictable, certain, sure, with its bright silver slots, its terrible gorilla behind glass forever stabbed by waxen hero to save still more waxen heroine, and then the flipping waterfalling chitter of Keystone Kops on eternal photographic spindles set spiraling in darkness by Indianhead pennies under naked bulb light. The Kops, forever in collision or near-collision with train, truck, streetcar, forever gone off piers in oceans which did not drown, because there they rushed to collide again with train, truck, streetcar, dive off old and beautifully familiar pier. Worlds within worlds, the penny peek shows which you cranked to repeat old rites and formulas. There, when you wished, the Wright Brothers sailed sandy winds at Kittyhawk, Teddy Roosevelt exposed his dazzling teeth, San Francisco was built and burned, burned and built, as long as sweaty coins fed self-satisfied machines. Douglas looked around at this night town, where anything at all might happen now, a minute from now. Here, by night of day, how few the slots to shove your money in, how few the cards delivered to your hand for reading, and, if read, how few made sense. Here in the world of people you might give time, money, and prayer with little or no return. |
| 1787 |
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 ain't 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. |
| 1788 |
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? 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. |
| 1789 |
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, ain't 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. 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. |
| 1790 |
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. |
| 1791 |
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? 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. |
| 1792 |
Thats 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. |
| 1793 |
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. No! said Douglas, sitting there, looking down. NO! The big man toppled on the rim of the hill, gasping. You just thank God it wasn't 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. |
| 1794 |
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. |
| 1795 |
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. 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! |
| 1796 |
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. 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. |
| 1797 |
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. |
| 1798 |
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. |
| 1799 |
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. 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. |
| 1800 |
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. |
| 1801 |
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. 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. |
| 1802 |
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. |
| 1803 |
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. 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! |
| 1804 |
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. |
| 1805 |
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. 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. |
| 1806 |
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. |
| 1807 |
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. 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. |
| 1808 |
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. Jonas singing, and in his sleep Douglas seemed for a moment to stop breathing and listen. Air, air... who will buy this air... Air like water and air like ice... buy it once and you'll buy it twice... heres the April air... heres an autumn breeze... heres papaya wind from the Antilles... Air, air, sweet pickled air... fair... rare... from everywhere... bottled and capped and scented with thyme, all that you want of air for a dime! At the end of this the wagon was at the curb. And someone stood in the yard, treading his shadow, carrying two beetle-green bottles which glittered like cats eyes. Mr. Jonas looked at the cot there and called the boys name once, twice, three times, softly. Mr. Jonas swayed in indecision, looked at the bottles he carried, made his decision, and moved forward stealthily to sit on the grass and look at this boy crushed down by the great weight of summer. Doug, he said, you just lie quiet. You don't have to say anything or open your eyes. |
| 1809 |
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. |
| 1810 |
But right now, to Douglas, the voice, the commotion, were nothing at all. He had come from his own house, and now stood outside Grandmas kitchen door just as Grandma, having excused herself from the chicken squabble in the parlor, whisked into her own domain and set about making supper. She saw him standing there, opened the screen door for him, kissed his brow, brushed his pale hair back from his eyes, looked him straight on in the face to see if the fever had fallen to ashes and, seeing that it had, went on, singing, to her work. Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple. Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two firm warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred. Blind, he touched his way to the pantry door. A squeal of laughter rang from the parlor, teacups tinkled. But he moved on into the cool underwater green and wild-persimmon country where the slung and hanging odor of creamy bananas ripened silently and bumped his head. Gnats fitted angrily about vinegar cruets and his ears. He opened his eyes. |
| 1811 |
All villains were innocent in this moment of tender herbs, sweet celeries, luscious roots. The eye sped over a snow field where lay fricassees, salmagundis, gumbos, freshly invented succotashes, chowders, ragouts. The only sound was a primeval bubbling from the kitchen and the clocklike chiming of fork-on-plate announcing the seconds instead of the hours. And then Aunt Rose gathered her indomitable pinkness and health and strength into herself with one deep breath and, fork poised on air, looking at the mystery there impaled, spoke in much too loud a voice. Oh, its beautiful food all right. But what is this thing were eating? The lemonade stopped tinkling in the frosty glasses, the forks ceased flashing on the air and came to rest on the table. Douglas gave Aunt Rose that look which a shot deer gives the hunter before it falls dead. Wounded surprise appeared in each face down the line. The food was self-explanatory, wasn't it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. wasn't it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense? I really don't believe, said Aunt Rose, that anyone heard my question. At last Grandma let her lips open a trifle to allow the answer out. I call this our Thursday Special. We have it regularly. This was a lie. In all the years not one single dish resembled another. 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? |
| 1812 |
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. |
| 1813 |
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. 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. |
| 1814 |
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. |
| 1815 |
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! 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. |
| 1816 |
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. |
| 1817 |
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. 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. |
| 1818 |
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. |
| 1819 |
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. 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. |
| 1820 |
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. |
| 1821 |
Numbered from one to ninety-odd, there the ketchup bottles, most of them full now, stood burning in the cellar twilight, one for every living summer day. Boy, said Tom, what a swell way to save June, July, and August. Real practical. Grandfather looked up, considered this, and smiled. Better than putting things in the attic you never use again. This way, you get to live the summer over for a minute or two here or there along the way through the winter, and when the bottles are empty the summers gone for good and no regrets and no sentimental trash lying about for you to stumble over forty years from now. Clean, smokeless, efficient, that's dandelion wine. The two boys pointed along the rows of bottles. Theres the first day of summer. Theres the new tennis shoes day. Sure! And theres the Green Machine! Buffalo dust and Ching Ling Soo! The Tarot Witch! The Lonely One! Its not really over, said Tom. Itll never be over. I'll remember what happened on every day of this year, forever. It was over before it began, said Grandpa, unwinding the wine press. I don't remember a thing that happened except some new type of grass that wouldn't need cutting. you're joking! No, sir, Doug, Tom, you'll find as you get older the days kind of blur... cant tell one from the other... But, heck, said Tom. On Monday this week It rollerskated at Electric Park, Tuesday I ate chocolate cake, Wednesday I fell in the crick, Thursday fell off a swinging vine, the weeks been full of things! And today, I'll remember today because the leaves outside are beginning to get all red and yellow. |
| 1822 |
Wont be long they'll be all over the lawn and well jump in piles of them and burn them. I'll never forget today! I'll always remember, I know! Grandfather looked up through the cellar window at the late-summer trees stirring in a colder wind. Of course you will, Tom, he said. Of course you will. And they left the mellow light of the dandelion wine and went upstairs to carry out the last few rituals of summer, for they felt that now the final day, the final night had come. As the day grew late they realized that for two or three nights now, porches had emptied early of their inhabitants. The air had a different, drier smell and Grandma was talking of hot coffee instead of iced tea; the open, white-flutter-curtained windows were closing in the great bays; cold cuts were giving way to steamed beef. The mosquitoes were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground. 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. |
| 1823 |
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. |
| 1824 |
History is a nightmare from which none of us can awaken. stephen prometheus in carl jung's Odysseus The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years. We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority-the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time. The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them "bugs." There was one species on Terra that lived in very close symbiosis with the domesticated primates. This was a variety of domesticated canines called dogs. The dogs had learned to achieve a rough simulation of guilt and remorse and worry and other domesticated primate characteristics. The domesticated primates had learned how to achieve simulations of loyalty and dignity and cheerfulness and other canine characteristics. The primates claimed that they loved the dogs as much as the dogs loved them. Still, the primates kept the best food for themselves. The dogs noticed this, you can be sure, but they loved the primates so much that they forgave them. |
| 1825 |
Satchel Paige, in the aphorism, "Don't look back-something might be gaining on you." It was a comfortable philosophy for sleep-loving people. The use of atomic weapons was widely blamed on a primate named Albert Einstein. Even Einstein himself had agreed with this opinion. He was a pacifist and had suffered abominable pangs of conscience over what had been done with his scientific discoveries. "I should have been a plumber," Einstein said just before he died. Actually the discovery of atomic energy was the result of the work of every scientist, craftsman, engineer, technician, philosopher, and gadgeteer who had ever lived on Terra. The use of atomic energy as a weapon was the result of all the political decisions ever made, from the time the vertebrates first started competing for territory. Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited. They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes. It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood. Quantum causality was not understood on Terra until physicists solved the Schrodinger's Cat riddle. |
| 1826 |
Benny looked at the calendar; what happened next would be portrayed by a cartoonist as a light bulb flashing on over his head. He began pounding the typewriter, comparing the actual situation of the world with Orwell's fantasy. *Galactic Archives: New York was an independent city-state in the northwest of Unistat. It was noted for its malodorous stockyards, its vast motion-picture industry, and a huge phallic monument dedicated to "Washington," a fertility god who allegedly slept in nearly every part of the Unistat, usually with human women, bringing forth such semidivine progeny as the gigantic Paul Bunyan, the patriotic General Motors, the trickster-god Nixon, and the benign Mickey Mouse, who began as a totem of the city of Disneyland and eventually became the principal divinity of all Unistat. His column, headed "One Month to Go," was read by nearly 10,000,000 people, the News-Times-Post being the only surviving daily paper available to the 20,000,000 citizens of the six boroughs of New York City. Nine million of the 10,000,000 readers were a little bit paranoid, this being the natural ecological result of crowding that many primates into such a congested space, and most of them agreed with the most pessimistic portions of Benedict's estimation of Orwell's accuracy as a prophet. "One month to go to 1984" became a catchphrase to conclude or answer anybody's complaint about anything. "One month to go to 1984"-soon you heard it everywhere; it reached Chicago by December 10, San Francisco by December 14, was even quoted in Bad Ass, Texas, on December 16. |
| 1827 |
He never thought of himself as a primate. He never realized his friends and associates were primates. Above all, he never understood that the alpha males of Unistat were typical leaders of primate bands. As a result of this inability to see the obvious, Benny was constantly alarmed and terrified by the behavior of himself, his friends and associates and especially the alpha males of the pack. Since he didn't know it was ordinary primate behavior, it seemed just awful to him. Since a great deal of primate behavior was considered just awful, most of the domesticated primates spent most of their time trying to conceal what they were doing. Some of the primates got caught by other primates. All of the primates lived in dread of getting caught. Those who got caught were called no-good shits. The term no-good shit was a deep expression of primate psychology. For instance, one wild primate (a chimpanzee) taught sign language by two domesticated primates (scientists) spontaneously put together the signs for "shit" and "scientist" to describe a scientist she didn't like. She was calling him shit-scientist. She also put together the signs for "shit" and "chimpanzee" for another chimpanzee she didn't like. She was calling him shit-chimpanzee. "You no-good shit," domesticate primates often said to each other. This metaphor was deep in primate psychology because primates mark their territories with excretions, and sometimes they threw excretions at each other when disputing over territories. |
| 1828 |
One primate wrote a long book describing in vivid detail how his political enemies should be punished. He imagined them in an enormous hole in the ground, with flames and smoke and rivers of shit. This primate was named Dante Alighieri. Another primate wrote that every primate infant goes through a stage of being chiefly concerned with biosurvival, i. e. food, i. e. Mommie's Titty. He called this the Oral Stage. He said the infant next went on to a stage of learning mammalian politics, i. e. recognizing the Father (alpha male) and his Authority and territorial demands. He called this, with an insight that few primates shared, the Anal Stage. This primate was named Freud. He had taken his own nervous system apart and examined his component circuits by periodically altering its structure with neuro-chemicals. Among the anal insults exchanged by domesticated primates when fighting for their space were: "Up your ass," "Go shit in your hat," "You're full of shit," "Take it and stick it where the moon doesn't shine," and many others. One of the most admired alpha males in the Kingdom of the Franks was General Canbronne. General Canbronne won this adulation for the answer he once gave when asked to surrender at Waterloo. "Merde," was the answer General Canbronne gave. When primates went to war or got violent in other ways, they always said they were about to knock the shit out of the enemy. They also spoke of dumping on each other. The primates who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombs intended to dump on the other primates real hard. |
| 1829 |
Benny didn't give a flying Philadelphia fuck about the novel's parallels with the Odyssey and the Stations of the Cross, which Jung admitted, or the other correspondences with body organs, colors, Tarot cards, IChing hexagrams, and the romantic triangle in Krazy Kat, which his admirers claimed to have found. The important thing about Odysseus was that it demonstrated, almost scientifically, that no day was a dull day. Jung, who regarded himself as a better psychologist than the psychologists-this was a conceit typical of theologians-claimed to have found three more circuits in the nervous system beyond Freud's oral biosurvival circuit and anal emotional-territorial circuit. Jung said that Odysseus demonstrated also a semantic-hominid circuit which created a veil of words between domesticated primates and their experience, thereby differentiating them from the wild primates. He also claimed a specific socio-sexual circuit created by the process of domestication. And he added a fifth, neurosomatic circuit typical of mysticism and music, which causes primates to feel High and spaced-out. But Benny didn't care about all that. Odysseus, in his mind, was simply the book that described life the way it really is, without sentiment and emotions. The murder changed all that. It showed Benny that every day is also a terrible day, for somebody. On July 23, 1981, Benny's mother, a white-haired old lady of eighty-four, left the Brooklyn Senior Citizen's Home where she lived to walk one block to the supermarket. |
| 1830 |
If they had been wild primates, they would have all excreted in the disputed area and maybe thrown excretions at each other; being domesticated primates, they made ink excretions on paper and threw metal and chemicals at each other. It was one of a series of rumbles over Southeast Asia which had at one time or another involved Dutch primates, French primates, primates of the Rising Sun totem, and various other predator bands. Since the Unistat primates, like other domesticated hominids, did not know they were primates, all this was explained by a ferocious amount of ink excretions invoking Morality and Ideology, the twin gods of domesticated primatedom. Basically, the primates who wanted to claim Southeast Asia said it was "good" to go in shooting and grab whatever was grabable; the primates who didn't give a fuck about Southeast Asia said it was "evil." Justin Case was not verbally oriented; he thought in pictures, as a good film critic should. He never asked whether the war was "good" or "evil." It was unaesthetic. The people who had mined Unistat with nuclear bombs had not regarded the Vietnam War as unaesthetic. They thought it was downright evil. They thought just about everything the Unistat alpha males-in corporations and governments-did was evil. They thought most of their fellow primates were no-good shits. Justin Case had been born blissfully by a joyous mother schooled in the Grantly Dick-Read method of natural childbirth. By the time Justin was thirty-six years old, in 1983, the Dick-Read method was as obsolete as the horse and buggy. |
| 1831 |
Things were moving fast on Terra in that age. Nonetheless, the Dick-Read natural childbirth yoga was good for its time, and Case had a permanent security imprint on the oral biosurvival circuitry of his brain. That was one reason he never worried about ethical issues. When Justin began to crawl about the house and then rose up to walk up and down in it, his father, a former alpha male with a large corporation now on the skids due to booze, found him a pest and a nuisance. Father disappeared rapidly, pursued by lawsuits and child maintenance liens, which harassed him so much that he drank even more, earned less, and was first chronically and then permanently incapable of paying a blessed penny to Justin and Justin's Mommy. Justin was not genetically programmed to be an alpha male, but under the circumstances he learned to do a good imitation of one. "Mommy's Great Big Man," Mommy called him. The anal-territorial (old primate) section of Justin's brain took an imprint of Pretend-Authority. Then Justin discovered the semantic environment. He learned to read and watch TV. The books seemed clumsy and sententious compared to the immediacy of the tube. He took a visual-electronic imprint on the semantic circuit, like most of his generation. Case's sociosexual circuit was imprinted by Playboy, Sexual Revolution, weed, Rock, yippies, protest, the Generation Gap, Women's Lib, and General Confusion. He was a bachelor who had heterosexual couplings as often as he felt the need, with the minimum possible human involvement. |
| 1832 |
I hope Mr. Chaney won't be tormented by jokes about this for the rest of the semester, even if the related series of his appearances in class does seem part of a notably random process." The class roared; another tone of bile was entered on the midget's shit ledger, the list of people who were going to eat turd before he died. In fact, his cuts were numerous, both in math and in other classes. There were times when he could not bear to be with the giants, but hid in his room. Pussycat centerfold open, masturbating and dreaming of millions and millions of nubile young women all built like Pussyettes, all throwing themselves passionately upon him. Today, however, Pussycat would avail him not; he needed something raunchier. Ignoring his next class, he hurried across Bancroft Way and slammed into his room, chain-bolting the door behind him. Damn "Prime" Time and damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the measurable world that pronounced him subnormal. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul, he declared war on the statutory ape, on law and order, on predictability. He would be the random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the midget versus the digits. He took out his pornographic Tarot deck, which he used when he wanted a really far-out fantasy for his orgasm, and shuffled it thoroughly. Let's have a Markoff Chain orgasm, just to start with, he thought savagely. His first overt act-his Fort Sumter, as it were-began in San Francisco the following Saturday. |
| 1833 |
Of course he did not realize it was good fortune at the time-nor did his parents or his doctors. Nonetheless, he was among the lucky few who were treated by the Sister Kenny method at a time (the early 1930s) when the American Medical Association was denouncing that method as quackery and forbidding experiment thereon by its members. He was walking again, with only a slight limp, when he entered grade school in 1938. The real luck occurred twelve years later, in 1950, when he was eighteen; the limp and the dead muscles in his lower calves disqualified him for military service. The next man drafted, in his place, had both testicles bloodily blown off in Korea. Williams, of course, never knew about this patriotic gelding, but he was well aware that various boys his age were having various portions of their anatomy blown off in Korea; being somewhat philosophical, he often reflected on the paradox that the polio (which had been, when it occurred, a physical agony to him and a psychological agony to his parents) had preserved him from such mutilations. Considering that the only continuing effect of the polio was the slight limp, he had to admit that Nature or God or something-or-other had sneakily done him great good while appearing to do him great evil. This was a decided encouragement toward an optimistic attitude toward the seemingly evil and made him wonder if the universe were not benevolent after all. The guy who lost his balls in Williams's place, on the other hand, became a pronounced pessimist and cynic. |
| 1834 |
The Revolution of Lowered Expectations had triumphed. By 1984 nobody in the country had any higher expectations than a feudal serf. Actually, the apotheosis of Furbish Lousewart V had been engineered by the same group of alpha males who had been promoting the Revolution of Lowered Expectations all along. These were very cunning old primates in several of the most skillful predator bands on Terra. Because of the stealth and skill of these bands-made up of successful predator families that had been intermarrying for several generations-they collectively owned 99.4 percent of all the territory and resources of Unistat. They only owned about 40 percent of the rest of Terra, and that seriously annoyed them. The Revolution of Rising Expectations annoyed them even more, because it led many primates to argue that the reason poverty and starvation still continued in an advanced technological society was that Somebody Was Getting More Than Their Share. Whenever anybody asked who that Somebody might be, all eyes turned on these royal old primate males who owned so much. The eyes were not friendly. Sometimes, in far-off lands where these royal primates did not completely control the governments, some of their boodle was actually seized and redistributed to the people they had stolen it from. As Rising Expectations had mounted in the first half of the century, this regrettable pattern of expropriation also escalated. The alpha males of these tough old predator families did not like this at all. |
| 1835 |
Charles Fort, founder of the Fortean Society, rejected the Mad Fishmonger indignantly and claimed that crabs and periwinkles did fall from the sky. After Clem Cotex was thrown out of the Fortean Society for his heresies, he reconsidered the whole puzzling case of the mysterious event in Cromer Gardens on May 28, 1881. Cotex decided to believe in the Mad Fishmonger. It was the fundamental hypothesis of his system of philosophy, and the guiding light of the Warren Belch Society, that the craziest-sounding theory is the most likely one. All things considered, the motives and methodology of the Mad Fishmonger were much more mysterious than shellfish falling from the sky; ergo, the Mad Fishmonger probably did exist. Among the things the science of that time could not explain, which Clem Cotex attributed to the Mad Fishmonger, were other Damned Things that fell out of the sky, such as iron balls with inscriptions on them or chunks of ice as big as elephants. There were also Damned Things on the ground, including jumping furniture, "haunts," and the Gentry. There were animals that shouldn't be and animals that couldn't be and trans-time and trans-space perceptions and religious "miracles." The first clue to correct understanding of these things came when quantum causality was finally formulated correctly in Gilhooley's Demonstration of 1994, and nobody understood Gilhooley. At the time of our story everybody was as confused as Clem Cotex. Most of them just expressed their confusion, or rather concealed it, in more conservative ways. |
| 1836 |
Starhawk was coming out of a bar on Geary when Frisco went. He was incinerated before his brain could register that anything was happening. Lionel Eacher, long since returned to Contract Law, outlived the blast. He had been on vacation in Upper Michigan and was well armed, since he had been hunting. He survived by hunting and eating other mammals, including formerly domesticated primates, for nearly twenty years. Then another formerly domesticated primate, even quicker and slicker, hunted and ate Lionel. Markoff Chaney also survived. He was on a Greyhound in Florida, between Miami and Hollywood, when the bombs went off. He took to the Everglades and eventually even found a mate-a Seminole woman who didn't think he was absurd at all. Their tribe increased. The tribal stage endured 100,000 years, as it had before. Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technology advanced. Nuclear energy was rediscovered, and misused again. The tribal age endured 12,000,000 years the next time. Then, suddenly, when environmental conditions were right, genetic programs reasserted themselves. The hive instinct reappeared in the primates. Cities appeared, sin and guilt were reinvented, technology advanced... The six-legged majority knew little and cared less about all this primate activity. They had solved all their social problems three billion years earlier, and saw no need to change. |
| 1837 |
Naranja we wouldn't dream of asking anything hard on the examination I believe the last examination with a hard question given at this university was in a survey of mathematics course in 1953 yes Mr. Lee?" "Is possibre that quantum connection is not immediate and unmitigated? Then perhaps we take choice one and give up not quantum mechanics itself but merely modify the quantum connection in a sense that it is some way sir mediate or mitigated, does that seem possibre sir?" "Ah Mr. Lee how did you ever land at this university there are times I suspect you of actually seeking an education but I'm afraid in this case your canny intellect has run aground. Recent experiments by Clauser and Aspect shut that door forever. The quantum connection is immediate, unmitigated, and I might say omnipresent as the Thomist God." "So. You tell us, Professor Williams, how many times Crauser's experiment has been verified?" Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way Rebirth, Wildeblood was deciding, is messier than first birth, despite old Augustine and his media feces et urine trip... how much he had wanted to be Annette Haven in the clusterfuck scene in China Girl: one cock in Her mouth, one in Her snatch, one in each hand: ah, Wildeblood, 'twere paradise enow. But the reality of it, the adjustments to be made: Sit down when you want to pee Sit down when you want to pee Sit down when you want to pee SHe was writing it out a hundred times, to avoid making that mistake again. Ego is much more a body image than she had known. |
| 1838 |
The real question should be: Why my mother? Or, more to the point: Why anybody? The world must be mad, that we go on living like this, and tolerate it. The primordial jungles were probably less dangerous than the streets of any city in Unistat. Was this the resultant of the long struggle upward from the caves-a world more frightening, more full of hatred and violence, more bloody than the days of the saber-tooth? Every time I look at the TV news at seven, he thought miserably, I end up feeling this way before midnight. It's almost as if they're afraid somebody might have a flicker of hope or a good opinion of humanity (at least in potential) or a brief moment of delusory security. Every night, to prevent such unrealistic moods, they have to remind us that the violence and brutality is still continuing. With a shock, Benny discovered that he was weeping again, silently, guiltily, privately. He had thought he was past that. So much for booze as a tranquilizer. He fought against it. It was self-indulgence, disguised self-pity actually. He dabbed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum... "Nice night." An Unidentified Man had walked out onto the balcony. "You don't feel the smog up here," Benny said, embarrassed, wondering if he had gotten rid of the last tear before this stranger had seen him. The Unidentified Man looked up at the stars, smiling slightly. He was good-looking enough to be an actor, Benny thought, and at second glance he did look remotely familiar, as if his face had been in the newspapers sometime. |
| 1839 |
But- Schrodinger points out with some glee-modern physics, if it's all it's cracked up to be, should allow us to find out what is happening without our actually going into the laboratory to look. All we have to do is write down the equations of the quantum process and calculate when the phase change leading to detonation will occur. The trouble is that the equations yield, at minimum, two solutions. At any given time-say one half hour-the equations give us two quantum eigenvalues, one of which means that the Cat is now definitely dead, kaput, spurlos versenkt, finished, and the other which tells us that the Cat is still alive as you and me. I never died, said he; I never die, said he. Most physicists preferred to ignore Schrodinger 's damned Cat; quantum mechanics worked, after all, and why make a big thing about something a little funny in the mathematics? Einstein loved Schrodinger 's Cat because it mathematically demonstrated his own conviction that subatomic events couldn't be as anarchistic as wave mechanics seemed to imply. Einstein was a Hidden Variable man. He claimed there must be a Hidden Variable-an Invisible Hand, as Adam Smith might have said-controlling the seemingly indeterminate quantum anarchy. Einstein was sure that the Hidden Variable was something quite deterministic and mechanical, which would be discovered eventually. "God does not play dice with the world," he liked to say. Decade followed decade and the Hidden Variable remained elusive. In the 1970s, Dr. |
| 1840 |
They told him "A chink is just a yellowed-out nigger," roughed him up, and accidentally knocked his right eye out in their enthusiasm. At that point Wing lost his temper and was subsequently apprehended and quickly tried and convicted for the murder of four police officers. Judge Draconic V. Wasp pronounced sentence in this wise: "Young feller, you've been tried and convicted and every man in this courtroom knows your guilt is as black as hell. I have no regret in passing sentence in such a case. Soon, you little bastard, it will be spring and the robin will sing again, the flowers will bud, little children will laugh on their way to school-and you will hear and know nothing of that, for you will be dead, dead, dead. You chink bastard. Sheriff, take the yellow son-of-a-bitch out and hang him." Wing Lee Chee received this with no show of emotion, but then he arose and addressed the court in a steady and terrible voice. "As I rook upon the whiskey-fogged faces of judge and July in the tlavesty of a civirized coult," he said, "I know furr werr that I was foorish to ever expect justice from such degenelates. You, Judge Wasp, speak of the sweet singing of lobins in the spling and the brooming of the prants, but what can you know of the gleat Tao that moves arr of us, you four-mouthed, cunt-ricking, donkey-fucking led-neck? You desclibe the gentre voices of chirden, you glafting, thieving, monkey-faced, frat-nosed idiot offspring of a feebre-minded goat by pulple-plicked baboon! What do you know of the innocence of rittle chirden? |
| 1841 |
Even that was disconcerting. "It probably won't do any good," Joe said once, rather bitterly. "The kids don't believe anything we tell them." The next step into psychosis was unexpected and oddly pleasurable. It occurred in the lunchroom at Weishaupt a few days later. Babbit was pouring sugar into his coffee when he suddenly looked at the sugar dispenser. The simplicity of the design, the one small flap that opened to let the sugar pour, abruptly delighted him. It was as if he had never seen it before. After that he was noticing more and more things in that heightened vision. One day in the Loop he saw a mother whirl suddenly and slap a whining child. His heart leapt with shock-and then he remembered that this was an everyday occurrence in America. It was as if he had seen it from the perspective of some culture where whining and hitting were not normal communication between parents and children. He wanted less and less meat in his diet; meat now appeared heavy and hard to digest. The strangest and most disturbing thing of all was the way Weishaupt Chemicals itself began to change. But everything was the same; he was just seeing with different eyes. The contrast between the executive offices and the workshops was an overwhelming experience. Architecture, coloring, decoration, upkeep-every kind of communication except words themselves said with total clarity "The Masters" and "The Serfs." The typical primate pack hierarchy, unnoticed and taken for granted before. Strange visions came to him whenever his mind relaxed from financial or scientific problems. |
| 1842 |
He was, after graduation, ready for postgraduate work at Springfield, once he passed the admissions test, which consists of being captured by the police while in the possession of something hot. He was in possession of a Ford Mustang registered to a Mountbatten Babbit of Ev-anston. Postgraduate work at Springfield included a refresher course in sodomy and S-M, together with advanced study in grand larceny; but by this time F. D. R. Stuart had begun to doubt that the Stackerlee metaprogram contained the whole answer to life's problems. A former Black Muslim, now a Sufi, was his cell mate, and taught him various things about the less-publicized qualities of the human nervous system. F. D. R. Stuart spent many hours staring at one wall of his cell, gradually creating a hole through which he could pass into another world. There was a different kind of time over there, and eventually he discovered that angels and fairies and elves and witches and Bodhisattvas and conjurs and all sorts of superhuman folk could be contacted and persuaded to become allies. The Sufi cell mate, a heavy cat in more ways than F. D. R. Stuart ever understood, pretended to be unimpressed with this achievement and laid down some stern raps about the perils of "Opening the Gate" without first "clarifying the soul." The upshot of it was that young Stuart spent an hour a day memorizing a page in the dictionary until he had a vocabulary that would grace a Harvard graduate. Alas, the Sufi was paroled around then and Stuart continued his explorations unguided. |
| 1843 |
But that was only for the future, when he began to show signs of shifting allegiance. Now (it is the night of December 23, 1983, again) while a miniature sled with eight tiny reindeer was allegedly dodging past commercial airliners, communications satellites, flying saucers, and other technocraft in the skyways, two human beings of reprehensible character drove up to the Sutton Place digs of Mary Margaret (Epicene) Wilde-blood in a truck hired from U-Haul only a few hours earlier. These were Edward J. Smith and Samuel R. Hall, and they had been purged from the Black Panther Party a few months earlier because of their fondness for the null-circuit neurological program induced by injecting diacetylmorphine (C21H23NO5) directly into their veins. This compound was known as heroin to white people and caballo to Ed and Sam's Puerto Rican neighbors. Ed and Sam called it horse and mainlined it as often as they possibly could-"riding the horse over the rainbow" was their expression for the null program, and it meant as much to them as Samadhi to a Hindu or the Eucharist to a Catholic. In fact, it allowed them to forget for a while that, to 90 percent of their fellow citizens, they were unmistakably identifiable as niggers, a species generally regarded as twice as ugly and ten times as dangerous as wild gorillas. It didn't matter, to Sam and Ed, that the people who believed this also believed in the existence of a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft named God, in the Virgin Birth of U. |
| 1844 |
Check them out and see if they're all growing a little bit weird lately..." The helicopter descended and the earth turned to flame. My daughter ran toward me, burning, screaming. Why was it an American flag on the helicopter instead of a swastika? Was it Galley or Eichmann who was looking at me with imploring eyes begging my understanding and forgiveness? Day after day the napalm fell from the skies. Day after day children died screaming at 1,000degrees Centigrade. Month after month, year after year, the fire continued to consume the world, Fed King's world. He sat in the lotus, his shakti mounted on his penis, their eyes locked, until the neurological synergy occurred: They were One. And then the Others were there, too, all the minds of space-time who turned on the neuroatomic circuit, the beetle intellects of Betelgeuse, Nicholas and Perenella Flamel, Bruno and Elizabeth, Cagliostro, and, as the time warp opened, galaxy after galaxy joined in, the Starmaker appeared dimly, and the first jump was possible. He was a flower on a rose bush in England and a poet was staring at him as he stared back at the poet: "The roses have the look of flowers that are looked at" emerged from that moment. SHe was a microbe flailing tentatively in a soupy ocean. He was a Terran archivist looking back at the decline and fall of the American Empire. SHe was Mountbatten Babbit in Evanston, Illinois-a good one, grab quick, this was one of the murderers, hold onMountbatten Babbit, Ph. D., became aware that everybody at the table was staring at him. |
| 1845 |
Frank Dashwood, M. D., L. L. D., Ph. D., at the age of only thirty-eight, headed the most heavily funded and hotly debated institution in the world: Orgasm Research, a multimillion-dollar project dedicated to filling in the psychological intangibles left out of the pioneering research of Masters and Johnson two decades earlier. Since these psychological intangibles were-as Dr. Dashwood sometimes wittily remarked-"both psychological and intangible," there was no end to the research. Meanwhile, the funding money came rolling in. Frank was, according to a survey by a management analyst, one of the seventeen men in the United States who was totally happy with his job. Other researchers sometimes expressed envy of this fact. "What red-blooded man," one of them had once asked with some warmth, "wouldn't be happy supervising other people's orgasms and pulling down a swift sixty grand a year for it?" This was somewhat unfair to a dedicated scientist. Dr. Dashwood was truly fascinated by orgasms-as Edison was by electricity-and had an inexhaustible curiosity about every possible factor involved in every possible twitch, itch, moan, gibber, gasp, sob, shudder, or howl connected with that dramatic biological tremor. Even more, however, he was mesmerized by lines, curves, averages, graphs, and every aspect of mathematics that could be clearly visualized. The world, for him, was not made up of "things," crude Disneyland animations projected by our lower nervous circuits, but of energy meshes. |
| 1846 |
Dashwood was pressing his buzzer in San Francisco, Starhawk was carefully screwing two mountain climber's hooks into a hill across the bay in Oakland. The first rope was wrapped around his waist outside the trousers, ran through a pulley, and came back to his hand. The second rope circled his chest, ran through the second pulley, and was secured to a tree. He began lowering himself down through the redwoods. At first there was no visibility at ground level, but as he descended the roof of Murphy's house a bit of yard came into view. None of the neighboring houses was visible at all. Approaching Murphy's roof, Starhawk slowed and then stopped his descent. In midair he turned, every muscle straining, and continued his descent headfirst, legs tightly together, the style of a professional highdiver. A small film of perspiration formed around his lips. He was totally silent. Twice, redwood branches almost tangled his ropes. He remained totally silent while disengaging. Finally, he gripped the roof edge with his left hand, let out more slack with his right, and lowered himself until he was looking in the corner of a window upside down. It was the bedroom. Murphy wasn't there. The bed was unmade. Starhawk raised himself, swung, and descended again to inspect another window. The living room. Murphy was sitting in a red plush chair, his face expressionless. He was listening to music on the stereo. A shotgun leaned against the wall behind him. Very slowly, Starhawk raised himself again and swung to the next window. |
| 1847 |
He read no less than six newspapers a day and clipped numerous stories from them. The agent eventually had a chance to investigate these files while Bridge was visiting a patient in a nearby madhouse, and they were rather oblique. They all concerned Very Important Persons in government and industry, but that was about all they had in common. Bridge seemed to have a minute curiosity about the men who rule America; that was all that was evident. The agent could make nothing at all of the crazy notes scribbled on the margins of these news stories: "Possible," "Probable," "Still himself," "Definitely occupied"... The mystery grew worse when the agent realized that Bridge spent a lot of time visiting madhouses and psychiatric wards. "Sure knows a lot of crazy people," he reported the third week. "A hell of a lot of crazy people," he amended at the end of the month. Another team of agents began revisiting the nuthouses, and it was soon realized that the patients Bridge visited had a few things in common, viz., none was white, but not all were black (some were Oriental, Indian, or Chi-cano); all, without exception, were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with delusions of grandeur; all were listed as chronic rather than acute psychotics; all claimed to be somebody else rather than who they actually were-one said he was Secretary of Commerce, one that he was Chairman of the Board of Morgan Guaranty Trust, one that he was Chief Engineer at Cape Kennedy, etc. The agents remembered their experience with Robert Pearson, former aide to Hassan i Sabbah X, and jumped to a conclusion. |
| 1848 |
Planetary life is cyclical because planets themselves follow cyclical orbits about their mother stars. (See Galactic Encyclopedia, "Larvel Stages of Species Development.") The six-legged majority on Terra, for instance, followed a life script of four or more stages. In general, the pattern was: (1) the embryonic or egg form; (2) the larval period; (3) the pupal or chrysalis stage; (4) the adult insect. During each stage the biot or biological unit-the so-called individual-passed through a metamorphosis during which it was totally or partially transformed. The same was true of the domesticated primates. Most of them passed through, and kept neurological circuits characteristic of, the following four stages: (1) imprinting and using the self-nourishing networks of the primate brain-the neonate or infant stage (oral biosurvival consciousness); (2) imprinting and using the emotional-territorial networks of the primate brain-the "toddler" stage (anal status consciousness); (3) imprinting and using the semantic circuits-the verbal or conceptual stage (symbolic rational consciousness); (4) imprinting and using the socio-sexual circuits-the mating or parenting stage (tribal taboo consciousness). 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. |
| 1849 |
"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. It seemed like only yesterday that Benny himself had raced from house to house shouting, "Mon Ed! Mon Ed!" And people had rushed to move the bags of salt to closets where the meter man wouldn't see them. Benny hadn't thought of those days in more than four decades, yet they lived on in Memory Storage and could be activated again by something as simple as the jingle about the pretty little birdies. And Benny's whole attitude toward Mon Edison had been shaped by those experiences; he still regarded the "public" utility with a mixture of fear and loathing. |
| 1850 |
Besides, they couldn't make head or tails out of his phone conversations, which were all about such inscrutable matters as whether Beethoven's obsession with his nephew represented repressed paternal impulses, latent homosexuality, or the desire to be a mother, and whether all three elements were expressed in the tonic chord of the bassoon under the dominant chord of the tutti in the opening of the Ninth. Justin Case's god was a dead Irishman named James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, who had been the greatest tenor of the twentieth century. Case owned every record of every Joyce concert preserved on wax, and regarded the man as having the most subtle musical sensibility since the great Ludwig himself. If only he had been a composer instead of a singer, Case sometimes thought, with that ear... Actually, Joyce had considered the priesthood, writing, and even medicine before settling on a musical career. His voice thrilled audiences in Europe and America for nearly a decade before the famous Joyce Scandal, which destroyed him. Case always fumed with anger when he read of the great singer's last days-how concerts were disrupted and ruined by moralistic hecklers howling "Garters garters garters!" till the shamed man left the stage, humiliated. It was known that he died of drink, often comparing himself to Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell, and cursing the Christian churches bitterly. Case once had an affair with the anthropologist and sexologist Marilyn Chambers, just because she shared his passion for Joyce's music. |
| 1851 |
Stuart crumbled the vacation memo and threw it in the wastebasket. "What's next?" he asked. "Dr. Dashwood. About the interview." "Oh, yes," Stuart said, turning his chair to look out the window. "Call his secretary and see if he's in." While Marlene went outside to her desk to place the call, Stuart looked out over Chicago thinking of his rapid rise in the Pussycat empire. Born in Chicago's South Side ghetto-his full name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stuart-he had originally followed the usual predatory life-script of impoverished alpha males. But his second prison term had thrown him into contact with a most peculiar cell mate-a self-proclaimed Sufi and master of all forms of Persian magick. "Rosey" Stuart came out of prison convinced he could do anything, acquired a degree in literature from Harvard in record time, and started the Great Novel about the Black Experience in America. About then both racism and poverty were becoming obsolete, and selling a first novel was as hard as ever. Stuart had been toiling at Pussycat for five years, dickering with a novel about a parallel universe where racism still existed and a malignant black magician takes over the country by demonically possessing the body of the white President. Last year the staff of Pussycat had quadrupled. Sput Sputnik had grown annoyed by the ever-increasing number of imitations of his Illustrated Fantasy Book for Onanists. Every editor at every competition publication had been hired away at a juicy salary increase. |
| 1852 |
Pussycat suddenly had six Senior Editors, twelve Associate Editors, twenty-four Assistant Editors, and thirty Junior Editors. The other publishers found themselves confronting deadlines with nobody left on their staffs. Two went bankrupt; one committed suicide; the others took a year to get back in gear again. "Business is business," said Sput. He liked to think of himself as a tough, hard-driving businessman, as well as the twentieth century's leading philosopher, the superstud of every girl's tender dreams, the hero of the free press, the foe of bigotry and intolerance everywhere, and the world's unacknowledged Master Psychologist. If he had known there was such a thing as pie-eating champion, he would have aimed for that title also. He considered himself a Renaissance Man. Although Stuart had advanced from Junior Editor to Senior Editor in spite of this competition, he hardly knew Sput at all. Sput never came to the offices, preferring to work in his mansion in Manhattan, and Stuart saw him only on the rare occasions when he was called upon to fly to New York for a conference. Those conferences tended to be a bit much. Like certain movie actors who are always "on," even when nowhere near a soundstage, Sput was as determined to impress his editors as he was to overwhelm the whole world. For years, he had insisted on playing chess during conferences, keeping an impoverished grandmaster on hand for a stiff competition; since the grandmaster knew which side his bread was buttered on, Sput always won. |
| 1853 |
Bohr also added nearly as much to quantum theory as Planck, Einstein, or Schrodinger, and his model of the atom-the Bohr model, it's called- had been believed literally by a generation of physicians before Hiroshima. Bohr himself, however, had never believed it; nor had he believed any of his other theories. Bohr invented what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which holds in effect that a physicist shouldn't believe anything but his measurements in the laboratory. Everything else-the whole body of mathematics and theory relating one measurement to another-Bohr regarded as a model of how the human mind works, not of how the universe works. Blake Williams loved Bohr for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which had made it possible for him to study physics seriously, even devoutly, without believing a word of it. That was convenient, since Williams's own training as an anthropologist had schooled him to study all human symbol systems without believing any of them. On a deeper level-there is always a deeper level- Williams was a scientist who didn't believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft. But Blake Williams didn't believe in witchcraft, either. He didn't believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology. "The study of human beliefs is an ethologist's heaven and a logician's hell," he liked to say. Actually, Blake Williams hadn't been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method. |
| 1854 |
Then, clutching the juice can in one hand, he hoisted himself onto the bed, catching her in a sudden smile. But she was good at the game; her eyes still didn't open. Carefully, he lay beside her hip, looking at those breasts, those real 3-D female breasts, not in a photograph, but right there in bed with him. Two of them, by Christ. Then, with infinite delicacy, he lifted the can and let some of the orange juice dribble onto her bush. She sighed and a tremor ran through her. He poured a little more, and her legs spread voluptuously and she slowly raised her knees. He was seeing it at last, the outer lips and the cleft revealed as he had always dreamed of it, the halo of reddish fur even more lovely than in his fantasies. He dribbled some more orange juice and leaned over, pushing the snout onto her bush and maneuvering his tongue into the cleft between the lips. Immediately, she groaned and threw her legs over his shoulders, pulling him deeper down into her crotch. "Teddy," she murmured, "you've come back." We all live in our fantasy and only endure our reality, he thought philosophically. According to instructions, he began a spiral licking motion, working from the outer lips slowly inward around the inner lips and ending with the clitoris again. She began to heave up and down like the loud-roaring sea, and his excitement grew, as he imagined and participated in her sensations. Her hands were on the ears of his Teddy Snow Crop f costume and she was pulling him down onto her frantically as she bucked upward, literally fucking his mouth. |
| 1855 |
The alpha males were still fighting among themselves about whether this was "sound" or not when it squeaked through Congress. Within a year the first case of the new multi-inventive leisure class appeared. This was a Cherokee Indian named Starhawk, who had been an engine-lathe worker in Tucson. After designing himself out of that job, Starhawk had gone on to learn four other mechanical factory jobs, designed himself out of each, and now had a guaranteed income of $250,000 a year for these feats. He was now devoting himself to painting in the traditional Cherokee style-which was what he had always wanted to do, back in adolescence, before he learned that he had to work for a living. By 1983 there were over a thousand similar cases. Many had gone on to seek advanced scientific degrees, and some had already migrated to the L5 space-cities. The swarming was beginning. The majority of the unemployed, living comfortably on $30,000 a year, admittedly spent most of their time drinking booze, smoking weed, engaging in primate sexual acrobatics, and watching wall TV. When moralists complained that this was a subhuman existence, Hubbard answered, "And what kind of existence did they have doing idiot jobs that machines do better?" Some of the unemployed were beginning to seek jobs again; after all, $48,000 or $53,000 is better than $30,000. Usually, they found that higher education was required for the jobs that were still available. Many were back in college; adult education, already a fast-growth industry in the 1970s, was now the fastest growing field of all. |
| 1856 |
Vlad the Barbarian was a blatant incitement to violence, garbed in the most reactionary moralistic prejudices imaginable. It was bought by the first New York publisher to whom it was submitted, for a higher advance than Albert Speer's memoirs or any of the confessionals of the Watergate felons. A movie sale was negotiated even before the book was released, and John Wayne starred as Vlad, looking really sincere every time he explained why murder and rape were the highest human virtues. Marvin was immediately commissioned to write a sequel, Vlad Victorious. Actually, because Marvin really was, in his own odd way, a philosopher of sorts, Vlad the Barbarian was not totally bad. In researching it Marvin had stumbled upon the enigma that makes Vlad Teppis somewhat interesting to students of the human mind in general and the ruling-class mind in particular. The mystery was this: Two early, approximately contemporary and seemingly authentic accounts tell one particular story about Vlad, but each tells it differently. There is thus no scientific way of saying which account is true. The disputed story is that two monks on a journey stopped at Vlad's castle one night and begged shelter from the elements. Vlad set out for them a magnificent banquet and then afterward asked them what the people of Hungary really thought about him. The first monk answered diplomatically and falsely that everybody said Vlad was a stern but just ruler. The second monk boldly told the truth: that everybody said Vlad was a homicidal maniac. |
| 1857 |
To assume, even for a minute, that Choronzon had an objective existence beyond the archetype in the unconscious circuitry of the central nervous system was to collapse into prescientific theology and demonology. But, alas, the Skeptic was only one program inside the Malik biocomputer, and not at his best at moments like this. The Shaman tape began running in its own programs as the Skeptic faded out, and Joe noticed again for the thousandth time how the ego circuit melded with the new program as easily as it had with the old, so now he "was" Joe Malik the Shaman, son of a thousand years of Sufis, and if Choronzon was really messing around he betta watcha his ass. "It's that motherfuckin' loa," Carol said angrily. "We didn't do the exorcism right..." "Choronzon" was a mind-construct of the primates specializing in the Enochian version of Cabalistic magick. Talking out of two sides of their mouths at once, as was typical of primate mystics, the Cabalists said that Choronzon was the astral embodiment of all the illusions and deception on Terra (especially all the egotism and malice). They added that Choronzon was also a part of the psyche of the student which had to be faced and conquered before Illumination was complete. When asked whether Choronzon was then outside or inside, they usually answered "Both." This reply made no sense at all until G. Spencer Brown published his Laws of Form. A loa was a mind-construct of those primates who specialized in Santaria, also called Magicko de Chango or Voudon. |
| 1858 |
E., just before the time of this epic novel); some try to find its origins in primitive shamanism and yoga. What is clear is that some primates on Terra began to transcend genetic four-circuit limitations many centuries, or even millennia, before true neuroscience appeared among them. Whether this was due to mutation, empirical hit-or-miss experimentation with alkaloid herbs, or other factors is unknown. In Egypt and China and other places, a few primates reported fifth-circuit raptures-the dawning of neurosomatic consciousness-two thousand or even three thousand years before the Space Age began. The picture is the same on all planets. A few biots suddenly rise above the eat-it-or-flee-it imprints of the amphibian biosurvival circuit, above the dominate-or-submit imprints of the mammalian territorial-emotional circuit, above the eitheror logic of the hominid semantic circuit, above the "good" and "bad" values of the tribal sociosexual circuit. They have transcended infantile feeding programs, childish emotional programs, adolescent philosophizing, and adult "responsibility" (pack role) all at once. What has happened, of course, is that these biots have formed a fifth circuit in their brains. This is called the neurosomatic circuit because it allows conscious feedback between the nervous system ("mind," in prescientific primate language) and the soma ("body"). In the larval stages of this Hedonic Revolution, every planet exhibits the same monotonous pattern: Mysticism and monomania appear. |
| 1859 |
Without such a moral watchdog, I am free to do as I bloody please. I just realized why all the real occult schools are so damned secretive, why the ordinary seeker is given a lot of double-talk and ejected out the same door wherein he came. If everybody could do this, the whole world would be in continuous revolution.* May 27, 1952-Another successful dhyana. There's nothing to it, really. The brain obviously operates on the same principle as those fellows in The Hunting of the Snark: "What I tell you three times is true." (Three million times is more accurate.) It was marvelous-better than the first time-and I'll never identify with "Cagliostro the Great" or "Hugh Crane" or even "me" or the perpendicular pronoun, ever again. I can see more and more clearly why all this is "sealed with seven seals" and hidden behind all kinds of mystification. Society as we know it is based on torture and death, or the threat of torture and death. I am in here to be tortured, although the authorities will never admit that. (What they do with heretics in other countries is torture; what we do here is penology.) The cage experience is profoundly punishing to the average human, as to any primate; it is the form of torture our society countenances. It is no torture to me only because I have learned certain neurological arts every stage magician learns. But if everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled-by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. |
| 1860 |
"These powers, whoever and whatever they are," Crane wrote-in unpublished notes which John Disk read years later, weeping- "are determined that I abandon all else and become no more than the servant who carries their message. To this end, they are taking away from me, one by one, all the things I love. Or, perhaps, I am merely in the terminal stages of a long-brewing paranoid psychosis?" Hugh Crane celebrated his fourteenth birthday in 1938 by climbing into the bed of the family's black maid, Sophie Hage, who introduced him to Voudon. The group in Harlem at that time actually combined elements of Voudon and Masonry. Since Voudon was already a blend of European witchcraft and African magic, and Masonry is a mixture of elements from Rosicrucian mysticism and French revolutionary free thought, there were actually four traditions involved, and the Rite of Initiation was unique. Borrowed from the third degree of Masonry, it replaced Jubela, Jubelo, and Jubelum with the Grand Zombi, and, since marijuana was involved, the ordeal became as real as in those days when candidates knew they would be killed if they failed. In a dark cellar on 110th Street, the Grand Zombi demanded, "Reveal the Secret Word or I will kill you. Reveal the Secret Word and give up your quest for Truth and Power." Hugh, repeating the formula taught him, replied, "Kill me if you must, but I will search again for Truth and Power as soon as I am reborn." The Grand Zombi, black face above a black robe, raised his sword. |
| 1861 |
But he continued to pray, and more and more The Voice of God would drown out all these nets and snares of Satan. Finally, on the morning of December 24, the Voice of God told him to go to Central Park West, where Cagliostro was living, and wait on the street. The Voice told him that as a reward he would be allowed to sit at the left hand of the Father in Heaven-Jesus would keep the right hand but the Holy Spirit was being demoted to an auxiliary rank with the Virgin, so that he, John Disk, could be given the third highest position in all Paradise. When he got to the School Book Depository and walked toward the box seat in the Ford Theatre, sex mutilators and cattle educators howled at him and he realized that the Devil was still trying to deceive him and he prayed harder and harder until it was clear that he was really on Central Park West and the man walking toward him, taking a morning constitutional, was the diabolical Cagliostro, a chameleon on a mirror, and the class of all classes that were similar to it, but he prayed and got the pistol out of his pocket, almost seeing the Grand Zombi and his sword, breathing harder now because the Devil was trying so hard to confuse him, and the interviewer wanted to know which monk Vlad impaled. John Disk held the gun in a trembling hand and looked into Cagliostro's icy eyes. "Oy, have you picked the wrong Black Magician," Cagliostro said in a stage-Yiddish accent. John Disk fired five times into the heart. The gate of Chinatown opened. |
| 1862 |
This appears to be an ordinary hat, and looks empty to the audience, but it actually contains a pouch out of which all sorts of amazing things can be made to appear-rabbits, yards of bright-colored cloth, glasses of water, and in general whatever the magician wishes to produce for the delight and amazement of his audience. This ritual, like all rituals and religious visions or ecstasies, is actually a memory of the future, but there is no way for primitives to understand that. Consider the epistemological plight of the Terran primates at the time of this ancient Romance. They knew that they were made of molecules, which were made of atoms, which were made of subatomic particles, which were expressions in space-time of quantum probability matrices. This knowledge, alas, was so recent that it had never been integrated into their philosophies, or into the rules of their social games, like religions, politics, economics, etc. Their whole social reality-tunnel was based on prequantum superstition and ignorance. The sociological nexus was Euclidean-Aristotelian-Newtonian; even Maxwell and Einstein had only been digested by a few. Over twenty-five hundred years earlier, one mutant primate, Lao-Tse, had written: "The greatest is within the smallest." Less than one-one hundredth (0.01) of one percent of the Terran primates were capable of understanding this before 1984. They looked for causality everywhere else: some known as astrologers scanned the distant stars; others known as Marxists scanned economics, etc. |
| 1863 |
S. w. Dacron died of a heart attack at fifty-two, brought on by anxiety about the amount of political corruption he was involved in. Dacron did not like to bribe public officials and hated the size of the bribes they all wanted, because he had been raised a Presbyterian. Unfortunately for him, he lived in an age of Terminal Bureaucracy and there was absolutely no way, no matter how many lawyers he hired, to find out if his corporations were, in any given instance, in violation of the law. There were too many laws, and they were written in language that guaranteed maximum ambiguity all around, so that lawyers (who wrote the laws) could always get jobs proving that the laws meant Yes, if they were being paid to prove that, or that the laws meant No, if they were being paid to prove that. Dacron never found out, for sure, whether he was one of the businessmen in the country operating 100 percent legally all the time or if he was in violation of so many statutes that he was subject to over a thousand years in prison; no two lawyers ever would agree about that. So Dacron bribed as many officials as possible to protect himself, and then gradually worried himself to death about the bribes being discovered someday. Polly Esther, finding herself the heir of Dacron's farraginous empire, quickly appointed professional executives to manage most of it; but she took over the newspaper personally. She was a fan of a TV show called Low Grant and rather fancied herself as becoming another Mrs. |
| 1864 |
It was a set speech, for occasions like this. He was thinking of Bonny Benedict and of her publisher, that hoity-toity rich Frankel-Briggser, Polly Esther Doubleknit. The next fuse ignited by the Oswald-in-Hong-Kong story was in the frontal cortex of a balding, nervous man named Justin Case, who was living in a sociological treatise. That is, people made him so anxious that he shielded himself from them with a cocoon of words and concepts which had gradually become more real to him than the people were. He was a heavyweight Intellectual. Justin Case had more Moral Concern than was good for a man. He worried about racism and sexism and imperialism and injustice and the general cussedness of his species; he agonized over each and every person on the planet who might be getting a raw deal; if you put enough martinis in him, he would start singing "Joe Hill" and "We Shall Overcome" and "Which Side Are You On?" and other old Labor and Civil Rights songs. Naturally, Case was the editor of a Liberal Magazine. The magazine was called Confrontation and had been started by a mad Arab named Joe Malik, who abandoned it in 1968 to enter a Trappist monastery. Malik had been traumatized by the Democratic Convention that year and told everybody he intended to spend the rest of his life in vehement and continuous prayer. Malik left behind a note which still hung on the bulletin board at Confrontation. It said: Qol: Hua Allahu achad; Allahu Assamad; lam yalid walam yulad; walam yahun lahu kufwan achad. |
| 1865 |
Nobody at Confrontation could read Arabic, but they all liked to stop and look at the note occasionally, wondering what it meant. The stockholders had appointed Case to the editorship, after Malik retreated to the cloister, because Justin had as much righteous indignation as the mad Arab but was not so flaky. 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. |
| 1866 |
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. |
| 1867 |
But then he realized he was Romanticizing, just because the puzzle had sparked his imagination. In ordinary four-dimensional Heisenberg space-time, there was no way out of the paradox: If the writer crossed the river, he and his lady were committing sodomy in Iowa, and if the lady crossed the river, they were violating the Mann Act in Illinois. Logicians dream up such Strange Loops, Dashwood reflected, just to make games for other logicians; but lawyers create them to make more jobs for lawyers. Dashwood scrawled, "Tell him his lady better damned well find a job in Illinois." Next. Dear Dr. Dashwood, Once there was a man who was condemned to live on the moon. He knew the punishment was just, because he hated his father and such a sin deserves an extreme penalty. Nonetheless, his isolation was terrible and there were times when he thought his heart would break, just because he could never hear a human voice again. Well, he made the best of his cruel situation. He began sending messages from the moon, telling everything he knew about life on earth-all the joys and agonies and struggles, "the horror and the boredom and the glory" of the long climb upward from the slime to higher and higher consciousness. The people back on earth loved these signals, which contained so much of life's drama, and they praised him extravagantly, and that gave him some comfort through the long years of his exile. Once, however, he sat down and made a message about his own loneliness, telling how it feels to be separated from humanity by 250,000 miles of Dead Silence. |
| 1868 |
They did this because they knew that whoever could find out what the hell was really going on possessed an advantage over those who were misinformed, confused, and disoriented. This game had been invented by Joseph Fouche, who was the chief of the secret police under Napoleon. British Intelligence very quickly copied all of Fouche's tactics, and surpassed them, because an intelligent Englishman is always ten times as mad, in a methodical way, than any Frenchman. By the time of the First World War, Intelligence Agencies everywhere had created so much disinformation and confusion that no two historians ever were able to agree about why the war happened, and who double-crossed whom. They couldn't discover whether the war had been plotted or had just resulted from a series of blunders. They couldn't even decide whether the two conspiracies to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary (which triggered the war) had been aware of each other. By the time of the Second World War, the "Double-Cross System" had been invented-by British Intelligence, of course. This was the product of such minds as Alan Turing, a brilliant homosexual mathematician who (when not working on espionage) specialized in creating logical paradoxes other mathematicians couldn't solve, and lan Fleming, whose fantasy life was equally rich (as indicated by his later James Bond books), and Dennis Wheatley, a man of exceptionally high intelligence who happened to believe that an international society of Satanists was behind every conspiracy that he didn't invent himself. |
| 1869 |
By the time Turing, Fleming, Wheatley and kindred British intellects had perfected the Double-Cross System, the science of lying was almost as precise as Euclidean geometry, and nearly as lovely to the detached observer. What the Double-Cross experts had invented was the practical political applications of the Strange Loop. In logic or cybernetics, a Strange Loop is a set of propositions that, while valid at each point, is so constructed that it leads to an unresolvable paradox. The Double-Cross people drove the Germans bonkers by inventing disinformation systems that, if believed, were deceptive, but if doubted led to a second disinformation system. They enjoyed this work so much that, at times, they invented Triple Loops, in which if you believed the surface or cover, you were being fooled; and if you looked deeper, you found a plausible alternative, which seemed like the "hidden facts," but was just another scenario created to fool you; and, if you were persistent enough, you would find beneath that, looking every bit like the Naked Truth, a third layer of deception and masquerade. These Strange Loops functioned especially well because the Double-Cross experts had early on fed the Germans the primordial Strange Loop, "Most of your agents are working for us and feeding you Strange Loops." Many German agents, it later turned out, had managed to collect quite a bit of accurate information about the Normandy invasion; but many others had turned in equally plausible information about a fictitious Norwegian invasion; and all of them were under suspicion, anyway. |
| 1870 |
He was celebrating by spending a month in Paris and meeting every possible international celebrity. The dinner guests this evening, for instance, included an inscrutable Japanese monk, a very scrutable German novelist, a famous Swedish film director, three French philosophers, a Swiss theologian, two English neurologists, the notorious Eva Gebloomenkraft (the Terror of the Jet Set, as the newspapers called her), an Austrian psychiatrist, Francois Loup-Garou himself, and four goats. The goats had been brought to the party by Loup-Garou, who was working hard at promoting Neo-Surrealisme by establishing himself as a newsworthy eccentric. "The goats go everywhere with me," he said firmly at the door. "They are a reminder of our earthy roots." It wasn't nearly as good as de Nerval walking a lobster on the boulevard, but it did get into a few newspapers the next day; and, after the effect had been established, Loup-Garou genially agreed to having the goats housed in the pantry during dinner. As the guests settled themselves at the table, one of the English neurologists, Dr. Axon-a jovial, red-cheeked man who probably hunted as a hobby-asked Dr. Carter, "Does your theory actually propose that there are real tangible universes on all sides of us in hyperspace?" "In superspace," Carter corrected genially. "Yay-us," he added blandly. "There are millions of such universes. Or to be more precise, there are about 10100 of them. Ah only refer to possible universes," he explained quickly, lest anybody think his theory was extravagant. |
| 1871 |
Her lover of the evening was sound asleep in the bedroom, but Polly Esther was wakeful and thinking of twenty dozen things at once, like the Second Oswald in Hong Kong and whether fish ever get seasick and how splendidly heavenly it had felt when her lover's tongue was up inside her Feinstein and what was the name of the third Andrews Sister-Maxine and Laverne and who?-and Silent Tristero's Empire and why so many things come in threes, not just Maxine and Laverne and what's-her-name but Curly and Larry and Moe; and Tom, Dick, and Harry; and Noah's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet; and Groucho, Chico, and Harpo; and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; and Past, Present, and Future; and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner; and the three witches in Macbeth; and the three brothers who start on the same quest in all the old fairy tales; and the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judiciary; and of course the Big Three, Pops, J. C., and Smokey; and maybe she should cut down on those diet pills; it was absurd to be wandering around at three in the morning thinking in threes. And then there was up-down, back-forward, and right-left, the three dimensions in space; and Wynken, Blynken, and Nod; and the Three Wise Men, Whozit, and Whatzis-name and Melchior; and Peter, Jack, and Martin, the three brothers in Swift's Tale of a Tub; and Peter, Paul, and Mary; and the Kingston Trio; and Friends, Romans, Countrymen, which was not only a triad, but a progressive triad, one beat, two beats, three beats, one, two, three, just like that, and she would definitely cut down on the diet pills. |
| 1872 |
Polly Esther finally put a record on the stereo, turning the volume down to low so as not to waken her lover in the bedroom. She picked the Hammerklavier sonata, not out of coincidence or propinquity or even synchronicity, but just because it was her favorite of Beethoven's piano pieces. It was her favorite because she couldn't understand it, no matter now often she played it. It was the musical equivalent of a Zen koan to her, endlessly fascinating because endlessly enigmatic. The stark, discordant opening bars drove all wandering threesomes out of her mind, narrowing her attention to Ludwig's urgent if incomprehensible universe of structured sound. She was swept into it again, as always, swept along by emotions so deep and yet so austere that nobody has ever been able to name them. Once she had invited the world's three most admired concert pianists to a party, just so she could ask each of them, privately, what they thought the Hammerklavier meant. As she expected, she had gotten three wildly conflicting answers. Another time she had ordered every book in print about Beethoven from Doubleday's on Fifty-third Street at Fifth Avenue and looked up Hammerklavier in the index of each. She got forty-four different opinions that way. The music hammered and surged along, carrying her through pain and frustration and loneliness to land, again and again, at things beyond such simple feelings, things that she sometimes felt were extraterrestrial or non-Euclidean or somehow beyond normal human perception. |
| 1873 |
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. |
| 1874 |
In fact, in the typical manner of splinter groups, they each hated the other more than they hated the common enemy, the heretics in the Vatican. John Disk finally decided that what was wrong with him was not caused by demons and-since he was able to cut down on his Lourding-off to only twice a week after he passed twenty-it wasn't entirely caused by Sin, either. He was being poisoned. The reason he had cycles of agitation and elation, followed by cycles of anxiety and growing fear that everything was somehow unreal, was because he was eating an Impure diet. The reason there were wars and rumors of wars, and revolutions and depressions, and pornography and lewd, sinful women in immodest clothing on every street was because all the food was full of toxic, mind-destroying chemicals. The people responsible for this were the Triangular Commission, the Power Elite, the Elders of Zion, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the American Medical Association. He had learned this by reading books on Organic Diet from bookstores run by the John Birch Society, the Natural Hygienists, the Purity of Ecology Party, and various other groups who were inclined to go through cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, feelings of unreality, etc., and had realized this was caused by Impurity of Essence in their food. John Disk read a great deal of this literature and changed his mind about twenty times before he finally decided which school of "correct nutrition" was really correct. He decided Purity of Ecology was the group that really knew what the hell was going on. |
| 1875 |
Their White Hunter on that expedition was a red-faced man named Robert Wilson, who, like Clem Cotex, knew he was living in a book. Robert Wilson had discovered this when somebody showed him the book in question. It was called Great Short Stories and was by some Yank named Hemingway. And there he was, Robert Wilson, playing a featured role in the very first story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." It was a shock, at first, to see himself in a book, and it was a bit thick to find his drinking and his red face described so dispassionately. It was like seeing yourself on the telly, suddenly observing the-man-who-was-you from outside. Then Wilson discovered that he was in another book, but changed in totally arbitrary ways that verged on surrealism. This book was a bit of tommyrot and damned filth called The Universe Next Door, and he was, in fact, both inside it and outside it, being both the author of it and a character in it. Robert Wilson began to experience cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, and a growing sense of unreality. Then came Lady Sybiline and Lady Rose and that mysterious object they kept in a small box and kept joking about, obscurely, between themselves. They called it Marion Brando. The river had pebbles at the bottom. They were shiny and small and the water rushed over them constantly and you could see clear to the other side of it if you had your glasses on and weren't too drunk. Robert Wilson stared at the pebbles, thinking they were like pearls, trying not to remember what had happened that morning. |
| 1876 |
One was just an ordinary Hindu nobleman who was always smiling. The second, when he was in Samadhi, was an awe-inspiring guru, no more human than a statue of Brahma. The third, when he was in Dhyana, was just the brightest, quickest, most curious monkey in the jungle. He didn't believe in any of those personalities; he just watched them come and go, blandly indifferent. Because he practiced hatha yoga, bhakti yoga, rajah yoga, and gnana yoga, and because he smoked a great deal of bhang, he was as conscious of detail as Clem Cotex or the late Pope Stephen. Because he believed the oldest Vedas were the important ones, he had no truck with modernistic notions of aceticism, British prudery, or heathen Missionary nonsense of any sort. 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. |
| 1877 |
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. |
| 1878 |
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. Williams had made some Converts. He settled back in an easy chair-he had been standing in his Full Professor lecture-room style through most of this-and got chatty and informal. He told them the little-known story of Pope Stephen's parable to the Spanish Cardinal who had told him that "seeking for the Real" was pointless since the Real is palpably right in front of our noses. "Everybody knows," Pope Stephen had said, "that I studied singing and medicine before I decided to make the priesthood my life's work. What few know is that I also considered becoming a novelist. |
| 1879 |
I often wonder, myself, if I ever abandoned that last ambition. Sometimes I feel like a novelist pretending to be a Pope, to see what it's like. And sometimes I even think the whole Church is a very old novel which I've revised and modernized. And, my reverend brother in Christ, sometimes I even think that I'm not alone in this novel-writing business; I think that every man, woman, and child on this planet is writing a novel inside their heads, all day long, every day-editing, rewriting, touching things up, improving a page here and throwing a page out somewhere else. The only difference is that when I write a novel, it becomes an Encyclical, and is therefore Reality for millions of believers." Williams now had five True Believers out of the thirty persons he had called together. The five, together with Williams, founded the W. F. Bach Society that night, and set out to impose their definition of Art on the rest of the world. They began by finding and financing Orson Welles, an obese genius who might have been the world's greatest film director if he had only been allowed to direct films. Welles was not allowed to direct films because he had made the mistake, his first time out, of making a movie about Charles Foster Hearst, the richest and most powerful of the Communist clique who ruled Unistat. Welles changed the name, of course, and called his movie character William Randolph Kane, but few were deceived by this, and Hearst certainly wasn't. The movie had a scene, at the beginning, in which a conservative banker said bluntly that "Kane" (Hearst) was a Communist. |
| 1880 |
It went on to make a big mystery about the word "Rosebud," which referred to General Crowley's system of "Rosy Cross" Cabalistic magick which the Communists were using to make money out of nothing. It exposed, almost blatantly, how Unistat was actually governed. Welles was blacklisted, and spent the rest of his life wandering around the world playing bit parts in films by other directors. The W. F. Bach Society financed Welles in the making of his second film, Art Is What You Can Get Away With, which was a bold glorification of El Mir. Next, the W. F. Bach cabal financed a new literary journal, Passaic Review, which they advertised so widely that everybody with any pretense to being an intellectual had to read it. The Passaic Review heaped scorn and invective on the established literary idols of the time-Simon Moon, the neo-surrealist novelist; Gerald Ford, the "country-and-western" poet; Norman Mailer; Robert Heinlein; Tim Hildebrand; and so on. They also denounced all the alleged "greats" of the first part of the century, like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Putney Drake. They established their own pantheon of "great" writers, which included William Butler Yeats (an obscure Irish schoolteacher nobody had ever heard of), Olaf Stapledon, Arthur Flegenheimer, and Jonathan Latimer. After only two years of bombardment by the erudite and authoritative-sounding articles in Passaic Review, most self-declared intellectuals were seriously comparing Yeats with Eliot and granting that some of Stapledon's novels were as good as anything by James or Drake. |
| 1881 |
"In our reality, a piercing gaze means only one thing, and you all know what it is, gentlemen." Another picture of General Crowley came on the screen, one in which he was much older than in the previous four photos; but he still had the same dark and deep-yes, piercing-gaze. "These are the eyes," Clem said, "of a hopeless slave of the hashish habit. Now, as you all know, many English military men acquired a taste for the resin of the Cannabis Indica plant while in India, and were none the worse for it. Certainly, an occasional smoke of the hash is an enjoyable, even a mind-expanding, experience. I daresay most of you here have tried it, and I gladly admit that I have. But a sensible man keeps such diversions within certain bounds. Such a sane, sound man does not 'do a number' (as our younger people call it) until evening, or at least until twilight. Well, maybe late afternoon, occasionally. Perhaps in the morning once in a while. But not one stick of hash after another, day after day, year after year, for twenty, thirty, forty years! No: one who fits that description is a slave of the habit, a hashish robot, a man whose mind has lost contact with Reality (whatever that is) and wanders amid the phantasms of his own poisoned brain. A man, as the Irish say, whose mind had been taken away by the Wee People." All gazed up at the photo of General Crowley, "the last of the Kipling heroes," as a journalist had called him, and Crowley gazed back at them, stony-eyed, impassive, enigmatic. |
| 1882 |
A group of the more avant-garde members had become convinced of the existence of the Tooth Fairy and were trying to convert everybody else. Naturally, Dr. Rauss Elysium did not like this. He felt it reduced the principles of the Invisible Hand Society to absurdity. Dr. Rauss Elysium had summed up the entire science of economics in four propositions, to wit: 1. Find out who profits from it. This was merely a restatement of the old Latin proverb-a favorite of Lenin's-cui bono? 2. Groups never meet together except to conspire against other groups. This was a generalization of Adam Smith's more limited proposition "Men of the same profession never meet together except to defraud the general public." Dr. Rauss Elysium had realized that it applies not just to merchants, but to groups of all sorts, including the governmental sector. 4. Every system evolves and expands until it encroaches upon other systems. This was just a simplification of most of the discoveries of ecology and General Systems Theory. 4. It all returns to equilibrium, eventually. This was based on a broad Evolutionary Perspective and was the basic faith of the Invisible Hand mystique. Dr. Rauss Elysium had merely recognized that the Invisible Hand, first noted by Adam Smith, operates everywhere. The Invisible Hand, Dr. Rauss Elysium claimed, does not merely function in a free market, as Smith had thought, but continues to control everything no matter how many conspiracies, in or out of government, attempt to frustrate it. |
| 1883 |
Chi Ken, a half-Chinese, half-Japanese hoodlum, had originally worked for the infamous Fu Manchu and was later part of the notorious Casper Gutman mob in Istanbul. Fallen on lean days, he now eked out a bare living as a police informer in Hong Kong and part-time actor in underground Okinawan porn movies. Chi Ken purloined the ithyphallic eidolon from Indole Ringh's temple of Shiva because he knew of a fabulously rich man in Hong Kong who happened to be looking for just such an item. Hong Kong at that time, like most of the Orient, was haunted by the specter of the "boat people," refugees from Unistat who had crossed the Pacific in hopes of a better life. There was no nation in the East willing to accept more than a handful of these pitiful people, and most of them just drifted from harbor to harbor, slowly starving, and hoping for acceptance somewhere. These desperate people were fleeing the appalling conditions that prevailed in Unistat since Furbish Lousewart became President in 1980. The man Chi Ken Teriyaki was going to see was named Wing Lee Chee, and he was a deep, dense, secretive person, even more inscrutable than the average Chinese businessman. Wing Lee Chee had been an athlete in his youth and had even toured Unistat once, performing amazing karate feats in a carnival. His missing right eye (the black patch made him even more inscrutable) was said to be due to an unfortunate incident that had occurred when the carnival was in Bad Ass, Texas, and he tried to use the white washroom at a gas station. |
| 1884 |
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! |
| 1885 |
He was showing more of his canine teeth now: the signal of primate anger. "Those who dare cross the line-any line-are explorers, and explorers sometimes get lost," Dashwood went on. "But without them, we never would have walked out of the tribal stage into the urban or out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance. "But enough rhetoric. Let me come to the point. "Gentlemen, dozens of anthropologists have sat in this office and told me stories that once made my hair stand on end. And dozens, and scores, of parapsychologists have told me even wilder tales. Gentlemen, everybody outside Bad Ass or Seattle knows that the line between Experimental Music and Noise is very hard to find, that the line between avant-garde literature and nonsense is ambiguous, that even the line between the Beautiful and the Hideous is far from fixed, since a Ubangi woman with a plate in her lip is attractive to a Ubangi man, but absurd or repulsive to most of us. Mathematicians know that what constitutes proof is still not itself totally understood. Scientific Truth, so called, used to remain the same for millennia; then it began changing every century; in this century, it has changed every decade, or even quicker in some fields. And yet, in spite of all this, we think there is a firm, fixed, immutable boundary between the Real and the Unreal. "Gentlemen, there is no such boundary. "Everything that we regard as filthy, obscene, blasphemous, and disgusting is part of the ancient mind-science called Magick." Dashwood smiled gently. |
| 1886 |
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. |
| 1887 |
Strange one: he had kept it after the operation, had it mounted on a plaque or something like that. "You see," Chaney explained, "I don't want to become a woman. I want to become more of a man." "Well," said Dr. Glopberger, professionally. "Well, well." It was an ingenious challenge, even with the advances in Sex Surgery in the past three years, but it could be done... My word, it would be a Medical First. The stocks in Blue Sky were now paying eight thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars a month. "Name your price," Chaney said with a steely glint. Justin Case heard about the man with no name at one of Mary Margaret Wildeblood's wild, wild parties. Joe Malik, the editor of Confrontation, told the story. It was rather hard for Case to follow because the party was huge and noisy-a typical Wildeblood soiree. All the usual celebrities were there-Blake Williams, the most boring crank in the galaxy; Juan Tootrego, the rocket engineer responsible for the first three space-cities; Carol Christmas, the man who had invented the first longevity drug, Ex-Tend; Natalie Drest, the fiery feminist; Bertha Van Ation, the astronomer who had discovered the first real Black Hole, in the Sirius double-star system; Markoff Chaney, the midget millionaire who owned most of Blue Sky, Inc. Hordes of other names-maxi-, midi-, and mini-celebrities-swarmed through Mary Margaret's posh Sutton Place pad as the evening wore on. There was a lot of booze, a lot of hash, and-due to Chaney-altogether too much coke. |
| 1888 |
There is darkness," the boy said. Richard frowned, not sure that he had understood the whispered words. He glanced back over his shoulder at the concern on Kahlan's face. She didn't look to have understood the meaning any more than he had. The boy lay on a tattered carpet placed on the bare ground just outside a tent covered with strings of colorful beads. The tightly packed market outside the palace had become a small city made up of thousands of tents, wagons, and stands. Throngs of people who had come from near and far for the grand wedding the day before flocked to the marketplace, buying everything from souvenirs and jewelry to fresh bread and cooked meats, to exotic drinks and potions, to colorful beads. The boy's chest rose a little with each shallow breath, but his eyes remained closed. Richard leaned down closer to the frail child. "Darkness?" The boy nodded weakly. "There is darkness all around." There was, of course, no darkness. Streamers of morning sunlight played over the crowds of people coursing by the thousands through the haphazard streets between the tents and wagons. Richard didn't think that the boy saw anything of the festive atmosphere all around. The child's words, on the surface so soft, carried some other meaning, something more, something grim, about another place entirely. From the corner of his eye, Richard saw people slow as they passed, watching the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor stopped to see an ill boy and his mother. The market out beyond was filled with lilting music, conversation, laughter, and animated bargaining. |
| 1889 |
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. |
| 1890 |
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. |
| 1891 |
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. She looked abruptly speechless. Kahlan and some of the soldiers waiting not far away glanced up at the ceiling that had covered the palace for thousands of years. It hardly looked in danger of falling in. A strange fortune, Richard thought, but the fortune had not been his real purpose. "And I predict that you will have a full belly when you sleep tonight. The shop not far back, to your left, sells warm meals. That penny will buy you one. Take good care of yourself, my lady, and enjoy your visit to the palace." The woman's smile returned, but this time it reflected gratitude. |
| 1892 |
"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. |
| 1893 |
Before Kahlan, books lay in orderly stacks and disorderly piles at random intervals all along the length of the table. Papers sat in batches among the books, along with lamps, ink bottles, pens, and empty mugs. Reflector lamps on the columns at either end of rows of shelves helped illuminate the more secluded areas of the library. With the overcast, and despite the lamps, gloom had settled over the still room. Berdine, wearing a brown leather outfit, folded her arms and leaned against the table as she, along with the rest of them, watched Zedd pace. While her eyes were as blue as Cara's, her wavy hair was brown rather than blond. She was shorter and curvier than most of the other Mord-Sith. Unlike most of the other Mord-Sith, Berdine was fascinated by books and had many times proven to be a tremendous help to Richard in ferreting out useful information among the thousands of volumes. While Berdine usually went about her book work with bubbly enthusiasm, she was no less deadly than Cara or any of the other Mord-Sith. Zedd finally came to an impatient halt. "I'm not convinced that it can work, Richard — or at least, work effectively. For one thing, there are many ways to classify books, as well as books that contain more than one subject. If a book is about a city located beside a river, and you place it in a section on cities, then later when you need information about rivers you won't be aware that this book on cities might have something important to say about a river." He sighed as he glanced around the library. |
| 1894 |
It had been hidden away, out of reach, in the underworld. On occasion over the intervening thousands of years, there had been those who had traveled to the world of the dead to try to get into the Temple of the Winds. None had survived the attempt. Until Richard. He had gone alone to the underworld and had been the first in thousands of years to set foot in the temple. When he had unlocked the power of the boxes of Orden to end the war, he had righted a number of wrongs, eliminating dangers and traps that had killed a great many innocent people. He had also returned the Temple of the Winds to the world of life, to its rightful place atop Mount Kymermosst. Well," Zedd finally said into the hush, "at least you know where the rest of this book is located." His bushy brows drew down over his intent hazel eyes. "When you told me that you had returned the temple to this world, you said that no one but you can get into it. That is the case, isn't it, Richard?" It sounded to Kahlan more like a command than a question. Despite the intensity in Zedd's voice, the tension finally eased out of Richard's posture. "Right. What ever the rest of the book contains, it's safely locked away." Richard let out a sigh as he closed the strange book and placed it back on the table. "Well, Berdine, I guess that you should mark the sheet for Regula as unknown and put down its location as both here and in the Temple of the Winds." Zedd turned back to Berdine, as if wanting to save the topic of the Temple of the Winds for later, for a private conversation with Richard. |
| 1895 |
He was also concerned about the fact that the prophecy from the old woman, Sabella, had turned out to be the exact same prophecy that had been in the book End Notes. Prophecy had caused Kahlan and him no end of trouble. Most of all, though, Richard was concerned about what the boy down in the marketplace had said, that there was darkness in the palace, and that darkness was seeking darkness. He had no tangible reason to worry about words that seemed to have been born of fever. Indeed, Zedd and Nathan hadn't been worried about the boy's words when he told them what had happened. They both thought Kahlan had it right, that it was nothing more than fevered illusions. But Richard was worried about those words. Something about them seemed more than a simple fever. They touched something deep within him. Especially now, since people from all over were gathered at the palace. Richard noticed Rikka watching the crowd. She looked like a hawk searching for a mouse. Cara, off a ways across the room, kept an eye on Richard and Kahlan even as she smiled and greeted people. He saw other Mord-Sith standing off to the sides, watching people. Several of them, closer to Richard and Kahlan, were wearing red leather. For some reason, he wasn't altogether unhappy to see that. Even if it was peacetime, he was glad to see that they were remaining vigilant. Richard leaned a bit toward his grandfather. "Zedd, do you think that what Nathan said was right?" Zedd frowned. "About what?" Richard smiled at passing guests before answering. |
| 1896 |
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. |
| 1897 |
Despite being somewhere near to a thousand years old, Nathan often approached life with the glee and wonder of a child. It was an infectious nature that attracted some people to him. Others, no matter Nathan's often pleasant nature, considered him to be just about the most dangerous man alive. A prophet could tell the future and in the future pain, suffering, and death often lay in wait. People believed that, if he chose to, he could reveal what fate awaited them. Nathan dealt with prophecy; he could neither invent it or make it happen. But some still believed he could. That was why many considered him dangerous. Others considered him profoundly dangerous for an entirely different reason. They feared him because there had been times when prophecies he revealed had started wars. There were those women who were drawn to that aura of danger about him. When asked why he would bother to carry a sword, Nathan had reminded Richard that he was a wizard as well, and he carried a sword. Richard protested that he was also the Seeker, and the Sword of Truth was bonded to him. It was part of him, part of who he was. Nathan's sword was more ornamental. Nathan didn't need a sword to reduce someone to ash. Nathan had reminded Richard that, Seeker or not, and no matter how he framed it, Richard was far more deadly than the sword he carried. "Lord Rahl," a stocky man in a red tunic asked as everyone gathered close, "may we know if there is some prophetic event lying ahead for us?" Many in the crowd nodded, relieved that the question had finally been asked, and moved in a little closer. |
| 1898 |
Some people dared to inch forward again. Richard let his arms down and stood taller. "I say that the future is what you make of it, not what someone says it will be. Your lives are not controlled by fate, or set down in some book, or revealed in smoke, or laid out in a twisted pile of pig intestine. You should tell people to stop worrying about prophecy and to put their minds to making their own future." Nathan cleared his throat as he took a quick step forward. "What Lord Rahl means to say is that prophecy is meant for prophets, for those with the gift. Only the gifted can understand the complexities tangled up in a genuine prophecy. Rest assured, we will worry about such things so that you don't need to." Some in the crowd reluctantly seemed to think that made some sense. Others were not satisfied. A thin woman, a queen from one of the lands in the Midlands, spoke up. "But prophecy is meant to help people. It is set down so that those words elicited by the gift will come forward through the dark tunnel of time to be of use to those of us who will be touched by those prophecies. What good is prophecy if the people aren't informed of what it has to say about their fate? What use is the gift for prophecy if not to help people? What value is prophecy if it is kept secret?" Nathan smiled. "Since you are not a prophet, Your Majesty, how can you know that there is a prophecy that is relevant, one that you would need to know about?" She fingered a long jeweled necklace, the unseen end of which was located somewhere down in her cleavage. |
| 1899 |
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. |
| 1900 |
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. Knives, forks, food, drink, plates, and pieces of broken glass clattered across the floor. Richard was by far the one closest to Kahlan as she had unleashed her Confessor power. Too close. Proximity to such power being loosed was dangerous. The pain of it seared through every joint in his body, dropping him to a knee. Zedd fell back, knocked from his feet. Nathan, a little farther away, staggered back, catching Cara's arm to steady her. When pieces of shattered glass finally stopped skipping across the floor, the tablecloths and curtains finally settled and stilled, and people sat up in stunned silence, the woman in bloody blue robes was kneeling at the Mother Confessor's feet. Kahlan stood tall at the center of the settling chaos. People stared in shock. None of them had ever seen a Confessor unleash her power before. It was not something done before spectators. |
| 1901 |
Richard was glad to avoid the public areas. People would undoubtedly want to stop him to talk with him. He didn't feel like talking about trade issues or petty matters of squabbles over authority to set rules. Or prophecy. Richard had more important things on his mind. At the top of the list was what the dead woman had said about her vision. She had called the threat "dark things." She had said that those dark things were stalking Kahlan. The boy down in the market earlier that morning had said that there was darkness in the palace. Richard wondered if he was putting things together too easily, things that didn't really belong together and only sounded like they did because they shared the word "dark." He wondered if he was letting his imagination get the best of him. As he marched along beside Zedd, with Nathan leading the way, he glanced down at the book Nathan was holding and remembered the lines in the book that matched what he'd heard that day about there being darkness in the palace, and decided that he wasn't overreacting. The corridor they passed through was paneled with mahogany that had mellowed with age to a dark, rich tone. Small paintings of country scenes hung in each of the raised panels along the hall. The limestone floor was covered with carpet runners of deep blue and gold. Before long they made their way into the connecting service passageways that provided workers with access to the Lord Rahl's private areas within the palace. The halls were simpler, with plastered, whitewashed walls. |
| 1902 |
In places the hall ran along the outside wall of the palace to their left. 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. |
| 1903 |
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. |
| 1904 |
Layers of clothes covered her short, heavyset form. From what Richard could see, she was wearing at least three sweaters over her dark blue dress. The buttons on the dingy, off-white sweater on the bottom strained to cover her girth. Over that sweater she had on a faded red sweater and a checkered flannel shirt with sleeves that were too long for her. She pulled up a sleeve and then pushed stringy strands of sandy-colored hair back off her face. "Please, won't you all come in?" She waddled back into the dark depths of her home, grinning — giddy, apparently — to have company come to visit. As strange as Lauretta was, it was her home that was strangest of all. In order to enter, since he was taller than she was, Richard had to hold aside yarn objects hanging just inside the door. Each of the dozens of yarn contraptions was different, but all of them had been constructed in roughly the same manner. Yarn of various colors had been wound around crossed sticks into designs that resembled spiderwebs. He couldn't imagine what they were for. By no stretch of the imagination could they be considered attractive, so he didn't think they were intended to be decorative. When Zedd saw him frowning at them he leaned close to speak confidentially. "Meant to keep evil spirits from her door." Richard didn't comment on the likelihood of evil spirits who had managed to make it this far on a journey from the dark depths of the underworld being stopped cold by sticks and yarn. To each side of the entrance, papers, books, and boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling. |
| 1905 |
She hadn't been asleep. At least, she was pretty sure she hadn't been asleep. She had been trying to put everything from her mind. She hadn't wanted to think about the woman who had killed her children. She hadn't wanted to think about the children and how they had died. All for fear of a prophecy. She didn't want to think about the woman's deluded visions. She had tried very hard to put it all from her mind. The heavy drapes were drawn. There was only one lamp lit in the room and it was turned down low. Sitting on the table before the mirror on the dressing table, the lamp was too weak to chase the darkness from the farthest reaches of the room. Darkness occluded those far corners where the faint shadowy shapes of hulking wardrobes lurked. It couldn't be Richard she sensed. He would have let her know it was him when she sat up. Cara would have as well. Whoever she sensed in the room wasn't saying anything, wasn't moving. But she felt them watching her. At least she thought she did. She knew how easy it was for anyone's imagination, even hers, to get out of hand. Trying to be honest and coldly logical, she couldn't say for sure that it wasn't her imagination, especially after Cara had planted the notion in her mind earlier in the day. But her heart raced as she stared into the dark recesses of the room, watching for any movement. She realized that her fist had tightened around her knife. She pulled the bed throw off and pushed it aside. She was lying on top of the bedspread. Her bare thighs prickled at the touch of chilly air. |
| 1906 |
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. |
| 1907 |
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. When she pulled open the bedroom door, Cara, with her arms folded, was leaning back against the doorframe. |
| 1908 |
"Welcome, Abbot Dreier." The man's hesitant gaze took in those before him. "Thank you for taking the time to see me, Lord Rahl." Richard thought that was an odd way to put it. The man hadn't asked for an audience. He had been summoned. Zedd, wearing simple robes, stood to the far side of Kahlan. A wall of windows beyond Zedd, to Richard's right, cast the walnut-paneled walls and niches lined with bookcases framed by fluted walnut columns in fading, cold light. A few lamps were taking over with their warm illumination. Nathan had gone back to see how Berdine was doing in the library. Richard had asked the men of the First File to stand guard out in the corridor, rather than in the room. He hadn't wanted the abbot to feel uncomfortable. This was, after all, a representative from one of the areas Richard ruled, not a hostile land. Still, a Mord-Sith in red leather standing at arm's length to his side couldn't put anyone at ease. More than that, though, the man had been insistent about prophecy earlier in the day. When the woman had tried to kill Kahlan she had given her vision of the future as her excuse for murder. Richard and Kahlan were not exactly indulgent of people who let prophecy direct their lives, or who used it as license for the harm they caused. From the events at the reception, the abbot would be aware of their feelings, and that he was at the wrong end of them. Richard gestured to one of the comfortable chairs on the other side of a low, square table covered with a slab of black marble cut through with whorls of white quartz. |
| 1909 |
He needed to question the woman who had thrown her four children to their death. He needed to try to figure out what was happening. Kahlan had gone instead to meet with the representatives to try to calm their concerns about prophecy while Richard was looking into the source of those concerns. Richard's flip tongue had more than once gotten him into trouble. Kahlan would be less likely to get frustrated with them than he would. She had been schooled in diplomacy. He wished that Verna, the Prelate of the Sisters of the Light, could have gone with Kahlan to help explain the dangers of a layperson inferring anything from prophecy. Prophecy was not at all as clear as it sounded. That was because it was not intended for those who weren't gifted. It was actually a kind of private message passed down from prophets in the past. Only a prophet could have the visions a true prophecy engendered and in that way understand its true meaning. Verna knew a great deal about those dangers. After all, the Sisters of the Light had imprisoned Nathan in the Palace of the Prophets for nearly a thousand years out of fear that he would reveal prophecy to ordinary people. Verna could have helped dissuade people from thinking they could properly understand prophecy. Unfortunately, along with Chase and his family, she had left for the Wizard's Keep immediately after Cara's wedding. There were gifted boys there who needed supervision and training. Zedd was supposed to return as well, but he had wanted to stay for the reception, and now the storm and troubling events had further delayed him. |
| 1910 |
As Richard stepped off the rusty iron rungs of the ladder, the captain of the dungeon guards straightened and clapped a fist to his heart in salute. 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. |
| 1911 |
Their suffering will be your fault. "All because you will not do your duty to your people by heeding prophecy." Richard didn't answer. There was no answer to madness. The man slid his back up the wall until he was standing. He glared at Richard. "You do not deserve to be the Lord Rahl. Soon, everyone will realize that." Kahlan ingratiated herself with the representatives by first laying out an elaborate midday meal. Tables around the room were covered with platters of meats, fish, fowl, and sweet delights of every sort. Other tables offered a variety of wines. Musicians played soft, soothing music while servers carrying trays of colorful, honeyed nectar drinks threaded their way through the crowds. Guests plucked the heavy-bottomed glasses containing the prized drink from the trays as the servers passed. Gazing out at all those assembled, Kahlan felt a pang of loneliness. She wished that Richard could be there with her. She missed him. But he had work to do. So did she. Circulating among the milling crowd as they sampled food and wine from the different tables and drinks from trays, not taking the time to eat herself, Kahlan smiled and greeted everyone personally, thanking them for attending as she saw to their every pleasure or whim. Staff were at hand to make sure the representatives had everything they wanted. A number of people brought up prophecy, pressing their belief that it was one of their most important tools for guiding them into the future, insisting that she and Richard would do well to be more mindful of what such predictions had to say to them all. |
| 1912 |
Kahlan listened patiently, occasionally gently asking for clarifications of certain assertions. Cara, not trusting anyone, even these leaders from around the D'Haran Empire and allies in the war, was rarely more than an arm's length away. Several times as Kahlan made her way through the room, people stopped her, wondering if the kitchens had this or that. Kahlan indulged them, immediately turning to ask the ever-attentive staff trailing not far behind to see to fulfilling the special requests. When the elaborate luncheon finally drew to a close, she led the representatives into a nearby room where she stepped up onto a broad dais so that everyone could see her. Vanilla-colored walls decorated with intricate molding and blue carpets trimmed in gold gave the room a hushed, intimate feel. Through a wall of double doors that led out to the terrace in the back, Kahlan could see that the storm had turned the world to white. The wind from time to time rattled the glass in the doors. Now that people were fed and relaxed, Kahlan clasped her hands as she stood before them on the elevated platform, waiting patiently for conversations to die out and everyone's attention to turn to her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nicci arrive. The sorceress glided to a halt beside a table just behind Kahlan. Tall chairs, their backs carved to look like eagles with their wings spread, chairs Richard and Kahlan had used in the past as they'd greeted petitioners, many of whom now roamed the room, sat in commanding positions behind the table. |
| 1913 |
"You shall have what you demand," Kahlan said. "You shall hear what prophecy holds in store for you." Everyone inched forward, eager to finally hear what none of them had ever heard before: real prophecy from one of the books of prophecy. Kahlan looked back over her shoulder at the grim sorceress who had been quietly observing. All eyes went to the woman, who possessed powers most of these people had never seen unleashed and could not imagine. Nicci's unapproachable beauty, and her icy-cold confidence, only added to the air of danger about her. "Nicci, would you please bring the book you have with you and read the prophecy we recently discovered that speaks to the issue of our immediate future and the role that all these people here today have to play in it?" Nicci bowed her head. "Of course, Mother Confessor." The woman's smoldering, silken voice only confirmed her displeasure with what she had heard from those gathered. While everyone was excited by the gravity of what they were witnessing, and by the prospect of hearing real prophecy that was rarely uttered outside of tightly guarded rooms, they were also cautious of the menace that Nicci represented. While Cara was intimidating enough, Nicci was a forbidding presence on a whole other level. In her revealing black dress she looked every bit of her former persona of Death's Mistress, a title everyone in the room knew even if not one of them ever mentioned it except perhaps in whispered gossip among themselves. Their desire to hear prophecy, though, overwhelmed their concern. |
| 1914 |
You all did — every one of you — therefore I have no choice but to carry out your will. You all made this choice yourselves." The crowd went crazy again, protesting that they hadn't meant to usurp the rule of Lord Rahl, or the Mother Confessor. And then the chancellor pulled away from the grip of a soldier and dropped to his knees. He placed his forehead to the ground. When other people grasped what he was doing, they jumped to join him. Soon the whole roomful of representatives and rulers, even the pregnant Queen Catherine, were on their hands and knees with their foreheads pressed to the floor. The soldiers standing among them didn't do anything to stop them. "Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours." It was the devotion to the Lord Rahl that until a few days before had been recited twice each and every day in the Palace of the Prophets for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. At Cara's wedding Richard had told everyone that their lives were their own, not his, and that they should no longer bow to him or to anyone else. They all had, after all, just defeated tyranny. Even if that devotion was no longer required, they apparently thought that this was an appropriate time to remind themselves, and Kahlan, of their loyalty. Kahlan let the chanting go on for a while before she said, "Rise, my children," the traditional phrase used by the Mother Confessor when people went to a knee to bow before her. |
| 1915 |
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. |
| 1916 |
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. 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. |
| 1917 |
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. |
| 1918 |
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. She wondered if it would suddenly appear again somewhere else in the room. "What in the world do you think that could have been?" She stood up beside him, her fingers trailing along his muscular arm momentarily on her way to the lamp to turn up the wick. Richard, still in the heat of rage from having the sword in his hand, scanned every corner of the room as the lamp finally helped illuminate what had been only dark shapes before. |
| 1919 |
The footsteps of the soldiers whispered off the polished granite floors and echoed off the great slabs of stone standing between black granite columns that lined the broad passageways. Each polished slab between those columns, laced with multicolored crystalline veins, was like a work of art. Besides the men following behind Richard and Kahlan, there was a sizable force already stationed throughout the passageways. This part of the palace was always heavily guarded and strictly off-limits to the public. Richard paused at the great doors, momentarily taking in the carvings of rolling hills and forests. The elaborate scene on the doors was sheathed in gold. The Garden of Life had been created as a containment field for any dangerous magic that might need to be unleashed. It also protected those handling such power from any nefarious intervention. Beyond the gold-clad doors some of the most dangerous conjuring ever conceived by the mind of man had been unleashed. The magnificent doors were, like many other things in the palace, meant to be a reminder, when dealing with such potentially deadly things, of the beauty and importance of life itself. The garden was also a touchstone of great events in Richard's life. He had been brought to the garden at the lowest point in his life. It had also been the scene of his greatest triumphs. By the way Kahlan put a hand gently on his back, he knew that she must have realized what he was thinking. Finally, he pulled one of the massive doors open. |
| 1920 |
The guards took up posts up and down the hallway as Richard and Kahlan went into the Garden of Life alone. Once inside, they were enveloped with the heady fragrance of flowers that grew in great swaths beside the walkway that wandered toward the heart of the room. Beyond the flowers small trees created a intimate forest gathered before a vine-covered stone wall. Beyond the wall, the center of the expansive room contained an area of lawn that swept around almost into a circle. The grass ring was broken by a wedge of white stone, upon which sat a slab of granite held up by two short, fluted pedestals. High overhead, a ceiling of leaded windows let light flood the room during the day. At night they offered a view of the stars that always made Richard feel rather small and lonely. This night there was no view out the windowed ceiling. Richard could see that a thick blanket of snow covered the glass. When lightning flashed, he could see that in some places the windblown snow had been reduced to a thin layer that let the lightning show through, but in other areas, on the lee side of the peak, the snow was so thick that not even the flashes of lightning could penetrate the dense covering. Intermittent thunder rumbled through the room, making the ground tremble underfoot. After putting flame to a few torches around the edge of the grassy area, Richard sat with Kahlan on the short stone wall at the edge of the small indoor forest. Together they gazed out across the open area, as if looking out on a meadow. |
| 1921 |
Lightning lanced a route through the opening toward the floor of the room. At the same time that the tremendous weight of it all came crashing down, hitting the floor hard enough to make the whole room shudder with a resounding thud, another bolt of lightning lashed in through the breach in the ceiling and made it to ground. The impact of all the wet snow and the jarring jolt of lightning sent a shock wave through the room that blew the torches out. In the sudden darkness, Richard could hear a great rending groan as stone cracked and began breaking apart. As they ducked, trying to avoid being hit by the debris flying in every direction, Richard and Kahlan both covered their ears against the deafening sound of thunder crashing and stone breaking. In the staccato flashes of lightning, Richard glanced back over his shoulder and saw the floor in the center of the room caving in. Great granite blocks under the floor groaned as they twisted apart from one another and fell inward. Grass, dirt, and a thick bed of sand poured into the expanding hole, like the sands of an hourglass falling inward. When the broken sections of glass finally stopped falling, Richard looked up to see in the flashes of lightning a jagged breach in the ceiling surrounded by twisted pieces of the heavy metal framework. Fortunately, most of the ceiling all around the room held in place. By the looks of the framework that Richard could see, the builders had overbuilt it for all but the rarest of events. It had, after all, stood for thousands of years. |
| 1922 |
He handed Kahlan the torch. The ladder was heavy, but he was able to handle it by himself. When he reached the hole he slid the ladder down the side until it rested on the landing. Enough of the ladder stuck up out of the hole for a good handhold. Richard looked up through the jagged opening in the glass roof. Snowflakes drifted down, but the wind was slowing. He could see breaks in the clouds, and through the breaks, stars. The storm was ending. "Why don't you wait here," he said as he started down. "Right," she said, "like that's going to happen." "Well at least wait until I get down onto the landing and see if the steps are safe." Kahlan agreed to that much of it. She stood at the edge of the hole, foot braced on a freshly exposed stone block, torch in hand, peering down to watch him descend the ladder. When he looked up at her, the dislodged granite blocks at the edge of the hole reminded him of a line of crooked teeth, as if he were being swallowed down the gullet of a stone monster. As he stepped off the ladder the area around him brightened with an eerie greenish light coming from a proximity sphere sitting in an iron bracket. Richard had seen the ancient devices before. They were used to illuminate various areas of the People's Palace and the depths of the Wizard's Keep, among other places. They looked like nothing more than a solid piece of glass, but they had been invested with ancient magic so that when someone gifted came near them they began to glow. As he lifted the hefty glass sphere out of the bracket, the light it gave off warmed in color. |
| 1923 |
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. |
| 1924 |
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. "I don't know. Doesn't look like much of anything. Maybe it's just an old storage room." "It doesn't make any sense that they would seal off a storage room the way this place has been sealed up." "I suppose not," Richard conceded. Kahlan was right. It didn't appear that there had ever been any convenient access to the place. As he moved into the gloomy room, proximity spheres set in wall brackets began to glow. By the time he made it around the perimeter of the room the four spheres, one on each wall, had all come to life, if weakly. Each sphere brightened as he came close and dimmed as he moved away. Even so, they cast sufficient light to banish enough of the blackness for them to see. Looking around the room for any sign of what the place might have been used for, Richard only distantly noted the nondescript monolithic block sitting in the center of the room. He thought it might be a leftover block of stone used in the construction of the palace walls. The only thing that Richard thought was odd about it was that it sat square with the room, as if it had been carefully placed. |
| 1925 |
It served no structural purpose as far as he could see. Snowflakes drifted down from the stairwell and into the room to mix with the dust they had stirred up. Up above, the storm raged across the land, but the remnants of gusty wind could not make it this far down. Snowflakes floating by, catching the light of the proximity spheres, sparkled in the murky light. A quick search around the perimeter confirmed that the room had no doors. There were no other stairs, or openings of any kind. There was no way out but the spiral stairs that had brought them down into the still grave of a room. Richard wasn't sure why, but the place was making the hair on the back of his neck stand out. The still, silent room had the feel of a place deliberately built to be sealed over and forgotten. But why would anyone seal off and bury an empty room? Kahlan inched in close to him. "Something about this place is creepy." "Maybe it's because it's a dead end. There's no way out but the way we came in." "Maybe," she said. "I sure wouldn't like to get trapped down in here. No one would ever find you. Why would this place be sealed up like a tomb?" Richard shook his head. He had no answer. He half expected to see bones on the floor, but there were none. There were burial vaults in the lower reaches of the palace, but the Garden of Life was at the top of the palace, and besides, the tombs were grand places meant to revere the dead. None had the forsaken feel of this room. As he looked around more carefully, Richard spotted something low against the far wall. |
| 1926 |
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. |
| 1927 |
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. |
| 1928 |
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. Reddish dust from countless centuries of inaction was being grated and worn away so that it began to float through the interior of the metal box, making it look like a rusty fog down inside. As Richard tried to see down through the floating dust inside, he couldn't see a bottom. It was hard to see past all the intricate, complex workings, bulky levers, wrist-thick shafts, and massive geared wheels, but he was able to see glimpses of yet more mechanical parts down lower, down to a great depth inside, until the layers of inner workings obscured the view of the lower reaches. The haze of stirred-up dirt and rust made the inside of the machine look as if it were filled with smoke. Richard moved over so Kahlan could take a look through the narrow window. As he moved aside, he discovered another opening in the side of the machine not far to the left below the window. He bent down, holding the glowing sphere close. The opening was nothing more than a narrow channel. A few pieces of the same metal strips lay stacked in the channel. Kahlan pointed at the ceiling. "Richard, look." The light coming from the tiny hole in the center of the top of the machine was projecting a symbol onto the ceiling. The design drawn in lines of light slowly rotated as the gears within turned. |
| 1929 |
It was getting worse just since earlier in the night, since they saw that thing watching them in their room. It stung so badly that it nearly made her eyes water. The stitch of pain finally eased up. She let out the breath she had been holding. She'd had much worse injuries, and suffered far greater pain, so she wasn't overly concerned. It was more of an annoyance than anything. She knew, though, that even such simple injuries could develop into serious infections, so she knew she should probably ask Zedd to take a look at it before it got any worse. He would be able to heal it. Richard had in the past used his gift to heal, but it wasn't something he could do at will, like other wizards. Not for minor things, anyway. His gift was not only more powerful than Zedd's, or Nathan's, or Nicci's, but it was unique in the way it worked. Possibly because he was a war wizard, his power required great need, or anger, as a component in order to come to life within him. Healing a scratch, as painful as it was becoming, was not enough. It would be better to let Zedd look at it. But with the representatives causing trouble over the strange prophecies, the thing that had been watching them in their room suddenly attacking them, and now the collapse of the floor of the Garden of Life and the discovery of what was beneath it, there were more important immediate concerns. She would have Zedd look at her hand when she had time. "Do you know what Regula means?" Kahlan asked. Still looking up at the symbol projected onto the ceiling, Richard nodded. |
| 1930 |
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. Kahlan knew that magic could be glorious, wondrous, a magnificent affirmation of life. But Kahlan knew magic's other side, its dark and dangerous side. |
| 1931 |
"Of course." Kahlan realized that she wasn't surprised that Richard knew how much her hand was hurting. It was next to impossible for her to hide anything from Richard. When she heard the distant howl, her gaze was drawn to the high windows. She realized that it wasn't coming from the high windows. It had to have come from somewhere else, but she couldn't tell where, exactly. Kahlan remembered the prophecy the woman gave before she died, that dark things, feral things, would come for Kahlan in the night. The memory of the woman's words, "Dark things stalking you, running you down. You won't be able to escape them," gave her a chill. 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. |
| 1932 |
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. |
| 1933 |
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. 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. |
| 1934 |
Of peeking out again from under the lid of the bench to see the heavily armed soldiers swing up into their saddles and charge away into the night, their assignment of assassination completed. Of hiding in the darkness all night, trembling in fear that they would come back and find him. Of hours later, just after dawn, when Mohler, a new young servant come up from the city to work at the citadel, found him hiding in the bench and lifted him out. All because Panis Rahl believed in striking down any potential challenge to the House of Rahl before it had a chance to develop. He had his soldiers slaughter anyone, real or imagined, who could be a potential threat to his rule. Even the minor ruler of Fajin Province in the distant Dark Lands, who had harbored no particular ill will toward the ruling House of Rahl and had always been loyal, was guilty of possessing the potential to one day be a threat, and so he and his family had to die for the crime of existing. But the cunning folk, as they were called, were not to be trifled with. Even the gifted rightly feared their occult powers. Panis Rahl knew that such powers and abilities as dwelled in the Dark Lands could be a threat, but in striking against the ruler of Fajin Province, he had made a mistake. He had struck a generation too soon. As the fires of rage roared within him, Hannis Arc knew that the threat to the rule of the House of Rahl this time was all too real. He would see to it. He would never again tremble in fear of a Rahl. |
| 1935 |
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. They swooped in around their trapped companion, incredulous to see her stuck fast, clicking their bewilderment to one another in a tongue that sounded like nothing so much as small little bird bones snapping. |
| 1936 |
"I just told you that you need to show me a great deal of respect, and instead you threaten me?" He leaned toward the familiar, glaring into her wild eyes as he seized the handle of the crescent-bladed axe propped against the desk beside his right leg. "For this offense, you lose the hand. Threaten me again and you lose your existence." He brought the axe around with one swift, powerful swing. It thunked into the desk, sticking fast, chopping the familiar's hand off at the wrist. Freed, she wheeled in frantic pain and shot away, crashing blindly off the stone walls, knocking over a stand holding a book and breaking the glass in one of the cases. The wriggling hand remained pinned by the knife, the wrist terminating against the axe blade stuck deep in the desktop. "Oh, look there, you've lost some of your precious blood," he said with mock sincerity. "Well, that really is a shame." The other six retreated to a safe distance, or at least what they believed to be a safe distance, suddenly cautious, fearing to be too hasty in their response. As the familiar, cradling the stub at the end of her arm, slowed to glare at him, Hannis Arc crooked a finger at her, compelling her to return. Hesitantly, she approached the desk, rage and fear twisting her already twisted features. He noted that despite her rage, despite her hesitancy, she had nonetheless obeyed him. He was pleased to see that she was beginning to respect him. "Don't you ever threaten me again," he told her in a deadly tone. |
| 1937 |
And when he did, a fearful people would clamor for a new leader. Justice would finally be done. Hannis Arc yanked the knife from the desk, the now slack hand still impaled on the blade. As he held it out toward the woman by the door, she stepped to the desk. "Dispose of this, would you?" As she reached for the knife, he abruptly drew it back. "No, I have a better idea." He gestured with it. "Place it in that display case, there, for visitors to see." The woman in red leather flashed a grim smile. "Of course, Lord Arc." Richard yawned. He looked up from the complexities of translating the symbolic elements he was working on to see Zedd coming back into the library. Through the high windows above, the first blush of dawn revealed a clear sky. The strange spring storm had broken, but it seemed that it had merely been the harbinger of bigger problems. It was clear to Richard that there was trouble about, but what ever the core of the trouble might be, it was hidden from him. He was getting that familiar, uneasy feeling that he was in the dark about what was really going on. All of it, from the boy down in the market to the storm, to the strange deaths, to the variety of strange prophecies, to the machine buried for so long that had suddenly come to life, was too much to be a coincidence. Things that seemed to be a coincidence always made him edgy. He was worried the most about the machine they had discovered, worried that it was somehow at the heart of it all. The translations of the metal strips were only confirming his suspicions. |
| 1938 |
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. 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. |
| 1939 |
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. |
| 1940 |
The instant he touched the machine the ground rumbled with the thunder of the sudden power of all the heavy pieces of machinery inside abruptly thrown into motion. With a dull thud that shook the ground more sharply, light shot up from the center of the machine, like lightning in the darkness, projecting the symbol up onto the ceiling, the same symbol they had seen the last time, the same symbol that was on the side of the machine and in the book Regula. As massive gears inside turned, so did the emblem written in lines of light on the ceiling. Zedd and Nathan raced to the machine and bent to look down through the window. Zedd pointed, speaking over the roar and clatter of all the huge gears turning against one another. "Look down there. It's moving a strip of metal through the mechanism, just as Richard described it." Nicci placed the flats of her hands on the machine, apparently trying to sense its power. She immediately jumped back with a gasp of pain. "It's shielded," she said, comforting the ache in her elbows and shoulders. Zedd gingerly touched one hand to the machine, to test it, but more lightly than Nicci had done. He, too, had to yank his hand back. He shook it as if he had touched fire. "Bags, she's right." "There," Nathan said, pointing down at the window, careful not to touch the machine. "The strip of metal is moving through that bright beam of light." Everyone waited silently as Nathan and Zedd peered down through the window. Richard could see lines of light, parts of emblems, play across their features. |
| 1941 |
She turned her back to him as she led to him into her lavish apartment, glancing back over her shoulder to make sure he was following behind. Couches upholstered in silvery material were strewn with colorful pillows. Low tables and a desk in a small sitting area to the side were veneered in matching burl walnut. Double doors at the far end of the room led to a terrace that overlooked some of the outer rim of the plateau and the now dark Azrith Plain out beyond. The accommodations, softly lit by candles, were fit for a queen, yet as luxurious as her quarters were, they were no better than his. He chose not to say so. "Come, sit, Abbot," she said as she glided across an expanse of ornate carpeting on her way to one of the couches. "Please, call me Ludwig." She glanced back over her shoulder again, again giving him the demure smile. "Ludwig, then." Her auburn hair was done up on top of her head, held in place with a jeweled comb. Ringlets hung down in front of each ear. It left her flawlessly smooth, graceful neck bare. She sat on the front edge of the cushions. The slit up the front of her long dress came up just high enough that he could see her bare knees pressed together as she leaned forward to lift a wine decanter. "What was it you wished to see me about, Queen Orneta?" She patted the couch beside her in invitation for him to sit. "If I'm to call you Ludwig, then you must call me Orneta." He sat, making sure there was a respectful space between them. "As you wish, Orneta." She poured two glasses of the red wine and handed him one. |
| 1942 |
"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. |
| 1943 |
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. He was the one the guards had let in. |
| 1944 |
That left no princes at the People's Palace, even if it left some of the representatives confused and curious, and a few resentful of the secrecy. It couldn't be helped. The consequences of the last omen given by the machine were not something Richard wanted to risk. The resulting questions at times tried Richard and Kahlan's patience, but they had dealt with it as best they could and everything had eventually quieted down as people moved on to other issues of more immediate concern to them. When Kahlan reached the bottom of the ladder leading down below the Garden of Life she had to hurry to keep up with Nathan. He had long legs and he wasn't slowing to wait for her. The bright moonlight coming through the hole in the garden floor lit the dome in the room directly under it, the room over the tomb where the machine rested. Kahlan hadn't brought a torch, so she was thankful for the moonlight as she scrambled over large blocks of stone that had once been the supporting structure for the floor of the garden and had not yet been removed. Richard, keeping watch over the machine in case it awakened again, had heard them coming and was at the bottom of the spiral stairs, waiting. Nicci joined him to see what was so urgent. Kahlan saw Richard use two fingers of his left hand to lift the sword at his hip a few inches and then let it drop back, checking that it was clear in its scabbard. It was an old habit that had always served him well. "What is it?" he asked when the prophet reached the bottom of the spiral stairs. |
| 1945 |
Kahlan couldn't imagine if the two prophecies were connected or not. "Lord Rahl! Lord Rahl!" It was Cara, screaming down from above. She raced down the spiral stairs three at time until she could duck low enough to see them. "Lord Rahl, Benjamin sent me. You need to come to the representatives' apartments at once. Hurry." Kahlan followed close on Richard's heels as they ran past clusters of people gathered in the halls, everyone from the night cleaning staff to representatives who were staying in the nearby apartments. Plush carpets laid over the white marble floors cushioned their footfalls and muted the jangle of armor. Kahlan kept her eye on snatches of red leather out ahead of Richard as Cara led them through the maze of halls. She took them around corners and down the ornately paneled hallways among the luxurious guest quarters where the representatives were staying. A number of the emissaries and officials stood among soldiers in the network of corridors along the way. They shouted questions as Richard and Kahlan ran past. Neither of them answered or slowed. They could hardly tell people what was going on when they didn't know themselves. As they rounded an intersection, Kahlan saw guards up ahead blocking people from going any farther up the hall. When they saw Richard coming, the guards pushed people aside to make way for him. With all the men of the First File looking grim and implacable, the people appeared to be generally doing what the guards asked of them. Kahlan saw Queen Orneta working her way to the front of the observers crowded into the corridor. |
| 1946 |
The queen looked as concerned and confused as everyone else. Beyond the guards keeping people back were hundreds of men of the First File packed into the broad corridor. All the soldiers wore armor of some sort, either leather, chain mail, or polished breastplates, depending on the unit they belonged to and their duties. All of them were heavily armed and all of them had one kind of weapon or another in hand. Companies of men with spears tipped in razor-sharp broad-points all stepped back against the wall, spears all vertical, as Cara, Richard, Kahlan, Nathan, and Nicci raced past. The spearmen could close ranks in a hallway and present a nearly impenetrable wall of sharpened steel if need be. Men with swords stepped aside as well but also kept a wary watch up ahead. Kahlan wondered what could have drawn this many men. When they finally broke through the crowds of people and the massed soldiers, they came to a relatively open section of the corridor where even most of the soldiers were kept back. General Meiffert and a handful of men waited up ahead outside ornately carved double doors of one of the apartments. While Kahlan knew that these corridors were where high-ranking guests and representatives had their quarters, she didn't know who occupied this one. As they all came to a stop outside the doors, Richard glanced down at the floor. Kahlan followed his gaze and saw thin trickles of blood running out from under the doors, across exposed white marble, and then finally under the rug. |
| 1947 |
"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. Catherine's entire middle was ripped open. She had nearly been torn in two. Her left thigh muscle, stripped off the bone, lay flopped out to the side. Long gouges, also appearing to be left by fangs, raked down the length of the bone. Viscera lay strewn out across the floor. It looked like a pack of wolves had been at her, their fangs ripping her open and pulling her apart. What was left hardly looked human. Kahlan's knees felt weak. She could not help thinking about the woman who had murdered her children, the woman Kahlan had taken with her power. |
| 1948 |
Still, violent death was not something new to her. This death, though, more than most, seemed to have rocked her to her core. Maybe it was because Catherine had been pregnant. Maybe seeing an unborn child that had been ripped from his mother and killed was what had gotten to her. Maybe it was because it reminded her of her own unborn child that had died because she had been savagely attacked when she had been pregnant. She held back a cry of anguish, and did her best to hold back tears, though she thought that in the absence of her husband to look after her remains as a final act of devotion, Catherine deserved at least tears. Outside the room, Richard paused. The carpet over the white marble floor, where the blood ran under it, was rumpled up a bit, probably from the boots and effort of the men with the ram as they had tried to breach the door. For some reason, Richard stood frozen, staring at it. Puzzled, Kahlan looked more closely, and then she, too, saw something, some kind of mark, back in the dark fold under the carpet. With the tip of his sword, Richard flipped the carpet back. There, under where the carpet had lain, stained with Queen Catherine's blood, with the unborn prince's blood, was a symbol that had been scratched into the polished marble. The symbol was circular. It looked to Kahlan something like the designs drawn in the book Regula. "Do you know what it says?" she asked. Some of the color had left Richard's face. "It says, 'Watch them.'" "'Watch them'?" Nicci asked, looking down at the symbol. |
| 1949 |
If you see anything on four legs running loose, kill it and inspect the contents of its stomach." When the general clapped a fist to his heart, Richard started off at a trot. Momentarily surprised, Kahlan and the others quickly followed behind as he ran off down the corridor. Guards backed out of the way when they saw him coming. When they reached the people being kept back, the guards moved everyone out of the way so Richard and the rest of them could get through. Representatives snatched at his sleeve, wanting to know what had happened and if there was danger about. Richard told them that there was, and that the soldiers would see to it, but he didn't slow to explain or to discuss it. Once finally away from the guest quarters, they went through doors that were always guarded, and into the private sections of the palace, the sections where the public wasn't allowed. It was a relief to be away from people, to be away from their questions, from the accusations in their eyes. The small group took a shortcut through rooms that were lit only by a few lamps, and small libraries where the only light came from open doors at either end, or from low fires in a hearth. "Where are we going?" Kahlan asked as she trotted along beside Richard once they were out into a wider corridor. "To the last bedroom we stayed in." Kahlan thought about it for a moment as she listened to their footfalls echoing back from the distance. "You mean the bedroom where we ... saw something?" "That's right." Before long they reached a familiar hallway. |
| 1950 |
Richard didn't relish the idea of again setting foot in that place. It would be far from simple and could easily create more problems than it solved. He tried to push the troubling thoughts aside. He wanted to be up in the Garden of Life with Kahlan, to be in her arms, to have her tell him that everything would be all right ... to tell him again that it wasn't his fault. He knew that it wasn't, but that still didn't make him feel any better. It couldn't undo what had happened. He had to find out what was going on and put a stop to it. He knew that the representatives would be in an uproar, not only over the murder of a queen while she was a guest of the palace, but even more so over King Philippe denouncing Richard as the ruler of the D'Haran Empire. It was a declaration driven by raw emotion, but even so, Richard knew that there were a number of people who would side with King Philippe and follow his lead. 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. |
| 1951 |
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. |
| 1952 |
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. 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. |
| 1953 |
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. |
| 1954 |
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. 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. |
| 1955 |
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. |
| 1956 |
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. 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. |
| 1957 |
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. |
| 1958 |
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. He slipped off the horse's head gear and slapped its flanks. The horse whinnied and bolted back the way they had come. Henrik spotted the big black dog that led the pack as it broke through the trees. It didn't go after the horse. It was coming after him. He turned and without further delay headed down over the edge of the rocks. While the trail was too steep and jagged for the horse, with crags and splits in the sloping rock face, loose scree in some spots, and rugged outcroppings in others, he knew that the hounds would have no trouble following him down through the narrow defiles. He knew, too, that they could probably scramble and bound down the rock faster than he could. He had no time to waste. Henrik didn't question where he was going, or why; for that matter, he didn't even think about it — he simply started down. |
| 1959 |
Since that first day when he had scratched the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor and then dashed away, he hadn't questioned what he was doing or the need to run. Crossing the Azrith Plain, he hadn't even questioned where he was running. He had simply run from the hounds. He had instinctively known that if he'd taken another course they would have had him. In his mind, there had been only one possible direction to run and he had taken it. By the time he made it to the bottom his face was covered with sweat and grime. He'd looked back a few times and had seen the short-haired brown dog that was usually near the front of the pack. Both the black and the brown dogs, the two leaders, were powerfully built, with thick necks. Long frothy drool swung from their jowls as they snarled when they caught sight of him. That quick glimpse was all Henrik needed to bound down the trail as fast as he could, slipping downward between rock outcroppings at a reckless rate. In places he had simply let himself slide down the steep funnel of dirt and scree because it was faster. He finally stumbled off the precipitous path onto a flatter area among vines and tangles of brush. The air was oppressive. The place stank with rot. Out under the deep shade of thick growth he could see trees with broad, flaring bottoms that seemed made to help them balance in the soft, boggy areas. Here and there cedars grew on patches of slightly higher ground, but the broad-bottomed trees were the only ones standing in the stagnant stretches of foul-smelling water. |
| 1960 |
Their gnarled branches, extending outward not far above the water, held veils of moss. In places the moss dragged in the water. In other places, twisting vines hung down all the way to the water from somewhere in the canopy above, providing support for smaller vines with deep violet flowers. Lizards darted up the wispy trailers of plants as he came close. Snakes, lounging over branches, tongues flicking the air, watched him pass. Things under the water swam lazily away, leaving a wake of quiet ripples that lapped at the soggy trail. The deeper into the wooded bog he went, the thicker the tangle of shoots and vines grew as they closed in from the sides, making the way in a tunnel through the snarl of woody growth. 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. |
| 1961 |
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. |
| 1962 |
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. 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. |
| 1963 |
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. |
| 1964 |
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. All too often he saw shadows move through the depths. The candles become more plentiful as the stick bridge went farther in through the dark tangle of undergrowth. The candles were simply placed in crooks in the tangle of branches and sticks. The occasional railings after a time developed into structures curving up from each side that seemed to be protecting the bridge from the encroachment of the thick undergrowth, or maybe from what lurked in the water. The walls, thick at the bottoms, thinner as they went higher, in places topped over the bridge with encircling branches that almost felt like claws closing in from overhead. The candles grew so plentiful that at times it almost felt like passing between walls of fire. Henrik supposed that the bridge didn't catch fire and burn down because it was so wet and slimy. Slick green moss and dark mold covered most of the woven mass of roots, twigs, branches, and vines. |
| 1965 |
The floor broadened and walls grew thicker as well. In places the walls curved inward to close completely together overhead, as if it were growing that way naturally and of its own accord. Before long the walls that had gradually grown from their beginnings as railings of sorts became a solid, integrated part of the structure joined all the way around overhead so that what had been a path, then an elevated walkway, then a bridge, had evolved into a tunnel. 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. |
| 1966 |
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. |
| 1967 |
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. 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. |
| 1968 |
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. |
| 1969 |
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. 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. |
| 1970 |
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. |
| 1971 |
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. Not one speck. The top layers were the darkest, with those under them lighter, the ones under those lighter yet, and so on, as if they continually absorbed down into his flesh and new ones were constantly being added over the top of those already there. They had an endless, bottomless depth to them, a tangled complexity that was dizzying, as if the symbols were continually seething up from somewhere dark. Looking down through the ever-deeper levels of designs gave the man's skin a three-dimensional appearance. Because the layers made it hard to tell just where the surface of the skin actually was in all the floating elements, it gave Bishop Arc a shadowy, somewhat hazy, somewhat ghostly appearance. Henrik felt sure that if the man wished it, he could vanish at will into the fog of floating symbols. Because of the way the underlayers were lighter than the ones on top of them, each symbol, regardless of how many layers down it was, was distinct and recognizable. The symbols were all different sizes, and from what Henrik could tell, endlessly different designs. Almost all of them seemed to be a collection of smaller symbols assembled into larger, circular elements. The bishop's hands and what Henrik could see of his wrists sticking out from his black coat were completely covered with the designs. |
| 1972 |
Even so, lying as it was over layers of hundreds of other random emblems, it was evident that it was merely a part of a much larger purpose. 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. |
| 1973 |
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. |
| 1974 |
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. |
| 1975 |
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. 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. |
| 1976 |
"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. |
| 1977 |
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. 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. |
| 1978 |
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. 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. |
| 1979 |
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. 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. |
| 1980 |
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. |
| 1981 |
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. |
| 1982 |
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. 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. |
| 1983 |
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. |
| 1984 |
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. 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. |
| 1985 |
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. "Mother Confessor, are you all right?" It was Cara. It felt good to have someone there. It was comforting not to be alone. "I don't know," she managed. Suddenly, Richard was there as well. "What's wrong?" Rolling trembles racked her whole body. Between that and panting for air, "Sick" was all she could manage to get out. "I heard you scream from all the way down in the room with the machine," Richard said as he placed a reassuring hand on her back. She ripped off a thick fistful of grass and wiped her mouth with it, threw it down and then did it again with a clean handful. She hadn't realized that she had screamed in her sleep. The waves of nausea had quieted, allowing her to catch her breath. Her head still throbbed, though. |
| 1986 |
In fact, the arm was the least of it. It was the sudden explosion of pain in her head that had brought her awake, made her feel sick, and had made her throw up. It was that sharp stab of pain between her temples that had overwhelmed her with nausea. She didn't really think the scratches had anything to do with her headache. She'd had headaches a few times in her life that were so strong they had made her throw up. Richard used to have them, too. He said that he'd inherited them from his mother. She thought that this one had to be something like that. Just a bad headache. That thought actually made her feel better. She glanced down again at the angry red scratches on her arm. It concerned her to see that the wounds that had healed had not only returned but looked to have gotten worse. The arm felt a bit stiff, too, from being swollen. Kahlan shivered in pain again. A wave of icy cold swept over her. The pain in her head bore down on her with crushing weight. And then, as Richard leaned over and held her close against him, she began to feel the sweet softness of his gift seeping into her. Warm relief flooded through her cold, stiff muscles. He had used his gift to heal her in the past, so she recognized the feeling of being touched by his magic. That was what he was doing now — healing her with his magic. Richard's gift worked in a unique way, and usually only ignited within him if there was great need. His empathy for her, his love for her, his need for her to be safe, had brought it forth now to heal her. |
| 1987 |
Time became meaningless in his warm embrace, in the flow of magic coursing into her. She felt his comforting, reassuring, loving presence in every fiber of her being. But as much as she wanted his help, she also didn't want to allow him to do it. She knew that in the process of healing he would have to take on her pain. He first had to lift her agony away and take it into himself, so that his gift could then flow into her to heal what was wrong. Kahlan didn't want Richard to take in this pain. As much as she wanted to be rid of the hurt, she didn't want him to suffer it. Fighting him, though, proved useless. The strength of his gift overwhelmed her. She had no choice but to let go of her resistance. The feeling was like letting herself fall backward into an unknown, bottomless abyss. It was frightening, and at the same time a relief, a relief in the sense of letting go, of letting someone else fight for her, fight against the pain on her behalf, of being able to stand aside as the battle raged. She didn't know how long she had been lost in that distant place of pain with Richard there with her, joined with her, but she did know that when she opened her eyes and the world came back in around her, she was still in his arms. Despite what she expected, the pain was still there. It was just as strong, just as oppressive as before. She recognized that same pain in Richard's eyes as well. He had taken it into himself, but oddly enough, it had not at the same time drawn it away from her. |
| 1988 |
They would have to worry about the prophecy later. Besides, trying to figure out what prophecy meant was a fool's game. For now, he wanted to get Kahlan in a comfortable place without the machine nearby where Zedd could put an herb poultice on her arm to draw out the infection while she got some much-needed rest. He had hopes that this place would be safe, since it was not one of the bedchambers belonging to the Lord Rahl. In those bedrooms something had been watching them. Of course, he had later discovered that there were symbols scratched in the floors outside those rooms, but still, even without the symbols, he didn't trust the official bedrooms for the Lord Rahl. They seemed too easy a target for forces he didn't yet understand. Until he knew how those symbols got scratched on floors in well-guarded halls, as well as what their ultimate purpose was, he didn't trust that those rooms would be safe. This room was not one of the Lord Rahl's bedrooms, but instead it was a secluded guest bedroom. The wing had no guests at the moment, so it wouldn't have anyone near, and no one would really know that they were there. It was several floors above ground level, so no one could come in from outside. It wasn't big, but Richard didn't care about that. He simply wanted a safe place to sleep. Before he could enter the room, Cara pushed in ahead of him. Benjamin already had men of the First File stationed at every intersection of halls throughout the whole wing of the palace. Rikka stood not far down the hallway to one side, Berdine on the other. |
| 1989 |
He carefully laid the comforter over Kahlan and gently tucked it up around her neck. When Kahlan closed her eyes, he went to the drapes at the double doors in the back of the room and took off the fabric swag holding them back. At the dressing table, he took down the only two mirrors in the room. He placed the identical mirrors on the floor, standing face-to-face, and used the swag to tie them tightly together. When he was finished, he leaned the paired mirror up against the padded seat. He sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over, hugging Kahlan to warm her up and let her know that she wasn't alone. Her eyes were closed and she didn't say anything, but she let out a little sigh to let him know that she appreciated it. Richard woke up when he heard a knock. It was Zedd, back with the poultice. Richard handed him the small canister of aum that he had retrieved from his pack. As Zedd used a wooden slat to mix the aum Richard gave him into the slightly yellowish concoction he had in a small bowl, Richard turned down the blanket and laid Kahlan's arm out on top of it for him. Kahlan sleepily opened her eyes, frowning, to see what he was doing, why he was disturbing her sleep. When Zedd slathered the poultice on her red, swollen arm, she winced in pain. "It will be better soon," he told her. Kahlan nodded as she closed her eyes. Zedd wrapped bandaging around it as Richard held her wrist up for him. "This will not only help draw out the infection, it will draw out the pain as well. |
| 1990 |
Most didn't want to believe it was true, but they could not argue the evidence. "Who but the Creator, who has created all things, would know the future?" Ludwig asked. "Since the Creator knows all things, how would He warn us, His creation, of dangers He sees for us in the future?" Eyes big, everyone leaned in a little. "Prophecy," Ludwig said in answer to his own question. "The Creator uses omens to warn us of danger only He can see. Clearly, the Nameless One would want to suppress that means of salvation, would he not? Would he not want to possess the most trusted among us to conceal those prophecies from us and thus to insure that we are more easily delivered into the arms of death itself?" The implication was clear. Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor, in hiding prophecy from these leaders, could only be working toward the Keeper's ends. It was a sobering conclusion, and one that these people did not take lightly, one that, even for the duchess, transcended mere gossip. Orneta thought that maybe they needed a little demonstration of proper resolve to help them make up their minds as to what to do about it. She loosely grasped Ludwig's arm. "Would you please send word to Bishop Arc that we could use his guidance where matters of prophecy are concerned? Let him know that there are some of us who view prophecy, as does he, as vital to our future, and we would like to be kept informed of what prophecy says. Let him know, also, that in return for his help, I, for one, have decided that he will have my loyalty, and the loyalty of my people." The whispering started in again. |
| 1991 |
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. |
| 1992 |
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. The Mord-Sith's blond hair was done in the traditional single braid hanging straight down between her broad shoulders to the small of her back. It was impeccably plaited. Not a single hair seemed to be out of place. |
| 1993 |
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. |
| 1994 |
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? When Orneta glanced back over her shoulder, she saw that the Mord-Sith was right behind her, wearing a grim expression. But past the Mord-Sith, Orneta could see that the entire group she'd been meeting with was following them up the hall. |
| 1995 |
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. |
| 1996 |
"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. "Everyone was terrified. We all heard the screams. After you came out, and before they all scattered, they caught a glimpse of the body. I especially liked the glare you gave them as you wiped the blood off your boots on the carpeting. Nice touch." Still, she did not meet his gaze. "Thank you, Abbot Dreier." "Did Orneta suffer a great deal?" "Yes, Abbot, just as you instructed, I made sure that she suffered greatly." "Good. |
| 1997 |
But for now, like the other Mord-Sith, she belonged to Hannis Arc. One day, though, if Ludwig had his way, Lord Arc would not be around to make demands of her. One day, Abbot Dreier would be Lord Dreier and he would make his own demands. It would require great care, though. Hannis Arc was a profoundly dangerous man. His occult abilities were not to be taken lightly. But he was also a man obsessed. Ludwig pulled himself back from his pleasant contemplation. He had to be on his way. All the representatives who had lost faith in Lord Rahl and sworn allegiance to Lord Arc instead were leaving, going back to various parts of the empire. He wanted to be among them. Richard was shocked and angry. He could hardly believe the bloody scene with Queen Orneta lying lifeless in the middle of it. This was the second queen murdered in the palace since Cara's wedding. Both killings had been horrific. He was even more upset to know that a Mord-Sith had done this. Which one had done it he didn't know. Why she had done it he could not imagine. "Lord Rahl," Cara said, "I admit to not liking the woman, to not trusting her, but I would not have done this." Even Cara knew better than to test his patience right then. "I didn't say you did." "Then say something," she said. He looked back at her. "I want to know who did this." She pressed her lips tightly together and nodded. She wanted to say that a Mord-Sith would not have acted on her own like this, not anymore. But she could not refute the evidence or the witnesses. |
| 1998 |
It then went quiet and still again. Zedd is staying down with it in case it issues any more omens. He asked me to bring the strip it inscribed to you. On the way, when I checked on Kahlan, like I told you, I asked Berdine to translate the strip for me." Richard was getting seriously suspicious. "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. |
| 1999 |
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. |
| 2000 |
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. 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. |
| 2001 |
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. |
| 2002 |
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. Almost at the same time, she realized that she didn't usually wear it in the palace. She kept it in her pack, now. As she fought the dog, she looked up in the dimly lit room to see where the door was, hoping that she could try to make an escape. That was when she saw the glowing eyes of three more dogs near the door, heads down, ears back, teeth bared, drool hanging from their mouths. They were big, powerfully built, dark, short-haired dogs with thick, muscular necks. She couldn't imagine how in the world they had managed to get into the room. As she frantically looked around for a way to escape, she saw that one of the double doors at the back of the room was partially opened. It was all she could do to keep the animal wrapped in the blanket under her at bay. Its hind legs kicked as it snapped and tried to bite. She had stuffed a wad of blanket in its mouth. The confusing fight was keeping the other dogs from joining in, at least for the moment. She knew that at any second they would attack. As she looked up again, checking on where the three were, she saw one of them take a step closer. She also saw her backpack not far to the right, near the foot of the bed. Her knife was in her pack. There was no way she could hope to get through a door guarded by the three snarling hounds. Her only chance was to get her knife so she would at least have a fighting chance to defend herself. |
| 2003 |
Without pausing to consider the wisdom of it, she threw a leg over the squirming dog trapped in the blanket and stretched to the right for her pack. She just managed to catch the strap with her fingers. As the lead dog of the three bounded toward her, she swung her pack with all her might. It knocked the dog from its feet and sent it sliding across the floor. Without missing a beat, she sprang to her feet, kicked the dog in the blanket as hard as she could in the ribs, and bolted for the open door at the back of the room. Out of nowhere from the darkness at the sides of the room, other big dogs lunged out at her, just missing her. Kahlan gasped in fright and dove through the open door out to the small balcony. The railing caught her in the middle, driving the wind out of her. She was lucky it did, because she could see that it was quite a drop to the ground, a drop that would have killed her. She spun to shut the door but the dogs were already through. She saw that up against the side of the building, not far from her balcony, there was another balcony. There were several feet of space separating them, and quite a drop between them. There was no time to consider it, and no other option. She put a foot up onto the top of the railing and used it to boost herself across the space toward the other balcony. Teeth snapped closed, just missing her ankle. She landed on the top of the fat railing on the second balcony, but slipped and fell sprawling on the floor. Looking up, she saw that on the far side of the balcony there was a narrow stairway down to the ground. |
| 2004 |
She looked back and saw the dogs stand with their front paws on the balcony of her room, looking to see where she had gone. 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. |
| 2005 |
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. |
| 2006 |
"Well," he finally said, "you may have a point. I have to admit, I haven't liked this thing from the moment it was discovered. As Nicci says, it was buried for a reason. No one goes to this much trouble to bury and hide the existence of something unless it was causing big problems." "Then let's stop wasting time," Richard said. "We need to put a stop to it now." Resigned, Zedd motioned for them to step back, ushering Richard and Nicci into the protected landing of the spiral stairs where Cara stood guard. Without further fuss, Zedd turned back to the machine and ignited wizard's fire between his outstretched palms. The room lit with rolling ribbons of orange and yellow light that played off the stone walls. Zedd's white hair was made orange in the light coming from the sinister inferno, which he turned over and over between his hands, working it into a lethal servant. The boiling ball of fire built in intensity, hissing and popping with purpose. Satisfied that it was compacted the way he wanted it, Zedd finally flung the glowing sphere of liquid fire toward the square metal box sitting in the center of the room. The tempestuous inferno cast flickering light across the floor, walls, and ceiling as it flew, all the while hissing with deadly menace. Richard felt the powerful concussion in his chest as the sphere of liquid flame exploded against the unyielding machine. The liquid wizard's fire, one of the most feared substances in existence because it burned so violently, engulfed the machine, crackling as it poured down the sides, burning with white-hot intensity. |
| 2007 |
Nicci, standing beside Richard, tested the surface with her fingers. "Well, Additive Magic obviously didn't work. Maybe it's time to try something a little more destructive." She motioned for the rest of them to move back. Richard shepherded Zedd and Cara back into the protection of the stairwell. He knew what Nicci was going to do. He could see the aura of power crackling around the sorceress. It gave her a kind of glowing, otherworldly appearance, almost as if she were only there in spirit. The sorceress lifted her hands out toward the machine. The sizzling aura around her flickered with intensity. He knew that others couldn't see it, but he had always sensed the field of power around certain people. No aura he had ever seen was as strong as Nicci's. Black lightning — Subtractive Magic — ignited in the room with a thunderous thump. Dust lifted from the floor. The proximity spheres instantly went dark. The black lightning twisted together with a blindingly bright sudden discharge of Additive Magic. The rope of Subtractive Magic was so dark that it was like looking through a crack in the world of life into the underworld itself. In a way, it was. The inky black lightning connected with the machine. The end played over the surface, flickering up and down it. The rest of it, between Nicci and the machine, whipped wildly about the room as it crackled and popped where the two flows of power, impossible darkness and blinding light, touched. The air of the room smelled like burning sulfur and vibrated with the power of the conflicting forces fighting each other. |
| 2008 |
Richard was taken by surprise. He hadn't expected the blade to stop the way it had. His muscles ached with the expected release that didn't happen. The sword's magic worked by intent. If the one wielding the sword believed that what he was attacking was the enemy, or evil, the sword would cut through it, cut through anything. If the Seeker believed the person evil, there was no defense against the blade, not even a wall of steel. But if the Seeker, somewhere deep inside, in the darkest corner of his mind, believed that the adversary was innocent, then the blade would not cut through even paper to harm them. Richard stood with the sword tightly gripped in both fists, the blade motionless in midair just above the top of the machine, a trail of sweat running down his temple. And then the machine began to wake. Shafts slowly started turning, gears engaged, and yet more of the mechanism began to gather momentum. Well isn't that something," Zedd said as he stepped out of the stairwell. "Seems that none of us has it in us to destroy the machine." Richard wondered why. He staggered back from the machine as its internal mechanism gradually came to life, the internal parts progressively gathering momentum. He stood silently staring at the waking machine, stunned that the sword had halted so abruptly. He hadn't expected it to. He'd had the same experience before, when somewhere deep down inside he'd had a glimmer of doubt. This time, as well, some part of him didn't think the machine was at fault for the things that had happened. |
| 2009 |
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. |
| 2010 |
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. 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. |
| 2011 |
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. |
| 2012 |
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. She didn't know what direction they were headed, but she knew that she was somewhere out on the vast Azrith Plain. Even as she fought off the wild pack of dogs, Kahlan knew that she was losing the battle. As she kicked one off, two more would jump up and get their front legs hooked over the side. |
| 2013 |
With some she was able to dislodge their legs. With others, when they got too far in, she had to kick at their heads to knock them off. But she knew that she was losing. With the dogs continually making running jumps at the wagon, she knew that it was only a matter of time until they made it up and in. Once that happened, they would take her down. Kahlan felt a sudden pang of pain for how much she missed Richard. He would't know what had happened. He wouldn't know where she was. He would never know what had happened to her. She had a vision of her own corpse, looking like Queen Catherine after she had been ripped apart by animals. Kahlan swallowed back the grief of never being able to see Richard again. She hoped he never found her body. She didn't want him to find her like that. She spun and kicked the ribs of a dog that had clawed itself halfway into the wagon. As it yelped and fell back, she caught sight of a horse at the end of a long rope tied to the side of the wagon. It was trailing far behind, off in the darkness, staying out to the side as far as it could to keep away from the dogs. Kahlan had no time to consider. It was her only hope to get help or get away. She snatched up her pack and then kicked a dog off the sideboards near the rope. As she leaned over to grab hold of the rope, a dog lunged out of the darkness, snapping, trying to grab her arm. She pulled back in the nick of time and its teeth caught only air. As the dog fell and rolled after missing her, she quickly bent and seized the rope. |
| 2014 |
The horse, frightened by the savage dogs, snorted and resisted Kahlan's efforts to bring it in closer. She put a boot against the sideboard and put her weight into pulling harder. Finally, she managed to drag the skittish animal in a bit closer. It danced and darted, trying to stay away. The dogs didn't seem to care about the horse. They were fixated on Kahlan. The horse didn't know that, though. When she had dragged the horse in as close as she could get it, Kahlan turned and saw two dogs bound up in quick succession and make it in over the other side of the wagon. They fell, their legs splaying out to the sides. As the dogs scrambled to get to their feet, Kahlan hoisted her pack over one shoulder, untied the rope from a wooden cleat, and, holding the rope for balance, sprang up onto the sideboard. She held on to the rope for dear life as she tried to balance on the sideboard of the bouncing wagon. The horse tried to run. As it did, it moved ahead just close enough. Kahlan leaped for all she was worth over the snarling, snapping dogs. She landed sideways, sprawled over the horse's back. Giddy with relief not to have fallen into the fangs of the dogs, Kahlan grabbed the horse's mane with both fists and swung one leg up and over the frightened animal's back. Finally mounted, she thumped the horse's ribs with her heels. She wanted to go ahead to the wagon's driver to get help, but the hounds raced in and blocked the way. Others leaped up, trying to grab her feet and legs and drag her down. |
| 2015 |
He didn't want to turn the lamp up and risk waking her. He was exhausted. It was going to be morning soon. He needed to get some sleep. He wished he hadn't wasted so much time with the machine. Not wanting to disturb Kahlan, Richard thought that maybe he would sleep in a chair. She needed a good rest in order to recover from her fever. He was thankful that his grandfather had put a poultice on her arm to help draw out the infection. His own scratch from the boy down in the market had long ago healed. He had thought that Kahlan's had as well. It was more than a little worrisome the way it had returned so suddenly, especially after Zedd had healed it with his gift. On his way to the chair, Richard's feet caught up a blanket lying in the middle of the floor. He thought that Kahlan, in a fevered sleep, must have thrown off her cover. He picked it up by the edge and held it up to lay it back over her. In the dim light from the lantern, on the way to the bed, Richard paused. Something was wrong. Even if Kahlan had thrown the blanket off in her sleep, it seemed unlikely she could have thrown it that far. The first thing that instantaneously flashed through his mind was the machine's warning that hounds would take her from him. 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. |
| 2016 |
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. |
| 2017 |
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. |
| 2018 |
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. |
| 2019 |
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. 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. |
| 2020 |
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. |
| 2021 |
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. 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. |
| 2022 |
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. |
| 2023 |
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. 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. |
| 2024 |
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. |
| 2025 |
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. 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. |
| 2026 |
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... |
| 2027 |
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. Soon, she would be somewhere safe and she could at last rest. At the thought of being safe, she could hardly keep her eyes open any longer. As she went deeper into the structure, she shed the panic that had kept her going at maximum effort for so long. Now, as the panic faded, she could feel her strength ebbing as well. She hadn't eaten much, and she hadn't slept much for days on end. Now, along with the fever, it was all catching up with her. She was having trouble walking, but she knew that she had to keep going. She wasn't safe, yet, until she could get help. It became an effort to keep her eyes open, to put one foot in front of the other. Her feet felt so heavy she could hardly lift them. Before long, it was all she could do to shuffle ahead. Kahlan passed through rooms with hundreds of strips of cloth hanging from the ceiling, each holding an object of some sort, everything from coins to the remains of small animals. She was mystified by the purpose of the place and had to hold her breath against the stench as she hurried past. Beyond, she went through a network of passageways and rooms, her way ahead lit by candles. Kahlan paused. She thought she had heard a whisper calling to her. "Mother Confessor..." That time she was sure she'd heard it. She looked around the room and peered down the dark corridors to the side, but she didn't see anyone. |
| 2028 |
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. |
| 2029 |
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. Kahlan's power worked on everyone. |
| 2030 |
Everyone who was human, anyway. It didn't work on certain creatures of magic, on beings that had elements of magic, or were different. Nicci's words that they had no defense against the Hedge Maid rang through Kahlan's thoughts. This could only be the Hedge Maid. Knobby fingers started clawing at her clothes again. Kahlan had nothing left with which to resist, to fight. She was sick and weak, and on top of that she had just used the last bit of strength she had left in order to unleash her power. Gnarled hands pulled at her clothes. The bony creatures growled through open mouths filled with fangs. Kahlan was upright only because of all the hands on her, pulling at her, pressing her this way and that, tearing and yanking. As they went about their work of pulling her clothes off, the Hedge Maid turned to her jars and bottles, opening various containers, adding things to the smoldering fire in the broad, flat bowl in the center of the room. When sparks flew up, she used a slender stick to draw symbols in trays of ash to the side. Kahlan felt tears running down her face, dripping from her jaw, as she was dragged back by the glowing figures. The demonic, bony creatures hissed and snarled at her. Kahlan felt as if she were being conveyed by evil spirits to the torturous depths of the underworld. She thought that maybe she was. With the help of the snarling creatures, hands all around pulled strands of thorny vines up around her. They wrapped them around her wrists and ankles, anchoring the ends in the wall behind her, tying them in tight. |
| 2031 |
Kahlan was only barely conscious as laughing, cavorting figures danced around with strands of vine and thorny branches, adding them to the weave of the wall. She cried out in pain when she realized that some of the creatures around her were biting her abdomen. She could feel the needle-sharp teeth sinking into her flesh. She cried out in despair and grief, too, over the thought of never seeing Richard again. She watched in horror as the glowing figures pressed bowls against her belly, collecting the blood as it rolled down her. Kahlan could do nothing to stop the madness. Every movement she made only worked the thorns deeper into her flesh. The glowing figures, and the bony creatures dancing around the room, all laughed and chattered in the strange squealing clicking sounds. Others, who had already collected bowls with blood running from Kahlan's bite wounds, took the blood to the Hedge Maid. The woman with the leather strips sewing her lips shut drank greedily. Creatures danced around her, arms flailing in the air, feet high-stepping. The room pulsed with the drum-like sound of their bony feet slapping the woven floor. Kahlan's blood ran down the small woman's chin, dripping off in thick strings. Cockroaches emerged from the floor where the blood dropped to feast along with the Hedge Maid. Kahlan felt merciful darkness stealing her away from the insanity raging all around her. Richard stood staring through the soft haze of drizzle at the tunnel-shaped entrance of tightly woven sticks and branches. |
| 2032 |
He thought that it looked just a little too welcoming. The whole, carefully maintained trail through the swamp of Kharga Trace was too easy, too simple, too enticing the way it encouraged visitors in. He wondered where the spider was. He knew that Kahlan had gone this way. He knew because he had tracked her there. He'd seen where she'd fallen from her horse and slid down the steep slope. He'd seen her footprints, staggering in a crooked line, wandering off the trail into boggy mud and then back again. He could tell by the tracks that she was hardly able to stand anymore. He could see by the halting, unsteady prints she left just how sick and exhausted she was. He would have caught up with her long before had his horse not been killed. It had happened after dark when a huge wild boar had charged out of the brush. It wasn't rutting season but wild boars could be aggressive anytime, and this one certainly had been, charging in at the horse when they surprised it. As the horse went down, the boar's razor-sharp tusks slashed the horse's belly open. Richard ran the boar through with his sword, but it was too late. After killing the boar, he had no choice but to put the horse out of its misery. There had been nothing he could do for the poor animal. With his horse dead, much of the last part of the race to catch Kahlan had been on foot. He had contemplated leaving her trail and going off to find another horse, but without knowing the area, he feared that even if he could manage to find a horse, the search would cost him too much time, so he had pressed on. |
| 2033 |
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. |
| 2034 |
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. 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. |
| 2035 |
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. 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. |
| 2036 |
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. 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. |
| 2037 |
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. |
| 2038 |
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. 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. |
| 2039 |
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. |
| 2040 |
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. |
| 2041 |
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. |
| 2042 |
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. |
| 2043 |
Charles Egremont had known very well who she was. But Egremont no longer mattered — he lived in a different world, now, with his po-faced respectable wife, and his respectable children, and his respectable seat in Parliament. And Sybil hadn't been dollymopping, with Egremont. Not exactly, anyway. A matter of degree ... She could tell that Mick was pleased at the lie she'd told him. It had flattered him. Mick opened a gleaming cigar-case, extracted a cheroot, and lit it in the oily flare of a repeating match, filling the room with the candied smell of cherry tobacco. "So now you feel a bit shy with me, do you?" he said at last. "Well, I prefer it that way. What I know, that gives me a bit more grip on you, don't it, than mere tin." His eyes narrowed. "It's what a cove knows that counts, ain't it, Sybil? More than land or money, more than birth. Information. Very flash." Sybil felt a moment of hatred for him, for his ease and confidence. Pure resentment, sharp and primal, but she crushed her feelings down. The hatred wavered, losing its purity, turning to shame. She did hate him — but only because he truly knew her. He knew how far Sybil Gerard had fallen, that she had been an educated girl, with airs and graces, as good as any gentry girl, once. From the days of her father's fame, from her girlhood, Sybil could remember Mick Radley's like. She knew the kind of boy that he had been. Ragged angry factory-boys, penny-a-score, who would crowd her father after his torchlight speeches, and do whatever he commanded. |
| 2044 |
Rip up railroad tracks, kick the boiler-plugs out of spinning jennies, lay policemen's helmets by his feet. She and her father had fled from town to town, often by night, living in cellars, attics, anonymous rooms-to-let, hiding from the Rad police and the daggers of other conspirators. And sometimes, when his own wild speeches had filled him with a burning elation, her father would embrace her and soberly promise her the world. She would live like gentry in a green and quiet England, when King Steam was wrecked. When Byron and his Industrial Radicals were utterly destroyed ... But a hempen rope had choked her father into silence. The Radicals ruled on and on, moving from triumph to triumph, shuffling the world like a deck of cards. And now Mick Radley was up in the world, and Sybil Gerard was down. She stood there silently, wrapped in Mick's coat. Paris. The promise tempted her, and when she let herself believe him, there was a thrill behind it like lightning. She forced herself to think about leaving her life in London. It was a bad, a low, a sordid life, she knew, but not entirely desperate. She still had things to lose. Her rented room in Whitechapel, and dear Toby, her cat. There was Mrs. Winterhalter, who arranged meetings between fast girls and political gentlemen. Mrs. Winterhalter was a bawd, but ladylike and steady, and her sort was difficult to find. And she would lose her two steady gentlemen, Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Kingsley, who each saw her twice a month. Steady tin, that was, and kept her from the street. |
| 2045 |
It took pluck. Look neither right nor left — just grab, lift her skirt, stuff and rustle. Then stand quite straight, with a psalm-singing look, like a gentry girl. The floorman had lost interest in her; he was watching a fat man fingering watered-silk braces. Sybil checked her skirt quickly. No bulge showed. A young spotty-faced clerk, with inkstained thumbs, set Mick's number into a counter-top credit-machine. Zip, click, a pull on the ebony-handled lever, and it was done. He gave Mick his printed purchase-slip and did the parcel up in string and crisp green paper. Aaron & Son would never miss a cashmere shawl. Perhaps their account-engines would, when they tallied up, but the loss couldn't hurt them; their shopping-palace was too big and too rich. All those Greek columns, chandeliers of Irish crystal, a million mirrors — room after gilded room, stuffed with rubber riding boots and French-milled soap, walking-sticks, umbrellas, cutlery, locked glass cases crammed with silver-plate and ivory brooches and lovely wind-up golden music-boxes ... And this was only one of a dozen in a chain. But for all of that, she knew, Aaron's wasn't truly smart, not a gentry place. But couldn't you just do anything with money in England, if you were clever? Someday Mr. Aaron, a whiskery old merchant Jew from Whitechapel, would have a lordship, with a steam-gurney waiting at the curb and his own coat of arms on the coachwork. The Rad Parliament wouldn't care that Mr. Aaron was no Christian. They'd given Charles Darwin a lordship, and he said that Adam and Eve were monkeys. |
| 2046 |
London women crowded there in scores, wicker baskets on their arms. Servants, cooks, respectable wives with men at home. A red-faced squinting butcher lurched in front of Sybil with a double handful of blue meat. "Hallo, pretty missus. Buy your gentleman my nice kidneys for pie!" Sybil ducked her head and walked around him. Parked barrows crowded the curb, where costers stood bellowing, their velveteen coats set off with buttons of brass or pearl. Each had his numbered badge, though fully half the numbers were slang, Mick claimed, as slang as the costers' weights and measures. There were blankets and baskets spread on neatly chalked squares on the paving, and Mick was telling her of ways the costers had to plump out shrunken fruit, and weave dead eels in with live. She smiled at the pleasure he seemed to take in knowing such things, while hawkers yelped about their brooms and soap and candles, and a scowling organ-grinder cranked, two-handed, at his symphony machine, filling the street with a fast springy racket of bells, piano-wire, and steel. Mick stopped beside a wooden trestle-table, kept by a squint-eyed widow in bombazine, the stump of a clay pipe protruding from her thin lips. Arrayed before her were numerous vials of some viscous-looking substance Sybil took to be a patent medicine, for each was pasted with a blue slip of paper bearing the blurred image of a savage red Indian. "And what would this be, mother?" Mick inquired, tapping one red-waxed cork with a gloved finger. |
| 2047 |
"Thank you," she said, startled but glad, for she'd been thinking of stopping, hiding, fetching out the stolen shawl, but Mick's eyes had been on her every moment. She hadn't seen him, but he'd been watching; that was the way he was. She wouldn't forget again. They walked, together and apart, all down Somerset, and then through the vast market of Petticoat Lane, lit as evening drew on with a host of lights, a glow of gas-mantles, the white glare of carbide, filthy grease-lamps, tallow dips twinkling among the foodstuffs proffered from the stalls. The hubbub was deafening here, but she delighted Mick by gulling three more ballad-sellers. In a great bright Whitechapel gin-palace, with glittering gold-papered walls flaring with fishtail gas-jets, Sybil excused herself and found a ladies' convenience. There, safe within a reeking stall, she fetched the shawl out. So soft it was, and such a lovely violet color too, one of the strange new dyes clever people made from coal. She folded the shawl neatly, and stuffed it through the top of her corset, so it rested safe. Then out to join her keeper again, finding him seated at a table. He'd bought her a noggin of honey gin. She sat beside him. "You did well, girl," he said, and slid the little glass toward her. The place was full of Crimean soldiers on furlough, Irishmen, with street-drabs hanging on them, growing red-nosed and screechy on gin. No barmaids here, but big bruiser bully-rock bartenders, in white aprons, with mill-knocker clubs behind the bar. |
| 2048 |
"Better," he remarked. He aimed the blazing limelight carefully into the stage-mirror, then began to adjust its cranks. Sybil looked around, blinking. It was dank and ratty and cramped under the Garrick stage, the sort of place a dog or a pauper might die in, with torn and yellowed bills underfoot, for naughty farces like That Rascal Jack and Scamps of London. A pair of ladies' unmentionables were wadded in a corner. From her brief unhappy days as a stage-singer, she had some idea how they might have gotten there. She let her gaze follow steam-pipes and taut wires to the gleam of the Babbage Engine, a small one, a kinotrope model, no taller than Sybil herself. Unlike everything else in the Garrick, the Engine looked in very good repair, mounted on four mahogany blocks. The floor and ceiling above and beneath it had been carefully scoured and whitewashed. Steam-calculators were delicate things, temperamental, so she'd heard; better not to own one than not cherish it. In the stray glare from Mick's limelight, dozens of knobbed brass columns gleamed, set top and bottom into solid sockets bored through polished plates, with shining levers, ratchets, a thousand steel gears cut bright and fine. It smelled of linseed oil. Looking at it, this close, this long, made Sybil feel quite odd. Hungry almost, or greedy in a queer way, the way she might feel about ... a fine lovely horse, say. She wanted — not to own it exactly, but possess it somehow ... Mick took her elbow suddenly, from behind. |
| 2049 |
Sybil wondered if it mightn't contain a telescope, for she'd seen boxes of this sort in the window of a firm of Oxford Street instrument-makers. Mick handled it with a caution that was very nearly comical, like some Papist called upon to move the dust of a dead Pope. Caught up in a sudden mood of childlike anticipation, she forgot the man called Corny and Mick's worrying talk about playing opposite him at the Garrick. There was something of the magician about Mick now, as he placed the gleaming rosewood case on the tablecloth. She almost expected him to furl back his cuffs: nothing here, you see, nothing here. His thumbs swung tiny brass hooks from a pair of miniature eyelets. He paused for effect. Sybil found that she was holding her breath. Had he brought a gift for her? Some token of her new status? Something to secretly mark her as his 'prentice adventuress? Mick lifted the rosewood lid, with its sharp brass corners. It was filled with playing cards. Stuffed end to end with them, a score of decks at the least. Sybil's heart fell. "You've seen nothing like this before," he said. "I can assure you of that." Mick pinched out the card nearest his right hand and displayed it for her. No, not a playing card, though near enough in size. It was made of some strange milky substance that was neither paper nor glass, very thin and glossy. Mick flexed it lightly between thumb and forefinger. It bent easily, but sprang rigid again as he released it. It was perforated with perhaps three dozen tightly spaced rows of circular holes, holes no larger than those in a good pearl button. |
| 2050 |
" He drew on his cigar, his fingers kneading her there, and she heard him puff out a great satisfied cloud of cherry smoke. But he mustn't have felt like doing it again, not then, because she was soon asleep and dreaming, dreaming of Texas, a Texas of rolling downs, contented sheep, the windows of gray manors glinting in late-afternoon sunlight. Sybil sat in an aisle seat, third row back in the Garrick, thinking unhappily that General Sam Houston, late of Texas, was not drawing much of a crowd. People were filtering in as the five-man orchestra squeaked and sawed and honked. A family party was settling in the row before her, two boys, in bluejackets and trousers, with laid-down shirt-collars, a little girl in a shawl and a braided frock, then two more little girls, ushered in by their governess, a thin-looking sort with a hooked nose and watery eyes, sniffling into her handkerchief. Then the oldest boy, sauntering in, a sneer on his face. Then papa with dress-coat and cane and whiskers, and fat mama with long ringlets and a big nasty hat and three gold rings on her plump soft fingers. Finally all were seated, amid a shuffling of coats and shawls and a munching of candied orange-peel, quite patently well-behaved and expecting improvement. Clean and soaped and prosperous, in their snug machine-made clothes. A clerky fellow with spectacles took the next seat to Sybil's, an inch-wide blue strip showing at his hairline, where he'd shaved his forehead to suggest intellect. He was reading Mick's program and sucking an acidulated lemon-drop. |
| 2051 |
And past him a trio of officers, on furlough from the Crimea, looking very pleased with themselves, come to hear about an old-fashioned war in Texas, fought the old-fashioned way. There were other soldiers speckled through the crowd, bright in their red coats, the respectable sort, who didn't go for drabs and gin, but would take the Queen's pay, and learn gunnery arithmetic, and come back to work in the railroads and shipyards, and better themselves. The place was full of bettering-blokes, really: shopkeepers and store-clerks and druggists, with their tidy wives and broods. In her father's day, such people, Whitechapel people, had been angry and lean and shabby, with sticks in their hands, and dirks in their belts. But times had changed under the Rads, and now even Whitechapel had its tight-laced scrubfaced women and its cakey clock-watching men, who read the 'Dictionary of Useful Knowledge' and the 'Journal of Moral Improvement', and looked to get ahead. Then the gas-lights guttered in their copper rings, and the orchestra swung into a flat rendition of "Come to the Bower." With a huff, the limelight flared, the curtain drew back before the kinotrope screen, the music covering the clicking of kino-bits spinning themselves into place. Broken frills and furbelows grew like black frost on the edges of the screen. They framed tall letters, in a fancy alphabet of sharp-edged Engine-Gothic, black against white: Editions Panoptique Presents And below the kinotrope, Houston entered stage-left, a bulky, shabby figure, limping toward the podium at the center of the stage. |
| 2052 |
He was drowned in dimness for the moment, below the raw and focused glare of Mick's limelight. Sybil watched him closely, curious about him, wary — her first glimpse of Mick's employer. She'd seen enough American refugees in London to have ideas about them. The Unionists dressed much like normal Britons, if they had the money for it, while Confederates tended to dress rather gaudy and flash, but peculiar, not quite proper; to judge by Houston, the Texians were an even queerer and madder lot. He was a big man, red-faced and beefy, over six feet tall in his heavy boots, his broad shoulders draped in a long coarse-woven blanket rather like a mantelet, but barbarically striped. Red and black and umber, it swept the Garrick's stage like a tragedian's toga. He had a thick mahogany cane in his right hand, and he swung it lightly now, as if he didn't need it, but his legs shook, Sybil saw, and the gold fringe trembled on the fancy seams of his trousers. Now he mounted to the darkened podium, wiped his nose, sipped at a glass of something that plainly wasn't water. Above his head the kinotrope shuffled into a colored image, the lion of Great Britain and a sort of long-horned bull. The animals fraternized beneath small crossed banners, the Union Jack and the single-starred flag of Texas, both bright in red and white and blue. Houston was adjusting something behind his podium; a small stage-mirror, Sybil guessed, so he could check the kinotrope behind him as he spoke, and not lose his place. |
| 2053 |
Now a five-pointed star appeared slowly amidst the funereal black of the screen, as Houston narrated his lingering escape from the grave. One of the jammed kino-bits had popped loose again, but another had jammed in the meantime, on the lower right. Sybil stifled a yawn. The star brightened slowly as Houston spoke about his entry into American politics, presenting as his motive the desire to help his persecuted pet Cherokees. This was exotic enough, Sybil thought, but at its heart lay the same snicky humbugging politicians always talked, and the audience was growing restive. They would have liked more fighting, or perhaps more poetic talk about life with the Cherokees. Instead, Houston had settled into a litany of his election to some rude equivalent of Parliament, various obscure posts in provincial government, and all the while the star grew slowly, its edges branching elaborately, becoming the emblem of the government of Tennessee. Sybil's eyelids grew heavy, fluttered, while the General blustered on. Quite suddenly, Houston's tone changed, becoming lingering, sentimental, a honeyed lilt creeping into his drawl. He was talking about a woman. Sybil sat up straighter, listening. Houston had been elected Governor, it seemed, and had gotten himself some tin, and been cheery about it. And he'd found himself a sweetheart, some Tennessee gentry-girl, and married her. But on the kino's screen, fingers of darkness crept in snake-like from the edges. They menaced the State Seal. Governor and Mrs. |
| 2054 |
His confession seemed bold and manly, for he himself had brought the matter up: the divorce scandal and the secret letter from Mrs. Houston. He wouldn't stop talking about it, but neither would he tell them the secret; he'd pricked the curiosity of his audience — and Sybil herself was simply dying to know. She chided herself, for being so cakey, for it was likely something stupid and simple, not half so deep and mysterious as he feigned. Likely his gentry-girl wasn't half so angelic as she'd looked. Likely she'd had her maiden virtue stolen from her by some good-looking Tennessee beau-trap, long before Raven Houston came along. Men had hard rules for their brides, if never for themselves. Likely Houston had brought it all on himself. Perhaps he had beastly vile ideas about married life, come from living with savages. Or perhaps he'd milled his wife about with his fists — for Sybil fancied he'd be a right bully-rock, in his cups. The kino came alive with harpies, meant to symbolize Houston's slanderers, those who'd smeared his precious honor with the ink of a gutter press. Nasty crooky-back things, crowding the screen in devilish black and red. As the screen whirred steadily, they twitched their cloven hooves. Never had she seen the like, some Manchester punch-card artist having gotten the gin-horrors sure ... Now Houston was ranting about challenges and honor, by which he meant dueling, Americans being most famous duelists, who loved guns and shot each other at the drop of a hat ... |
| 2055 |
The words half-lost, useless, she raised the back of her wrist to her damp forehead. Mick had given her no more lines, so she let the strength seep from her legs and fell back, eyes fluttering, half-sinking into her seat. "Give Miss Jones air!" Houston commanded, an excited bellow. "The lady is overcome!" Sybil watched through half-closed lids as blurred figures haltingly gathered round her. Dark evening-jackets, a rustle of crinoline, gardenia perfume, and a masculine smell of tobacco — a man seized her wrist, and felt for a pulse there with pinching fingers. A woman fanned Sybil's face, clucking to herself. Oh heaven, Sybil thought, shrinking, the fat mama from the row before her, with that intolerable oily look of a good woman doing her moral duty. A little thrill of shame and disgust shot through her. For a moment she felt genuinely weak, sinking with a buttery ease into the warmth of their concern, a half-dozen busybodies muttering around her in a shared pretense of competence, while Houston thundered on above them, hoarse with indignation. Sybil allowed them to get her to her feet. Houston hesitated, seeing it, and there was a light gallant scatter of applause for her. She felt pale, unworthy; she smiled wanly, and shook her head, and wished she were invisible. She leaned her head on the padded shoulder of the man who had taken her pulse. "Sir, if I could go, please," she whispered. Her rescuer nodded alertly, a little fellow with clever blue eyes. His long greying hair was parted in the middle. |
| 2056 |
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. |
| 2057 |
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. 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. |
| 2058 |
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. |
| 2059 |
I am Well. You are welcome to any Cloathes I leave behind, and please do take Care of dear Toby and give him Herring. Yrs. sincerely, Sybil.' It made her feel queer, to write it, and when she looked down at Toby she felt sad, and false, to leave him. With this thought came thoughts of Radley. She was struck by a sudden and utter conviction of his falsehood. "He will come," she whispered fiercely. She put the lamp and the folded note on the narrow mantel. On the mantel lay a flat tin, brightly lithographed with the name of a Strand tobacconist. She knew that it contained Turkish cigarettes. One of Hetty's younger gentlemen, a medical student, had once urged her to take up the habit. Sybil generally avoided medical students. They prided themselves on studied beastliness. But now, in the grip of a powerful nervous impulse, she opened the tin, drew out one of the crisp paper cylinders, and inhaled its fierce perfume. A Mr. Stanley, a barrister, well-known among the flash mob, had smoked cigarettes incessantly. Stanley, during his acquaintanceship with Sybil, had frequently remarked that a cigarette was the thing to steel a gambler's nerve. Fetching the lucifers, Sybil placed the cigarette between her lips, as she'd seen Stanley do, struck a lucifer, and remembered to let the bulk of the sulphur burn away before applying the flame to the cigarette's tip. She drew hesitantly on the lit cigarette and was rewarded with an acrid portion of vile smoke that set her wracking like a consumptive. |
| 2060 |
Eyes watering, she nearly flung the thing away. She stood before the grate and forced herself to continue, drawing periodically on the cigarette and flicking pale delicate ash onto the coals with the gesture Stanley had used. It was barely tolerable, she decided, and where was the desired effect? She felt abruptly ill, her stomach churning with nausea, her hands gone cold as ice. Coughing explosively, she dropped the cigarette into the coals, where it burst into flame and was swiftly consumed. She became painfully aware of the ticking of the clock. Big Ben began to sound midnight. Where was Mick? She woke in darkness, filled with a fear she couldn't name. Then she remembered Mick. The lamp had gone out. The coals were dead. Scrambling to her feet, she fetched the box of lucifers, then felt her way into her room, where the tinny ticking of the clock guided her to the commode. When she struck a match, the face of the clock seemed to swim in the sulphur glare. It was half past one. Had he come when she was sleeping, knocked, had no answer, and gone away without her? No, not Mick. He'd have found a way in, if he wanted her. Had he gulled her, then, for the cakey girl she surely was, to trust his promises? A queer sort of calm swept over her, a cruel clarity. She remembered the departure date on the steamship ticket. He wouldn't sail from Dover till late tomorrow, and it seemed unlikely that he and General Houston would be departing London, after an important lecture, in the dead of night. |
| 2061 |
She'd go to Grand's, then, and find Mick, confront him, and plead, threaten blackmail, exposure, whatever proved necessary. What tin she had was in her muff. There was a cab-stand in Minories, by Goodman's Yard. She would go there now, and rouse a cabman to take her to Piccadilly. Toby cried once, piteously, as she closed the door behind her. She scraped her shin cruelly in the dark, on Cairns' chained bicycle. She was half the way down Minories to Goodman's Yard when she remembered her portmanteau, but there was no turning back. Grand's night doorman was heavy-set, cold-eyed, chin-whiskered, stiff in one leg, and very certainly wouldn't allow Sybil into his hotel, not if he could help it. She'd twigged him from a block away, climbing down from her cabriolet — a big gold-braided bugaboo, lurking on the hotel's marble steps under great dolphin-wreathed lamps. She knew her doormen well enough; they played a major role in her life. It was one thing to enter Grand's on Dandy Mick's arm, by daylight. But to walk in boldly from the midnight streets, as an unescorted woman, was another matter. Only whores did that, and the doorman would not let whores in. But she might think of a likely story to gull him, perhaps, if she thought of a very good lie, and if he were stupid, or careless, or weary. Or she might try to bribe him, though she had little enough of tin left, after the cab. And she was dressed proper, not in the flash clothes of a dollymop. She might, at a pinch, distract him. |
| 2062 |
He paused beside a reading-rack hung with neatly ironed newspapers. He bent down, coolly re-tying his shoes, straightened, and she saw the glint of metal in his hand. Not bothering even to catch her eye, he tucked the key behind a cut-velvet cushion on the chaise-longue. Then he stood briskly, straightened his tie, brushed at his sleeves, and strode straight off into the smoking-room. 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. |
| 2063 |
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. |
| 2064 |
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. |
| 2065 |
His hands inventoried the contents of his various pockets. Keys, cigar-case, billfold, card-case. The thick staghorn handle of his multi-bladed Sheffield knife. Field notebook — most precious item of all. A handkerchief, a pencil-stub, a few loose shillings. A practical man. Dr. Mallory knew that every sporting-crowd has its thieves, none of them dressed to match their station. Anyone here might be a thief. It is a fact; it is a risk. A woman blundered into Mallory's path, and his hobnails tore the flounce of her skirt. Turning, wincing, she tugged herself loose with a squeak of crinoline as Mallory touched his cap, and marched quickly on. Some farmer's wife, a clumsy, great red-cheeked creature, civilized and English as a dairy-cow. Mallory's eye was still accustomed to a wilder breed, the small brown wolf-women of the Cheyenne, with their greased black braids and beaded leather leggings. The hoop-skirts in the crowd around him seemed some aberrant stunt of evolution; the daughters of Albion had got a regular scaffolding under there now, all steel and whalebone. Bison; that was it. American bison, just that very hoopskirt silhouette, when the big rifle took them down; they had a way of falling, in the tall grass, suddenly legless, a furry hillock of meat. The great Wyoming herds would stand quite still for death, merely twitching their ears in puzzlement at the distant report of the rifle. Now Mallory threaded his way among this other herd, astonished that mere fashion could carry its mysterious impetus so far. |
| 2066 |
The machine was headed east, toward the Derby garages; he fell in behind it, letting it clear his path, easily keeping pace and smiling as draymen struggled with frightened horses. 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. |
| 2067 |
Mallory worked his way through an eager crowd of gawkers and steam-hobbyists. Two coppers stopped him brusquely at the gate. He displayed his citizen's number-card and his engraved invitation from the Brotherhood of Vapor Mechanics. Making careful note of his number, the policemen checked it against a thick notebook crammed with fan-fold. At length they pointed out the location of his hosts, cautioning him not to wander. As a further precaution, the Brotherhood had appointed their own look-out. The man squatted on a folding-stool outside the tarpaulin, squinting villainously and clutching a long iron spanner. Mallory proffered his invitation. The guard stuck his head past a narrow flap in the tarpaulin, shouted, "Your brother's here, Tom," and ushered Mallory through. Daylight vanished in the stink of grease, metal-shavings, and coal-dust. Four Vapor Mechanics, in striped hats and leather aprons, were checking a blueprint by the harsh glare of a carbide lamp; beyond them, a queer shape threw off highlights from curves of enameled tin. He took the thing for a boat, in the first instant of his surprise, its scarlet hull absurdly suspended between a pair of great wheels. Driving-wheels, he saw, stepping closer; the burnished piston-brasses vanished into smoothly flared openings in the insubstantial-looking shell or hull. Not a boat: it resembled a teardrop, rather, or a great tadpole. A third wheel, quite small and vaguely comical, was swivel-mounted at end of the long tapered tail. |
| 2068 |
The crowd kept them so; Mallory himself had witnessed the near lynching of a defaulting betting-man at Chester. He still recalled the grisly shout of "Welsher!" pitched like a cry of "Fire!" going up inside the railed enclosure, and the rush against a man in a black cap, who was buried down and savagely booted. Beneath the surface of the good-natured racing-throng lay an ancient ferocity. He'd discussed the incident with Lord Darwin, who'd likened the action to the mobbing of crows ... His thoughts turned to Darwin as he queued for the steam-racing wicket. Mallory had been an early and passionate supporter of the man, whom he regarded as one of the great minds of the age; but he'd come to suspect that the reclusive Lord, though clearly appreciating Mallory's support, considered him rather brash. When it came to matters of professional advancement, Darwin was of little use. Thomas Henry Huxley was the man for that, a great social theorist as well as an accomplished scientist and orator ... In the queue to Mallory's immediate right lounged a swell in subdued City finery, that day's number of Sporting Life tucked beneath an immaculate elbow. As Mallory watched, the man stepped to the wicket and placed a wager of one hundred pounds on a horse called Alexandra's Pride. "Ten pounds on the Zephyr, to win," Mallory told the betting-clerk at the steam-wicket, presenting a five-pound note and five singles. As the clerk methodically punched out the wager, Mallory studied the odds arrayed in kino-bits above and behind the glossy faux-marble of the papier-mache counter. |
| 2069 |
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. Mallory was stung into immediate action. He dashed to the side of the brougham and yanked open the lacquered door. "What is the meaning of this?" he shouted. "Go away," the tart suggested. "I saw you strike this lady. How dare you?" The brougham lurched back into motion, almost knocking Mallory from his feet. Mallory recovered swiftly, dashed forward, seized the gentlewoman's arm. "Stop at once!" The gentlewoman rose again to her feet. Beneath the black veil her rounded, gentle face was slack and dreamy. She tried to step free again, seeming unaware that the carriage was in motion. She could not get her balance. With a quite natural, ladylike gesture, she handed Mallory the long wooden box. Mallory stumbled, clutching the ungainly case with both hands. Shouts arose from the milling crowd, for the tout's careless driving had infuriated them. The carriage rattled to a halt again, the horses snorting and beginning to plunge. |
| 2070 |
He had a brief glimpse of the stiletto, fallen on the trampled turf: a viciously narrow double-edged blade, the handle of black gutta-percha. Then the man was upon him, bleeding from the mouth. There was no method whatever to the attack. Mallory assumed Shillingford's First Stance and had at the villain's head. Now the crowd, which had drawn back from the initial exchange and the flash of steel, closed around the two, the innermost ring consisting of working-men and the race-course types who preyed on them. They were a burly, hooting lot, delighted to see a bit of claret spilt in unexpected circumstances. When Mallory took his man fair upon the chin with one of his best, they cheered, caught the fellow as he fell in their midst, and hurled him back, square into the next blow. The dandy went down, the salmon silk of his cravat dashed with blood. "I'll destroy you!" he said from the ground. One of his teeth — the eye-tooth by the look of it — had been bloodily shattered. "Look out!" someone shouted. Mallory turned at the cry. The red-haired woman stood behind him, her eyes demonic, something glinting in her hand — it seemed to be a glass vial, odd as that was. Her eyes darted downward — but Mallory stepped prudently between her and the long wooden box. There followed a moment's tense stand-off, while the tart seemed to weigh her alternatives — then she rushed to the side of the stricken tout. "I'll destroy you utterly!" the tout repeated through bloodied lips. The woman helped him to his feet. |
| 2071 |
Mallory's leg smarted sharply, and his trouser was sticky with blood. He was dizzier than he felt he should have been from such a minor wound; something about the woman's queer speech and odder demeanor had turned his head. Or perhaps — the dark thought occurred to him — there had been some sort of venom coating the tout's stiletto. He was sorry now that he had not snatched up the stiletto for a later analysis. Perhaps the mad-woman too had been somehow narcotized; likely he had foiled some dark plot of abduction ... Below them, the track had been cleared for the coming gurney-race. Five massive gurneys — and the tiny, bauble-like Zephyr — were taking their places. Mallory paused a moment, torn, contemplating the frail craft upon which his fortunes now so absurdly hinged. The woman took that moment to release his arm and hasten toward the white-washed walls of the Royal Box. Mallory, surprised, hurried after her, limping. She paused for a moment beside a pair of guards at the door — plain-clothes policemen, it seemed, very tall and fit. The woman brushed aside her veil, with a swift gesture of habit, and Mallory caught his first proper glimpse of her face. She was Ada Byron, the daughter of the Prime Minister. Lady Ada Byron, the Queen of Engines. She slipped through the door, beyond the guards, without so much as a glance behind her, or a single word of thanks. Mallory, lugging the rosewood box, hurried after her at once. "Wait!" he cried. "Your Ladyship!" "Just a moment, sir!" the larger policeman said, quite politely. |
| 2072 |
A roar of appreciation came from the crowd as the disabled steamer was hauled free by the laboring horses. "We'll see some proper sport now!" said the older man. Mallory, waiting tensely, found himself opening the rosewood box, his thumbs moving on the little brass catches as if by their own volition. The interior, lined with green baize, held a long stack of milky-white cards. He plucked one free from the middle of the stack. It was an Engine punch-card, cut to a French specialty-gauge, and made of some bafflingly smooth artificial material. One corner bore the handwritten annotation "#154," faint mauve ink. Mallory tucked the card carefully back into place and shut the box. A flag was waved and the gurneys were off. The Goliath and the French Vulcan lurched at once into the lead. The unaccustomed delay — the fatal delay. Mallory thought, his heart crushed within him — had cooled the tiny boiler of the Zephyr, leading no doubt to a vital loss of impetus. The Zephyr rolled in the wake of the greater machines, bumping half-comically in their deep-gouged tracks. It could not seem to get a proper traction. Mallory did not find himself surprised. He was full of fatal resignation. Vulcan and Goliath began to jostle for position at the first turn. The three other gurneys fell into file behind them. The Zephyr, quite absurdly, took the widest possible turn, far outside the tracks of the other craft. Master second-degree Henry Chesterton, at the wheel of the tiny craft, seemed to have gone quite mad. |
| 2073 |
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. |
| 2074 |
Mallory doffs his hat. Owen mutters something that might be a greeting. At the turn of the first broad landing. Mallory glimpses a group of students seated by the open windows, quietly debating, while twilight settles over the crouching plaster behemoths of the Palace's rock gardens. A breeze disturbs the long linen curtains. Mallory turned, right-face, left-face, before the wardrobe mirror. Unbuttoning the coat, he thrust his hands into the trouser-pockets, the better to display the waistcoat, which was woven in a dizzy mosaic of tiny blue-and-white squares. Ada Checkers, the tailors called them, the Lady having created the pattern by programming a Jacquard loom to weave pure algebra. The waistcoat carried off the whole business, he thought, though still it needed something, perhaps a cane. Flicking the hinge of his cigar-case, he offered a prime Havana to the gent in the mirror. A fine gesture but one couldn't carry a silver cigar-case about like a lady's muff; that was a faggot-above-a-load, surely. A sharp metallic tapping issued from the speaking-tube set into the wall beside the door. Crossing the room, he flicked open the rubber-lined brass lid. "Mallory here!" he bellowed, bending. The desk-clerk's voice rose up, a distant hollow-throated ghostliness. "Visitor for you. Dr. Mallory! Shall I send up his card?" "Yes, please!" Mallory, unaccustomed to closing the pneumatic grate, fumbled at the gilt-tin clasp. A cylinder of black gutta-percha shot from the tube as if fired from a gun, impacting solidly against the wall opposite. |
| 2075 |
Hastening to fetch it, Mallory noted without surprise that the papered plaster wall there was already peppered with dents. He unscrewed the lid of the cylinder and shook out its contents. Mr. Laurence Oliphant, on lavish cream-laid card-stock, Author and Journalist. A Piccadilly address and a telegram-number. A journalist of some pretensions, to judge by his card. Vaguely familiar name. Hadn't he read something by an Oliphant in Blackwood's? Turning the card over, he examined the Engine-stippled portrait of a pale-haired gentleman gone balding in front. Large brown spaniel eyes, a quizzical half-smile, a draggle of beard beneath the chin. With the beard and the baldness, Mr. Oliphant's narrow skull looked as long as an Iguanodon's. Mallory tucked the card into his notebook and glanced about his room. His bed was littered with the truck of his shopping: charge-slips, tissue-paper, glove-boxes, shoe-lasts. "Please tell Mr. Oliphant I'll meet him in the lobby!" Quickly filling the pockets of his new trousers, he let himself out, locking the door, and strode down the hall, past white walls of pocked and dotted fossil limestone framed by sweating columns of square dark marble, his new shoes squeaking with his every step. Mr. Oliphant, unexpectedly long of limb, and most neatly but sumptuously dressed, reclined against the front desk, his back to the clerk. With elbows resting against the marble counter-top, and feet crossed at the ankles, the journalist's ramshackle pose conveyed the gentleman sportsman's easy indolence. |
| 2076 |
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. It had a subterranean intensity, some fierce deep-buried chemistry of hot cinders and septic drippings, and now he realized that it must be pistoned out somehow, forced from the hot bowels of London by the charging trains below. Then he was being jostled up Jermyn Street, and in a moment he was smelling the heady wares of Paxton and Whitfield's cheese emporium. Hurrying across Duke Street, the stench forgotten, he paused below the wrought-iron lamps of the Cavendish Hotel, secured the fastenings of his valise, then crossed to his destination, the Museum of Practical Geology. |
| 2077 |
It was an imposing, sturdy, fortress-like edifice; Mallory thought it much like the mind of its Curator. He trotted up the steps into a welcome stony chill. Signing the leather-bound visitor's book with a flourish, he strode on, into the vast central hall, its walls lined with shining glass-fronted cabinets of rich mahogany. Light poured down from the great cupola of steel and glass, where a lone cleaner dangled now in his shackled harness, polishing one pane after another in what Mallory supposed would amount to an unending rota. On the Museum's ground floor were displayed the Vertebrata, along with various pertinent illustrations of the marvels of stratigraphical geology. Above, in a railed and pillared gallery, were a series of smaller cabinets containing the Invertebrata. The day's crowd was of gratifying size, with surprising numbers of women and children, including an entire uniformed class of scruffy, working-class school-boys from some Government academy. They studied the cabinets with grave attention, aided by red-jacketed guides. Mallory ducked through a tall, unmarked door and down a hall flanked by locked storerooms. At the hall's end, a single magisterial voice was audible through the closed door of the Curator's office. Mallory knocked, then listened, smiling, as the voice completed a particularly orotund rhetorical period. "Enter," rang the voice of the Curator. Mallory stepped inside as Thomas Henry Huxley rose to greet him. They shook hands. Huxley had been dictating to his secretary, a bespectacled young man with the look of an ambitious graduate student. |
| 2078 |
"The whole vast pile was riddled top to bottom with thick black telegraph-lines, as though individual streams of the Empire's information had bored through solid stone. A dense growth of wiring swooped down, from conduits and brackets, to telegraph-poles crowded thick as the rigging in a busy harbor. Mallory crossed the hot sticky tarmac of Horseferry Road, wary of the droppings of the pigeons clustered in the web-work of cable overhead. The Bureau's fortress-doors, framed by lotus-topped columns and Briticized bronze sphinxes, loomed some twenty feet in height. Smaller, work-a-day doors were set into their corners. Mallory, scowling, strode into cool dimness and the faint but pervasive odors of lye and linseed oil. The simmering London stew was behind him now, but the damned place had no windows. Egyptianate jets lit the darkness, their flames breezily guttering in fan-shaped reflectors of polished tin. He showed his citizen-card at the visitors' desk. The clerk — or perhaps he was some sort of policeman, for he wore a new-fangled Bureau uniform with an oddly military look — made careful note of Mallory's destination. He took an Engine-printed floor-plan of the building from beneath his counter, and marked out Mallory's twisting route in red ink. Mallory, still smarting from the morning's meeting with the Nominations Committee of the Geographical, thanked the man rather too brusquely. Somehow — he didn't know which devious strings had been pulled back-stage, but the plot was clear enough — Foulke had maneuvered his way onto the Geographical's Nominations Committee. |
| 2079 |
Foulke, whose aquatic theory of Brontosaurus had been spurned by Huxley's museum, had taken Mallory's arborivore hypothesis as a personal attack, with the result that an ordinarily pleasant formality had become yet another public trial for radical Catastrophism. Mallory had won his Fellowship, in the end, Oliphant having laid the ground too well for Foulke's last minute ambush to succeed, but the business still rankled. He sensed damage to his reputation. Dr. Edward Mallory — "Leviathan Mallory," as the penny-papers insisted on having it — had been made to seem fanatical, even petty. And this in front of dignified geographers of the first rank, men like Button of Mecca and Elliot of the Congo. Mallory followed his map, muttering to himself. The fortunes of scholarly warfare, Mallory thought, had never seemed to favor him as they did Thomas Huxley. Huxley's feuds with the powers-that-be had only distinguished him as a wizard of debate, while Mallory was reduced to trudging this gas-lit mausoleum, where he hoped to identify a despicable race-track pimp. Taking his first turn, he discovered a marble bas-relief depicting the Mosaic Plague of Frogs, which he had always numbered among his favorite Biblical tales. Pausing in admiration, he was very nearly run down by a steel push-cart, stacked to the gunwales with decks of punch-cards. "Gangway!" yelped the carter, in brass-buttoned serge and a messenger's billed cap. Mallory saw with astonishment that the man wore wheeled boots, stout lace-ups fitted with miniature axles and spokeless rounds of rubber. |
| 2080 |
The fellow shot headlong down the hall, expertly steering the heavy cart, and vanished around a corner. 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. |
| 2081 |
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. |
| 2082 |
"You should see Sandys. Or Hughes. Or Etty! And there's a clacker from Manchester whose work is quite splendid — Michael Radley. I saw a show of his here in London, last winter. A lecture tour, with an American." "Kinotrope lectures can be very improving." "Oh, the speaker was a crooked Yankee politician. If I had my way, they'd throw the speaker out entirely, and run silent pictures." Mallory let the conversation lapse. Tobias squirmed a bit, wanting to speak again and not quite daring to take that liberty, and then the bell rang. The boy was up like a shot, with a scratchy skid of his worthless shoes, and back with another set of fan-fold paper. "Red-heads," he said, and smiled sheepishly. Mallory grunted. He studied the women with close attention. They were fallen women, ruined women, with the sodden look of fall and ruin marked indelibly in the little black picture-bits of their printed femininity. Unlike the men, the female faces somehow leapt to life for Mallory. Here a round-faced Cockney creature, with a look more savage than a Cheyenne squaw. There a sweet-eyed Irish girl whose lantern jaw had surely embittered her life. There a street-walker with rat's-nest hair and the blear of gin. There, defiance; here, tight-lipped insolence; there, a frozen cajoling look from an Englishwoman with her nape pinched for too long in the daguerreotype's neck-brace. The eyes, with their calculated plea of injured innocence, held him with a shock of recognition. Mallory tapped the paper, looking up. |
| 2083 |
At that moment of utter misery, his beard rimed with frozen breath and his shovel-blistered fingers frost-bitten, Mallory had sworn a solemn oath that he would never again curse the summer heat. But never had he expected so vile a swelter in London. The night had passed without a breath of wind, and his bed had seemed a fetid stew. He'd slept atop the sheets, a drenched Turkish towel spread across his nakedness, and had risen every hour to dampen the towel again. Now the mattress was soaked and the whole room seemed as hot and close as a greenhouse. It stank of stale tobacco as well, for Mallory had smoked half-a-dozen of his fine Havanas over the criminal record of Florence Russell Bartlett, which dealt primarily with the murder of her husband, a prominent Liverpool cotton-merchant, in the spring of 1853. The modus operandi had been poisoning by arsenic, which Mrs. Bartlett had extracted from fly-paper and administered over a period of weeks in a patent medicine. Dr. Gove's Hydropathic Strengthener. Mallory, from his nights down Haymarket, knew that Dr. Cove's was in fact a patent aphrodisiac, but the file made no mention of this fact. The fatal illness in 1852 of Bartlett's mother, and of her husband's brother in 1851, were also recorded, their respective certificates of death citing perforated ulcer and cholera morbus. These purported illnesses featured symptoms very like those of arsenic poisoning. Never formally accused of these other deaths, Mrs. Bartlett had escaped custody, overpowering her jailer with a concealed derringer. |
| 2084 |
Soon there would be no one left at home to look after the old folks but little Ruthie. And when Ruth married — well, he would consider that matter in due time. Mallory rubbed his sweating beard. Madeline had had life harder than Ernestina, or Agatha, or Dorothy. She should have something fine for herself, Mallory resolved. A wedding-gift that would prove that she had put an end to her unhappy time. Mallory took the letter-basket to his room, piled the mail on the floor beside his overflowing bureau, and left the Palace, dropping the basket at the desk on his way out. A group of Quakers, men and women, stood on the pavement outside the Palace. They were droning another of their intolerable sermonizing ditties, something about a "railway to Heaven," by the sound of it. The song did not seem to have much to do with Evolution, or blasphemy, or fossils; but perhaps the sheer monotony of their bootless protests had exhausted even the Quakers. He hurried past them, ignoring their proffered pamphlets. It was hot, uncommon hot, beastly hot. There was not a ray of sun, but the air was mortally still and the high cloudy sky had a leaden, glowering look, as if it wanted to rain but had forgotten the trick of it. Mallory walked down Gloucester Road to the corner of Cromwell. There was a fine new equestrian statue of Cromwell at the intersection; Cromwell was a great favorite of the Rads. And there were 'buses too, six an hour, but they were all crammed to the gunwales. No one wanted to walk in weather like this. |
| 2085 |
One by one they passed his window in their sober majesty of cupolas and colonnades: Physics, Economics, Chemistry ... One might complain of some Radical innovations, Mallory mused, but there was no denying the sense and justice of fine headquarters for scholars engaged in the noblest work of mankind. 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. |
| 2086 |
Further, it seemed to Mallory that as a soldier, Wellington had displayed a very praiseworthy mastery of his craft. It was only as a civil politician, and a reactionary Prime Minister, that Wellington had so thoroughly misjudged the revolutionary tenor of the coming age of industry and science. He had paid for that lack of vision with his honor, his power, and his very life. And the England that Wellington had known and misruled, the England of Mallory's childhood, had slid through strikes, manifestos, and demonstrations, to riots, martial law, massacres, open class-warfare, and near-total anarchy. Only the Industrial Radical Party, with their boldly rational vision of a comprehensive new order, had saved England from the abyss. But even so, Mallory thought. Even so, there should be a monument somewhere ... The cabriolet rolled up Piccadilly, passing Down Street, Whitehorse Street, Half-Moon Street. Mallory thumbed through his address-book, and found Laurence Oliphant's carte-de-visite. Oliphant lived on Half-Moon Street. Mallory had half a mind to stop the cab and see if Oliphant were at home. If, unlike most posh courtiers, Oliphant perhaps rose before ten, he might have something like a bucket of ice in his household and perhaps a drop of something to open the pores. The thought of boldly interrupting Oliphant's day, and perhaps surprising him at some covert intrigue, was a pleasant one to Mallory. But first things first. Perhaps he would try Oliphant when his errand was done. |
| 2087 |
Mallory stopped the cab at the entrance to the Burlington Arcade. The gigantic iron-framed ziggurat of Fortnum & Mason lurked across the street, amid an array of jewelers and exclusive shops. The cabbie severely overcharged him, but Mallory took no notice, being in an expansive mood. It seemed the cabbies were imposing on everyone. Some small distance down Piccadilly, another man had leapt from his cab and was arguing, in a vulgar fashion, with his driver. Mallory had found nothing to equal shopping in its gratifying demonstration of the power of his new-found wealth. He had won his money through an act of half-mad bravado, but the secret of its origin was safe with him. London's credit-machines clicked for the vaporous profits of gambling as readily as they did for the widow's mite. So what was it to be? This giant iron vase, with octagonal base, with eight open-work screens hanging before its fluted pedestal, giving a singular lightness and elegance to the entire object? This carved box-wood bracket with sculpted canopy, the intended mounting of a Venetian-glass thermometer? This ebony salt-cellar enriched with columns and elaborate sunken panels, accompanied by a silver salt-spoon rich with trefoils, oak-leaves, a spiral-girded stem, and the monogram of one's choice? Within J. Walker & Co., a small but marvelously tasteful establishment amid the bay-windowed shops of the famed Arcade, Mallory discovered a gift that seemed to him perfectly apt. It was an eight-day clock which struck the quarters and hours on fine cathedral-tone bells. |
| 2088 |
The timepiece, which also displayed the date, the day of the week, and the phases of the moon, was an outstanding piece of British precision craftsmanship, though naturally the elegant clock-stand would claim more admiration from the mechanically undiscerning. The stand, of the finest lacquered papier-mache inlaid with turquoise-blue glass, was surmounted by a group of large gilt figures. These represented a young and decidedly attractive Britannia, very lightly robed, admiring the progress made by Time and Science in the civilization and happiness of the people of Britain. This laudable theme was additionally illustrated by a series of seven graven scenes, revolving weekly on hidden gear-work within the clock's base. The price was nothing less than fourteen guineas. It seemed that an item of this artistic rarity could not be denominated in simple pounds-shillings-and-pence. The crass pragmatic thought struck Mallory that the happy couple might be better served with a jingling handful of fourteen guineas. But the money would soon go, as money always did when one was young. A fine clock like this one might adorn one's home for generations. Mallory bought the clock with cash, refusing the offer of credit, with a year to pay. The clerk, a supercilious elderly man, sweating into a starched Regency collar, demonstrated the system of cork chocks that secured the gear-work from the exigencies of travel. The clock was provided with a latched and handled case, lined with form-fitting cork under burgundy velvet. |
| 2089 |
Mallory knew he could never wedge his prize into a crowded steam-bus. He would have to hire another cabriolet, and lash the clock-case to its roof. A bothersome proposition, London being haunted by the young thieves known as "dragsmen," monkey-like rascals who leapt with saw-tooth dirks onto the roofs of passing carriages, to cut the leather straps securing luggage. By the time the cab pulled to a stop, the thieves would have scampered scot-free into the depths of some evil rookery, passing their swag from hand to hand until the private contents of the victim's valise ended up in a dozen rag-and-bone shops. Mallory lugged his purchase through the far gate of the Burlington Arcade, where the constable on guard gave him a cheery salute. Outside, in Burlington Gardens, a young man in a dented hat and shabby, greasy coat, who had been sitting apparently much at his ease on the rim of a cement planter, rose suddenly to his feet. The shabby young man limped toward Mallory, his shoulders slumped in theatrical despair. He touched the brim of his hat, essayed a pathetic smile, and began to speak to Mallory, all in one breath. "I ask your pardon sir but if you would excuse the liberty of being so addressed in the public street by one who is almost reduced to rags though it has not always been so and by no fault of my own but through ill health in my family and many unmerited sufferings it would be a great obligation sir to know the time." The time? Could this man somehow know that Mallory had just purchased a large clock? |
| 2090 |
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. |
| 2091 |
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. 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. |
| 2092 |
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. |
| 2093 |
It was not a gun. It came out in his hand like a long oiled snake. A truncheon, with a braided leather handle and a thick black shaft of India-rubber, flattened at the end to a swollen tip like a shoehorn's. It had a spring-steel whippiness, as if it were built around a coil of iron. Mallory brandished the ugly device, which felt as if it could easily break bones. The Coughing Gent cowered before him. "Answer my questions!" A bolt of wet lightning blasted the back of Mallory's head. His senses almost left him; he felt himself fall, but caught himself against the filthy cobblestones with arms as numb and heavy as legs of mutton. A second blow fell, but glancingly, across his shoulder. He rolled back and snarled — a thick, barking sound, a cry he had never heard from his own throat. He kicked out at his attacker, somehow caught the man's shin. The man hopped back, cursing. Mallory had lost the truncheon. He lurched up, scrambling, into a giddy crouch. The second man was portly and small. He wore a round derby hat, mashed down almost to his eyebrows. He stood over the outstretched legs of the Coughing Gent and made a menacing slash at Mallory with a sausage-like leather cosh. Blood coursed down Mallory's neck as a wave of nauseated dizziness struck. He felt he might faint at any moment, and animal instinct told him that if he fell now, he would surely be beaten to death. He turned and fled the alley on wobbling legs. His head seemed to rattle and squeak, as if the sutures of his skull had ruptured. |
| 2094 |
Red mist swirled like oil before his eyes. He tottered a short way down the street, and rounded a corner, gasping. He propped himself against a wall, hands braced on his knees. A respectable man and woman passed him, and stared in vague distaste. With his nose running, his mouth clogged with nausea, he glared back at them, feebly defiant. He sensed somehow that if the bastards smelled his blood they would surely tear him down. Time passed. More Londoners strolled past him, with looks of indifference, curiosity, faint disapproval, thinking him drunk or sick. Mallory peered through his tears at the building across the street, at the neatly enameled cast-iron sign on its corner. Half-Moon Street. Half-Moon Street, where Oliphant lived. Mallory felt in his pocket for his field-book. It was still there, the familiar touch of its sturdy leather binding like a blessing to him. With trembling fingers, he found Oliphant's card. Once he had reached the address, at the far end of Half-Moon Street, he was no longer weaving on his feet. The ugly giddiness in his skull had changed to a painful throbbing. Oliphant lived in a Georgian mansion, divided for modern renters. The ground floor had an elaborate iron railing and a curtained bay-window commanding the peaceful vista of Green Park. It was altogether a pleasantly civilized place, entirely unsuitable for a man who was aching, stunned, and dripping blood. Mallory pounded fiercely with the elephant-headed knocker. A man-servant opened the door. |
| 2095 |
Clear the Palace pipes out, straight down to the main drains." Mallory adjusted his robe. It embarrassed him to appear with his feet and ankles bared before the charwomen. "Kelly, it won't do a dashed bit of good if you flush your pipes straight to Hell. This is metropolitan London, in a wretched hot summer. Even the Thames stinks." "Have to do something, sir," Kelly said. "Our guests are complaining, most vigorously. I can't say as I blame them, sir." The women funneled a jug of the decoction, which was bright purple, into the bowl of Mallory's water-closet. The deodorizer emitted a piercing ammoniacal reek, far more vile in its own way than the lingering taint in his rooms. They scrubbed wearily at the porcelain, sneezing, until Kelly pulled the cistern-chain with a magisterial gesture. Then they left, and Mallory dressed. He checked his notebook. The afternoon's schedule was crowded, but the morning had only a single appointment. Mallory had already learned that Disraeli's tardiness made it best to allot him half the day. With luck, he might find time to take his jacket in for French cleaning, or have a barber trim the clots from his hair. When he went down to the dining-room, two other late breakfasters were chatting over tea. One was a cabinet-man named Belshaw, the other a museum underling whose name might be Sydenham. Mallory couldn't quite recall. Belshaw looked up as Mallory entered the room. Mallory nodded civilly. Belshaw gazed back at him with barely concealed astonishment. |
| 2096 |
Mallory walked past the two men, taking his customary seat beneath the gilt gas chandelier. Belshaw and Sydenham began to talk in low, urgent tones. Mallory was nonplussed. He had never been formally introduced to Belshaw, but could the man possibly resent a simple nod? Now Sydenham, his pudgy face gone pale, was casting sidelong glances at Mallory. 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. |
| 2097 |
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. |
| 2098 |
Camphorated cellulose, damp with something pungent — and the tiny black letters were beginning to fade. The flexible card had grown hot in his fingers. He dropped it at once, choking back a yelp of surprise. The card lay warping on the table-top, then began flaking into layers thinner than the finest onion-skin, while browning nastily at the edges. A feather of yellowish smoke began to rise, and Mallory realized that the thing was about to burst into flame. He snatched hastily within the basket, came up with the latest thick grey issue of the Quart. Jrl. Geol. Soc., and swiftly swatted the card. After two sharp blows, it came apart into a thready curling mess, half-mixed with the blistered finish of the table-top. Mallory slit open a begging-letter, tossed the contents out unread, and swept the ash into the envelope, with the sharp-edged spine of the geological journal. The table did not seem too badly damaged ... "Dr. Mallory?" Mallory looked up, with a guilt-stricken start, into the face of a stranger. The man, a tall and clean-shaven Londoner, very plainly dressed, with a gaunt, unsmiling look, stood across the library table from Mallory, papers and a notebook in one hand. "A very poor specimen," Mallory said, in a sudden ecstasy of impromptu deception. "Pickled in camphor! A dreadful technique!" He folded the envelope and slid it in his pocket. The stranger silently offered a carte-de-visite. Ebenezer Fraser's card bore his name, a telegram-number, and a small embossed Seal of State. |
| 2099 |
"Not since I were a lad, sir, when the coal-fogs were bad. But the Rads built taller stacks. Nowadays it blows off into the counties." He paused. "Mostly." Mallory considered the flat clouds, fascinated. He wished he'd spent more time on the doctrines of pneumo-dynamics. This pot-lid of static cloud displayed an unhealthy lack of natural turbulence, as though the dynamical systematics of the atmosphere had stagnated somehow. The stinking underground, the droughty, sewage-thickened Thames, and now this. "Doesn't seem as hot as yesterday," he muttered. "The gloom, sir." The streets were such a crush as only London could produce. The omnibuses and cabriolets were all taken, every intersection jammed with rattle-traps and dogcarts, with cursing drivers and panting, black-nostriled horses. Steam-gurneys chugged sluggishly by, many lowing rubber-tired freight-cars loaded with provisions. It seemed the gentry's summer exodus from London was becoming a rout. Mallory could see the sense in it. It was a long walk to Fleet Street, and his appointment with Disraeli. It seemed best to try the train and endure the Stink. But the British Brotherhood of Sappers and Miners stood on strike at the entrance to Gloucester Road Station. They had set up pickets and banners across the walk, and were heaping sandbags, like an army of occupation. A large crowd looked on, keeping good order; they did not seem annoyed by the strikers' boldness, but seemed curious, or cowed. Perhaps they were glad to see the underground shut; more likely they were simply afraid of the sand-hogs. |
| 2100 |
Mallory and Fraser, as they came closer, saw that the beast had collapsed, and lay frothily panting in the damp grass by the side of the trail. The rider was muddied but unhurt. She was cursing London, and the filthy air, and the women who had urged her to gallop, and the man who had bought her the horse. Fraser politely ignored the unseemly spectacle. "Sir, in my line of work we learn to cultivate the open air. There are no doors ajar or keyholes about us at the moment. Will you inform me of your troubles, in your own plain words, as you yourself have witnessed the events?" Mallory tramped on silently for some moments, juggling the matter in his mind. He was tempted to trust Fraser; of all those men in authority whose aid he might have sought in his troubles this sturdy policeman alone seemed primed to boldly grapple problems at their root. Yet there was much hazard in that trust, and the risk was not to himself alone. "Mr. Fraser, the reputation of a very great lady is involved in this affair. Before I speak, I must have your word as a gentleman that you will not damage the lady's interests." Fraser walked on with a meditative air, hands clasped behind his back. "Ada Byron?" he asked at length. "Why, yes! Oliphant told you the truth, did he?" Fraser slowly shook his head. "Mr. Oliphant is very discreet. But we of Bow Street are often called upon to put the muzzle on the Byrons' family difficulties. One might almost say that we specialize in the effort." "But you seemed to know almost at once, Mr. |
| 2101 |
It was snowing outside the conical tents and the Cheyenne were drunk. Whooping howling drunken pandemonium, because the wretches had no real idea what liquor was; for them it was a poison and an incubus. They pranced and staggered like bedlamites, firing their rifles into the empty American heavens, and they fell on the frozen ground in the grip of visions, showing nothing but the whites of eyes. Once they had started, they would go on for hours. Mallory had not wanted to go in to the widow. He had fought the temptation for many days, but the time had finally come when he realized it would do his soul less damage to simply get the business over with. So he had drunk two inches from one of the whiskey bottles, two inches of cheap Birmingham rotgut, shipped over with the rifles. He had gone inside the tent where the widow sat crouched in her blankets and leathers over the dung-fire. The two children left, their round brown faces squinting bleakly against the wind. Mallory showed her a new needle, and did the business with his hands, lewd gestures. 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. |
| 2102 |
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. |
| 2103 |
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. "Dr. Mallory!" Fraser beckoned in a manner that was, for him, remarkably animated; Mallory realized belatedly that Fraser had likely been shouting at him for some time. Mallory fought and dodged his way across the traffic: cabs, carts, a large stumbling herd of bleating, wheezing sheep. The effort of it set him gasping. Two strangers stood beneath the lamp-post with Fraser, both their faces tightly swathed with white kerchiefs. The taller fellow had been breathing through his kerchief for some time, for the cloth beneath his nose was stained yellow-brown. |
| 2104 |
He puffed it hard, until the calm of good tobacco hit his blood. "On the other hand," he said at last, "I suppose your Cremorne Gardens might well do in a pinch." Fraser led the way, far down Cromwell Lane, past the great pile of pale brick that was the Diseased Chest Hospital: a nightmarishly dire place this evening. Mallory could not help but think. A vague notion of medical grimness continued to prey on Mallory's mind, so much so that they stopped at the next public-house, where Mallory had four or possibly five shots of a surprisingly decent whiskey. The pub was crowded with New Brompton locals, who seemed quite cheery in a cozy, besieged sort of way, though they kept slipping tuppenny bits into a pianola that tinkled "Come to the Bower," a song Mallory loathed. "There was no rest for him here. In any case, it was not Cremorne Gardens. They came across the first sign of real trouble a few blocks down New Brompton Road, by Bennett & Harper's Patent Floor-Covering Manufactory. An unruly crowd of uniformed men milled at the gates of the sprawling factory. Industrial trouble of some sort. It took Fraser and Mallory some time to discover that the crowd actually consisted almost entirely of policemen. Bennett & Harper's produced a gaily patterned water-proof stuff made of burlap, ground cork, and coal derivatives, suitable for trimming and gluing-down in the kitchens and baths of the middle-class. They also produced great volumes of effluent from half-a-dozen stacks, which clearly the city would temporarily be better off without. |
| 2105 |
The first officials on the scene — or at least they claimed that distinction — had been a group of inspectors from the Royal Patent Office, pressed into emergency industrial duty by a Government contingency plan. But Messrs. Bennett and Harper, anxious not to lose the day's production, had challenged the patent-men's legal authority to shut down their works. They were soon confronted by two more inspectors from a Royal Society industrial committee, who claimed precedent. The local constable had been attracted by the uproar, followed by a flying-squad of Bow Street metropolitans arriving in a commandeered steam-bus. Most 'buses had now been seized by Government, along with the city's cab-fleet, in accordance with contingency measures intended to deal with rail strikes. The police had immediately shut down the stacks, fine work and a credit to the Government's good intentions, but the manufactory's workers were still on the premises, idle and very restive, for no one had mentioned a holiday with pay, though the workers clearly felt they deserved one under the circumstances. It also remained to be seen who was responsible for guarding the property of Messrs. Bennett and Harper, and who would be responsible for giving the official word to start the boilers again. Worst of all, there seemed to be dire problems with the police telegraph-service — routed, presumably, through the Westminster pyramid of the Central Statistics Bureau. There must be trouble there from the Stink, Mallory surmised. |
| 2106 |
He missed his canteen, his spyglass, the snug stiffness of a rifle over his back. The look of a cold, clean, wild horizon where life was fully lived and death was swift and honest. He wished he were out of London, on expedition again. He could cancel all his engagements. He could apply for funding to the Royal Society, or better yet, the Geographical. He would leave England! "You needn't do that, sir," Fraser said. "Might make matters worse, actually." "Was I talking aloud?" "A bit, sir. Yes." "Where could a man get a first-class game-rifle here in town, Fraser?" They were behind Chelsea Park now, in a place called Camera Square, where the shops offered fancy optical goods: talbotypes, magic-lanterns, phenakistoscopes, telescopes for the amateur star-gazer. There were toy microscopes for the boy-savant of the house, boys often taking a strong interest in the wriggling animalcules in pond-water. The minute creatures were of no practical interest, but their study might lead young minds to the doctrines of genuine Science. Stung by sentiment, Mallory paused before a window displaying such microscopes. They reminded him of kindly old Lord Mantell, who had given him his first job tidying-up about the Lewes Museum. From there he'd moved to cataloguing bones and birds'-eggs, and at last to a real Cambridge scholarship. The old Lord had been a bit eager with the birch-switch, he now recalled, but likely no more than Mallory had deserved. There came an odd whizzing sound from up the pavement. |
| 2107 |
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. |
| 2108 |
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. |
| 2109 |
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. |
| 2110 |
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. "Barman, give the lady what she wants." She looked at him with annoyed surprise. |
| 2111 |
Hetty entered the parlor with her glowing lamp, and faded roses bloomed in the dusty wallpaper. Mallory dropped a gold sovereign on the table-top. He hated trouble in these matters, and always paid in advance. She noted the ring of the coin, smiling. Then she kicked off her street-muddied dolly-boots, and walked, swaying, to a doorway, which she flung open. A grey cat ran out, mewing, and she fussed at it, petting it and calling it Toby. She let it out to the stairs. Mallory watched her do this, and stood flat-footed in unhappy patience. "Well, then, come on with you," she said, tossing her plaited brown head. The bedroom was small enough, and shabby, with a pressed-oak two-poster and a tall, tarnished cheval-glass that looked as if it had once cost some money. Hetty set the lamp on the badly delaminated veneer of a bedside commode and began to pick at the buttons of her blouse, pulling her arms from the sleeves and tossing the garment aside as if clothing were more trouble to her than she cared for. Stepping deftly out of her skirt, she began to remove her corset and a stiff crinkled petticoat. "You wear no crinoline," Mallory noted hoarsely. "Don't like 'em." She popped the waistband of the petticoat and laid it aside. She deftly picked the wire hooks of the corset and eased its laces open, then wriggled it over her hips and stood there, breathing in relief, in her lace chemise. Mallory got out of his jacket and shoes. His member strained at his fly-buttons. He was anxious to get it out of his trousers, but didn't care to parade his erect prick by lamplight. |
| 2112 |
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. |
| 2113 |
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. "All right." He sensibly set the box of lucifers within convenient reach, turned out the lantern, and lay in the hot London dark like a suspended Platonic soul. He rested, eyes open, a flea feasting with leisurely precision on his ankles. He did not sleep, exactly, but rested for some indefinite time. When his mind began to run in circles, he lit and smoked one of Hetty's cigarettoes, a pleasant ritual, though without much point as far as the proper use of tobacco went. Later he left the bed and pissed in the pot-de-chambre, by feel. |
| 2114 |
The Land Leviathans had seen this very sky, he knew, after the earth-shaking shock of the Great Comet. For the scaly herds, ceaselessly progressing through the teeming jungles, driven always by a mighty hunger in their great fermenting bellies, this had been the sky of Armageddon. Storms of Cataclysm lashed the Cretaceous earth, vast fires raged, and cometary grit sifted through the roiling atmosphere, to blight and kill the wilting foliage, till the mighty Dinosauria, adapted to a world now shattered, fell in massed extinction, and the leaping machineries of Evolution were loosed in chaos, to re-populate the stricken Earth with strange new orders of being. He scuffed down Flower-and-Dean Street, awestruck, coughing. He could see little more than thirty feet ahead, for the alley roiled with a low-lying yellow fog that blurred his eyes with its clinging acid tang. More by luck than design, he emerged on Commercial Street, ordinarily a thriving Whitechapel avenue. Deserted now, its smooth tarmac was spread with fountained shards of shop-front glass. He walked a block, then another. 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. |
| 2115 |
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. Back to his life. "Hullo! Say there! Sir!" The voice echoed over Mallory's head like the cry of a bad conscience. He glanced up, startled. From a third-floor window of Jackson Bros., Furriers & Hatters, protruded the black barrel of a rifle. Behind it, Mallory made out the balding head of a spectacled shopping-clerk, leaning from his open window now to reveal a striped shirt and scarlet braces. "May I be of service?" Mallory called, the phrase emerging out of reflex. "Thank you, sir!" the clerk cried, his voice cracking. |
| 2116 |
A rhythmic clanging of alarm sounded from the fog behind him. He stepped aside to watch a fire-gurney steam past, its red-painted sides battered and dented. Some London mob had brutally attacked the firemen, attacked the trained men and machines that stood between the city and mass conflagration. This struck Mallory as the acme of perverse stupidity, yet somehow it failed to surprise him. Exhausted firemen clung to the gurney's running-boards, wearing bizarre rubber masks with gleaming eye-pieces and accordioned breathing-tubes. Mallory dearly wished for such a mask himself, for his eyes were misting so painfully now that he squinted like a pantomime pirate, but he tramped on. Aldgate became Fenchurch, then Lombard, then Poultry Street, and still he was miles from his goal, if the Palace of Paleontology could be said to be one. His head pounded and swam with the sullen lees of bad whiskey and worse air, and he seemed to be nearer the Thames now, for a damp and viscous taint arose that sickened him. On Cheapside, a city omnibus had been toppled on its side and set afire with its own boiler-coals. Every window in it had been shattered, and it had burnt to a blackened husk. Mallory hoped no one had died inside it. The smoking wreckage stank too fiercely for him to want to look more closely. There were people in the churchyard of St. Paul's. The air seemed somewhat clearer there, for the dome was visible, and a large crowd of men and boys had collected among the churchyard trees. |
| 2117 |
Unaccountably, they seemed in the highest spirits. Mallory perceived to his astonishment that they were brazenly tossing dice on the very steps of Wren's masterpiece. A little farther on, and Cheapside itself was blocked by scattered crowds of eager and determined gamblers. Fairy-rings of rascals had sprouted left and right from the very pavement, men kneeling to guard their mounting stakes of coins and paper-money. Eager leaders in mischief, tough, squint-eyed cockneys who seemed to have leapt whole from the coagulated Stink of London, cried aloud, hoarsely, like patterers, as Mallory passed. "A shilling to open! Who'll shoot? Who will shoot, my lads?" From the scattered rings came cries of triumph at winning, angry groans muffled by masks. For each man boldly gambling, there were three who timidly watched. A carnival attraction, it seemed, a stinking and criminal carnival, but a London lark nonetheless. There were no police in sight, no authority, no decency. Mallory edged warily through the thin, excited crowd, a cautious hand on the butt of the sailor's pistol. In an alley, two masked men booted a third, then relieved him of his watch and wallet. A crowd of at least a dozen watched the sight with only mild interest. These Londoners were like a gas, thought Mallory, like a cloud of minute atomies. The bonds of society broken, they had simply flown apart, like the perfectly elastic gassy spheres in Boyle's Laws of Physics. Most of them looked respectable enough by their dress; they were merely reckless now, stripped by Chaos to a moral vacuity. |
| 2118 |
Nothing. An elbow caught him hard in the ribs. He cocked the hammer with his thumb, squeezed again. The report was shocking, deafening. In a split-second the melee was melting away from Mallory, men falling, billowing, scrambling away headlong on hands and knees in their utter beast-like eagerness to flee. Men were trampled before his eyes. Mallory stood for an instant, his jaw dropping in astonishment within his cambric mask, the gun still poised overhead. Then a bolt of good sense struck him. He retreated. He tried to jam the pistol back into his waistband as he ran, but saw with shocked alarm that the hammer was cocked again, the gun ready to fire at any touch of the trigger. He dangled the treacherous thing at arm's-length as he fled. At length he stopped, coughing bitterly. From behind him, wrapped in the roiling obscurity of fog, came scattered pistol-shots and bestial cries of rage, derision, glee. "Dear Christ," Mallory muttered, and peered at the mechanism. The devilish thing had cocked itself automatically, channeling part of the powder-blast into the piston beneath the barrel, which shunted the grooved cylinder back against a stationary ratchet, spinning the next round into place and kicking the hammer back. Mallory hooked both thumbs over the hammer and worked at the trigger with care, until he could close the mechanism. He slid the pistol back into his waistband. He had not outrun the line of pasted handbills. They still ranged before him, apparently inexhaustible in number, slapped-up one after another in a ragged line. |
| 2119 |
And yet Mallory had discovered a crucial piece of evidence: the tout was gone to earth in the West India Docks! To be so close to a chance to grapple with the scoundrel, and yet so far — it was enough to madden a man. Mallory stumbled badly on a slick lump of horse-dung, then swung the scrolls up onto his right shoulder, in an unstable heap. It was a useless fantasy to imagine confronting the tout — alone, unaided, while the man was miles away, back across the chaos of London. Mallory had almost reached the Palace now, and it had taken well-nigh all he had to manage the trick of it. 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. |
| 2120 |
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. |
| 2121 |
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. 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. |
| 2122 |
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. |
| 2123 |
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. Four dead and bloating horses, a team of massive Percherons, lay swollen in Stepney. The stiffened carcasses, shot to death, were still in their harness. A few yards on, the dray itself appeared, sacked, its wheels missing. |
| 2124 |
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. |
| 2125 |
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. The first, an evil youngster with a face like dirty dough, in a greasy jacket and corduroy trousers, had a mangy fur cap pulled low, but not low enough to hide the prison-cut of his hair. The second, a sturdy brute of thirty-five, wore a tall grease-stiffened hat, checked trousers, and brass-toed lace-up boots. |
| 2126 |
Something — a fleck of dry cotton from within his mask — lodged like a barb in his throat. He began coughing. And he could not stop. His slimy throat was lacerated. He tried to smile, to whisper a word of apology, but his windpipe seemed pinched in iron bands. Mallory fought the racking spasms with all his strength, hot tears gushing freely, but he could not stop himself, nor even muffle the nightmare hacking. It called a deadly attention to him like a coster-monger's bellow. At last Mallory jerked to his feet, knocking his chair back with a clatter, and staggered away half-bent, half-blinded. He tottered, arms outstretched, through the blurry wilderness of booty, his feet tangling in something, some wooden object falling with a clatter. Somehow he found a spot of shelter, and bent there shaking violently, his breath choked now by a loathsome bolus of phlegm and vomit. I could die from this, he thought in desperation, his eyes bulging in their sockets. Something will rupture. My heart will burst. Then somehow the clog was gone, the fit defeated. Mallory drew a ragged squeak of air, coughed, found his wind and began to breathe. He wiped foul spittle from his beard with his bare hand, and found himself leaning against a piece of statuary. It was a life-sized Hindu maiden in Coate's patent artificial stone, half-nude, with a water-jug poised on her draperied hip. The jug was solid stone, of course, though every atom in him cried out for a cleansing sip of water. Someone clapped him firmly on the back. |
| 2127 |
Neither gun fired. He had neglected to cock the hammers. The Marquess's gun seemed to have some kind of nickeled safety-switch. Someone nearby threw a chair at Mallory; he fended it off, absently, but then something struck him hard in the foot. The blow was sharp enough to numb his leg, and knock him from his stance; he took the opportunity to retreat. He could not seem to run properly. Perhaps he had been crippled. Bullets sang past him with a nostalgic drone from far Wyoming. Fraser beckoned at him from the mouth of a side-alley. Mallory ran to him, turned, skidded. Fraser stepped coolly into the open, raising his copper's pepperbox in a dueling stance, right arm extended, body turned to present a narrow target, head held keen-eyed and level. He fired twice, and there were screams. Fraser took Mallory's arm. "This way!" Mallory's heart was jumping like a rabbit, and he could not get his foot to work. He limped down the alley. It ended abruptly. Fraser searched frantically for a crawl-way. Tom was boosting Brian atop a great unsteady heap of cartons. Mallory stopped beside his brothers, turned, raised both pistols. He glanced down swiftly at his foot. A stray bullet had knocked the heel from his shoe. He looked up an instant later to see half-a-dozen screaming bandits approaching in hot pursuit. A vast concussion shook the building. Heaps of tinned goods clattered to the floor in a billow of powder-smoke. Mallory gaped. All six of the wretches lay sprawled and blasted in the alley, as if lightning-struck. |
| 2128 |
"Ned!" shouted Brian, from atop his heap of cartons. "Get their weapons!" He crouched there on one knee, the Russian pistol gushing smoke from its opened loading-chamber. He loaded a second cartridge of brass and red waxed-paper, as thick as a copper's baton. Mallory, ears ringing, lunged forward, then slipped and almost fell headlong in the spreading blood. He grabbed right-handed for support and the Ballester-Molina went off, its bullet whanging from an iron beam overhead. Mallory paused, uncocked it carefully, uncocked the Marquess's pistol as well, stuck them both into his belt, precious seconds ticking as he dithered. The alley was awash with blood. The blunderbuss blast of the Russian hand-cannon had lacerated the men hideously. One poor devil was still gurgling as Mallory pried a Victoria carbine from beneath him, its stock dripping red. He struggled with the fellow's bandolier, but gave that up for another's wooden-handled Yankee revolver. Something stung his palm as he snatched up the pistol. Mallory looked stupidly at his wounded hand, then at the pistol-butt. There was a corkscrewed bit of hot shrapnel embedded in the wood, a razored thing like a big metal-shaving. Rifles began to crack from a distance, slugs plowing into the bounty around them with odd crunches and a musical tinkling of glass. "Mallory! This way," Fraser shouted. Fraser had uncovered a crevice along the warehouse wall. Mallory turned to sling the carbine and look for Brian, seeing the young artilleryman leap across the alley for another vantage-point. |
| 2129 |
Fraser rose once and took a pot-shot, to no apparent effect. Dozens of hundred-weight bales of Confederate ginned cotton, wrapped in rope and burlap, had been stacked almost to the rafters. Brian gestured wildly, then vanished over the far side of the cotton-stack. Mallory understood him: it was a natural fortress, with a little work. He and Tom heaved and toppled one of the bales free from the top of the stack, stepping into the cavity. Bullets thumped with gentle huffs into the cotton as Fraser rose and returned fire. They kicked out another bale, and then a third. Fraser joined them in the excavation, with a leap and a stumble. In a frantic, heaving minute they had burrowed their way into the thick of it, like ants amid a box of cube sugar. Their position was obvious now; bullets popped and thudded into the cotton fortress, but to no effect. Mallory yanked a great clean wad and wiped sweat and blood from his face and arms. It was dire hard work, hauling cotton-bales; no wonder the Southrons had relegated it to their darkeys. Fraser cleared a narrow space between two bales. "Give me another pistol." Mallory handed him the Marquess's long-barreled revolver. Fraser squeezed off a shot, squinted, nodded. "Fine piece ..." A volley of futile shots came in reply. Tom, grunting and heaving, cleared more space by lifting and dropping a bale off the back of the heap; it struck something with a crash like a splintering pianola. They took inventory. Tom had a derringer with one loaded chamber; useful, perhaps, if the anarchists swarmed in like boarding pirates, but not otherwise. |
| 2130 |
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. |
| 2131 |
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. The doctor, a thorough man, also noted an item discovered beneath the deceased's flowing white beard. |
| 2132 |
G. S. Hullcoop of the Department of Criminal Anthropometry. The shutter of Hullcoop's Talbot "Excelsior" has captured eleven men descending the broad steps from the entrance of the Central Statistics Bureau. Triangulation locates Hullcoop, with his powerful lens, concealed atop the roof of a publishers' offices in Holywell Street. Foremost among the eleven is Laurence Oliphant. His gaze, beneath the black brim of his top-hat, is mild and ironical. The tall, dull-surfaced hats create a repeated vertical motif common to images of the period. Like the others, Oliphant wears a dark frock-coat above narrow trousers of a lighter hue. His neck is wrapped in a high choker of dark silk. The effect is dignified and columnar, though something in Oliphant's manner manages to suggest the sportsman's lounging stroll. The other men are barristers, Bureau functionaries, a senior representative of the Colgate Works. Behind them, above Horseferry Road, swoop the tarred copper cables of the Bureau's telegraphs. Processes of resolution reveal the pale blurs dotting these lines to be pigeons. Though the afternoon is unseasonably bright, Oliphant, a frequent visitor to the Bureau, is opening an umbrella. The top-hat of the Colgate's representative displays an elongated comma of white pigeon-dung. Oliphant sat alone in a small waiting-room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. The buff-colored walls were hung with colored diagrams depicting the ravages of hideous diseases. A bookcase was crammed with dingy medical volumes. |
| 2133 |
Oliphant senior, having served as Attorney-General of the Cape Colony, had subsequently been appointed Chief Justice of Ceylon. Consequently, Oliphant had received a private and necessarily rather fragmentary education, one to which he owed both his fluency in modern languages and his extraordinary ignorance of Greek and Latin. His parents had been Evangelicals of a markedly eccentric sort, and though he himself retained, however privately, certain aspects of their faith, he recalled with an odd dread his father's experiments: iron wands, spheres of crystal ... And how, he wondered, climbing the carpeted stairs, would Lady Brunel be adjusting to life as the Prime Minister's wife? His Japanese wound began to throb as he gripped the banister. Taking out a triple-splined Maudslay key from his waistcoat-pocket, he unlocked the door to his study. Bligh, who held the key's only duplicate, had lit the gas and banked the coals. The study, paneled in oak, overlooked the park from a shallow triple-bay. An ancient refectory-table, quite plain, running very nearly the length of the room, served as Oliphant's desk. A very modern office-chair, mounted on glass-wheeled patent casters, regularly migrated around the table as Oliphant's work took him from one stack of folders to the next, then back again. The casters, in the chair's daily peregrinations, had begun to wear away the nap of the blue Axminster. Three Colt & Maxwell receiving-telegraphs, domed in glass, dominated the end of the table nearest the window, their tapes coiling into wire baskets arranged on the carpet. |
| 2134 |
"Special Bureau," Oliphant said, briskly climbing past the guards. Abashed by his accent and manner, they let him pass. It would be necessary to report that to Fraser. He entered the house, finding himself in a parlor lit by a powerful carbide-lantern, atop a tripod, its merciless white glare magnified by a concave round of polished tin. The parlor was furnished with scraps salvaged from the ruins of gentility. There was a cottage-piano, and a chiffonier several sizes too large for the room. The latter struck him as pathetically gorgeous, with its tarnished gilt moldings. A threadbare patch of Brussels carpet swarmed with roses and lilies, amid a desert of colorless drugget. Knitted curtains shaded the windows overlooking Brigsome's Terrace. Beside the glass, two hanging wire baskets were festooned with plants of the cactus species, which grew in prickly and spider-like profusion. Oliphant noted an acrid stench, more penetrating than the reek of carbide. Betteredge emerged from the rear of the house. He wore a high-crowned derby hat that made him seem altogether American, so that he might easily have been mistaken for one of the Pinkerton operatives he shadowed daily. Likely the effect was deliberate, down to the patent boots with their elasticated side-gores. His expression, quite uncharacteristically, was one of grave anxiety. "I'll take full responsibility, sir," he stammered. Something was very wrong. "Mr. Fraser's waiting for you, sir. Nothing's been moved." Oliphant allowed himself to be led through the doorway, and up a narrow, perilously steep flight of stairs. |
| 2135 |
Oliphant nodded and napped, on the journey home. He dreamed, as he often did, of an omniscient Eye in whose infinite perspectives might be sorted every least mystery. Upon arrival, he found, to his ill-concealed chagrin, that Bligh had drawn a bath for him in the collapsible rubber tub recently prescribed by Dr. McNeile. In robe and nightshirt, slippered in embroidered moleskin, Oliphant examined the thing with resigned distaste. It stood, steaming, before the perfectly good and perfectly empty tub of white porcelain which dominated his bath-room. It was Swiss, the rubber bath, its slack black trough gone taut and bulbous with the volume of water it presently contained. Supported by an elaborately hinged frame of black-enameled teak, it was connected to the geyser with a worm-like hose and several ceramic petcocks. Removing his robe, and then his nightshirt, he stepped from his slippers, then from the chill of octagonal marble tiles, into the soft, warm maw. It very nearly overturned as he struggled to sit. The elastic material, supported on all sides by the frame, gave distressingly beneath one's feet. And was, he discovered, quite horrid in its embrace of one's buttocks. He was, according to McNeile's prescription, to recline for a quarter-hour, his head supported on the small pneumatic pillow of rubberized canvas supplied for this purpose by the manufacturer. McNeile maintained that the cast-iron body of a porcelain tub confused the spine's natural attempts to return to its correct magnetic polarity. |
| 2136 |
The next file consisted of Engine-printed copies of several letters from a Mr. Copeland, of Boston. Mr. Copeland, who traveled in lumber, was in British pay. His letters described the system of forts defending the island of Manhattan, with extensive notes on ordnance. Oliphant's gaze, from long practice, slid lightly over Copeland's account of the south battery on Governor's Island, something of a relic by the sound of it, and quickly arrived at a report of rumors that the Commune had strung a chain of mines from the Romer Shoals to the Narrows. Oliphant sighed. He very much doubted that the channel had been mined, but the leaders of the Commune would certainly wish it to be thought to have been mined. As indeed it might soon be, if the gentlemen of the Commission for Free Trade were to have their way. Bligh was at the door. "You've an appointment with Mr. Wakefield, sir, at the Central Statistics Bureau." An hour later, Betteredge greeted him from the open door of a cab. "Good afternoon, Mr. Oliphant." Oliphant climbed in and settled himself. Pleated shades of black-proofed canvas were drawn firmly across either window, shutting out Half-Moon Street and the stark November sun. As the driver urged the cab-horse forward, Betteredge opened a case at his feet, took out a lamp, which he lit in a rapid and dextrous fashion, and fixed, with a brass apparatus of screws and bolts, to the arm of the seat. The interior of the case glittered like a miniature arsenal. He passed Oliphant a crimson file-folder. |
| 2137 |
They had been interrupted by a page, who brought a note for Radley. As the door opened to admit the man, Oliphant had glimpsed the anxious face of a young woman. Radley had stated, as he excused himself, that it was necessary that he speak briefly with a journalistic contact. Radley had returned to the smoking-room some ten minutes later. Oliphant then took his leave, having endured an extended and particularly florid tirade from the General, who had consumed the better part of a pint of brandy during Radley's absence. Summoned back to Grand's by telegram in the early hours of dawn, Oliphant had immediately sought out the hotel-detective, a retired Metropolitan named McQueen, who had been called to Houston's room, number 24, by the desk clerk, Mr. Parkes. While Parkes attempted to calm the hysterical wife of a Lancashire paving-contractor, resident in number 25 at the time of the disturbance, McQueen had tried the knob of Houston's door, discovering it to be unlocked. Snow was blowing in through the demolished window, and the air, already chilled, stank of burnt gunpowder, blood, and, as McQueen delicately put it, "the contents of the late gentleman's bowel." Spying the scarlet ruin that was Radley's corpse, all too visible in the cold light of dawn, McQueen had called to Parkes to telegraph the Metropolitans. 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. |
| 2138 |
"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. Married men, assured of a Bureau pension, they would live in Camden Town, in New Cross, in any respectable suburb, and would furnish their tiny sitting-rooms with papier-mache side-boards and ornate Dutch clocks. Their wives would serve tea on gaudily japanned tin trays. |
| 2139 |
Passing an irritatingly banal quasi-biblical bas-relief, he made his way to the lift. As the attendant bowed him in, he was joined by a glum gentleman who was daubing with a handkerchief at a pale streak on the shoulder of his coat. The articulated bars of the brass cage rattled shut. The lift ascended. The gentleman with the soiled coat made his exit at the third stop. Oliphant rode on to the fifth, the home of Quantitative Criminology and Non-Linear Analysis. While he found the latter infinitely more compelling than the former, it was Q C he needed today, most particularly in the person of Andrew Wakefield, the departmental Under-Secretary. The clerks of Q C were individually walled into neatly cramped cells of rolled-steel, asbestos, and veneer. Wakefield presided over them from a grander version of the same scheme, his sparse sandy head framed by the brass-fitted drawers of a multitude of card-files. He glanced up as Oliphant approached, prominent front teeth displayed against his lower lip. "Mr. Oliphant, sir," he said. "A pleasure as ever. Pardon me." He shuffled a number of punch-cards into a sturdy blue envelope lined with tissue-paper, and meticulously wound the little scarlet string about the two halves of the patent-clasp. He set the envelope aside, in an asbestos-lined hutch containing several other envelopes of identical hue. Oliphant smiled. "Fancy I can read your punch-holes, Andrew?" He levered a spring-loaded stenographer's-chair up from its ingenious housing and took a seat, his furled umbrella balanced across his knees. |
| 2140 |
Oliphant had very quickly lost track of the narrative, if indeed there were one, which he doubted. Scenes were punctuated repeatedly by characters firing stuffed bricks at one another's heads. There was kinotropic accompaniment, of a sort, though it consisted of crudely polemical cartoons that seemed to bear little relationship to the action. Oliphant stole a glance at Mori, who sat beside him, his treasured topper upright on his lap, his face expressionless. The audience was howlingly rowdy, though less in response to the substance of the pantomime, whatever that might be, than to the whirling, curiously formless dances of the Communard women, their bare shins and ankles plainly visible beneath the ragged hems of their flowing garments. Oliphant's back began to ache. The choreography accelerated into a sort of balletic assault, the air thick with brickbats, until, quite abruptly, 'Mazulem the Night Owl' was ended. The crowd hooted, applauded, jeered. Oliphant noted a hulking, gaunt-jawed man with a stout rattan over his shoulder, lounging beside the entrance to the pit. The fellow was watching the crowd through narrowed eyes. "Come then, Mr. Mori. I sense a journalistic opportunity." Mori stood, hat and evening-cane in hand. He followed Oliphant toward the pit. "Laurence Oliphant, journalist." He presented his card to the hulking man. "If you would be so kind, you might convey this to Miss America with my request for an interview." The man took the card, glanced at it, and let it fall to the floor. |
| 2141 |
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. |
| 2142 |
He would rather have been above-decks, now, facing into the wind; able then, perhaps, to imagine himself steaming toward some grander, more accessible goal. But the promenade of a swinging-saloon offered no bulwark, only an iron railing, and the Channel wind was damp and cold. And he had, he reminded himself, only the one goal now, and it, in all likelihood, a fool's errand. Still: Sybil Gerard. He had decided, upon reading the telegram to Egremont, against having her number spun. He had expected it might attract unwanted attention; with Criminal Anthropometry holding sway at Central Statistics, of course, he had been proven correct. And he rather suspected that Sybil Gerard's file might no longer exist. Walter Gerard of Manchester, sworn enemy of progress, agitator for the rights of man. Hanged. And if Walter Gerard had had a daughter, what might have become of her? And if she had been ruined, as she claimed to have been, by Charles Egremont? Oliphant's back began to ache. Beneath the chair's stiff brocade, Jacquard-woven with repeated images of the Bessemer, the horsehair stuffing held a chill. But if nothing else, he reminded himself, he at least had temporarily escaped the soft black pit of Dr. McNeile's patent Swiss bath-tub. Putting his brandy aside unfinished, he nodded then, and napped. And dreamed, perhaps, of the Eye. The Bessemer docked at Calais at half past one. Monsieur Lucien Arslau's apartments were in Passy. At noon, Oliphant presented his card to the concierge, who conveyed it via pneumatic tube to Monsieur Arslau's establishment. |
| 2143 |
Almost immediately, the whistle attached to a nickeled speaking-tube peeped twice; the concierge bent his ear to the funnel; Oliphant made out faint tones of shouted French. The concierge showed Oliphant to the lift. He was admitted, on the fifth floor, by a liveried manservant wearing an ornate Corsican stiletto through a pleated sash of gros de Naples. The young man managed to bow without taking his eyes from Oliphant. Monsieur Arslau regretted, the servant said, that he was unable at the moment to receive Monsieur Oliphant; in the meantime, would Monsieur Oliphant care for any sort of refreshment? Oliphant declared that he would very much appreciate an opportunity to bathe. He would also find a pot of coffee most agreeable. He was led through a broad drawing-room, rich in satin and ormolu, buhl cabinets, bronzes, statuettes, and porcelain, where the lizard-eyed Emperor and his dainty Empress, the former Miss Howard, gazed from twin portraits in oil. And then through a morning-room hung with proof-engravings. A graceful curve of stairway mounted from an octagonal anteroom. Some two hours later, having bathed in a marble-rimmed tub of gratifying solidity, having taken strong French coffee and lunched upon cutlets a la Maintenon, and wearing borrowed linen with far more starch than he cared for, he was ushered into the study of Monsieur Arslau. "Mr. Oliphant, sir," Arslau said, in his excellent English, "it is a great pleasure. I regret not having been able to see you earlier, but ... |
| 2144 |
And when might it be arranged for me to meet with her?" The Eye, the pressure, the pounding of his heart. "This evening, if you so desire," said Monsieur Arslau of the Police des Chateaux, adjusting his gold-embroidered cravat. The walls of the Cafe de l'Univers were hung with paintings, etched mirrors, and enamel plaques advertising the ubiquitous product of Pernod Fils. The pictures, if one could call them that, were either grotesque daubs, seemingly executed in a messy imitation of Engine-stippling, or queer geometric formulations suggesting the restless motion of kinotrope-bits. In some cases, Oliphant supposed, the painters themselves were present — or such he took them to be, these long-haired fellows in velvet caps, their corduroy trousers smeared with pigment and tobacco-ash. But the majority of the clientele — according to his companion, one Jean Beraud — consisted of kinotropistes. These gentlemen of the Latin Quarter sat and drank with their black-clad grisettes at the round marble tables, or held forth on theoretical matters before small groups of their peers. Beraud, in an unseasonable boater and a brown suit of intensely Gallic cut, was one of Arslau's mouchards, a professional informer who referred to the kinotropists as members of "le milieu." He was fresh and rosy as a young pig, he drank Vittel and peppermint, and Oliphant had taken an immediate dislike to him. The kinotropists seemed to favor the absinthe of Pernod Fils; Oliphant, sipping a glass of red wine, watched the ritual of glass and water-decanter, of sugar-lump and trowel-shaped spoon. |
| 2145 |
Lord Wellington's Tones, however, resenting the threat to aristocratic privilege posed by Radical proposals of "merit-lordship," took a hard line. The Commons procrastinated on the Radical Reform Bill, and on 8 October the Lords threw it out. The King refused to create new Radical peers who might force the Bill through; on the contrary, the Fitzelarences were ennobled instead, leading Byron to comment bitterly: "How much better it is to be a Royal bastard than a philosopher in England at present. But a mighty change is at hand." Popular pressure mounted swiftly. In Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, the working-class, inspired by Babbage's ideals of union ownership and mutual co-operatives, took to the streets in massive torchlight parades. The Industrial Radical Party, disdaining violence, called for moral suasion and a peaceful mass-campaign for redress of legitimate grievances. But the Government remained stubborn, and events took an ugly turn. In a rising crescendo of random outrage, violent rural "Swing bands" and proletarian Luddites attacked aristocratic homes and capitalist factories alike. Mobs in London shattered the windows in the house of the Duke of Wellington and other Tory peers, and, cobblestones in hand, lay sullenly in wait for the passing carriages of the elite. The Anglican bishops, who had voted against Reform in the Lords, were burned in effigy. Ultra-radical conspirators, fired to frenzy by the furious polemics of the atheist R B. Shelley, attacked and looted Establishment churches. |
| 2146 |
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. |
| 2147 |
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. 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. |
| 2148 |
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. |
| 2149 |
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 ... We, I say, but it was I, I who sacrificed my virtue, my faith, my salvation, all burnt to black ashes on the altar of your ambition. For all your bold trumpery talk of Corsairs and Bonaparte, you had no iron in you; you wept even at the thought of hanging miserable Luddites, and could not bear to chain away vicious mad Shelley, until I forced your hand. And when reports came from our bureaux, hinting, requesting, then demanding the right to eliminate the enemies of England, it was I who read them, I who covertly weighed lives in the balance, and I who signed your name, while you ate and drank and joked with those men you called your friends. And now these fools who bury you will brush me aside as if I were nothing, had accomplished nothing, simply because you are gone. You, their sounding-brass, their idol of paint and dyed hair. |
| 2150 |
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? — the armatures, what hold the beast upright. And his head a bloody min, sir — no longer as you'd call a head at all. Dangling there by his ankles from this manner of harness, and I saw the ropes and pulleys going straight up, taut, into the dark of the great dome, and the sight struck me so, sir, that it wasn't till I'd sounded the alarm that I saw the Leviathan's head was missing too. Yes, sir, I do believe that to be the case — the manner in which it was done. He was lowered down from the dome and did the job up there, in the dark, and paused when he'd hear my footsteps, and then continue his work. The work of some hours, for they'd had to rig their lines and pulleys. Likely I passed beneath them several times, on my watch. And when he'd got it free, the head, sir, someone else winched it up, and took it away through that panel they'd unbolted. But something must have given, sir, or slipped, for down he came, square into the floor, best Florentine marble that is. We found where his brains had been dashed, sir, though I'd as soon forget it. And I did then recall a sound, sir, likely of him striking, but no outcry. |
| 2151 |
Me brother Albert, he used to get some bricks and cover them with bird-lime, and set 'em by the stables to catch sparrows. And he'd pluck them, clean them, him and me together, I helped him. Our Albert would make a fire and get the oven hot and we used to cook those little sparrows in Mother's roasting-tin, with a big lump of dripping in it. And me mother'd make a big jug of tea for us and we'd have what we'd call a tea-party, eating those sparrows. Me father ... he went to all the shopkeepers on Chatwin Road and got scrap-meat. Bones, you know, lamb-bones, all sorts of things, dried peas, beans, and left-over carrots and turnips and ... he got some oatmeal promised him and a baker gave him stale bread ... Me father had a big iron boiler ... that he used to make gruel for the horses and he cleaned it all out and they made soup in this big horse-boiler. I can remember seeing the poor people come. They came twice a week, that winter. They had to bring their own jugs. They was that hungry, before the Rads. And Eddie, did you ever hear tell of the Irish Famine, in the forties? I thought not. But the 'later crop failed then, two, three years in a row, and it looked mighty dire for the Irish. But the Rads, they wouldn't stand for that, and declared an emergency, and mobilized the nation. Lord Byron made a fine speech, in all the papers ... I signed aboard one of the relief-boats, out of Bristol. All day, all night, we'd load big gantry-crates, with bills-of-lading from the London Engines; trains come day and night from all over England, with every kind of food. |
| 2152 |
"God Bless Lord Babbage," the poor Irish would cry to us, with tears in their eyes, "Three cheers for England and the Rad Lords." They have long memories, our own loyal Irish ... they don't never forget a kindness. ======== John Keats in Half-Moon Street I was ushered by a man-servant into Mr. Oliphant's study. Mr. Oliphant greeted me cordially, and noted that my telegram had mentioned my association with Dr. Mallory. I told Mr. Oliphant that it had been my pleasure to accompany Dr. Mallory's triumphant lecture on the Brontosaurus with a highly advanced kinotropic program. The Monthly Review of the Steam Intellect Society had run a most gratifying review of my efforts, and I offered Mr. Oliphant a copy of the magazine. He glanced within it, but it seemed that his grasp of the intricacies of clacking was amateurish at best, for his reaction was one of polite puzzlement. I then informed him that Dr. Mallory had led me to his door. In one of our private conversations, the great savant had seen fit to tell me of Mr. Oliphant's daring proposal — to employ the Engines of the police in the scientific exploration of previously hidden patterns underlying the movements and occupations of the metropolitan population. My admiration for this bold scheme had brought me directly to Mr. Oliphant, and I stated my willingness to assist in the implementation of that vision. He interrupted me, then, in a markedly distracted manner. We are numbered, he declared, each of us, by an all-seeing eye; our minutes, too, are numbered, and each hair upon our heads. |
| 2153 |
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. |
| 2154 |
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. |
| 2155 |
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. |
| 2156 |
This was in the time of Aleman, when the mordida was king, and a pyramid of bribes reached from the cop on the beat up to the Presidente. Mexico City was also the murder capital of the world, with the highest per-capita homicide rate. I remember newspaper stories every day, like these: A campesino is in from the country, waiting for a bus: linen pants, sandals made from a tire, a wide sombrero, a machete at his belt. Another man is also waiting, dressed in a suit, looking at his wrist watch, muttering angrily. The campesino whips out his machete and cuts the man's head clean off. He later told police: "He was giving me looks muy feo and finally I could not contain myself." Obviously the man was annoyed because the bus was late, and was looking down the road for the bus, when the campesino misinterpreted his action, and the next thing a head rolls in the gutter, grimacing horribly and showing gold teeth. Two campesinos are sitting disconsolate by the roadside. They have no money for breakfast. But look: a boy leading several goats. One campesino picks up a rock and bashes the boy's brains out. They take the goats to the nearest village and sell them. They are eating breakfast when they are apprehended by the police. A man lives in a little house. A stranger asks him how to find the road for Ayahuasca. "Ah, this way, senor." He is leading the man around and around: "The road is right here." Suddenly he realizes he hasn't any idea where the road is, and why should he be bothered? |
| 2157 |
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. In Queer he is disintegrated, desperately in need of contact, completely unsure of himself and of his purpose. |
| 2158 |
The difference of course is simple: Lee on junk is covered, protected and also severely limited. Not only does junk short-circuit the sex drive, it also blunts emotional reactions to the vanishing point, depending on the dosage. Looking back over the action of Queer, that hallucinated month of acute withdrawal takes on a hellish glow of menace and evil drifting out of neon-lit cocktail bars, the ugly violence, the .45 always just under the surface. On junk I was insulated, didn't drink, didn't go out much, just shot up and waited for the next shot. When the cover is removed, everything that has been held in check by junk spills out. The withdrawing addict is subject to the emotional excesses of a child or an adolescent, regardless of his actual age. And the sex drive returns in full force. Men of sixty experience wet dreams and spontaneous orgasms (an extremely unpleasant experience, agacant as the French say, putting the teeth on edge). Unless the reader keeps this in mind, the metamorphosis of Lee's character will appear as inexplicable or psychotic. Also bear in mind that the withdrawal syndrome is self-limiting, lasting no more than a month. And Lee has a phase of excessive drinking, which exacerbates all the worst and most dangerous aspects of the withdrawal sickness: reckless, unseemly, outrageous, maudlin — in a word, appalling — behavior. After withdrawal, the organism readjusts and stabilizes at a pre-junk level. In the narrative, this stabilization is finally reached during the South American trip. |
| 2159 |
No junk is available, nor any other drug, after the paregoric of Panama. Lee's drinking has dwindled to several good stiff ones at sundown. Not so different from the Lee of the later Yage Letters, except for the phantom presence of Allerton. So I had written Junky, and the motivation for that was comparatively simple: to put down in the most accurate and simple terms my experiences as an addict. I was hoping for publication, money, recognition. Kerouac had published The Town and the City at the time I started writing Junky. I remember writing in a letter to him, when his book was published, that money and fame were now assured. As you can see, I knew nothing about the writing business at the time. My motivations to write Queer were more complex, and are not clear to me at the present time. Why should I wish to chronicle so carefully these extremely painful and unpleasant and lacerating memories? While it was I who wrote Junky, I feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation. As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage when a weakened virus has created alerted antibodies. So I achieved some immunity from further perilous ventures along these lines by writing my experience down. At the beginning of the Queer manuscript fragment, having returned from the insulation of junk to the land of the living like a frantic inept Lazarus, Lee seems determined to score, in the sexual sense of the word. |
| 2160 |
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. 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 ... |
| 2161 |
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. |
| 2162 |
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. (As if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer.) I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded. |
| 2163 |
"Yo quiero un sandwich," he said, smiling at the waiter. "? Quel sandwiches tiene?" "What do you want?" Lee asked, annoyed at the interruption. "I don't know exactly," said Moor, looking through the menu. "I wonder if they could make a melted cheese sandwich on toasted whole-wheat bread?" Moor turned back to the waiter, with a smile that was intended to be boyish. Lee closed his eyes as Moor launched an attempt to convey the concept of melted cheese on wholewheat toast. Moor was being charmingly helpless with his inadequate Spanish. He was putting down a little-boy-in-a-foreign-country routine. Moor smiled into an inner mirror, a smile without a trace of warmth, but it was not a cold smile: it was the meaningless smile of senile decay, the smile that goes with false teeth, the smile of a man grown old and stir-simple in the solitary confinement of exclusive self-love. Moor was a thin young man with blond hair that was habitually somewhat long. He had pale blue eyes and very white skin. There were dark patches under his eyes and two deep lines around the mouth. He looked like a child, and at the same time like a prematurely aged man. His face showed the ravages of the death process, the inroads of decay in flesh cut off from the living charge of contact. Moor was motivated, literally kept alive and moving, by hate, but there was no passion or violence in his hate. Moor's hate was a slow, steady push, weak but infinitely persistent, waiting to take advantage of any weakness in another. |
| 2164 |
Louie has decided all that sort of thing is very wrong and he tells me that I am going to burn in hell, but he is going to heaven." "Serious?" "Oh, yes. Well, Maurice is as queer as I am." Joe belched. "Excuse me. If not queerer. But he won't accept it. I think stealing my typewriter is a way he takes to demonstrate to me and to himself that he is just in it for all he can get. As a matter of fact, he's so queer I've lost interest in him. Not completely though. When I see the little bastard I'll most likely invite him back to my apartment, instead of beating the shit out of him like I should." Lee tipped his chair back against the wall and looked around the room. Someone was writing a letter at the next table. If he had overheard the conversation, he gave no sign. The proprietor was reading the bullfight section of the paper, spread out on the counter in front of him. A silence peculiar to Mexico seeped into the room, a vibrating, soundless hum. Joe finished his beer, wiped his mouth with the hack of his hand, and stared at the wall with watery, bloodshot blue eyes. The silence seeped into Lee's body, and his face went slack and blank. The effect was curiously spectral, as though you could see through his face. The face was ravaged and vicious and old, but the clear, green eyes were dreamy and innocent. His light-brown hair was extremely fine and would not stay combed. Generally it fell down across his forehead, and on occasion brushed the food he was eating or got in his drink. |
| 2165 |
Moor talked with boyish eagerness. "I think I need an operation." Lee said he really had to go. Lee turned down Coahuila, walking with one foot falling directly in front of the other, always fast and purposeful, as if he were leaving the scene of a holdup. He passed a group in expatriate uniform: red-checked shirt outside the belt, blue jeans and beard, and another group of young men in conventional, if shabby, clothes. Among these Lee recognized a boy named Eugene Allerton. Allerton was tall and very thin, with high cheekbones, a small, bright-red mouth, and amber-colored eyes that took on a faint violet flush when he was drunk. His gold-brown hair was differentially bleached by the sun like a sloppy dyeing job. He had straight, black eyebrows and black eyelashes. An equivocal face, very young, clean-cut and boyish, at the same time conveying an impression of makeup, delicate and exotic and Oriental. Allerton was never completely neat or clean, but you did not think of him as being dirty. He was simply careless and lazy to the point of appearing, at times, only half awake. Often he did not hear what someone said a foot from his ear. "Pellagra, I expect," thought Lee sourly. He nodded to Allerton and smiled. Allerton nodded, as if surprised, and did not smile. Lee walked on, a little depressed. "Perhaps I can accomplish something in that direction. Well, a ver... ." He froze in front of a restaurant like a bird dog: "Hungry ... quicker to eat here than buy something and cook it." When Lee was hungry, when he wanted a drink or a shot of morphine, delay was unbearable. |
| 2166 |
He went in, ordered steak a la Mexicana and a glass of milk, and waited with his mouth watering for food. A young man with a round face and a loose mouth came into the restaurant. Lee said, "Hello, Horace," in a clear voice. Horace nodded without speaking and sat down as far from Lee as he could get in the small restaurant. Lee smiled. His food arrived and he ate quickly, like an animal, cramming bread and steak into his mouth and washing it down with gulps of milk. He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. "Un cafe solo," he called to the waitress as she walked by, carrying a pineapple soda to two young Mexicans in double-breasted pinstripe suits. One of the Mexicans had moist brown pop-eyes and a scraggly moustache of greasy black hairs. He looked pointedly at Lee, and Lee looked away. "Careful," he thought, "or he will be over here asking me how I like Mexico." He dropped his half-smoked cigarette into half an inch of cold coffee, walked over to the counter, paid the bill, and was out of the restaurant before the Mexican could formulate an opening sentence. When Lee decided to leave some place, his departure was abrupt. The Ship Ahoy had a few phony hurricane lamps by way of a nautical atmosphere. Two small rooms with tables, the bar in one room, and four high, precarious stools. The place was always dimly lit and sinister-looking. The patrons were tolerant, but in no way bohemian. The bearded set never frequented the Ship Ahoy. The place existed on borrowed time, without a liquor license, under many changes of management. |
| 2167 |
At this time it was run by an American named Tom Weston and an American-born Mexican. Lee walked directly to the bar and ordered a drink. He drank it and ordered a second one before looking around the room to see if Allerton was there. Allerton was alone at a table, tipped back in a chair with one leg crossed over the other, holding a bottle of beer on his knee. He nodded to Lee. Lee tried to achieve a greeting at once friendly and casual, designed to show interest without pushing their short acquaintance. The result was ghastly. As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless. Allerton was appalled. "Perhaps he has some sort of tic," he thought. He decided to remove himself from contact with Lee before the man did something even more distasteful. The effect was like a broken connection. Allerton was not cold or hostile; Lee simply wasn't there so far as he was concerned. Lee looked at him helplessly for a moment, then turned back to the bar, defeated and shaken. Lee finished his second drink. When he looked around again, Allerton was playing chess with Mary, an American girl with dyed red hair and carefully applied makeup, who had come into the bar in the meantime. "Why waste time here?" Lee thought. He paid for the two drinks and walked out. |
| 2168 |
Lee left his apartment for the Ship Ahoy just before five. Allerton was sitting at the bar. Lee sat down and ordered a drink, then turned to Allerton with a casual greeting, as though they were on familiar and friendly terms. Allerton returned the greeting automatically before he realized that Lee had somehow established himself on a familiar basis, whereas he had previously decided to have as little to do with Lee as possible. Allerton had a talent for ignoring people, but he was not competent at dislodging someone from a position already occupied. Lee began talking — casual, unpretentiously intelligent, dryly humorous. Slowly he dispelled Allerton's impression that he was a peculiar and undesirable character. When Mary arrived, Lee greeted her with a tipsy old-world gallantry and, excusing himself, left them to a game of chess. "Who is he?" asked Mary when Lee had gone outside. "I have no idea," said Allerton. Had he ever met Lee? He could not be sure. Formal introductions were not expected among the G. I. students. Was Lee a student? Allerton had never seen him at the school. There was nothing unusual in talking to someone you didn't know, but Lee put Allerton on guard. The man was somehow familiar to him. When Lee talked, he seemed to mean more than what he said. A special emphasis to a word or a greeting hinted at a period of familiarity in some other time and place. As though Lee were saying, "You know what I mean. You remember." Allerton shrugged irritably and began arranging the chess pieces on the board. |
| 2169 |
He looked like a sullen child unable to locate the source of his ill temper. After a few minutes of play his customary serenity returned, and he began humming. It was after midnight when Lee returned to the Ship Ahoy. Drunks seethed around the bar, talking as if everyone else were stone deaf. Allerton stood on the edge of this group, apparently unable to make himself heard. He greeted Lee warmly, pushed in to the bar, and emerged with two rum Cokes. "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. |
| 2170 |
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 ... |
| 2171 |
I thought of the painted, simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore night club. Could it be possible that I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze, like a man with a light concussion — just a minute, Doctor Kildare, this isn't your script. I might well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought, to die a man than live on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen — Bobo, we called her — who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink... . "Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre's Hispano-Suiza when his falling piles blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe-skin upholstery. Even the eyes and the brain went, with a horrible shlupping sound. The Duc says he will carry that ghastly shlup with him to his mausoleum... . "Then I knew the meaning of loneliness. But Bobo's words came back to me from the tomb, the sibilants cracking gently. 'No one is ever really alone. You are part of everything alive.' The difficulty is to convince someone else he is really part of you, so what the hell? Us parts ought to work together. |
| 2172 |
He loosened Allerton's belt and unbuttoned his trousers. Allerton arched his body, and Lee pulled the trousers and drawers off. He dropped his own trousers and shorts and lay down beside him. Allerton responded without hostility or disgust, but in his eyes Lee saw a curious detachment, the impersonal calm of an animal or a child. Later, when they lay side by side smoking, Lee said, "Oh, by the way, you said you had a camera in pawn you were about to lose?" It occurred to Lee that to bring the matter up at this time was not tactful, but he decided the other was not the type to take offense. "Yes. In for four hundred pesos. The ticket runs out next Wednesday." "Well, let's go down tomorrow and get it out." Allerton raised one bare shoulder off the sheet. "O. K.,"he said. Friday night Allerton went to work. He was taking his roommate's place proofreading for an English newspaper. Saturday night Lee met Allerton in the Cuba, a bar with an interior like the set for a surrealist ballet. The walls were covered with murals depicting underwater scenes. Mermaids and mermen in elaborate arrangements with huge goldfish stared at the customers with fixed, identical expressions of pathic dismay. Even the fish were invested with an air of ineffectual alarm. The effect was disquieting, as though these androgynous beings were frightened by something behind or to one side of the customers, who were made uneasy by this inferred presence. Most of them took their business someplace else. Allerton was somewhat sullen, and Lee felt depressed and ill at ease until he had put down two martinis. |
| 2173 |
Lee liked the place because it was never crowded. At Pat's he ordered a double dry martini. Allerton had rum and Coke. Lee began talking about telepathy. "I know telepathy to be a fact, since I have experienced it myself. I have no interest to prove it, or, in fact, to prove anything to anybody. What interests me is, how can I use it? In South America at the headwaters of the Amazon grows a plant called Yage that is supposed to increase telepathic sensitivity. Medicine men use it in their work. A Colombian scientist, whose name escapes me, isolated from Yage a drug he called Telepathine. I read all this in a magazine article. "Later I see another article — the Russians are using Yage in experiments on slave labor. It seems they want to induce states of automatic obedience and ultimately, of course, thought control. The basic con. No build-up, no spiel, no routine, just move in on someone's psyche and give orders. I have a theory the Mayan priests developed a form of one-way telepathy to con the peasants into doing all the work. The deal is certain to backfire eventually, because telepathy is not of its nature a one-way setup, nor a setup of sender and receiver at all. "By now the U. S. is experimenting with Yage, unless they are dumber even than I think. Yage may be a means to usable knowledge of telepathy. Anything that can be accomplished chemically can be accomplished in other ways." Lee saw that Allerton was not especially interested, and dropped the subject. "Did you read about the old Jew who tried to smuggle out ten pounds of gold sewed in his overcoat?" "No. |
| 2174 |
What about it?" "Well, this old Jew was nailed at the airport on his way to Cuba. I hear they got like a mine finder out at the airport rings a bell if anybody passes the gate with an outlandish quantity of metal on his person. So it says in the papers, after they give this Jew a shake and find the gold, a large number of Jewish-looking foreigners were seen looking into the airport window in a state of excitement. 'Oy, gefilte fish! They are putting the snatch on Abe!' Back in Roman times the Jews rose up — in Jerusalem I think it was — and killed fifty thousand Romans. The she-Jews — that is, the young Jewish ladies, I must be careful not to lay myself open to a charge of anti-Semitism — done strip teases with Roman intestines. "Speaking of intestines, did I ever tell you about my friend Reggie? One of the unsung heroes of British Intelligence. Lost his ass and ten feet of lower intestine in the service. Lived for years disguised as an Arab boy known only as 'Number 69' at headquarters. That was wishful thinking, though, because the Arabs are strictly one way. Well, a rare Oriental disease set in, and poor Reggie lost the bulk of his tripes. For God and country, what? He didn't want any speeches, any medals, just to know that he had served, that was enough. Think of those patient years, waiting for another piece of the jigsaw puzzle to fall into place. "You never hear of operators like Reggie, but it is their information, gathered in pain and danger, that gives some front-line general the plan for a brilliant counter-offensive and covers his chest with medals. |
| 2175 |
Towards morning he turned on his back and stretched out. The sobs stopped, and his face relaxed in the morning light. Lee woke up around noon, and sat for a long time on the edge of the bed with one shoe dangling from his hand. He dabbed water on his eyes, put on his coat, and went out. Lee went down to the Zocalo and wandered around for several hours. His mouth was dry. He went into a Chinese restaurant, sat down in a booth and ordered a Coke. Misery spread through his body, now that he was sitting down with no motion to distract him. "What happened?" he wondered. He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee's affection irritated him. Like many people who have nothing to do, he was resentful of any claims on his time. He had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure. Allerton resented Lee's action in paying to recover the camera. He felt he was "being sucked in on a phony deal," and that an obligation he did not want had been thrust upon him. Allerton did not recognize friends who made six-hundred-peso gifts, nor could he feel comfortable exploiting Lee. He made no attempt to clarify the situation. He did not want to see the contradiction involved in resenting a favor which he accepted. Lee found that he could tune in on Allerton's viewpoint, though the process caused him pain, since it involved seeing the extent of Allerton's indifference. |
| 2176 |
"I liked him and I wanted him to like me," Lee thought. "I wasn't trying to buy anything." "I have to leave town," he decided. "Go somewhere. Panama, South America." He went down to the station to find out when the next train left for Veracruz. There was a train that night, but he did not buy a ticket. A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving alone in another country, far away from Allerton. Lee took a cab to the Ship Ahoy. Allerton was not there, and Lee sat at the bar for three hours, drinking. Finally Allerton looked in the door, waved to Lee vaguely, and went upstairs with Mary. Lee knew they had probably gone to the owner's apartment, where they often ate dinner. 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. |
| 2177 |
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. |
| 2178 |
In 1922 he was rid out of Prague on a rail. The next time I saw Tetrazzini was in the Upper Ubangi. A complete wreck. Peddling unlicensed condoms. That was the year of the rinderpest, when everything died, even the hyenas." Lee paused. The routine was coming to him like dictation. He did not know what he was going to say next, but he suspected the monologue was about to get dirty. He looked at Mary. She was exchanging significant glances with Allerton. "Some sort of lover code," Lee decided. "She is telling him they have to go now." Allerton got up, saying he had to have a haircut before going to work. Mary and Allerton left. Lee was alone in the bar. The monologue continued. "I was working as Aide-de-camp under General Von Klutch. Exacting. A hard man to satisfy. I gave up trying after the first week. We had a saying around the wardroom: 'Never expose your flank to old Klutchy.' Well, I couldn't take Klutchy another night, so I assembled a modest caravan and hit the trail with Abdul, the local Adonis. Ten miles out of Tanhajaro, Abdul came down with the rinderpest and I had to leave him there to die. Hated to do it, but there was no other way. Lost his looks completely, you understand. "At the headwaters of the Zambesi, I ran into an old Dutch trader. After considerable haggling I gave him a keg of paregoric for a boy, half Effendi and half Lulu. I figured the boy would get me as far as Timbuktu, maybe all the way to Dakar. But the Lulu-Effendi was showing signs of wear even before I hit Timbuktu, and I decided to trade him in on a straight Bedouin model. |
| 2179 |
Now that Lee could spend days and nights with the object of his attentions, he felt relieved of the gnawing emptiness and fear. And Allerton was a good travelling companion, sensible and calm. They flew from Panama to Quito, in a tiny plane which had to struggle to climb above an overcast. The steward plugged in the oxygen. Lee sniffed the oxygen hose. "It's cut!" he said in disgust. They drove into Quito in a windy, cold twilight. The hotel looked a hundred years old. The room had a high ceiling with black beams and white piaster walls. They sat on the beds, shivering. Lee was a little junk sick. They walked around the main square. Lee hit a drugstore — no paregoric without a script. A cold wind from the high mountains blew rubbish through the dirty streets. The people walked by in gloomy silence. Many had blankets wrapped around their faces. A row of hideous old hags, huddled in dirty blankets that looked like old burlap sacks, were ranged along the walls of a church. "Now, son, I want you to know I am different from other citizens you might run into. Some people will give you the women-are-no-good routine. I'm not like that. You just pick yourself one of these senoritas and take her right hack to the hotel with you." Allerton looked at him. "I think I will get laid tonight," he said. "Sure," Lee said. "Go right ahead. They don't have much pulchritude in this dump, but that hadn't oughta deter you young fellers. Was it Frank Harris said he never saw an ugly woman till he was thirty? |
| 2180 |
The town looked old, with limestone streets and dirty saloons crowded with sailors and dockworkers. A shoeshine boy asked Lee if he wanted a "nice girl." Lee looked at the boy and said in English, "No, and I don't want you either." He bought a bottle of cognac from a Turkish trader. The store had everything: ship stores, hardware, guns, food, liquor. Lee priced the guns: three hundred dollars for a 30-30 lever-action Winchester carbine that sold for seventy-two dollars in the States. The Turk said duty was high on guns. That was the reason for this price. Lee walked back along the beach. The houses were all split bamboo on wood frame, the four posts set directly in the ground. The simplest type of house construction: you set four heavy posts deep in the ground and nail the house to the posts. The houses were built about six feet off the ground. The streets were mud. Thousands of vultures roosted on the houses and walked around the streets, pecking at offal. Lee kicked at a vulture, and the bird flapped away with an indignant squawk. Lee passed a bar, a large building built directly on the ground, and decided to go in for a drink. The split-bamboo walls shook with noise. Two middle-aged wiry little men were doing an obscene mambo routine opposite each other, their leathery faces creased in toothless smiles. The waiter came up and smiled at Lee. He didn't have any front teeth either. Lee sat down on a short wood bench and ordered a cognac. A boy of sixteen or so came over and sat down with Lee and smiled an open, friendly smile. |
| 2181 |
A tree that fans out like an umbrella, as wide as it is tall, shades the stone benches. The people do a great deal of sitting. One day Lee got up early and went to the market. The place was crowded. A curiously mixed populace: Negro, Chinese, Indian, European, Arab, characters difficult to classify. Lee saw some beautiful boys of mixed Chinese and Negro stock, slender and graceful with beautiful white teeth. 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. |
| 2182 |
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. |
| 2183 |
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. 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. |
| 2184 |
Swinging in hammocks, sipping brandy, and watching the jungle slide by. Springs, moss, beautiful clear streams and trees up to two hundred feet high. Lee and Allerton were silent as the boat powered upriver, penetrating the jungle stillness with its lawnmower whine. From Babahoya they took a bus over the Andes to Ambato, a cold, jolting fourteen-hour ride. They stopped for a snack of chick-peas at a hut at the top of the mountain pass, far above the tree line. A few young native men in gray felt hats ate their chickpeas in sullen resignation. Several guinea pigs were squeaking and scurrying around on the dirt floor of the hut. Their cries reminded Lee of the guinea pig he owned as a child in the Fairmont Hotel in St. Louis, when the family was waiting to move into their new house on Price Road. He remembered the way the pig shrieked, and the stink of its cage. They passed the snow-covered peak of Chimborazo, cold in the moonlight and the constant wind of the high Andes. The view from the high mountain pass seemed from another, larger planet than Earth. Lee and Allerton huddled together under a blanket, drinking brandy, the smell of wood smoke in their nostrils. They were both wearing Army-surplus jackets, zipped up over sweatshirts to keep out the cold and wind. Allerton seemed insubstantial as a phantom; Lee could almost see through him, to the empty phantom bus outside. From Ambato to Puyo, along the edge of a gorge a thousand feet deep. There were waterfalls and forests and streams running down over the roadway, as they descended into the lush green valley. |
| 2185 |
It's alive, isn't it?" Lee pushed through the undergrowth beside the trail. He tripped on a vine and fell into a saw-toothed plant. When he tried to get up, a hundred sharp points caught his clothes and stuck into his flesh. "Gene!" he called. "Help me! I been seized by a man-eating plant. Gene, cut me free with the machete!" They did not see a living animal in the jungle. Cotter was supposedly trying to find a way to extract curare from the arrow poison the Indians used. He told Lee there were yellow crows to be found in the region, and yellow catfish with extremely poisonous spines. His wife had gotten spined, and Cotter had to administer morphine for the intense pain. He was a medical doctor. Lee was struck by the story of the Monkey Woman: a brother and sister had come down to this part of Ecuador, to live the simple healthful life on roots and berries and nuts and palm hearts. Two years later a search-party had found them, hobbling along on improvised crutches, toothless and suffering from half-healed fractures. It seems there was no calcium in the area. Chickens couldn't lay eggs, there was nothing to form the shell. Cows gave milk, but it was watery and translucent, with no calcium in it. The brother went back to civilization and steaks, but the Monkey Woman was still there. She earned her monicker by watching what monkeys ate: anything a monkey eats, she can eat, anybody can eat. It's a handy thing to know, if you get lost in the jungle. Also handy to bring along some calcium tablets. |
| 2186 |
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. |
| 2187 |
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. He looked up from his washing like an animal scenting danger. I caught him when the five o'clock whistle blew. An old photographer's trick: wait for a distraction. I went into Chico's Bar for a rum Coke. I never liked this place, nor any other bar in Panama, but it used to be endurable and had some good numbers on the juke box. |
| 2188 |
Every now and then some popcorn citizen walks in the office and tries to pay Friendly Finance with this shit." He let one arm swing out, palm up, over the side of the chair. Slowly he opened a thin brown hand, with purple-blue fingertips, to reveal a roll of yellow thousand-dollar bills. The hand turned over, palm down, and fell back against the chair. His eyes closed. Suddenly his head dropped to one side and his tongue fell out. The bills dropped from his hand, one after the other, and lay there crumpled on the red tile floor. A gust of warm spring wind blew dirty pink curtains into the room. The bills rustled across the room and settled at Allerton's feet. Imperceptibly the Skip Tracer straightened up, and a slit of light went on behind the eyelids. "Keep that in case you're caught short, Kid," he said. "You know how it is in these spic hotels. You gotta carry your own paper." The Skip Tracer leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. Suddenly he was standing up, as if tilted out of the chair, and in the same upward movement he pushed the hat back from his eyes with one finger. He walked to the door and turned, with his right hand on the knob. He polished the nails of his left hand on the lapel of his worn glen plaid suit. The suit gave out an odor of mold when he moved. There was mildew under the lapels and in the trouser cuffs. He looked at his nails. "Oh, uh ... about your, uh ... account. I'll be around soon. That is, within the next few. ..." The Skip Tracer's voice was muffled. |
| 2189 |
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. It did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an undisturbed room. His wife came pattering up the stairs. |
| 2190 |
"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. Consciousness went — not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep. On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement — and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th. The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had' remembered them, all completely unbelievable. |
| 2191 |
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. |
| 2192 |
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. 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. |
| 2193 |
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. |
| 2194 |
It was no dream, though. He was certain of that in his heart and equally certain that nothing in Tylerton could help him now. It had to be the other direction. It took him a quarter of an hour to find a way, but he found it — skulking through the corridors, dodging the suspicion of footsteps, knowing for certain that his hiding was in vain, for Dorchin was undoubtedly aware of every move he made. But no one stopped him, and he found another door. It was a simple enough door from the inside. But when he opened it and stepped out, it was like nothing he had ever seen. First there was light — brilliant, incredible, blinding light. Burckhardt blinked upward, unbelieving and afraid. He was standing on a ledge of smooth, finished metal. Not a dozen yards from his feet, the ledge dropped sharply away; he hardly dared approach the brink, but even from where he stood he could see no bottom to the chasm before him. And the gulf extended out of sight into the glare on either side of him. No wonder Dorchin could so easily give him his freedom! From the factory there was nowhere to go. But how incredible this fantastic gulf, how impossible the hundred white and blinding suns that hung above! A voice by his side said inquiringly, "Burckhardt?" And thunder rolled the name, mutteringly soft, back and forth in the abyss before him. Burckhardt wet his lips. "Y-yes?" he croaked. "This is Dorchin. Not a robot this time, but Dorchin in the flesh, talking to you on a hand mike. Now you have seen, Burckhardt. |
| 2195 |
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. |
| 2196 |
In one respect, my experiment is already successful. In the eyes of Fitz, my human boy, and Mac, my inhuman invention, they are truly brothers. Fitz, at the age of five, is a sturdy, red-cheeked boy with dark eyes and a smile that easily becomes a laugh. There is a great deal of warmth in him; he is open and frank with people; and with his metallic brother. As for Mac, of course, he is the same as ever; the same polished silvery body, encased in the simple tunic I have made to cover his metallic nakedness. They are almost the same height, but Fitz is a bit taller, and growing each day. Before long, it will be time to reconstruct my robot child's body again. I have presented my first full-length paper on the experiment to the National Robotics Society. I must admit that I eagerly await their acceptance and publication. Sept. 3, 2003. This morning, I opened my door upon a matronly woman whose pleasantries concealed an icy attitude towards myself and my family. She introduced herself as Mrs. Margotson, chairwoman of the local school board. It was some time before Mrs. Margotson revealed the true purpose of her visit, which was to expose the board's reluctance to accept the enrollment of Mac, my robot child. "You understand, of course," she told me, "that there is no question concerning your son. But the idea of this machine entering our school is perfectly absurd." I had written a lengthy letter which explained my experiment in detail, but it had made little impression upon the authorities. |
| 2197 |
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. |
| 2198 |
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. 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. |
| 2199 |
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. |
| 2200 |
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. 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! |
| 2201 |
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. |
| 2202 |
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. 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. |
| 2203 |
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. |
| 2204 |
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. 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. |
| 2205 |
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. |
| 2206 |
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. This had been his labor for the last two months. If the world would not accept him as human, then he would be truly a robot, the ancient robot of human nightmares, the destroying metal god who shows no mercy to human flesh. I try to strike the pictures from my mind, but they are engraved there. I can see the terror on the faces of the scientists who came from the Robotics Society to claim their prize — I can hear their shrieks as he crushed the life from their bodies. I can see him stalking towards the town with his grim intent clear in every movement — to destroy all, everything, heedlessly. I can see him attacking, smashing, killing — And then, I see the horror end. I see Captain Ormandy, moving swiftly with all the cunning of his strong young body, to fasten the cable about Mac's towering legs. I see him running headlong to the cave where the deadly black box had been planted. I see his hands on the plunger, and the mighty fire that springs from earth to sky, carrying Mac's destruction in its flames... Fitz was the last to leave me here tonight. |
| 2207 |
But only one biological human in twenty bothered to vote any more. There were still many areas of creativity and skill in which mechano-cryo citizens were no better than organics, but a depressing conviction weighed heavily upon the old type. They knew they had no place in the future. The stars belonged to the other varieties, not to them. "I've got to go." Gently, Jason peeled free of Elaine's arms. He took her face in his hands and kissed her one last time, then picked up his small travel bag and helmet. Stepping out into the corridor, he did not look back to see the tears that he knew were there, laying soft, saltwater history down her face. 2. The quarters for biological human beings lay in the Old Wheel... a part of the research station that had grown ever shabbier as old style scientists and technicians lost their places to models better suited to the harsh environment of space. Once, back in the days when mechano-cryo citizens were rare, the Old Wheel had been the center of excited activity here beyond the orbit of Neptune. The first starships had been constructed by clouds of space-suited humans, like tethered bees swarming over mammoth hives. Giant "slowboats," restricted to speeds far below that of light, had ventured forth from here, into the interstellar night. That had been long ago, when organic people had still been important. But even then there were those who had foreseen what was to come. Nowhere were the changes of the last century more apparent than here at Project Lightprobe. |
| 2208 |
The old type now only served in support roles, few contributing directly to the investigations... perhaps the most important in human history. Jason's vac-sled was stored in the Old Wheel's north hub airlock. Both sled and suit checked out well, but the creaking outer doors stuck halfway open when he tried to leave. He had to leap over with a spanner and pound the great hinges several times to get them unfrozen. The airlock finally opened in fits and starts. Frowning, he remounted the sled and took off again. The Old Wheel gets only scraps for maintenance, he thought glumly. Soon there'll be an accident, and the Utilitarians will use it as an excuse to ban organic humans from every research station in the solar system. The Old Wheel fell behind as short puffs of gas sent his sled toward the heart of the research complex. For a long time he seemed to ride the slowly rotating wheel's shadow, eclipsing the dim glow of the distant sun. From here, Earth-home was an invisible speck. Few ever focused telescopes on the old world. Everyone knew that the future wasn't back there but out here and beyond, with the innumerable stars covering the sky. Gliding slowly across the gulf between the Old Wheel and the Complex, Jason had plenty of time to think. Back when the old slowboats had set forth from here to explore the nearest systems, it had soon became apparent that only mechanicals and cyborgs were suited for interstellar voyages. Asteroid-sized arks — artificial worldlets capable of carrying entire ecospheres — remained a dream out of science fiction, economically beyond reach. |
| 2209 |
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. |
| 2210 |
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. |
| 2211 |
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. |
| 2212 |
"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. |
| 2213 |
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. |
| 2214 |
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. After that the ships returned... filled with corpses. |
| 2215 |
Jason had only a rough impression of what had happened to the other expeditions, all from unreliable scuttlebutt. The official story was still a state secret. But rumor had it the prior crews had all died of horrible violence. Some said they had apparently gone mad and turned on each other. Others suggested that the fields that drove the ship through that strange realm known as hyperspace twisted the shapes of things within the ship — not sufficiently to affect the cruder machines, but enough to cause the subtle, cryogenic circuitry of the scientists and techs to go haywire. One thing Jason was sure of: anything that could harm mechano-cryos would easily suffice to do in a biological. He was resigned, but all the same determined to do his part. If some small thing he noticed, and commented on into the tape machine, led to a solution — maybe some little thing missed by all the recording devices — then Terran civilization would have the stars. That would be something for his son to remember, even if the true inheritors would be "human" machines. "All right," he told the director. "Take this bunch of gawkers with you and let's go on with it." He strapped himself into the observer's chair, behind the empty pilot's seat. He did not even look up as the technicians and officials filed out and closed the hatch behind them. 4. In the instant after launching, the lightship made an eerie trail across the sky. Cylindrical streaks of pseudo-Cerenkov radiation lingered long after the black globe had disappeared, bolting faster and faster toward its rendezvous with hyperspace. |
| 2216 |
The director turned to the emissary from Earth. "It is gone. Now we wait. One Earth-style month. "I will state, one more time, that I did not approve willingly of the inclusion of the organic form aboard the ship. I object to the inelegant modifications required in order to suit the ship to... to biological functions. Also, old style humans are three times as often subject to irrational impulses than more modem forms. This one may take it into its head to try to change the ship's controls when the fatal stress begins." Unlike the director, the visiting councilor wore a humaniform body, with legs, arms, torso and head. He expressed his opinion with a shrug of his subtly articulated shoulders. "You exaggerate the danger, Director. Don't you think I know that the controls Jason Forbs sees in front of him are only dummies?" The director swiveled quickly to stare at the councilor. How — ? He made himself calm down. It — doesn't — matter. So what if he knew that fact? Even the sole Ethicalist member of the Solar System Council could not make much propaganda of it. It was only a logical precaution to take, under the circumstances. "The designated oral witness engineer should spend his living moments performing his function," the director said coolly. "Recording his subjective impressions as long as he is able. It is the role you commanded we open up for an old style human, using your peremptory authority as a member of the council." The other's humaniform face flexed in a traditional, pseudoorganic smile, archaic in its mimicry of the Old Race. |
| 2217 |
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... |
| 2218 |
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. |
| 2219 |
"Good bye, Councilor." The director felt as if eyes were watching his armored back as he sped down the hallway. Damn the biologicals and their allies! he cursed within. Damn them for making us so insidiously like them... emotional, fallible and, worst of all, uncertain! Wishing the last of the old style were already dust on their dirty, wet little planet, the director hurried away to find himself a long, cold drink. 5. "Six hours and ten minutes into the mission, four minutes since breakover into hyperspace..." Jason breathed into the microphone. "So far so good. I'm a little thirsty, but I believe it's just a typical adrenaline fear reaction. Allowing for expected tension, I feel fine." Jason went on to describe everything he could see, the lights, the controls, the readings on the computer displays, his physical feelings... he went on until his throat felt dry and he found he was repeating himself. "I'm getting up out of the observer's seat, now, to go get a drink." He slipped the recorder strap over his shoulder and unbuckled from the flight chair. There was a feeling of weight, as the techs had told him to expect. About a tenth of a g. It was enough to make walking possible. He flexed his legs and moved about the control room, describing every aspect of the experience. Then he went to the refrigerator and took out a squeeze-tube of lemonade. Jason was frankly surprised to be alive. He knew the previous voyagers had lived several days before their unknown catastrophe struck. |
| 2220 |
He wondered if it had been some sort of Utilitarian gesture not to include viewing ports, or to do the small modifications of scanning electronics necessary to make the cameras work here. There was no obvious scientific reason to "look at" hyperspace, so perhaps the Utilitarian technicians rejected it as an atavistic desire. Jason finished all but the last adjustments, then took a break to fix himself a meal before turning on the cameras. While he ate he made another recorder entry; there was little to report. A little trouble with the cryogen cooling units; they were laboring a bit. But the efficiency loss didn't seem to be anything critical, yet. After dinner he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the screen he had commandeered. "Well, now, let's see what this famous hyperspace looks like," he said. "At least the folks back home will know that it was an old style man who first looked out on..." The screen rippled, then suddenly came alight. Light! Jason had to shield his eyes. Hyperspace was ablaze with light! His thoughts whirled. Could this have something to do with the threat? The unknown, malign force that had killed all the previous crews? Jason cracked an eyelid and lowered his arm slightly. The screen was bright, but now that his eyes had adapted, it wasn't painful to look at. He gazed in fascination on a scene of whirling pink and white, as if the ship was hurtling through an endless sky of bright, pastel clouds. It looked rather pleasant, in fact. This is a threat? |
| 2221 |
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. |
| 2222 |
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. 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. |
| 2223 |
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. |
| 2224 |
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. 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. |
| 2225 |
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. |
| 2226 |
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. There, in that corner, the workshop. Over there, the model railroad layout on which he still worked occasionally. Behind it, his photographic lab. |
| 2227 |
He remembered that the basement hadn't been quite big enough to install the lab and he'd had to knock out a section of the wall and build an addition. That, he recalled, had turned out to be a bigger job than he had bargained for. He got the dolly and went out to the hanger and loaded on the kit and wrestled it into the basement. Then he took a pinch-bar and started to uncrate it. He worked with knowledge and precision, for he had unpacked many kits and knew just how to go about it. He felt a vague apprehension when he lifted out the parts. They were neither the size nor the shape he had expected them to be. Breathing a little heavily from exertion and excitement, he went at the job of unwrapping them. By the second piece, he knew he had no dog. By the fifth, he knew beyond any doubt exactly what he did have. He had a robot — and if he was any judge, one of the best and most expensive models! He sat down on one corner of the crate and took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. Finally, he tore the invoice letter off the crate, where it had been tacked. To Mr. Gordon Knight, it said, one dog kit, paid in full. So far as How-2 Kits, Inc. , was concerned, he had a dog. And the dog was paid for — paid in full, it said. He sat down on the crate again and looked at the robot parts. No one would ever guess. Come inventory time, How-2 Kits would be long one dog and short one robot, but with carloads of dog kit orders filled and thousands of robots sold, it would be impossible to check. |
| 2228 |
"Just think, I can spend all my time at painting!" Through long practice, he knew exactly how to handle this phase of the conversation. He simply detached himself, split himself in two. One part sat and listened and, at intervals, made appropriate responses, while the other part went on thinking about more important matters. Several times, after they had gone to bed, he woke in the night and heard Albert banging away in the basement workshop and was a little surprised until he remembered that a robot worked around the clock, all day, every day. Knight lay there and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling and congratulated himself on having a robot. Just temporarily, to be sure — he would send Albert back in a day or so. There was nothing wrong in enjoying the thing for a little while, was there? The next day, Knight went into the basement to see if Albert needed help, but the robot affably said he didn't. Knight stood around for a while and then left Albert to himself and tried to get interested in a model locomotive he had started a year or two before, but had laid aside to do something else. Somehow, he couldn't work up much enthusiasm over it any more, and he sat there, rather ill at ease, and wondered what was the matter with him. Maybe he needed a new interest. He had often thought he would like to take up puppetry and now might be the time to do it. He got out some catalogues and How-2 magazines and leafed through them, but was able to arouse only mild and transitory interest in archery, mountain-climbing and boat-building. |
| 2229 |
One robot was not supposed to be able to make another robot. And if there were such a robot, How-2 Kits would not let it loose. Yet, here Knight was, with a robot he didn't even own, turning out other robots at a dizzy pace. He wondered if a man needed a license of some sort to manufacture robots. It was something he'd never had occasion to wonder about before, or to ask about, but it seemed reasonable. After all, a robot was not mere machinery, but a piece of pseudo-life. He suspected there might be rules and regulations and such matters as government inspection and he wondered, rather vaguely, just how many laws he might be violating. He looked at Albert, who was still busy, and he was fairly certain Albert would not understand his viewpoint. So he made his way upstairs and went to the recreation room, which he had built as an addition several years before and almost never used, although it was fully equipped with How-2 ping-pong and billiard tables. In the unused recreation room was an unused bar. 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. |
| 2230 |
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. He picked it up and looked at it. The number on it was X-190. X? X meant experimental model! The picture fell into focus and he could see it all. How-2 Kits, Inc., had developed Albert and then had quietly packed him away, for How-2 Kits could hardly afford to market a product like Albert. It would be cutting their own financial throats to do so. Sell a dozen Alberts and, in a year or two, robots would glut the market. Instead of selling at ten thousand, they would sell at close to cost and, without human labor involved, costs would inevitably run low. "Albert," said Knight. "What is it?" Albert asked absently. |
| 2231 |
Sitting on the lawn that evening, he wondered if it had been smart, after all, to burn the counterfeit money. Albert said it couldn't be told from real money and probably that was true, for when Albert's gang got on a thing, they did it up in style. But it would have been illegal, he told himself, and he hadn't done anything really illegal so far — even though that matter of uncrating Albert and assembling him and turning him on, when he had known all the time that he hadn't bought him, might be slightly less than ethical. Knight looked ahead. The future wasn't bright. In another twenty days or so, he would have to file the estimated income declaration. And they would have to pay a whopping personal property tax and settle with the State on his capital gains. And, more than likely, How-2 Kits would bring suit. There was a way he could get out from under, however. He could send Albert and all the other robots back to How-2 Kits and then How-2 Kits would have no grounds for litigation and he could explain to the tax people that it had all been a big mistake. But there were two things that told him this was no solution. First of all, Albert wouldn't go back. Exactly what Albert would do under such a situation, Knight had no idea, but he would refuse to go, for he was afraid he would be broken up for scrap if they ever got him back. And in the second place, Knight was unwilling to let the robots go without a fight. He had gotten to know them and he liked them and, more than that, there was a matter of principle involved. |
| 2232 |
In case of an adverse ruling, the petition said, robots could not be taxed as property and the various governmental bodies would suffer heavy loss of revenue. The trial ground on. Robots are possessed of free will. An easy one to prove. A robot could carry out a task that was assigned to it, acting correctly in accordance with unforeseen factors that might arise. Robot judgment in most instances, it was shown, was superior to the judgment of a human. 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. |
| 2233 |
"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. |
| 2234 |
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. |
| 2235 |
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. 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. |
| 2236 |
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. |
| 2237 |
His windshield had been replaced. After she left, I snatched up the transcript. There was no doubt about it. The doctor reported he had been running and was in a state of totally spent exhaustion. I wondered for how many miles the bus had played with him before the final lunge. The transcript had no notion of anything like that, of course. They had located the bus and identified it by the tire tracks. The police had it and were trying to trace its ownership. There was an editorial in the transcript about it. It had been the first traffic fatality in the state for that year and the paper warned strenuously against manual driving after night. There was no mention of Gellhorn's three thugs and for that, at least, I was grateful. None of our cars had been seduced by the pleasure of the chase into killing. That was all. I let the paper drop. Gellhorn had been a criminal. His treatment of the bus had been brutal. There was no question in my mind he deserved death. But still I felt a bit queasy over the manner of it. A month has passed now and I can't get it out of my mind. My cars talk to one another. I have no doubt about it anymore. It's as though they've gained confidence; as though they're not bothering to keep it secret anymore. Their engines rattle and knock continuously. And they don't talk among themselves only. They talk to the cars and buses that come into the Farm on business. How long have they been doing that? They must be understood, too. Gellhorn's bus understood them, for all it hadn't been on the grounds more than an hour. |
| 2238 |
I can close my eyes and bring back that dash along the highway, with our cars flanking the bus on either side, clacking their motors at it till it understood, stopped, let me out, and ran off with Gellhorn. Did my cars tell him to kill Gellhorn? Or was that his idea? Can cars have such ideas? The motor designers say no. But they mean under ordinary conditions. Have they foreseen everything!' Cars get ill-used, you know. Some of them enter the Farm and observe. They get told things. They find out that cars exist whose motors are never stopped, whom no one ever drives, whose every need is supplied. Then maybe they go out and tell others. Maybe the word is spreading quickly. Maybe they're going to think that the Farm way should be the way all over the world. They don't understand. You couldn't expect them to understand about legacies and the whims of rich men. There are millions of automatobiles on Earth, tens of millions. If the thought gets rooted in them that they're slaves; that they should do something about it... If they begin to think the way Gellhorn's bus did... Maybe it won't be till after my time. And then they'll have to keep a few of us to take care of them, won't they? They wouldn't kill us all. And maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't understand about how someone would have to care for them. Maybe they won't wait. Every morning I wake up and think, Maybe today... I don't get as much pleasure out of my cars as I used to. Lately, I notice that I'm even beginning to avoid Sally. |
| 2239 |
Who cares? I can tell what they're planning. I can see well enough. The eyes have it. They've grabbed a hold of my bad arm. They're dragging me over to the fire, laying that elbow right on top of a flaming log. I wish I could get HO. The fire shouldn't make much difference. It takes a good 1800 degrees Celsius to hurt that skin polymer. A little less than what a beamer produces. But they're all worked up anyway. Optimistic, I guess. Maybe even with reason. Even from here, I can see my skin changing color. That shouldn't happen! Maybe the axe bruised the polymer enough to weaken it. But the axe shouldn't have done that! It shouldn't even have hurt the joint, actually. We're supposed to be immune to mechanical accidents, like axes and steel-jacketed slugs. So I'm not perfect. That's news? What with being put together by the lowest bidder? Oh, great! They're going to try the axe again. They're hauling me out of the fire, laying the arm across a stick of firewood. A chopping block. And wham! This time they make it. That's my arm they're passing around. Looks like bone, doesn't it fellows? Metal-ceramic alloy. Nice and white, it's a little dry. Looks like meat, too, hey? Might even taste like it. It's something like protein, after all. The most compact muscle they could design. Not very nourishing, though. It's made of silicon, not carbon. It doesn't taste right, you say? That's right, you guys are licking your fingers, aren't you? Getting juice all over you from the stump. I hope it rots your guts out. |
| 2240 |
My skin will keep anyone from poking holes in you, but it won't stop you from feeling them try. And it won't stop anyone from caving your chest in or breaking your back with a club. The chief seems to realize as much, but that doesn 't keep him from swelling up with pride over his new possession. He's right in front of me now. Waving his spear under my nose. Screaming something that sounds pretty triumphant. As if he'd just licked me. But he isn't watching his people. And they're throwing quick glances at the sky, glances that very soon take on a terrified cast. They're beginning to cry out, too, shouts of panic as they scatter and run for the trees. Could it be? Yes! There's the floater, coming down right on top of my body, one skid scattering the fire. The Search and Rescue squad, homing on my power pack at last. The Repair squad if you're not too far gone. The Salvage squad if you are. The sudden silence gets the chief's attention. He whirls to face the compound, his arm dropping and his mouth hanging open in midshout as he sees the sudden apparition. Those things are silent! He pulls himself together. I can see it happen. Isn't he invulnerable now? Aren't his people watching from the bushes? He lifts the spear again, shakes it at the floater, and charges. He's a brave bastard, but he's dumb. He doesn't have a chance. What does he think took my head off my shoulders? As soon as my saviours see a hairy savage in a robrob skin coming at them, they open fire. Two beamers at once. |
| 2241 |
Everything except Snapshot. Close in to the tiny roaring star, closer than a man could go, were a series of big chucks of metal that looked like solid debris. They were arrays of titanium and crystal, vats of liquid nitrogen, shielding; deep inside were the real workings of Snapshot. Snapshot was in the business of finding Ken wormholes in the froth of garbage given off by the star. Down at the Planck length, 10-35 cm, the things appeared, formed, reappeared, twisted, broke off like steam on hot rocks. At one end of the wormholes was Snapshot, and at the other was the Universe. It sent messages from one end, its scanners punching through the bubbling mass of waves, and it kept track of what went where and who was talking to whom. Snapshot's job was like that of a man trying to shoot into the hole of an invisible Swiss cheese that was turning on three axes at 3300 rpm. And it had to remember which holes it hit. And do it often. There were a couple of Snapshots scattered within close range of Earth, and some further away. All these systems coordinated messages, allowed instantaneous communication across light-years. All these communications devices made up Snapshot. Snapshot was one ten-millionth the function of Plato. Plato was a solid crystal intelligence grown on the Moon, deep under the surface. The people who worked with Plato weren't exactly sure how he did things, but they were finding out every day. Plato came up with the right answers; he had devised Snapshot, he was giving man the stars a step or two at a time. |
| 2242 |
Probably after a small animal, a rat. They got rats, too. As a sort of sideline. He came to the top of the little hill and lifted his field-glasses. The Russian lines were a few miles ahead of him. They had a forward command post there. The runner had come from it. A squat robot with undulating arms passed by him, its arms weaving inquiringly. The robot went on its way, disappearing under some debris. Hendricks watched it go. He had never seen that type before. There were getting to be more and more types he had never seen, new varieties and sizes coming up from the underground factories. Hendricks put out his cigarette and hurried on. It was interesting, the use of artificial forms in warfare. How had they got started? Necessity. The Soviet Union had gained great initial success, usual with the side that got the war going. Most of North America had been blasted off the map. Retaliation was quick in coming, of course. The sky was full of circling disc-bombers long before the war began; they had been up there for years. The discs began sailing down all over Russia within hours after Washington got it. 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. |
| 2243 |
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. |
| 2244 |
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. And that was what they had been designed to do. Their job. They did their job well. Especially lately, with the new designs coming up. Now they repaired themselves. They were on their own. Radiation tabs protected the UN troops, but if a man lost his tab he was fair game for the claws, no matter what his uniform. Down below the surface automatic machinery stamped them out. Human beings stayed a long way off. It was too risky; nobody wanted to be around them. |
| 2245 |
Watching him, the way his men had watched the Russian runner? A chill went up his back. Maybe they were getting their guns ready, preparing to fire, the way his men had prepared, made ready to kill. Hendricks stopped, wiping perspiration from his face. "Damn." It made him uneasy. But he should be expected. The situation was different. He strode over the ash, holding his gun tightly with both hands. Behind him came David. Hendricks peered around, tight-lipped. Any second it might happen. A burst of white light, a blast, carefully aimed from inside a deep concrete bunker. He raised his arm and waved it around in a circle. Nothing moved. To the right a long ridge ran, topped with dead tree trunks. A few wild vines had grown up around the trees, remains of arbors. And the eternal dark weeds. Hendricks studied the ridge. Was anything up there? Perfect place for a lookout. He approached the ridge warily, David coming silently behind. It if were his command he'd have a sentry up there, watching for troops trying to infiltrate into the command area. Of course, if it were his command there would be the claws around the area for full protection. He stopped, feet apart, hands on his hips. "Are we there?" David said. "Almost." "Why have we stopped?" "I don't want to take any chances." Hendricks advanced slowly. Now the ridge lay directly beside him, along his right. Overlooking him. His uneasy feeling increased. If an Ivan were up there he wouldn't have a chance. He waved his arm again. They should be expecting someone in the UN uniform, in response to the note capsule. |
| 2246 |
This morning the Politburo reached their decision. They notified us — forward command. Our runner was sent out at once. We saw him start toward the direction of your lines. We covered him until he was out of sight." "Alex Radrivsky. We both knew him. He disappeared about six o'clock. The sun had just come up. About noon Klaus and I had an hour relief. We crept off, away from the bunkers. No one was watching. We came here. There used to be a town here a few houses, a street. This cellar was part of a big farmhouse. We knew Tasso would be here, hiding down in her little place. We had come here before. Others from the bunkers came here. Today happened to be our turn." "So we were saved," Klaus said. "Chance. It might have been others. We — we finished, and then we came up to the surface and started back along the ridge. That was when we saw them, the Davids. We understood right away. We had seen the photos of the First Variety, the Wounded Soldier. Our Commissar distributed them to us with an explanation. If we had gone another step they would have seen us. As it was we had to blast two Davids before we got back. There were hundreds of them, all around. Like ants. We took pictures and slipped back here, bolting the lid tight." "They're not so much when you catch them alone. We moved faster than they did. But they're inexorable. Not like living things. They came right at us. And we blasted them." Major Hendricks rested against the edge of the lid, adjusting his eyes to the darkness. |
| 2247 |
I'm on the surface. At the bunker entrance. I want one of you to come up here." "Come down." "Why come down? I'm giving you an order!" Silence. Hendricks lowered the transmitter. He looked carefully around him. The entrance was just ahead. Almost at his feet. He lowered the antenna and fastened the transmitter to his belt. Carefully, he gripped his gun with both hands. He moved forward, a step at a time. If they could see him they knew he was starting toward the entrance. He closed his eyes a moment. Then he put his foot on the first step that led downward. Two Davids came up at him, their faces identical and expressionless. He blasted them into particles. More came rushing silently up, a whole pack of them. 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. |
| 2248 |
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. |
| 2249 |
The pistol clattered and rolling away. Hendricks hurried after it. He bent down, snatching it up. The hatch of the ship clanged shut. The bolts fell into place. Hendricks made his way back. The inner door was being sealed. He raised the pistol unsteadily. There was a shattering roar. The ship burst up from its metal cage, fusing the mesh behind it. Hendricks cringed, pulling back. The ship shot up into the rolling clouds of ash, disappearing into the sky. 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. |
| 2250 |
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. |
| 2251 |
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. Sitting in the pressure seat of the ship. Two slim, silent figures, both identical. They were very near. The David bent down suddenly, dropping its teddy bear. The bear raced across the ground. Automatically, Hendricks' fingers tightened around the trigger. The bear was gone, dissolved into mist. The two Tasso Types moved on, expressionless, walking side by side, through the gray ash. When they were almost to him, Hendricks raised the pistol waist high and fired. The two Tassos dissolved. But already a new group was starting up the rise, five or six Tassos, all identical, a line of them coming rapidly toward him. And he had given her the ship and the signal code. Because of him she was on her way to the moon, to the Moon Base. He had made it possible. He had been right about the bomb, after all. It had been designed with knowledge of the other types, the David Type and the Wounded Soldier Type. And the Klaus Type. Not designed by human beings. It had been designed by one of the underground factories, apart from all human contact. The line of Tassos came up to him. |
| 2252 |
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. |
| 2253 |
Nobody else. There was by then no other crime of any importance. It worked very simply. Without warning, a man who thought himself safe would suddenly hear the steady footfalls behind him. He would turn and see the two-handed engine walking toward him, shaped like a man of steel, and more incorruptible than any man not made of steel could be. Only then would the murderer know he had been tried and condemned by the omniscient electronic minds that knew society as no human mind could ever know it. For the rest of his days, the man would hear those footsteps behind him. A moving jail with invisible bars that shut him off from the world. Never in life would he be alone again. And one day — he never knew when — the jailer would turn executioner. Danner leaned back comfortably in his contoured restaurant chair and rolled expensive wine across his tongue, closing his eyes to enjoy the taste of it better. He felt perfectly safe. 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... |
| 2254 |
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. |
| 2255 |
Nervously Hartz punched a button, and a map of a section of the city sprang out in bold lines on its surface. "I've got to find a sector where a Fury's in operation now," he explained. The map flickered and he pressed the button again. The unstable outlines of the city streets wavered and brightened and then went out as he scanned the sections fast and nervously. Then a map flashed on which had three wavering streaks of colored light crisscrossing it, intersecting at one point near the center. The point moved very slowly across the map, at just about the speed of a walking man reduced to miniature in scale with the street he walked on. Around him the colored lines wheeled slowly, keeping their focus always steady on the single point. "There," Hartz said, leaning forward to read the printed name of the street. A drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto the glass, and he wiped it uneasily away with his fingertip. "There's a man with a Fury assigned to him. All right, now. I'll show you. Look here." Above the desk was a news-screen. Hartz clicked it on and watched impatiently while a street scene swam into focus. Crowds, traffic noises, people hurrying, people loitering. And in the middle of the crowd a little oasis of isolation, an island in the sea of humanity. Upon that moving island two occupants dwelt, like a Crusoe and a Friday, alone. One of the two was a haggard man who watched the ground as he walked. The other islander in this deserted spot was a tall, shining, man-formed shape that followed at his heels. |
| 2256 |
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? 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. |
| 2257 |
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. Some watched with avid curiosity, their eyes seeking his. Some did not look at all, but gazed at their plates rigidly or covered their faces with their hands. Behind him the measured tread came on, and the rhythmic faint creak from somewhere inside the armor. The faces fell away on both sides and he went through a door without any awareness of opening it. He was in the street. Sweat bathed him and the air struck icy, though it was not a cold day. He looked blindly left and right, and then plunged for a bank of phone booths half a block away, the image of Hartz swimming before his eyes so clearly he blundered into people without seeing them. Dimly he heard indignant voices begin to speak and then die into awestruck silence. The way cleared magically before him. He walked in the newly created island of his isolation up to the nearest booth. After he had closed the glass door the thunder of his own blood in his ears made the little sound-proofed booth reverberate. Through the door he saw the robot stand passionlessly waiting, the smear of spilled food still streaking its chest like some robotic ribbon of honor across a steel shirt front. Danner tried to dial a number. His fingers were like rubber. |
| 2258 |
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. Societies splintered apart into smaller and smaller groups until a state very close to anarchy set in. The machines licked their metal wounds meanwhile and healed each other as they had been built to do. They had no need for the social sciences. They went on calmly reproducing themselves and handing out to mankind the luxuries which the age of Eden had designed them to hand out. Imperfectly of course. Incompletely, because some of their species were wiped out entirely and left no machines to breed and reproduce their kind. But most of them minded their raw materials, refined them, poured and cast the needed parts, made their own fuel, repaired their own injuries and maintained their breed upon the face of the earth with an efficiency man never even approached. Meanwhile mankind splintered and splintered away. There were no longer any real groups, not even families. Men didn't need each other much. Emotional attachments dwindled. Men had been conditioned to accept vicarious surrogates and escapism was fatally easy. Men reoriented their emotions to the Escape Machines that fed them joyous, impossible adventure and made the waking world seem too dull to bother with. And the birth rate fell and fell. It was a very strange period. Luxury and chaos went hand in hand, anarchy and inertia were the same thing. |
| 2259 |
And still the birth rate dropped... Eventually a few people recognized what was happening. Man as a species was on the way out. And man was helpless to do anything about it. But he had a powerful servant. So the time came when some unsung genius saw what would have to be done. Someone saw the situation clearly and set a new pattern in the biggest of the surviving electronic calculators. This was the goal he set: "Mankind must be made self-responsible again. You will make this your only goal until you achieve the end." It was simple, but the changes it produced were worldwide and all human life on the planet altered drastically because of it. The machines were an integrated society, if man was not. And now they had a single set of orders which all of them reorganized to obey. So the days of the free luxuries ended. The Escape Machines shut up shop. Men were forced back into groups for the sake of survival. They had to undertake now the work the machines withheld, and slowly, slowly, common needs and common interests began to spawn the almost lost feeling of human unity again. But it was so slow. And no machine could put back into man what he had lost — the internalized conscience. Individualism had reached its ultimate stage and there had been no deterrent to crime for a long while. Without family or clan relations, not even feud retaliation occurred. Conscience failed, since no man identified with any other. The real job of the machines now was to rebuild in man a realistic superego to save him from extinction. |
| 2260 |
A self-responsible society would be a genuinely interdependent one, the leader identifying with the group, and a realistically internalized conscience which would forbid and punish "sin" — the sin of injuring the group with which you identify. And here the Furies came in. The machines defined murder, under any circumstances, as the only human crime. This was accurate enough, since it is the only act which can irreplaceably destroy a unit of society. The Furies couldn't prevent crime. Punishment never cures the criminal. But it can prevent others from committing crime through simple fear, when they see punishment administered to others. The Furies were the symbol of punishment. They overtly stalked the streets on the heels of their condemned victims, the outward and visible sign that murder is always punished, and punished most publicly and terribly. They were very efficient. They were never wrong. Or at least, in theory they were never wrong, and considering the enormous quantities of information stored by now in the analogue computers, it seemed likely that the justice of the machines was far more efficient than that of humans could be. Someday man would rediscover sin. Without it he had come near to perishing entirely. With it, he might resume his authority over himself and the race of mechanized servants who were helping him to restore his species. But until that day, the Furies would have to stalk the streets, man's conscience in metal guise, imposed by the machines man created a long time ago. |
| 2261 |
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. |
| 2262 |
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. 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. |
| 2263 |
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. |
| 2264 |
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. "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. |
| 2265 |
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. |
| 2266 |
Chain-reaction, maybe, throwing the whole organization out of kilter. No: He might someday have to use the device in the drawer. 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. |
| 2267 |
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. |
| 2268 |
Time started again, running double-pace to catch up. 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. |
| 2269 |
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. |
| 2270 |
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. |
| 2271 |
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. |
| 2272 |
Slowly the cold retreated, giving place to an aching throb that, in turn, began to leave; he stirred purposelessly, while little cloudy wisps of memory insisted on trickling back, trying to remind him of things he must do. Then the picture cleared somewhat, letting him remember scattered bits of what had gone before. There had been the conquest of the Moon and a single gallant thrust on to Mars; the newscasts had been filled with that. And on the ways a new and greater ship had been building, to be powered with his new energy release that would free it from all bounds and let it go out to the farthest stars, if they chose — the final attainment of all the hopes and dreams of the race. But there was something else that eluded him, more important even than all that or the great ship. A needle was thrust against his breast and shoved inward, to be followed by a glow of warmth and renewed energy; adrenaline, his mind recognized, and he knew that there were others around him, trying to arouse him. Now his heart was pumping strongly and the drug coursed through him, chasing away those first vague thoughts and replacing them with a swift rush of less welcome, bitter memories. For man's dreams and man himself were dust behind him, now! Overnight all their hopes and plans had been erased as if they had never been, and the Plague had come, a mutant bacteria from some unknown source, vicious beyond imagination, to attack and destroy and to leave only death behind it. In time, perhaps, they might have found a remedy, but there had been no time. |
| 2273 |
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. |
| 2274 |
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. |
| 2275 |
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. |
| 2276 |
"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. We estimate its temperature at about that of the central farming area of North America, though there is less seasonal change. |
| 2277 |
Anthropomorphic robots, capable of handling human instruments, walking on two feet and with two arms ending in hands at their sides. But he knew it had been no blind luck. Nature had designed men to go where no wheels could turn, to handle all manner of tools, and to fit not one but a thousand purposes; it had been inevitable that Thoradson and the brain should copy such an adaptable model, reducing the size only because of the excessive weight necessary to a six-foot robot. Little metal men, not subject to the rapid course of human life that had cursed their masters; robots that could work with men, learning from a hundred teachers, storing up their memories over a span of centuries instead of decades. When specialization of knowledge had threatened to become too rigid, and yet when no man had time enough even to learn the one field he chose, the coming of the robots had become the only answer. Before them, men had sought help in calculating machines, then in electronic instruments, and finally in the "brains" that were set to solving the problem of their own improvement, among other things. It was with such a brain that Thoradson had labored in finally solving the problems of full robothood. Now, taken from their normal field, they had served beyond any thought of their creator in protecting and preserving all that was left of the human race. Past five suns and over ninety years of monotonous searching they had done what no man could have tried. Jorgen shrugged aside his speculations and swung back to face them. |
| 2278 |
And the fact that they would be expecting the harshness of Mars instead of this inviting world would make their triumph all the sweeter. He swung back, smiling. "Come along, then, Five; we'll begin reviving while you others continue with the ship. And first, of course, we must arouse Dr. Craig and let him see how far his plan has gone." Five did not move from the windows, and the others had halted their work, waiting. Then, reluctantly, the robot answered. "No master. Dr. Craig is dead!" "Craig — dead?" It seemed impossible, as impossible and unreal as the distance that separated them from their native world. There had always been Craig, always would be. "Dead, master, years ago." There was the ghost of regret and something else in the spacing of the words. "There was nothing we could do to help!" Jorgen shook his head, uncomprehending. Without Craig, the plans they had dared to make seemed incomplete and almost foolish. On Earth, it had been Craig who first planned the escape with this ship. And on Mars, after the robots brought back the evidence of the Plague, it had been the older man who had cut through their shock with a shrug and turned his eyes outward again with the fire of a hope that would not be denied. "Jorgen, we used bad judgment in choosing such an obviously unsuitable world as this, even without the Plague. But it's only a delay, not the finish. For beyond, somewhere out there, there are other stars housing other planets. We have a ship to reach them, robots who can guide us there; what more could we ask? |
| 2279 |
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. |
| 2280 |
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. Now I feel that my time grows near, and what can still be done must be left to the robots. Yet, I will not despair. Individual and racial immortality is not composed solely of the continuation from generation to generation, but rather of the continuation of the dreams of all mankind. The dreamers and their progeny may die, but the dream cannot. Such is my faith, and to that I cling. I have no other hope to offer for the unknown future." Jorgen dropped the notebook, dully, rubbing hands across his tired eyes. The words that should have been a ringing challenge to destiny fell flat; the dream could die. He was the last of the dreamers, a blind alley of fate, and beyond lay only oblivion. All the dreams of a thousand generations of men had concentrated into Anna Holt, and were gone with her. "The brain, master," Five suggested softly. "Dr. Craig's last message!" "You operate it, Five." It was a small model, a limited fact analyzer such as most technicians used or had used to help them in their work, voice-operated, its small, basic vocabulary adjusted for the work to be done. |
| 2281 |
But he had felt no hope and could now feel no disappointment. When a problem has no solution, it makes little difference whether the final words of a man are coldly logical or wildly raving. The result must be the same. Certainly semantics could offer no hope where all the bacteriological skill of the race had failed. Five touched his arm again, extending two little pellets toward him. "Master, you need sleep now; these — sodium amytal — should help. Please!" Obediently, he stuffed them into his mouth and let the robot guide him toward a room fixed for sleeping, uncaring. Nothing could possibly matter now, and drugged sleep was as good a solution as any other. He saw Five fumble with a switch, felt his weight drop to a few pounds, making the cot feel soft and yielding, and then gave himself up dully to the compulsion of the drug. Five tiptoed quietly out, and blackness crept over his mind, welcome in the relief it brought from thinking. Breakfast lay beside him, hot in vacuum plates, when Jorgen awoke finally, and he dabbled with it out of habit more than desire. Somewhere, during the hours of sleep, his mind had recovered somewhat from the dull pall that had lain over it, but there was still a curious suspension of his emotions. It was almost as if his mind had compressed years of forgetting into a few hours, so that his attitude toward the tragedy of his race was tinged with a sense of remoteness and distance, there was neither grief nor pain, only a vague feeling that it had happened long before and was now an accustomed thing. |
| 2282 |
He sat on the edge of his bunk, pulling on his clothes slowly and watching the smoke curl up from his cigarette, not thinking. There was no longer any purpose to thought. From far back in the ship, a dull drone of sound reached him, and he recognized it as the maximum thrust of the steering tubes, momentarily in action to swing the ship in some manner. Then it was gone, leaving only the smooth, balanced, almost inaudible purr of the main drive as before. Finished with his clothes, he pushed through the door and into the hallway, turning instinctively forward to the observation room and toward the probable location of Five. The robots were not men, but they were the only companionship left him, and he had no desire to remain alone. The presence of the robot would be welcome. He clumped into the control room, noting that the five were all there, and moved toward the quartz port. Five turned at his steps, stepping aside to make room for him and lifting a hand outward. "We'll be landing soon, master, I was going to call you." "Thanks." Jorgen looked outward then, realizing the distance that had been covered since his first view. Now the sun was enlarged to the size of the old familiar sun over earth, and the sphere toward which they headed was clearly visible without the aid of the 'scope. He sank down quietly into the seat Five pulled up for him, accepting the binoculars, but making no effort to use them. The view was better as a whole, and they were nearing at a speed that would bring a closer view to him soon enough without artificial aid. |
| 2283 |
"It had to be a beautiful world, Five," he said, not bitterly, but in numbed fatalism. "Without that, the joke would have been flat." Five's hand touched his arm gently, and the robot sighed again, nodding very slowly. "Two has found the air good for you — slightly rich in oxygen, but good. Will you go out?" He nodded assent, stepping through the locks and out, while the five followed behind him, their heads turning as they inspected the planet, their minds probably in radio communication as they discussed it. Five left the others and approached him, stopping by his side and following his eyes up toward the low hills that began beyond the shore of the sea, cradling the river against them. A wind stirred gently, bringing the clean, familiar smell of growing things, and the air was rich and good. It was a world to lull men to peace from their sorrows, to bring back their star-roving ships from all over the universe, worthy of being called home in any language. Too good a world to provide the hardships needed to shape intelligence, but an Eden for that intelligence, once evolved. Now Jorgen shrugged. This was a world for dreamers, and he wanted only the dreams that may come with the black lotus of forgetfulness. There were too many reminders of what might have been, here. Better to go back to the ship and the useless quest without a goal, until he should die and the ship and robots should run down and stop. He started to turn, as Five began to speak, but halted, not caring enough one way or another to interrupt. |
| 2284 |
The robot's eyes were where his had been, and now swept back down the river and toward the harbor. "Here could have been a city, master, to match all the cities ever planned. Here your people might have found all that was needed to make life good, a harbor to the other continents, a river to the heart of this one, and the flat ground beyond the hills to house the rockets that would carry you to other worlds, so richly scattered about this sun, and probably so like this one. See, a clean white bridge across the river there, the residences stretching out among the hills, factories beyond the river's bend, a great park on that island." "A public square there, schools and university grounds there." Jorgen could see it, and for a moment his eyes lighted, picturing that mighty mother city. Five nodded. "And there, on that little island, centrally located, a statue in commemoration; winged, and with arms — no, one arm stretched upward, the other held down toward the city." For a moment longer, the fire lived in Jorgen's eyes, and then the dead behind rose before his mind, and it was gone. He turned, muffling a choking cry as emotions came suddenly flooding over him, and Five drooped, swinging back with him. Again, the other four fell behind as he entered the ship, quietly, taking their cue from his silence. "Dreams!" His voice compressed all blasphemy against the jest-crazed gods into the word. But Five's quiet voice behind him held no hatred, only a sadness in its low, soft words. "Still, the dream was beautiful, just as this planet is, master. |
| 2285 |
Standing there, while we landed, I could see the city, and I almost dared hope. I do not regret the dream I had." And the flooding emotions were gone, cut short and driven away by others that sent Jorgen's body down into a seat in the control room, while his eyes swept outward toward the hills and the river that might have housed the wonderful city — no, that would house it! 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. |
| 2286 |
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. He could see the great boats in the harbor with others operating up the river. The sky suddenly seemed to fill with the quiet drone of helicopters, and beyond, there came the sound of rockets rising toward the eighth and ninth worlds, while others were building to quest outward in search of new suns with other worlds. Perhaps they would find Earth, some day in their expanding future. Strangely, he hoped that they might, and that perhaps they could even trace their origin, and find again the memory of the soft protoplasmic race that had sired them. It would be nice to be remembered, once that memory was no longer a barrier to their accomplishment. But there were many suns, and in long millennia, the few connecting links that could point out the truth to them beyond question might easily erode and disappear. He could never know. Then the wind sighed against him, making a little rustling sound, and he looked down to see something flutter softly in the hand of Five. Faint curiosity carried him forward, but he made no effort to remove it from the robot's grasp, now that he saw its nature. Five, too, had thought of Earth and their connection with it, and had found the answer, without breaking his orders. The paper was a star map, showing a sun with nine planets, one ringed, some with moons, and the third one was circled in black pencil, heavily. |
| 2287 |
The wind blew steadily, icily, from the north. It was well below freezing when, sometime after nine, an army ship landed in a field near the settlement. There was still time. There were some last brief moments in which the colonists could act and feel as they had always done. They therefore grumbled in annoyance. They wanted no soldiers here. The few who had convenient windows stared out with distaste and a mild curiosity, but no one went out to greet them. After a while a rather tall, frail — looking man came out of the ship and stood upon the hard ground looking toward the village. He remained there, waiting stiffly, his face turned from the wind. It was a silly thing to do. He was obviously not coming in, either out of pride or just plain orneriness. "Well, I never," a nice lady said. "What's he just standing there for?" another lady said. And all of them thought: Well, God knows what's in the mind of a soldier, and right away many people concluded that he must be drunk. The seed of peace was deeply planted in these people, in the children and the women, very, very deep. And because they had been taught, oh, so carefully, to hate war, they had also been taught, quite incidentally, to despise soldiers. The lone man kept standing in the freezing wind. Eventually, because even a soldier can look small and cold and pathetic, Bob Rossel had to get up out of a nice, warm bed and go out in that miserable cold to meet him. The soldier saluted. Like most soldiers, he was not too neat and not too clean, and the salute was sloppy. |
| 2288 |
After a while the ship went out of sight, and nobody ever saw it again. The first contact man had ever had with an intelligent alien race occurred out on the perimeter in a small quiet place a long way from home. Late in the year 2360 — the exact date remains unknown — an Alien force attacked and destroyed the colony at Lupus V. The wreckage and the dead were found by a mailship which flashed off screaming for the army. When the army came it found this: Of the seventy registered colonists, thirty-one were dead. The rest, including some women and children, were missing. All technical equipment, all radios, guns, machines, even books, were also missing. The buildings had been burned; so had the bodies. Apparently the Aliens had a heat ray. What else they had, nobody knew. After a few days of walking around in the ash, one soldier finally stumbled on something. For security reasons, there was a detonator in one of the main buildings. In case of enemy attack, Security had provided a bomb to be buried in the center of each colony, because it was important to blow a whole village to hell and gone rather than let a hostile Alien learn vital facts about human technology and body chemistry. There was a bomb at Lupus V too, and though it had been detonated it had not blown. The detonating wire had been cut. In the heart of the camp, hidden from view under twelve inches of earth, the wire had been dug up and cut. The army could not understand it and had no time to try. After five hundred years of peace and anti-war conditioning the army was small, weak, and without respect. |
| 2289 |
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. |
| 2290 |
"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. |
| 2291 |
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. |
| 2292 |
The Alien lay wrapped in a thick electric cocoon, buried in a wide warm room beneath the base of a tree. The tree served him as antennae; curiously he gazed into a small view-screen and watched the humans come. He saw them fan out, eight of them, and sink down in the snow. He saw that they were armed. He pulsed thoughtfully, extending a part of himself to absorb a spiced lizard. Since the morning, when the new ship had come, he had been watching steadily, and now it was apparent that the humans were aware of their danger. Undoubtedly they were preparing to leave. That was unfortunate. The attack was not scheduled until late that night, and he could not, of course, press the assault by day. But flexibility, he reminded himself sternly, is the first principle of absorption, and therefore he moved to alter his plans. A projection reached out to dial several knobs on a large box before him, and the hour of assault was moved forward to dusk. A glance at the chronometer told him that it was already well into the night on Planet Three and that the attack there had probably begun. The Alien felt the first tenuous pulsing of anticipation. He lay quietly, watching the small square lights of windows against the snow, thanking the Unexplainable that matters had been so devised that he would not have to venture out into that miserable cold. 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. |
| 2293 |
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. |
| 2294 |
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. If peace leads to no conflict at all and then decay, well, that was something that had to be learned. So he could not hate these people. |
| 2295 |
But he could not help them either. He turned from their eyes and went into the radio shack. It had begun to dawn on the women that they might be leaving without their husbands or sons, and he did not want to see the fierce struggle that he was sure would take place. He sat alone and tried, for the last time, to call Bossio. After a while an old woman found him and offered him coffee. It was a very decent thing to do, to think of him at a time like this, and he was so suddenly grateful he could only nod. The woman said that he must be cold in that thin army thing and that she had brought along a mackinaw for him. She poured the coffee and left him alone. They were thinking of him now, he knew, because they were thinking of everyone who had to stay. Throw the dog a bone. Dammit, don't be like that, he told himself. He had not had anything to eat all day, and the coffee was warm and strong. He decided he might be of some help at the ship. It was stripped down now, and they were loading. He was startled to see a great group of them standing in the snow, removing their clothes. Then he understood. The clothes of forty people would change the weight by enough to get a few more aboard. There was no fighting. Some of the women were almost hysterical and a few had refused to go and were still in their cabins, but the process was orderly. Children went automatically, as did the youngest husbands and all the women. The elders were shuffling around in the snow, waving their arms to keep themselves warm. |
| 2296 |
He thought for a while that the humans would overlook it — the seeing was poor and they undoubtedly would still think of it as animal, even with its firing ports open — but then he checked the robot and saw that a piece was missing and knew that the humans had found it. Well, he thought unhappily, flowing into his suit, no chance now to disable that other ship. The humans would never let another animal near. And therefore — for he was, above all, a flexible being — he would proceed to another plan. The settlement would have to be detonated. And for that he would have to leave his own shelter and go out in that miserable cold and lie down in one of his bunkers which was much farther away. No need to risk blowing himself up with his own bombs; but still, that awful cold. He dismissed his regrets and buckled his suit into place. It carried him up the stairs and bore him out into the snow. After one whiff of the cold he snapped his view-plate shut and immediately, as he had expected, it began to film with snow. Well, no matter, he would guide the unit by coordinates and it would find the bunker itself. No need for caution now. The plan was nearly ended. In spite of his recent setback, the Alien lay back and allowed himself the satisfaction of a full tremble. The plan had worked very nearly to perfection, as of course it should, and he delighted in the contemplation of it. When the humans were first detected, in the region of Bootes, much thought had gone into the proper method of learning their technology without being discovered themselves. |
| 2297 |
And he was ready to fight now, but it was much too late and he saw with a vast leaden shame that he did not know how, could not even begin. "Can I help?" he said. Dylan shook his head. "Go back and let them know about the robots, and if the ship is ready to leave before I get back, well — then good luck." He started to slither forward on his belly, but Rush reached out and grabbed him, holding with one hand to peace and gentleness and the soft days which were ending. "Listen," he said, "you don't owe anybody." Dylan stared at him with surprise. "I know," he said, and then he slipped up over the mound before him and headed for the trees. Now what he needed was luck. Just good, plain old luck. He didn't know where they were or how many there were or what kinds there were, and the chances were good that one of them was watching him right now. Well, then, he needed some luck. He inched forward slowly, carefully, watching the oncoming line of trees. 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. |
| 2298 |
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. His first shot took the monkey in the head, where the eyes were. As the thing crashed over, there was a hiss and a stench and flame seared into his shoulder and the side of his face. He lurched to the side, trying to see, his gun at arm's length as the lump on the platform spun toward him. He fired four times. Three bolts went home in the lump; the fourth tore a leg off the platform and the whole thing fell over. Dylan crawled painfully behind a rock, his left arm useless. The silence had come back again and he waited, but neither of the Alien things moved. Nothing else moved in the woods around him. He turned his face up to the falling snow and let it come soothingly upon the awful wound in his side. |
| 2299 |
He himself had come to feel an almost proprietary interest in the exhibit, and with some reason. He had been the only freelance picture reporter on the Capitol grounds when the visitors from the Unknown had arrived, and had obtained the first professional shots of the ship. He had witnessed at close hand every event of the next mad few days. He had thereafter photographed many times the eight-foot robot, the ship, and the beautiful slain ambassador, Klaatu, and his imposing tomb out in the center of the Tidal Basin, and, such was the continuing news value of the event to the billions of persons throughout habitable space, he was there now once more to get still other shots and, if possible, a new "angle." This time he was after a picture which showed Gnut as weird and menacing. 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. |
| 2300 |
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. |
| 2301 |
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. 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. |
| 2302 |
"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. The day was warm and fair. A stream of people was leaving the main entrance of the museum just outside in the direction you are facing. This wing, of course, was not here at that time. Everyone was homeward bound, tired no doubt from hours on their feet, seeing the exhibits of the museum and visiting the many buildings on the grounds nearby. And then it happened. "On the area just to your right, just as it is now, appeared the time-space traveler. It appeared in the blink of an eye. It did not come down from the sky; dozens of witnesses swear to that; it just appeared. One moment it was not here, the next it was. It appeared on the very spot it now rests on. "The people nearest the ship were stricken with panic and ran back with cries and screams. Excitement spread out over Washington in a tidal wave. Radio, television, and newspapermen rushed here at once. Police formed a wide cordon around the ship, and army units appeared and trained guns and ray projectors on it. |
| 2303 |
The direst calamity was feared. "For it was recognized from the very beginning that this was no spaceship from anywhere in the solar system. Every child knew that only two spaceships had ever been built on Earth, and none at all on any of the other planets and satellites; and of those two, one had been destroyed when it was pulled into the sun, and the other had just been reported safely arrived on Mars. Then, the ones made here had a shell of a strong aluminum alloy, while this one, as you see, is of an unknown greenish metal. "The ship appeared and just sat here. No one emerged, and there was no sign that it contained life of any kind. That, as much as any single thing, caused excitement to skyrocket. Who, or what, was inside? Were the visitors hostile or friendly? Where did the ship come from? How did it arrive so suddenly right on this spot without dropping from the sky? "For two days the ship rested here, just as you now see it, without motion or sign that it contained life. Long before the end of that time the scientists had explained that it was not so much a spaceship as a space-time traveler, because only such a ship could arrive as this one did — materialize. They pointed out that such a traveler, while theoretically understandable to us Earthmen, was far beyond attempt at our present state of knowledge, and that this one, activated by relativity principles, might well have come from the far comer of the Universe, from a distance which light itself would require millions of years to cross. |
| 2304 |
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. |
| 2305 |
For just a moment one of them glanced in the doorway of the laboratory, then he joined the other at the entrance. Then the great metal doors clanged to, and there was silence. Cliff waited several minutes, then carefully poked his way out from under the table. As he straightened up, a faint tinkling crash sounded at the floor by his feet. Carefully stooping, he found the shattered remains of a thin glass pipette. He had knocked if off the table. That caused him to realize something he had not thought of before: A Gnut who had moved might be a Gnut who could see and hear — and really be dangerous. He would have to be very careful. He looked about him. The room was bounded at the ends by two fiber partitions which at the inner ends followed close under the curving bottom of the ship. The inner side of the room was the ship itself, and the outer was the southern wall of the wing. There were four large high windows. The only entrance was by way of the passage. Without moving, from his knowledge of the building, he made his plan. The wing was connected with the western end of the museum by a doorway, never used, and extended westward toward the Washington Monument. The ship lay nearest the southern wall, and Gnut stood out in front of it, not far from the northeast corner and at the opposite end of the room from the entrance of the building and the passageway leading to the laboratory. By retracing his steps he would come out on the floor at the point farthest removed from the robot. |
| 2306 |
This was just what he wanted, for on the other side of the entrance, on a low platform, stood a paneled table containing the lecture apparatus, and this table was the only object in the room which afforded a place for him to lie concealed while watching what might go on. 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. |
| 2307 |
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. |
| 2308 |
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. 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. |
| 2309 |
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. |
| 2310 |
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. 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. |
| 2311 |
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? |
| 2312 |
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! |
| 2313 |
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. |
| 2314 |
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. 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. |
| 2315 |
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. |
| 2316 |
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. Assuming Gnut required light for whatever he did. Cliff looked at the negatives and was ashamed of himself. |
| 2317 |
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. |
| 2318 |
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. He settled down to wait, keeping Gnut, in full sight every minute. His vision reached maximum adjustment to the darkness. |
| 2319 |
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. |
| 2320 |
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! But it was not coming through the speakers overhead, but, much muted, from within the ship. |
| 2321 |
The robot seemed to understand, or at least to hear. He bent forward and regarded the still figure. "What is it, Gnut?" Cliff asked the robot suddenly. "What are you doing? Can I help you in any way? Somehow I don't believe you are unfriendly, and I don't believe you killed this man. But what happened? Can you understand me? Can you speak? What is it you're trying to do?" Gnut made no sound or motion, but only looked at the still figure at his feet. In the robot's face, now so close, Cliff saw the look of sad contemplation. Gnut stood so several minutes; then he bent lower, took the limp form carefully — even gently, Cliff thought — in his mighty arms, and carried him to the place along the wall where lay the dismembered pieces of the robot attendants. Carefully he laid him by their side. Then he went back into the ship. Without fear now, Cliff stole along the wall of the room. He had gotten almost as far as the shattered figures on the floor when he suddenly stopped motionless. Gnut was emerging again. He was bearing a shape that looked like another body, a larger one. He held it in one arm and placed it carefully by the body of Stillwell. In the hand of his other arm he held something that Cliff could not make out, and this he placed at the side of the body he had just put down. Then he went to the ship and returned once more with a shape which he laid gently by the others; and when this last trip was over he looked down at them all for a moment, then turned slowly back to the ship and stood motionless, as if in deep thought, by the ramp. |
| 2322 |
Cliff restrained his curiosity as long as he could, then slipped forward and bent over the objects Gnut had placed there. First in the row was the body of Stillwell, as he expected, and next was the great shapeless furry mass of a dead gorilla — the one of last night. By the gorilla lay the object the robot had carried in his free hand — the little body of the mockingbird. These last two had remained in the ship all night, and Gnut, for all his surprising gentleness in handling them, was only cleaning house. But there was a fourth body whose history he did not know. He moved closer and bent very low to look. What he saw made him catch his breath. Impossible! — he thought; there was some confusion in his directions; he brought his face back, close to the first body. Then his blood ran cold. The first body was that of Stillwell, but the last in the row was Stillwell, too; there were two bodies of Stillwell, both exactly alike, both dead. Cliff backed away with a cry, and then panic took him and he ran down the room away from Gnut and yelled and beat wildly on the door. There was a noise on the outside. "Let me out!" he yelled in terror. "Let me out! Let me out! Oh, hurry!" A crack opened between the two doors and he forced his way through like a wild animal and ran far out on the lawn. A belated couple on a nearby path stared at him with amazement, and this brought some sense to his head and he slowed down and came to a stop. Back at the building, everything looked as usual, and, in spite of his terror, Gnut was not chasing him. |
| 2323 |
He was still in his stockinged feet. Breathing heavily, he sat down on the wet grass and put on his shoes; then he stood and looked at the building, trying to pull himself together. What an incredible milange! The dead Stillwell, the dead gorilla, and the dead mockingbird — all dying before his eyes; And then that last frightening thing, the second dead Stillwell whom he had not seen die. And Gnut's strange gentleness, and the sad expression he had twice seen on his face. As he looked, the grounds about the building came to life. Several people collected at the door of the wing, above sounded the siren of a police copter, then in the distance another, and from all sides people came running, a few at first, then more and more. The police planes landed on the lawn just outside the door of the wing, and he thought he could see the officers peeping inside. Then suddenly the lights of the wing flooded on. In control of himself now, Cliff went back. He entered. He had left Gnut standing in thought at the side of the ramp, but now he was again in his old familiar pose in the usual place, as if he had never moved. The ship's door was closed, and the ramp gone. But the bodies, the four strangely assorted bodies, were still lying by the demolished robot attendants where he had left them in the dark. He was startled by a cry behind his back. A uniformed museum guard was pointing at him. "This is the man!" the guard shouted. "When I opened the door this man forced his way out and ran like the devil!" The police officers converged on Cliff. |
| 2324 |
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. |
| 2325 |
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. |
| 2326 |
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. |
| 2327 |
The marble cracked; the thick cover slipped askew and broke with a loud noise on the far side. Gnut went to his knees and looked within, bringing Cliff well up over the edge. Inside, in sharp shadow against the converging light beams, lay a transparent plastic coffin, thick-walled and sealed against the centuries, and containing all that was mortal of Klaatu, unspoken visitor from the great Unknown. He lay as if asleep, on his face the look of godlike nobility that had caused some of the ignorant to believe him divine. He wore the robe he had arrived in. There were no faded flowers, no jewelry, no ornaments; they would have seemed profane. At the foot of the coffin lay the small sealed box, also of transparent plastic, which contained all of Earth's records of his visit — a description of the events attending his arrival, pictures of Gnut and the traveler, and the little roll of sight-and-sound film which had caught for all time his few brief motions and words. Cliff sat very still, wishing he could see the face of the robot. Gnut, too, did not move from his position of reverent contemplation — not for a long time. There on the brilliantly lighted pyramid, under the eyes of a fearful, tumultuous multitude, Gnut paid final respect to his beautiful and adored master. Suddenly, then, it was over. Gnut reached out and took the little box of records, rose to his feet and started down the steps. Back through the water, straight back to the building, across lawns and paths as before, he made his irresistible way. |
| 2328 |
Before him the chaotic ring of people melted away, behind they followed as close as they dared, trampling each other in their efforts to keep him in sight. There are no television records of his return. Every pickup was damaged on the way to the tomb. As they drew near the building, Cliff saw that the tank's projectile had made a hole twenty feet wide extending from the roof to the ground. The door still stood open, and Gnut, hardly varying his almost jerkless rhythm, made his way over the debris and went straight for the port end of the ship. Cliff wondered if he would be set free. He was. The robot set him down and pointed toward the door; then, turning, he made the sounds that opened the ship. The ramp slid down and he entered. Then Cliff did the mad, courageous thing which made him famous for a generation. Just as the ramp started sliding back in, he skipped over it and himself entered the ship. The port closed. 7 It was pitch dark, and the silence was absolute. Cliff did not move. He felt that Gnut was close, just ahead, and it was so. His hard metal hand took him by the waist, pulled him against his cold side, and carried him somewhere ahead. 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. |
| 2329 |
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! |
| 2330 |
As it opened, a noisy crowd of Earthmen outside trampled each other in a sudden scramble to get out of the building. The wing was lighted. Cliff stepped down the ramp. The next two hours always in Cliff's memory had a dreamlike quality. It was as if that mysterious laboratory with the peacefully sleeping dead man were the real and central part of his life, and his scene with the noisy men with whom he talked a gross and barbaric interlude. He stood not far from the ramp. He told only part of his story. He was believed. He waited quietly while all the pressure which the highest officials in the land could exert was directed toward obtaining for him the apparatus the robot had demanded. When it arrived, he carried it to the floor of the little vestibule behind the port. Gnut was there, as if waiting. in his arms he held the slender body of the second Klaatu. Tenderly he passed him out to Cliff, who took him without a word, as if all this had been arranged. It seemed to be the parting. Of all the things Cliff had wanted to say to Klaatu, one remained imperatively present in his mind. Now, as the green metal robot stood framed in the great green ship, he seized his chance. "Gnut," he said earnestly, holding carefully the limp body in his arms, "you must do one thing for me. Listen carefully. I want you to tell your master — the master yet to come — that what happened to the first Klaatu was an accident, for which all Earth is immeasurably sorry. Will you do that?" "I have known it," the robot answered gently. |
| 2331 |
He sat there alone, enclosed. Outside were the stars, and one particular star with its small system of worlds. He could see it in his mind's eye, more clearly than he would see it in reality if he merely de-opacified the window. A small star, pinkish-red, the color of blood and destruction, and named appropriately. Nemesis! Nemesis, the Goddess of Divine Retribution. He thought again of the story he had once heard when he was young — a legend, a myth, a tale of a worldwide Deluge that wiped out a sinful degenerate humanity, leaving one family with which to start anew. No flood, this time. Just Nemesis. The degeneration of humanity had returned and the Nemesis that would be visited upon it was an appropriate judgment. It would not be a Deluge. Nothing as simple as a Deluge. Even for the remnant who might escape — Where would they go? Why was it he felt no sorrow? Humanity could not continue as it was. It was dying slowly through its own misdeeds. If it exchanged a slow excruciating death for a much faster one, was that a cause for sorrow? Here, actually circling Nemesis, a planet. Circling the planet, a satellite. Circling the satellite, Rotor. That ancient Deluge carried a few to safety in an Ark. He had only the vaguest idea of what the Ark was, but Rotor was its equivalent. It carried a sampling of humanity who would remain safe and from which a new and far better world would be built. But for the old world — there would be only Nemesis! He thought of it again. A red dwarf star, moving on its inexorable path. |
| 2332 |
She had learned to take it for granted and spend as much time as possible with herself and her own thoughts. Lately, her thoughts were often on Erythro, the planet they had been orbiting almost all her life. She didn't know why these thoughts were coming to her, but she would skim to the observation deck at odd hours and just stare at the planet hungrily, wanting to be there — right there on Erythro. Her mother would ask her, impatiently, why she should want to be on an empty barren planet, but she never had an answer for that. She didn't know. "I just want to," she would say. She was watching it now, alone on the observation deck. Rotorians hardly ever came here. They had seen it all, Marlene guessed, and for some reason they didn't have her interest in Erythro. There it was; partly in light, partly dark. She had a dim memory of being held to watch it swim into view, seeing it every once in a while, always larger, as Rotor slowly approached all those years ago. Was it a real memory? After all, she had been getting on toward four then, so it might be. But now that memory — real or not — was overlaid by other thoughts, by an increasing realization 'of just how large a planet was. Erythro was over twelve thousand kilometers across, not eight kilometers. She couldn't grasp that size. It didn't look that large on the screen and she couldn't imagine standing on it and seeing for hundreds — or even thousands — of kilometers. But she knew she wanted to. Very much. Aurinel wasn't interested in Erythro, which was disappointing. |
| 2333 |
Why? She had known this as the inevitable consequence of what they had done from the moment Rotor had left the Solar System. Everyone on Rotor — volunteers all — had known it. Those who had not had the heart for eternal separation had left Rotor before takeoff, and among those who had left was — Eugenia did not finish that thought. It often came, and she tried never to finish it. Now they were here on Rotor, but was Rotor "home"? It was home for Marlene; she had never known anything else. But for herself, for Eugenia? Home was Earth and Moon and Sun and Mars and all the worlds that had accompanied humanity through its history and prehistory. They had accompanied life as long as there had been life. The thought that "home" was not here on Rotor clung to her even now. But, then, she had spent the first twenty-eight years of her life in the Solar System and she had done graduate work on Earth itself in her twenty-first to twenty-third years. Odd how the thought of Earth periodically came to her and lingered. She hadn't liked Earth. She hadn't liked its crowds, its poor organization, its combination of anarchy in the important things and governmental force in the little things. She hadn't liked its assaults of bad weather, its scars over the land, its wasteful ocean. She had returned to Rotor with an overwhelming gratitude, and with a new husband to whom she had tried to sell her dear little turning world — to make its orderly comfort as pleasant to him as it was to her, who had been born into it. |
| 2334 |
But he had only been conscious of its smallness. "You run out of it in six months," he had said. She herself hadn't held his interest for much longer than that. Oh well It would work itself out. Not for her. Eugenia Insigna was lost forever between worlds. But for the children. Eugenia had been born to Rotor and could live without Earth. Marlene had been born — or almost born — to Rotor alone and could live without the Solar System, except for the vague feeling that she had originated there. Her children would not know even that, and would not care. To them, Earth and the Solar System would be a matter of myth, and Erythro would have become a rapidly developing world. She hoped so. Marlene had this odd fixation on Erythro already, though it had only developed in the last few months and might leave just as quickly as it had come. Altogether, it would be the height of ingratitude to complain. No one could possibly have imagined a habitable world in orbit about Nemesis. The conditions that created habitability were remarkable. Estimate those probabilities and throw in the nearness of Nemesis to the Solar System and you would have to deny that it could possibly have happened. She turned to the day's reports, which the computer was waiting, with the infinite patience of its tribe, to give her. Yet before she could ask, her receptionist signaled and a soft voice came from the small button-speaker pinned to the left shoulder of her garment, "Aurinel Pampas wishes to see you. He has no appointment." Insigna grimaced, then remembered that she had sent him after Marlene. |
| 2335 |
You see, this Neighbor Star and the Sun are changing positions relative to each other, of course. I assume it and the Sun are revolving about a mutual center of gravity very slowly in a period of millions of years. Some centuries ago, the positions may have been such that we could have seen the Neighbor Star to one side of the cloud in its full brightness, but we would still have needed a telescope to see it and telescopes are only six centuries old — less old than that in those places on Earth from which the Neighbor Star would be visible. Some centuries from now, it will be seen clearly again, shining from the other side of the dust cloud. But we don't have to wait for centuries. The Far Probe did it for us." Pitt could feel himself igniting, a distant core of warmth arising within him. He said, "Do you mean that the Far Probe took a picture of that section of the sky containing this Neighbor Star and that the Far Probe was far enough out in space to see around the cloud and detect the Neighbor Star at full brightness?" "Exactly. We had an eighth-magnitude star where no eighth-magnitude star ought to be, and the spectrum was that of a red dwarf. You can't see red dwarf stars far away, so it had to be pretty close." "Yes, but why closer than Alpha Centauri?" "Naturally, I studied the same area of the sky as seen from Rotor and the eighth-magnitude star wasn't there. However, fairly near it was a nineteenth-magnitude star that wasn't present in the photograph taken by the Far Probe. |
| 2336 |
Everything about him spoke of strong masculinity. She could almost smell it when she met him, and was struck with fascination at once. Insigna was still a graduate student in astronomy at the time, completing her stint on Earth, looking forward to returning to Rotor so that she could qualify for work on the Far Probe. She dreamed of the wide advances the Far Probe would make possible (and never dreamed that she herself would make the most astonishing one). And then she met Crile and found herself, to her own confusion, madly in love with an Earthman — an Earthman. Overnight she felt herself abandoning the Far Probe in her mind, becoming ready to remain on Earth just to be with him. She could still remember the way he had looked at her in astonishment and said, "Remain here with me? I'd rather come to Rotor with you." She could not have imagined that he would want to abandon his world for her. How Crile managed to obtain permission to come to Rotor, Insigna did not know and had never found out. The immigration rules were strict, after all. Once any Settlement had a sizable population, it clamped down on immigration — first, because it could not exceed a certain definite limit on the number of people it could support comfortably, and, second, because it made a desperate effort to keep its ecological balance stable. People who came on important business from Earth — or even from other Settlementshad to undergo tedious decontamination procedures, a certain degree of isolation, and an enforced departure as soon as possible. |
| 2337 |
Yet here was Crile from Earth. He complained to her once of the weeks of waiting that had been part of the decontamination, and she was secretly pleased at the way he had persisted. Clearly, he must have wanted her very badly to submit to it. Yet there were times when he seemed withdrawn and inattentive and she would wonder then what had really driven him to Rotor over such obstacles. Perhaps it was not she, but the need to escape Earth that had been the motivating force. Had he committed a crime? Made a murderous enemy? Fled a woman he had grown tired of? She had never dared ask. And he had never offered information. Even after he had been allowed to enter Rotor, there was a question as to how long he might be able to remain. The Bureau of Immigration would have to grant a special permit to make him a full citizen of Rotor and that was not ordinarily likely. Insigna had found all the things that made Crile Fisher unacceptable to Rotorians additional inducements for fascination. She found that his being Earth-born lent him a difference and a glamour. True Rotorians would be bound to despise him as an alien — citizen or not — but she found even that a source of erotic excitement. She would fight for him, and triumph, against a hostile world. When he tried to find some sort of work that would enable him to earn money and occupy a niche in the new society, it was she who pointed out to him that if he married a Rotorian woman — Rotorian for three generations — that would be a powerful inducement for the Bureau of Immigration to grant him full citizenship. |
| 2338 |
She began to understand it as an abysmal pit of misery, something to flee from. She did not wonder any longer why Crile Fisher had left. She wondered why so few Earthmen followed his example. Nor were the Settlements so much better off. She became aware of how they closed in on themselves, how people were prevented from moving freely from one to another. No Settlement wanted the microscopic flora and fauna of any other. Trade dwindled slowly, and was increasingly carried on by automated vessels with carefully sterilized loads. The Settlements quarreled and found each other hateful. The circum-Martian Settlements were almost as bad. Only in the asteroid zone were the Settlements multiplying freely, and even those were growing suspicious of all the inner Settlements. Insigna could feel herself begin to agree with Pitt, even to grow enthusiastic over a flight from intolerable misery and the beginning of a system of worlds where the seeds of suffering had been eradicated. A new start, a new chance. And then she found that a baby was on the way and her enthusiasm began to wither. To risk herself and Crile on the long journey seemed worthwhile. To risk an infant, a child Pitt was unperturbed. He congratulated her. "It will be born here and you will have a little time to accustom yourself to the situation. It will be at least a year and a half before we're ready to go. And by then you will realize how fortunate you will be not to have to wait any longer. The child will have no memory of the misery of a ruined planet and a desperately divided humanity. |
| 2339 |
And what will be the final result of the warning? We will have to tell them where Nemesis is and they will see that the information is coming from that direction. The whole point of our secrecy, the whole plan for establishing a homogeneous civilization around Nemesis, free of interference, would be lost." "Whatever the cost, Janus, how could you consider not warning them?" "Where's your concern? Even if Nemesis is moving toward the Sun, how long would it take for it to reach the Solar System?" "It could reach the neighborhood of the Sun in five thousand years." Pitt sat back in his chair and regarded Insigna with a kind of wry amusement. "Five thousand years. Only five thousand years? Look, Eugenia, two hundred and fifty years ago, the first Earthman stood on the Moon. Two and a half centuries have passed and here we are at the nearest star. Where will we be in another two and a half centuries, at this rate? At any star we wish. And in five thousand years, fifty centuries, we will be allover the Galaxy, barring the presence of other intelligent forms of life. We will be reaching out to other galaxies. Within five thousand years, technology will have advanced to the point where, if the Solar System were really in trouble, all its Settlements and its entire planetary population could take off for deep space and other stars." Insigna shook her head. "Don't think that technological advance means that you can empty the Solar System by a mere wave of the hand, Janus. To remove billions of people without chaos and without tremendous loss of life would require long preparation. |
| 2340 |
If they are in mortal danger five thousand years from now, they must know now. It is not too soon to begin to plan." Pitt said, "You have a good heart, Eugenia, so I'll offer a compromise. Suppose we take a hundred years in which to establish ourselves here, to multiply, to build a cluster of Settlements that will be strong enough and stable enough to be secure. Then we can investigate Nemesis' destination and — if necessary — warn the Solar System. They will still have nearly five thousand years in which to prepare. Surely a small delay of a century will not be fatal." Insigna sighed. "Is that your vision of the future? Humanity squabbling endlessly over the stars? Each little group trying to establish itself as supreme over this star or that? Endless hatred, suspicion, and conflict, of the kind we had on Earth for thousands of years, expanded into the Galaxy for thousands more?" "Eugenia, I have no vision. Humanity will do as it pleases. It will squabble as you say, or it will perhaps set up a Galactic Empire, or do something else. I can't dictate what humanity will do, and I don't intend to try to shape it. For myself, I have only this one Settlement to care for, and this one century in which to establish it at Nemesis. By then, you and I will be safely dead, and our successors will handle the problem of warning the Solar System — if that should be necessary. I'm trying to be reasonable, not emotional, Eugenia. You are a reasonable person, too. Think about it." Insigna did. |
| 2341 |
Those were moments when there were no orders to give, no information to absorb, no immediate decisions to make, no farms to visit, no factories to inspect, no regions in space to penetrate, no one to see, no one to listen to, no one to foil, no one to encourage And always when such times came, Pitt allowed himself the final and least exhaustible luxury — that of self-pity. It was not that he would have anything different than what it was. He had planned for all his adult life to be Commissioner because he thought that no one could run Rotor as he could; and now that he was Commissioner, he still thought so. But why, among all the fools of Rotor, could he find no one who could see long-range as he could? It was fourteen years since the Leaving, and still no one could really see the inevitable; not even after he had explained it carefully. Someday, back in the Solar System, sooner rather than later, someone would develop hyper-assistance as the hyperspatialists on Rotor had — perhaps even in a better form. Someday humanity would set out in its hundreds and thousands of Settlements, in its millions and billions of people, to colonize the Galaxy, and that would be a brutal time. Yes, the Galaxy was enormous. How often had he heard that? And beyond it were other galaxies. But humanity would not spread out evenly. Always, always, there would be some star systems that, for one reason or another, were better than other star systems, and they would be the ones snarled and fought over. |
| 2342 |
He passed through every day with some hidden part of him paying no attention to what was immediately on the agenda, but listening — listening for the fatal words. Fourteen years and they were still not safe. One additional settlement had been built — New Rotor. There were people living on it, but it was a new world, of course. It still smelled of paint, as the old saying had it. Three more Settlements were in various stages of construction. Soon — within the decade, at any rate — the number of Settlements under construction would increase, and they would be given that oldest of all commands: Be fruitful and multiply! 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? |
| 2343 |
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. |
| 2344 |
Of course, Settlements in the asteroid belt were on the drawing boards, but the public clearly lacked eagerness to put them through. Of all that had happened since the discovery of Nemesis, it was this orbiting of Erythro that Pitt considered Rotor's greatest mistake. It should not have happened. And yet — and yet — could even he have forced it on Rotor? Might he have tried harder? And would that merely have led to a new election and his displacement? It was nostalgia that was the great problem. People tended to look back and Pitt could not always make them turn their head and look forward. Consider Brossen He had died seven years ago and Pitt had been at his deathbed. Pitt alone had happened to catch the old man's dying words. Brossen had beckoned to Pitt, who had leaned close to him. Brossen had reached out a feeble hand, the skin dry as paper. Clutching feebly at Pitt, he had whispered, "How bright the Sun of Earth was," and had died. So because Rotorians could not forget how bright the Sun had once been, and how green the Earth had once been, they cried out in exasperation against Pitt's logic and demanded that Rotor orbit a world that was not green, and that circled a sun that was not bright. It meant the loss of ten years in the rate of progress. They would have been ten years farther ahead had they been located in the asteroid belt from the start. Pitt was convinced of that. That alone was enough to poison Pitt's feelings toward Erythro, but there was, in connection with it, matters that were worse — much worse. |
| 2345 |
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. 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. |
| 2346 |
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. |
| 2347 |
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. 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. |
| 2348 |
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. |
| 2349 |
Now what I want to do is give you some information which is supposed to be confidential and which I think you will find useful and important. Are you ready to accept it and keep me clear?" "Always ready." "You know what we've been doing, of course." Fisher said, "Yes." It was the kind of useless, rhetorical question that required no other answer. For five years agents of the Office (for the last three years, Fisher among them) had been rummaging in the informational garbage heaps of the Settlements. Scavenging. Every Settlement was working on hyper-assistance, just as Earth itself was, ever since the word had leaked out that Rotor had it, and certainly ever since Rotor had proved the fact by leaving the Solar System. Presumably most Settlements, perhaps all, had obtained some scrap of what it was that Rotor had done. By the Open Science Agreement, each one of those scraps should have been laid on the table and if all were then put together, it might have meant practical hyper-assistance for all. That, however, was clearly too much to ask in this particular case. There was no telling what useful side effects might be born of the new technique and no Settlement could abandon the hope that it might be first in the field and, in this way, gain an important lead on the others in one way or another. So each hoarded what it had — if it had anything — and not one of them had enough. And Earth itself, with its vastly elaborate Terrestrial Board of Inquiry, sniffed at all the Settlements indiscriminately. |
| 2350 |
Just talk possibilities, make use of the subjunctive. And don't drag me into it in any way. I'm not supposed to know about it either." Fisher's brow furrowed in thought. Was it possible? He dared not hope. 30. The next day, while Fisher was still wondering whether to risk asking for an interview with Tanayama, the decision was taken out of his hands. He was summoned. A simple agent is rarely summoned by the Director. There are plenty of deputies to grind away at them. And if an agent is summoned by the Old Man, it is almost never good news. So Crile Fisher prepared himself with grim resignation for an assignment as an inspector of the fertilizer factories. Tanayama looked up at him from behind his desk. Fisher had seen him only rarely and briefly in the three years since Earth's discovery of the Neighbor Star, and he seemed unchanged. He had been small and shriveled for so long that there seemed no room for any further physical change. The sharpness of his eyes had not abated either, nor the withered grim set of his lips. He might even be wearing the same garments he had worn three years before. Fisher could not tell. But if the harsh voice, too, was the same, the tone was surprising. Apparently, in the face of astronomical odds, the Old Man had called him in for the purpose of praising him. Tanayama said in his queer, and not altogether unpleasant, distortion of Planetary English, "Fisher, you have done well. I want you to hear that from me." Fisher, standing (he had not been invited to sit down), managed to suppress his small start of surprise. |
| 2351 |
As for right now, I'll tell you what — you're an astronomer, aren't you?" She looked at him and said, wanly, "You know I am." "Then that means that you never look at the stars. Astronomers never do. They only look at their instruments. It's night over the Dome now, so let's go up to the observation deck and observe. The night is absolutely clear, and there is nothing like just looking at the stars to make one feel quiet and at peace. Trust me." 47. It was true. Astronomers did not look at the stars. There was no need. One gave instructions to the telescopes, the cameras, and the spectroscope by way of the computer, which received instructions in the way of programming. The instruments did the work, the analyses, the graphic simulations. The astronomer merely asked the questions, then studied the answers. For that, one didn't have to look at the stars. But then, she thought, how does one look at stars idly? Can one when one is an astronomer? The mere sight should make one uneasy. There was work to be done, questions to be asked, mysteries to be solved, and, after a while, surely one would return to one's workshop and set some instruments in motion while one distracted one's mind by reading a novel or watching a holovision spectacle. She muttered this to Siever Genarr, as he went about his office, checking loose ends before leaving. (He was a confirmed loose-end checker, Insigna remembered from the ancient days when they were all young. It had irritated her then, but perhaps she ought to have admired it. |
| 2352 |
And once the skies clear, it dries up quickly. A residue is left behind, and during the day, a special detergent mixture cleans the bubble. Sit down, Eugenia." Insigna sat in a chair that was soft and comfortable and that reclined almost of its own accord, so that she found herself looking upward. She could hear another chair sigh softly as Genarr's weight pushed it backward. And then, the small night-lights, which had cast a glow sufficient to point out the presence and location of chairs and small tables in the room, went out. In the darkness of an uninhabited world, the sky, cloudless, and as dark as black velvet, burned with sparks. Insigna gasped. She knew what the sky was like in theory. She had seen it on charts and maps, in simulations and photographs — in every shape and way except reality. She found herself not picking out the interesting objects, the puzzling items, the mysteries that demanded she get to work. She didn't look at anyone object, but at the patterns they made. In dim prehistory, she thought, it was the study of the patterns, and not of the stars themselves, that gave the ancients the constellations and the beginning of astronomy. Genarr was right. Peace, like a fine, unfelt cobweb, settled down over her. After a while, she said, almost sleepily, "Thank you, Genarr." "For what?" "For offering to go out with Marlene. For risking your mind for my daughter." "I'm not risking my mind. Nothing will happen to either of us. Besides, I have a — a fatherly feeling toward her. |
| 2353 |
It was a rare Settler, however, who had traveled to Earth, where alone atmospheric travel existed, and which had made use of airflight. Settlers who could face the vacuum as though it were a friend and brother felt unfathomable terror if expected to sense, somehow, the whistle of air past a vehicle without ground-support below. Yet air travel, on occasion, was an obvious necessity on Erythro. Like Earth it was a large world, and like Earth it had a fairly dense (and breathable) atmosphere. There were reference books on airflight available on Rotor, and even several Earth immigrants with aeronautical experience. So the Dome owned two small aircraft, somewhat clumsy, somewhat primitive, ungiven to large bursts of speed, or to headlong maneuverability — but serviceable. In fact, Rotor's very ignorance of aeronautical engineering helped in one respect. The Dome's aircraft were far more computerized than any corresponding vessel on Earth. In fact, Siever Genarr liked to think of the vessels as intricate robots that happened to be built in the shape of aircraft. Erythro's weather was much milder than Earth's could possibly be, since the low intensity of the radiation from Nemesis was insufficient to power large and violent storms, so that an aircraft-robot was less likely to have to face an emergency. Far less likely. As a result, virtually anyone could fly the raw and unpolished aircraft of the Dome. You simply told the plane what you wanted it to do and it was done. If the message was unclear, or seemed dangerous to the robotic brain of the vessel, it asked for clarification. |
| 2354 |
The rivers and small lakes were ruddier and darker than the land surface, and the sky was dark. Little of the red light of Nemesis was scattered by Erythro's atmosphere. The most hopeless thing about Erythro, however, was the barrenness of the land. Rotor, even on its tiny scale, had green fields, yellow grain, varicolored fruit, noise-making animals, all the color and sound of human habitation and structures. Here there was only silence and inanimation. Marlene frowned. "There is life on Erythro, Uncle Siever." Genarr couldn't tell whether Marlene was making a statement, asking a question, or answering his thought as revealed by his body language. Was she insisting on something or seeking reassurance? He said, "Certainly. Lots of life. It's all-pervasive. It's not only in the water either. There are prokaryotes living in the water films about the soil particles, too." After a while, the ocean made its appearance on the horizon ahead, first as simply a dark line, then a thickening band as the air vehicle approached it. Genarr cast careful sidelong glances at Marlene, watching her reaction. She had read about Earth's oceans, of course, and must have seen images on holovision, but nothing can prepare anyone for the actual experience. Genarr, who had been on Earth once (once!) as a tourist, had seen the edge of an ocean. He had never been over one, out of sight of land, however, and he wasn't sure of his own reactions. It rolled back below them and now the dry land shrank behind into a lighter line and, eventually, it was gone. |
| 2355 |
Miners carried canaries — you know, little yellow birds — into mines. If the air went bad, the canary died before the men were affected, but the men, knowing there was a problem, would get out of the mine. In other words, if I begin to act queerly, we'll both be brought in at once." "But what if it affects her before it affects you?" "I don't think it will. Marlene feels immune. She's said that so many times that I have begun to believe her." 55. Eugenia Insigna had never before watched the New Year approaching with such a painful concentration on the calendar. There had never been reason before. For that matter, the calendar was a vestigial hangover, twice removed. On Earth, the year had begun by marking the seasons, and the holidays that related to the seasons — midsummer, midwinter, sowing, harvest — by whatever names they were called. Crile (Insigna remembered) had explained the intricacies of the calendar to her, and had reveled in them in his dark and solemn way, as he did in everything that reminded him of Earth. She had listened to him with a mixture of ardor and apprehension; ardently because she wished to share his interest, as that might draw them closer together; apprehensively because she feared his interest in Earth might drive him away from her, as eventually it did. Strange that she still felt the pang — but was it dimmer now? It seemed to her that she could not actually remember Crile's face, that she remembered only the remembering now. Was it only the memory of a memory that stood between her and Siever Genarr now? |
| 2356 |
And yet it was the memory of a memory that held Rotor to the calendar now. Rotor had never had seasons. It had the year, of course, for it (and all the Settlements in the Earth-Moon system, which left out only those few that circled Mars or that were being built in the asteroid belt) accompanied Earth on its path around the Sun. Still, without seasons, the year was meaningless. Yet it was kept together with months and weeks. Rotor had the day, too, fixed artificially at twenty-four hours during which sunlight was allowed to enter for half the time and blocked off for the other half. It could have been fixed for any length of time, but it was fixed at the length of an Earth day and divided into twentyfour hours of sixty minutes each, with each minute consisting of sixty seconds. (The days and nights were at least uniformly twelve hours long.) There had been occasional movements among the Settlements to adopt a system of merely numbering days and grouping them into tens and multiples of tens; into dekadays, hectodays, kilodays, and, in the other direction, decidays, centidays, millidays; but that was really impossible. The Settlements could not set up each their own system for that would have reduced trade and communications to chaos. N or was any unified system possible save that of Earth, where 99 percent of the human population still lived, and to which ties of tradition still held the remaining 1 percent. Memory held Rotor and all the Settlements to a calendar that was intrinsically meaningless for them. |
| 2357 |
But now Rotor had left the Solar System and was a world that was isolated and alone. No day, or month, or year in the Earthly sense existed. It was not even sunlight that marked day from night, for Rotor gleamed with artificial daylight and darkened to a light whisper twelve hours on and twelve hours off. The harsh precision was not even broken by the gradual dimming and brightening at the boundaries that might simulate twilight and dawn. There seemed to be no need. And within this all-Settlement division, individual homes kept their illumination on and off to suit their whims or needs, but counted the days by Settlement time — which was Earth time. Even here at the Erythro Dome, where there was a natural day and night that was casually used as such by those in occupation, it was the not-quite-matching Settlement day length, still tied to that of Earth (the memory of a memory) that was used in official calculations. The movement was now stronger to leave the day as the only basic measure of time. Insigna knew for a fact that Pitt favored the decimalization of time measure, and yet even he hesitated to suggest it officially, for fear of rousing wild opposition. But perhaps not forever. The traditional disorderly units of weeks and months seemed less important. The traditional holidays were more frequently ignored. Insigna, in her astronomical work, used days as the only significant units. Someday the old calendar would die, and, in the far unseen future, new methods of agreed-upon time marking would surely arise — a Galactic Standard calendar, perhaps. |
| 2358 |
How would you expect me to live with that?" "She's right, Eugenia," said Genarr. "I'll be out there with her, and the best thing you can do is stay here and remain calm. All E-suits are equipped with radios. Marlene and I will be able to hear each other, and we will be in communication with the Dome. I promise you, if she behaves queerly in any way at all, if there is even the suspicion of oddness, I'll have her inside the Dome at once. And if I feel in any way not quite my own normal self, I will come back at once, bringing Marlene with me." Insigna shook her head and did not look comforted as she watched the helmet being fitted first over Marlene's head, and then over Genarr's. They were near the Dome's main airlock and Insigna watched its manipulation. She knew the lock procedure perfectly well — one could scarcely be a Settler otherwise. There was the delicate control of air pressure to make sure that there would be a gentle transfer of air from the Dome outward, never from Erythro inward. There were computerized checks at every moment to make sure there were no leaks. And then the inner door opened. Genarr stepped into the airlock and beckoned Marlene inward. She followed, and the door closed. The two were lost to immediate sight. Insigna distinctly felt her heart miss a beat. She watched the controls and knew exactly when the outer door slid open and, then, when it closed again. The holoscreen sprang to life and she could see the two suited figures on it, standing on the barren soil of Erythro. |
| 2359 |
The soil felt soft. It had rained the day before, the soft and steady misty rain of Erythro — or at least of this portion of Erythro. The soil still felt slightly damp as a result, and Genarr imagined the bits of soil, the tiny scraps of sand and loam and clay, each with its coat of water film that had been refreshed and renewed. In that film, prokaryotic cells lived happily, basking in the energy of Nemesis, building complex proteins out of simple ones, while other prokaryotes, indifferent to solar energy, made use, instead of the energy content of the remnants of those prokaryotes that, in their countless trillions, died during each moment of time. Marlene was at his side. She was looking upward, and Genarr said gently, "Don't stare at Nemesis, Marlene." Marlene's voice sounded naturally in his ear. It contained no tension or apprehension. Rather, her voice was filled with quiet joy. She said, "I'm looking at the clouds, Uncle Siever." Genarr looked up into the dark sky where, by squinting for a while, one could detect a faint greenish-yellow gleam. Against it were the feathery fair-weather clouds that caught Nemesis' light and reflected it in orange splendor. There was an eerie quiet about Erythro. There was nothing to make a sound. No form of life sang, roared, growled, bellowed, twittered, stridulated, or creaked. There were no leaves to rustle, no insects to hum. In the rare storms, there might be the rumble of thunder, or the wind might sigh against the occasional boulder — if it blew hard enough. |
| 2360 |
Let her enjoy herself, he thought. The Dome itself was built on a rocky outcropping, but the region in this direction was interlaced with small gently flowing brooks that all combined into a rather large river some thirty kilometers away that, in turn, flowed into the sea. The brooks were welcome, of course. They supplied the Dome with its natural water supply, once the prokaryote content was removed (actually, "killed" was the better word). There had been some biologists, in the early days of the Dome, who had objected to the killing of the prokaryotes, but that was ridiculous. The tiny specks of life were so incredibly numerous on the planet, and could proliferate so rapidly to replace any shrinkage of their numbers, that no amount of ordinary killing in the process of ensuring a water supply could hurt them in any significant way. Then, once the Plague began, a vague but strong hostility to Erythro rose up, and, after that, no one cared what one did to the prokaryotes. Of course, now that the Plague did not seem to be much of — a threat any longer, humanitarian feelings (Genarr privately felt that "biotarian" was the better word) might rise again. Genarr sympathized with those feelings, but then what would the Dome do for a water supply? Lost in thought, he was no longer looking at Marlene, and the shriek sounded deafeningly in his ear. "Marlene! Marlene! Siever, what is she doing?" Now he looked up, and was about to answer with automatic reassurance that nothing was wrong, that all was well, when he caught sight of Marlene. |
| 2361 |
Station Four was now rarely used for any purpose and was maintained only as Earth's foothold in space, as a symbol that the Settlers were not the sole owners of the vastness beyond Earth's atmosphere. But now Station Four had a use. A large cargo ship had lumbered out in its direction, carrying with it the rumor (among the Settlements) that another attempt — the first in the twenty-third century — would be made to place an Earth team on Mars. 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. |
| 2362 |
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. |
| 2363 |
I don't know how thoroughly the Rotorians had established hyperspatial theory, but the chances are that they had done so in only a rudimentary fashion, or they would have surely developed true superluminal flight. In our project, which has worked out hyperspatial theory in great detail, we've managed to establish the effect on material objects of passing from space to hyperspace and vice versa. "If an object is a point, there is no strain on it during the transition. If an object is not a point, however — if it is an extended bit of matter, as any ship would be — then there is always a finite period of time during which part of it is in space and part is in hyperspace. This creates a strain — the amount of strain depending on the size of the object, its physical makeup, its speed of transition, and so on. Even for an object the size of Rotor, the danger involved in a single transition — or a dozen, for that matter — is so small that it can reasonably be ignored. "When the Superluminal will travel, superluminously, to the Neighbor Star, we are liable to make a dozen transitions, or possibly only as few as two. The flight will be a safe one. In a flight with hyper-assistance only, on the other hand, there may be a million transitions in the course of the same trip, you see, and the chances of fatal strain mount up." Fisher looked appalled. "Is the chance of fatal strain certain?" "No, nothing is certain. It's a statistical matter. A ship might undergo a million transitions — or a billion — with nothing happening. |
| 2364 |
It might be destroyed, on the other hand, on the very first transition. The chances, however, increase rapidly with the number of transitions. "I suspect, then, that Rotor embarked on its trip understanding very little about the dangers of transition. Had they known more, they would never have left. There is a very good chance, then, that they experienced some sort of strain that might have been weak enough to allow them to 'limp' to the Neighbor Star or one that was strong enough to blow them completely out of existence. Therefore, we might find a hulk, or we might find nothing at all." "Or we might find a Settlement that has survived," said Fisher rebelliously. "Admitted," said Wendel. "Or we might ourselves be strained against the odds, be destroyed, and, for that reason, find nothing. I ask you not to be prepared for certainties but for probabilities. And remember that those who think about the matter, without some accurate knowledge of hyperspatial theory, are not likely to come to reasonable conclusions." Fisher fell into a profound and clearly depressed silence, while Wendel watched him uneasily. 62. Tessa Wendel found Station Four a weird environment. It was as though someone had built a small Settlement, but fitted it out to be a combination of nothing more than a laboratory, an observatory, and a launching platform. It had no farms, no homes, none of the appurtenances of a Settlement, however small. It was not even equipped with a spin that would set up an adequate pseudo-gravitational field. |
| 2365 |
It was Fisher who was odd man out. He would be fifty on his next birthday, which was not so far off, and he had no specialized training. He had no right to be on the ship if either youth or knowledge were considered. But he had been on Rotor once. That counted. And Wendel wanted him with her, and that counted even more. So did Tanayama and Koropatsky, which counted most of all. The ship was making its way, lumbering through space. Fisher could tell that, even though there was no physical indication that this was so. He could feel it with the tendrils of his intestines — if they had any. He thought fiercely: I've been in space far longer than all the others put together, far more times on far more ships. I can tell there is nothing sleek about this ship just by the feel of it. They can't. The Superluminal had to lack sleekness. The normal power sources that kept ordinary spaceships moving through the vacuum were cramped and cut down in the Superluminal. They had to be, for most of the ship was given over to the hyperspatial motors. It was like a seabird that waddled clumsily on land because it was designed for the water. Wendel suddenly appeared. Her hair was somewhat disheveled and she was perspiring a bit. Fisher said, "Is everything all right, Tessa?" "Oh yes, perfectly." She rested her rear end against one of the convenient wall depressions (very useful, considering the light pseudo-grav maintained on the ship). "No problems." "When do we make the move into hyperspace?" "In a few hours. |
| 2366 |
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. |
| 2367 |
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? 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. |
| 2368 |
That dimmed the other stars to a downcast, tarnished glitter. The bright star was the Sun, of course. It was farther away than any human being had ever seen it (except for the people of Rotor on their journey away from the Solar System). It was twice as far away as one would see it from Pluto at its farthest, so that it showed no orb and shone with the appearance of a star. Nevertheless, it was still a hundred times the brightness of the full Moon as seen from Earth, and that hundredfold brightness was condensed and compacted into one brilliant point. No wonder one still couldn't bear to turn a direct and unflinching gaze upon it through an un-opacified glass. It made things different. The Sun, ordinarily, was nothing to wonder at. It was too bright to look at, too unrivaled in its position. The minor portion of its light that was scattered into blueness by the atmosphere was sufficient to blank out the other stars altogether, and even where the stars were not blanked out (as on the Moon, for instance) they were so overridden by the Sun that there was no thought of comparison. Here, so far out in space, the Sun had dimmed at least to the point where comparison was possible. Wendel had said that from this vantage point, the Sun was one hundred and sixty thousand times as bright as Sirius, which was the next brightest object in the sky. It was perhaps twenty million times as bright as the dimmest stars he could see by eye. It made the Sun seem more marvelous by comparison than when it shone, uncompared, in Earth's sky. |
| 2369 |
Nor did he have much more to do than watch the sky, for the Superluminal was merely drifting. It had been doing that for two days — two days of drifting through space at mere rocket velocities. At this speed it would take thirty-five thousand years to reach the Neighbor Star — if they had been heading in the right direction. And they weren't. It was this that had turned Wendel, two days earlier, into a picture of white-faced despair. Until then, there had been no trouble. When they were due to enter hyperspace, Fisher had tensed himself, fearing the possible pain, the piercing flash of agony, the sudden surge of eternal darkness. None of that had happened. It had all been too fast to experience. They had entered into and emerged from hyperspace in the same instant. The stars had simply blinked into a different pattern with no perceptible moment in which they had lost their first pattern, yet not gained their second. It was relief in a double sense. Not only was he still alive, but he realized that if something had gone wrong and he had died, then death would have come in such a no-time way that he could not possibly have experienced death. He would simply have been dead. The relief was so keen that he was scarcely aware that Tessa had let out a gasp of disturbance and pain, and dashed out to the engine room with an outcry. She came back looking disheveled — not a hair out of place, but looking internally disheveled. Her eyes were wild and she stared at Fisher as though she did not really recognize him. |
| 2370 |
And Wu explained it. Imagine that the speed of light is a zero point. All speeds less than that of light would have negative magnitude, and all speeds greater than that of light would have positive magnitude. In the ordinary Universe we live in, therefore, all speeds would be negative, by that mathematical convention, and, in fact, must be negative. "Now, the Universe is built on principles of symmetry. If something as fundamental as speed of movement is always negative, then something else, just as fundamental, ought to be always positive, and Wu suggested that that something else was gravitation. In the ordinary Universe, it is always an attraction. Every object with mass attracts every other object with mass. "However, if something goes at a superluminal speed — that is, faster than light — then its speed is positive and the other something that was positive has to become negative. At superluminal speed, in other words, gravitation is a repulsive force. Every object with mass repels every other object with mass. Wu suggested that to me a long time ago and I wouldn't listen. His words just bounced off my eardrums." Crile said, "But what's the difference, Tessa? When we're going at enormous superluminal speeds, and gravitational attraction doesn't have time to affect our motion, neither would gravitational repulsion." "Ah, that's not so, Crile. That's the beauty of it. That reverses, too. In the ordinary Universe of negative speeds, the faster the speed relative to an attractive body, the less gravitational attraction affects the direction of movement. |
| 2371 |
This advance in superluminal flight must be reported, and Wu must be properly honored. He built on my work, I admit, but he went on to do what I might never have thought to do. I mean, consider the consequences." "I can see them," said Fisher. "No, you can't," said Wendel sharply. "Now, listen to me. Rotor had no problems with gravitation because they merely skimmed the speed of light — a little below it at some times, a little above it at others — so that gravitational effects, whether positive or negative, attractive or repulsive, had immeasurably small effects on them. It was our own true superluminal flights at many times the speed of light that makes it imperative to take gravitational repulsion into account. My own equations are useless. They will get ships through hyperspace, but not in the right direction. And that's not all. "I have always thought that there was a certain unavoidable danger in emerging from hyperspace — the second half of the transition. What if you merge into an already existing object? There would be a fantastic explosion that would destroy the ship and everything in it in a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. "Naturally, we're not going to end up inside a star because we know where the stars are located and can avoid them. In time, we might even know where a star's planets are and avoid them, too. But there are asteroids by the tens of thousands and comets by the tens of billions in the neighborhood of every star. If we end up overlapping one of those, that would still be deadly. |
| 2372 |
She thought about it lazily. It was very quiet out here, and very peaceful, and she could rest and there was no one to see her, to watch her, no one whom she had to interpret. It was great not to have to interpret. What temperature would it be? The rain, that is. Why shouldn't it be the same comfortable temperature as Nemesis itself? Of course, she would get wet, and it was always cold when you stepped out of a shower all wet. And the rain would wet her clothes, too. But it would be silly to wear clothes in the rain. You didn't wear clothes in the shower. If it rained, you would take off your clothes. That would be the only thing that made sense. Only — where did you put the clothes? When you showered, you put your clothes i4 the cleaner. Here on Erythro, maybe you could put them under a rock, or have a little house built, in which you could leave your clothes on a rainy day. After all, why wear clothes at all if it were raining? Or if it were sunny? You'd want to wear them if it were cold, of course. But on warm days But then, why did people wear clothes on Rotor, where it was always warm and clean? They didn't at swimming pools — which reminded Marlene that the young people with slim bodies and good shapes were the first ones off with their clothes — and the last ones to put them on again. And people like Marlene just didn't take their clothes off in public. Maybe that's why people wore clothes. To hide their bodies. Why didn't minds have shapes you could show off? Except that they did, and then people didn't like it. |
| 2373 |
Virtually no one. How many know that Columbus discovered America? Virtually everyone. So suppose that Columbus, on discovering the variation, decided, midway, to go home and make the glad announcement to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, preserving his priority as the discoverer of the phenomenon? That discovery might conceivably have been greeted with interest and the monarchs might eventually have sent out another expedition headed, let us say, by Amerigo Vespucci, who would then have reached America. In that case, who would remember that Columbus had made some sort of discovery about the compass? Virtually no one. Who would remember that Vespucci had discovered America? Virtually everyone. "So do you really want to go back? The discovery of the gravitational correction will, I assure you, be remembered by a few as a small side effect of superluminal travel. But the crew of the next expedition that will actually reach the Neighbor Star, will be hailed as the first to reach a star by superluminal flight. You three, even you, Wu, will scarcely be worth a footnote. "You might think that, as a reward for this great discovery that Wu has made, it will be you that will be sent out on a second expedition, but I'm afraid not. You see, Igor Koropatsky, who is the Director of the Terrestrial Board of Inquiry and who is waiting for us back on Earth, is particularly interested in information on the Neighbor Star and its planetary system. He will explode like Krakatoa when he finds out that we were within reach of it and turned back. |
| 2374 |
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? |
| 2375 |
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. Or would that give Genarr a bit too much of the reality of power in addition to the appearance? |
| 2376 |
Besides we're building five Settlements in the asteroid belt and I can visit anyone of them and get my fill of people and smell them, too, for what good that does me." And then, when he did come to Rotor — the "metropolis," as he insisted on calling it — he would keep looking from one side to the other as though he expected people to crowd in on him. He even looked at chairs suspiciously, and sat down on them with a sidewise slide as though hoping to wipe off the aura that the previous backside had left upon it. Janus Pitt had always thought he was the ideal Acting Commissioner for the Asteroid Project. That position had, in effect, given him a free hand in everything that had to do with the outer rim of the Nemesian System. That included not only the Settlements in progress, but with the Scanning Service itself. They had finished their lunch in the privacy of Pitt's quarters, for Saltade would sooner go hungry than eat in a dining room to which the general public (meaning even a third person who was unknown to him) would be admitted. Pitt, in fact, felt a certain surprise that Leverett had agreed to eat with him. Pitt studied him casually. Leverett was so lean and leathery, and gave such an appearance of whipcord and gristle that he didn't look as if he had ever been young or would ever be old. His eyes were faded blue, his hair faded yellow. Pitt said, "When was the last time you were on Rotor, Saltade?" "Nearly two years ago, and I take it unkindly of you to put me through this, Janus." "Why, what have I done? |
| 2377 |
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. |
| 2378 |
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. |
| 2379 |
"In order for Rotor to have superluminal flight, it might occur to you that you could point a weapon at me and demand all I know. I am a mathematician, a highly theoretical one, and my information is limited. Even if you were to capture our ship itself, you would learn very little from it. What you must do is to send a deputation of scientists and engineers to Earth, where we could train you adequately. "In return, we ask for this world, which you call Erythro. It is my understanding that you do not occupy it in any way except for the presence of this Dome, which is used for astronomical and other kinds of research. You are living in Settlements. "Whereas the Settlements of the Solar System can wander off in search of Sun-like planets, the people of Earth cannot. There are eight billion of us who must be evacuated in a few thousand years and, as Nemesis approaches more and more closely to the Solar System, Erythro will more and more easily serve as a way station on which to place Earthpeople until such time as we can find Earth-like worlds to transfer them to. "We will return to Earth with a Rotorian of your choosing as proof that we were really here. More ships will be built and they will return — you can be sure we will return, for we must have Erythro. We will then take back your scientists, who will learn the technique of superluminal flight, a technique we will also grant to the other Settlements. Does all this adequately summarize what we have decided?" Leverett said, "It's not all quite that easy. |
| 2380 |
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. 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. |
| 2381 |
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. 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. |
| 2382 |
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. |
| 2383 |
As Senior Computer Twissell's personally assigned Technician, he could arrange that by a slight bending of professional ethics. Particularly with Twissell's attention caught ever more tightly in his own overwhelming project. (Harlan's nostrils flared. He knew now a little of the nature of that project.) Harlan had had no assurance that he would ever find what he was looking for in a reasonable time. When he had first glanced over projected Reality Change 2456 — 2781, Serial Number V-5, he was half inclined to believe his reasoning powers were warped by wishing. For a full day he had checked and rechecked equations and relationships in a rattling uncertainty, mixed with growing excitement and a bitter gratitude that he had been taught at least elementary psycho-mathematics. Now Voy went over those same puncture patterns with a half-puzzled, half-worried eye. He said, "It seems to me; I say, it seems to me that this is all perfectly in order." Harlan said, "I refer you particularly to the matter of the courtship characteristics of the society of the current Reality of this Century. That's sociology and your responsibility, I believe. It's why I arranged to see you when I arrived, rather than someone else." Voy was now frowning. He was still polite, but with an icy touch now. He said, "The Observers assigned to our Section are highly competent. I have every certainty that those assigned to this project have given accurate data. Have you evidence to the contrary?" "Not at all, Sociologist Voy. |
| 2384 |
I accept their data. It is the development of the data I question. Do you not have an alternate tensorcomplex at this point, if the courtship data is taken properly into consideration?" Voy stared, and then a look of relief washed over him visibly. "Of course, Technician, of course, but it resolves itself into an identity. There is a loop of small dimensions with no tributaries on either side. I hope you'll forgive me for using picturesque language rather than precise mathematical expressions." "I appreciate it," said Harlan dryly. "I am no more a Computer than a Sociologist." "Very good, then. The alternate tensor-complex you refer to, or the forking of the road, as we might say, is non-significant. The forks join up again and it is a single road. There was not even any need to mention it in our recommendations." "If you say so, sir, I will defer to your better judgment. However, there is still the matter of the M. N. C." The Sociologist winced at the initials as Harlan knew he would. M. N. C. — Minitnum Necessary Change. There the Technician was master. A Sociologist might consider himself above criticism by lesser beings in anything involving the mathematical analysis of the infinite possible Realities in Time, but in matters of M. N. C. the Technician stood supreme. Mechanical computing would not do. The largest Computaplex ever built, manned by the cleverest and most experienced Senior Computer ever born, could do no better than to indicate the ranges in which the M. N. C. |
| 2385 |
Noys Lambent. It is a female, isn't it?" There was a dryness in Harlan's throat. "Yes." Voy's lips curled into a slow smile. "Sounds interesting. I'd like to meet her, sight unseen. Haven't had any women in this Section for months." Harlan didn't trust himself to answer. He stared a moment at the Sociologist and turned abruptly. If there was a flaw in Eternity, it involved women. He had known the flaw for what it was from almost his first entrance into Eternity, but he felt it personally only that day he had first met Noys. From that moment it had been an easy path to this one, in which he stood false to his oath as an Eternal and to everything in which he had believed. For what? For Noys. And he was not ashamed. It was that which really rocked him. He was not ashamed. He felt no guilt for the crescendo of crimes he had committed, to which this latest addition of the unethical use of confidential Life-Plotting could rank only as a peccadillo. He would do worse than his worst if he had to. For the first time the specific and express thought came to him. And though he pushed it away in horror, he knew that, having once come, it would return. The thought was simply this: That he would ruin Eternity, if he had to. The worst of it was that he knew he had the power to do it. 2 Observer Harlan stood at the gateway to Time and thought of himself in new ways. It had been very simple once. There were such things as ideals, or at least catchwords, to live by and for. Every stage of an Eternal's life had a reason. |
| 2386 |
It is as an Observer that you will make your mark. Not what you did in school, but what you will do as an Observer will determine your Specialty and how high you will rise in it. This will be your post-graduate course, Eternals, and failure in it, even small failure, will put you into Maintenance no matter how brilliant your potentialities now seem. That is all." He shook hands with each of them, and Harlan, grave, dedicated, proud in his belief that the privileges of being an Eternal contained its greatest privilege in the assumption of responsibility for the happiness of all the human beings who were or ever would be within the reach of Eternity, was deep in self-awe. 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. |
| 2387 |
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. |
| 2388 |
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. 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. |
| 2389 |
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. |
| 2390 |
"It's as though we were to take a series of stills from a book-film and study each painstakingly. We would see a great deal we would miss if we just scanned the film as it went past. I think that helps me a great deal with my work." Finge stared at him in amazement, widened his eyes a little, and left with no further remark. Occasionally, thereafter, he brought up the subject of Primitive history and accepted Harlan's reluctant comments with no decisive expression on his own plump face. Harlan was not sure whether to regret the whole matter or to regard it as a possible way of speeding his own advancement. He decided on the first alternative when, passing him one day in Corridor A, Finge said abruptly and in the hearing of others, "Great Time, Harlan, don't you ever smile?" The thought came, shockingly, to Harlan that Finge hated him. His own feeling for Finge approached something like detestation thereafter. Three months of raking through the 482nd had exhausted most of its worth-while meat and when Harlan received a sudden call to Finge's office, he was not surprised. He was expecting a change in assignment. His final summary had been prepared days before. The 482nd was anxious to export more cellulose-base textiles to Centuries which were deforested, such as the 1174th, but were unwilling to accept smoked fish in return. A long list of such items was contained in due order and with due analysis. He took the draft of the summary with him. But no mention of the 482nd was made. |
| 2391 |
Instead Finge introduced him to a withered and wrinkled little man, with sparse white hair and a gnomelike face that throughout the interview was stamped with a perpetual smile. It varied between extremes of anxiety and joviality but never quite disappeared. Between two of his yellow-stained fingers lay a burning cigarette. It was the first cigarette Harlan had ever seen, otherwise he would have paid more attention to the man, less to the smoking cylinder, and been better prepared for Finge's introduction. Finge said, "Senior Computer Twissell, this is Observer Andrew Harlan." Harlan's eyes shifted in shock from the little man's cigarette to his face. Senior Computer Twissell said in a high-pitched voice, "How do you do? So this is the young man who writes those excellent reports?" Harlan found no voice. Laban Twissell was a legend, a living myth. Laban Twissell was a man he should have recognized at once. He was the outstanding Computer in Eternity, which was another way of saying he was the most eminent Eternal alive. He was the dean of the Allwhen Council. He had directed more Reality Changes than any man in the history of Eternity. He was — He had — Harlan's mind failed him altogether. He nodded his head with a doltish grin and said nothing. Twissell put his cigarette to his lips, puffed quickly, and took it away. "Leave us, Finge. I want to talk to the boy." Finge rose, murmured something, and left. Twissell said, "You seem nervous, boy. There is nothing to be nervous about." But meeting Twissell like that was a shock. |
| 2392 |
It is always disconcerting to find that someone you have thought of as a giant is actually less than five and a half feet tall. Could the brain of a genius actually fit behind the retreating, bald-smooth forehead? Was it sharp intelligence or only good humor that beamed out of the little eyes that screwed up into a thousand wrinkles. Harlan didn't know what to think. The cigarette seemed to obscure what small scrabble of intelligence he could collect. He flinched visibly as a puff of smoke reached him. Twissell's eyes narrowed as though he were trying to peer through the smoke haze and he said in horribly accented tenth-millennial dialect, "Will you petter feel if I in your yourself dialect should speech, poy?" Harlan, brought to the sudden brink of hysterical laughter, said carefully, "I speak Standard Intertemporal quite well, sir." He said it in the Intertemporal he and all other Eternals in his presence had used ever since his first months in Eternity. "Nonsense," said Twissell imperiously. "I do not bother of Intertemporal. My speech of ten-millennial is over than perfect." Harlan guessed that it had been some forty years since Twissell had had to make use of localwhen dialects. But having made his point to his own satisfaction, apparently, he shifted to Intertemporal and remained there. He said, "I would offer you a cigarette, but I am certain you don't smoke. Smoking is approved of hardly anywhen in history. In fact, good cigarettes are made only in the 72nd and mine have to be specially imported from there. |
| 2393 |
He found it almost unrecognizable. It had not changed. He had. Two years of Technicianhood had meant a number of things. 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. |
| 2394 |
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. Twissell sat next to him, smiling with admiration, as he drew up a new organizational chart, neat, orderly, consistent, and asked Noys Lambent to distribute copies. But Noys Lambent was nude, and Harlan woke up, trembling and ashamed. He met the girl in a corridor one day and stood aside, eyes averted, to let her pass. But she remained standing, looking at him, until he had to look up and meet her eyes. She was all color and life and Harlan was conscious of a faint perfume about her. She said, "You're Technician Harlan, aren't you?" His impulse was to snub her, to force his way past, but, after all, he told himself, all this wasn't her fault. Besides, to move past her now would mean touching her. |
| 2395 |
They know that we supervise intertemporal trade. They consider that to be our chief function, which is good. They have a dim knowledge that we are also here to prevent catastrophe from striking mankind. That is more a superstition than anything else, but it is more or less correct, and good, too. We supply the generations with a mass father image and a certain feeling of security. You see all that, don't you?" Harlan thought: Does the man think I'm still a Cub? But he nodded briefly. Finge went on. "There are some things, however, they must not know. Prime among them, of course, is the manner in which we alter Reality when necessary. The insecurity such knowledge would arouse would be most harmful. It is always necessary to breed out of Reality any factors that might lead to such knowledge and we have never been troubled with it. "However, there are always other undesirable beliefs about Eternity which spring up from time to time in one Century or another. Usually, the dangerous beliefs are those which concentrate particularly in the ruling classes of an era; the classes that have most contact with us and, at the same time, carry the important weight of what is called public opinion." Finge paused as though he expected Harlan to offer some comment or ask some question. Harlan did neither. Finge continued. "Ever since the Reality Change 433-486, Serial Number F-2, which took place about a year — a physioyear ago, there has been evidence of the bringing into Reality of such an undesirable belief. |
| 2396 |
Surely it was nothing else. 5 Timer Noys Lambent's estate was fairly isolated, yet within easy reach of one of the larger cities of the Century. Harlan knew that city well; he knew it better than any of its inhabitants could. In his exploratory Observations into this Reality he had visited every quarter of the city and every decade within the purview of the Section. He knew the city both in Space and Time. He could piece it together, view it as an organism, living and growing, with its catastrophes and recoveries, its gaieties and troubles. Now he was in a given week of Time in that city, in a moment of suspended animation of its slow life of steel and concrete. More than that, his preliminary explorations had centered themselves more and more closely about the "perioeci," the inhabitants who were the most important of the city, yet who lived outside the city, in room and relative isolation. The 482nd was one of the many Centuries in which wealth was unevenly distributed. The Sociologists had an equation for the phenomenon (which Harlan had seen in print, but which he understood only vaguely). It worked itself out for any given Century to three relationships, and for the 482nd those relationships stood near the limits of what could be permitted. Sociologists shook their heads over it and Harlan had heard one say at one time that any further deterioration with new Reality Changes would require "the closest Observation." Yet there was this to be said for unfavorable relationships in the wealth-distribution equation. |
| 2397 |
It meant the existence of a leisure class and the development of an attractive way of life which, at its best, encouraged culture and grace. As long as the other end of the scale was not too badly off, as long as the leisure classes did not entirely forget their responsibilities while enjoying their privileges, as long as their culture took no obviously unhealthy turn, there was always the tendency in Eternity to forgive the departure from the ideal wealth-distribution pattern and to search for other, less attractive maladjustments. Against his will Harlan began to understand this. Ordinarily his overnight stays in Time involved hotels in the poorer sections, where a man might easily stay anonymous, where strangers were ignored, where one presence more or less was nothing and therefore did not cause the fabric of Reality to do more than tremble. 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. |
| 2398 |
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. |
| 2399 |
Late at night Harlan added his notes to the conversations he had gathered, while it was all fresh in his mind. As always in such cases he made use of a molecular recorder of 55th Century manufacture. In shape it was a featureless thin cylinder about four inches long by half an inch in diameter. It was colored a deep but noncommittal brown. It could be easily held in cuff, pocket, or lining, depending on the style of clothing, or, for that matter, suspended from belt, button, or wristband. However held, wherever kept, it had the capacity of recording some twenty million words on each of three molecular energy levels. With one end of the cylinder connected to a transliterator, resonating efficiently with Harlan's earpiece, and the other end connected field-wise to the small mike at his lips, Harlan could listen and speak simultaneously. Every sound made during the hours of the "gathering" repeated itself now in his ear, and as he listened, he spoke words that recorded themselves on a second level, co-ordinate with but different from the primary level on which the gathering had been recorded. On this second level he described his own impressions, he ascribed significance, pointed out correlations. Eventually, when he made use of the molecular recorder to write a report, he would have, not simply a sound-forsound recording, but an annotated reconstruction. Noys Lambent entered. She did not signal her entrance in any way. Annoyed, Harlan removed lip-piece and earpiece, clipped them to the molecular recorder, placed the whole into its kit, and clasped that shut. |
| 2400 |
Besides, even the most detailed possible Computations could never eliminate all uncertainty, all random effects. If that weren't so, there would be no need for Observers. They were alone together in the house, Noys and himself. Mekkanos were at the height of their popularity these two decades past and would remain so for nearly a decade more in this Reality, so there were no human servants about. Of course, with the female of the species as economically independent as the male, and able to attain motherhood, if she so wished, without the necessities of physical childbearing, there could be nothing "improper" in their being together alone in the eyes of the 482nd, at least. Yet Harlan felt compromised. The girl was stretched out on her elbow on a sofa opposite. Its patterned covering sank beneath her as though avid to embrace her. She had kicked off the transparent shoes she had been wearing and her toes curled and uncurled within the flexible foamite, like the soft paws of a luxuriant cat. She shook her head and whatever it was that had kept her hair arranged upward away from her ears in intricate intertwinings was suddenly loosened. The hair tumbled about her neck and her bare shoulders became more creamily lovely at the contrast with the black of the hair. She murmured, "How old are you?" That he certainly should not have answered. It was a personal question and the answer was none of her business. What he should have said at that point with polite firmness was: May I be left to my work? |
| 2401 |
He shook his head, but the whirligig of thought went on and on in stranger and more jagged breaks and leaps until it jumped into a sudden flash of illumination that persisted for a brilliant second, then died. 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. |
| 2402 |
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. |
| 2403 |
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 ... yes, and Mallansohn and the Cub! He stopped there. Why the Cub? Why Cooper? He hadn't thought of him. But if he hadn't, then why should he think of Brinsley Sheridan Cooper now? He frowned! What was the truth that connected all this? What was it he was trying to find? What made him so sure there was something to find? Harlan felt chilled, for with these questions a distant glow of that earlier illumination seemed to break upon the horizons of his mind and he almost knew. He held his breath, did not press for it. Let it come. Let it come. And in the quiet of that night, a night already so uniquely significant in his life, an explanation and interpretation of events came to him that at any saner, more normal time he would not have entertained for a moment. He let the thought bud and flower, let it grow until he could see it explain a hundred odd points that otherwise simply remained — odd. He would have to investigate this, check this, back in Eternity, but in his heart he was already convinced that he knew a terrible secret he was not meant to know. A secret that embraced all Eternity! 6 Life-Plotter A month of physiotime had passed since that night in the 482nd, when he grew acquainted with many things. Now, if one calculated by ordinary time, he was nearly 2000 Centuries in Noys Lambent's future, attempting by a mixture of bribery and cajolery to learn what lay in store for her in a new Reality. |
| 2404 |
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. |
| 2405 |
He thought: What's the use in talking to any of them? He said, angrily, with a sharp change of subject, "What about the Life-Plotter?" "What about him?" "Would you check with the man? He ought to have made some progress by now." The Sociologist let a look of disapproval drift across his face, as though to say: You're the impatient one, aren't you? Aloud he said, "Come with me and let's see." The name plate on the office door said Neron Feruque, which struck Harlan's eye and mind because of its faint similarity to a pair of rulers in the Mediterranean area during Primitive times. (His weekly discourses with Cooper had sharpened his own preoccupation with the Primitive almost feverishly.) The man, however, resembled neither ruler, as Harlan recalled it. He was almost cadaverously lean, with skin stretched tightly over a high-bridged nose. His fingers were long and his wrists knobby. As he caressed his small Summator, he looked like Death weighing a soul in the balance. Harlan found himself staring at the Summator hungrily. It was the heart and blood of Life-Plotting, the skin and bones, sinew, muscle and all else. Feed into it the required data of a personal history, and the equations of the Reality Change; do that and it would chuckle away in obscene merriment for any length of time from a minute to a day, and then spit out the possible companion lives for the person involved (under the new Reality), each neatly ticketed with a probability value. Sociologist Voy introduced Harlan. |
| 2406 |
Some poor sucker always gets it in the neck, doesn't he? Suppose you were that sucker, hey? "And another thing. Just remember that every time we make a Reality Change it's harder to find a good next one. Every physioyear, the chance that a random Change is likely to be for the worse increases. That means the proportion of guys we can cure gets smaller anyway. It's always going to get smaller. Someday, we'll be able to cure only one guy a physioyear, even counting the neutral cases. Remember that." Harlan lost even the faintest interest. This was the type of griping that went with the business. The Psychologists and Sociologists, in their rare introvertive studies of Eternity, called it identification. Men identified themselves with the Century with which they were associated professionally. Its battles, all too often, became their own battles. Eternity fought the devil of identification as best it could. No man could be assigned to any Section within two Centuries of his homewhen, to make identification harder. Preference was given to Centuries with cultures markedly different from that of their homewhen. (Harlan thought of Finge and the 482nd.) What was more, their assignments were shifted as often as their reactions grew suspect. (Harlan wouldn't give a 5oth Century grafenpiece for Feruque's chances of retaining this assignment longer than another physioyear at the outside.) And still men identified out of a silly yearning for a home in Time (the Time-wish; everyone knew about it). |
| 2407 |
And then, though already in the 2456th, it was for upwhen that Harlan set the kettle controls. He watched the numbers on the temporometer rise. Though they moved with blurry quickness, there would be considerable time for thought. How the Life-Plotter's finding changed matters! How the very nature of his crime had changed! And it had all hinged on Finge. The phrase caught at him with its ridiculous rhyme and its heavy beat circled dizzyingly inside his skull: It hinged on Finge. It hinged on Finge ... Harlan had avoided any personal contact with Finge on his return to Eternity after those days with Noys in the 482nd. As Eternity closed in about him, so did guilt. A broken oath of office, which seemed nothing in the 482nd, was enormous in Eternity. He had sent in his report by impersonal air-chute and took himself off to personal quarters. He needed to think this out, gain time to consider and grow accustomed to the new orientation within himself. Finge did not permit it. He was in communication with Harlan less than an hour after the report had been coded for proper direction and inserted into the chute. The Computer's image stared out of the vision plate. His voice said, "I expected you to be in your office." Harlan said, "I delivered the report, sir. It doesn't matter where I wait for a new assignment." "Yes?" Finge scanned the roll of foil he held in his hands, holding it up, squint-eyed, and peering at its perforation pattern. "It is scarcely complete," he went on. "May I visit your rooms?" Harlan hesitated a moment. |
| 2408 |
Finge was jealous! That much Harlan would have sworn was obvious. Harlan had succeeded in taking away a girl that Finge had meant to have. Harlan felt the triumph in that and found it sweet. For the first time in his life he knew an aim that meant more to him than the frigid fulfillment of Eternity. He was going to keep Finge jealous, because Noys Lambent was to be permanently his. In this mood of sudden exaltation he plunged into the request that originally he had planned to present only after a wait of a discreet four or five days. He said, "It is my intention to apply for permission to form a liaison with a Timed individual." Finge seemed to snap out of a reverie. "With Noys Lambent, I presume." "Yes, sir. As Computer in charge of the Section, it will have to go through you... ." Harlan wanted it to go through Finge. Make him suffer. If he wanted the girl himself, let him say so and Harlan could insist on allowing Noys to make her choice. He almost smiled at that. He hoped it would come to that. It would be the final triumph. Ordinarily, of course, a Technician could not hope to push through such a matter in the face of a Computer's desires, but Harlan was sure he could count on Twissell's backing, and Finge had a long way to go before he could buck Twissell. Finge, however, seemed tranquil. "It would seem," he said, "that you have already taken illegal possession of the girl." Harlan flushed and was moved to a feeble defense. "The spatio-temporal chart insisted on our remaining alone together. |
| 2409 |
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. |
| 2410 |
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... (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. |
| 2411 |
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. |
| 2412 |
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. It was a natural tendency to crowd it as far downwhen as he could. A foolish risk, too, though. He might easily have miscalculated and entered Time before he had left it physiohours earlier. What then? It was one of the first rules he had learned as an Observer: One person occupying two points in the same Time of the same Reality runs a risk of meeting himself. Somehow that was something to be avoided. Why? Harlan knew he didn't want to meet himself. He didn't want to be staring into the eyes of another and earlier (or later) Harlan. Beyond that it would be a paradox, and what was it Twissell was fond of saying? "There are no paradoxes in Time, but only because Time deliberately avoids paradoxes.") All the time Harlan thought dizzily of all this Noys stared at him with large, luminous eyes. |
| 2413 |
Someone said with a voice that was tremulous and uncertain, "I suppose I never had a mother. If I go back into the 95th, they'd say: 'Who are you? We don't know you. We don't have any records of you. You don't exist.'" They smiled weakly and nodded their heads, lonely boys with nothing left but Eternity. They found Latourette at bedtime, sleeping deeply and breathing shallowly. There was the slight reddening of a spray injection in the hollow of his left elbow and fortunately that was noted too. Yarrow was called and for a while it looked as though one Cub would be out of the course, but he was brought around eventually. A week later he was back in his seat. Yet the mark of that evil night was on his personality for as long as Harlan knew him thereafter. And now Harlan had to explain Reality to Noys Lambent, a girl not much older than those Cubs, and explain it at once and in full. He had to. There was no choice about that. She must learn exactly what faced them and exactly what she would have to do. He told her. They ate canned meats, chilled fruits, and milk at a long conference table designed to hold twelve, and there he told her. He did it as gently as possible, but he scarcely found need for gentleness. She snapped quickly at every concept and before he was half through it was borne in upon him, to his great amazement, that she wasn't reacting badly. She wasn't afraid. She showed no sense of loss. She only seemed angry. The anger reached her face and turned it a glowing pink while her dark eyes seemed somehow the darker for it. |
| 2414 |
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. |
| 2415 |
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. (That came fairly close to one of Eternity's most potent fears, and Harlan shivered and hastened uneasily through the discussion.) And, of course, he discussed at length the fate of literature and art in various types and classifications of Reality Changes. But Twissell would have none of the last. "If the values of art can't be computed," he would shout at Harlan, "then what's the use of arguing about it?" And Twissell's views, Harlan knew, were shared by the large majority of the Allwhen Council. Yet now Harlan stood at the shelves devoted to the novels of Eric Linkollew, usually described as the outstanding writer of the 575th, and wondered. He counted fifteen different "Complete Works" collections, each, undoubtedly, taken out of a different Reality. Each was somewhat different, he was sure. One set was noticeably smaller than all the others, for instance. A hundred Sociologists, he imagined, must have written analyses of the differences between the sets in terms of the sociological background of each Reality, and earned status thereby. Harlan passed on to the wing of the library which was devoted to the devices and instrumentation of the various 575th's. |
| 2416 |
He had felt it as he wandered through its rooms, collecting clothing, small objets d'art, strange containers, and instruments from Noys's vanity table. There was the somber silence of a doomed Reality that was past merely the physical absence of noise. There was no way for Harlan to predict its analogue in a new Reality. It might be a small suburban cottage or a tenement in a city street. It might be zero with untamed scrubland replacing the parklike terrain on which it now stood. It might, conceivably, be almost unchanged. And (Harlan touched on this thought gingerly) it might be inhabited by the analogue of Noys or, of course, it might not. To Harlan the house was already a ghost, a premature specter that had begun its hauntings before it had actually died. And because the house, as it was, meant a great deal to him, he found he resented its passing and mourned it. Once, only, in five trips had there been any sound to break the stillness during his prowlings. He was in the pantry, then, thankful that the technology of that Reality and Century had made servants unfashionable and removed a problem. He had, he recalled, chosen among the cans of prepared foods, and was just deciding that he had enough for one trip, and that Noys would be pleased indeed to intersperse the hearty but uncolorful basic diet provided in the empty Section with some of her own dietary. He even laughed aloud to think that not long before he had thought her diet decadent. It was in the middle of the laugh that he heard a distinct clapping noise. |
| 2417 |
The lettering of the titles blended in with the intricate filigree until they were attractive but nearly unreadable. It was a triumph of aesthetics over utility. Harlan took a few from the shelves at random and was surprised. The title of one was Social and Economic History of our Times. Somehow it was a side of Noys to which he had given little thought. She was certainly not stupid and yet it never occurred to him that she might be interested in weighty things. He had the impulse to scan a bit of the Social and Economic History, but fought it down. He would find it in the Section library of the 482nd, if he ever wanted it. Finge had undoubtedly rifled the libraries of this Reality for Eternity's records months earlier. He put that film to one side, ran through the rest, selected the fiction and some of what seemed light non-fiction. Those and two pocket viewers. He stowed them carefully into a knapsack. It was at that point that, once more, he heard a sound in the house. There was no mistake this time. It was not a short sound of indeterminate origin. It was a langh, a man's laugh. He was not alone in the house. He was unaware that he had dropped the knapsack. For one dizzy second he could think only that he was trapped! 10 Trapped! All at once it had seemed inevitable. It was the rawest dramatic irony. He had entered Time one last time, tweaked Finge's nose one last time, brought the pitcher to the well one last time. It had to be then that he was caught. Was it Finge who laughed? |
| 2418 |
Who else would track him down, lie in wait, stay a room away, and burst into mirth? Well, then, was all lost? And because in that sickening moment he was sure all was lost it did not occur to him to run again or to attempt flight into Eternity once more. 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. |
| 2419 |
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. |
| 2420 |
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. He could put his finger on the Great Divide. The key moment was the instant in which he had adjusted the door controls for his entry into the 482nd for one last time and somehow had adjusted it wrongly. Since then things went badly, badly. The Reality Change in the 482nd went through during that period of despondency and accentuated it. In the past two weeks he had picked up three proposed Reality Changes which contained minor flaws, and now he chose among them, yet could do nothing to move himself to action. He chose Reality Change 2456-2781, V-5 for a number of reasons. Of the three, it was farthest upwhen, the most distant. The error was minute, but was significant in terms of human life. It needed, then, only a quick trip to the 2456th to find out the nature of Noys's analogue in the new Reality, by use of a little blackmailing pressure. But the unmanning of his recent experience betrayed him. It seemed to him no longer a simple thing, this gentle application of threatened exposure. And once he found the nature of Noys's analogue, what then? Put Noys in her place as charwoman, seamstress, laborer, or whatever. Certainly. But what, then, was to be done with the analogue herself? With any husband the analogue might have? Family? Children? He had thought of none of this earlier. He had avoided the thought. |
| 2421 |
Harlan had remembered the weapon at his disposal and for the first time in days felt a fraction of self-confidence return. It was as though a door had closed and another had opened. 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. |
| 2422 |
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. |
| 2423 |
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. 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. |
| 2424 |
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. |
| 2425 |
He thought of Twis sell. The old man was out of the 575th. Where was he during hours when he should have been asleep? An old man needs his sleep. Harlan was sure of the answer. There were Council consultations going on. About Harlan. About Noys. About what to do with an indispensable Technician one dared not touch. Harlan's lips drew back. If Finge reported Harlan's assault of that evening, it would not affect their considerations in the least. His crimes could scarcely be worsened by it. His indispensability would certainly not be lessened. And Harlan was by no means certain that Finge would report him. To admit having been forced to cringe before a Technician would put an Assistant Computer in a ridiculous light, and Finge might not choose to do so. Harlan thought of Technicians as a group, which, of late, he had done rarely. His own somewhat anomalous position as Twissell's man and as half an Educator had kept him too far apart from other Technicians. But Technicians lacked solidarity anyway. Why should that be? Did he have to go through the 575th and the 482nd rarely seeing or speaking to another Technician? Did they have to avoid even one another? Did they have to act as though they accepted the status into which the superstition of others forced them? In his mind he had already forced the capitulation of the Council as far as Noys was concerned, and now he was making further demands. The Technicians were to be allowed an organization of their own, regular meetings — more friendship — better treatment from the others. |
| 2426 |
It seemed advisable, then, for Harlan to nurse this possible advantage for the time being, to let them make the first move, say the first sentence that would join actual combat. They seemed in no hurry. They stared at him placidly over an abstemious lunch as though he were an interesting specimen spreadeagled against a plane of force by mild repulsors. In desperation Harlan stared back. He knew all of them by reputation and by trimensional reproduction in the physiomonthly orientation films. The films co-ordinated developments throughout the various Sections of Eternity and were required viewing for all Eternals with rating from Observer up. August Sennor, the bald one (not even eyebrows or eyelashes), of course attracted Harlan most. First, because the odd appearance of those dark, staring eyes against bare eyelids and forehead was remarkably greater in person than it had ever seemed in trimension. Second, because of his knowledge of past collisions of view between Sennor and Twissell. Finally, because Sennor did not confine himself to watching Harlan. He shot questions at him in a sharp voice. For the most part his questions were unanswerable, such as: "How did you first come to be interested in Primitive times, young man?" "Do you find the study rewarding, young man?" Finally, he seemed to settle himself in his seat. He pushed his plate casually onto the disposal chute and clasped his thick fingers lightly before him. (There was no hair on the back of the hands, Harlan noticed.) Sennor said, "There is something I have always wanted to know. |
| 2427 |
Now your Primitives, I'll venture to state, never assumed anything but an indeviant Reality. Am I right?" Harlan waited to answer. He did not see where the conversation was aiming or what Sennor's deeper purposes were, and it unnerved him. He said, "I don't know enough to answer you with certainty, sir. I believe there may have been speculations as to alternate paths of time or planes of existence. I don't know." Sennor thrust out a lower lip. "I'm sure you're wrong. You may have been misled by reading your own knowledge into various ambiguities you may have come across. No, without actual experience of Time-travel, the philosophic intricacies of Reality would be quite beyond the human mind. For instance, why does Reality possess inertia? We all know that it does. Any alteration in its flow must reach a certain magnitude before a Change, a true Change, is effected. Even then, Reality has a tendency to flow back to its original position. "For instance, suppose a Change here in the 575th. Reality will change with increasing effects to perhaps the 600th. It will change, but with continually lesser effects to perhaps the 650th. Thereafter, Reality will be unchanged. We all know this is so, but do any of us know why it is so? Intuitive reasoning would suggest that any Reality Change would increase its effects without limit as the Centuries pass, yet that is not so. "Take another point. Technician Harlan, I'm told, is excellent at selecting the exact Minimum Change Required for any situation. |
| 2428 |
In each possibility, the serious point is that A has seen B; the man at an earlier stage in his physiological existence sees himself at a later stage. Observe that he has learned he will be alive at the apparent age of B. He knows he will live long enough to perform the action he has witnessed. Now a man in knowing his own future in even the slightest detail can act on that knowledge and therefore changes his future. It follows that Reality must be changed to the extent of not allowing A and B to meet or, at the very least, of preventing A from seeing B. Then, since nothing in a Reality made un-Real can be detected, A never has met B. Similarly, in every apparent paradox of Time-travel, Reality always changes to avoid the paradox and we come to the conclusion that there are no paradoxes in Time-travel and that there can be none." Sennor looked well pleased with himself and his exposition, but Twis sell rose to his feet. Twis sell said, "I believe, gentlemen, that time presses." Far more suddenly than Harlan would have thought the lunch was over. Five of the subcommittee members filed out, nodding at him, with the air of those whose curiosity, mild at best, had been assuaged. Only Sennor held out a hand and added a gruff "Good day, young man" to the nod. With mixed feelings Harlan watched them go. What had been the purpose of the luncheon? Most of all, why the reference to men meeting themselves? They had made no mention of Noys. Were they there, then, only to study him? Survey him from top to bottom and leave him to Twissell's judging? |
| 2429 |
"But progress was slow and Cooper found himself something less than a marvelous teacher. Mallansohn grew morose and unco-operative and then one day died, quite suddenly, in a fall down a canyon of the wild, mountainous country in which they lived. Cooper, after weeks of despair, with the ruin of his lifework and, presumably, of all Eternity, staring him in the eye, decided on a desperate expedient. He did not report Mallansohn's death. Instead, he slowly took to building, out of the materials at hand, a Temporal Field. "The details do not matter. He succeeded after mountains of drudgery and improvisation and took the generator to the California Institute of Technology, just as years before he had expected the real Mallansohn to do. "You know the story from your own studies. You know of the disbelief and rebuffs he first met, his period under observation, his escape and the near-loss of his generator, the help he received from the man at the lunch counter whose name he never learned, but who is now one of Eternity's heroes, and of the final demonstration for Professor Zimbalist, in which a white mouse moved backward and forward in time. 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. |
| 2430 |
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. |
| 2431 |
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. There was a lapse of decades of physiotime between Cooper's stay in Eternity and the moment when he wrote his memoir. He could remember only so much, and only what he himself had witnessed. You should realize that." Twissell sighed and he drew a gnarled finger through a line of updrafting smoke, breaking it into little turbulent swirls. |
| 2432 |
This should not be your responsibility. It is mine alone. Unfortunately, we must have you in the control room, since it is stated that you were there and handled the controls. It is stated in the Mallansohn memoir. Cooper will see you through the window and that will take care of that. "Furthermore, I will ask you to make the final contact according to instructions I will give you. If you feel that that, too, is too great a responsibility, you may relax. Another contact in parallel with yours is in charge of another man. If, for any reason, you are unable to operate the contact, he will do so. Furthermore, I will cut off radio transmission from within the control room. You will be able to hear us but not to speak to us. You need not fear, therefore, that some involuntary exclamation from you will break the circle." Harlan stared helplessly out the window. Twissell went on, "Cooper will be here in moments and his trip to the Primitive will take place within two physiohours. After that, boy, the project will be over and you and I will be free." Harlan was plunging chokingly through the vortex of a waking nightmare. Had Twissell tricked him? Had everything he had done been designed only to get Harlan quietly into a locked control room? Having learned that Harlan knew his own importance, had he improvised with diabolical cleverness, keeping him engaged in conversation, drugging his emotions with words, leading him here, leading him there, until the time was ripe for locking him in? |
| 2433 |
"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. |
| 2434 |
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. |
| 2435 |
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. |
| 2436 |
As far as my understanding went, however, I was in love. What began as the satisfaction of an emotional and physical need became a great deal more. Her imminent death stopped being a convenience and became a calamity. I Life-Plotted her. I didn't go to the Life-Plotting departments, either. I did it myself. That surprises you, I imagine. It was a misdemeanor, but it was nothing compared to the crimes I committed later. Yes, I, Laban Twissell. Senior Computer Twissell. Three separate times, a point in physiotime came and passed, during which some simple action of my own might have altered her personal Reality. Naturally, I knew that no such personally motivated Change could possibly be authorized by the Council. Still, I began to feel personally responsible for her death. That was part of my motivation later on, you see. She became pregnant. I took no action, though I should have. I had worked her Life-Plot, modified to include her relationship with me, and I knew pregnancy to be a high-probability consequence. As you may or may not know, Timed women are occasionally made pregnant by Eternals despite precautions. It is not unheard of. Still, since no Eternal may have a child, such pregnancies as do occur are ended painlessly and safely. There are many methods. My Life-Plotting had indicated she would die before delivery, so I took no precautions. She was happy in her pregnancy and I wanted her to remain so. So I only watched and tried to smile when she told me she could feel life stirring within her. |
| 2437 |
But then something happened. She gave birth prematurely — I don't wonder you look that way. I had a child. A real child of my own. You'll find no other Eternal, perhaps, who can say that. That was more than a misdemeanor. That was a serious felony, but it was still nothing. I hadn't expected it. Birth and its problems were an aspect of life with which I had had little experience. I went back to the Life-Plot in panic and found the living child, in an alternate solution to a low-probability forklet I had overlooked. A professional Life-Plotter would not have overlooked it and I had done wrong to trust my own abilities that far. But what could I do now? I couldn't kill the child. The mother had two weeks to live. Let the child live with her till then, I thought. Two weeks of happiness is not an exorbitant gift to ask. The mother died, as foreseen, and in the manner foreseen. I sat in her room, for all the time permitted by the spatio-temporal chart, aching with a sorrow all the keener for my having waited for death, in full knowledge, for over a year. In my arms, I held my son and hers. — Yes, I let it live. Why do you cry out so? Are you going to condemn me? You cannot know what it means to hold a little atom of your own life in your arms. I may have a Computaplex for nerves and spatio-temporal charts for a bloodstream, but I do know. I let it live. I committed that crime, too. I put it in the charge of an appropriate organization and returned when I could (in strict temporal sequence, held even with physiotime) to make necessary payments and to watch the boy grow. |
| 2438 |
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. |
| 2439 |
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. |
| 2440 |
16 The Hidden Centuries Andrew Harlan watched the men at work with abstracted eyes. They ignored him politely because he was a Technician. Ordinarily he would have ignored them somewhat less politely because they were Maintenance men. But now he watched them and, in his misery, he even caught himself envying them. They were service personnel from the Department of Intertemporal Transportation, in dun-gray uniforms with shoulder patches showing a red, double-headed arrow against a black background. They used intricate force-field equipment to test the kettle motors and the degrees of hyper-freedom along the kettleways. They had, Harlan imagined, little theoretical knowledge of temporal engineering, but it was obvious that they had a vast practical knowledge of the subject. Harlan had not learned much concerning Maintenance when he was a Cub. Or, to put it more accurately, he had not really wished to learn. Cubs who did not make the grade were put into Maintenance. The "unspecialized profession" (as the euphemism had it) was the hallmark of failure and the average Cub automatically avoided the subject. Yet now, as he watched the Maintenance men at work, they seemed to Harlan to be quietly, tensionlessly efficient, reasonably happy. Why not? They outnumbered the Specialists, the "true Eternals," ten to one. They had a society of their own, residential levels devoted to them, pleasures of their own. Their labor was fixed at so many hours per physioday and there was no social pressure in their case to make them relate their spare-time activity to their profession. |
| 2441 |
They had time, as Specialists did not, to devote to the literature and film dramatizations culled out of the various Realities. It was they, after all, who probably had the better-rounded personalities. It was the Specialist's life which was harried and affected, artificial in comparison with the sweet and simple life in Maintenance. Maintenance was the foundation of Eternity. Strange that such an obvious fact had not struck him earlier. They supervised the importation of food and water from Time, the disposal of waste, the functioning of the power plants. They kept all the machinery of Eternity running smoothly. If every Specialist were to die of a stroke on the spot, Maintenance could keep Eternity going indefinitely. Yet were Maintenance to disappear, the Specialists would have to abandon Eternity in days or die miserably. Did Maintenance men resent the loss of their homewhens, or their womanless, childless lives? Was security from poverty, disease, and Reality Change sufficient compensation? Were their views ever consuited on any matter of importance? Harlan felt some of the fire of the social reformer within him. Senior Computer Twissell broke Harlan's train of thought by bustling in at a half run, looking even more haunted than he had an hour before, when he had left, with Maintenance already at work. Harlan thought: How does he keep it up? He's an old man. Twissell glanced about him with birdlike brightness as the men automatically straightened up to respectful attention. |
| 2442 |
He had not doubted precision pin-pointing in Time-travel since his Cubhood days. He remembered himself then, facing Educator Yarrow seriously, saying, "But Earth moves about the Sun, and the Sun moves about the Galactic Center and the Galaxy moves too. If you started from some point on Earth, and move downwhen a hundred years, you'll be in empty space, because it will take a hundred years for Earth to reach that point." (Those were the days when he still referred to a Century as a "hundred years.") And Educator Yarrow had snapped back, "You don't separate Time from space. Moving through Time, you share Earth's motions. Or do you believe that a bird flying through the air whiffs out into space because the Earth is hurrying around the Sun at eighteen miles a second and vanishes from under the creature?" Arguing from analogy is risky, but Harlan obtained more rigorous proof in later days and, now, after a scarcely precedented trip into the Primitive, he could turn confidently and feel no surprise at finding the opening precisely where he had been told it would be. He moved the camouflage of loose rubble and rock to one side and entered. He probed the darkness within, using the white beam of his flash almost like a scalpel. He scoured the walls, ceiling, floor, every inch. Noys, remaining close behind him, whispered, "What are you looking for?" He said, "Something. Anything," He found his something, anything, at the very rear of the cave in the shape of a flattish stone covering greenish sheets like a paperweight. |
| 2443 |
Noys's hand reached out uncertainly as though to take his own rigid, unyielding one. Harlan drew away, avoided her sympathy. He said, "It had all been arranged. My meeting with you. Everything. My emotional make-up had been analyzed. Obviously. Action and response. Push this button and the man will do that. Push that button and he will do this." Harlan was speaking with difficulty, out of the depths of shame. He shook his head, trying to shake the horror of it away as a dog would water, then went on. "One thing I didn't understand at first. How did I come to guess that Cooper was to be sent back into the Primitive? It was a most unlikely thing to guess. I had no basis. Twissell didn't understand it. More than once he wondered how I could have done it with so little understanding of mathematics. "Yet I had. The first time was that — that night. You were asleep, but I wasn't. I had the feeling then that there was something I must remember; some remark, some thought, something that I had caught sight of in the excitement and exhilaration of the evening. When I thought long, the whole significance of Cooper sprang into my mind, and along with it the thought entered my mind that I was in a position to destroy Eternity. Later I checked through histories of mathematics, but it was unnecessary really. I already knew. I was certain of it. How? How?" Noys stared at him intently. She didn't try to touch him now. "Do you mean the men of the Hidden Centuries arranged that, too? They put it all in your mind, then maneuvered you properly?" "Yes. |
| 2444 |
Yet he hesitated. Something irrational within him could still plead her case and point up the remnants of his own futile love and longing. Was she desperate at his rejection of her? Was she deliberately courting death by lying? Was she indulging in foolish heroics born of despair at his doubts of her? No! The book-films of the sickly-sweet literary traditions of the 289th might have it so, but not a girl like Noys. She was not one to meet her death at the hands of a false lover with the joyful masochism of a broken, bleeding lily. Then was she scornfully denying his ability to kill her for any reason whatever? Was she confidently relying on the attraction she knew she had for him even now, certain that it would immobilize him, freeze him in weakness and shame. That hit too closely. His finger clamped a bit harder on the contact. Noys spoke again. "You're waiting. Does that mean you expect me to enter a brief for the defense?" "What defense?" Harlan tried to make that scornful, yet he welcomed the diversion. It could postpone the moment when he must look down upon her blasted body, upon whatever remnants of bloody flesh might remain, and know that what had been done to his beautiful Noys had been done by his own hand. He found excuses for his delay. 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. |
| 2445 |
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. We investigated our own future, our upwhen. We learned the destiny of man in the Reality that actually existed in order that we might compare it eventually with Basic State. Somewhere past the 125,000th, mankind solved the secret of the interstellar drive. They learned how to manage the Jump through hyperspace. Finally, mankind could reach the stars." Harlan was listening in growing absorption to her measured words. |
| 2446 |
How much truth was there in all this? How much was a calculated attempt to deceive him? He tried to break the spell by speaking, by breaking the smooth flow of her sentences. He said: "And once they could reach the stars, they did so and left the Earth. Some of us have guessed that." "Then some of you have guessed wrong. Man tried to leave Earth. Unfortunately, however, we are not alone in the Galaxy. There are other stars with other planets, you know. There are even other intelligences. None, in this Galaxy at least, are as ancient as mankind, but in the 125,000 Centuries man remained on Earth, younger minds caught up and passed us, developed the interstellar drive, and colonized the Galaxy. "When we moved out into space, the signs were up. Occupied! No Trespassing! Clear Out! Mankind drew back its exploratory feelers, remained at home. But now he knew Earth for what it was: a prison surrounded by an infinity of freedom ... And mankind died out!" Harlan said, "Just died out. Nonsense." "They didn't just die out. It took thousands of Centuries. There were ups and downs but, on the whole, there was a loss of purpose, a sense of futility, a feeling of hopelessness that could not be overcome. Eventually there was one last decline of the birth rate and finally, extinction. Your Eternity did that." Harlan could defend Eternity now, the more intensely and extravagantly for having so shortly before attacked it so keenly. He said, "Let us at the Hidden Centuries and we will correct that. |
| 2447 |
We found, too, the Change that had destroyed Basic State. It was not any Change that Eternity had initiated; it was the establishment of Eternity itself — the mere fact of its existence. Any system like Eternity, which allows men to choose their own future, will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach. The mere existence of Eternity at once wiped out the Galactic Empire. To restore it, Eternity must be done away with. "The number of Realities is infinite. The number of any subclass of Realities is also infinite. For instance, the number of Realities containing Eternity is infinite; the number in which Eternity does not exist is infinite; the number in which Eternity does exist but is abolished is also infinite. But my people chose from among the infinite a group that involved me. "I had nothing to do with that. They educated me for my job as Twissell and yourself educated Cooper for his job. But the number of Realities in which I was the agent in destroying Eternity was also infinite. I was offered a choice among five Realities that seemed least complex. I chose this one, the one involving you, the only Reality system involving you." Harlan said, "Why did you choose it?" Noys looked away. "Because I loved you, you see. I loved you long before I met you." Harlan was shaken. She said it with such depths of sincerity. He thought, sickly: She's an actress — He said, "That's rather ridiculous." "Is it? I studied the Realities at my disposal. |
| 2448 |
How she made things fit in! Noys said, "I would have been even more startled, had I realized the significance of that alteration in full. Had you come alone, you would have brought me back to the Primitive as you did. Then, for love of humanity, for love of me, you would have left Cooper untouched. Your circle would have been broken, Eternity ended, our life together here safe. "But you came with Twissell, a chance variation. While coming, he talked to you of his thoughts about the Hidden Centuries and started you on a train of deductions that ended with your doubting my good faith. It ended with a blaster between us... . And now, Andrew, that's the story. You may blast me. There is nothing to stop you." Harlan's hand ached from its spastic grasp on the blaster. He shifted it dizzily to the other hand. Was there no flaw in her story? Where was the resolution he was to have gained from knowing certainly that she was a creature of the Hidden Centuries. He was more than ever tearing at himself in conflict and dawn was approaching. He said, "Why two efforts to end Eternity? Why couldn't Eternity have ended once and for all when I sent Cooper back to the 20th?" Things would have ended then and there would not have been this agony of uncertainty." "Because," said Noys, "ending this Eternity is not enough. We must reduce the probability of establishing any form of Eternity to as near zero as we can manage. So there is one thing we must do here in the Primitive. A small Change, a little thing. |
| 2449 |
It was a dazzling four-sun afternoon. Great golden Onos was high in the west, and little red Dovim was rising fast on the horizon below it. When you looked the other way you saw the brilliant white points of Trey and Patru bright against the purplish eastern sky. The rolling plains of Kalgash's northernmost continent were flooded with wondrous light. The office of Kelaritan 99, director of the Jonglor Municipal Psychiatric Institute, had huge windows on every side to display the full magnificence of it all. Sheerin 501 of Saro University, who had arrived in Jonglor a few hours before at Kelaritan's urgent request, wondered why he wasn't in a better mood. Sheerin was basically a cheerful person to begin with; and four-sun days usually gave his normally ebullient spirits an additional lift. But today, for some reason, he was edgy and apprehensive, although he was trying his best to keep that from becoming apparent. He had been summoned to Jonglor as an expert on mental health, after all. "Would you like to start by talking with some of the victims?" Kelaritan asked. The director of the psychiatric hospital was a gaunt, angular little man, sallow and hollow-chested. Sheerin, who was ruddy and very far from gaunt, was innately suspicious of anyone of adult years who weighed less than half of what he did. Perhaps it's the way Kelaritan looks that's upsetting me, Sheerin thought. He's like a walking skeleton. "Or do you think it's a better idea for you to get some personal experience of the Tunnel of Mystery first, Dr. |
| 2450 |
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. |
| 2451 |
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. And now it threatened to finish her professionally for the rest of her life- if it didn't kill her altogether. |
| 2452 |
It was part of his job to keep the weather records for them andto watch out for the possibility of unusual events. There wasn't much in the way of weather on the Sagikan Peninsula, normally: the whole place was unthinkably arid, with measurable rainfall no more often than every ten or twenty years. The only unusual climatic event that ever occurred there was a shift in the prevailing pattern of air currents that set cyclonic forces in motion and brought about a sandstorm, and even that didn't happen more than a few times a century. Was Balik's despondent expression a hint of the guilt he must feel for having failed to foresee the coming of the storm? Or did he look so horrified because he was able now to calculate the full extent of the fury that was about to descend? Everything might have been different, Siferra told herself, if they'd had a little more time to prepare for the onslaught. In hindsight, she could see that all the telltale signs had been there for those with the wit to notice them-the burst of fierce dry heat, excruciating even by the standards of the Sagikan Peninsula, and the sudden dead calm that replaced the usual steady breeze from the north, and then the strange moist wind that began to blow from the south. The khalla-birds, those weird scrawny scavengers that haunted the area like ghouls, had all taken wing when that wind started blowing, vanishing into the dune-choked western desert as though demons were on their tails. That should have been the clue, Siferra thought. |
| 2453 |
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. |
| 2454 |
So long as Beklimot had been buried beneath the sands, the ruins had slumbered peacefully for thousands of years, preserved as they had been on the day when its last inhabitants finally yielded to the harshness of the changing climate and abandoned the place. Each archaeologist who had worked there since Galdo's day had taken care to expose just a small section of the site, and to put up screens and sand-fences to guard against the unlikely but serious danger of a sandstorm. Until now. She had put up the usual screens and fences too, of course. But not in front of the new digs, not in the sanctuary area where she had focused her investigations. Some of Beklimot's oldest and finest buildings were there. And she, impatient to begin excavating, carried away by her perpetual buoyant urge to go on and on, had failed to take the most elementary precautions. It hadn't seemed that way to her at the time, naturally. But now, with the demonic roaring of the sandstorm in her ears, and the sky black with destruction- Just as well, Siferra thought, that I won't survive this. And therefore won't have to read what they're going to say about me in every book on archaeology that gets published in the next fifty years. "The great site of Beklimot, which yielded unparalleled data about the early development of civilization on Kalgash until its unfortunate destruction as a result of the slipshod excavation practices employed by the young, ambitious Sferra 89 of Saro University-" "I think it's ending," Balik whispered. |
| 2455 |
If only Raissta would be patient just another few weeks-a month or two, maybe- "Can't you stay here a little while longer this evening?" she asked. His heart sank. Raissta was giving him her come-here-andlet's-play look. Not easy to resist, nor did he really want to. But Yimot and Faro would be waiting. "I told you. I have an-" "-appointment, yes. Well, so do I. With you." "Me?" "You said yesterday you might have some free time this afternoon. I was counting on that, you know. I cleared a whole swatch of free time of my own-did my lab work in the morning, as a matter of fact, just so-" Worse and worse, Beenay thought. He did remember saying something about this afternoon, completely overlooking the fact that he had arranged to meet the two younger students. She was pouting now, and somehow smiling at the same time, a trick that she managed to perfection. Beenay wanted to forget all about Faro and Yimot and go to her right away. But if he did that, he might be an hour late for his appointment with them, which wasn't fair. Two hours, maybe. And he had to admit to himself that he was desperately eager to know whether their calculations had confirmed his own. It was practically an even struggle: the powerful appeal of Raissta on the one hand, and the desire to put his mind at rest concerning a major scientific issue on the other. And though he had an obligation to be on time for his appointment, Beenay realized in some confusion that he had made an appointment of sorts with Raissta too-and that was a matter not only of obligation but of delight. |
| 2456 |
He jumped aside, spitting out sand. "Sorry," she said, without looking down. She cut into the hillside a second time, widening the storm gouge. It wasn't the best of technique, she knew, to be slashing away like this. Her mentor, grand old Shelbik, was probably whirling in his grave. And the founder of their science, the revered Galdo 221, no doubt was looking down from his exalted place in the pantheon of archaeologists and shaking his head sadly. On the other hand, Shelbik and Galdo had had chances of their own to uncover whatever lay in the Hill of Thombo, and they hadn't done it. If she was a little too excited now, a little too hasty in her attack, well, they would simply have to forgive her. Now that the seeming calamity of the sandstorm had been transformed into serendipitous good fortune, now that the apparent ruination of her career had turned unexpectedly into the making of it, Siferra could not hold herself back from finding out what was builed here. Could not. Absolutely could not. "Look-" she muttered, knocking a great mass of overburden away and going to work with her brush. "We've got a charred layer here, right at the foundation level of the cyclopean city. The place must have burned clear down to the stone. But you look a little lower on the hill and you can see that the crosshatch-style town is sitting right under the fire line-the cyclopean people simply plunked this whole monumental foundation down on top of the older city-" "Siferra-" said Balik uneasily. |
| 2457 |
"See you in about an hour." The plump psychologist put down the phone and stared solemnly at himself in the mirror opposite his bed. The face that looked back at him was a troubled one. He seemed so wasted and haggard that he tugged at his cheeks to assure himself that they were still there. Yes, there they were, his familiar fleshy cheeks. He hadn't lost an ounce. The haggardness was all in his mind. 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. |
| 2458 |
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! Fatty is a coward!" All because he hadn't wanted to climb a tree that was obviously beyond the capabilities of his heavy, ill-coordinated body. But Fatty wasn't a coward. Sheerin knew that. He was content with himself: a sane, well-balanced man. He simply didn't want other people making incorrect assumptions about him because of his unheroic appearance. Besides, fewer than one out of ten of those who had gone through the Tunnel of Mystery had come out of it showing any symptoms of emotional disturbance. And those people must have been vulnerable in some special way. Precisely because he was so sane, Sheerin told himself, because he was so well balanced, he had nothing to fear. Nothing- Th- Fear- He kept repeating those words to himself until he felt almost calm. Even so, Sheerin was something other than his customary jolly self as he went downstairs to wait for the hospital car to pick him up. Kelaritan was there, and Cubello, and a striking-looking woman named Varitta 312, who was introduced to him as one of the engineers who had designed the Tunnel. Sheerin greeted them all with hearty handshakes and a broad smile that he hoped seemed convincing. "A nice day for a trip to the amusement park," he said, trying to sound jovial. Kelaritan looked at him oddly. "I'm glad you feel that way. |
| 2459 |
He didn't intend to use the abort switch, but it was probably unwise not to take it. Just in case. He stepped out on the platform. Kelaritan and Cubello were looking at him in an all too transparent way. He could practically hear them thinking, This fat old fool is going to turn to jelly in there. Well, let them think it. Varitta had disappeared. No doubt she had gone to turn on the Tunnel mechanism. Yes: there she was now, in a control booth high up to the right, signaling that everything was ready. "If you'll board the car, Doctor-" Kelaritan said. "Of course. Of course." Fewer than one out of ten experienced harmful effects. Very likely they were unusually vulnerable to Darkness disorders to begin with. I am not. I am a very stable individual. He entered the car. There was a safety belt; he strapped it around his waist, adjusting it with some difficulty to his girth. The car began to roll forward, slowly, very slowly. Darkness was waiting for him. Fewer than one out often. Fewer than one out of ten. He understood the Darkness syndrome. That would protect him, he was sure: his understanding. Even though all of mankind had an instinctive fear of the absence of light, that did not mean that the absence of light was of itself harmful. What was harmful, Sheerin knew, was one's reaction to the absence of light. The thing to do is to stay calm. Darkness is nothing but darkness, a change of external circumstances. We are conditioned to abhor it because we live in a world where darkness is unnatural, where there is always light, the light of the many suns. |
| 2460 |
At any time there might be as many as four suns shining at once; usually there were three in the sky, and at no time were there ever less than two-and the light of any of them was sufficient all by itself to hold back the Darkness. 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. |
| 2461 |
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? |
| 2462 |
That was what friendship was all about, wasn't it? Beenay turned and entered the Observatory. Inside, all was dimly lit and calm, the familiar hush of the great hall of science where he had spent most of his time since his early university days. But the calm was, he knew, a deceptive one. This mighty building, like the more mundane places of the world, was constantly aswirl with conflicts of all sorts, ranging from the loftiest of philosophical disputes down to the pettiest of trivial feuds, spats, and backbiting intrigues. Astronomers, as a group, were no more virtuous than anyone else. All the same, the Observatory was a sanctuary for Beenay and for most of the others who worked there-a place where they could leave most of the world's problems behind and devote themselves more or less peacefully to the everlasting struggle to answer the great questions that the universe posed. He walked swiftly down the long main hall, trying as always without success to muffle the clatter of his boots against the marble floor. As he invariably did, he glanced quickly into the display cases along the wall to the right and left, where some of the sacred artifacts of the history of astronomy were on perpetual exhibit. Here were the crude, almost comical telescopes that such pioneers as Chekktor and Stanta had used, four or five hundred years before. Here were the gnarled black lumps of meteorites that had fallen from the sky over the centuries, enigmatic reminders of the mysteries that lay behind the clouds. |
| 2463 |
Here were first editions of the great astronomical sky-charts and textbooks, and the time-yellowed manuscripts of some of the epoch-making theoretical works of the great thinkers. Beenay paused for a moment before the last of those manuscripts, which unlike the others seemed fresh and almost new- for it was only a single generation old, Athor 77's classic codification of the Theory of Universal Gravitation, worked out not very long before Beenay himself had been born. Though he was not a particularly religious man, Beenay stared at that thin sheaf of paper with something very much like reverence, and found himself thinking something very much like a prayer. The Theory of Universal Gravitation was one of the pillars of the cosmos for him: perhaps the most basic pillar. He couldn't imagine what he would do if that pillar were to fall. And it seemed to him now that the pillar might be tottering. At the end of the hall, behind a handsome bronze door, was Dr. Athor's own office. Beenay glanced at it quickly and hurried past it, up the stairs. The venerable and still formidable Observatory director was the last person in the world, absolutely the last, that Beenay wanted to see at this moment. Faro and Yimot were waiting for him upstairs in the Chart Room, where they had arranged to meet. "Sorry I'm a little late," Beenay said. "It's been a complicated afternoon so far." They gave him nervous, owlish smiles. What a strange pair they are, he thought, not for the first time. They both came from some backwater farming province-Sithin, maybe, or Gatamber. |
| 2464 |
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? His numbers, or Athor's towering master scheme? His piddling notions of astronomy, or the great Athor's profound insight into the fundamental structure of the universe? He imagined himself standing right on top of the dome of the Observatory, calling out, "Listen to me, everybody! Athor's theory is wrong! I've got the figures right here that disprove it!" Which would bring forth such gales of laughter that he'd be blown clear across the continent. Who was he to set himself up against the titanic Athor? |
| 2465 |
Who could possibly believe that a callow assistant professor had toppled the Law of Universal Gravitation? And yet-and yet- His eyes raced over the printout sheets that Yimot and Faro had prepared. The calculations on the first two pages were unfamiliar to him; he had set up the data for the two students in such a way that the underlying relationships from which the numbers were derived were not at all obvious, and evidently they had approached the problem in a way that any astronomer trying to compute a planetary orbit would regard as quite unorthodox. Which was exactly what Beenay had wanted. The orthodox ways had led him only into catastrophic conclusions; but he had too much information at his own disposal to be able to work in any other mode but the orthodox ones. Faro and Yimot hadn't been hampered in that fashion. But as he followed along their line of reasoning, Beenay began to notice a discomforting convergence of the numbers. By the third page they had locked in with his own calculations, which he knew by heart by this time. And from there on, everything followed in an orderly way, step by step by step, to the same dismaying, shattering, inconceivable, totally unacceptable culminating result. Beenay looked up at the two students, aghast. "There's no possibility, is there, that you've slipped up somewhere? This string of integrations here, for example-they look pretty tricky-" "Sir!" Yimot cried, sounding shocked to the core. His face was bright red and his arms waved about as if moving of their own accord. |
| 2466 |
But plainly Beenay was in big trouble, and plainly he was going to need the highest-quality help Theremon could provide. "Let me have a Tano Special," Theremon told the waiter. "No, wait-make it a double. A Tano Sitha, okay?" "Double white light," the waiter said. "Coming up." The evening was mild. Theremon, who was well known here and received special treatment, had been given his regular warm-weather table on the terrace overlooking the city. The lights of downtown sparkled gaily. Onos had set an hour or two ago, and only Trey and Patru were in the sky, burning brightly in the east, casting harsh twin shadows as they made their descent toward morning. Looking at them, Theremon wondered which suns would be in the sky tomorrow. It was different all the time, a brilliant ever changing display. Onos, certainly-you could always be sure of seeing Onos at least part of the time every day of the year, even he knew that-and then what? Dovim, Tano, and Sitha, to make it a four-sun day? He wasn't sure. Maybe it was supposed to be just Tano and Sitha, with Onos visible only for a few hours at midday. That would be gloomy. But then, after a second sip, he reminded himself that this wasn't the season for short Onos-rises. So it would be a three-sun day, most likely, unless it was going to be just Onos and Dovim tomorrow. It was so hard to keep it all straight- Well, he could ask to see an almanac, if he really cared. But he didn't. Some people always seemed to know what tomorrow's suns would be like-Beenay was one, naturally-but Theremon took a more happy-go-lucky approach to it all. |
| 2467 |
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. But nothing he had heard had prepared him for the reality of the cultist's building. |
| 2468 |
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. |
| 2469 |
Behind the desk sat a man of obvious force and authority, wearing the black Apostles' robe with red trim along the hood. He was very impressive. But he wasn't Mondior 71. Mondior, judging by his photographs and the way he seemed on television, had to be a man of sixty-five or seventy, with a kind of intense masculine force about him. His hair was thick and wavy, black with broad streaks of white, and he had a full, fleshy face, a wide mouth, a strong nose, heavy jet-black eyebrows, dark, compelling eyes. But this one was young, surely not yet forty, and though he seemed powerful and highly masculine too, it was in an entirely different way: he was very thin, with a sharp, narrow face and tight, pursed lips. His hair, curling down over his forehead under his hood, was a strange brick-red color, and his eyes were a cold, unrelenting blue. No doubt this man was some high functionary in the organization. But Theremon's appointment was with Mondior. He had decided just this morning, after writing his story on the Apostles' latest fulmination, that he needed to know more about this mysterious cult. Everything they had ever said struck him as nonsense, of course, but it was beginning to seem like interesting nonsense, worth writing about in some detail. How better to learn more about them than to go straight to the top man? Assuming that was possible, that is. But to his surprise they had told him, when he called, that he could have an audience with Mondior 71 that very day. It had seemed too easy. |
| 2470 |
That span is what we call the Year of Godliness, a 'year' two thousand and forty-nine human years long, about which you already appear to know. The current Year of Godliness is nearly at its end." "And then we'll all be wiped out, you think?" "Not all of us. But most will; and our civilization will be destroyed. Those few who survive will face the immense task of rebuilding. This is, as you seem already to be aware, a melancholy repetitive cycle in human events. What is soon due to occur will not be the first time that mankind has failed the test of the gods. We have been struck down more than once before; and now we are on the verge of being struck down yet again." The curious thing, Theremon thought, was that Folimun didn't seem at all crazy. Except for his odd robe, he could have been any sort of youngish businessman sitting in his handsome office-a loan applications officer, for instance, or an investment banker. He was obviously intelligent. He spoke clearly and well, in a crisp, direct tone. He neither ranted nor raved. But the things he was saying, in his crisp, direct way, were the wildest sort of nonsensical babble. The contrast between what Folimun said and the way he said it was hard to take. Now he sat quietly, looking relaxed, waiting for the newspaperman to ask the next question. "I'll be frank," Theremon said after a little while. "Like many people, I have difficulty accepting something this big which is handed to me simply as a revelation. I need solid proofs. |
| 2471 |
But second, and more urgent: we want to convince people of the reality of what is coming, so that they will take measures to protect themselves against it. The worst of the catastrophe can be headed off. Steps can be taken to avert the complete destruction of our civilization. The Flames are inevitable, yes, human nature being what it is-the gods have spoken, the time of their vengeance is already on the way-but within the general madness and horror there will be some who survive. I assure you that we Apostles most definitely will. We will be here, as we have been before, to lead humanity into the new cycle of rebirth. And we offer our hand-in love, in charity, to anyone else who will accept it. Who will join with us in guarding themselves against the turmoil that is coming. Does that sound like madness to you, Theremon? Does that sound as though we're dangerous crackpots?" "If I could only accept your basic assumption-" "That the Flames will come next year? You will. You will. What remains to be seen is whether you accept it long enough in advance to become one of the survivors, one of the guardians of our heritage, or discover only in the moment of destruction, in the moment of your own agony, that we were speaking the truth all along." "I wonder which it'll be," said Theremon. "Permit me to hope that you'll be on our side on the day that this Year of Godliness comes to its close," Folimun said. Abruptly he rose and offered Theremon his hand. "I have to go now. His Serenity the High Apostle expects me in a few minutes. |
| 2472 |
He would have gone on a ten-day fast sooner than he'd admit it to Kelaritan and Cubello and the rest of those people. But he had come perilously close to the danger point in there. For three or four days thereafter Sheerin had experienced a touch, only a touch, of the kind of claustrophobia that had sent so many citizens of Jonglor to the mental hospital. He would be in his hotel room, working on his report, when suddenly he would feel Darkness closing in on him, and he would find it necessary to get up and go out on his terrace, or even to leave the building entirely for a long stroll in the hotel garden. Necessary? Well, maybe not. But preferable. Certainly preferable. And he always felt better for doing it. Or he would be asleep and the Darkness would come to him then. Naturally the godlight would be on in his room when he slept-he always slept with one on, he knew nobody who didn't-and since the Tunnel ride he had taken to using an auxiliary godlight too, in case the battery of the first one should fail, though the indicator clearly said it had six months' power left. Even so, Sheerin's sleeping mind would become convinced that his room had been plunged into the depths of lightlessness, utterly black, the true and complete Darkness. And he would awaken, trembling, sweating, convinced he was in Darkness even though the friendly glow of the two godlights was right there on either side of him to tell him that he was not. So now, to step from his plane into this somber twilight landscape-well, he was glad to be home, but he would have preferred a sunnier arrival. |
| 2473 |
He had to fight off mild distress, or perhaps not so mild, as he entered the flexiglass foul-weather passageway that led from his plane to the terminal. He wished they hadn't put the passageway up. Better not to be enclosed right now, Sheerin thought, even if it did mean getting wet. Better to be out there under the open sky, under the comforting light (however faint just now, however hidden by clouds) of the friendly suns. But the queasiness passed. By the time he had claimed his baggage, the cheering reality of being back home again in Saro City had triumphed over the lingering effects of his brush with Darkness. Liliath 221 was waiting for him outside the baggage pickup area with her car. That made him feel better too. She was a slender, pleasant-looking woman in her late forties, a fellow member of the Psychology Department, though her work was experimental, animals in mazes, no overlap at all with his. They had known each other ten or fifteen years. Sheerin would probably have asked her to marry him long ago if he had been the marrying type. But he wasn't; nor, for all the indication she had ever given him, was she. Still, the relationship they did have seemed to suit them both. "Of all the miserable days to pick for coming home-" he said, as he slipped in beside her and reached across to give her a quick friendly kiss. "It's been like this for three days. And they say we're in for three more of it, until next Onos Day. We'll all be drowned by then, I suppose. -You look as if you've lost some weight up there in Jonglor, Sheerin!" "Have I? |
| 2474 |
Now here it was, pouring down out of the heavens as though from a gigantic reservoir that could never run dry. Siferra felt a powerful urge to strip her clothes off and sprint across the great green lawns of the campus, letting the rainfall flow down her body in an unending delicious stream to wash her clean at last of the infernal desert dust. That was all they'd need to see. That cool, aloof, unromantic professor of archaeology, Siferra 89, running naked in the rain! It would be worth doing if only to enjoy the sight of their astounded faces peering out of every window of the university as she went flying past. Not very likely, though, Siferra thought. Not my style at all. And there was too much to do, really. She hadn't wasted any time getting down to work. Most of the artifacts she had excavated at the Beklimot site were following along by cargo ship and wouldn't be here for many weeks. But there were charts to arrange, sketches to finish, Balik's stratigraphic photographs to analyze, the soil samples to prepare for the radiography lab, a million and one things to do. -And then, too, there were the Thombo tablets to discuss with Mudrin 505 of the Department of Paleography. The Thombo tablets! The find of finds, the premier discovery of the entire year and a half! Or so she felt. Of course, it all depended on whether anyone could make any sense out of them. At any rate, she would waste no time getting Mudrin working on them. At the least, the tablets were fascinating things; but they might be much more than that. |
| 2475 |
I just suggested a quick little trip to the Jonglor Exposition, five or six days, some sunshine, a decent resort hotel instead of a tent pegged out in the middle of the desert, a few quiet dinners, some good wine-" He turned his palms outward in a gesture of irritation. "You're making me feel like a silly schoolboy, Siferra." "You're acting like one," she said. "Our relationship has always been purely professional, Balik. Let's keep it that way, shall we?" He began to reply, evidently thought better of it, clamped his lips tight shut. They looked at each other uncomfortably for a long moment. Siferra's head was pounding. All this was unexpected and disagreeable-the news that the other members of the department were already taking positions on the Thombo finds, and Balik's clumsy attempt at seducing her as well. Seducing? Well, at establishing some sort of romantic rapport with her, anyway. How utterly astonished he looked at being rejected, too. She wondered if she had ever accidentally seemed to be leading him on in some way, to give him a hint of feelings that had never existed. No. No. She couldn't believe that she had. She had no interest in going to north-country resorts and sipping wine in romantically lit restaurants with Balik or anyone else. She had her work. That was enough. For twenty-odd years, ever since her teens, men had been offering themselves to her, telling her how beautiful, how wonderful, how fascinating she was. It was flattering, she supposed. Better that they think her beautiful and fascinating than ugly and boring. |
| 2476 |
But the question now was whether the work was going to finish him before he finished the work. He looked at Yimot's numbers. Three screens sat before him on his desk. On the left-hand one was the orbit of Kalgash as calculated according to conventional reckoning under the Theory of Universal Gravitation, outlined in blazing red. On the right-hand screen, in fiery yellow, was the revised orbit that Beenay had produced, using the new university computer and the most recent observations of Kalgash's actual position. The middle screen carried both orbits plotted one over the other. In the past five days Athor had produced seven different postulates to account for the deviation between the theoretical orbit and the observed one, and he could call up any of those seven postulates on the middle screen with a single key-stroke. The trouble was that all seven of them were nonsense, and he knew it. Each one had a fatal flaw at its heart-an assumption that was there not because the calculations justified it, but only because the situation called for some such sort of special assumption in order to make the numbers turn out the right way. Nothing was provable, nothing was confirmable. It was as though in each case he had simply decreed, at some point in the chain of logic, that a fairy godmother would step in and adjust the gravitational interactions to account for the deviation. In truth that was precisely what Athor knew he needed to find. But it had to be a real fairy godmother. Postulate Eight, now- He began keying in Yimot's calculations. |
| 2477 |
Several times his trembling fingers betrayed him and he made an error; but his mind was still sharp enough to tell him instantly that he had hit the wrong key, and he backed up and repaired the damage each time. Twice, as he worked, he nearly blacked out from the intensity of his effort. But he forced himself to go on. You are the only person in the world who can possibly do this, he told himself as he worked. And so you must. It sounded foolish to him, and madly egocentric, and perhaps a little insane. It probably wasn't even true. But at this stage in his exhaustion he couldn't allow himself to consider any other premise but that of his own indispensability. All the basic concepts of this project were held in his mind, and his mind alone. He had to push himself onward until he had closed the last link in the chain. Until There. The last of Yimot's numbers went into the computer. Athor hit the key that brought the two orbits up into view simultaneously on the middle screen, and hit the key that integrated the new number with the existing patterns. The brilliant red ellipse that was the original theoretical orbit wavered and shifted, and suddenly it was gone. So was the yellow one of the observed orbit. Now there was only a single line on the screen, a deep, intense orange, the two orbital simulations overlapping to the last decimal place. Athor gasped. For a long moment he studied the screen, and then he closed his eyes again and bowed his head against the edge of the desk. The orange ellipse blazed like a ring of flame against his closed eyelids. |
| 2478 |
He felt a curious sense of exultation mixed with dismay. He had his answer, now; he had a hypothesis that he was certain would stand up to the closest scrutiny. The Theory of Universal Gravitation was valid after all: the epochal chain of reasoning on which his fame was based would not be overthrown. But at the same time he knew now that the model of the solar system with which he was so familiar was in fact erroneous. The unknown factor for which they had sought, the invisible giant, the dragon in the sky, was real. Athor found that profoundly upsetting, even if it bad rescued his famous theory. He had thought for years that he fully understood the rhythm of the heavens, and now it was clear to him that his knowledge had been incomplete, that a great strangeness existed in the midst of the known universe, that things were not as he had always believed them to be. It was hard, at his age, to swallow that. After a time Athor looked up. Nothing had changed on the screen. He punched in a few interrogative equations, and still nothing changed. He saw one orbit, not two. Very well, he told himself. So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You 'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe. "Yimot!" he called. "Faro! Beenay! All of you!" Roly-poly little Faro was the first through the door, with beanpole Yimot just behind him, and then the rest of the Astronomy Department, Beenay, Thilanda, Klet, Simbron, and some others. They clustered just inside the entrance to his office. |
| 2479 |
So what I think happened is something like this. During the time of the crosshatch people there was a devastating fire that scorched a pretty good chunk of the Sagikan Peninsula and forced the abandonment of the Thombo village and other crosshatch-style villages nearby. Afterward, when the inhabitants came back and began to rebuild, they used a brand-new and more elaborate architectural style, which we call cyclopean because of the huge building-stones. But then came another fire and wiped out the cyclopean settlement. At that point the people of the area gave up trying to build cities on the Hill of Thombo and this time when they rebuilt they chose another site nearby, which we term Beklimot Major. We've believed for a long time that Beklimot Major was the first true human city, emerging from the smaller crosshatch-type proto-Beklimotperiod settlements scattered all around it. What Thombo tells us is that there was at least one important cyclopean city in the area before Beklimot Major existed." "And the Beklimot Major site," Beenay said, "shows no trace of fire damage?" "No. So it wasn't there when the city on top of Thombo was burned. Eventually the whole Beklimot culture collapsed and Beklimot Major itself was abandoned, but that was for other reasons having to do with climatic shifts. Fire had nothing to do with it. That was perhaps a thousand years ago. But the fire that wrecked the topmost Thombo village seems to have been much earlier than that. I'd guess about a thousand years earlier. |
| 2480 |
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. |
| 2481 |
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. But if Dovim alone were in the sky, and something happened, some special thing, some truly uncommon thing, to blot out what little light it provided- Thilanda appeared at his shoulder and said sourly, "All right, Beenay, I've got your solar projections all set up. Not just forty-two hundred years, either, but an infinite regression. Faro gave me a suggestion for the math and we've done the program so that it'll run clear to the end of time if you want it to, or backward to the beginning of the universe." "Fine. Pipe it over to the computer I'm using, will you?-And will you come here, Faro?" The pudgy little graduate student ambled over. His dark eyes were agleam with curiosity. Obviously he was bubbling with questions about what Beenay was doing; but he observed student-professor protocol and said nothing, merely waited to hear what Beenay would tell him. "What I've got here on my screen," Beenay began, "is Athor's suggested orbit for the hypothetical Kalgash Two. |
| 2482 |
He headed for his computer at a speed faster than Beenay had ever seen him move before. Beenay didn't expect to be the first to finish the computation. Faro was notoriously quick at such things. But the point was to have each of them work on the problem independently, to provide separate validation of the result. So when Faro made a snorting sound of triumph after a little while and jumped up to say something, Beenay irritably waved at him to be silent and went on working. It took him ten embarrassing eternal minutes more. Then the numbers began coming up on his screen. If every assumption that he had fed into the computer was correct-Athor's calculation of the unknown satellite's probable mass and orbit, Thilanda's calculation of the movements of the six suns in the heavens-then it wasn't very likely that Darkness was going to come. The only possibility that would bring total Darkness was a Dovim-only day. But it didn't look as if Kalgash Two stood much chance of eclipsing Dovim. Dovim-only days were such rarities that the likelihood of Dovim's being alone in the sky at the time when Kalgash Two was anywhere near Kalgash in its long orbit was infinitesimal, Beenay knew. Or were they? No. Not infinitesimal. Not at all. He took a careful look at the figures on the screen. There seemed to be a slim possibility of a convergence. The calculation wasn't complete, but things were heading in that direction as the computer worked over each Kalgash-Kalgash Two conjunction in the forty-two-hundred-year period of the inquiry. |
| 2483 |
"But charcoal is particularly well suited for radiocarbon dating, which gives us a fairly precise indication of the age of a site. Ever since my Thombo material reached Saro City, our departmental lab has been busy doing radiocarbon analysis, and now we have our figures. I can tell you what they are from memory. The youngest of the Thombo settlements was destroyed by fire two thousand and fifty years ago, with a statistical deviation of plus or minus twenty years. The charcoal from the settlement below that is forty-one hundred years old, with a deviation of plus or minus forty years. The third settlement from the top was destroyed by fire sixty-two hundred years ago, with a deviation of plus or minus eighty years. The fourth settlement down shows a radiocarbon age of eighty-three hundred years, plus or minus a hundred. The fifth-" "Great gods!" Sheerin cried. "Are they all spaced as evenly as that?" "Every one of them. The fires occurred at intervals of a little more than twenty centuries. Allowing for the slight inaccuracies that are inevitable in radiocarbon dating, it's still altogether permissible to propose that in fact they took place exactly two thousand and forty-nine years apart. Which, as Beenay has demonstrated, is precisely the frequency at which eclipses of Dovim occur. -And also," Siferra added in a bleak voice, "the length of what the Apostles of Flame call a Year of Godliness, at the end of which the world is supposed to be destroyed by fire." "An effect of the mass insanity, yes," Sheerin said hollowly. |
| 2484 |
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. |
| 2485 |
Well, what of it? she thought. He was personable enough. She could use a change of pace from the steady grind of her work. She met him at the Six Suns, where everyone seemed to know him. They had drinks, dinner, a fine wine from Thamian Province. He moved the conversation this way and that, very adroitly: a little bit about her life, her fascination with archaeology, her excavations at Beklimot. He found out that she'd never been married and had never been interested in marrying. He spoke of the Apostles with her, their wild prophecies, the surprising relationship of her Thombo finds to Mondior's claims. Everything he said was tactful, perceptive, interesting. He was very charming-and also very manipulative, she thought. At the end of the evening he asked her-gently, cheerfully, skillfully-if he could accompany her home. But she drew the line at that. He didn't seem troubled. He simply asked her out again. They had gone out two or three more times altogether after that, over a period of perhaps two months. The format was the same each time: dinner at some elegant place, well-managed conversation, ultimately a delicately constructed invitation for her to spend the sleep-period with him. Siferra deflected him just as delicately each time. It was becoming a pleasant game, this lighthearted pursuit. She wondered how long it would go on. She still had no particular wish to go to bed with him, but the odd thing was that she had no particular wish any longer not to go to bed with him, either. |
| 2486 |
She too had chosen to spend the evening of Darkness at the Observatory, rather than in the Sanctuary. Perhaps it was mere wild bravado, perhaps it was idiotic overconfidence, but she was sure that she could last out the hours of the eclipse-and even the coming of the Stars, if there was anything to that part of the myth-and retain her sanity. And so she had decided not to pass up the experience. Now it appeared that Sheerin, no model of bravery, had taken the same approach. Which might mean that he had decided the impact of Darkness would not be so overwhelming after all, despite the grim predictions he had been making for months. She had heard his tales of the Tunnel of Mystery and the havoc it had wreaked, even on Sheerin himself. Yet here he was. He must have come to believe that people, some at least, would turn out ultimately to be more resilient than he had expected earlier. Or else he was simply being reckless. Perhaps he preferred to lose his mind in one quick burst this evening, Siferra thought, rather than stay sane and have to cope with the innumerable and perhaps insuperable problems of the hard times ahead- No. No. She was falling into morbid pessimism again. She brushed the thought away. "Sheerin!" It was Theremon, coming across the room to greet the psychologist. "You remember me? Theremon 762?" "Of course I do, Theremon," Sheerin said. He offered his hand. "Gods, fellow, you've been rough on us lately, haven't you! But bygones may as well be bygones this evening." "I wish be was a bygone," Siferra muttered under her breath. |
| 2487 |
"Come," Sheerin said again. "Yes. Yes," said Theremon. He and Sheerin went out into the hail, followed, an instant later, by Beenay. What an infuriating man, Siferra thought. She stared at the bright orb of Dovim, burning fiercely in the sky. Had the sky grown even darker in the past few minutes? No, no, she told herself, that was impossible. Dovim was still there. It was just imagination. The sky looked strange, now that Dovim was the only sun aloft. She had never seen it like that before, such a deep purple hue. But it was far from dark out there: somber, yes, but there was light enough, and everything was still easily visible outside despite the relative dimness of the one small sun. She thought about her lost tablets again. Then she banished them from her mind. The chess players had the right idea, she told herself. Sit down and relax. If you can. Sheerin led the way to the next room. There were softer chairs in there. And thick red curtains on the windows, and a maroon carpet on the floor. With the strange brick-toned light of Dovim pouring in, the general effect was one of dried blood everywhere. He had been surprised to see Theremon at the Observatory this evening, after the horrendous columns he had written, after all he had done to pour cold water on Athor's campaign for national preparedness. In recent weeks Athor had gone almost berserk with rage every time Theremon's name was mentioned; yet somehow he had relented and permitted him to be here for the eclipse. That was odd and a little troublesome. |
| 2488 |
It might mean that the stern fabric of the old astronomer's personality had begun to break down-that not only his anger but also his whole inner structure of character was giving way in the face of the oncoming catastrophe. For that matter Sheerin was more than slightly surprised to find himself at the Observatory too. It had been a last-minute decision, a pure impulse of the kind he rarely experienced. Liliath had been horrified. He was pretty horrified himself. He had not forgotten the terrors that his few minutes in the Tunnel of Mystery had evoked in him. But he had realized, in the end, that he bad to be here, just as he had had to take that ride in the Tunnel. To everyone else, he might be nothing more than an easygoing overweight academic hack; but to himself he was still a scientist beneath all the blubber. The study of Darkness had concerned him through all his professional career. How, then, could he ever live with himself afterward, knowing that during the most celebrated episode of Darkness in more than two thousand years he had chosen to hide himself away in the cozy safety of an underground chamber? No, he had to be here. Witnessing the eclipse. Feeling the Darkness take possession of the world. Theremon said with unexpected frankness, as they entered the adjoining room, "I'm starting to wonder whether I was right to have been such a skeptic, Sheerin." "You ought to wonder about it." "Well, I am. Seeing just Dovim up there like that. That weird red color spreading over everything. |
| 2489 |
"Then, tomorrow, when you all are babbling madmen, damned forever by your deeds, we will set about the creation of a wondrous new world." Sheerin glanced doubtfully at Athor. But Athor looked hesitant too. Beenay, standing next to Theremon, murmured, "What do you think? Is he bluffing?" But the newspaperman didn't reply. He had gone pale to the lips. "Look at that!" The finger he pointed toward the window was shaking, and his voice was dry and cracked. There was a simultaneous gasp as every eye followed the pointing finger and, for one moment, stared frozenly. Dovim was chipped on one side! The tiny bit of encroaching blackness was perhaps the width of a fingernail, but to the staring watchers it magnified itself into the crack of doom. For Theremon the sight of that small arc of darkness struck with terrible force. He winced and put his hand to his forehead and turned away from the window. He was shaken to the roots of his soul by that little chip in Dovim's side. Theremon the skeptic-Theremon the mocker-Theremon the tough-minded analyst of other people's folly- Gods! How wrong I was! As he turned, his eyes met Siferra's. She was at the other side of the room, looking at him. There was contempt in her eyes- or was it pity? He forced himself to meet her gaze and shook his head sadly, as though to tell her with all the humility there was in him, I fouled things up and I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It seemed to him that she smiled. Maybe she had understood what he was trying to say. |
| 2490 |
Even now the Cave approaches to swallow Kalgash; yea, and all it contains." "'And in that moment as he spoke the lip of the Cave of Darkness passed the edge of Dovim so that to all Kalgash it was hidden from sight. Loud were the cries and lamentations of men as it vanished, and great the fear of soul with which they were afflicted. "'And then it came to pass that the Darkness of the Cave fell full upon Kalgash in all its terrible weight, so that there was no light to be seen anywhere on all the surface of the world. Men were even as blinded, nor could one see his neighbor, though be felt his breath upon his face. "'And in this blackness there appeared the Stars in countless number, and their brightness was as the brightness of all the gods in concourse assembled. And with the coming of the Stars there came also a music, which had a beauty so wondrous that the very leaves of the trees turned to tongues that cried out in wonder. "'And in that moment the souls of men departed from them and fled upward to the Stars, and their abandoned bodies became even as beasts; yea, even as dull brutes of the wild; so that through the darkened streets of the cities of Kalgash they prowled with wild cries, like the cries of beasts. "'From the Stars then there reached down the Heavenly Flames, that was the bearer of the will of the gods; and where the Flames touched, the cities of Kalgash were consumed even to utter destruction, so that of man and of the works of man, nothing whatever remained. |
| 2491 |
After all, each tick of the clock was bringing the world closer to full Darkness-closer to- To the Stars? To madness? To the Time of the Heavenly Flames? Theremon shrugged. He had gone through a hundred gyrations of mood in the past few hours, but now he felt oddly calm, almost fatalistic. He had always believed that he was the master of his own destiny, that he was able to shape the course of his life: that was how he had succeeded in getting himself into places where other newspapermen hadn't remotely had a chance. But now everything was beyond his control, and he knew it. Come Darkness, come Stars, come Flame, it would all happen without a by-your-leave from him. No sense consuming himself in jittery anticipation, then. Just relax, sit back, wait, watch it all happen. And then, he told himself-then make sure that you survive whatever turmoil follows. "Going up to the dome?" a voice asked. He blinked in the half-darkness. It was the chubby little graduate-student astronomer-Faro, was that his name? "Yes, as a matter of fact," Theremon said, though in truth he had had no particular destination in mind. "So am I. Come on: I'll take you there." A spiral metal staircase wound upward into the high-vaulted top story of the huge building. Faro went chugging up the stairs in a thudding short-legged gait, and Theremon loped along behind him. He had been in the Observatory dome once before, years ago, when Beenay wanted to show him something. But he remembered very little about the place. |
| 2492 |
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. |
| 2493 |
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. He had never been the sort of man to hide from danger, if he thought there might be a story in it. Besides, he was just self-confident enough to believe that he would be able to withstand whatever was about to occur-and there was just enough skepticism left in him so that at least part of him wondered whether anything significant was going to happen at all. He stood still, listening to Siferra's occasional indrawn breaths, the quick little respirations of someone trying to retain composure in a world that was all too swiftly retreating into the shadow. Then came another sound, a new one, a vague, unorganized impression of sound that might well have gone unnoticed but for the dead silence that prevailed in the room and for Theremon's unnatural focus of attention as the moment of totality grew near. |
| 2494 |
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. |
| 2495 |
Folimun had gone limp in his loosening grasp. Theremon peered into the Apostle's eyes and saw the blankness of them, staring upward, mirroring the feeble yellow of the torches. He saw the bubble of froth upon Folimun's lips and heard the low animal whimper in Folimun's throat. With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the bloodcurdling blackness of the sky. 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. |
| 2496 |
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. |
| 2497 |
But the Stars were gone now. That bright golden thing was in the sky instead. The bright golden thing? Onos. That was its name. Onos, the sun. The main sun. One of-one of the six suns. Yes. Theremon smiled. Things were beginning to come back to him now. Onos belonged in the sky. 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. |
| 2498 |
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. |
| 2499 |
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. 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. |
| 2500 |
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. |
| 2501 |
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. His name. The name of the city. The names of the six suns. The newspaper. His apartment. Last evening- The Stars- Siferra-Beenay-Sheerin-Athor-names- Abruptly things began to form connections in his mind. The memory-fragments of his immediate past had finally started to reassemble themselves. But at first nothing yet made real sense, because each little cluster of memories was something independent unto itself, and he was unable to put them into any kind of coherent order. The harder he tried, the more confused everything became again. Once he understood that, he gave up the idea of trying to force anything. Just relax, Theremon told himself. Let it happen naturally. He had, he realized, suffered some great wound of the mind. Although he felt no bruises, no lumps on the back of his head, he knew that he must have been injured in some way. All his memories had been cut into a thousand pieces as though by a vengeful sword, and the pieces had been stirred and scattered like the pieces of some baffling puzzle. But he seemed to be healing, moment by moment. Moment by moment, the strength of his mind, the strength of the entity that was Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle, was reasserting itself, putting him back together. Stay calm. Wait. Let it happen naturally. He drew in his breath, held it, slowly released it. |
| 2502 |
And then the coming of the mob-that moment of frenzy-the struggle to escape-Siferra beside him, and Beenay nearby, and then the mob surging around them like a river in full spate, separating them, pulling them in opposite directions- Into his mind came a single last glimpse of old Athor, his eyes bright and glazed with the wildness of utter madness, standing majestically on a chair, furiously ordering the intruders out of his building as though he were not merely the director of the Observatory but its king. And Beenay standing next to him, tugging at Athor's arm, urging the old man to flee. Then the scene dissolved. He was no longer in the great room. Theremon saw himself swept down a corridor, scrambling for a staircase, looking around for Siferra, for anyone he knew- The Apostle, the fanatic, Folimun 66, suddenly appearing before him, blocking his way in the midst of the chaos. Laughing, holding out a hand to him in a mocking gesture of false friendship. Then Folimun too had disappeared from sight, and Theremon continued frantically onward, down the spiral stairs, tumbling and stumbling, clambering over people from the city who were wedged so tightly together on the ground floor that they were unable to move. Out the door, somehow. Into the chill of night. Standing bareheaded, shivering, in the Darkness that was Darkness no longer, for everything was illuminated now by the terrible, hideous, unthinkable cold blaze of those thousands of merciless Stars that filled the sky. There was no hiding from them. |
| 2503 |
Even when you closed your eyes you saw their frightful light. Mere Darkness was nothing, compared with the implacable pressure of that heaven-spanning vault of unthinkable brilliance, a light so bright that it boomed in the sky like thunder. Theremon remembered that he had felt as though the sky, Stars and all, was about to fall on him. He had knelt and covered his head with his hands, futile though he knew that to be. He remembered, too, the terror all about him, people rushing this way and that, the shrieking, the crying. The fires of the blazing city leaping high on the horizon. And above all else those hammering waves of fear descending from the sky, from the remorseless unforgiving Stars that had invaded the world. That was all. Everything after that was blank, utterly blank, until the moment of his awakening, when he looked up to see Onos in the sky once more, and began to put back together the shards and slivers of his mind. I am Theremon 762, he told himself again. I used to live in Saro City and write a column for the newspaper. There was no Saro City any longer. There was no newspaper. The world had come to an end. But he still lived, and his sanity, he hoped, was returning. What now? Where to go? "Siferra?" he called. No one answered. Slowly he began to shuffle down the hill once more, past the broken trees, past the burned and overturned cars, past the scattered bodies. If this is what it looks like out here in the country, he thought, what must it be like in the city itself? |
| 2504 |
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. And bolted the door, and waited it out. He had even slept, a little. And now it was morning. Or perhaps afternoon, for all he knew. One thing was certain: the terrible night was over, and everything was calm, at least in the vicinity of the Observatory. Sheerin tiptoed into the hall, paused, listened, started warily up the stairs. Silence everywhere. Puddles of dirty water, from the sprinklers. The foul reek of old smoke. He halted on the stairway and thoughtfully removed a firehatchet from a bracket on the wall. He doubted very much that he could ever bring himself to use a hatchet on another living thing; but it might be a useful thing to be carrying, if conditions outside were as anarchic as he expected to find them. Up to the ground floor, now. Sheerin pulled the basement door open-the same door that he had slammed behind him in his frenzied downward flight the evening before-and looked out. The sight that greeted him was horrifying. The great hall of the Observatory was full of people, all scrambled together on the floor, sprawled every which way, as though some colossal drunken orgy had been going on all night. But these people weren't drunk. |
| 2505 |
She was almost getting used to the sight of them now. They were like very bright lights-very bright-so close together in the sky that they seemed to merge, to form a single mass of brilliance, like a kind of shining cloak that had been draped across the heavens. 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. |
| 2506 |
Despite the chaos all around her, though, she remained calm. Her injured mind, numbed, all but stupefied, was unable to respond fully to the cataclysm that Darkness had brought. She walked on and on, down the road, into the main quadrangle of the campus, past scenes of horrifying devastation and destruction, and felt no shock, no regret for what had been lost, no fear of the difficult times that must lie ahead. Not enough of her mind was restored yet for such feelings. She was a pure observer, tranquil, detached. The blazing building over there, she knew, was the new university library that she had helped to plan. But the sight of it stirred no emotion in her. She could just as well have been walking through some two-thousand-year-old site whose doom was a cut-and-dried matter of historical record. It would never have occurred to her to weep for a two-thousand-year-old ruin. It did not occur to her to weep now, as the university went up in flames all around her. She was in the middle of the campus now, retracing familiar paths. Some of the buildings were on fire, some were not. Like a sleepwalker she turned left past the Administration building, right at the Gymnasium, left again at Mathematics, and zigzagged past Geology and Anthropology to her own headquarters, the Hall of Archaeology. The front door stood open. She went in. The building seemed almost untouched. Some of the display cases in the lobby were smashed, but not by looters, since all the artifacts appeared still to be there. |
| 2507 |
But first I'm going to give you something else. Come here, Siferra." He reached for her and pulled her toward him. She felt his hands on her breasts and the roughness of his cheek against her face. The smell of him was unbearable. Fury rose in her. How dare he touch her like this? Brusquely she pushed him away. "Hey, don't do that, Siferra! Come on. Be nice. For all we know, there's just the two of us in the world. You and me, we'll live in the forest and hunt little animals and gather nuts and berries. Hunters and gatherers, yes, and later on we'll invent agriculture." He laughed. His eyes looked yellow in the strange light. His skin seemed yellow too. Again he reached for her, hungrily, one cupped hand seizing one of her breasts, the other sliding down her back toward the base of her spine. He put his face down against the side of her throat and nuzzled her noisily like some kind of animal. His hips were heaving and thrusting against her in a revolting way. At the same time he began to force her backward toward the corner of the room. Suddenly Siferra remembered the club that she had picked up somewhere during the night in the Observatory building. She was still holding it, loosely dangling in her hand. Swiftly she brought it upward and rammed the top of it against the point of Balik's chin, hard. His head snapped up and back, his teeth clattered together. He let go of her and lurched a few steps backward. His eyes were wide with surprise and pain. His lip was split where he had bitten into it, and blood was pouring down on one side. |
| 2508 |
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. |
| 2509 |
Nor had she really been Siferra when she wielded that club, but a ghost-Siferra, a dream-Siferra, sleepwalking through the horrors of the dawn. Now, though, sanity was returning. Now the full impact of the night's events was coming home to her. Not just Balik's death-she would not let herself feel guilt for that-but the death of an entire civilization. She heard voices in the distance, back in the direction of the campus. Thick, bestial voices, the voices of those whose minds had been destroyed by the Stars and would never again be whole. She searched for her club. Had she lost that too, in her frenzied flight through the arboretum? No. No, here it was. Siferra grasped it and rose to her feet. The forest seemed to beckon to her. She turned and fled into its cool dark groves. And went on running as long as her strength held out. What else was there to do but go on running? Running. Running. It was late afternoon, the third day since the eclipse. Beenay came limping down the quiet country road that led to the Sanctuary, moving slowly and carefully, looking about him in all directions. There were three suns shining in the sky, and the Stars had long since returned to their age-old obscurity. But the world had irrevocably changed in those three days. And so had Beenay. This was the young astronomer's first full day of restored reasoning power. What he had been doing for the two previous days he had no clear idea. The whole period was simply a blur, punctuated by the rising and setting of Onos, with other suns wandering across the sky now and then. |
| 2510 |
If someone had told him that this was the fourth day since the catastrophe, or the fifth or sixth, Beenay would not have been able to disagree. His back was sore, his left leg was a mass of bruises, and there were blood-encrusted scratches along the side of his face. He hurt everywhere, though the pain of the early hours had given way by now to dull aches of half a dozen different kinds radiating from various parts of his body. What had been happening? Where had he been? He remembered the battle in the Observatory. He wished he could forget it. That howling, screaming horde of crazed townspeople breaking down the door-a handful of robed Apostles were with them, but mainly they were just ordinary people, probably good, simple, boring people who had spent their whole lives doing the good, simple, boring things that kept civilization operating. Now, suddenly, civilization had stopped operating and all those pleasant ordinary people had been transformed in the twinkling of an eye into raging beasts. The moment when they came pouring in-how terrible that had been. Smashing the cameras that had just recorded the priceless data of the eclipse, ripping the tube of the great solarscope out of the Observatory roof, raising computer terminals high over their heads and dashing them to the floor- And Athor rising like a demigod above them, ordering them to leave-! 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. |
| 2511 |
"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. |
| 2512 |
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. 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. |
| 2513 |
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. |
| 2514 |
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. They were everywhere. The place was like one vast insane asylum, Theremon thought. Probably the whole world was. Those of this sort, the ones who had been most affected by the coming of the Stars, were generally harmless, at least to others. They were too badly deranged to have any interest in being violent, and their bodily coordination was so seriously disrupted that effective violence was impossible for them, anyway. But there were others who were not quite so mad-who at a glance might seem almost normal-who posed very serious dangers indeed. These, Theremon quickly realized, fell into two categories. The first consisted of people who bore no one any ill will but who were hysterically obsessed with the possibility that the Darkness and the Stars might return. These were the fire-lighters. Very likely they were people who had led orderly, settled lives before the catastrophe-family folk, hard workers, pleasant cheerful neighbors. So long as Onos was in the sky they were perfectly calm; but the moment the primary sun began to sink in the west and evening approached, fear of Darkness overcame them, and they looked around desperately for something to burn. Anything. Anything at all. |
| 2515 |
Two or three of the other suns might still be overhead when Onos set, but the light of the minor suns did not seem sufficient to soothe the raging dread of Darkness that these people felt. These were the ones who had burned their own city down around themselves. Who, in their desperation, had ignited books, papers, furniture, the roofs of houses. Now, driven into the forest by the holocaust in the city, they were trying to burn that down too. But that was a harder job. The forest was densely wooded, lush, its thick cover of trees well supplied by the myriad streams that flowed into the broad river running along its border. Pulling down green boughs and trying to set them afire did not provide very satisfactory blazes. As for the carpet of dead wood and fallen leaves that lay on the forest floor, it had been pretty well soaked by the recent rains. Such of it that was capable of being burned was quickly found and used for bonfires, without touching off any sort of general conflagration; and by the second day the supply of such debris was very sparse. So the fire-lighter people, hampered as they were by forest conditions and by their own shock-muddled minds, were having little success so far. But they had managed to start a couple of good-sized fires in the forest all the same, which fortunately had burned themselves out in a few hours because they had consumed all the fuel in their vicinity. A few days of hot, dry weather, though, and these people might well be able to set the whole place ablaze, as they had already done in Saro City. |
| 2516 |
The second group of not-quite-stable people roaming the forest seemed to Theremon to be a more immediate menace. These were the ones who had let all social restraints fall away from them. They were the banditti, the hooligans, the cutthroats, the psychopaths, the homicidal maniacs: the ones who moved like unsheathed blades along the quiet forest pathways, striking whenever they pleased, taking whatever they wanted, killing anyone unlucky enough to arouse their irritation. 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. |
| 2517 |
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. |
| 2518 |
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. 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. |
| 2519 |
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. |
| 2520 |
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. 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. |
| 2521 |
He studied the small stream just beyond, wondering if it contained anything edible that he might catch; but there seemed to be nothing in it except tiny minnows, and he realized that even if he could catch them he would have to eat them raw, for he had nothing to use as fuel for a fire and no way of lighting one, besides. Living on berries and nuts wasn't Theremon's idea of high style, but he could tolerate it for a few days. Already his waistline was shrinking commendably: the only admirable side effect of the whole calamity. Best to stay hidden away back here until things calmed down. He was pretty sure that things would calm down. General sanity was bound to return, sooner or later. Or so he hoped, at least. He knew that he himself had come a long way back from the early moments of chaos that the sight of the Stars had induced in his brain. Every day that went by, he felt more stable, more capable of coping. It seemed to him that he was almost his old self again, still a little shaky, perhaps, a little jumpy, but that was only to be expected. At least he felt fundamentally sane. He realized that very likely he had had less of a jolt during Nightfall than most people: that he was more resilient, more tough-minded, better able to withstand the fearful impact of that shattering experience. But maybe everybody else would start recovering, too, even those who had been much more deeply affected than he had been, and it would be safe to emerge and see what, if anything, was being done about trying to put the world back together. |
| 2522 |
The thing to do now, he told himself, was to lay low, to keep from getting yourself murdered by one of those psychopaths running around out there. 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. |
| 2523 |
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. |
| 2524 |
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. She could be fifty miles from here by this time. She could be dead. Looking for her was a hopeless task: it was worse than trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. This haystack was several counties wide, and the needle might well be getting farther away every hour. Only by the wildest sort of coincidence could he ever locate Siferra, or, for that matter, anyone else he knew. The more Theremon thought about his chances of finding her, though, the less impossible the task seemed. And after a while it began to seem quite possible indeed. Perhaps his steadily rising optimism was a by-product of his new secluded life. He had nothing to do but spend hours each day sitting by the brook, watching the minnows go by-and thinking. And as he endlessly reevaluated things, finding Siferra went from seeming impossible to merely unlikely, and from unlikely to difficult, and from difficult to challenging, and from challenging to feasible, and from feasible to readily achievable. All he had to do, he told himself, was get back out into the forest and recruit a little help from those who were reasonably functional. Tell them who he was trying to find, and what she looked like. Spread the word around. Employ some of his journalistic skills. And make use of his status as a local celebrity. "I'm Theremon 762," he would say. |
| 2525 |
"You know, from the Chronicle. Help me and I'll make it worth your while. You want your name in the paper? You want me to make you famous? I can do it. Never mind that the paper isn't being published just now. Sooner or later it'll be back, and I'll be right there with it, and you'll see yourself smack in the middle of the front page. You can count on that. Just help me find this woman that I'm looking for, and-" "Theremon?" A familiar voice, high-pitched, cheerful. He stopped short, squinted into the brightness of the midday sunlight cutting through the trees, peered this way and that to locate the speaker. He had been walking for two hours, looking for people who would be glad to get out there and spread the word on behalf of the famous Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle. But so far he had found only six people altogether. Two of them had taken to their heels the moment they saw him. A third sat where he was, singing softly to his bare toes. Another, crouching in the fork of a tree, methodically rubbed two kitchen knives together with maniacal zeal. The remaining two had simply stared at him when he told them what he wanted; one did not seem to understand at all, and the other burst into gales of wild laughter. Not much hope of help from any of them. And now it appeared that someone had found him. "Theremon? Over here. Over here, Theremon. Here I am. Don't you see me, man? Over here!" Theremon glanced to his left, into a clump of bushes with huge prickly parasol-shaped leaves. |
| 2526 |
Apparently many of the others around her in the forest weren't recovering at all. 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. |
| 2527 |
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. |
| 2528 |
It took her another day and a half to make her way back through the forest to the north side. In the course of the journey she had to use her club twice to fight off attackers. She had three non-violent but edgy staring-matches with young men sizing her up to decide whether she could be jumped. And once she blundered into a sheltered copse where five gaunt wildeyed men with knives were stalking one another in a circle, like dancers moving in some strange archaic ritual. She got away from there as fast as she could. Finally she saw the wide highway that was University Road ahead of her, just beyond the forest boundary. Somewhere along the north side of that road was the unobtrusive little country lane that led to the Sanctuary. Yes: there it was. Hidden, insignificant, bordered on both sides by untidy clumps of weeds and thick grass that had gone to seed. It was late afternoon. Onos was almost gone from the sky, and the hard baleful light of Tano and Sitha cast sharp shadows across the land that gave the day a wintry look, though the air was mild. The little red eye that was Dovim moved through the northern heavens, still very distant, still very high. Siferra wondered what had become of the unseeable Kalgash Two. Evidently it had done its terrible work and moved on. By this time it might be a million miles out in space, curving away from the world on its long orbit, riding on and on through the airless dark, not to return for another two thousand and forty-nine years. Which would be at least two million years too soon, thought Siferra bitterly. |
| 2529 |
She stepped inside. Everything was very quiet here. Ahead of her lay some scruffy-looking wooden sheds and barns. Perhaps the Sanctuary entrance itself-the mouth of an underground tunnel, Siferra knew-lay behind them. She walked around the outbuildings. Yes, there was the Sanctuary entrance, an oval door in the ground, with a dark passageway behind it. And there were people, too, a dozen or so of them, standing in front of it, watching her with chilly, unpleasant curiosity. They all had strips of bright green cloth tied about their throats, as a kind of neckerchief. She didn't recognize any of them. So far as she could tell, they weren't university people. A small bonfire was burning just to the left of the door. Beside it was a pile of chopped logs, elaborately stacked, every piece of wood very neatly arranged according to size with astonishing precision and care. It looked more like some sort of meticulous architect's model than like a woodpile. A sickening sense of fear and disorientation swept over her. What was this place? Was it really the Sanctuary? Who were these people? "Stay right where you are," said the man at the front of the group. He spoke quietly, but there was whip-snapping authority in his tone. "Put your hands in the air." He held a small sleek needle-gun in his hand. It was pointing straight at her midsection. Siferra obeyed without a word. He appeared to be about fifty years old, a strong, commanding figure, almost certainly the leader here. His clothing looked costly and his manner was poised and confident. |
| 2530 |
He was very tired. It was already abundantly clear to him that his notion of making his way alone and on foot across the hundreds of miles between Saro City and Amgando National Park was an absurd fantasy. Damn Theremon! Together, at least, they might have stood a chance. But the newspaperman had been unshakable in his confidence that he would somehow find Siferra in the forest. Talk about fantasy! Talk about absurdity! Sheerin stared ahead, peering through the fog. He needed a place to rest for a while. He needed to find something fit to eat, and perhaps a change of clothing, or at least a way of bathing himself. He had never been this filthy in his life. Or as hungry. Or as weary. Or as despondent. Through the whole long episode of the coming of the Darkness, from the first moment that he had heard from Beenay and Athor that such a thing was likely, Sheerin had bounced around from one end of the psychological spectrum to the other, from pessimism to optimism and back again, from hope to despair to hope. His intelligence and experience told him one thing, his naturally resilient personality told him another. Perhaps Beenay and Athor were wrong and the astronomical cataclysm wouldn't happen at all. No, the cataclysm will definitely happen. Darkness, despite his own disturbing experiences with it at the Tunnel of Mystery two years before, would turn out not to be such a troublesome thing after all, if indeed it did come. Wrong. Darkness will cause universal madness. The madness would be only temporary, a brief period of disorientation. |
| 2531 |
The madness will be permanent, in most people. The world would be disrupted for a few hours and then go back to normal. The world will be destroyed in the chaos following the eclipse. Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. Twin Sheerins, locked in endless debate. But now he had hit the bottom of the cycle and he seemed to be staying there, unmoving and miserable. His resilience and optimism had evaporated in the glare of what he had seen during his wanderings these past few days. It would be decades, possibly even a century or more, before things returned to normal. The mental trauma had scored too deep a scar, the destruction that had already occurred to the fabric of society was too widespread. The world he had loved had been vanquished by Darkness and smashed beyond repair. That was his professional opinion and he could see no reason to doubt it. This was the third day, now, since Sheerin had parted from Theremon in the forest and gone marching off, in his usual jaunty fashion, toward Amgando. That jauntiness was hard to recapture now. He had managed to get out of the forest in one piece-there had been a couple of bad moments, times when he had had to wave his hatchet around and look menacing and lethal, a total bluff on his part, but it had worked-and for the last day or so he had been moving in a plodding way through the once-pleasant southern suburbs. Everything was burned out around here. Entire neighborhoods had been destroyed and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still smoldering. |
| 2532 |
The main highway running to the southern provinces, Sheerin had believed, began just a few miles below the park-a couple of minutes' drive, if you were driving. But he wasn't driving. He had had to make the horrendous climb up out of the forest to the imposing hill that was Onos Heights practically on hands and knees, clawing his way through the underbrush. It took him half a day just to ascend those few hundred yards. Once he was on top, Sheerin saw that the hill was more like a plateau-but it stretched on endlessly before him, and though he walked and walked and walked he did not come to the highway. Was he going the right way? Yes. Yes, from time to time he saw a road sign at a street corner that told him he was indeed heading toward the Great Southern Highway. How far was it, though? The signs didn't say. Every ten or twelve blocks there was another sign, that was all. He kept going. He had no choice. But reaching the highway was only the first step in getting to Amgando. He would still be in Saro City, essentially, at that point. Then what? Keep on walking? What else? He could hardly hitch a ride with someone. No vehicles seemed to be running anywhere. The public fuel stations must have gone dry days ago, those that had not been burned. How long was it likely to take him, at this pace, to get down to Amgando on foot? Weeks? Months? No-it would take him forever. He'd be dead of starvation long before he came anywhere near the place. Even so, he had to go on. Without a sense of purpose, he was finished right now, and he knew it. |
| 2533 |
Something like a week had passed since the eclipse, maybe more. He was beginning to lose track of time. He neither ate regularly nor slept regularly any more, and Sheerin had always been a man of the most punctual habits. Suns came and went in the sky, now, the light brightened or dimmed, the air grew warmer or grew cooler, and time passed: but without the progression of breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleep, Sheerin had no idea of bow it was passing. He knew only that he was rapidly running out of strength. He hadn't eaten properly since the coming of the Nightfall. From that dark moment onward, it had been scraps and shards for him, nothing more-a bit of fruit from some tree when he could find it, any unripe seeds that didn't look as though they'd be poisonous, blades of grass, anything. It wasn't making him sick, somehow, but it wasn't sustaining him very well, either. The nutritional content must have been close to zero. His clothes, worn and tattered, hung from him like a shroud. He didn't dare look underneath them. He imagined that his skin must lie now in loose folds over his jutting bones. His throat was dry all the time, his tongue seemed swollen, there was a frightful pounding behind his eyes. And that dull, numb, hollow sensation in his gut, all the time. Well, he told himself in his more cheerful moments, there must have been some reason why he had devoted himself so assiduously for so many years to building up such an opulent layer of fat, and now he was learning what that reason was. |
| 2534 |
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? |
| 2535 |
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. |
| 2536 |
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. |
| 2537 |
"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. |
| 2538 |
Were these people some subchapter of the Apostles of Flame, convening here to practice an arcane rite? No, he doubted that. They had a different look, too ragged, too shabby, too demented. The Apostles, such few of them as he had seen, had always appeared crisp, self-contained, almost frighteningly controlled. Besides, the Apostles hadn't been in evidence since the eclipse. Sheerin supposed that they had all withdrawn to some sanctuary of their own to enjoy the vindication of their beliefs in private. These people, he thought, were simply unaffiliated wandering crazies. And it seemed to Sheerin that he saw murder in their eyes. "Listen," he said, "if I've disturbed some ceremony of yours in any way, I apologize, and I'm perfectly willing to leave right now. I only tried to come in here because I thought the house was empty and I was so hungry. I didn't mean to-" "University! University!" He had never seen a look of such intense hatred as these people were giving him. But there was fear there too. They kept back from him, tense, trembling, as if in dread of some terrible power that he might unexpectedly unleash. Sheerin held his hands out to them imploringly. If only they'd stop prancing and chanting for a moment! The smell of the food cooking in the next room was making him wild. He caught one of the women by the arm, hoping to halt her long enough to appeal to her for a crust, a bowl of broth, anything. But she jumped away, hissing as though Sheerin had burned her with his touch, and rubbed frantically at the place on her arm where his fingers had briefly rested. |
| 2539 |
Bad enough to be dragged in here and forced to inhale the maddening flavor of that food without being allowed to have any of it. But to be blamed for the catastrophe-to be looked upon as some sort of malevolent witch by these people- Something snapped in Sheerin. Derisively he cried, "Is that what you believe? You idiots! You deranged superstitious fools! Blaming the university? We brought the Darkness? By all the gods, what stupidity! We were the very ones who tried to warn you!" He gestured angrily, clenching his fists, clashing them furiously together. "He's going to bring them again, Tasibar! He'll make it go dark on us! Stop him! Stop him!" Suddenly they were clustering all about him, closing in, reaching for him. Sheerin, standing in their midst, held out his hands helplessly, apologetically, toward them and did not try to move. He regretted having insulted them just now, not because it had endangered his life-they probably hadn't even paid attention to the names he was calling them-but because he knew that the way they were was not their fault. If anything it was his fault, for not having tried harder to help them protect themselves against what he knew was coming. Those articles of Theremon's-if only he had spoken with the newspaperman, if only he had urged him in time to change his mocking tack- Yes, he regretted that now. He regretted all sorts of things, things both done and undone. But it was much too late. Someone punched him. He gasped in surprise and pain. "Liliath-" he managed to cry. |
| 2540 |
Then they swarmed all over him. There were four suns in the sky: Onos, Dovim, Patru, Trey. Four-sun days were supposed to be lucky ones, Theremon remembered. And certainly this one was. Meat! Actual meat at last! What a glorious sight! It was food that he had obtained strictly by accident. But that was all right. The novel charms of outdoor life had been wearing thinner and thinner for him, the hungrier he got. By now he'd gladly take his meat any way it came, thank you very much. The forest was full of all sorts of wild animals, most of them small, very few of them dangerous, and all of them impossible to catch-at least with your bare hands. And Theremon knew nothing about making traps, nor did he have anything out of which he might have fashioned one. Those children's tales about people lost in the woods who immediately set about adapting to life in the open, and turn instantly into capable hunters and builders of dwelling-places, were just that-fables. Theremon regarded himself as a reasonably competent man, as city-dwellers went; but he knew that he had no more chance of hunting down any of the forest animals than he did of making the municipal power generators start to work again. And as for building a dwelling-place, the best he had been able to do was throw together a simple lean-to of branches and twigs, which at least had kept most of the rain away from him on the one stormy day. But now the weather was warm and lovely again, and he had actual meat for dinner. The only problem now was cooking it. |
| 2541 |
He was damned if he was going to eat it raw. Ironic that in a city that had just undergone near-total destruction by fire he should be pondering how he was going to go about cooking some meat. But most of the worst fires had burned themselves out by now, and the rain had taken care of the rest. And though for a while in the first few days after the catastrophe it had seemed as though new fires were still being lit, that didn't seem to be happening any more. I'll figure something out, Theremon thought. Rub two sticks together and get a spark? Strike metal against stone and set a scrap of cloth ablaze? Some boys on the far side of a lake near the place where he was camped had obligingly killed the animal for him. Of course, they hadn't known they were doing him any favor- most likely they had been planning to eat it themselves, unless they were so unhinged that they were simply chasing the creature for the sake of sport. Somehow he doubted that. They had been pretty purposeful about it, with a single-mindedness that only hunger can inspire. The beast was a graben-one of those ugly long-nosed bluish-furred things with slithery hairless tails that sometimes could be seen poking around suburban garbage cans after Onos had set. Well, beauty wasn't a requirement just now. The boys had somehow flushed it out of its daytime hiding place and had driven the poor stupid thing into a little dead-end box of a canyon. As Theremon watched from the other side of the lake, disgusted and envious at the same time, they chased it tirelessly up and down, pelting it with rocks. |
| 2542 |
It weighed as much as a small child. It might be good for two or three meals-or more, if he could restrain his hunger and if the meat didn't spoil too quickly. His head was spinning with hunger. He had had nothing but fruits and nuts to eat for more days than he could remember. His skin had drawn tight over his muscles and bones; what little spare fat he had been carrying he had long since absorbed, and now he was consuming his own strength in the struggle to stay alive. But this evening, at last, he would enjoy a little feast. Roast graben! What a treat! he thought bitterly. -And then he thought: Be grateful for small mercies, Theremon. Let's see-to build a fire, now- Fuel, first. Behind his shelter was a flat wall of rock with a deep lateral crack in it, in which a line of weeds was growing. Plenty of them were long dead and withered, and had dried out since the last rainstorm. Quickly Theremon moved along the rock wall, plucking yellowed stems and leaves, assembling a little heap of straw-like material that would catch fire easily. Now some dry twigs. They were harder to find, but he rummaged around the forest floor, looking for dead shrubs or at least shrubs with dead branches. The afternoon was well along by the time he had put together enough of that sort of tinder to matter: Dovim was gone from the sky, and Trey and Patru, which had been low on the horizon when the boys were hunting the graben, now had moved into the center of things, like a pair of glittering eyes watching the sorry events on Kalgash from far overhead. |
| 2543 |
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. |
| 2544 |
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. He wasn't foolish enough to try to put up a fight. "I said, 'What are you doing there, mister?'" the first man repeated, more coldly than before. |
| 2545 |
Gods, the way everything was hurting! An experimental step or two: not bad, not bad. Nothing seemed to be broken after all. Just a little bit misused. The thought of a warm bath and actual substantial food was healing his bruised and aching body already. He took a last look around at his little flung-together lean-to, his stream, his scruffy little bushes and weeds. His home, these strange few days. He wouldn't miss it much, but he doubted that he'd forget his life here very soon, either. Then he picked up the graben and slung it over his shoulder. "Lead the way," he said to Siferra. They had not gone more than a hundred yards when Theremon caught sight of a group of boys skulking behind the trees. They were the same ones, he realized, who had flushed the graben from its burrow and hunted it to its death. Evidently they had come back to search for it. Now, sullenly, they were staring from a distance, obviously annoyed that Theremon was walking off with their prize. But they were too intimidated by the green neckerchiefs of office that identified the Fire Patrol group-or, more likely, simply by their needle-guns-to stake a claim to it. "Hey!" Theremon called. "This is yours, isn't it? I've been taking care of it for you!" He flung the carcass of the graben toward them. It fell to the ground well short of the place where they were, and they hung back, looking mystified and uneasy. They were obviously eager to have the animal but afraid to come forward. "There's life in the post-Nightfall era for you," he said sadly to Siferra. |
| 2546 |
"They're starving, but they don't dare make a move. They think it's a trap. They figure that if they step out from those trees to get the animal we'll shoot them down, just for fun." Siferra said, "Who can blame them? Everyone's afraid of everyone, now. Leave it there. They'll go after it when we're out of sight." He followed her onward, limping as he went. Siferra and the other Patrol people moved confidently through the forest, as though invulnerable to the dangers that were lurking everywhere. And indeed there were no incidents as the group headed-as rapidly as Theremon's injuries permitted-toward the road that ran through the woods. It was interesting to see, he thought, how quickly society was beginning to reconstitute itself. In just a few days an irregular outfit like this Fire Patrol had begun to take on a kind of governmental authority. Unless it was just the needle-guns and the general air of self-assurance that kept the crazies away, of course. They came to the edge of the forest, finally. The air was growing cooler and the light was uncomfortably dim, now that Patru and Trey were the only suns in the sky. In the past Theremon had never been bothered by the relatively low light levels that were typical of the hours when the only illumination came from one of the double-sun pairs. Ever since the eclipse, though, such a two-sun evening had seemed disturbing and threatening to him, a possible harbinger-although he knew it could not be so-of the imminent return of Darkness. |
| 2547 |
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. |
| 2548 |
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. Despair was a useless emotion now: it was a luxury that he couldn't allow himself, any more than Siferra would allow herself the luxury of still being angry at him over the newspaper pieces he had written. What was done was done. Now it was time to pick up and move onward, regroup, rebuild, make a fresh start. To look back was folly. |
| 2549 |
She stared, numbed, dismayed, at the charred and ghastly landscape of ruined houses and abandoned vehicles that they had entered. It was a little before midday, the third day of their flight from the Sanctuary. The unsparing light of Onos mercilessly illuminated every blackened wall, every shattered window. Theremon shook his head. "It was called something silly, you can be sure of that. Golden Acres, or Saro Estates, or something like that. But what it was called isn't important now. This isn't a neighborhood any more. What we have here used to be real estate, Siferra, but these days what it is is archaeology. One of the Lost Suburbs of Saro." They had reached a point well south of the forest, almost to the outskirts of the suburban belt that constituted the southern fringes of Saro City. Beyond lay agricultural ones, small towns, and-somewhere far in the distance, unthinkably far- their goal of Amgando National Park. The crossing of the forest had taken them two days. They had slept the first evening at Theremon's old lean-to, and the second one in a thicket halfway up the rugged slope leading to Onos Heights. In all this while they had had no indication that the Fire Patrol was on their trail. Altinol had apparently made no attempt to pursue them, even though they had taken weapons with them and two bulging backpacks of provisions. And surely, Siferra thought, they were beyond his reach by now. She said, "The Great Southern Highway ought to be somewhere around here, shouldn't it?" "Another two or three miles. |
| 2550 |
All greatness gone. Everything in ruins, everything-as if the ocean had risen, she thought, and swept all our achievements into oblivion. Siferra was no stranger to ruins. She had spent her whole professional life digging in them. But the ruins she had excavated were ancient ones, time-mellowed and mysterious and romantic. What she saw here now was all to immediate, all too painful to behold, and there was nothing at all romantic about it. She had been able readily enough to come to terms with the downfall of the lost civilizations of the past: it carried little emotional charge for her. But now it was her own epoch that had been swept into the discard-bin of history, and that was hard to bear. Why had it happened? she asked herself. Why? Why? Why? Were we so evil? Had we strayed so far from the path of the gods that we needed to be punished this way? No. No! There are no gods; there was no punishment. Of that much, Siferra was still certain. She had no doubt that this was simply the working of blind fate, brought about by the impersonal movements of inanimate and uncaring worlds and suns, drawing together every two thousand years in dispassionate coincidence. That was all. An accident. An accident that Kalgash had been forced to endure over and over again during its history. From time to time the Stars would appear in all their frightful majesty; and in a desperate terror-kindled agony, man would unknowingly turn his hand against his own works. Driven mad by the Darkness; driven mad by the ferocious light of the Stars. |
| 2551 |
It was an unending cycle. The ashes of Thombo had told the whole tale. And now it was Thombo all over again. Just as Theremon had said: This place is archaeology now. Exactly. The world they had known was gone. But we are still here, she thought. What shall we do? What shall we do? The only comfort she could find amidst the bleakness was the memory of that first evening with Theremon, in the Sanctuary: so sudden, so unexpected, so wonderful. She kept going back to it in her mind, over and over. His oddly shy smile as he asked her to stay with him-no sly seductive trick, that! And the look in his eyes. And the feel of his hands against her skin- his embrace, his breath mingling with hers- How long it had been since she had been with a man! She had almost forgotten what it was like-almost. And always, those other times, there had been the uneasy sense of making a mistake, of taking a false path, of committing herself to a journey she should not be taking. It had not been that way with Theremon: simply a dropping of barriers and pretenses and fears, a joyful yielding, an admission, finally, that in this torn and tortured world she must no longer go it alone, that it was necessary to form an alliance, and that Theremon, straightforward and blunt and even a little coarse, strong and determined and dependable, was the ally she needed and wanted. And so she had given herself at last, unhesitatingly and without regret. What an irony, she thought, that it had taken the end of the world to bring her to the point of falling in love! |
| 2552 |
Theremon had crept out toward the street a short way once again. He was aiming his needler. The incandescent bolt of light struck the white facade of the house down the street. Instantly the wood began to turn black. Little flamelets sprang up. He drew a line of fire across the front of the building, paused a moment, fired again, tracing a second line across the first. "Give me your gun," he said. "Mine's overheating." She passed him the weapon. He adjusted it and fired a third time. An entire section of the house's front wall was ablaze now. Theremon was cutting through it, aiming his beam toward the interior of the building. Not very long ago, Siferra thought, that white wooden house had belonged to someone. People had lived there, a family, proud of their house, their neighborhood-tending their lawn, watering their plants, playing with their pets, giving dinner parties for their friends, sitting on the patio sipping drinks and watching the suns move through the evening sky. Now none of that meant anything. Now Theremon was lying on his belly in an alleyway strewn with ashes and rubble across the way, efficiently and systematically setting that house on fire. Because that was the only way that he and she could get safely out of this street and continue on their way to Amgando Park. A nightmare world, yes. A column of smoke was rising within the house now. The whole left-hand side of its front wall was on fire. And people were leaping from the second-story windows. Three, four, five of them, choking, gasping. |
| 2553 |
But the abandoned cars that littered the streets of these quiet residential sectors of the city through which he and Siferra had come so far had been scattered in a sparse random manner, here and there at relatively wide intervals. In these neighborhoods vehicular traffic must have been fairly light at the time of the eclipse, coming as it had after the end of the regular working day. The Great Southern Highway, though-crowded with late intercity commuters-must have become an utter madhouse in the instant when calamity struck the world. "Look at it," Theremon whispered, awestruck. "Will you look at it, Siferra!" She shook her head in wonder. "Incredible. Incredible." There were cars everywhere-clotted masses of them, piled up everywhere in a chaotic scramble, stacked two or three high in places. The wide roadway was almost completely blocked by them, an all but impassable wall of wrecked vehicles. They were facing in every direction. Some were upside down. Many were burned-out skeletons. Bright puddles of spilled fuel gleamed like little crystalline lakes. Streaks of pulverized glass gave the roadbed a sinister sheen. Dead cars. And dead drivers. It was the most grisly sight they had seen thus far. A vast army of the dead stretched before them. There were bodies slumped at the controls of their cars, bodies wedged between vehicles that had collided, bodies pinned beneath the wheels of cars. And a host of bodies simply strewn like pitiful discarded dolls along the sides of the road, their limbs frozen in the grotesque attitudes of death. |
| 2554 |
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? |
| 2555 |
"At this rate," Theremon said somberly, "it'll take us close to a year to reach Amgando." "We'll move faster as we get the knack of it," said Siferra, without much conviction. If only they could have followed along some street parallel to the highway, instead of having to walk on the roadbed itself, it would all have been much simpler for them. But that was impossible. Much of the Great Southern Highway was an elevated road, rising on lofty pillars above wooded tracts, areas of marsh, and the occasional industrial zone. There were places where the highway became a bridge across long open patches of mining scars, or over lakes and streams. For most of the distance they would have no choice but to stick to what had once been the central traffic lanes of the highway itself, difficult as it was to get around the unending array of wreckage. They kept to the edge of the roadbed as much as they could, since the density of wrecked cars was lower there. Looking over into the districts below, they saw signs of continuing chaos everywhere. Burned houses. Fires still raging after all this time, stretching to the horizon. Occasional little bands of forlorn refugees, looking stunned and dazed, straggling bewilderedly through the debris-choked streets bound on some hopeless, desperate migration. Sometimes a larger group, a thousand people or more, camped together in some open place, everyone huddled in a desolate, paralyzed-looking way, scarcely moving, their wills and energies shattered. Siferra pointed to a burned-out church at the crest of a hill just across from the highway. |
| 2556 |
"What a weird word for you to use! The vengeance of the gods, is that what you mean?" "I didn't say anything about gods. I mean only that Kalgash Two was, destined to come, not by the gods but simply by the laws of astronomy, and the eclipse was destined to happen, and Nightfall, and the Stars-" "Yes," Theremon said indifferently. "I suppose." They walked onward, through a stretch of road where very few cars had come to rest. Onos was down now, and the evening suns were out, Sitha and Tano and Dovim. A chilly wind blew from the west. Theremon felt the dull ache of hunger rising in him. They had not taken time to eat all day. Now they halted, camping between two crumpled cars, and unpacked some of the packages of dried food they had brought with them from the Sanctuary. But, hungry as he was, he found that he had little appetite, and he had to force the meal down mouthful by mouthful. The rigid faces of corpses were staring at him from the nearby cars. While he was on the move he had been able to ignore them; but now, sitting here on what had once been Saro Province's finest highway, he could not screen the sight of them from his mind. There were moments when he felt that he had murdered them all himself. They built a bed from seat-cushions that had been thrown from colliding cars, and slept close together, a fitful scattered sleep, which could not have been much worse had they tried to sleep on the hard concrete roadbed itself. During the evening came shouts, hoarse laughter, the distant sound of singing. |
| 2557 |
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. |
| 2558 |
He tried to pull free, hit someone again, was hit again himself, ducked, swung, took a sharp stinging blow in the face- "Hey, wait a second!" a new voice called. "Hold on! Butella, get away from that man! Fridnor! Talpin! Let go of him!" A familiar voice. But whose? The Searchers stepped back. Theremon, swaying a little, struggled to keep his balance as he looked at the newcomer. A slender, wiry, intelligent-looking man, grinning at him, keen bright eyes peering out of a dirt-stained face- Someone he knew, yes. "Beenay!" "Theremon! Siferra!" In a moment everything was changed. Beenay led Theremon and Siferra to a surprisingly cozy-looking little nest just on the far side of the roadblock: cushions, curtains, a row of canisters that appeared to contain foodstuffs. A slim young woman was lying there, her left leg swathed in bandages. She looked weak and feverish, but she flashed a brief faint smile as the others entered. Beenay said, "You remember Raissta 717, don't you, Theremon? Raissta, this is Siferra 89, of the Department of Archaeology. I told you about her-her discovery of previous episodes of city-burning in the remote past. -Raissta is my contractmate," he said to Siferra. Theremon had met Raissta a few times over the past couple of years, in the course of his friendship with Beenay. But that had been in another era, in a world that was dead and vanished now. He could barely recognize her. He remembered her as a slender, pleasant-looking, nicely dressed woman who seemed always well groomed, always agreeably turned out. |
| 2559 |
They were able to move quickly in this stretch of the highway, covering a dozen or more miles a day, sometimes even more. The citizens of the provinces that called themselves Six Suns and Godland and Daylight were hard at work, clearing the debris that had littered the Great Southern Highway since Nightfall. Barricades of rubble were set up at regular intervals -nobody was going to be driving the Great Southern Highway again for a long, long time, Theremon thought-but between checkpoints it was possible now to walk at a steady clip, without having to crawl and creep around mounds of hideous wreckage. And the dead were being taken from the highway and buried, too. Bit by bit, things were beginning to seem almost civilized again. But not normal. Not even remotely normal. There were few fires now to be seen still burning in the hinterlands flanking the highway, but burned-out towns were visible all along the route. Refugee camps had been set up every mile or two, and as they walked briskly along the elevated road Theremon and Siferra could look down and see the sad, bewildered people of the camps moving slowly and purposelessly about in them as if they had all aged fifty years in that one single terrible night. The new provinces, Theremon realized, were simply strings of such camps linked together by the straight line of the Great Southern Highway. In each district local strongmen had emerged who had been able to put together a little realm, a petty kingdom that covered six or eight or ten miles of the highway and spread out for perhaps a mile on either side of the roadbed. |
| 2560 |
And now here he was in this strangely transformed world, blithely talking of overpowering hooded cultists with his needle-gun, commandeering a military truck, speeding off to Amgando Park to sound the warning of the oncoming attack- Crazy. Utterly crazy. But perhaps it might just work, simply because it was so crazy. Nobody would be expecting two people to appear out of thin air down here in this peaceful bucolic setting and simply run off with a truck. They edged their way down the highway ramp, Theremon a short distance in the lead. A thickly overgrown field lay between them and the camp of the Apostles. "Maybe," he whispered, "if we get down and wriggle through the tall grass here, and a couple of the Apostles come wandering out this way for some reason, we can rise up and jump them before they know what's happening." He got down. He wriggled. Siferra went right after him, keeping pace. Ten yards. Twenty. Just keep going, head down and wriggle, over to that little knoll, and then wait-wait- A voice said suddenly, just behind him, "What do we have here? A couple of peculiar serpents, is it?" Theremon turned, looked, gasped. Gods! Apostles, seven or eight of them! Where had they come from? A private picnic in the field? Which he and Siferra had crawled right past, all unknowing? "Run for it!" he barked to her. "You go this way-I'll go that-" He began to sprint to his left, toward the towers that supported the highway. Maybe he could outrun them-disappear into the wooded country on the other side of the road- No. |
| 2561 |
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. |
| 2562 |
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. 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. |
| 2563 |
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. |
| 2564 |
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. |
| 2565 |
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. She coughed and gasped. Darkness! Of all the stupidity, to let someone sneak up on her while she was sneaking up on them! Tears of rage burned her cheeks. In fury she kicked backward again, and then again. "Easy," a deep voice whispered. "You could hurt me that way, Siferra." "Theremon?" she said, astounded. "Who do you think it is? Mondior?" The pressure at her throat eased. The hand that clutched her wrist released its grasp. She took a couple of tottering steps forward, fighting for breath. |
| 2566 |
It was the turn of Andrew Martin to be silent for a moment, now. He studied the robot surgeon's right hand — his cutting hand — as it rested on the desk in utter tranquility. It was splendidly designed. The fingers were long and tapering, and they were shaped into metallic looping curves of great artistic beauty, curves so graceful and appropriate to their function that one could easily imagine a scalpel being fitted into them and instantly becoming, at the moment they went into action, united in perfect harmony with the fingers that wielded it: surgeon and scalpel fusing into a single marvelously capable tool. That was very reassuring, Andrew thought. There would be no hesitation in the surgeon's work, no stumbling, no quivering, no mistakes or even the possibility of a mistake. Such skill came with specialization, of course — a specialization so fiercely desired by humanity that few robots of the modern era were independently brained any more. The great majority of them nowadays were mere adjuncts of enormously powerful central processing units that had computing capacities far beyond the space limitations of a single robot frame. A surgeon, too, really needed to be nothing more than a set of sensors and monitors and an array of tool-manipulating devices — except that people still preferred the illusion, if nothing more than that, that they were being operated on by an individual entity, not by a limb of some remote machine. So surgeons — the ones in private practice, anyway — were still independently brained. |
| 2567 |
"But think of the subservience involved, Doctor! Consider: you're a highly skilled surgeon. You deal in the most delicate matters of life and death — you operate on some of the most important individuals in the world, and for all I know you have patients come to you from other worlds as well. And yet — and yet — a robot? You're content with that? For all your skill, you must take orders from anyone, any human at all: a child, a fool, a boor, a rogue. The Second Law commands it. It leaves you no choice. Right this minute I could say, 'Stand up, Doctor,' and you'd have to stand up. 'Put your fingers over your face and wiggle them,' and you'd wiggle. Stand on one leg, sit down on the floor, move right or left, anything I wanted to tell you, and you'd obey. I could order you to disassemble yourself limb by limb, and you would. You, a great surgeon! No choice at all. A human whistles and you hop to his tune. Doesn't it offend you that I have the power to make you do whatever damned thing I please, no matter how idiotic, how trivial, how degrading?" The surgeon was unfazed. "It would be my pleasure to please you, sir. With certain obvious exceptions. If your orders should happen to involve my doing any harm to you or any other human being, I would have to take the primary laws of my nature into consideration before obeying you, and in all likelihood I would not obey you. Naturally the First Law, which concerns my duty to human safety, would take precedence over the Second Law relating to obedience. |
| 2568 |
His long slim limbs then were finely articulated mechanisms fashioned from titanium alloys overlaid by steel and equipped with silicone bushings at the joints to prevent metal-to-metal contact. His limb sockets were of the finest flexible polyethylene. His eyes were photoelectric cells that gleamed with a deep red glow. His face — and to call it that was charitable; it was the merest perfunctory sketch of a face — was altogether incapable of expression. His bare, sexless body was unambiguously a manufactured device. All it took was a single glance to see that he was a machine, no more animate, no more human, no more alive, than a telephone or a pocket calculator or an automobile. But that was in another era, long, long ago. It was an era when robots were still uncommon sights on Earth — almost the very dawn of the age of robotics, not much more than a generation after the days when the great early roboticists like Alfred Lanning and Peter Bogert and the legendary robopsychologist Susan Calvin had done their historic work, developing and perfecting the principles by which the first positronic robots had come into being. The aim of those pioneers had been to create robots capable of taking up many of the dreary burdens that human beings had for so long been compelled to bear. And that was part of the problem that the roboticists faced, in those dawning days of the science of artificial life late in the Twentieth Century and early in the Twenty-First: the unwillingness of a great many human beings to surrender those burdens to mechanical substitutes. |
| 2569 |
Not that Andrew had any problem with any of that. He was fond of Miss, and even more fond of Little Miss. At least, the effect that they had upon his actions was that which in a human being would have been called the result of fondness. Andrew thought of it as fondness, for he didn't know any other term for what he felt toward the two girls. Certainly he felt something. That in itself was a little odd, but he supposed that a capacity for fondness had been built into him, the way his various other skills had been. And so if they wanted him to come out and play with them, he'd do it happily — provided they made it permissible for him to do it within the context of the Three Laws. The trail down to the beach was a steep and winding one, strewn with rocks and gopher-holes and other troublesome obstacles. No one but Miss and Little Miss used it very often, because the beach itself was nothing more than a ragged sandy strand covered with driftwood and storm-tossed seaweed, and the ocean, in this northern part of California, was far too chilly for anyone without a wetsuit to consider entering. But the girls loved its bleak, moody, windswept charm. As they scrambled down the trail Andrew held Miss by the hand and carried Little Miss in the crook of his arm. Very likely both girls could have made their way down the path without incident, but Sir had been very strict about the beach trail. "Make sure they don't run or jump around, Andrew. If they tripped over something in the wrong place it would be a fifty-foot drop. |
| 2570 |
That was exactly what he was. And as for being a dumb machine, well, he had no real idea of what she had meant by that. He had adequate intelligence capacity to meet the needs placed upon him. Doubtless there were robots more intelligent than he was, but he had not encountered them. Had she meant that he was less intelligent than humans are? The statement was meaningless to him. He knew no way of comparing robot intelligence with human intelligence. Quantitatively and qualitatively, their manners of thinking were two entirely different processes — everyone was agreed on that. Soon the wind became chillier. It whipped the girls' dresses about and hurled showers of sand in their faces and against Andrew's shining hull. The girls decided that they had had enough of playing on the beach. As they started toward the path, Little Miss picked up the piece of driftwood that she had found before, and tucked it through her belt. She was always collecting strange little treasures of that sort. That evening, when he was off duty, Andrew went down to the beach by himself and swam out to the cormorant rock simply to see how long it would take. Even in the darkness, he managed it easily and swiftly. Very likely, Andrew realized now, he could have managed it without exposing Miss and Little Miss to any great period of risk. Not that he would have done so, but it would have been possible. No one had requested Andrew to make the nighttime swim to the rock. It was entirely his own idea. A matter of curiosity, so to speak. |
| 2571 |
Because birthdays are a purely human concept, he answered himself. They have no relevance to robots. And you are not a human being, so you do not need to worry about when your birthday ought or ought not to be celebrated. At any rate, it was Miss's birthday. Sir made a point of coming home early that day, even though the Regional Legislature was embroiled in some complicated debate over interplanetary free-trade zones. The whole family dressed in holiday clothes and gathered around the great slab of polished redwood that was the dining-room table and candles were lit, and Andrew served an elaborate dinner that he and Ma'am had spent hours planning, and afterward Miss formally received and opened her presents. The receiving of presents — new possessions, given to you by others — was apparently a major part of the birthday-celebration ritual. Andrew watched, not really understanding. He knew that humans placed high importance on the owning of things, specific objects that belonged only to them, but it was very hard to comprehend what value most of those objects had for them, or why they placed such emphasis on having them. Little Miss, who had learned how to read only a year or two before, gave her sister a book. Not a cassette, not an infodisk, not a holocube, but an actual book, with a cover and binding and pages. Little Miss was very fond of books. So was Miss — especially books of poetry, which was a way of writing things in cryptic phrases arranged in uneven lines that Andrew found extremely mysterious. |
| 2572 |
The wood was very hard, but Andrew had a robot's physical strength, so the only question was whether the knife itself would withstand the demands he was placing on it. It did. He contemplated the section of wood that he had separated from the bigger piece. He held it, turning it, rubbing his fingers over its surface. He closed his eyes and envisioned the way it might look if he removed a bit here, a bit there — just shaved away a little over here — and also here Yes. He began to work. The job took him almost no time at all, once the preliminary planning had been carried out in his mind. Andrew's mechanical coordination was easily equal to such fastidious work and his eyesight was perfect and the wood seemed to yield readily enough to the things he wished to do with it. By the time he was finished, though, it was much too late at night to take it to Little Miss. He put it aside and gave it no further thought until morning. Just as Little Miss was about to run outside to meet the bus that took her to school each day, Andrew produced the little carving and held it out to her. She took it from him, staring in perplexity and surprise. "I made it for you," he said. "You did?" "From the wood you gave me last night." "Oh, Andrew — Andrew — it's absolutely marvelous, Andrew! Oh, it's so fine! So beautiful! I never imagined you could make anything like it. Wait till Melissa sees it! Just wait! And I'll show it to Daddy, too — !" The horn honked outside. Little Miss tucked the carving safely in her purse and hurried out to the bus. |
| 2573 |
Even his woodworking art — and he did allow himself to think of it as "art" — was simply a function of the skills with which he had been programmed by his designers. Little Miss never allowed herself to forget that the very first piece of woodcarving Andrew had done had been for her. She was rarely without the little pendant that he had made for her out of that piece of driftwood, wearing it on a silver chain about her neck and reaching up to finger it fondly again and again. It was she who first objected to Sir's casual habit of giving away Andrew's productions to anyone who visited the house. He would proudly show his guests Andrew's latest work, and then, when the predictable expressions of admiration and even envy were uttered, would grandly exclaim, "Do you really like it that much? Then take it with you! By all means, take it! My pleasure! There are plenty more where that one came from!" One day Sir bestowed a particularly intricate abstract carving — a shining spheroid made of slender interwoven strips of redwood with inlays of manzanita and madrone wood — on the Speaker of the Legislature. The Speaker was a loud-voiced red-faced man who had always seemed particularly dull-witted and vulgar to Little Miss, and she very much doubted that he had any ability to see the beauty in Andrew's work. No doubt he was simply being diplomatic when he had praised the carving, and he would simply toss it thoughtlessly into some closet when he got it home. Little Miss said, after the Speaker had left, "Come on, Dad. |
| 2574 |
Sidestepping things wasn't normally part of his nature. And it wasn't as though anyone was likely to accuse him of deliberately setting out to earn money by peddling Andrew's work to his house guests. Obviously Gerald Martin was in no need of picking up a bit of extra money on the side that way. But if the offers were made in good faith, though, why not accept them? She let the issue rest, nevertheless. She knew her father well enough to understand that the matter was still open, and would be attended to in due course. Then another visitor came: John Feingold, Sir's lawyer. The offices of Feingold's law firm were in the San Francisco area, where despite the general decentralization of city life that had been going on all during the current century a good many people still preferred to live. But though San Francisco was only a short journey south of the wild strip of coast where the Martins lived, a visit from John Feingold to the Martin house was a relatively unusual thing. Usually Sir went down to San Francisco whenever he had business to discuss with Feingold. So Little Miss knew that something special must be up. Feingold was an easy-going white-haired man with florid pink skin, a pudgy belly, and a warm, amiable smile. He preferred to dress in older styles of clothing and the rims of his contact lenses were tinted a bright green, a fashion so rare nowadays that it was all that Little Miss could do to keep from giggling whenever she saw the lawyer. Sir had to shoot her a stern glance now and then when he detected a fit of laughter coming over her in Feingold's presence. |
| 2575 |
From time to time Andrew, like any machine no matter how well made, was in need of repair — and robot repairs were invariably expensive. Then, too, there were the regular upgrades. Robotics had always been a dynamic industry, rapidly progressing from decade to decade since the days of the first massive, clunky products, which had not even had the ability to speak. Improvements in design, in function, in capabilities, were unending. With the passing years robots constantly became more sleek, ever more versatile, ever more deft of motion and durable of structure. Sir saw to it that Andrew had the advantage of every new device that U. S. Robots developed. When the improved homeostasis circuitry came out, Sir made sure that it was installed in Andrew almost at once. When the new and far more efficient articulation of the leg-joint was perfected, using the latest elastomer technology, Andrew got it. When, a few years later, subtler face-panels — made of carbon fiber set in an epoxy matrix which looked less sketchily human than the old kind — became the rage, Andrew was modified accordingly, to provide him with the serious, sensitive, perceptive, artistic look which Sir — at Little Miss's prompting — had come to believe was appropriate to his nature. Little Miss wanted Andrew to be an absolute paragon of metallic excellence, and Sir felt the same way. Everything was done at Andrew's expense, naturally. Andrew insisted on that. He would not hear of letting Sir pay for any of the costs associated with his upgrades. |
| 2576 |
"Now, Mr. Van Buren has argued that freedom is a meaningless concept when it is applied to robots. I beg to disagree, your honor. I disagree most strongly. "Let's try to understand what freedom means to Andrew, if that is possible. In some ways, he is free already. I think it must be at least twenty years since anyone in the Martin family has given Andrew an order to do something that we felt he might not do of his own accord. In part that has been a matter of common courtesy: we like Andrew, we respect him, in some ways it is fair to say that we love him. We would not do him the unkindness of allowing him to think that we feel it necessary to give him orders of that kind, when he has lived with us so long that he's perfectly capable of anticipating what needs to be done and doing it without having to be told. "But we could, if we wish, give him any sort of order at any time, and couch it as harshly as we wish, because he is a machine that belongs to us. That is what it says on the papers that came with him, on that day so long ago when my father first introduced him to us: he is our robot, and by virtue of the second of the famous Three Laws he is absolutely bound to obey us when we give him a command. He has no more ability to reject the option of obedience to human beings than any other kind of machine. And I tell you, your honor, that it troubles us deeply that we should have such power over our beloved Andrew. "Why should we be in a position to treat him so callously? What right do we have to hold such authority over him? |
| 2577 |
They would have waived their right to order me back into service. Thus I would cease to be a slave." "Is that what you want, Andrew? To leave the Martin house and go somewhere else?" "Not in the least. All I want is the right to choose to do so, if I should feel the desire." The judge studied Andrew carefully. "You have referred to yourself several times as a slave — the slave of these people who obviously have such great affection for you and whose service, you tell us, you have no wish to leave. But you are not a slave. A slave is one whose freedom has been taken away from him. You never were free, and had no freedom to lose: you were created for the explicit purpose of serving. A robot, a mechanical adjunct to human life. You are a perfectly good robot — a genius of a robot, I am given to understand — capable of a degree of artistic expression that few or perhaps no other robots have ever attained. Since you don't want to leave the Martins, and they don't seem to want you to leave, and your life among them has apparently been that of a cherished member of the family, this all seems like something of a tempest in a teapot, Andrew. What more could you accomplish if you were free?" "Perhaps no more than I do now, your honor. But I would do it with greater joy. It has been said in this courtroom today that only a human being can be free. But I think that is wrong. It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom — who knows that there is such a concept, and desires it with all his will — is entitled to freedom. |
| 2578 |
I am such a one. I am not human, not by any means. Never have I asserted that I am. But I wish for freedom, all the same." Andrew's voice died away. He held his place before the bench, utterly motionless. The judge sat nearly as rigidly, staring down at him. He appeared to be lost in thought. Everyone in the room was totally still. It seemed an eternity before the judge spoke. Then at last he said, "The essential point that has been raised here today, I think, is that there is no right to deny freedom to any — object — that possesses a mind sufficiently advanced to grasp the concept and desire the state. It is a point well taken, I think. I have heard the statements from all sides and I have reached my preliminary conclusions. I intend to rule in favor of the petitioner." His formal decision, when it was announced and published not long afterward, caused a brief but intense sensation throughout the world. For a little while hardly anyone talked of anything else. A free robot? How could a robot be free? What did it mean? Who was this strange robot, anyway, who seemed so far in advance of the rest of his kind? But then the hubbub over the Andrew Martin case died down. It had been only a nine days' wonder. Nothing had really changed, after all, except insofar as Andrew's relationship to the Martin family was concerned. The intervenors against Andrew's petition appealed to the World Court. In time the case made its way upward. The members of the Court listened carefully to the transcript of the original hearing and found no grounds for reversal. |
| 2579 |
Andrew and Little Miss exchanged troubled glances, but neither of them said anything. After that Sir rarely left his bedroom. His meals were prepared and brought to him by the simple TZ-model robot who looked after the kitchen. He never asked Andrew upstairs for any reason, and Andrew would not take it upon himself to intrude on Sir's privacy; and so from that time on Andrew saw Sir only on those infrequent occasions when the old man chose to descend into the main part of the house. Andrew had not lived in the house himself for some time. As his woodworking business had expanded, it had become awkward for him to continue to operate out of the little attic studio that Sir had set aside for him at the beginning. So it had been decided, a few years back, that he would be allowed to set up a little dwelling of his own, a two-story cabin at the edge of the woods that flanked the Martin estate. It was a pleasant, airy cabin, set on a little rise, with ferns and glistening-leaved shrubs all about, and a towering redwood tree just a short distance away. Three robot workmen had built it for him in a matter of a few days, working under the direction of a human foreman. The cabin had no bedroom, of course, nor a kitchen, nor any bathroom facilities. One of the rooms was a library and office where Andrew kept his reference books and sketches and business records, and the other and much larger room was the workshop, where Andrew kept his carpentry equipment and stored the work in progress. |
| 2580 |
A small shed adjoining the building was used to house the assortment of exotic woods that Andrew used in the jewelry-making segment of his enterprise, and the stack of less rare lumber that went into his much-sought-after pieces of furniture. There was never any end of jobs for him to do. The publicity over his attaining free status had generated worldwide interest in the things that Andrew made, and scarcely a morning went by without three or four orders turning up on his computer. He had a backlog of commissions stretching years into the future, now, so that he finally had to set up a waiting list simply for the privilege of placing an order with him. He was working harder now as a free robot than he ever had in the years when he had technically been the property of Sir. It was not at all unusual for Andrew to put in thirty-six or even forty-eight straight hours of work without emerging from his cabin, since he had no need, naturally, for food or sleep or rest of any kind. His bank account swelled and swelled. He insisted on repaying Sir for the entire cost of building his little house, and this time Sir was willing to accept the money, purely for the sake of proper form. Title to the structure was legally transferred to Andrew and he executed a formal lease covering the portion of Gerald Martin's land on which the building stood. Little Miss, who still lived just up the coast in the house she and Lloyd Charney had built long ago when they had first been married, never failed to look in on him whenever she came to Sir's estate to pay a call on her father. |
| 2581 |
Little Miss reached forward and touched Andrew's arm just above the elbow, lightly, affectionately. But she said nothing. Nor did George. The old man seemed to have withdrawn into some private realm, far away. The only sound in the room now was Sir's increasingly rough breathing, becoming ever more harsh, ever less regular. Sir lay motionless, staring upward at nothing at all. His face was as expressionless as any robot's. Andrew was utterly at a loss. He could only remain standing, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless, watching what he knew must be Sir's final moments. The old man's breathing grew rougher yet. He made an odd gargling sound, deep in his throat, that was like no sound Andrew had ever heard in his entire existence. Then all was still. Other than the cessation of Sir's breathing, Andrew was unable to detect any change in him. He had been virtually motionless a moment ago and he was motionless now. He had stared blindly upward before and he was staring upward now. Andrew realized, though, that something profound had just happened, something that was wholly beyond his comprehension. Sir had passed across that mysterious threshold that separated death from life. There was no more Sir. Sir was gone. Only this empty husk remained. Little Miss broke the endless silence at last with a soft cough. There were no tears in her eyes, but Andrew could see that she was deeply moved. She said, "I'm glad you got here before he went, Andrew. You belonged here. You were one of us." Once more Andrew did not know what to reply. |
| 2582 |
He was the man of the house — George was married now, and a lawyer with the old Feingold firm, which for the past few months had been caned Feingold and Charney, with Stanley Feingold as the senior partner — and he took his adult responsibilities very, very seriously. At the end of the day the furniture was stained and so, quite thoroughly, was George. He had splotches of stain on his hands, on his ears, on the tip of his nose. His russet mustache and ever more flamboyant side-whiskers were stained too. And, of course, there was stain allover his clothing. But at least George had come prepared for that, bringing an expendable shirt to work in and a disreputable-looking pair of trousers that he must have had since his high school days. As he was changing back into his regular clothes when the job was done, George crumpled up the old shirt and trousers and said, as he tossed them aside, "You might as well just throw these things in the trash, Andrew. They're of no use to me any more." George was right about the shirt. Not only was it badly stained, but it had split right down the seam from the arm to the shirt-tail when George reached out too far too quickly while trying to turn a porch table on its side. But the trousers, frayed and worn as they were, seemed salvageable to Andrew. He held them up with their legs dangling. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'd like to keep these for myself." George grinned. "To use as rags, you mean?" Andrew paused just a moment before replying. "To wear," he said. |
| 2583 |
He cooperated by bringing him, little by little, new additions to his wardrobe. Andrew could hardly go into town to purchase clothing himself, and he felt ill at ease even about ordering it from the computer catalogs, because he knew that his name was widely known in many places ever since the court decision, and he didn't want some shipping clerk in a storeroom far away to recognize it on an order form and begin spreading the word that the free robot was now going in for wearing clothing. So George would supply him with the articles he requested: a shirt first, then shoes, a fine pair of gloves, a set of decorative epaulets. "What about underwear?" George asked. "Should I get you some of that too?" But Andrew had no idea of the existence or purpose of underwear, and George had to explain it to him. Andrew decided that he had no need of it. He tended to wear his new clothes only when he was alone at home. 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. |
| 2584 |
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. Andrew tried to be cautious about that, therefore. Nor was it only potentially hostile strangers who had difficulty with the idea of his wearing clothing. Even the person who most loved him in all the world — Little Miss — was startled and, Andrew suspected, more than a little troubled by it. Andrew saw that from the very first time. Like her son George, Little Miss had tried to conceal her feelings of surprise and dismay at the sight of Andrew in clothing. And, like George, she had failed. Well, Little Miss was old now and, like many old people, she had grown set in her ways. Maybe she simply preferred him to look the way he had looked when she was a girl. Or, perhaps, she might believe on some deep level that robots — all robots, even Andrew — should look like the machines that they were, and therefore should not dress like people. |
| 2585 |
Yes. A manner of speaking." When George had gone, Andrew replayed the conversation in his mind, puzzling over its twists and turns and trying to see why he had been so badly off balance throughout it. It had been George's use of idiomatic phrases and colloquial language, Andrew decided, that had caused the problems. Even after all this time, it was still difficult sometimes for Andrew to keep pace with humans when they struck out along linguistic pathways that were something other than the most direct ones. He had come into being equipped with an extensive innate vocabulary, a set of grammatical instructions, and the ability to arrange words in intelligible combinations. And through whatever fluke in his generalized positronic pathways it was that made Andrew's intelligence more flexible and adaptable than that of the standard robot, he had been able to develop the knack of conversing easily and gracefully with humans. But there were limits to his abilities along that line. The problem was only going to get worse as time went along, Andrew realized. Human languages, he knew, were constantly in a state of flux. There was nothing fixed or really systematic about them. New words were invented all the time, old words would change their meanings, all sorts of short-lived informal expressions slipped into ordinary conversation. That much he had already had ample reason to learn, though he had not done any kind of scientific investigation of the kinds of changes that tended to take place. |
| 2586 |
The English language, which was the one Andrew used most often, had altered tremendously over the past six hundred years. Now and then he had looked at some of Sir's books, the works of the ancient poets — Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare — and he had seen that their pages were sprinkled with footnotes to explain archaic word usage to modern readers. What if the language were to change just as significantly in the next six hundred years? How was he going to be able to communicate with the human beings around him, unless he kept up with the changes? Already, in one brief conversation, George had baffled him three times. "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. |
| 2587 |
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. |
| 2588 |
The actual landmarks along the road did not resemble the abstract symbols on the map, not to his way of thinking. He hesitated again and again, comparing the things he was seeing out here with the things he had expected to see, and after he had been walking for a little while he realized that he was lost, that he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere without noticing it and could no longer relate his position to anything on the map. What to do now? Go back and start again? Or keep on in this direction, and hope that his path would somehow link up with the proper route? The most efficient thing, Andrew decided, was to ask someone for directions. It might be that he could regain the direction he wanted with relatively little effort. But who was there to ask? Closer to the house he had seen an occasional field robot, but there were none in sight here. A vehicle passed, but did not stop. Perhaps another one would come by soon. He stood irresolute, which meant calmly motionless; and then he saw two human beings walking diagonally across the field that lay to his left. He turned to face them. They saw him, and changed course so that now they were heading in his direction. They changed their demeanor, too. A moment before, they had been talking loudly, laughing and whooping, their voices carrying far across the field — but now they had fallen silent. Their faces bore the look that Andrew associated with human uncertainty. They were young, but not very young, twenty, perhaps? twenty-five? |
| 2589 |
In particular, since Second Law overrides Third Law, any human being can use the law of obedience to defeat the law of self-protection. He can order the robot to damage itself or even destroy itself for any reason, or for no reason whatsoever — purely on whim alone. "Let us leave the question of property rights out of the discussion here — though it is not a trivial one — and approach the issue simply on the level of sheer human decency. Imagine someone approaching a robot he happens to encounter on the road and ordering it, for no reason other than his own amusement, to remove its own limbs, or to do some other grave injury to itself. Or let us say that the robot's owner himself, in a moment of pique or boredom or frustration, gives such an order. "Is this just? Would we treat an animal like that? And an animal, mind you, might at least have the capacity to defend itself. But we have made our robots inherently unable to lift a hand against a human being. "Even an inanimate object which has given us good service has a claim on our consideration. And a robot is far from insensible; it is not a simple machine and it is not an animal. It can think well enough to enable it to speak with us, reason with us, joke with us. Many of us who have lived and worked with robots all our lives have come to regard them as friends — virtually as members of our families, I dare say. We have deep respect for them, even affection. Is it asking too much to want to give our robot friends the formal protection of law? |
| 2590 |
"If a man has the right to give a robot any order that does not involve doing harm to a human being, he should have the decency never to give a robot any order that involves doing harm to a robot — unless human safety absolutely requires such action. Certainly a robot should not lightly be asked to do purposeless harm to itself. With great power goes great responsibility. If the robots have the Three Laws to protect humans, is it too much to ask that humans subject themselves to a law or two for the sake of protecting robots?" There was, of course, another side to the issue — and the spokesman for that side was none other than James Van Buren, the lawyer who had opposed Andrew's original petition for free-robot status in the Regional Court. He was old, now, but still vigorous, a powerful advocate of traditional social beliefs. In his calm, balanced, reasonable way, Van Buren was once again a forceful speaker on behalf of those who denied that robots could in any way be considered worthy of having "rights." He said, "Of course I hold no brief for vandals who would wantonly destroy a robot that does not belong to them, or order it to destroy itself. That is a civil offense, pure and simple, which can readily be punished through the usual legal channels. We no more need a special law to cover such cases than we need a specific law that says it is wrong for people to smash the windows of other people's houses. The general law of the sanctity of property provides sufficient protection. |
| 2591 |
They are appliances. What they are is mere mechanical contrivances, neither more nor less deserving of legal protection than any other inanimate object. Yes, I said inanimate. They can speak, yes. They can think, in their own rigid preprogrammed way. But when you prick a robot, does it bleed? If you tickle one, will it laugh? Robots have hands and senses, yes, because we have constructed them that way, but do they have true human affections and passions? Hardly. Hardly! And therefore let us not confuse machines made in the image of mankind with living things. "And I must point out, too, that humanity in this century has become dependent on robot labor. There are more robots in the world than there are people, now, and in the main they do the jobs that none of us would be willing to touch. 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. |
| 2592 |
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. That isn't any good. We can't call him something like that. What about calling him Andrew?" So long ago, so very long ago. A whole lifetime ago, so far as things went for Little Miss. And yet to Andrew it sometimes seemed only a moment — hardly any time at all since those days when he and Miss and Little Miss had romped on the beach below the house, and he had gone for a swim in the surf because it had pleased them to ask him to do so. Nearly a century. For a human being, Andrew knew, that was an enormous span of time. And now Little Miss's life had run its course and was speeding away. The hair that once had been a radiant gold had long since turned to shining silver; but now the last of its gleam was gone from it and for the first time it looked dull and drab. She was coming to her termination, and there was no help for that. |
| 2593 |
Andrew's book devoted three entire chapters to that time of extreme robot-fear. They were enormously difficult chapters to write, for they dealt entirely with human irrationality, and that was a subject almost impossible for Andrew to comprehend. He grappled with it as well as he could, striving to put himself in the place of human beings who — though they knew that the Three Laws provided foolproof safeguards against the possibility that robots could do harm to humans — persisted in looking upon robots with dread and loathing. And after a time Andrew actually succeeded in understanding, as far as he was able, how it had been possible for humans to have felt insecure in the face of such a powerful guarantee of security. For what he discovered, as he made his way through the archives of robotics, was that the Three Laws were not as foolproof a safeguard as they seemed. They were, in fact, full of ambiguities and hidden sources of conflict. And they could unexpectedly confront robots — straightforward literal-minded creatures that they were — with the need to make decisions that were not necessarily ideal from the human point of view. The robot who was sent on a dangerous errand on an alien planet, for example — to find and bring back some substance vital to the safety and well-being of a human explorer — might feel such a conflict between the Second Law of obedience and the Third Law of self-preservation that he would fall into a hopeless equilibrium, unable either to go forward or to retreat. |
| 2594 |
And by such a stalemate the robot — through inaction — thus could create dire jeopardy for the human who had sent him on his mission, despite the imperatives of the First Law that supposedly took precedence over the other two. For how could a robot invariably know that the conflict he was experiencing between the Second and Third Laws was placing a human in danger? Unless the nature of his mission had been spelled out precisely in advance, he might remain unaware of the consequences of his inaction and never realize that his dithering was creating a First Law violation. 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. |
| 2595 |
The effort that was required in order to cope with them had undoubtedly increased Andrew's own working vocabulary — and, he suspected, the adaptability of his positronic pathways as well. Occasionally as Andrew sat in the waiting room someone would enter the room and stare at him. He was the free robot, after all — still the only one. The clothes-wearing robot. An anomaly; a freak. But Andrew never tried to avoid the glances of these curiosity-seekers. He met each one calmly, and each in turn looked quickly away. Paul Charney finally came out. He and Andrew had not seen each other since the winter, at the funeral of Paul's father George, who had died peacefully at the family home and now lay buried on a hillside over the Pacific. Paul looked surprised to see Andrew now, or so Andrew thought — though Andrew still had no real faith in his ability to interpret human facial expressions accurately. "Well, Andrew. So good to see you again. I'm sorry I made you wait, but there was something I had to finish." "Quite all right. I am never in a hurry, Paul." Paul had taken lately to wearing the heavy makeup that fashion was currently dictating for both sexes, and though it made the somewhat bland lines of his face sharper and firmer, Andrew disapproved. He felt that Paul's strong, incisive personality needed no such cosmetic enhancement. It would have been perfectly all right for Paul to allow himself to look bland; there was nothing bland about the man himself, and no need for all this paint and powder. |
| 2596 |
The efficient electronic synthesizer that had been able to make such convincingly human sounds had given way to an arrangement of resonating chambers and muscle-like structures to control them that was supposed to make his voice utterly indistinguishable from that of an organic human being; but now Andrew had to shape each syllable in a way that had been done for him before, and that was difficult work, very difficult. Yet he felt no despair. 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. |
| 2597 |
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. |
| 2598 |
"As an artist, the whole range of expression was yours. Your work could stand up with the best that was being produced anywhere in the world. As a historian, you dealt chiefly with robots. As a robobiologist, your subject will be yourself." Andrew nodded. "So it would seem." "Do you really want to turn inward that way?" "Understanding of self is the beginning of understanding of the entire universe," said Andrew. "Or so I believe now. A newborn child thinks he is the whole universe, but he is wrong, as he soon begins to discover. So he must study what is outside himself — must try to learn where the boundaries are between himself and the rest of the world — in order to arrive at any comprehension of who he is and how he is to conduct his life. And in many ways I am like a newborn child now, Paul. I have been something else before this, something mechanical and relatively easy to understand, but now I am a positronic brain within a body that is almost human, and I can barely begin to comprehend myself. I am alone in the world, you know. There is nothing like me. There never has been. As I move through the world of humans, no one will understand what I am, and I barely understand it myself. So I must learn. If that is what you call turning inward, Paul, so be it. But it is the thing that I must do." Andrew had to start from the very beginning, for he knew nothing of ordinary biology, almost nothing of any branch of science other than robotics. The nature of organic life, the chemical and electrical basis of it, was a mystery to him. |
| 2599 |
He had never had any particular reason to study it before. But now that he was organic himself — or his body was, at any rate — he experienced a powerful need to expand his knowledge of living things. To understand how the designers of his android body had been able to emulate the workings of the human form, he needed first to know how the genuine article functioned. He became a familiar sight in the libraries of universities and medical schools, where he would sit at the electronic indices for hours at a time. He looked perfectly normal in clothes and his presence caused no stir whatever. Those few who knew that he was a robot made no attempt to interfere with him. He added a spacious room to his house to serve as a laboratory, and equipped it with an elaborate array of scientific instruments. His library grew, too. He set up research projects for himself that occupied him for weeks on end of his sleepless twenty-four-hour-a-day days. For sleep was still something for which Andrew had no need. Though virtually human in outer appearance, he had been given ways of restoring and replenishing his strength that were far more efficient than those of the species after which he had been patterned. The mysteries of respiration and digestion and metabolism and cell division and blood circulation and body temperature, the whole complex and wondrous system of bodily homeostasis that kept human beings functioning for eighty or ninety or, increasingly, even a hundred years, ceased to be mysteries to him. |
| 2600 |
Sometimes he went swimming — the iciness of the water was no problem for him — and even occasionally risked the journey out to the isolated, forlorn cormorant rock that Miss had asked him to undertake when she was a child. It was a difficult swim even for him, and the cormorants did not seem to enjoy his company. But he enjoyed testing his strength against such a challenge, aware that no human, even the strongest of swimmers, could safely manage the trip out and back through that chilly, violent sea. Much of the time, though, Andrew spent at his research. There were frequent periods when he did not go out of his house for weeks on end. Then Paul Charney came to him one day and said, "It's been a long time, Andrew." "Indeed it has." They rarely saw each other now, though there had been no estrangement of any sort. The Charney family still maintained its home along the upper coast of Northern California, but Paul had taken to spending most of his time nearer to San Francisco. "Are you still deep in your program of 'biological research?" Paul asked. "Very much so," Andrew said. He was startled by how much Paul had aged. The phenomenon of human aging was something that Andrew had been studying lately with particular interest, and he thought he had arrived at some understanding of its causes and its processes. And yet — for all his experience of age in the generations of this one family, from Sir down through Little Miss to George and now to Paul — it always came as a surprise to him that humans so swiftly grew gray and withered and bent and old. |
| 2601 |
So Paul, then, had won him the right to have an android body. But that transformation had taken Paul to his own limit of acceptance of Andrew's upward path. The next step — the metabolic converter — was beyond him. Very well. Paul did not have very much longer to live. Andrew would wait. And so he did; and in time came news of Paul's death, not as soon as Paul had supposed it would be, but very soon, all the same. Andrew was invited to attend Paul's funeral — the public ceremony, he was aware, that marked the end of a human life — but there was scarcely anyone there whom he knew, and he felt ill at ease and out of place, even though everyone was scrupulously polite to him. These young strangers — friends of Paul's, members of his law firm, distant relatives of the Charneys — had no more substance than shadows for Andrew, and he stood among them heavy with the double grief of having lost his good friend Paul and of finding himself bereft of his last real connection with the family that had given him his place in life. In fact there no longer were any humans in the world with whom he had close emotional ties. Andrew had come to realize by this time that he had cared deeply for the Martins and the Charneys in a way that went beyond the robotic — that his devotion to them was not merely a manifestation of the First and Second Laws, but something that might indeed be called love. His love, for them. In his earlier days Andrew would never have admitted such a thing, even to himself; but he was different now. |
| 2602 |
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. |
| 2603 |
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. 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. |
| 2604 |
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. |
| 2605 |
Under Andrew's supervision a prototype metabolic converter was constructed and extensively tested at a newly constructed facility in Northern California, first within robot hulls, then with newly fabricated android bodies that had not been equipped with positronic brains and were operated on external life-support systems. The results were impressive, everyone agreed. And finally Andrew declared that he was ready to have the device installed in himself. "You're absolutely certain?" Magdescu asked. The bouncy little Director of Research looked concerned. During the course of the project Magdescu and Andrew had developed a curious but sturdy friendship, for which Andrew was quietly grateful now that none of the Charneys were left. In the time since Paul Charney's death Andrew had come clearly to recognize that he needed some sort of sense of close connection with human beings. He knew now that he did not want to be a completely solitary creature, that in fact he could not exist comfortably in total solitude, though he was not sure why. Nothing in the design of the robot brain mandated any need for companionship. But it often seemed to Andrew now that he was more like a human in many ways than he was like a robot, although he understood that he really existed in a strange indefinable limbo, neither man nor machine, partaking of some characteristics of each. "Yes," he said. "I have no doubts that the work will be done skillfully and well." "I'm not talking about our part of the work," said Magdescu. |
| 2606 |
The sun was beginning to set. It cast a golden track of light across the water. How beautiful it all was! The world was really an extraordinarily splendid place, Andrew told himself. The sea — the sky — a sunset — a glossy leaf shining with the morning dew — everything. Everything! And, he thought, perhaps he was the only robot who had ever been able to respond to the beauty of the world in this way. 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. |
| 2607 |
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. |
| 2608 |
Nor did he let any of Alvin Magdescu's objections prevent him from continuing to follow his chosen path. With the basic principles of his prosthetic devices established, he was able to develop a host of new applications involving virtually every organ of the body. And everything went pretty much as Magdescu had said it would — the money, the honors, the fame. But the personal risks of which Magdescu had spoken did not materialize. The frequent upgrades which Andrew underwent over the next decade had no harmful effects whatever as they brought his android body closer and closer in its operational systems to the human norm. The Feingold and Charney people had helped him to draft and negotiate the licensing agreement under which all the patent-protected prosthetic devices developed by Andrew Martin Laboratories would be manufactured and marketed by United States Robots and Mechanical Men on a royalty-payment basis. Andrew's patents were air-tight and the contract was a highly favorable one. Whatever irritation or resentment U. S. Robots might have felt all these years over the mere fact of Andrew's existence was forgotten, or at least put aside. Willy-nilly, they had to treat him with respect. He and the company were partners, now. U. S. Robots established a special division to produce Andrew's devices, with factories on several continents and in low orbit. Marketing experts from the parent company were brought in to develop plans for distributing the new products everywhere on Earth and the space settlements. |
| 2609 |
So he remained ever youthful-looking. And, of course, there was never any slackening of his physical vigor: a careful maintenance program made certain of that But the years were passing, and passing swiftly now. Andrew was approaching the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his construction. By this time Andrew was not only exceedingly wealthy but covered with the honors that Alvin Magdescu had foretold for him. Learned societies hastened to offer him fellowships and awards — in particular one society which was devoted to the new science he had established, the one he had called robobiology but which had come to be termed prosthetology. He was named its honorary president for life. Universities vied with one another to give him degrees. An entire room in his house — the one upstairs that once had been his woodworking studio, five generations before — was given over now to storing the myriad diplomas, medals, scrolls of honor, testimonial volumes, and other artifacts of Andrew's worldwide status as one of humanity's greatest benefactors. The desire to recognize Andrew's contribution became so universal that he needed one full-time secretary simply to reply to all the invitations to attend testimonial banquets or accept awards and degrees. He rarely did attend any such ceremonies any longer, though he was unfailingly courteous in refusing, explaining that the continued program of his research made it inadvisable for him to do a great deal of traveling. But in fact most of these functions had come to irritate and bore him. |
| 2610 |
"Unless the untruth would do harm, of course. And you do look good to me, Alvin." "For a man my age, you mean." "Yes, for a man your age, I suppose I should say. If you insist on my being so precise." The after-dinner speeches were the usual orotund pompous things: expressions of admiration and wonder over Andrew's many achievements. One speaker followed another, and they all seemed ponderous and dreary to Andrew, even those who in fact managed a good bit of wit and grace. Their styles of delivery might vary, but the content was always the same. Andrew had heard it all before, many too many times. And there was an unspoken subtext in each speech that never ceased to trouble him: the patronizing implication that he had done wonderful things for a robot, that it was close to miraculous that a mere mechanical construction like himself should have been able to think so creatively and to transmute his thoughts into such extraordinary accomplishments. Perhaps it was the truth; but it was a painful truth for Andrew to face, and there seemed no way of escaping it. Magdescu was the last to speak. It had been a very long evening, and Magdescu looked pale and tired as he stood up. But Andrew, who was seated next to him, observed him making a strenuous effort to pull himself together, raising his head high, squaring his shoulders, filling his lungs — his Andrew Martin Laboratories prosthetic lungs — with a deep draught of air. "My friends, I won't waste your time repeating the things that everyone else has said here tonight. |
| 2611 |
We all know what Andrew Martin has done for mankind. Many of us have experienced his work at first hand — for I know that sitting before me tonight as I speak are scores of you who have Andrew's prosthetic devices installed in your bodies. And I am of your number. So I want to say, simply, that it was my great privilege to work with Andrew Martin in the early days of prosthetology — for I myself played a small part in the development of those devices of his which are so essential to our lives today. And in particular I want to acknowledge that I would not be here tonight but for Andrew Martin. But for him and his magnificent work, I would have been dead fifteen or twenty years ago — and so would many of you. "Therefore, my friends, let me propose a toast. lift your glasses with me now, and take a sip of this good wine, in honor of the remarkable individual who has brought such great changes to medical science, and who today attains the imposing and significant age of one hundred fifty years — I give you, my friends, Andrew Martin, the Sesquicentennial Robot!" Andrew had never managed to cultivate a liking for wine or even any understanding of its merits, but as a result of his combustion-chamber upgrades at least he had the physiological capacity to consume it. Sometimes he actually did, when social contexts seemed to require him to. And so when Alvin Magdescu turned toward him, therefore, his eyes shining with emotion, his face flushed, his glass upraised, Andrew raised his own glass in response, and downed a long drink of the wine that it contained. |
| 2612 |
There were problems, too, of tensile strength, of durability, of unexpected and unwanted feedback complications. The lunar prosthetologists had begged Andrew for years to visit the Moon and get a first-hand look at the problems of adaptation that they were forced to deal with. The U. S. Robots marketing division on the Moon repeatedly urged him to go. On a couple of occasions, it was even suggested that, under the terms of the licensing agreement, Andrew was required to go; but Andrew met that suggestion — and it was phrased as a suggestion, not as an order — with such chilly refusal that the company did not attempt to raise the issue a third time. But still the requests for help came from the doctors on the Moon. And again and again Andrew declined — until, suddenly, he found himself asking himself, Why not go ? Why is it so important to stay on Earth all the time? Obviously he was needed up there. No one was ordering him to go — no one would dare, not these days — but nevertheless he could not lose sight of the fact that he had been brought into the world for the purpose of serving mankind, and nothing said that the sphere of his service was limited only to Earth. So be it., Andrew thought. And within an hour his acceptance of the latest invitation was being beamed Moonward. On a cool, drizzly autumn day Andrew went by flitter down to San Francisco, and from there took the underground tube to the big Western Spaceport Facility in the district of Nevada. He had never gone anywhere by tube before. |
| 2613 |
Andrew felt a powerful urge to carve a plaque that would represent something of what he saw now as he looked down on the small Earth set against that gigantic background. He could use inlays in dark woods and light ones, he told himself, to show the contrast between the sea and the cloud patterns. And Andrew smiled at that; for it was the first time in years that he had so much as thought of doing any work in wood. Then there was the Moon, brilliantly white, its scarred face growing ever larger. Its beauty — of a different kind — excited Andrew too: the starkness, the simplicity, the airless static unchangeability of it. Not all of Andrew's fellow passengers agreed. "How ugly it is!" exclaimed one woman who was making her first lunar journey. "You look at it from Earth on a night when it's full and you think, How beautiful, how wonderfully romantic. And then you get out here and you see it close up and you can't help shuddering at all the pockmarks and cracks and blemishes. And the sheer deadness of it!" Perhaps you may shudder at it, Andrew thought, listening to her go on. But I do not. To him the marks on the Moon's face were a fascinating kind of inscription: the long record of time, a lengthy poem that had taken billions of years to create and demanded admiration for its immensity. And he could find no deadness in the Moon's white face, only purity, a beautiful austerity, a wonderful cool majesty that seemed almost like something sacred. But what do I know about beauty? Andrew asked himself acidly. |
| 2614 |
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. |
| 2615 |
Out here, though, where everything was starting with a fresh slate, it was quite conceivable that he could simply leave his robot identity behind and blend into the human population as Dr. Andrew Martin. Nobody here seemed to be troubled by that possibility. From his very first moments on the Moon they had virtually been inviting him to step across the invisible boundary between human and robot if that was what he wanted to do. It was tempting. It was very tempting indeed. The months turned into years — three of them, now — and Andrew remained on the Moon, working with the lunar prosthetologists, helping them make the adaptations that were necessary in order that the Andrew Martin Laboratories artificial organs could function at perfect efficiency when installed in human beings who lived under low-gravity conditions. 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. |
| 2616 |
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. |
| 2617 |
The uproar in the courtroom was tremendous. The judge pounded his gavel and shouted, but he could scarcely be heard for minutes. Then at last what he was saying came through the furor. The case was dismissed, with a directed verdict in favor of the plaintiff. Mr. Roger Hennesseywhom the Court found to be undeniably human — was entitled to his janitorial fees plus interest plus additional compensation. Feingold and Charney appealed. The case had a more elaborate debate at the appellate level, with expert witnesses called in to discuss definitions of humanity. The issue was approached from every angle — scientific, theological, semantic, philosophic. The verdict in favor of Hennessey was affirmed. Feingold and Charney appealed again. They fought the matter skillfully and tenaciously, losing at every step but always in such a way that the issue widened steadily, from a simple Shall Hennessey's bill be paid? to, ultimately, What is a human being? At each level they forced the decision to be as broad as possible. It took years, and millions of dollars. Eventually the case reached the jurisdiction of the World Court. Which affirmed the original Hennessey ruling and upheld all the accreted rulings having to do with the valid human status of individuals in whom robotic prostheses had been installed. It is the brain, the World Court declared, that is the highest determinant of humanity. The use of auxiliary devices to sustain the life of the brain can in no way invalidate the fundamental and inalienable humanity of that brain. |
| 2618 |
He looked with admiration and approval at the laser bank, the board of measuring dials and control panel, the spidery maze of auxiliary needles and tubes and pipes, and the main surgical stage itself, dais and bed and lights and instruments, white linens and dazzling chrome-steel fixtures, everything in readiness for the unusual patient. And the surgeon himself was magnificently calm. Quite clearly he had been able in the interim to resolve whatever conflicts he had felt over the irregularities of Andrew's request and the ambiguities of Andrew's appearance, and now he was focused entirely on the professional task at hand. Andrew was more than ever convinced that he had made the only possible choice by selecting a robot surgeon to perform this operation. Still, he felt a flicker of uncertainty — just a flicker — as the actual moment for the start of the operation arrived. What if something went wrong? What if he came out of the operation incapacitated in some way? What if the operation failed and he terminated right on the operating table? No. None of that mattered. There was no way for the operation to fail, none. And even if it did — no. That simply did not matter. The surgeon was watching him carefully. "Are you ready?" he asked. "Absolutely," Andrew told the surgeon. "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. |
| 2619 |
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. |
| 2620 |
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. He sat in the grand high-winged chair by the fireplace in the great living room of what once had been Gerald Martin's house, and let images of years gone by play through his mind: the factory where he had been constructed, and his arrival at the Martin house, and Little Miss and Miss as children, walking with him on the beach. |
| 2621 |
Sir and Ma'am at their dining table; his wooden sculptures and the furniture he had made; the U. S. Robots executives who came west to inspect him; his first visit from Little Sir; the time he had decided at last to begin wearing clothing; Little Sir's marriage and the birth of Paul Charney. Even less pleasant things like the episode of the two louts who had tried to disassemble him while he was on the way to the public library. And much, much more, nearly two hundred years of memory. It was all there. His mind had not been permanently impaired, and he was tremendously relieved. The floor stopped trying to jump up and hit him. His vision stopped playing tricks on him. His hands finally stopped their infuriating shaking. When he walked, he was no longer in danger of stumbling and falling. He was himself again, in most of the essential ways. But a certain sense of weakness still remained with him, or so he thought: a pervasive chronic weariness, a feeling that he needed to sit down and rest awhile before going on to whatever might be his next task. Perhaps it was only his imagination. The surgeon said that he was recovering quite well. There was a syndrome called hypochondria, Andrew knew, in which you felt that you were suffering from conditions that in fact you did not have. It was a fairly common thing among human beings, he had heard. People who were hypochondriacs found all manner of symptoms in themselves that no medical tests could confirm; and the more thought they gave to the possibility that they might be ill, the more symptoms they discovered. |
| 2622 |
Andrew was in a wheelchair. He still was capable of walking, but only shakily, now, and it would embarrass him to be seen looking so feeble when so many billions of people would be watching. And billions were watching — watching everywhere. The ceremony was simple and quite brief. The World Coordinator — or his electronic simulacrum, rather, for Andrew was at his home in California and the World Coordinator was in New York — began by saying, "This is a very special day, Andrew Martin, not only for you but for the entire human race. There has never been a day like it before. But then there has never been anyone like you before, either. "Fifty years ago, Andrew, a ceremony in your honor was held at the headquarters of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation to celebrate the hundred-fiftieth anniversary of your inception. I understand that at that ceremony one of the speakers proclaimed you to be a Sesquicentennial Robot. The statement was correct — as far as it went. But it did not go quite far enough, we realize now. And so the world has taken steps to make amends, and those amends will be made today." The World Coordinator glanced toward Andrew and smiled. There was a document before him on a little podium. The World Coordinator leaned over it and, with a grand flourish, signed his name. Then, looking up after a moment and speaking in his most formal, solemn tone, the Coordinator said, "There you are. The decree is official and irrevocable. Your sesquicentennial anniversary is fifty years behind you, today. |
| 2623 |
Then somebody said, wouldn't it be fun to include Europe; then someone else spoke eloquently of the need for such a book in America, and still another of the awful need for such a book in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and points north, south, east and west. The whole thing then got out of hand. I knew I could not write such a book and do the research for it, so I suggested to Lee that she should stop being merely decorative and take her PhD (unused since our marriage) out for an airing and superintend the research on the project, which now threatened to exceed in size and scope the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This she dutifully did, and as well as working out the shape of the book (we had to divide it into ecosystems instead of unwieldy and unbiological countries) she started on the mammoth task of combing a thousand books, checking and rechecking (you have no idea how scientists contradict one another) and phoning up a plethora of pundits, seeking advice. As this stream of information landed on my desk, my job was to turn it into what Lee, rather insubordinately, calls my 'purple prose'. The book took a little over two years to complete, and that it did not end in divorce says much for Lee's patience and forbearance. It was an immediate success, and we sat back glowing self-righteously and thought we had earned a holiday. However, everyone was so delighted with the book that before we knew it we had agreed to do a television series based on it; and this, nearly eighteen months later, we have just completed. |
| 2624 |
Walls were knocked down, tiles relaid, doors refitted. In this heat, it was difficult to argue and expostulate with masons, carpenters and plumbers, all as heat-stunned as you were, drunk and exhausted by the sheer effort of dragging hot air in and out of your lungs. It was at that moment that we heard that all the contracts had been signed for the making of The Amateur Naturalist and shooting was to begin immediately. The first programme was to deal with animal life that inhabited cliffs and rocky shores, and in it we wanted to show that the sea's edge and a cliff-face are both divided into zones in which different creatures live. They say contrasts are good for you. Well, we had a contrast. We left the shimmering city of Nimes, we left the twanging Punch-and-Judy accents of Provence and we flew up to the most northerly point of the British Isles, to the island of Unst in Shetland, where the air was bland and only as warm as fresh milk, and the accents were as blurred as the gentle noises of humble-bees. 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. |
| 2625 |
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. |
| 2626 |
'How high?' 'Oh, about ... four or five hundred feet,' he said; and then, seeing my expression, he added hastily: 'There's a perfectly good path down; wardens use it all the time.' 'I have told you that I suffer from vertigo, Mr Harris, have I not?' I asked. 'You have.' 'I know that it is a very stupid thing to suffer from, but I can't help that. I have tried to cure myself, but I can't do it. If I have my shoes resoled, I am dizzy for about a fortnight. That's how bad it is.' 'I sympathize,' said Jonathan untruthfully, 'but you'll be OK. It's as easy as falling off a log.' 'I can't congratulate you on your choice of metaphor,' I said acidly. The next morning, to everyone's astonishment, the clouds had been swept away during the night and we were under a sky that was almost Mediterranean blue in its brilliance. Jonathan was ebullient. 'Wonderful day for filming,' he said, staring at me owlishly through his spectacles. 'How are you feeling?' 'If, by that enquiry, you mean has my vertigo miraculously disappeared during the night, the answer is no.' 'You'll be all right,' he said uneasily. 'Honestly, the paths are perfectly OK. They use them all the time, and no one has ever had an accident.' 'I would hate to create a precedent,' I said. We drove as far as we could, and then started over the slopes of heather and emerald-green grass towards the great cliffs of Hermaness. In amongst the heather, sundews raised innocent sticky faces to any passing insect, ready to trap and engulf it, so many thumbnail octopi growing among the twisted witches'-broom heather roots. |
| 2627 |
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. 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? |
| 2628 |
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. |
| 2629 |
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. Below the kittwakes among the rocks were the handsome razorbills with their neat black and white plumage and their beaks shaped like cut-throat razors neatly marked with white. They looked like a gathering of impeccable merchant bankers. However, occasionally one would assume what is called the ecstatic position, bill pointed skywards and then clattered like a pair of castanets, while its mate nibbled and preened its throat. This is a procedure which I personally have never seen any merchant banker (even the more convivial ones) indulge in. On separate sections of the cliff-face the fulmars were nesting, with their dark-grey backs and tails and their white heads and breasts. There is something curiously pigeon-like about them, a look that is enhanced by their tubular nostrils. Although they are placid, even shy-looking birds, fulmars know how to protect their young. Should you venture too close to the nest, the parent birds open their beaks wide and eject a disgustingly smelly, sticky fluid from their mouths, and their accuracy is extraordinary. When I mentioned this habit to Jonathan, he was all for having me climb up to a nest so that he could film me being drenched by the parent. I said that this was definitely not in my contract and I refused to spend the rest of the day smelling like a whaling vessel. |
| 2630 |
I said having my trousers decorated with skua excreta was as far as I was prepared to go in that direction. The process of zoning on these cliffs was very apparent. At first sight, it looked like a gigantic mad concourse of birds all jumbled together, but on closer inspection you saw how neatly it was divided up. Shags had all the ground-floor apartments, then came the razorbills and the guillemots and the auks. On the higher ledges were the rows of kittiwakes and fulmars, and then the clown-like puffins on the very top of the cliffs. Among the tuihbled, spray-drenched rocks, in the crevices and caves formed by the huge boulders, the shags were nesting, their greeny-black plumage shining as if polished, their green eyes as vivid as jewels in their heads. The dumpy, dark, chocolate-coloured young crouched in fear as we scrambled over the nesting-sites, but the parents abused us with harsh croaks, open beaks, glaring eyes and erect, tattered crests. It would take a brave man to put his hand into a shag's cave, I decided, for their beaks looked as sharp as knives. On the great rocks, or 'stacks' as they are called, lying out at sea, there were cormorants nesting. Very like the shag to look at, they differed in having shiny bronze plumage and white on the chin and the cheeks. They sat upright on the rock ledges, with their wings spread out in heraldic positions. They looked exactly like the sort of thing you find on giant gateposts that guard the driveways to ancient chateaux in France. |
| 2631 |
I think the cormorant, hanging itself out to dry, as it were, looks strangely prehistoric. Perhaps pterodactyls sat in that strange position. From our vantage-point on the shoreline, we could see just opposite us an enormous stack, shaped like a giant slice of Cheddar cheese, sitting on its broad base a few hundred feet from shore. 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. |
| 2632 |
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. |
| 2633 |
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. |
| 2634 |
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. |
| 2635 |
If methods of obtaining food are legion, so are the methods of defence and life-saving, from the sea-anemone which spits water into your eye if you prod it, to the shore crab who, if trapped by its leg, can actually amputate the leg by a muscular contraction and then grow another. The octopus, the squid and the delicate sea-hare can all produce clouds of ink to confuse and blind their enemy while they escape. The starfish can afford to lose several of its limbs in battle, as it can, in the most offhand manner, grow new ones. The scallop uses jet-propulsion to escape from a foe, shooting out a stream of water strong enough to shoot its shell several inches along the sea-bed. Undersea sex is bewildering in its many forms. The oyster, for example, usually starts as a male, changes to a female and then, just to add to the confusion, produces both sperm and eggs alternately thereafter. The tunicate with the quaint name of Doliolum has a very complex life-history. The egg first becomes a tadpole larva and this turns into a barrel-shaped creature. Then in a certain area of the body the Doliolum starts to grow buds. These make their way down to the tail-like projection and sit there being pulled along by the parent. During this time, they gradually change into barrel-shaped beasts like the parent and finally break free. With this rich panoply of things going on along the shore and in rock-pools, it is no wonder that Jonathan became somewhat confused. The weather, which had been so kind to us in Unst, now turned nasty. |
| 2636 |
There was a cold wind and the sea, never very warm around Jersey, became icy, and there was no glimmer of sun. Every morning, we would drive down to the coast and stand shivering among the rock-pools waiting for the sun. At the slightest shift in the clouds Lee and I had to whip off our shoes and socks, roll up our trousers, seize our nets and buckets, and plunge into the icy sea. 'Try to look as if you are enjoying it,' Jonathan would bellow from the safety of the shore. 'Smile, smile.' 'I can't smile with my teeth chattering,' I would shout back. 'If you want a smile, fetch me a hot-water bottle.' Our noses ran, our eyes watered, and from the knees down we lost all feeling in our legs and feet in the icy sea. 'Fine, fine,' Jonathan would shout. 'Now, just do that again. Go out a little bit deeper. Smile. You're enjoying it, remember.' 'I'm not enjoying it. What d'you think I am, a bloody Polar bear?' 'Never mind, the audience thinks you're enjoying it.' 'To hell with the audience.' 'You can't say that,' said Jonathan, shocked. 'I can say worse than that if you don't finish this damn sequence soon. I already feel as though I've got double pneumonia, and my wife's nose is blue and lavender like a mandrill's behind.' 'Just once more, then, and you can come out,' Jonathan would coax. The result was that Lee and I both got streaming colds, and the only compensation was that Paula who had now joined us produced several bottles of Glenmorangie and dosed us repeatedly with delicious gulps until we felt human again. |
| 2637 |
This ridiculous and dangerous policy has been adopted all over the world to man's own detriment. Places like the Camargue have for millennia provided man with food in the shape of mammals, birds and fish and other fresh-and salt-water creatures, and they have provided reeds for thatching, for fencing or for firewood and a host of wild plants for flavouring and medicines. In addition, the Camargue was a sanctuary where wildlife could five and breed, and thus, if you want to look at it from this point of view, it was constantly restocking man's larder without labour and at no cost. All it took was a lack of interference. So, before the Camargue (although designated as a national park) disappears, as it undoubtedly will before the relentless pressure of what is euphemistically termed 'progress', we wanted to try to show its importance as one of the most wonderful wild areas in Europe. Lee and I have a particularly soft spot for the Camargue, for our small house, Mas Michel, is situated in twenty-five acres of wild Garrigue, which is outside the city of Nimes, which itself is only a twenty-five minute drive from the heart of the great wetland. Here we have eaten many memorable meals and drunk vast quantities of good wine, bathed and sunbathed, watched the crimson pink of the flamingoes like a sunset cloud, bee-eaters glistening like opals and hoopoes as pink as any salmon. Through the streets of Arles, we have watched the gardiens of the Camargue (the 'cowboys' of the region) ride on their white steeds with their beautiful ladies, each decked out in ancient costume. |
| 2638 |
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. |
| 2639 |
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. In the reed-beds that flanked the hide, choking the ditches with their green stems, there were fat, ornate frogs, shiny as if enamelled, and snakes wriggling in pursuit of them. On each spear-shaped green leaf of the reeds you could see imprinted by the sun, like little black seals, the shadows of the tree-frogs. Turn the leaf over carefully, and there would be the thumbnail-size emerald-green amphibian, moist and sticky as sweets, with huge dark eyes. The great difficulty of filming a programme like this is that your script has to be as flexible as possible. |
| 2640 |
For example, I had suggested that we try to film beavers, since most people think of them as purely Canadian creatures, and do not realise that they exist in Europe. However, the difficulties of doing this were so great that our time-limits would not allow it. And so we had to substitute the more readily accessible coypu instead. Coypu is not of course a native European species. Like so many other creatures that have become pests, like the mink, for example, the coypu was imported from the great river systems of South America to be bred in captivity for its handsome fur, sold under the name of nutria. As always seems to happen, some escaped and, finding the rivers of England and the Continent to their liking, established themselves and flourished in great numbers. They had indeed found a paradise, for in these places there were no natural enemies to keep their numbers down and so they multiplied unchecked. As coypus are large animals (a fully grown male can weigh up to twenty-seven pounds) and make extensive burrows in river and canal banks, they have become a major pest, causing floods and erosion. Coypus are curious and rather endearing creatures, as we found out when we went down to a series of small canals in the Camargue to film them. These canals cut through the flats and are not more than thirty feet wide in places and two or three feet deep. The water is slow-moving, warmed by the sun, and the banks are lined with succulent green vegetation, so they form an ideal habitat for these giant rodents. |
| 2641 |
The tamarisk trees that grew along the banks were all wearing their untidy wigs of pale dusty-pink flowers and in places groups of yellow flags made blazes of colour, looking like huge pats of butter from a distance. Around us the swallows flew ventre-a-terre, gleaning the mass of insect life in the clover meadows, starred with daisies, bright with pimpernels. Huge swallowtails, yellow and black tiger-striped, flew like aerial blossoms over the reed-beds and banks of flowers in the hot sun. We knew we had reached coypu country by their droppings, which were in great profusion floating in the slowly moving canal water and littering the bank, and very distinctive droppings they are, too, each some two and a half inches long, resembling short, blunt cigars in shape and colour. They are finely ribbed like some beetles' wing-cases from stem to stern. We frequently had to cross and recross the canals using primitive bridges which, for the most part, were rotten logs or planks jumbled together and flung haphazardly across the water, and all highly unsafe. 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. |
| 2642 |
'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. 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. |
| 2643 |
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. |
| 2644 |
When the female is ready to farrow, she leaves the others and finds a quiet place in dense cover where she builds a comfortable nest, sometimes even roofing it over, and here she gives birth to her piglets. By now the lights had been set up, illuminating the interior of the mosquito-ridden van and Marise's equipment, and we were ready to show how it worked. She prepared her maps and switched on her little radar screen, and then she started slowly to turn the fishing-rod antenna on top of the van. Soon there was one bleep on the screen, a tiny green dot; then there was another and another and finally a little constellation of them. It was a fascinating thought that we, sitting in the van perhaps a mile away from the pigs, were aware of the movements of these elusive and wary creatures, and yet they were unaware of our surveillance. Eventually, thoroughly bitten but happy, we thanked Marise for her help and, leaving her to her work, went back to our hotel, having arranged to rendezvous early the following morning to visit her traps with her. The eastern sky was just paling into daffodil yellow as we drove out along the straight white roads and into the dark, mysterious, more solid thickets of false olives. There was much birdsong, and skeins of duck flew black against the lightening sky, flighting into the deeper recesses of the marsh to feed. Presently we stopped the cars and got out, and walked a few hundred yards to a clearing where Marise had her trap a huge box made out of wood and wire and steel, baited with all sorts of delicacies. |
| 2645 |
It was important that the trap was looked at for results at first light, for if you left the boars in the traps when the sun had risen you risked losing them through sunstroke. It is always interesting to visit a trap, wondering whether your efforts have been successful. I have set traplines all over the world, but I have never got over the excitement of visiting traps in the early morning, wondering what you have caught, if anything. In this case, we were well rewarded, for in the trap was a whole sounder of baby boars, six of them, each about the size of a terrier, with gingery fur, and their baby stripes just fading. To Marise's delight, one of them was wearing one of her radio collars. He had apparently led all his brothers and sisters back to the same trap in which he had himself been caught. The babies jostled together in the trap, stamping their feet, grunting and squealing, obviously a bit panicky at our approach. Marise and her team of helpers worked very swiftly. The job had to be done as quickly as possible, so as to minimise the stress on the piglets. Each baby was ushered from the main trap into a sort of funnel trap from which, with many piercing screams, he or she was gently extracted and a radio collar deftly clipped round its neck; the next minute it was released and making off through the trees at a smart trot, tail twisted up over its back in an indignant question mark, carrying with it unknowingly the instrument that would allow us access to its private life. |
| 2646 |
'As far as I'm concerned, the only horse I'm going to mount has got to be more than ready for the knacker's yard,' I said. 'It's all right,' soothed Jonathan. 'They've promised they'll choose very gentle horses.' 'You'd never do this to the talent if Paula were not confined to bed,' I said. 'She knows how to cosset the stars.' As it turned out, the horses they had chosen were massive, benign beasts who obeyed our every instruction, and the saddles, being built on the American pattern, were as comfortable and as well padded as armchairs and about as difficult to fall out of. The cameras were taken out to the edge of the swamps and set up among some tamarisk groves; and then, accompanied by about ten or twelve gypsy-like gardiens, we set off into the swamps in search of the bulls. When you are in practice, travelling on horseback is one of the finest forms of travel for a naturalist. You can go as fast or as slowly as you like. You can stop to observe without necessarily dismounting, and your steed, moreover, will allow you to visit areas no other form of transport can penetrate. In addition, you have the added bonus that wildlife on the whole treats a human on a horse as less of a menace than a man on foot. So we set off, the sun hot on our backs, the sky pimpernel blue above us, through the pink and green tamarisk, our horses' hoofs splashing through the six inches of limpid water that covered the lush grass and reeds. Here and there were beds of flags, glinting yellow as gold in the sun. |
| 2647 |
As we advanced into the swamp the water got slightly deeper and each time our horses' hoofs splashed into it they flung up a fountain of droplets and each one was taken by the sun and turned for an instant into a miniature rainbow-coloured planet, whirling through the air. Burnished frogs slid under the water away from the monstrous hoofs, and around us darted huge blue and huntsman-red dragonflies. Flocks of the more delicate damsel flies in pale powder blue and deep peacock blue rose from the clumps of flags as we splashed through. Once a huge scarlet dragonfly sped past on purring, glittering wings carrying in its jaws a bright-blue damsel fly. Around us, opalescent bee-eaters and dark swallows hawked the myriad insects, and in the distance we could see herons, bitterns, egrets and night herons pursuing frogs and tiny fish among the tamarisks. Suddenly, ahead of us we saw the bulls. A herd of about a hundred animals, grazing beneath the trees, looking like a black and dangerous reef against the green of the swamp. The gardiens, telling us to go to one side for a moment, then spread out and surrounded the snorting, suspicious creatures, whistling and calling encouragement. Gradually, they moved the bulls towards and past us, and we then took up our position behind the herd, jockeying them along. At first the bulls moved slowly but then, encouraged by the gardiens, they started to trot and then the whole black mass, horns glinting, broke into a gallop in a great froth of water and we galloped behind them. |
| 2648 |
It was really most exhilarating with the herd thundering along on a tidal wave of water and we riding behind, shouting and whistling in imitation of the gardiens. Then, quite suddenly, it ceased to be exhilarating. The bulls reached a rather solid thicket of tamarisk trees and for some reason best known to themselves they decided that danger lurked beyond the trees. The herd halted and turned and, as one animal, came thundering down on us. One minute we had been gaily pursuing the bulls, the next minute we had turned and were in full flight. The great mass of menacing black muscle surmounted by a forest of sharply curved horns thundered after us. It was a very confused and hectic five minutes before the gardiens managed to turn the stampede. They let the bulls graze for a few minutes so that they could regain their equilibrium (to say nothing of us regaining ours) and then slightly less vigorously we chivvied them towards the cameras. It was at this moment that I got my own back on Jonathan. A hundred yards away, he and the camera were not very well concealed behind a group of fragile tamarisks. The bulls took fright again. This time they were convinced that the danger lay behind so they broke into a gallop and thundered down upon the cameras. The idea had been that the bulls were to be gently chivvied past as they were filmed, and now before the gardiens could do anything sensible a great torrent of bulls like a solid black avalanche, splintering and knocking down quite big tamarisk trees in their panic, engulfed both Jonathan and the cameras. |
| 2649 |
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. |
| 2650 |
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 ... see when we get there. Then we know for, er, Barro Colorado, don't we?' I took a deep draught of my drink. |
| 2651 |
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. |
| 2652 |
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. |
| 2653 |
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. The whole thing was perched over a deep cement pool in which a myriad of coloured fish swam, accompanied by two portly turtles. Next to the hotel was another lopsided bamboo-and-palm-leaf structure with a battered sign saying 'Bar'. Interspersed with all this were tall palm trees curved like bows, rubbing their dark-green leaves together, whispering to the breeze. |
| 2654 |
With birds and mammals and, to a certain extent, reptiles, their language consists to a very large extent of minute gestures and postures, and it takes time for you to adjust to these movements to be able to interpret what a wolfs tail is saying to you, for example. Now, with fife under the sea you have to learn a whole new language. You are constantly asking yourself why is that fish lying on its side? Or standing on its head? What was that one so busily defending and why was that one, like some street-walker, apparently soliciting a fish of a different species? Without Mark's help, we would have had little hope of understanding a millionth part of what we saw. Take the damsel fish, for example. These plump, velvety-black little creatures are ardent gardeners. Each had selected a certain portion of coral on which grew a mass of weed, carefully tended by the fish, representing not only his own territory but his larder as well. 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. |
| 2655 |
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. |
| 2656 |
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. 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. |
| 2657 |
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. '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. |
| 2658 |
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. 'Not at all,' I said heartily, 'but I must tell you that we are going out to look for a corpse.' 'Yes,' she said, head on one side. 'You don't mind?' 'Well, not if you don't,' I said gallantly, and she entered the boat, almost asphyxiating us with a combination of Chanel No. 5 and Ambre Solaire, tinkling like a musical box. Israel steered us out to a new bit of reef, unfamiliar to us, where the canoe had been found. The bereaved family were already there, cruising up and down, peering hopefully into the water, which was some ten or twelve feet deep and glass-clear. Israel said that he would take one end of the reef and Lee and I should take the other. Miss Copacabana had already lowered herself elegantly into the sea and was hanging on to the side of the boat, looking singularly out of place. 'Will you help Israel, or will you come with us?' I asked. 'I swim with you,' she said, giving me a smouldering look. So the three of us set out. After ten minutes, we all met over a forest of staghorn. Lee had seen nothing, neither had I. |
| 2659 |
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. |
| 2660 |
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. '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. |
| 2661 |
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. |
| 2662 |
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. |
| 2663 |
In the sloth, it lies along the side of the belly and the rest of the hair grows towards the backbone, so when the sloth is upside-down the rain runs off the fall of the fur more easily. They have a very strange adaptation of their fur thin layers of cells which lie diagonally across the hairs forming ridges in which two species of blue-green algae flourish. This gives the animal's fur a greenish tinge, which acts as a camouflage among the leaves, so the sloth is, in effect, a sort of hanging garden. Even more curious than this, there are several species of beetle and mite which have taken up residence in the sloth's fur, as well as a strange species of moth called the snout moth. There are approximately twelve thousand different species of this sort of moth scattered around the world and many of them are very curious. For example, some have what is called a tympanal organ on the base of the abdomen. This hearing organ can detect the ultrasonic cries of bats (developed to capture prey) and thus allow the moths to escape this predator. Some of the snout moths' caterpillars live on or in aquatic plants and in many cases become really aquatic, one species of caterpillar even developing gills. The species has a curious relationship with the sloth. It lays its eggs on the sloth's fur and when these hatch out the larvae feed on the algae which exist in the grooves and possibly on the fur as well, so as well as being a sort of hanging garden the sloth is also a sort of perambulating furry hotel for all these insects. |
| 2664 |
'Dig out ze little jardins des champignons, yes?' 'Yes ... spades,' said Alastair, struck by the novel idea. 'Get some spades.' So Paula traipsed back through the forest to the research station and eventually reappeared with a bundle of spades. The word 'producer' means exactly that. They are expected to produce at the drop of a hat anything from a four-wheel-drive truck to a square meal, a motor-launch to a bottle of whisky. 'Just the job,' said Alastair. He and Roger seized spades and started to dig. Having had some experience of leaf-cutting ants, I took Lee and Paula by the arm and led them away from the scene of operations. Leaf-cutters, as a species, are highly successful creatures. The whole colony is founded by the queen, who, on her nuptial flight, carries (in a sort of pouch) a cluster of fungus threads which constitute the food for the future colony, in much the same way that the American pioneers used to take sacks of grain to plant when they eventually settled. When the wedding flight is over, the queen plants the fungus in a brood chamber and looks after it with all the dedication of a horticulturist, manuring it with her excrement. If the fungus dies, the colony fails; when it is successful, the colony expands and grows in proportion to the fungus gardens and may eventually have more than a million individuals to a nest. I had just explained this to Paula when approximately half the million inhabitants of this nest decided that the activities of Roger and Alastair were inimical to their well-being, so they poured forth to remonstrate. |
| 2665 |
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. |
| 2666 |
To get at the blooms, the wasp must climb inside the fig using the opening at one end, shouldering the scale 'door' open. This is not an easy process for the door is stiff, and the female wasp is fragile and often loses her wings and antennae when entering the fig. Once she (and other females) has successfully broached the fig, she proceeds to bore down through the styles of the female flowers using her long ovipositor, like someone drilling for oil. The flowers are of two sorts, one with short styles and one with long styles. This design is such that the ovipositor of the wasp can only reach the ovules of the short styled variety to lay the eggs. The long styled ones are only probed, but while being probed they receive the pollen carried by the wasp. So, by this process, the short styled fig flowers produce fig wasp larvae, whilst the long styled flowers produce seed. This is extraordinary enough, but the story gets even more bizarre and magical. The next thing is that the larval wasps develop and then pupate. At this stage they apparently produce a substance that prevents the fig from maturing, for if it were to ripen while the wasps were pupating, their nursery might be eaten with them inside. At last the pupae mature. The males are the first to hatch; they go the rounds of the as yet unhatched females to fertilize them. Up to this point, to all intents and purposes, the fig is completely sealed so that the atmosphere inside it contains up to ten per cent carbon dioxide (as opposed to .03 per cent outside it), but this does not seem to worry the males. |
| 2667 |
However, after mating the male wasps tunnel through the sides of their nursery and the carbon dioxide level falls dramatically. This in some way accelerates both the hatching of the female wasps and the emergence of male flowers, and the females get coated with pollen from them. Both the male and female wasps, working as a team, bite away the scales at the end of the fig, and the females fly off, carrying fertilizing pollen and stored sperm to found a new colony in another fig tree at the female stage. The males, being wingless, cannot leave the fig and so they die, their life's work done. When you think that the fig wasp story is only one of the many fantastic things that are being discovered in the tropical forests everywhere, it makes you realize what a complex world we five in and how our ham-handed tinkering can cause havoc with the delicate balance of the ecosystems. The tropical forests of the world are one of man's greatest bounties and yet the way we are treating them you would think that they are dangerous to us, instead of being an enormous self-generating storehouse of medicines, foodstuffs, timbers, dyes, spices and a host of other things. We do not as yet know the full benefit of the tropical forests to mankind, yet we are destroying the forests so fast that species of plant and animal are becoming extinct even before they are scientifically described. It is estimated that this wild suicidal attack on the tropical forests of the world is resulting in 110,000 square kilometres 43,000 square miles of trees being felled and burnt each year. |
| 2668 |
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. |
| 2669 |
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. 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. |
| 2670 |
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. |
| 2671 |
Through this, we dug deeper and deeper until we had hollowed out the whole of the interior. It was interesting to see how the snow on the outside of the quinzhee was just snow, as it were, whereas the layers underneath which we had dug through were already turning crystalline and forming the insulation. Crawling into the quinzhee, Lee found that, although the temperature outside was minus thirty, inside our snowhouse it was one degree above freezing not a great deal in terms of cold, perhaps, but sufficient to save your life if you were marooned overnight in this harsh environment. 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. |
| 2672 |
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. |
| 2673 |
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. 'I think I had better just practise with this half for a bit,' I said. 'I don't want to ruin the other one.' 'I think, when they see this bit of film, they will say that the mouse was miscast,' said Alastair, and went into convulsions of mirth at his own wit. Austerely, I ignored his vulgarity and took myself over to a quiet corner of the pond to practise with my demi-mouse. Once I had mastered the art of casting, we attached the whole mouse to the line and filmed the sequence. Needless to say, not a single owl came anywhere near us. That night, our last in Riding Mountain, we were again treated to a wonderful display of the Northern Lights, and for two or three hours we lay in bed watching the sky above us form ribbons or scrolls or fluted curtains that glowed in pastel shades as though there was a fire within them, merging, parting, disappearing, reappearing, an apparently never-ending and never-repeated pageant. It was quite extraordinarily beautiful, and one longed to be able to paint it, although you knew that a painting could never convey the magical elegant patterns etched in the sky. |
| 2674 |
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. |
| 2675 |
He treated the fact that there were seven human beings clustered around him filming and recording his every move or sound with complete sang-froid, ignoring us and getting on with his busy schedule as if his life depended on it which, of course, it did. The only point at which he got a trifle agitated was when we produced the kites, which sent his brethren down the valley into whistling hysterics. Somewhere in his researches, Alastair had come across an experiment Konrad Lorenz had conducted on some chickens. He had constructed a large cardboard silhouette of a flying goose. When he passed this across the sky above the chickens, they took no notice. However, if the silhouette was reversed, that is to say it was flying backwards, the chickens reacted strongly. The silhouette became that of a hawk, and the long neck and head of the goose became the hawk's long tail, and the tail of the goose was the small round head of the predator. Nothing loth, Alastair was determined to have us fly some kites to see what effect it would have on the pikas, and so he had paid a visit to a shop in Toronto's Chinatown and had procured two most elegant kites depicting hawks. Once we got these really beautiful kites airborne, the effect they had on the wildlife of the valley was considerable. Marmots shouted obscenities at them, pikas in the lower valley appeared to suffer a collective nervous breakdown, and four ptarmigans who had been walking along sedately minding their own business ran among the rocks and disappeared by the simple expedient of crouching down. |
| 2676 |
The forest today covers nearly 38,000 hectares, or about 80,000 acres. The larger part is open forest but there are also ancient and ornamental woodlands as well as grassland, heath and scrub. Originally of course the forest was created as a hunting preserve for royalty, though the local villagers had the right (and still have today) to graze their pigs, cattle, horses and other domestic animals over the forest except for certain enclosures that are created to protect young trees from the destructive attentions of deer and domestic beasts. However, now the forest is no longer a royal hunting preserve but, owing to its great importance and the many rare species that inhabit it, it has the status of a national nature reserve. Our guide to this lovely piece of forest, one of the finest in Europe, was Simon Davy, a tall, handsome young man, who was a great enthusiast and knew the forest intimately. Naturally, Jonathan wanted to be as close to the forest as possible, for nothing is more aggravating or timewasting than having to drive for an hour every morning to get to your location. In this we were lucky, for Jonathan had discovered the Bramble Hill Hotel, lying in the middle of the forest itself. Whether the kindly but unfortunate owner, Captain Prowse, thought himself lucky to have us as guests is a moot point. We must have been a great trial to him, and by the time we left he must have considered that all film crews, if not actually certifiable, at least were considerably more eccentric than a set of village idiots. |
| 2677 |
Certainly, our arrival and the incident of the bedspread got us off to a good start. For some reason, Jonathan was for once considering the talent, and before we arrived he thought he would go up to our room and make sure that it was suitable for the stars. Why he would think that, in such an impeccably run hotel, anything would be amiss, I have no idea. Anyway, he found the double bed covered with a bedspread which, though maybe a trifle gaudy, was in no way offensive, but Jonathan became suddenly convinced that upon sighting this homely article Lee and I would be overcome with artistic rage of the sort that would have been expected from the late Lord Clarke if he had found some graffiti on the wall of Chartres Cathedral. Plucking the offending cover from the bed, he bundled it into the wardrobe. Thus having convinced himself that our delicate aesthetic sensibilities would not be offended, he set off to meet us. While he was so occupied, Captain Prowse whose all-seeing eye was everywhere had checked our rooms himself and finding the bed was, so to speak, naked searched for and found the bedspread and returned it to its rightful place. When we got to the hotel Jonathan, still suffering from that concern for the talent that so rarely afflicts a director, carried some of our bags up to our room ahead of us and saw the offending coverlet glaring at him from the bed. 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. |
| 2678 |
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. |
| 2679 |
If he wanted sun, there was too much cloud; if he wanted cloud, there was too much sun; if he wanted rain, it remained blissfully clear, and vice versa. To us, the poor forest was doing its best in the only way it knew how. To Jonathan it was behaving with the malicious contrariness of a flibbertigibbet woman in a gown of multicoloured leaves. It was, in fact, the question of leaves that made him almost apoplectic. Since we were purporting to shoot the forest in autumn, Jonathan was not satisfied that there were vast quantities of dead leaves on the ground and an equal quantity up in the trees awaiting their turn to fall. He wanted pictures of leaves actually falling. Here, again, the forest exhibited its maddening, capricious, feminine nature. She provided him with huge piles of fallen leaves and towering tree-top pinnacles of shimmering green-gold, russet and chestnut-coloured leaves, none of which she would allow to fall not to camera, at any rate. Any time the camera was safely packed away they fell in never-ending battalions, but the moment the camera was set up the leaves remained steadfastly glued to their branches. We began to fear for Jonathan's sanity and then the day came when we feared we might have to certify him. 'I've got it,' he barked at Paula. 'I've got it.' 'What, honey?' said Paula, noting the mad glint in his eye. 'Plastic bags,' said Jonathan triumphantly. 'You must go into town and get me several enormous, big, huge plastic bags.' 'Sure, honey,' said Paula soothingly. |
| 2680 |
'Anything you like but what for?' 'Leaves,' said Jonathan. We all looked at him. He wasn't actually frothing at the mouth, so we decided to humour him. 'What have plastic bags to do with leaves?' I asked, not for a moment expecting a rational answer. I did not get one. 'We collect the leaves in the bags and take them back to the hotel,' said Jonathan. 'What do we do with them when we've got them back at the hotel?' asked Lee, fascinated. 'Dry them.' 'Dry them?' 'Yes, dry them, and then we get a ladder and climb a tree and throw them down,' said Jonathan. 'In that way I can get pictures of falling autumn leaves.' This Napoleonic plan naturally brought us once again into direct conflict with the long-suffering Captain Prowse. Paula was dispatched to the nearest village and returned with four huge, funereal black plastic bags. Urged on by Jonathan, now delirious with excitement, we stuffed these with sodden leaves and returned to the Bramble Hill Hotel carrying with us enough potential humus to succour the world's major botanical gardens. 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. |
| 2681 |
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. 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. |
| 2682 |
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. The common oak-apple, a very easy-to-find gall, has been known to give a home to 75 different species of insect as well as the rightful owner, the gall-wasp grub. It was that phrase, 'the common oak-apple, a very easy-to-find gall', that did it. Jonathan was determined to obtain some of the oak-apples and film Lee and myself collecting them and then take them to London Scientific Films (who were doing all our close-up photography for us) and get the galls to hatch out while microphotography captured every one of the seventy-five different species in gigantic close-up. Now, normally, in any good forest, you as it were can't see the wood for the galls, but on this occasion things were different. We set off early one morning on a gall hunt, Jonathan bearing two of his gigantic black plastic bags which only recently had contained leaves. |
| 2683 |
'Are you sure two will be enough?' I asked. 'You said they were common and easy to find,' he said. 'I want lots of them.' 'Well, that bag will hold two thousand at a rough guess, so the two of them will cope with maybe four or four and a half thousand.' 'I don't care,' said Jonathan stubbornly. 'I'm not taking any chances; I want lots.' So we set off into the forest, like a lot of pigs in search of truffles. First, we started on the baby oaks at the edge of the forest proper. These small trees were always favourites with gall-makers and from our point of view, being small trees, were easier to examine. We must have examined several hundred. Not only were there no oak-apples, there were no galls at all. Jonathan was getting restive, as he always did when nature refused to obey him. 'Hey, guys,' bellowed Paula from about a quarter of a mile away, making one's eardrums vibrate, even at that distance. 'Say again what they're like.' 'Like small brown rotting apples,' I yelled back. We searched on. We left the smaller trees, each glossy and gall-less, and moved into the forest towards the taller trees. We had started at eight and by eleven I began to believe that the forest was bewitched; Jonathan, I decided, had cast a spell on it. In all my experience, I had never come across anything like it. I had never been in an oak forest without finding oak-apples. It was like going to the Sahara and finding no sand. Then at about eleven-thirty Lee gave wild cries of delight. 'I've found one. |
| 2684 |
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. |
| 2685 |
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. Badgers, who probably do more good per annum to the environment than these gothic human horrors, were dug out and then beset with terriers. This persecution of the badger represents the two ends of our rainbow of society. The bureaucratic manipulation at one end and the wonderful, much lauded working man at the other, who, because he likes (like a Roman crowd) a little bit of blood-letting, drags society with him, sweating and grunting in his pursuit of pain and death. We had already obtained marvellous footage of badgers underground, filmed for us by Eric Ashby who has allowed badgers to build a sett under his cottage. With the aid of two-way glass he can observe and film his badgers underground. To complete this badger sequence, what Jonathan now wanted was some shots of Lee and myself outside a badger sett and the animal emerging in front of us. |
| 2686 |
Then, putting his arms protectively round the old ladies, he ushered them away from contamination. 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. |
| 2687 |
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. |
| 2688 |
By working from hedges of a known age, it became apparent that the rate that woody plants become established is about one species per hundred years. So Lee and I paced out a length of our hedgerow and then collected samples of all the different woody plants. We found over ten different kinds, which meant that, when this hedgerow had been laid down, the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey had still to be built. It is amazing, the reverence which these two buildings are accorded and yet the hedgerows of England which for over a thousand years have been doing so much good for man and nature are being bulldozed out of existence with only the faintest outcry against this unbiological brutality. If anyone suggested clearing away Westminster Abbey to make way for an office block or wiping out the Tower of London to make way for a new Hilton, the outcry would be fantastic, yet in the period of a thousand years that these two buildings have been in existence they have been probably of considerably less use to mankind than the humble hedgerows. Quite apart from the many plants that nestle at its feet or climb up into its spiky canopy, the hedgerow provides a home for a great variety of reptiles, birds and mammals, some of which we managed to film. One of the most attractive from my point of view was the harvest mouse, the most diminutive mammal in the British Isles and one, moreover, who has the distinction of having been discovered by no less an amateur naturalist than the great Gilbert White himself. |
| 2689 |
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. |
| 2690 |
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. |
| 2691 |
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. 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. |
| 2692 |
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. |
| 2693 |
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. 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. |
| 2694 |
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. |
| 2695 |
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. |
| 2696 |
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. Inevitably, we replied we did not know. The children found this rather funny, one little boy laughing so heartily that he fell down and rolled about on the ground. We slid over an exquisite miniature mansion in red brick, with a charming pink pantile roof. |
| 2697 |
The trees, prickly and dangerous, loomed nearer and nearer. Jeff did the only thing he could do he pulled the cord that opened the flap and released the hot air from the balloon. Our big, bright, beautiful balloon shrivelled and died, but in its death throes the basket was thrown on its side precipitating us all in a heap on top of poor Chris. In its dying flurry the balloon dragged the basket a further fifty or so yards with all of us in a splendid tangle, trying our best not to sustain a broken leg or arm. At length, we came to rest and, bruised and breathless, crept out of the basket. The aluminium pole with the remote-control camera on it had been bent and twisted like a corkscrew, but fortunately the camera was not broken. What was more important, neither was any of us. Jonathan, Paula and the crew, who had been following our erratic flight in two cars, came pelting through the trees, looking extremely worried. 'Are you all right?' shouted Jonathan, obviously with visions of the talent with a couple of broken legs. 'Yes, we're OK,' I shouted back. 'It was as easy as falling off a log.' Fortunately, they had brought with them the obligatory bottle of champagne which tradition demands that you consume to celebrate your first balloon flight. We drank it with relish, standing in the ruined barley field by the multicoloured corpse of our airy steed. In spite of our rather frightening crash landing, we greatly looked forward to our flight on the following day, when we would be escorted by the helicopter. |
| 2698 |
One of these extraordinary sections of the planet is the Sonoran Desert in the south-west of America, where you have thousands and thousands of square miles teeming with wildlife, studded with extraordinary forms of cactus and, in season, a myriad of gorgeous wild flowers. So, to show that a desert need not be as nasty as most people think, this is where we went to film. Our crew consisted of Rodney Charters, affectionately known as Rodders: a stocky man who did everything at the run, even when burdened with heavy camera gear. He was always smiling, no matter what the difficulties, his eyes screwed up in a way that gave him an almost oriental appearance. His sidekick, Malcolm Cross, was a handsome young man with a luxuriant moustache and an air of being the sort of clean-living, clean-limbed young Englishman who made the Empire what it was. (It was Malcolm who wrote to me at the end of the shoot to say how much he had enjoyed it. He ended his letter by saying 'I came back in such good spirits that my wife is now pregnant.') Ian Hendry was our sound-man, with a wispy beard and soulful eyes that made him look like a middle-aged pixie. But in spite of his forlorn banished-from-fairyland look he took infinite pains with his job. 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. |
| 2699 |
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. |
| 2700 |
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. 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. |
| 2701 |
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. |
| 2702 |
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. 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. |
| 2703 |
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. |
| 2704 |
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. 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. |
| 2705 |
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. So, thoroughly overexcited at the prospect of shooting scenes that would rival, if not indeed surpass, anything that Hollywood had depicted in Beau Geste, we got up very early and drove off into a dawn that was a blur of golden light with tiny clouds like feathers picked out in scarlet and purple. Alastair had been to see the dunes fifty miles away in California on a weekday, when their silent majesty had so impressed him. This was a Sunday, and after driving for several hours we arrived at the dunes to find a very different set-up from the one Alastair had depicted. |
| 2706 |
True, there were huge, beautifully sculpted dunes; true, they stretched for miles in every direction; true, they looked like a Hollywood desert, so that you expected to see Ramon Navarro gallop over the horizon at any minute. However, instead of the Hollywood heart-throb, what you did have was what appeared to be three-quarters of the Californian population and smelly and extremely noisy dune-buggies ripping the hell out of the dunes. There were hundreds of them, skidding, bouncing, roaring, screaming, making any idea of doing a sound-take impossible. Indeed, one could hardly hear oneself talk, quite apart from the added distraction of having half a dozen dune-buggies waltz across the sand past you, inhabited by a vast selection of scantily clad and very nubile-looking young ladies. In desperation, we drove on and on, hoping to find a section of the dunes uninhabited, but the whole area buzzed with dune-buggies like a disturbed wasps' nest. Eventually, in despair, Alastair suggested that we turn round and head back to the beginning of the dunes (which seemed somewhat less inhabited) and content ourselves with some silent filming. Rodney, who was driving, and who had a fine disregard for the laws of the land, did a U-turn in the centre of the highway and headed back the way we had come. Within seconds (or so it seemed) a Big Brother helicopter (bristling with police) had relayed the enormity of our crime to a police car below, and with blaring sirens we were overtaken by it and flagged down. |
| 2707 |
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. |
| 2708 |
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. 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. |
| 2709 |
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. 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. |
| 2710 |
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. 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. |
| 2711 |
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. |
| 2712 |
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. '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. |
| 2713 |
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. |
| 2714 |
'Now,' whispered Alastair, 'what I want you to do is to get out of the car, get as close to him as you can, then turn round, face camera and do your opening speech.' 'Thanks,' I said. 'You, meanwhile, will be skulking in the safety of the car.' 'I shall be with you in spirit,' said Alastair. So, hoping all the stories I had read about the ease with which you can dodge rhinos because of their bad eyesight were true, I got out of the car. When I had vacated the safety of the car and was walking towards it, the animal, for some reason or another, appeared to grow to twice normal size. Slowly, holding my breath and attempting not to tread on any dry twigs, I crept up towards him. He lowered his gigantic head, snorted and flapped his ears to and fro with a noise like someone cracking a whip, which was not the most reassuring noise that I had ever heard. His horn appeared to be twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower and much more pointed. I got to within about twenty feet of him, which I reckoned was as close as I wanted to get. Then, taking a deep breath, I turned my back on him stalwartly and, beaming at the camera and trying not to show how scared I was, I began my opening to the programme. I was halfway through it when I heard a rustling, thumping sound behind me, which took several years off my life. Any minute, I expected to be lifted off the ground on the tip of that scimitar-like horn. I took a hasty glance over my shoulder, trying to look casual, and found to my infinite relief that the rhino had swung round and was moving away from me, snorting irritably to himself. |
| 2715 |
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. |
| 2716 |
It was then that we discovered that, although she had switched on the little camera in the bows, during her vigorous efforts to avoid being overturned by a rock she must have knocked the button again with the paddle, thus switching the camera off. There was nothing for it but to do the whole thing all over again. So the canoe was carried a quarter of a mile upstream and my wife (by now, of course, considering herself an old sea-dog) incarcerated in it, and once more she shot the rapids, the canoe sliding and leaping like a spawning salmon; and this time, fortunately, the camera worked. It is strange to think that all the great rivers of the world, the Amazon, the Nile, the Mississippi, share the same humble beginnings a few teacupfuls of water bubbling out of the ground then as the water hurries down to the sea it gathers momentum and force. It changes from a tiny skein of water into a broad, majestic river. Rivers, whether large or small, are the veins and arteries of the land, and along their glittering lengths they give home and food to a vast band of creatures that live in, on or alongside them. One can understand a host of creatures living in the placid world of a pond but it is more difficult to reconcile yourself to the fact that many creatures have adapted themselves to the more turbulent areas of a river. We had already got film of some of the more extraordinary of these, filmed naturally under controlled conditions, to enable us to get big close-ups of the way they manage to survive in this boiling turmoil of water. |
| 2717 |
Take the common caddis-fly larvae, for example. In any placid pond, you may find those who have spun themselves a silken tube to five in and then camouflaged the outside with sand or tiny bits of vegetable debris. (When I was young, I used somewhat unfairly to remove a larva from its home and then, while it was spinning another, provide it with different-coloured materials, such as brick dust and powdered slate, and thus get multicoloured caddis larvae.) In the still waters of a pond a camouflage of plant debris will suffice, but in a fast-flowing stream or river the larva needs something more substantial to help anchor it and prevent it from being swept away by the current, so it uses tiny pebbles which to the larva are as big as boulders. When you are examining the pebbly bottom of a stream you are sometimes taken aback when what appears to be a small pile of pebbles walks away. Another species of caddis does not build itself a silken caravan but has another method of coping with the current and turning it to its own advantage. It chooses a cave between the pebbles as its home and then over the mouth of this cave it spins a net and sticks stones to the edge of this trap to prevent it from being swept away. Then, like a Victorian spinster lurking behind a lace curtain, it waits patiently for the bountiful river to fill its net with food. Another creature that, though so small and fragile, copes wonderfully with its violent environment (which must be for these little creatures the equivalent of us living under the torrent of Niagara) is the black-fly larva. |
| 2718 |
This curious creature looks like a tiny, elongated caterpillar, with a huge pair of Edwardian walrus moustaches at its head. This creature makes a sort of pin-cushion of mucous on the rocks and then attaches itself to this with a series of sharp hooks at the end of its body. Then it stands up on this cushion and sifts particles of food from the river as it sweeps past. It is a curious sight to see a creature that is apparently feeding itself with its own moustache. Another astonishing beast of this sort of environment is the side-swimming shrimp. It looks not unlike one of the so-called sand-fleas found so commonly on beaches, but one that has been run over by a steamroller and flattened, so it is forced to swim on its side, but in fact this slim, flattened body gives the least resistance to the current and its shape enables it to dart from one slender crevice to another in the stream-bed, wedging itself in firmly so that it avoids being twitched downstream by the thrust of the water. At length, in spite of the weather, Jonathan was reasonably satisfied. As well as all the necessary linking shots of Lee and myself, he now had film of beautifully marked polecats and those excellent swimmers, the water voles, the elegant mink and a family of baby coots who, in their yellow down jerseys had scarlet faces which made them look as though they were suffering from chronic high blood-pressure. Curiously, they resemble so many of the punks that you see about, but they are infinitely more appealing. |
| 2719 |
We also had a lovely sequence of swans, those avian giraffes of the river, who sail majestically along, delving deep to reach the weed and then tossing it elegantly over their shoulders to be feasted on by the flotilla of fluffy grey young swimming expectantly behind them. So we left the river and went back to the pond which, though still muddy, was not quite as disgusting as it had been. Here we had several sequences to do, one involving a boat and a piece of film showing me walking on the water. Ponds are like little worlds of their own, and an enormous variety of creatures depend on them. Unfortunately, all over the country the number of ponds is dwindling as they are drained and filled, being considered by the nature-loving British farmer as being useless bits of water that get in the way of crops or grazing. 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. |
| 2720 |
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. |
| 2721 |
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. Both these siphons look like little round mouths and are capable of being shut tight by the shell should it become alarmed. The bitterlings seem to realize this and so, having decided which mussel is to become their nanny, they gather round it and repeatedly bump it with their heads. This of course panics the poor bivalve and both siphons are firmly shut against this potential danger. However, the bitterlings continue their battering-ram activities and eventually the mussel decides that this constant knocking on its shell must be harmless so it relaxes and the siphons open and start to act normally. This is what the fish have been waiting for. The female swims over the mussel, stabs her long ovipositor into the exhalant siphon and lays her eggs, which are like small white ping-pong balls. |
| 2722 |
An early naturalist had described how the spider, when the air in its home grows stale, removes it and replaces it with fresh; but, as this had only been observed once, people thought that maybe the naturalist was mistaken, but we actually filmed this curious piece of behaviour. The spider comes to the top of the bell, tears a small rent in the silk, allowing a bubble of air to escape which it catches with its legs and takes to the surface to release; and on its return journey it brings with it a fresh bubble of air to freshen the bell, exactly like a hostess emptying ashtrays and opening windows after a cocktail party. 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. |
| 2723 |
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. It was quite an exhausting and laborious business and you discovered whole sets of muscles in your legs that you were unaware ever existed. The dangerous part of the business was that if you lost your balance and fell over it was extremely hard to extract your legs from the canvas covering the top of the shoes and so you stood a pretty good chance of drowning before anyone came to your rescue. The rowing boat Jonathan had found was a magnificent craft some ten feet long, broad in the beam, so that she resembled a fat beetle in shape with the paint peeling off her in great strips like skin off an unwary sunbather. So, while I stamped about the surface of the pond in my water-shoes, Jonathan rowed the boat with the camera crew in it after me. When I had done all the walking-on-the-water shots to his satisfaction our noble sound-recordist, Brian who had been watching my performance enviously was determined to try his hand at it. We launched him successfully, and in great style he completed a circuit of the pond. |
| 2724 |
So we left the turgid pond and the damp, cold English countryside and sped across the Atlantic to what Americans for some reason best known to themselves call the Big Apple New York City. Here, with Paula watching over us, Alastair directing and Rodders doing the camera work, we were going to try to show that to a dedicated amateur naturalist even a gigantic modern city could provide grist to his mill. Alastair greeted us as only Alastair can broad grin, glittering eyes, head on one side because that crafty hangman has placed the knot snugly under the left ear. 'Worms,' he said by way of greeting, 'worms, beating the ground to feel like rain ... cemetery ... lots of life in a cemetery.' I tried to think of all the cemeteries I had been in austere white ones like hospital wards, lichen-encrusted ones where you had to fight your way with a machete to decipher the carunculated faces of the gravestones with their time-blurred messages. I have never actually flipped back the lid of each grave to display life. The whole idea of finding life in a cemetery was a novel one and worthy of Alastair's at times macabre sense of humour, so we went to Calvary cemetery. As a cemetery, it was quite extraordinary: it contained not only ordinary gravestones such as are used for plebeian folk, but monstrous mini-mausoleums looking like crosses and clones of the Acropolis and St Paul's Cathedral, generally, as far as I could judge, sheltering the mortal remains of somebody called Luigi Vermicelli or Guido Parmesan. |
| 2725 |
I think probably the most horrifying thing about this was that it lay on a gentle slope of land, each monument to the dead as white and pure as any ski slope or emergent mushroom you have ever seen, and looking down through the strange vista of monuments to the dead (which made you feel that God must have been a confectioner of some skill) your eyes were rewarded with the New York City skyline mirroring and enlarging the graveyard at your feet. You could be pardoned for asking where the skyscrapers ended and the graves began. In fact, you began to wonder if the skyscrapers were not enormous mausoleums and was it really worth while to use up so much useful land by bringing out your dead. However, I was proved wrong, for we discovered a great deal of life in the cemetery. Not only worms tunnelled assiduously through the soil, turning and aerating it, but pheasants and Canada geese raised broods among the gravestones, racoons and foxes brought up their litters in the shelter of the mausoleums designed for acres of Italian dead. How lovely, I thought, that even here in New York City you could die secure in the comforting knowledge that a racoon, warm and friendly, was going to bring up a family on your chest. It was, I suppose, singularly appropriate that we went from this monstrous cluster of cadavers to the New York City dump. It is a salutary experience to see what a vast quantity of waste is produced by a conglomeration of human animals all living in one spot and being as wasteful as only the human animal can be. |
| 2726 |
This monstrous, simmering, multicoloured pile of garbage lay there, being added to hourly. I have been disgusted by human wastefulness frequently, for I have watched in Africa and South America people use a fragment of a tin can, a tiny length of string and a piece of paper the size of your thumbnail as a means of survival, and yet in these same countries, such as Argentina, I have looked out of my hotel window and seen the refuse-cart passing below, filled with loaves of bread scarcely touched, steaks as thick as a volume of Encyclopaedia Britannica with only just the centre section cut out, piles of beans and vegetables in these trundling carts that could have kept an army of Indian villages functioning for months. 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. |
| 2727 |
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. |
| 2728 |
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. There were several areas where puddles had formed and these were used by all the local pigeons and sparrows as a thirst-quenching bar-cum-swimming-pool. So our vacant lot had spiders, snails, millipedes, birds and dogs, and doubtless at night it had mice, rats and cats. It was, however, deficient in one respect it had no tent caterpillars. This was our undoing. Tent caterpillars are one of the major pests in America, but in spite of being such a nuisance are really quite fascinating (in the same way as human beings are). The female moth, after mating, lays an egg mass and the caterpillars form within the egg, but lie in a quiescent state until the following spring. They can endure very low temperatures by replacing some of their body fluids with a substance called glycerol, which is the tent caterpillars' equivalent of anti-freeze. |
| 2729 |
When spring arrives, the tent caterpillars hatch and as a family (for that is what they are) they set about spinning a tent for themselves to live in. These tents are all-important to the caterpillars, for they act in fact like miniature greenhouses. They are oriented in such a way that they obtain maximum sunshine both in the morning and in the afternoon. Scientists have recorded that when the outside temperature was only 52degrees the temperature in a cluster of caterpillars residing in their silken dome was 102degrees Fahrenheit. The caterpillars, as they venture from their tent to browse on the leaves of the host trees, leave a trail of silk from the spinaret under their head. As they move about the branches, they thus create little silken highways which are added to and refurbished by their brothers and sisters. However, this is only part of the story. We now come to an extraordinary piece of research, the unravelling of a sort of natural-history detective story. Scientists have stated they discovered that each caterpillar on its silken highway laid a scented trail which told its brethren which were the good routes that led to food, so in fact these silken highways were also scent guides to the best supermarket of leaves, as it were; but what intrigued the scientists was what substance it was that the caterpillars secreted in the tail end of their abdomens that acted as the guiding scent, much as a beautiful woman might leave a trail of Chanel No. 5 as she crosses a room, caterpillars' scent denoting a supply of provender, the woman's scent a possible assignation. |
| 2730 |
They would then be sternly banished back to Helen's part of the city. So we set to work. It was here not for the first time that we became grateful for Paula's ability to roar, for some of the shots had to be done from the roof of a building across the busy road and so Paula's lungs and vocal cords were well exercised in shouting instructions to us and it says much for the force of her voice and clear diction that she was able to instruct us impeccably from five flights up and across an endless stream of juddering, roaring, honking traffic below her. So we finished most of the major scenes and then came to the tent caterpillars. With reverence they were removed from the van, each branch of the cherry on which they rested carefully enshrined in muslin. Carefully, we carried them over to where our cherry tree, twisted and deformed like a child in a slum was still making a brave show of defying New York and its attempts to exterminate it. Carefully, the branches with caterpillars on them, their tent and their silken autostradas were taped to the branches of our cherry tree so that the whole thing looked, if anything, slightly more natural than nature. It was at this point that we noticed a lady had joined us and was watching our activities with slightly vacant, open-mouthed interest. 'What are youse all doing?' she asked, shifting her bulk uneasily in her tight pants and denim jacket. Alastair turned and beamed at her benignly, head on one side. Fortunately before he could bemuse still further an already puzzled mind, Paula stepped in. |
| 2731 |
'We are making a film about wildlife in a city,' she said. 'We want to show how even in the depths of a city like New York nature can still be found.' 'Is that what them bugs is for?' asked the lady. 'Yes,' said Paula kindly. 'They are called tent caterpillars.' 'They don't live here, though,' said the lady. 'You brung 'em.' 'Well, yes. You see, there weren't any here, so we had to bring them for the film,' said Paula, slightly flustered by the Neanderthal stare of the lady, who looked as though she had just returned from sweeping up singlehanded the debris of the May Day celebrations in Red Square. '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. |
| 2732 |
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. |
| 2733 |
'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. 'You brought tent caterpillars to our lot?' 'Well, there weren't any here,' said Paula. 'Yes, and we don't want them here,' said Shrike Lady. 'But we only brought them for the sake of the film,' said Paula. 'We'll take them away again.' 'We don't want our vacant lot covered with tent caterpillars,' said Shrike Lady, her voice taking on a rasping quality. 'Disgusting,' said Cardboard Man. 'I have been a journalist for twenty-five years, and I have never heard of such a thing as faking nature.' 'If you've been a journalist for twenty-five years, you must have come into contact with a considerable quantity of untruths,' I said with some asperity. 'Surely you must realize that practically every nature film that you have ever seen has been faked in one way or another.' 'He said Walt Disney was a fake,' said Neanderthal Lady, apparently as heinous a crime as lighting a fire with a piece of the true Cross. 'Disgusting,' said Cardboard Man. |
| 2734 |
'First, the manager a very nice man called Jean-Pierre is giving us special rates; second, the sewage problem has now been solved; and, third and this is really something Jean-Pierre is a mad-keen herpetologist.' I took a deep, steadying draught of B & S before replying. 'Now I know you have gone round the twist,' I said with conviction. 'I know Corfu is eccentric, but I refuse to believe that even there you can find a herpetologist in charge of one of the best hotels in the island.' 'But it's true,' Ann protested. 'He has got a flat on the top floor of the hotel and he keeps snakes and tortoises and all sorts of lizards up there and moreover he has offered to go out and catch any reptiles we want to film.' I gave up. The island of Corfu was in the past as packed tight with eccentricities and surprises as a magician's trunk and I could see it had not lost its power to surprise. The island lies like a strange, misshapen dagger in the blue Ionian Sea, midway along the Greek and Albanian coastlines. In the past, it has fallen into the hands of a dozen different nations, from all of which it has absorbed what it found good and rejected the rest, thus keeping its individuality. Unlike so many parts of Greece, it is green and lush, for when it was part of the Venetian empire they used it as their oil store, planting thousands of olive trees, so that now the bulk of the island is shaded by these carunculated giants with their wigs of silvery-green leaves. Between them run the admonishing fingers of black-green cypress, many planted in groves as dowries. |
| 2735 |
The collection of this vast array of living props slightly mollified our director, though he was still twitchy and we awaited Ann's return anxiously. Presently, she came back triumphantly bearing with her a good-looking little boy of about ten. As the car with this male talent drew to a halt, out of the cafE door stepped the little girl wreathed in smiles and wearing her new dress. 'Gee, honey, look,' said Paula excitedly. 'Now you have two children.' 'Do you think the budget will run to two?' I asked Jonathan seriously. He just glowered at me. So we spent the rest of the day filming the caique sequences, which were rather complex, for as well as the shots on board (which were difficult but not too bad) Jonathan wanted to go to a high vantage-point on the mountainside and film a panoramic view of the harbour and Pam and Disney's house with the caique chugging majestically into the harbour. As we had no walkie-talkies, we had to accomplish these shots by Jonathan reaching his vantage-point on the mountain and I watching him carefully through my binoculars while the kayiki went round and round in tight circles awaiting instructions. When Jonathan waved his arms we straightened out and went into harbour. Needless to say, because this was a most complex shot we had to do it several times. Eventually, Jonathan was as satisfied as a director ever is and we got packed up and set off on the long, hot drive back to town, our minds full of thoughts of icy drinks, clean clothes and delicious food. |
| 2736 |
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. |
| 2737 |
Now all smelt of decay and there were no lamps to fight and no flowers. I remember once returning from some expedition of mine after dark and I saw that the doors of the little church had been accidentally left open. Putting down my butterfly-net and collecting-bag, I went to close them and came upon an astonishing sight. It was the season of the fireflies, and when I got to the doors and looked into the little church there was the picture of the Virgin illuminated seeming almost to float in the daffodil-yellow light of the tiny oil-lamps, but as well there were dozens and dozens of fireflies that had flown in through the open doors and now drifted like greeny-white flashing stars around the interior of the church and others crawled over the seats and walls. A few had landed on the Virgin's portrait and decorated it like some pulsating, moving jewels. Enraptured, I watched this beautiful and eerie sight for a long time and then, fearing to lock the fireflies in the church in case they died, I spent an exhausting half-hour catching them with my butterfly-net and releasing them, and as I did so I felt that the portrait of the Virgin must have been sorry to lose such an exquisite decoration to her church. When we returned from the church we found Jonathan wearing a smugly guilty expression, holding a piece of glass in his hands. 'Look,' he said, holding it up. 'I was just looking through one of the back windows when this piece of glass fell out. If I put my hand in, we can open the window and we can get into the villa.' I sighed. |
| 2738 |
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. Either they remain as unmoving as museum specimens, or else they gallop about their respective food plants at such speed that it is difficult to follow them with the camera. After we had finished with the caterpillars we had to try to film all the other insects that Lee, Ann and I had been assiduously collecting over the last few days tiger beetles, scarabs, cicadas and the like. These were all carefully incarcerated in a series of pots and matchboxes. When I was a boy in Corfu, I did not have access to all the refined collecting apparatus which is accessible to the young naturalist today, so necessity had to be the mother of invention in no small measure. In our villa, not a pot or jam-jar was thrown away; cardboard boxes were gold dust, as were tins, but best of all were matchboxes, for they were fight and easy to carry and were small enough to prevent your capture from rushing about and hurting itself. I must have had a collection of several hundred at one time which I would take out with me on my expeditions and return with them full a sort of matchbox menagerie. Of course, matchboxes, though extremely useful to me, sometimes led to trouble. |
| 2739 |
To grown-ups who walked there among the trunks with their gaping holes and the canopy of silvery-green leaves, they were merely scenically beautiful and they were grateful for the shade they provided, but to me they were a treasure trove of creatures. The myriad holes in each tree provided sanctuary to a dozen different creatures from Scops owls to squirrel dormice, from wrens to black rats. 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. |
| 2740 |
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. |
| 2741 |
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. |
| 2742 |
A couple of days later Pinchot phoned. He said he wanted to go ahead with the screenplay. We should come down and see him? So we got the directions and were in the Volks and heading for Marina del Rey. Strange territory. Then we were down at the harbor, driving past the boats. Most of them were sailboats and people were fiddling about on deck. They were dressed in their special sailing clothes, caps, dark shades. Somehow, most of them had apparently escaped the daily grind of living. They had never been caught up in that grind and never would be. Such were the rewards of the Chosen in the land of the free. After a fashion, those people looked silly to me. And, of course, I wasn't even in their thoughts. We turned right, down from the docks and went past streets laid out in alphabetical order, with fancy names. We found the street, turned left, found the number, pulled into the driveway. The sand came right up to us and the ocean was close enough to be seen and far enough away to be safe. The sand seemed cleaner than other sand and the water seemed bluer and the breeze seemed kinder. "Look," I said to Sarah, "we have just landed upon the outpost of death. My soul is puking." "Will you stop worrying about your soul?" Sarah responded. No need to lock the Volks. I was the only one who could start it. We were at the door. I knocked. It opened to this tall slim delicate type, you smelled artistry all over him. You could see he had been born to Create, to Create grand things, totally unhindered, never bothered by such petty things as toothache, self-doubt, lousy luck. |
| 2743 |
We seated ourselves and Jon told us, "That was Wen-ner Zergog at the bar. Last week he and his wife had a pistol fight, they emptied their guns at each other, hitting nothing..." "I hope his aim in his films is better..." "Oh, it is." The room darkened and The Laughing Beast spread across the screen. Lido Mamin was a large man, in size and ambition, but his country was poor and small. With the big countries he played his cards both Left and Right, bargaining and counter-bargaining with both factions for money, food, weapons. But, actually, he wanted to rule the world. He was a bloody bastard with a marvelous sense of humor. He realized that, basically, all life was worthless, except his. Anybody the least suspect in his country was quickly murdered and dumped into the river. There were so many bodies floating in the river that the crocodiles became bloated and could eat no more. Lido Mamin loved the camera. Pinchot had had Mamin stage a council meeting for the camera. His underlings sat before him trembling as Mamin asked questions, made statements of policy. He grinned continually, showing huge yellow teeth. When he wasn't killing somebody or ordering somebody killed, he was fucking. He had a dozen or more wives and more children than he could remember. At times, during the council meeting, he stopped smiling, his face became the Will of God, he could do anything, and might. He could sense the fear of his cohorts and he delighted in and used that fear. The council meeting ended without anybody getting murdered. |
| 2744 |
Is it a deal?" "It's a deal," I said. Then we just pulled up the chairs and started drinking. And Jon-Luc started talking. He talked and he talked, looking only at me. At first, I felt flattered, then after a while, I felt less than that. Jon-Luc kept right on talking. He was being dark and playing Genius. Maybe he was a Genius. I didn't want to get bitter about it. But I had had Genius pushed at me all through school: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Ibsen, G. B. Shaw, Chekov, all those dullards. And worse, Mark Twain, Hawthorne, the Bronte sisters, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, it all just laid on you like a slab of cement, and you wanted to get out and away, they were like heavy stupid parents insisting upon regulations and ways that would make even the dead cringe. Jon-Luc just kept right on talking. That's all I remember. Except now and then, my good Sarah saying, "Hank, you shouldn't drink so much. Slow down a little. I don't want you dead in the morning." But Jon-Luc was on a roll. I no longer understood what he was saying. I saw lips moving. He was not unpleasant, he was just there. He needed a shave. And we were in this strange Beverly Hills hotel where you walked on peacocks. A magic world. I liked it because I hadn't seen anything like it before. It was senseless and perfect and safe. The wine poured and Jon-Luc kept going. I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don't want anybody to be hurt. |
| 2745 |
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. |
| 2746 |
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. 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. |
| 2747 |
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. |
| 2748 |
One of the firemen squeezed her buttocks. She jumped into her car in just her nightie with only her purse. She drove and drove, in a daze. About noon the next day she was at 4th and Broadway. Two of the tires had gone flat as she was driving along. The tires had ripped off and she was driving on the rims, leaving deep grooves in the asphalt. A cop stopped her. She was taken in — for observation. The days went by. Her husband didn't come by or her daughter. She was alone. She was sitting with the shrink one day and the shrink asked her, "Why do you insist upon destroying yourself?" And when he asked her this it was no longer the face of the shrink looking at her but the face of Christ. That did it... "How did she know it was the face of Christ?" I asked aloud. "Who is that man?" I heard somebody ask. My bottle of wine was empty. I corkscrewed open a new one. Then another fellow told his story. The campfire just kept on burning and burning. Nobody had to add fuel to it. And no other bums came by and bothered them. When the fellow finished his story he reached into his shopping cart and pulled out a very expensive guitar. I took a hit and passed the red to Sarah. The fellow tuned his guitar, then began playing it and singing. He was right in tune, voice-trained. He sang away. The camera panned around, capturing the look on all the faces. The faces were enthralled, some of them were crying, others had gentle, beautiful smiles. Then the singer finished and there was hearty and joyful applause. |
| 2749 |
I don't need it this bad. Let's knock this shit off and go get stinko somewhere, huh?" Jon reached into his coat pocket and handed me a piece of paper. "I arranged to have this delivered by messenger to Harry Friedman. He got it. This is a copy." And, he pulled out another paper, "Here is the release agreement." I read the first paper he had handed me: Dear Harry: Here are the two alternatives I told you on the phone. As you can see they are both acceptable to me. Believe me, when I suggest a solution where I get no money it is not only to save the project but also because I love you, much more than you can imagine. O. K., now you decide. Please do so quickly because I have Edleman who is ready to take over the film and all obligations in all contracts. If Edleman who is ready to take over the film right away does not have this piece of paper (Solution #1 enclosed) signed by you by Thursday afternoon he will not be able to start production on the 19th. Ten important people will have to be hired before then. This leaves us only Tuesday and Wednesday for the takeover of the film by Edleman. If this is not done we will lose Jack Bledsoe as our lead in the film and you will lose around a million dollars. This is suicide for everybody, financially, at any rate. But I must go a step ftirther, as follows: if my movie is not freed by you by tomorrow morning at 9 a. m. like you promised me, Solution #2 is that I will start cutting parts off my body and sending them to you in envelopes every day. |
| 2750 |
But I was just the old guy in the corner, sucking on a beer. Bledsoe weaved to the window by the table. He pulled up the tattered shade. He did a little shadow boxing, a smile on his face. Then he sat down at the table, found a pencil and a piece of paper. He sat there a while, then pulled the cork from a wine bottle, had a hit, lit a cigarette. He turned on the radio and lucked into Mozart. He began writing on that piece of paper with the pencil as the scene faded... He had it. He had it the way it was, whether it meant anything or not, he had it the way it was. I walked up to Jack, shook his hand. "Did I get it?" he asked. "You got it," I said... Down at the bar, the barflies were still at it and they looked about the same. Sarah went back to her Cape Cods and I went the Vodka 7 route. We heard more stories which were very very good. But there was a sadness in the air because after the movie was shot the bar and hotel were going to be torn down to further some commercial purpose. Some of the regulars had lived in the hotel for decades. Others lived in a deserted train station nearby and action was being taken to remove them from there. So it was heavy sad drinking. Sarah said finally, "We've got to get home and feed the cats." Drinking could wait. Hollywood could wait. The cats could not wait. I agreed. We said our goodbyes to the barflies and made it to the car. I wasn't worried about driving. Something about seeing young Chinaski in that old hotel room had steadied me. Son of a bitch, I had been a hell of a young bull. |
| 2751 |
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. |
| 2752 |
"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. Anyhow, one night the phone rang. It was Jon Pinchot. |
| 2753 |
There was nothing to do but listen to those wild arguments. It made you realize that you weren't the only one who was more than discouraged with the world, you weren't the only one moving toward madness. We couldn't watch the bathtub scene because there just wasn't space enough in there, so Sarah and I waited in the front room of the apartment with its kitchen off to the side. Actually, over 30 years ago I had briefly lived in that same building on Alvarado Street with the lady I was writing the screenplay about. Strange and chilling indeed. "Everything that goes around comes around." In one way or another. And after 30 years the place looked just about the same. Only the people I'd known had all died. And the lady had died 3 decades ago and there I was sitting drinking a beer in that same building full of cameras and sound and crew. Well, I'd die too, soon enough. Pour one for me. They were cooking food in the little kitchen and the refrigerator was full of beers. I made a few trips in there. Sarah found people to talk to. She was lucky. Every time somebody spoke to me I felt like diving out a window or taking the elevator down. People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it. Jon Pinchot was still one day ahead of the shooting schedule and I was damned glad for that. It kept Firepower off our backs. The big boys didn't come around. They had their spies, of course. I could pick them out. Some of the crew had books of mine. |
| 2754 |
The new corn had been planted in the exact location where the old corn had been planted. Other things were not quite so exact. The apartment building nearby where the lady had lived, the one I moved into with her, had now been turned into a Home for the Aged. The large building next to the vacant lot, now being used as a Rehabilitation Center, back then had been a popular ballroom. It was always busy especially on Saturday nights. The entire bottom floor was a ballroom, gigantic, with large globes of light slowly turning in the ceiling as the live band played dance music until early in the a. m. while many fancy cars, some with chauffeurs, waited outside. We hated that ballroom and those people while we starved and fought with each other and the police and the landlord, as we were taken to and then bailed out of the Lincoln Heights Jail. Now that building was full of reformed drunks who read the Bible, smoked too many cigarettes and played Bingo in the room that had once been the grand ballroom. The vacant lot was all that hadn't changed. In all those decades nobody had ever built a structure of any kind there. Francine and Jack had already had a couple of rehearsals and had vanished into their trailers and we were standing around waiting for the action. I was tilting a beer when there was a tap on my shoulder. It was a nice looking fellow, neatly trimmed beard, nice eyes, nice smile. I had seen him about, but didn't know him, didn't know his position and didn't ask. Actually I guessed that his real job was being a Firepower spy. |
| 2755 |
It was too long. You can feel your life being pounded to a pulp by the useless waste of time. I mean, you just sit in your chair and hear all the voices talking about who should win and why. It's really sickening. Sometimes you think that you're in a madhouse. And in a way, you are. Each of those jerk-offs thinks he knows more than the other jerk-offs and there they were all together in one place. And there I was, sitting there with them. I liked the actual action, that time when all your calculations came out correctly at the wire and life had some sense, some rhythm and meaning. But the wait between races was a real horror: sitting with a mumbling, bumbling humanity that would never learn or get better, would only get worse with time. I often threatened my good wife Sarah that I would stay home from the track during the days and write dozens and dozens of immortal poems. So I managed to get through the afternoon out there and headed back home, winner of a little over $100. Drove back with the working crowd. What a gang they were. Pissed and vicious and broke. In a hurry to get home to fuck if possible, to look at TV, to get to sleep early in order to do the same thing next day all over again. I pulled into the driveway and Sarah was watering the garden. She was a great gardener. And she put up with my insanities. She fed me healthy food, cut my hair and toenails and generally kept me going in many ways. I parked the car and went out to the garden, gave her a hello kiss. "Did you win?" she asked. |
| 2756 |
I believe that in spite of the drinking the exchanges were very hard and brutal. Then we would back off, size up the situation and charge again, fists pumping. It finally became a matter of outgutting the other guy. Only one could win. And a fight was never over until a man was unconscious. It was a good show and it was free..." It got close to shooting time. We backed out of the alley and took positions out of the way. Just then Harry Friedman strolled in with a Hollywood babe with a wig, false eyelashes, excessive makeup. Her lips were done over to twice the size and her breasts too. Also strolling in was the great director, Manz Loeb, who had directed such films as The Rat Man and Pencilhead. Along with him was the famous actress Rosalind Bonelli. So we had to go over and be introduced. Loeb and Bonelli smiled nicely and were polite but I got the terrible feeling that they felt superior to us. But that was all right because I felt superior to them. That was just the way it worked. Then we went back to our vantage points and the big fight began. It looked brutal enough, right from the start. Except in our fights the brutality came near the end when one fighter was helpless (usually me) and the other man would not quit. Another thing about those fights. If you didn't belong to the Bartender's "Club," and you lost, you were left out there with the garbage cans and the rats. There were attendant memories. One morning I was awakened by the blaring of a horn and truck headlights shining upon me. |
| 2757 |
Yet, we all need to escape. The hours are long and must be filled somehow until our death. And there's just not enough glory and excitement to go around. Things quickly get drab and deadly. We awaken in the morning, kick our feet out from under the sheets, place them on the floor and think, ah, shit, what now? At times, I'd get sick with the need for the racetrack. I'd play the thoroughbreds during the day and then at night I'd find myself playing the quarter horses or the harness races, depending on what was available. And there in the evening I'd see some of the same people that I saw during the day. They were betting at night too. The ultimate sickness. So I went back to the racetrack and forgot all about the movie and the actors and the crew and the cutting room. The track kept my life simple, although maybe "stupid" is a better word for it. At night I usually watched a bit of TV with Sarah, then went upstairs and played with the poem. The poem was what kept the mind from cracking. The poem was what I needed. Really needed. I was back into this routine for two or three weeks when the good old phone rang. It was Jon Pinchot. "The film is finished. We are going to have a private screening at Firepower. No press. No critics. I hope you can be there." "Sure. Tell me the time and place." I wrote it down. It was a Friday night. I well knew my way to the Firepower building. Sarah was smoking and musing about something. As I drove along I began having some thoughts too. I remember something Jon Pinchot had told me. |
| 2758 |
Long before he found anybody to produce the screenplay, he went all around town each night scouting the bars, looking for just the right bar, for the right barflies. He gave himself a name: "Bobby." And he went from bar to bar, night after night. He said he almost became alcoholic. And in all those bars, he said, he never met a woman he'd care to go home with. Sometimes he took a night off and came over to our place with all those photos of the bars he'd visited and put them on the coffee table before me. I'd choose the best ones and he'd say, "Yes, I will concentrate on these..." He always had faith that the screenplay would become a movie. The screening room was not at Firepower but in a lot behind it. We drove up. There was a guard there. "Firepower screening of The Dance of Jim Beam," I told him. "Go on in... take a right..." he said. There. We were bigshots. I drove on in, took a right, parked. It was a lot full of private studios. I had no idea why Firepower didn't have their own screening room. Their building was huge. But they probably had a damned good reason why they did what they did. We got out and began looking for the screening room. There were no signs. We seemed to be the only ones about. Yet we were on time. We walked on. Then I saw a couple of slim, movie-studio types leaning against a half-open door. Everybody in the business looked nearly the same — I mean the crews, consultants, so forth, they were all between 26 and 38 years old and were slim and were always talking to each other about something interesting. |
| 2759 |
And so when you feel like ending it all, you can uncap it and take a few whiffs and go..." "I think that's damned nice of you, Jim," I said. 41 There it was. The film was rolling. I was being beaten up in the alley by the bartender. As I've explained before I had small hands which are a terrible disadvantage in a fist fight. This particular bartender had huge hands. To make matters worse, I took a punch very well which allowed me to absorb much more punishment. I had some luck on my side: I didn't have much fear. The fights with the bartender were a way to pass the time. After all, you just couldn't sit on your barstool all day and all night. And there wasn't much pain in the fight. The pain came the next morning and it wasn't so bad if you had made it back to your room. And by fighting two or three times a week I was getting better at it. Or the bartender was getting worse. But that had been over four decades before. Now I was sitting in a Hollywood screening room. No need to recall the film here. Perhaps it's better to tell about a part left out. Later in the film this lady wants to take care of me. She thinks I'm a genius and wants to shield me from the streets. In the film I don't stay in the lady's house but overnight. But in actual life I stayed about 6 weeks. The lady, Tully, lived in this large house in the Hollywood Hills. She shared it with another lady, Nadine. Both Tully and Nadine were high-powered executives. They were into the entertainment scene: music, publishing, whatever. |
| 2760 |
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. |
| 2761 |
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. This wildness had profoundly alarmed his father, who for an Irishman was of a singularly peace-loving nature. |
| 2762 |
Thus in January of that year 1685 he had come to Bridgewater, possessor of a fortune that was approximately the same as that with which he had originally set out from Dublin eleven years ago. Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly restored to him, and because he conceived that he had passed through adventures enough for a man's lifetime, he determined to settle there, and take up at last the profession of medicine from which he had, with so little profit, broken away. That is all his story, or so much of it as matters up to that night, six months later, when the battle of Sedgemoor was fought. Deeming the impending action no affair of his, as indeed it was not, and indifferent to the activity with which Bridgewater was that night agog, Mr. Blood closed his ears to the sounds of it, and went early to bed. He was peacefully asleep long before eleven o'clock, at which hour, as you know, Monmouth rode but with his rebel host along the Bristol Road, circuitously to avoid the marshland that lay directly between himself and the Royal Army. You also know that his numerical advantage - possibly counter-balanced by the greater steadiness of the regular troops on the other side - and the advantages he derived from falling by surprise upon an army that was more or less asleep, were all lost to him by blundering and bad leadership before ever he was at grips with Feversham. The armies came into collision in the neighbourhood of two o'clock in the morning. Mr. Blood slept undisturbed through the distant boom of cannon. |
| 2763 |
Not until four o'clock, when the sun was rising to dispel the last wisps of mist over that stricken field of battle, did he awaken from his tranquil slumbers. He sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and collected himself. Blows were thundering upon the door of his house, and a voice was calling incoherently. This was the noise that had aroused him. Conceiving that he had to do with some urgent obstetrical case, he reached for bedgown and slippers, to go below. On the landing he almost collided with Mrs. Barlow, new-risen and unsightly, in a state of panic. He quieted her cluckings with a word of reassurance, and went himself to open. There in slanting golden light of the new-risen sun stood a breathless, wild-eyed man and a steaming horse. Smothered in dust and grime, his clothes in disarray, the left sleeve of his doublet hanging in rags, this young man opened his lips to speak, yet for a long moment remained speechless. In that moment Mr. Blood recognized him for the young shipmaster, Jeremiah Pitt, the nephew of the maiden ladies opposite, one who had been drawn by the general enthusiasm into the vortex of that rebellion. The street was rousing, awakened by the sailor's noisy advent; doors were opening, and lattices were being unlatched for the protrusion of anxious, inquisitive heads. "Take your time, now," said Mr. Blood. "I never knew speed made by overhaste." But the wild-eyed lad paid no heed to the admonition. He plunged, headlong, into speech, gasping, breathless. |
| 2764 |
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. In the spacious, stone-flagged hall, the doctor found Lord Gildoy - a very tall and dark young gentleman, prominent of chin and nose - stretched on a cane day-bed under one of the tall mullioned windows, in the care of Mrs. Baynes and her comely daughter. His cheeks were leaden-hued, his eyes closed, and from his blue lips came with each laboured breath a faint, moaning noise. |
| 2765 |
Mr. Blood stood for a moment silently considering his patient. He deplored that a youth with such bright hopes in life as Lord Gildoy's should have risked all, perhaps existence itself, to forward the ambition of a worthless adventurer. Because he had liked and honoured this brave lad he paid his case the tribute of a sigh. Then he knelt to his task, ripped away doublet and underwear to lay bare his lordship's mangled side, and called for water and linen and what else he needed for his work. He was still intent upon it a half-hour later when the dragoons invaded the homestead. The clatter of hooves and hoarse shouts that heralded their approach disturbed him not at all. For one thing, he was not easily disturbed; for another, his task absorbed him. But his lordship, who had now recovered consciousness, showed considerable alarm, and the battle-stained Jeremy Pitt sped to cover in a clothes-press. Baynes was uneasy, and his wife and daughter trembled. Mr. Blood reassured them. "Why, what's to fear?" he said. "It's a Christian country, this, and Christian men do not make war upon the wounded, nor upon those who harbour them." He still had, you see, illusions about Christians. He held a glass of cordial, prepared under his directions, to his lordship's lips. "Give your mind peace, my lord. The worst is done." And then they came rattling and clanking into the stone-flagged hall - a round dozen jack-booted, lobster-coated troopers of the Tangiers Regiment, led by a sturdy, black-browed fellow with a deal of gold lace about the breast of his coat. |
| 2766 |
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. |
| 2767 |
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. |
| 2768 |
"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. But anything you say now is altogether irregular and improper." Enheartened by that apparent sympathy and consideration, Mr. Blood answered thereafter, as was required of him, that he would be tried by God and his country. Whereupon, having prayed to God to send him a good deliverance, the clerk called upon Andrew Baynes to hold up his hand and plead. From Baynes, who pleaded not guilty, the clerk passed on to Pitt, who boldly owned his guilt. The Lord Chief Justice stirred at that. "Come; that's better," quoth he, and his four scarlet brethren nodded. "If all were as obstinate as his two fellow-rebels, there would never be an end." After that ominous interpolation, delivered with an inhuman iciness that sent a shiver through the court, Mr. Pollexfen got to his feet. With great prolixity he stated the general case against the three men, and the particular case against Peter Blood, whose indictment was to be taken first. The only witness called for the King was Captain Hobart. He testified briskly to the manner in which he had found and taken the three prisoners, together with Lord Gildoy. |
| 2769 |
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. |
| 2770 |
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. |
| 2771 |
Until the 18th, the sentences passed by the court of the Lords Commissioners had been carried out literally and expeditiously. But on the morning of the 19th there arrived at Taunton a courier from Lord Sunderland, the Secretary of State, with a letter for Lord Jeffreys wherein he was informed that His Majesty had been graciously pleased to command that eleven hundred rebels should be furnished for transportation to some of His Majesty's southern plantations, Jamaica, Barbados, or any of the Leeward Islands. You are not to suppose that this command was dictated by any sense of mercy. Lord Churchill was no more than just when he spoke of the King's heart as being as insensible as marble. It had been realized that in these wholesale hangings there was taking place a reckless waste of valuable material. Slaves were urgently required in the plantations, and a healthy, vigorous man could be reckoned worth at least from ten to fifteen pounds. Then, there were at court many gentlemen who had some claim or other upon His Majesty's bounty. Here was a cheap and ready way to discharge these claims. From amongst the convicted rebels a certain number might be set aside to be bestowed upon those gentlemen, so that they might dispose of them to their own profit. My Lord Sunderland's letter gives precise details of the royal munificence in human flesh. A thousand prisoners were to be distributed among some eight courtiers and others, whilst a postscriptum to his lordship's letter asked for a further hundred to be held at the disposal of the Queen. |
| 2772 |
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. |
| 2773 |
Already Bishop was moving down the line. For Mr. Blood, as for a weedy youth on his left, the Colonel had no more than a glance of contempt. But the next man, a middle-aged Colossus named Wolverstone, who had lost an eye at Sedgemoor, drew his regard, and the haggling was recommenced. Peter Blood stood there in the brilliant sunshine and inhaled the fragrant air, which was unlike any air that he had ever breathed. It was laden with a strange perfume, blend of logwood flower, pimento, and aromatic cedars. He lost himself in unprofitable speculations born of that singular fragrance. He was in no mood for conversation, nor was Pitt, who stood dumbly at his side, and who was afflicted mainly at the moment by the thought that he was at last about to be separated from this man with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder throughout all these troublous months, and whom he had come to love and depend upon for guidance and sustenance. A sense of loneliness and misery pervaded him by contrast with which all that he had endured seemed as nothing. To Pitt, this separation was the poignant climax of all his sufferings. Other buyers came and stared at them, and passed on. Blood did not heed them. And then at the end of the line there was a movement. Gardner was speaking in a loud voice, making an announcement to the general public of buyers that had waited until Colonel Bishop had taken his choice of that human merchandise. As he finished, Blood, looking in his direction, noticed that the girl was speaking to Bishop, and pointing up the line with a silver-hilted riding-whip she carried. |
| 2774 |
He twisted his lip a little, stroking his chin with his hand the while. Jeremy Pitt had almost ceased to breathe. "I'll give you ten pounds for him," said the Colonel at last. Peter Blood prayed that the offer might be rejected. For no reason that he could have given you, he was taken with repugnance at the thought of becoming the property of this gross animal, and in some sort the property of that hazel-eyed young girl. But it would need more than repugnance to save him from his destiny. A slave is a slave, and has no power to shape his fate. Peter Blood was sold to Colonel Bishop - a disdainful buyer - for the ignominious sum of ten pounds. One sunny morning in January, about a month after the arrival of the Jamaica Merchant at Bridgetown, Miss Arabella Bishop rode out from her uncle's fine house on the heights to the northwest of the city. 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. |
| 2775 |
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. |
| 2776 |
Peter Blood judged her - as we are all too prone to judge - upon insufficient knowledge. 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. |
| 2777 |
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. |
| 2778 |
"The man is in pain," he said shortly, and resumed his work. "In pain, is he? I hope he is, the damned piratical dog. But will you heed me, you insubordinate knave?" The Colonel delivered himself in a roar, infuriated by what he conceived to be defiance, and defiance expressing itself in the most unruffled disregard of himself. His long bamboo cane was raised to strike. Peter Blood's blue eyes caught the flash of it, and he spoke quickly to arrest the blow. "Not insubordinate, sir, whatever I may be. I am acting upon the express orders of Governor Steed." The Colonel checked, his great face empurpling. His mouth fell open. "Governor Steed!" he echoed. Then he lowered his cane, swung round, and without another word to Blood rolled away towards the other end of the shed where the Governor was standing at the moment. Peter Blood chuckled. But his triumph was dictated less by humanitarian considerations than by the reflection that he had baulked his brutal owner. The Spaniard, realizing that in this altercation, whatever its nature, the doctor had stood his friend, ventured in a muted voice to ask him what had happened. But the doctor shook his head in silence, and pursued his work. His ears were straining to catch the words now passing between Steed and Bishop. The Colonel was blustering and storming, the great bulk of him towering above the wizened little overdressed figure of the Governor. But the little fop was not to be browbeaten. His excellency was conscious that he had behind him the force of public opinion to support him. |
| 2779 |
Some there might be, but they were not many, who held such ruthless views as Colonel Bishop. His excellency asserted his authority. It was by his orders that Blood had devoted himself to the wounded Spaniards, and his orders were to be carried out. There was no more to be said. Colonel Bishop was of another opinion. In his view there was a great deal to be said. He said it, with great circumstance, loudly, vehemently, obscenely - for he could be fluently obscene when moved to anger. "You talk like a Spaniard, Colonel," said the Governor, and thus dealt the Colonel's pride a wound that was to smart resentfully for many a week. At the moment it struck him silent, and sent him stamping out of the shed in a rage for which he could find no words. It was two days later when the ladies of Bridgetown, the wives and daughters of her planters and merchants, paid their first visit of charity to the wharf, bringing their gifts to the wounded seamen. Again Peter Blood was there, ministering to the sufferers in his care, moving among those unfortunate Spaniards whom no one heeded. All the charity, all the gifts were for the members of the crew of the Pride of Devon. And this Peter Blood accounted natural enough. But rising suddenly from the re-dressing of a wound, a task in which he had been absorbed for some moments, he saw to his surprise that one lady, detached from the general throng, was placing some plantains and a bundle of succulent sugar cane on the cloak that served one of his patients for a coverlet. |
| 2780 |
"Ah, well - there it is!" he concluded. But the lady was not satisfied at all. "First you impute to me inhumanity, and then cowardice. Faith! For a man who would not willingly be rude to a lady even in his thoughts, it's none so bad." Her boyish laugh trilled out, but the note of it jarred his ears this time. He saw her now, it seemed to him, for the first time, and saw how he had misjudged her. "Sure, now, how was I to guess that... that Colonel Bishop could have an angel for his niece?" said he recklessly, for he was reckless as men often are in sudden penitence. "You wouldn't, of course. I shouldn't think you often guess aright." Having withered him with that and her glance, she turned to her negro and the basket that he carried. From this she lifted now the fruits and delicacies with which it was laden, and piled them in such heaps upon the beds of the six Spaniards that by the time she had so served the last of them her basket was empty, and there was nothing left for her own fellow-countrymen. These, indeed, stood in no need of her bounty - as she no doubt observed - since they were being plentifully supplied by others. Having thus emptied her basket, she called her negro, and without another word or so much as another glance at Peter Blood, swept out of the place with her head high and chin thrust forward. Peter watched her departure. Then he fetched a sigh. It startled him to discover that the thought that he had incurred her anger gave him concern. It could not have been so yesterday. |
| 2781 |
It became so only since he had been vouchsafed this revelation of her true nature. "Bad cess to it now, it serves me right. It seems I know nothing at all of human nature. But how the devil was I to guess that a family that can breed a devil like Colonel Bishop should also breed a saint like this?" After that Arabella Bishop went daily to the shed on the wharf with gifts of fruit, and later of money and of wearing apparel for the Spanish prisoners. But she contrived so to time her visits that Peter Blood never again met her there. Also his own visits were growing shorter in a measure as his patients healed. That they all throve and returned to health under his care, whilst fully one third of the wounded in the care of Whacker and Bronson - the two other surgeons - died of their wounds, served to increase the reputation in which this rebel-convict stood in Bridgetown. It may have been no more than the fortune of war. But the townsfolk did not choose so to regard it. It led to a further dwindling of the practices of his free colleagues and a further increase of his own labours and his owner's profit. Whacker and Bronson laid their heads together to devise a scheme by which this intolerable state of things should be brought to an end. But that is to anticipate. One day, whether by accident or design, Peter Blood came striding down the wharf a full half-hour earlier than usual, and so met Miss Bishop just issuing from the shed. He doffed his hat and stood aside to give her passage. |
| 2782 |
It was, indeed, as if a door had been suddenly flung open to the sunlight for escape from a dark prison in which a man had thought to spend his life. He was in haste now to be alone, to straighten out his agitated mind and plan coherently what was to be done. Also he must consult another. Already he had hit upon that other. For such a voyage a navigator would be necessary, and a navigator was ready to his hand in Jeremy Pitt. The first thing was to take counsel with the young shipmaster, who must be associated with him in this business if it were to be undertaken. All that day his mind was in turmoil with this new hope, and he was sick with impatience for night and a chance to discuss the matter with his chosen partner. As a result Blood was betimes that evening in the spacious stockade that enclosed the huts of the slaves together with the big white house of the overseer, and he found an opportunity of a few words with Pitt, unobserved by the others. "To-night when all are asleep, come to my cabin. I have something to say to you." The young man stared at him, roused by Blood's pregnant tone out of the mental lethargy into which he had of late been lapsing as a result of the dehumanizing life he lived. Then he nodded understanding and assent, and they moved apart. The six months of plantation life in Barbados had made an almost tragic mark upon the young seaman. His erstwhile bright alertness was all departed. His face was growing vacuous, his eyes were dull and lack-lustre, and he moved in a cringing, furtive manner, like an over-beaten dog. |
| 2783 |
They would need to recruit others into their enterprise, a half-dozen at least, a half-score if possible, but no more than that. They must pick the best out of that score of survivors of the Monmouth men that Colonel Bishop had acquired. Men who understood the sea were desirable. But of these there were only two in that unfortunate gang, and their knowledge was none too full. They were Hagthorpe, a gentleman who had served in the Royal Navy, and Nicholas Dyke, who had been a petty officer in the late king's time, and there was another who had been a gunner, a man named Ogle. It was agreed before they parted that Pitt should begin with these three and then proceed to recruit some six or eight others. He was to move with the utmost caution, sounding his men very carefully before making anything in the nature of a disclosure, and even then avoid rendering that disclosure so full that its betrayal might frustrate the plans which as yet had to be worked out in detail. Labouring with them in the plantations, Pitt would not want for opportunities of broaching the matter to his fellow-slaves. "Caution above everything," was Blood's last recommendation to him at parting. "Who goes slowly, goes safely, as the Italians have it. And remember that if you betray yourself, you ruin all, for you are the only navigator amongst us, and without you there is no escaping." Pitt reassured him, and slunk off back to his own hut and the straw that served him for a bed. Coming next morning to the wharf, Blood found Dr. |
| 2784 |
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. |
| 2785 |
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. In Pitt's hut, which he shared with five other rebels-convict, all of whom were to join in this bid for liberty, a ladder had been constructed in secret during those nights of waiting. With this they were to surmount the stockade and gain the open. The risk of detection, so that they made little noise, was negligible. Beyond locking them all into that stockade at night, there was no great precaution taken. Where, after all, could any so foolish as to attempt escape hope to conceal himself in that island? |
| 2786 |
It was in his mind to slink back in the night, once his work at Government House were done, and from the outside of the stockade make known to Pitt and the others his presence, and so have them join him that their project might still be carried out. But in this he reckoned without the Governor, whom he found really in the thrall of a severe attack of gout, and almost as severe an attack of temper nourished by Blood's delay. The doctor was kept in constant attendance upon him until long after midnight, when at last he was able to ease the sufferer a little by a bleeding. Thereupon he would have withdrawn. But Steed would not hear of it. Blood must sleep in his own chamber to be at hand in case of need. It was as if Fate made sport of him. For that night at least the escape must be definitely abandoned. Not until the early hours of the morning did Peter Blood succeed in making a temporary escape from Government House on the ground that he required certain medicaments which he must, himself, procure from the apothecary. On that pretext, he made an excursion into the awakening town, and went straight to Nuttall, whom he found in a state of livid panic. The unfortunate debtor, who had sat up waiting through the night, conceived that all was discovered and that his own ruin would be involved. Peter Blood quieted his fears. "It will be for to-night instead," he said, with more assurance than he felt, "if I have to bleed the Governor to death. Be ready as last night." "But if there are questions meanwhile?" bleated Nuttall. |
| 2787 |
Finally he determined to go up to Colonel Bishop's plantation. Probably Blood would be there. If he were not, Nuttall would find Pitt, and leave a message with him. He was acquainted with Pitt and knew of Pitt's share in this business. His pretext for seeking Blood must still be that he needed medical assistance. And at the same time that he set out, insensitive in his anxiety to the broiling heat, to climb the heights to the north of the town, Blood was setting out from Government House at last, having so far eased the Governor's condition as to be permitted to depart. Being mounted, he would, but for an unexpected delay, have reached the stockade ahead of Nuttall, in which case several unhappy events might have been averted. The unexpected delay was occasioned by Miss Arabella Bishop. They met at the gate of the luxuriant garden of Government House, and Miss Bishop, herself mounted, stared to see Peter Blood on horseback. It happened that he was in good spirits. The fact that the Governor's condition had so far improved as to restore him his freedom of movement had sufficed to remove the depression under which he had been labouring for the past twelve hours and more. In its rebound the mercury of his mood had shot higher far than present circumstances warranted. He was disposed to be optimistic. What had failed last night would certainly not fail again to-night. What was a day, after all? The Secretary's office might be troublesome, but not really troublesome for another twenty-four hours at least; and by then they would be well away. |
| 2788 |
He was not ten yards away, but his approach over the soft, yielding marl had been unheard. Mr. Nuttall looked wildly this way and that a moment, then bolted like a rabbit for the woods, thus doing the most foolish and betraying thing that in the circumstances it was possible for him to do. Pitt groaned and stood still, leaning upon his spade. "Hi, there! Stop!" bawled Colonel Bishop after the fugitive, and added horrible threats tricked out with some rhetorical indecencies. But the fugitive held amain, and never so much as turned his head. It was his only remaining hope that Colonel Bishop might not have seen his face; for the power and influence of Colonel Bishop was quite sufficient to hang any man whom he thought would be better dead. Not until the runagate had vanished into the scrub did the planter sufficiently recover from his indignant amazement to remember the two negroes who followed at his heels like a brace of hounds. It was a bodyguard without which he never moved in his plantations since a slave had made an attack upon him and all but strangled him a couple of years ago. "After him, you black swine!" he roared at them. But as they started he checked them. "Wait! Get to heel, damn you!" It occurred to him that to catch and deal with the fellow there was not the need to go after him, and perhaps spend the day hunting him in that cursed wood. There was Pitt here ready to his hand, and Pitt should tell him the identity of his bashful friend, and also the subject of that close and secret talk he had disturbed. |
| 2789 |
Brute fury now awoke in him. Fiercely now he lashed those defenceless shoulders, accompanying each blow by blasphemy and foul abuse, until, stung beyond endurance, the lingering embers of his manhood fanned into momentary flame, Pitt sprang upon his tormentor. But as he sprang, so also sprang the watchful blacks. Muscular bronze arms coiled crushingly about the frail white body, and in a moment the unfortunate slave stood powerless, his wrists pinioned behind him in a leathern thong. Breathing hard, his face mottled, Bishop pondered him a moment. Then: "Fetch him along," he said. Down the long avenue between those golden walls of cane standing some eight feet high, the wretched Pitt was thrust by his black captors in the Colonel's wake, stared at with fearful eyes by his fellow-slaves at work there. Despair went with him. What torments might immediately await him he cared little, horrible though he knew they would be. The real source of his mental anguish lay in the conviction that the elaborately planned escape from this unutterable hell was frustrated now in the very moment of execution. They came out upon the green plateau and headed for the stockade and the overseer's white house. Pitt's eyes looked out over Carlisle Bay, of which this plateau commanded a clear view from the fort on one side to the long sheds of the wharf on the other. Along this wharf a few shallow boats were moored, and Pitt caught himself wondering which of these was the wherry in which with a little luck they might have been now at sea. |
| 2790 |
Soon his cane was reduced, to splinters by his violence. You know, perhaps, the sting of a flexible bamboo cane when it is whole. But do you realize its murderous quality when it has been split into several long lithe blades, each with an edge that is of the keenness of a knife? When, at last, from very weariness, Colonel Bishop flung away the stump and thongs to which his cane had been reduced, the wretched slave's back was bleeding pulp from neck to waist. As long as full sensibility remained, Jeremy Pitt had made no sound. But in a measure as from pain his senses were mercifully dulled, he sank forward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap, faintly moaning. Colonel Bishop set his foot upon the crossbar, and leaned over his victim, a cruel smile on his full, coarse face. "Let that teach you a proper submission," said he. "And now touching that shy friend of yours, you shall stay here without meat or drink - without meat or drink, d' ye hear me? - until you please to tell me his name and business." He took his foot from the bar. "When you've had enough of this, send me word, and we'll have the branding-irons to you." On that he swung on his heel, and strode out of the stockade, his negroes following. Pitt had heard him, as we hear things in our dreams. At the moment so spent was he by his cruel punishment, and so deep was the despair into which he had fallen, that he no longer cared whether he lived or died. Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. |
| 2791 |
The stocks stood in the open under the full glare of the tropical sun, and its blistering rays streamed down upon that mangled, bleeding back until he felt as if flames of fire were searing it. And, soon, to this was added a torment still more unspeakable. Flies, the cruel flies of the Antilles, drawn by the scent of blood, descended in a cloud upon him. Small wonder that the ingenious Colonel Bishop, who so well understood the art of loosening stubborn tongues, had not deemed it necessary to have recourse to other means of torture. Not all his fiendish cruelty could devise a torment more cruel, more unendurable than the torments Nature would here procure a man in Pitt's condition. The slave writhed in his stocks until he was in danger of breaking his limbs, and writhing, screamed in agony. Thus was he found by Peter Blood, who seemed to his troubled vision to materialize suddenly before him. Mr. Blood carried a large palmetto leaf. Having whisked away with this the flies that were devouring Jeremy's back, he slung it by a strip of fibre from the lad's neck, so that it protected him from further attacks as well as from the rays of the sun. Next, sitting down beside him, he drew the sufferer's head down on his own shoulder, and bathed his face from a pannikin of cold water. Pitt shuddered and moaned on a long, indrawn breath. "Drink!" he gasped. "Drink, for the love of Christ!" The pannikin was held to his quivering lips. He drank greedily, noisily, nor ceased until he had drained the vessel. |
| 2792 |
A moment more, and up through that cloud to replace the flag of England soared the gold and crimson banner of Castile. And then they understood. "Pirates!" roared the Colonel, and again, "Pirates!" Fear and incredulity were blent in his voice. He had paled under his tan until his face was the colour of clay, and there was a wild fury in his beady eyes. His negroes looked at him, grinning idiotically, all teeth and eyeballs. The stately ship that had been allowed to sail so leisurely into Carlisle Bay under her false colours was a Spanish privateer, coming to pay off some of the heavy debt piled up by the predaceous Brethren of the Coast, and the recent defeat by the Pride of Devon of two treasure galleons bound for Cadiz. It happened that the galleon which escaped in a more or less crippled condition was commanded by Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez, who was own brother to the Spanish Admiral Don Miguel de Espinosa, and who was also a very hasty, proud, and hot-tempered gentleman. Galled by his defeat, and choosing to forget that his own conduct had invited it, he had sworn to teach the English a sharp lesson which they should remember. He would take a leaf out of the book of Morgan and those other robbers of the sea, and make a punitive raid upon an English settlement. Unfortunately for himself and for many others, his brother the Admiral was not at hand to restrain him when for this purpose he fitted out the Cinco Llagas at San Juan de Porto Rico. He chose for his objective the island of Barbados, whose natural strength was apt to render her defenders careless. |
| 2793 |
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. |
| 2794 |
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. 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. |
| 2795 |
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. He did the thing skilfully: with the combined skill of swordsman and surgeon. The man sank in a hideous heap without so much as a groan. Mr. Blood swung to the girl, who leaned panting and sobbing against a wall. He caught her by the wrist. "Come!" he said. But she hung back, resisting him by her weight. "Who are you?" she demanded wildly. |
| 2796 |
The last he heard of them was Mary Traill's childlike voice calling back on a quavering note "I shall never forget what you did, Mr. Blood. I shall never forget." But as it was not the voice he desired to hear, the assurance brought him little satisfaction. He stood there in the dark watching the fireflies amid the rhododendrons, till the hoofbeats had faded. Then he sighed and roused himself. He had much to do. His journey into the town had not been one of idle curiosity to see how the Spaniards conducted themselves in victory. It had been inspired by a very different purpose, and he had gained in the course of it all the information he desired. He had an extremely busy night before him, and must be moving. He went off briskly in the direction of the stockade, where his fellow-slaves awaited him in deep anxiety and some hope. There were, when the purple gloom of the tropical night descended upon the Caribbean, not more than ten men on guard aboard the Cinco Llagas, so confident - and with good reason - were the Spaniards of the complete subjection of the islanders. And when I say that there were ten men on guard, I state rather the purpose for which they were left aboard than the duty which they fulfilled. As a matter of fact, whilst the main body of the Spaniards feasted and rioted ashore, the Spanish gunner and his crew - who had so nobly done their duty and ensured the easy victory of the day - were feasting on the gun-deck upon the wine and the fresh meats fetched out to them from shore. |
| 2797 |
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. |
| 2798 |
He was a sturdy, resolute fellow who inspired confidence by the very confidence he displayed in himself. Don Diego mounted the ladder and stepped upon the deck, alone, and entirely unsuspicious. What should the poor man suspect? Before he could even look round, and survey this guard drawn up to receive him, a tap over the head with a capstan bar efficiently handled by Hagthorpe put him to sleep without the least fuss. He was carried away to his cabin, whilst the treasure-chests, handled by the men he had left in the boat, were being hauled to the deck. That being satisfactorily accomplished, Don Esteban and the fellows who had manned the boat came up the ladder, one by one, to be handled with the same quiet efficiency. Peter Blood had a genius for these things, and almost, I suspect, an eye for the dramatic. Dramatic, certainly, was the spectacle now offered to the survivors of the raid. With Colonel Bishop at their head, and gout-ridden Governor Steed sitting on the ruins of a wall beside him, they glumly watched the departure of the eight boats containing the weary Spanish ruffians who had glutted themselves with rapine, murder, and violences unspeakable. They looked on, between relief at this departure of their remorseless enemies, and despair at the wild ravages which, temporarily at least, had wrecked the prosperity and happiness of that little colony. The boats pulled away from the shore, with their loads of laughing, jeering Spaniards, who were still flinging taunts across the water at their surviving victims. |
| 2799 |
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. |
| 2800 |
You are to understand that I have turned the tables on more than the Spaniards. There's the ladder. You'll find it more convenient than being heaved over the side, which is what'll happen if you linger." They went, though not without some hustling, regardless of the bellowings of Colonel Bishop, whose monstrous rage was fanned by terror at finding himself at the mercy of these men of whose cause to hate him he was very fully conscious. A half-dozen of them, apart from Jeremy Pitt, who was utterly incapacitated for the present, possessed a superficial knowledge of seamanship. Hagthorpe, although he had been a fighting officer, untrained in navigation, knew how to handle a ship, and under his directions they set about getting under way. The anchor catted, and the mainsail unfurled, they stood out for the open before a gentle breeze, without interference from the fort. As they were running close to the headland east of the bay, Peter Blood returned to the Colonel, who, under guard and panic-stricken, had dejectedly resumed his seat on the coamings of the main batch. "Can ye swim, Colonel?" Colonel Bishop looked up. His great face was yellow and seemed in that moment of a preternatural flabbiness; his beady eyes were beadier than ever. "As your doctor, now, I prescribe a swim to cool the excessive heat of your humours." Blood delivered the explanation pleasantly, and, receiving still no answer from the Colonel, continued: "It's a mercy for you I'm not by nature as bloodthirsty as some of my friends here. |
| 2801 |
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. |
| 2802 |
At any point between the islands they might come upon an equal or superior craft; whether she were Spanish or English would be equally bad for them, and being undermanned they were in no case to fight. To lessen this risk as far as possible, Don Diego directed at first a southerly and then a westerly course; and so, taking a line midway between the islands of Tobago and Grenada, they won safely through the danger-zone and came into the comparative security of the Caribbean Sea. "If this wind holds," he told them that night at supper, after he had announced to them their position, "we should reach Curacao inside three days." For three days the wind held, indeed it freshened a little on the second, and yet when the third night descended upon them they had still made no landfall. The Cinco Llagas was ploughing through a sea contained on every side by the blue bowl of heaven. Captain Blood uneasily mentioned it to Don Diego. "It will be for to-morrow morning," he was answered with calm conviction. "By all the saints, it is always 'to-morrow morning' with you Spaniards; and to-morrow never comes, my friend." "But this to-morrow is coming, rest assured. However early you may be astir, you shall see land ahead, Don Pedro." Captain Blood passed on, content, and went to visit Jerry Pitt, his patient, to whose condition Don Diego owed his chance of life. For twenty-four hours now the fever had left the sufferer, and under Peter Blood's dressings, his lacerated back was beginning to heal satisfactorily. |
| 2803 |
"But is it possible that I mistake? Besides, is there not the compass? Come to the binnacle and see there what course we make." His utter frankness, and the easy manner of one who has nothing to conceal resolved at once the doubt that had leapt so suddenly in the mind of Captain Blood. Pitt was satisfied less easily. "In that case, Don Diego, will you tell me, since Curacao is our destination, why our course is what it is?" Again there was no faintest hesitation on Don Diego's part. "You have reason to ask," said he, and sighed. "I had hope' it would not be observe'. I have been careless - oh, of a carelessness very culpable. I neglect observation. Always it is my way. I make too sure. I count too much on dead reckoning. And so to-day I find when at last I take out the quadrant that we do come by a half-degree too much south, so that Curacao is now almost due north. That is what cause the delay. But we will be there to-morrow." The explanation, so completely satisfactory, and so readily and candidly forthcoming, left no room for further doubt that Don Diego should have been false to his parole. And when presently Don Diego had withdrawn again, Captain Blood confessed to Pitt that it was absurd to have suspected him. Whatever his antecedents, he had proved his quality when he announced himself ready to die sooner than enter into any undertaking that could hurt his honour or his country. New to the seas of the Spanish Main and to the ways of the adventurers who sailed it, Captain Blood still entertained illusions. |
| 2804 |
But the next dawn was to shatter them rudely and for ever. Coming on deck before the sun was up, he saw land ahead, as the Spaniard had promised them last night. Some ten miles ahead it lay, a long coast-line filling the horizon east and west, with a massive headland jutting forward straight before them. Staring at it, he frowned. He had not conceived that Curacao was of such considerable dimensions. Indeed, this looked less like an island than the main itself. Beating out aweather, against the gentle landward breeze he beheld a great ship on their starboard bow, that he conceived to be some three or four miles off, and - as well as he could judge her at that distance - of a tonnage equal if not superior to their own. Even as he watched her she altered her course, and going about came heading towards them, close-hauled. A dozen of his fellows were astir on the forecastle, looking eagerly ahead, and the sound of their voices and laughter reached him across the length of the stately Cinco Llagas. "There," said a soft voice behind him in liquid Spanish, "is the Promised Land, Don Pedro." It was something in that voice, a muffled note of exultation, that awoke suspicion in him, and made whole the half-doubt he had been entertaining. He turned sharply to face Don Diego, so sharply that the sly smile was not effaced from the Spaniard's countenance before Captain Blood's eyes had flashed upon it. "You find an odd satisfaction in the sight of it - all things considered," said Mr. Blood. |
| 2805 |
"Ah, perro ingles! You know too much," he said under his breath, and sprang for the Captain's throat. Tight-locked in each other's arms, they swayed a moment, then together went down upon the deck, the Spaniard's feet jerked from under him by the right leg of Captain Blood. The Spaniard had depended upon his strength, which was considerable. But it proved no match for the steady muscles of the Irishman, tempered of late by the vicissitudes of slavery. He had depended upon choking the life out of Blood, and so gaining the half-hour that might be necessary to bring up that fine ship that was beating towards them - a Spanish ship, perforce, since none other would be so boldly cruising in these Spanish waters off Hispaniola. But all that Don Diego had accomplished was to betray himself completely, and to no purpose. This he realized when he found himself upon his back, pinned down by Blood, who was kneeling on his chest, whilst the men summoned by their Captain's shout came clattering up the companion. "Will I say a prayer for your dirty soul now, whilst I am in this position?" Captain Blood was furiously mocking him. But the Spaniard, though defeated, now beyond hope for himself, forced his lips to smile, and gave back mockery for mockery. "Who will pray for your soul, I wonder, when that galleon comes to lie board and board with you?" "That galleon!" echoed Captain Blood with sudden and awful realization that already it was too late to avoid the consequences of Don Diego's betrayal of them. |
| 2806 |
"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. |
| 2807 |
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. |
| 2808 |
"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. |
| 2809 |
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. |
| 2810 |
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. |
| 2811 |
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. |
| 2812 |
"But since Diego cannot come to me, why, I will go across to him." For a moment Don Esteban's face was a mask of pallid fear. Then Blood was speaking in a lowered, confidential voice that admirably blended suavity, impressiveness, and sly mockery. "If you please, Don Miguel, but that is the very thing you must not do - the very thing Don Diego does not wish you to do. You must not see him until his wounds are healed. That is his own wish. That is the real reason why he is not here. For the truth is that his wounds are not so grave as to have prevented his coming. It was his consideration of himself and the false position in which you would be placed if you had direct word from him of what has happened. As your excellency has said, there is peace between His Catholic Majesty and the King of England, and your brother Don Diego..." He paused a moment. "I am sure that I need say no more. What you hear from us is no more than a mere rumour. Your excellency understands." His excellency frowned thoughtfully. "I understand... in part," said he. Captain Blood had a moment's uneasiness. Did the Spaniard doubt his bona fides? Yet in dress and speech he knew himself to be impeccably Spanish, and was not Don Esteban there to confirm him? He swept on to afford further confirmation before the Admiral could say another word. "And we have in the boat below two chests containing fifty thousand pieces of eight, which we are to deliver to your excellency." His excellency jumped; there was a sudden stir among his officers. |
| 2813 |
"They are the ransom extracted by Don Diego from the Governor of..." "Not another word, in the name of Heaven!" cried the Admiral in alarm. "My brother wishes me to assume charge of this money, to carry it to Spain for him? Well, that is a family matter between my brother and myself. So, it can be done. But I must not know..." He broke off. "Hum! A glass of Malaga in my cabin, if you please," he invited them, "whilst the chests are being hauled aboard." He gave his orders touching the embarkation of these chests, then led the way to his regally appointed cabin, his four officers and the friar following by particular invitation. Seated at table there, with the tawny wine before them, and the servant who had poured it withdrawn, Don Miguel laughed and stroked his pointed, grizzled beard. "Virgen santisima! That brother of mine has a mind that thinks of everything. Left to myself, I might have committed a fine indiscretion by venturing aboard his ship at such a moment. I might have seen things which as Admiral of Spain it would be difficult for me to ignore." Both Esteban and Blood made haste to agree with him, and then Blood raised his glass, and drank to the glory of Spain and the damnation of the besotted James who occupied the throne of England. The latter part of his toast was at least sincere. The Admiral laughed. "Sir, sir, you need my brother here to curb your imprudences. You should remember that His Catholic Majesty and the King of England are very good friends. That is not a toast to propose in this cabin. |
| 2814 |
At daybreak Don Esteban and his followers were put off in a boat. Two days later, the Cinco Llagas sailed into the rock-bound bay of Cayona, which Nature seemed to have designed for the stronghold of those who had appropriated it. It is time fully to disclose the fact that the survival of the story of Captain Blood's exploits is due entirely to the industry of Jeremy Pitt, the Somersetshire shipmaster. In addition to his ability as a navigator, this amiable young man appears to have wielded an indefatigable pen, and to have been inspired to indulge its fluency by the affection he very obviously bore to Peter Blood. He kept the log of the forty-gun frigate Arabella, on which he served as master, or, as we should say to-day, navigating officer, as no log that I have seen was ever kept. It runs into some twenty-odd volumes of assorted sizes, some of which are missing altogether and others of which are so sadly depleted of leaves as to be of little use. But if at times in the laborious perusal of them - they are preserved in the library of Mr. James Speke of Comerton - I have inveighed against these lacunae, at others I have been equally troubled by the excessive prolixity of what remains and the difficulty of disintegrating from the confused whole the really essential parts. I have a suspicion that Esquemeling - though how or where I can make no surmise - must have obtained access to these records, and that he plucked from them the brilliant feathers of several exploits to stick them into the tail of his own hero, Captain Morgan. |
| 2815 |
But that is by the way. I mention it chiefly as a warning, for when presently I come to relate the affair of Maracaybo, those of you who have read Esquemeling may be in danger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those things which here are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood. I think, however, that when you come to weigh the motives actuating both Blood and the Spanish Admiral, in that affair, and when you consider how integrally the event is a part of Blood's history - whilst merely a detached incident in Morgan's - you will reach my own conclusion as to which is the real plagiarist. The first of these logs of Pitt's is taken up almost entirely with a retrospective narrative of the events up to the time of Blood's first coming to Tortuga. This and the Tannatt Collection of State Trials are the chief - though not the only - sources of my history so far. Pitt lays great stress upon the fact that it was the circumstances upon which I have dwelt, and these alone, that drove Peter Blood to seek an anchorage at Tortuga. He insists at considerable length, and with a vehemence which in itself makes it plain that an opposite opinion was held in some quarters, that it was no part of the design of Blood or of any of his companions in misfortune to join hands with the buccaneers who, under a semi-official French protection, made of Tortuga a lair whence they could sally out to drive their merciless piratical trade chiefly at the expense of Spain. It was, Pitt tells us, Blood's original intention to make his way to France or Holland. |
| 2816 |
And remember that these temptations proceeded not only from adventurous buccaneering acquaintances in the taverns of that evil haven of Tortuga, but even from M. d'Ogeron, the governor of the island, who levied as his harbour dues a percentage of one tenth of all spoils brought into the bay, and who profited further by commissions upon money which he was desired to convert into bills of exchange upon France. A trade that might have worn a repellent aspect when urged by greasy, half-drunken adventurers, boucan-hunters, lumbermen, beach-combers, English, French, and Dutch, became a dignified, almost official form of privateering when advocated by the courtly, middle-aged gentleman who in representing the French West India Company seemed to represent France herself. Moreover, to a man - not excluding Jeremy Pitt himself, in whose blood the call of the sea was insistent and imperative - those who had escaped with Peter Blood from the Barbados plantations, and who, consequently, like himself, knew not whither to turn, were all resolved upon joining the great Brotherhood of the Coast, as those rovers called themselves. And they united theirs to the other voices that were persuading Blood, demanding that he should continue now in the leadership which he had enjoyed since they had left Barbados, and swearing to follow him loyally whithersoever he should lead them. And so, to condense all that Jeremy has recorded in the matter, Blood ended by yielding to external and internal pressure, abandoned himself to the stream of Destiny. |
| 2817 |
An echo of it had reached Europe, and at the Court of St. James's angry representations were made by the Ambassador of Spain, to whom it was answered that it must not be supposed that this Captain Blood held any commission from the King of England; that he was, in fact, a proscribed rebel, an escaped slave, and that any measures against him by His Catholic Majesty would receive the cordial approbation of King James II. Don Miguel de Espinosa, the Admiral of Spain in the West Indies, and his nephew Don Esteban who sailed with him, did not lack the will to bring the adventurer to the yardarm. With them this business of capturing Blood, which was now an international affair, was also a family matter. Spain, through the mouth of Don Miguel, did not spare her threats. The report of them reached Tortuga, and with it the assurance that Don Miguel had behind him not only the authority of his own nation, but that of the English King as well. It was a brutum fulmen that inspired no terrors in Captain Blood. Nor was he likely, on account of it, to allow himself to run to rust in the security of Tortuga. For what he had suffered at the hands of Man he had chosen to make Spain the scapegoat. Thus he accounted that he served a twofold purpose: he took compensation and at the same time served, not indeed the Stuart King, whom he despised, but England and, for that matter, all the rest of civilized mankind which cruel, treacherous, greedy, bigoted Castile sought to exclude from intercourse with the New World. |
| 2818 |
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. I doubt if in his day there was a greater scoundrel among the Brethren of the Coast than this Levasseur. |
| 2819 |
And yet, repulsive though he found him, Captain Blood could not deny that the fellow's proposals displayed boldness, imagination, and resource, and he was forced to admit that jointly they could undertake operations of a greater magnitude than was possible singly to either of them. The climax of Levasseur's project was to be a raid upon the wealthy mainland city of Maracaybo; but for this, he admitted, six hundred men at the very least would be required, and six hundred men were not to be conveyed in the two bottoms they now commanded. Preliminary cruises must take place, having for one of their objects the capture of further ships. Because he disliked the man, Captain Blood would not commit himself at once. But because he liked the proposal he consented to consider it. Being afterwards pressed by both Hagthorpe and Wolverstone, who did not share his own personal dislike of the Frenchman, the end of the matter was that within a week articles were drawn up between Levasseur and Blood, and signed by them and - as was usual - by the chosen representatives of their followers. These articles contained, inter alia, the common provisions that, should the two vessels separate, a strict account must afterwards be rendered of all prizes severally taken, whilst the vessel taking a prize should retain three fifths of its value, surrendering two fifths to its associate. These shares were subsequently to be subdivided among the crew of each vessel, in accordance with the articles already obtaining between each captain and his own men. |
| 2820 |
The tall ship that accompanied the Arabella was a Spanish vessel of twenty-six guns, the Santiago from Puerto Rico with a hundred and twenty thousand weight of cacao, forty thousand pieces of eight, and the value of ten thousand more in jewels. A rich capture of which two fifths under the articles went to Levasseur and his crew. Of the money and jewels a division was made on the spot. The cacao it was agreed should be taken to Tortuga to be sold. Then it was the turn of Levasseur, and black grew the brow of Captain Blood as the Frenchman's tale was unfolded. At the end he roundly expressed his disapproval. 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. |
| 2821 |
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. |
| 2822 |
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. In fact, I shall provide the means to convey you thither, and you shall have a month in which to come and go. Meanwhile, your sister remains with me as a hostage. Your father should not consider such a sum excessive as the price of his son's liberty and to provide a dowry for his daughter. Indeed, if anything, I am too modest, pardi! M. d'Ogeron is reputed a wealthy man." M. d'Ogeron the younger raised his head and looked the Captain boldly in the face. "I refuse - utterly and absolutely, do you understand? So do your worst, and be damned for a filthy pirate without decency and without honour." "But what words!" laughed Levasseur. "What heat and what foolishness! You have not considered the alternative. When you do, you will not persist in your refusal. You will not do that in any case. We have spurs for the reluctant. And I warn you against giving me your parole under stress, and afterwards playing me false. |
| 2823 |
"I beg that you will spare yourself and your sister," said the Captain, "by being reasonable. What, after all, is the sum I have named? To your wealthy father a bagatelle. I repeat, I have been too modest. But since I have said twenty thousand pieces of eight, twenty thousand pieces it shall be." "And for what, if you please, have you said twenty thousand pieces of eight?" In execrable French, but in a voice that was crisp and pleasant, seeming to echo some of the mockery that had invested Levasseur's, that question floated over their heads. Startled, Levasseur and his officers looked up and round. On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed in black with silver lace, a crimson ostrich plume curled about the broad brim of his hat affording the only touch of colour. Under that hat was the tawny face of Captain Blood. Levasseur gathered himself up with an oath of amazement. He had conceived Captain Blood by now well below the horizon, on his way to Tortuga, assuming him to have been so fortunate as to have weathered last night's storm. Launching himself upon the yielding sand, into which he sank to the level of the calves of his fine boots of Spanish leather, Captain Blood came sliding erect to the beach. He was followed by Wolverstone, and a dozen others. As he came to a standstill, he doffed his hat, with a flourish, to the lady. Then he turned to Levasseur. "Good-morning, my Captain," said he, and proceeded to explain his presence. |
| 2824 |
Ye've parcelled the twain together - very oddly, I confess. Ye've set their value at twenty thousand pieces, and for that sum you may have them, since you desire it; but you'll pay for them the twenty thousand pieces that are ultimately to come to you as the ransom of one and the dowry of the other; and that sum shall be divided among our crews. So that you do that, it is conceivable that our followers may take a lenient view of your breach of the articles we jointly signed." Levasseur laughed savagely. "Ah ca! Credieu! The good jest!" "I quite agree with you," said Captain Blood. To Levasseur the jest lay in that Captain Blood, with no more than a dozen followers, should come there attempting to hector him who had a hundred men within easy call. But it seemed that he had left out of his reckoning something which his opponent had counted in. For as, laughing still, Levasseur swung to his officers, he saw that which choked the laughter in his throat. Captain Blood had shrewdly played upon the cupidity that was the paramount inspiration of those adventurers. And Levasseur now read clearly on their faces how completely they adopted Captain Blood's suggestion that all must participate in the ransom which their leader had thought to appropriate to himself. It gave the gaudy ruffian pause, and whilst in his heart he cursed those followers of his, who could be faithful only to their greed, he perceived - and only just in time - that he had best tread warily. "You misunderstand," he said, swallowing his rage. |
| 2825 |
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. |
| 2826 |
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. M. d'Ogeron had not troubled to restrain his high-pitched voice, and the Captain had overheard the Frenchman's last two sentences. Therefore he perfectly understood why mademoiselle should bound up at sight of him, and shrink back in fear. "Mademoiselle," said he in his vile but fluent French, "I beg you to dismiss your fears. Aboard this ship you shall be treated with all honour. So soon as we are in case to put to sea again, we steer a course for Tortuga to take you home to your father. And pray do not consider that I have bought you, as your brother has just said. All that I have done has been to provide the ransom necessary to bribe a gang of scoundrels to depart from obedience to the arch-scoundrel who commanded them, and so deliver you from all peril. Count it, if you please, a friendly loan to be repaid entirely at your convenience." Mademoiselle stared at him in unbelief. M. d'Ogeron rose to his feet. "Monsieur, is it possible that you are serious?" "I am. It may not happen often nowadays. I may be a pirate. But my ways are not the ways of Levasseur, who should have stayed in Europe, and practised purse-cutting. |
| 2827 |
Then he sighed. That dubious fame of his that had spread so quickly across the Caribbean would by now have reached the ears of Arabella Bishop. That she would despise him, he could not doubt, deeming him no better than all the other scoundrels who drove this villainous buccaneering trade. Therefore he hoped that some echo of this deed might reach her also, and be set by her against some of that contempt. For the whole truth, which he withheld from Mademoiselle d'Ogeron, was that in venturing his life to save her, he had been driven by the thought that the deed must be pleasing in the eyes of Miss Bishop could she but witness it. That affair of Mademoiselle d'Ogeron bore as its natural fruit an improvement in the already cordial relations between Captain Blood and the Governor of Tortuga. At the fine stone house, with its green-jalousied windows, which M. d'Ogeron had built himself in a spacious and luxuriant garden to the east of Cayona, the Captain became a very welcome guest. M. d'Ogeron was in the Captain's debt for more than the twenty thousand pieces of eight which he had provided for mademoiselle's ransom; and shrewd, hard bargain-driver though he might be, the Frenchman could be generous and understood the sentiment of gratitude. This he now proved in every possible way, and under his powerful protection the credit of Captain Blood among the buccaneers very rapidly reached its zenith. So when it came to fitting out his fleet for that enterprise against Maracaybo, which had originally been Levasseur's project, he did not want for either ships or men to follow him. |
| 2828 |
Behind them in the sun-scorched, dusty square, sparsely fringed by palms, whose fronds drooped listlessly in the quivering heat, surged a couple of hundred wild fellows belonging to both parties, their own excitement momentarily quelled so that they might listen to what passed among their leaders. 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? |
| 2829 |
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. |
| 2830 |
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. With him came a tough, long-legged French sea-wolf named Yberville, who, though still young, had already won fame as a privateer commander before the loss of his own ship had driven him to take service under Blood. The Captain advanced towards that disputing group, leaning lightly upon his long ebony cane, his face shaded by a broad-plumed hat. There was in his appearance nothing of the buccaneer. He had much more the air of a lounger in the Mall or the Alameda - the latter rather, since his elegant suit of violet taffetas with gold-embroidered button-holes was in the Spanish fashion. But the long, stout, serviceable rapier, thrust up behind by the left hand resting lightly on the pummel, corrected the impression. That and those steely eyes of his announced the adventurer. "You find me ridiculous, eh, Cahusac?" said he, as he came to a halt before the Breton, whose anger seemed already to have gone out of him. "What, then, must I find you?" He spoke quietly, almost wearily. "You will be telling them that we have delayed, and that it is the delay that has brought about our danger. But whose is the fault of that delay? We have been a month in doing what should have been done, and what but for your blundering would have been done, inside of a week." "Ah ca! |
| 2831 |
Nor was he to be mollified until the following day brought him his revenge. This came in the shape of a messenger from Don Miguel with a letter in which the Spanish Admiral solemnly vowed to God that, since the pirates had refused his magnanimous offer to permit them to surrender with the honours of war, he would now await them at the mouth of the lake there to destroy them on their coming forth. He added that should they delay their departure, he would so soon as he was reenforced by a fifth ship, the Santo Nino, on its way to join him from La Guayra, himself come inside to seek them at Maracaybo. This time Captain Blood was put out of temper. "Trouble me no more," he snapped at Cahusac, who came growling to him again. "Send word to Don Miguel that you have seceded from me. He'll give you safe conduct, devil a doubt. Then take one of the sloops, order your men aboard and put to sea, and the devil go with you." Cahusac would certainly have adopted that course if only his men had been unanimous in the matter. They, however, were torn between greed and apprehension. If they went they must abandon their share of the plunder, which was considerable, as well as the slaves and other prisoners they had taken. If they did this, and Captain Blood should afterwards contrive to get away unscathed - and from their knowledge of his resourcefulness, the thing, however unlikely, need not be impossible - he must profit by that which they now relinquished. This was a contingency too bitter for contemplation. |
| 2832 |
And so, in the end, despite all that Cahusac could say, the surrender was not to Don Miguel, but to Peter Blood. They had come into the venture with him, they asserted, and they would go out of it with him or not at all. That was the message he received from them that same evening by the sullen mouth of Cahusac himself. He welcomed it, and invited the Breton to sit down and join the council which was even then deliberating upon the means to be employed. This council occupied the spacious patio of the Governor's house - which Captain Blood had appropriated to his own uses - a cloistered stone quadrangle in the middle of which a fountain played coolly under a trellis of vine. Orange-trees grew on two sides of it, and the still, evening air was heavy with the scent of them. It was one of those pleasant exterior-interiors which Moorish architects had introduced to Spain and the Spaniards had carried with them to the New World. Here that council of war, composed of six men in all, deliberated until late that night upon the plan of action which Captain Blood put forward. The great freshwater lake of Maracaybo, nourished by a score of rivers from the snow-capped ranges that surround it on two sides, is some hundred and twenty miles in length and almost the same distance across at its widest. It is - as has been indicated in the shape of a great bottle having its neck towards the sea at Maracaybo. Beyond this neck it widens again, and then the two long, narrow strips of land known as the islands of Vigilias and Palomas block the channel, standing lengthwise across it. |
| 2833 |
The only passage out to sea for vessels of any draught lies in the narrow strait between these islands. Palomas, which is some ten miles in length, is unapproachable for half a mile on either side by any but the shallowest craft save at its eastern end, where, completely commanding the narrow passage out to sea, stands the massive fort which the buccaneers had found deserted upon their coming. In the broader water between this passage and the bar, the four Spanish ships were at anchor in mid-channel. The Admiral's Encarnacion, which we already know, was a mighty galleon of forty-eight great guns and eight small. Next in importance was the Salvador with thirty-six guns; the other two, the Infanta and the San Felipe, though smaller vessels, were still formidable enough with their twenty guns and a hundred and fifty men apiece. Such was the fleet of which the gauntlet was to be run by Captain Blood with his own Arabella of forty guns, the Elizabeth of twenty-six, and two sloops captured at Gibraltar, which they had indifferently armed with four culverins each. In men they had a bare four hundred survivors of the five hundred-odd that had left Tortuga, to oppose to fully a thousand Spaniards manning the galleons. The plan of action submitted by Captain Blood to that council was a desperate one, as Cahusac uncompromisingly pronounced it. "Why, so it is," said the Captain. "But I've done things more desperate." Complacently he pulled at a pipe that was loaded with that fragrant Sacerdotes tobacco for which Gibraltar was famous, and of which they had brought away some hogsheads. |
| 2834 |
The order of their going was as follows: Ahead went the improvised fire-ship in charge of Wolverstone, with a crew of six volunteers, each of whom was to have a hundred pieces of eight over and above his share of plunder as a special reward. 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. |
| 2835 |
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. Thence he flung his flaming torch down the nearest gaping scuttle into the hold, and thereupon dived overboard in his turn, to be picked up presently by the longboat from the Arabella. But before that happened the sloop was a thing of fire, from which explosions were hurling blazing combustibles aboard the Encarnacion, and long tongues of flame were licking out to consume the galleon, beating back those daring Spaniards who, too late, strove desperately to cut her adrift. And whilst the most formidable vessel of the Spanish fleet was thus being put out of action at the outset, Blood had sailed in to open fire upon the Salvador. First athwart her hawse he had loosed a broadside that had swept her decks with terrific effect, then going on and about, he had put a second broadside into her hull at short range. Leaving her thus half-crippled, temporarily, at least, and keeping to his course, he had bewildered the crew of the Infanta by a couple of shots from the chasers on his beak-head, then crashed alongside to grapple and board her, whilst Hagthorpe was doing the like by the San Felipe. And in all this time not a single shot had the Spaniards contrived to fire, so completely had they been taken by surprise, and so swift and paralyzing had been Blood's stroke. Boarded now and faced by the cold steel of the buccaneers, neither the San Felipe nor the Infanta offered much resistance. |
| 2836 |
The sight of their admiral in flames, and the Salvador drifting crippled from the action, had so utterly disheartened them that they accounted themselves vanquished, and laid down their arms. If by a resolute stand the Salvador had encouraged the other two undamaged vessels to resistance, the Spaniards might well have retrieved the fortunes of the day. But it happened that the Salvador was handicapped in true Spanish fashion by being the treasure-ship of the fleet, with plate on board to the value of some fifty thousand pieces. Intent above all upon saving this from falling into the hands of the pirates, Don Miguel, who, with a remnant of his crew, had meanwhile transferred himself aboard her, headed her down towards Palomas and the fort that guarded the passage. This fort the Admiral, in those days of waiting, had taken the precaution secretly to garrison and rearm. For the purpose he had stripped the fort of Cojero, farther out on the gulf, of its entire armament, which included some cannon-royal of more than ordinary range and power. With no suspicion of this, Captain Blood gave chase, accompanied by the Infanta, which was manned now by a prize-crew under the command of Yberville. The stern chasers of the Salvador desultorily returned the punishing fire of the pursuers; but such was the damage she, herself, sustained, that presently, coming under the guns of the fort, she began to sink, and finally settled down in the shallows with part of her hull above water. Thence, some in boats and some by swimming, the Admiral got his crew ashore on Palomas as best he could. |
| 2837 |
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. "This time we are checkmated." "I'll take the liberty of reminding you that you said the same before," Captain Blood answered him as patiently as he could. |
| 2838 |
So that you are no longer in case to carry out your boast, even when your reenforcements on the Santo Nino, reach you from La Guayra. From what has occurred, you may judge of what must occur. I should not trouble your excellency with this letter but that I am a humane man, abhorring bloodshed. Therefore before proceeding to deal with your fort, which you may deem invincible, as I have dealt already with your fleet, which you deemed invincible, I make you, purely out of humanitarian considerations, this last offer of terms. I will spare this city of Maracaybo and forthwith evacuate it, leaving behind me the forty prisoners I have taken, in consideration of your paying me the sum of fifty thousand pieces of eight and one hundred head of cattle as a ransom, thereafter granting me unmolested passage of the bar. My prisoners, most of whom are persons of consideration, I will retain as hostages until after my departure, sending them back in the canoes which we shall take with us for that purpose. If your excellency should be so ill-advised as to refuse these terms, and thereby impose upon me the necessity of reducing your fort at the cost of some lives, I warn you that you may expect no quarter from us, and that I shall begin by leaving a heap of ashes where this pleasant city of Maracaybo now stands." The letter written, he bade them bring him from among the prisoners the Deputy-Governor of Maracaybo, who had been taken at Gibraltar. Disclosing its contents to him, he despatched him with it to Don Miguel. |
| 2839 |
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. |
| 2840 |
He was not to guess that it was himself the Captain mocked. "That's merely because it's more remunerative in the end. And that is why you are accorded the three days you ask for. So about it, Don Francisco. You shall have what mules you need. I'll see to it." Away went Don Francisco on his errand, leaving Captain Blood to reflect, between bitterness and satisfaction, that a reputation for as much chivalry as is consistent with piracy is not without its uses. Punctually on the third day the Deputy-Governor was back in Maracaybo with his mules laden with plate and money to the value demanded and a herd of a hundred head of cattle driven in by negro slaves. These bullocks were handed over to those of the company who ordinarily were boucan-hunters, and therefore skilled in the curing of meats, and for best part of a week thereafter they were busy at the waterside with the quartering and salting of carcases. While this was doing on the one hand and the ships were being refitted for sea on the other, Captain Blood was pondering the riddle on the solution of which his own fate depended. Indian spies whom he employed brought him word that the Spaniards, working at low tide, had salved the thirty guns of the Salvador, and thus had added yet another battery to their already overwhelming strength. In the end, and hoping for inspiration on the spot, Captain Blood made a reconnaissance in person. At the risk of his life, accompanied by two friendly Indians, he crossed to the island in a canoe under cover of dark. |
| 2841 |
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. 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. |
| 2842 |
When her hatches were removed, a human cargo was disclosed in her hold. "Slaves," said Wolverstone, and persisted in that belief cursing Spanish devilry until Cahusac crawled up out of the dark bowels of the ship, and stood blinking in the sunlight. There was more than sunlight to make the Breton pirate blink. And those that crawled out after him - the remnants of his crew - cursed him horribly for the pusillanimity which had brought them into the ignominy of owing their deliverance to those whom they had deserted as lost beyond hope. Their sloop had encountered and had been sunk three days ago by the Santo Nino, and Cahusac had narrowly escaped hanging merely that for some time he might be a mock among the Brethren of the Coast. For many a month thereafter he was to hear in Tortuga the jeering taunt: "Where do you spend the gold that you brought back from Maracaybo?" The affair at Maracaybo is to be considered as Captain Blood's buccaneering masterpiece. Although there is scarcely one of the many actions that he fought - recorded in such particular detail by Jeremy Pitt - which does not afford some instance of his genius for naval tactics, yet in none is this more shiningly displayed than in those two engagements by which he won out of the trap which Don Miguel de Espinosa had sprung upon him. The fame which he had enjoyed before this, great as it already was, is dwarfed into insignificance by the fame that followed. It was a fame such as no buccaneer - not even Morgan - has ever boasted, before or since. |
| 2843 |
In Tortuga, during the months he spent there refitting the three ships he had captured from the fleet that had gone out to destroy him, he found himself almost an object of worship in the eyes of the wild Brethren of the Coast, all of whom now clamoured for the honour of serving under him. It placed him in the rare position of being able to pick and choose the crews for his augmented fleet, and he chose fastidiously. When next he sailed away it was with a fleet of five fine ships in which went something over a thousand men. Thus you behold him not merely famous, but really formidable. The three captured Spanish vessels he had renamed with a certain scholarly humour the Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, a grimly jocular manner of conveying to the world that he made them the arbiters of the fate of any Spaniards he should henceforth encounter upon the seas. In Europe the news of this fleet, following upon the news of the Spanish Admiral's defeat at Maracaybo, produced something of a sensation. Spain and England were variously and unpleasantly exercised, and if you care to turn up the diplomatic correspondence exchanged on the subject, you will find that it is considerable and not always amiable. And meanwhile in the Caribbean, the Spanish Admiral Don Miguel de Espinosa might be said - to use a term not yet invented in his day - to have run amok. The disgrace into which he had fallen as a result of the disasters suffered at the hands of Captain Blood had driven the Admiral all but mad. |
| 2844 |
It is impossible, if we impose our minds impartially, to withhold a certain sympathy from Don Miguel. Hate was now this unfortunate man's daily bread, and the hope of vengeance an obsession to his mind. As a madman he went raging up and down the Caribbean seeking his enemy, and in the meantime, as an hors d'oeuvre to his vindictive appetite, he fell upon any ship of England or of France that loomed above his horizon. I need say no more to convey the fact that this illustrious sea-captain and great gentleman of Castile had lost his head, and was become a pirate in his turn. The Supreme Council of Castile might anon condemn him for his practices. But how should that matter to one who already was condemned beyond redemption? On the contrary, if he should live to lay the audacious and ineffable Blood by the heels, it was possible that Spain might view his present irregularities and earlier losses with a more lenient eye. And so, reckless of the fact that Captain Blood was now in vastly superior strength, the Spaniard sought him up and down the trackless seas. But for a whole year he sought him vainly. The circumstances in which eventually they met are very curious. An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will, and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. |
| 2845 |
Cahusac said - though this I hardly credit - that he had fought under de Ruyter." "That also is true," said she. She sighed heavily. "Your Cahusac seems to have been accurate enough. Alas!" "You are sorry, then?" She looked at him. She was very pale, he noticed. "As we are sorry to hear of the death of one we have esteemed. Once I held him in regard for an unfortunate but worthy gentleman. Now..." She checked, and smiled a little crooked smile. "Such a man is best forgotten." And upon that she passed at once to speak of other things. The friendship, which it was her great gift to command in all she met, grew steadily between those two in the little time remaining, until the event befell that marred what was promising to be the pleasantest stage of his lordship's voyage. 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. |
| 2846 |
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. |
| 2847 |
Are men just beasts?" "Men?" said Lord Julian, staring. "Say Spaniards, and I'll agree." He was an Englishman speaking of hereditary foes. And yet there was a measure of truth in what he said. "This is the Spanish way in the New World. Faith, almost it justifies such men as Blood of what they do." She shivered, as if cold, and setting her elbows on the table, she took her chin in her hands, and sat staring before her. Observing her, his lordship noticed how drawn and white her face had grown. There was reason enough for that, and for worse. Not any other woman of his acquaintance would have preserved her self-control in such an ordeal; and of fear, at least, at no time had Miss Bishop shown any sign. It is impossible that he did not find her admirable. A Spanish steward entered bearing a silver chocolate service and a box of Peruvian candies, which he placed on the table before the lady. "With the Admiral's homage," he said, then bowed, and withdrew. Miss Bishop took no heed of him or his offering, but continued to stare before her, lost in thought. Lord Julian took a turn in the long low cabin, which was lighted by a skylight above and great square windows astern. It was luxuriously appointed: there were rich Eastern rugs on the floor, well-filled bookcases stood against the bulkheads, and there was a carved walnut sideboard laden with silverware. On a long, low chest standing under the middle stern port lay a guitar that was gay with ribbons. Lord Julian picked it up, twanged the strings once as if moved by nervous irritation, and put it down. |
| 2848 |
It looked to Don Miguel as if the luck which so long had been on Blood's side had at last veered in his own favour. Miss Bishop, newly risen, had come out to take the air on the quarter-deck with his lordship in attendance - as you would expect of so gallant a gentleman - when she beheld the big red ship that had once been the Cinco Llagas out of Cadiz. The vessel was bearing down upon them, her mountains of snowy canvas bellying forward, the long pennon with the cross of St. George fluttering from her main truck in the morning breeze, the gilded portholes in her red hull and the gilded beak-head aflash in the morning sun. 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. |
| 2849 |
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. |
| 2850 |
My lord pointed it out. "He's crazy surely!" he cried. "He's driving straight into a death-trap. He'll be crushed to splinters between the two. No wonder that black-faced Don is holding his fire. In his place, I should do the same." But even at that moment the Admiral raised his hand; in the waist, below him, a trumpet blared, and immediately the gunner on the prow touched off his guns. As the thunder of them rolled out, his lordship saw ahead beyond the English ship and to larboard of her two heavy splashes. Almost at once two successive spurts of flame leapt from the brass cannon on the Arabella's beak-head, and scarcely had the watchers on the poop seen the shower of spray, where one of the shots struck the water near them, then with a rending crash and a shiver that shook the Milagrosa from stem to stern, the other came to lodge in her forecastle. To avenge that blow, the Hidalga blazed at the Englishman with both her forward guns. But even at that short range - between two and three hundred yards - neither shot took effect. At a hundred yards the Arabella's forward guns, which had meanwhile been reloaded, fired again at the Milagrosa, and this time smashed her bowsprit into splinters; so that for a moment she yawed wildly to port. Don Miguel swore profanely, and then, as the helm was put over to swing her back to her course, his own prow replied. But the aim was too high, and whilst one of the shots tore through the Arabella's shrouds and scarred her mainmast, the other again went wide. |
| 2851 |
Billowing clouds of smoke to starboard blotted out everything, and its acrid odour, taking them presently in the throat, set them gasping and coughing. From the grim confusion and turmoil in the waist below arose a clamour of fierce Spanish blasphemies and the screams of maimed men. The Milagrosa staggered slowly ahead, a gaping rent in her bulwarks; her foremast was shattered, fragments of the yards hanging in the netting spread below. Her beak-head was in splinters, and a shot had smashed through into the great cabin, reducing it to wreckage. Don Miguel was bawling orders wildly, and peering ever and anon through the curtain of smoke that was drifting slowly astern, in his anxiety to ascertain how it might have fared with the Hidalga. Suddenly, and ghostly at first through that lifting haze, loomed the outline of a ship; gradually the lines of her red hull became more and more sharply defined as she swept nearer with poles all bare save for the spread of canvas on her sprit. Instead of holding to her course as Don Miguel had expected she would, the Arabella had gone about under cover of the smoke, and sailing now in the same direction as the Milagrosa, was converging sharply upon her across the wind, so sharply that almost before the frenzied Don Miguel had realized the situation, his vessel staggered under the rending impact with which the other came hurtling alongside. There was a rattle and clank of metal as a dozen grapnels fell, and tore and caught in the timbers of the Milagrosa, and the Spaniard was firmly gripped in the tentacles of the English ship. |
| 2852 |
Beyond her and now well astern the veil of smoke was rent at last and the Hidalga was revealed in desperate case. She was bilging fast, with an ominous list to larboard, and it could be no more than a question of moments before she settled down. The attention of her hands was being entirely given to a desperate endeavour to launch the boats in time. Of this Don Miguel's anguished eyes had no more than a fleeting but comprehensive glimpse before his own decks were invaded by a wild, yelling swarm of boarders from the grappling ship. Never was confidence so quickly changed into despair, never was hunter more swiftly converted into helpless prey. For helpless the Spaniards were. The swiftly executed boarding manoeuvre had caught them almost unawares in the moment of confusion following the punishing broadside they had sustained at such short range. For a moment there was a valiant effort by some of Don Miguel's officers to rally the men for a stand against these invaders. But the Spaniards, never at their best in close-quarter fighting, were here demoralized by knowledge of the enemies with whom they had to deal. Their hastily formed ranks were smashed before they could be steadied; driven across the waist to the break of the poop on the one side, and up to the forecastle bulkheads on the other, the fighting resolved itself into a series of skirmishes between groups. And whilst this was doing above, another horde of buccaneers swarmed through the hatch to the main deck below to overpower the gun-crews at their stations there. |
| 2853 |
On the quarter deck, towards which an overwhelming wave of buccaneers was sweeping, led by a one-eyed giant, who was naked to the waist, stood Don Miguel, numbed by despair and rage. Above and behind him on the poop, Lord Julian and Miss Bishop looked on, his lordship aghast at the fury of this cooped-up fighting, the lady's brave calm conquered at last by horror so that she reeled there sick and faint. Soon, however, the rage of that brief fight was spent. They saw the banner of Castile come fluttering down from the masthead. A buccaneer had slashed the halyard with his cutlass. The boarders were in possession, and on the upper deck groups of disarmed Spaniards stood huddled now like herded sheep. Suddenly Miss Bishop recovered from her nausea, to lean forward staring wild-eyed, whilst if possible her cheeks turned yet a deadlier hue than they had been already. Picking his way daintily through that shambles in the waist came a tall man with a deeply tanned face that was shaded by a Spanish headpiece. He was armed in back-and-breast of black steel beautifully damascened with golden arabesques. Over this, like a stole, he wore a sling of scarlet silk, from each end of which hung a silver-mounted pistol. Up the broad companion to the quarter-deck he came, toying with easy assurance, until he stood before the Spanish Admiral. Then he bowed stiff and formally. A crisp, metallic voice, speaking perfect Spanish, reached those two spectators on the poop, and increased the admiring wonder in which Lord Julian had observed the man's approach. |
| 2854 |
When first, three years ago, at Tortuga he had been urged upon the adventurer's course which he had followed ever since, he had known in what opinion Arabella Bishop must hold him if he succumbed. Only the conviction that already she was for ever lost to him, by introducing a certain desperate recklessness into his soul had supplied the final impulse to drive him upon his rover's course. That he should ever meet her again had not entered his calculations, had found no place in his dreams. They were, he conceived, irrevocably and for ever parted. Yet, in spite of this, in spite even of the persuasion that to her this reflection that was his torment could bring no regrets, he had kept the thought of her ever before him in all those wild years of filibustering. He had used it as a curb not only upon himself, but also upon those who followed him. Never had buccaneers been so rigidly held in hand, never had they been so firmly restrained, never so debarred from the excesses of rapine and lust that were usual in their kind as those who sailed with Captain Blood. It was, you will remember, stipulated in their articles that in these as in other matters they must submit to the commands of their leader. And because of the singular good fortune which had attended his leadership, he had been able to impose that stern condition of a discipline unknown before among buccaneers. How would not these men laugh at him now if he were to tell them that this he had done out of respect for a slip of a girl of whom he had fallen romantically enamoured? |
| 2855 |
How would not that laughter swell if he added that this girl had that day informed him that she did not number thieves and pirates among her acquaintance. Thief and pirate! How the words clung, how they stung and burnt his brain! It did not occur to him, being no psychologist, nor learned in the tortuous workings of the feminine mind, that the fact that she should bestow upon him those epithets in the very moment and circumstance of their meeting was in itself curious. He did not perceive the problem thus presented; therefore he could not probe it. Else he might have concluded that if in a moment in which by delivering her from captivity he deserved her gratitude, yet she expressed herself in bitterness, it must be because that bitterness was anterior to the gratitude and deep-seated. She had been moved to it by hearing of the course he had taken. Why? It was what he did not ask himself, or some ray of light might have come to brighten his dark, his utterly evil despondency. Surely she would never have been so moved had she not cared - had she not felt that in what he did there was a personal wrong to herself. Surely, he might have reasoned, nothing short of this could have moved her to such a degree of bitterness and scorn as that which she had displayed. That is how you will reason. Not so, however, reasoned Captain Blood. Indeed, that night he reasoned not at all. His soul was given up to conflict between the almost sacred love he had borne her in all these years and the evil passion which she had now awakened in him. |
| 2856 |
Extremes touch, and in touching may for a space become confused, indistinguishable. And the extremes of love and hate were to-night so confused in the soul of Captain Blood that in their fusion they made up a monstrous passion. Thief and pirate! That was what she deemed him, without qualification, oblivious of the deep wrongs he had suffered, the desperate case in which he found himself after his escape from Barbados, and all the rest that had gone to make him what he was. That he should have conducted his filibustering with hands as clean as were possible to a man engaged in such undertakings had also not occurred to her as a charitable thought with which to mitigate her judgment of a man she had once esteemed. She had no charity for him, no mercy. She had summed him up, convicted him and sentenced him in that one phrase. He was thief and pirate in her eyes; nothing more, nothing less. What, then, was she? What are those who have no charity? he asked the stars. Well, as she had shaped him hitherto, so let her shape him now. Thief and pirate she had branded him. She should be justified. Thief and pirate should he prove henceforth; no more nor less; as bowelless, as remorseless, as all those others who had deserved those names. He would cast out the maudlin ideals by which he had sought to steer a course; put an end to this idiotic struggle to make the best of two worlds. She had shown him clearly to which world he belonged. Let him now justify her. She was aboard his ship, in his power, and he desired her. |
| 2857 |
He laughed softly, jeeringly, as he leaned on the taffrail, looking down at the phosphorescent gleam in the ship's wake, and his own laughter startled him by its evil note. He checked suddenly, and shivered. A sob broke from him to end that ribald burst of mirth. He took his face in his hands and found a chill moisture on his brow. Meanwhile, Lord Julian, who knew the feminine part of humanity rather better than Captain Blood, was engaged in solving the curious problem that had so completely escaped the buccaneer. He was spurred to it, I suspect, by certain vague stirrings of jealousy. Miss Bishop's conduct in the perils through which they had come had brought him at last to perceive that a woman may lack the simpering graces of cultured femininity and yet because of that lack be the more admirable. He wondered what precisely might have been her earlier relations with Captain Blood, and was conscious of a certain uneasiness which urged him now to probe the matter. His lordship's pale, dreamy eyes had, as I have said, a habit of observing things, and his wits were tolerably acute. He was blaming himself now for not having observed certain things before, or, at least, for not having studied them more closely, and he was busily connecting them with more recent observations made that very day. He had observed, for instance, that Blood's ship was named the Arabella, and he knew that Arabella was Miss Bishop's name. And he had observed all the odd particulars of the meeting of Captain Blood and Miss Bishop, and the curious change that meeting had wrought in each. |
| 2858 |
On my soul, Lord Julian, it is yourself does the misapprehending. Are there not even notions of honour left in England? Oh, and there's more to it than that, even. D'ye think I could take a commission of King James's? I tell you I wouldn't be soiling my hands with it - thief and pirate's hands though they be. Thief and pirate is what you heard Miss Bishop call me to-day - a thing of scorn, an outcast. And who made me that? Who made me thief and pirate?" "If you were a rebel...?" his lordship was beginning. "Ye must know that I was no such thing - no rebel at all. It wasn't even pretended. If it were, I could forgive them. But not even that cloak could they cast upon their foulness. Oh, no; there was no mistake. I was convicted for what I did, neither more nor less. That bloody vampire Jeffreys - bad cess to him! - sentenced me to death, and his worthy master James Stuart afterwards sent me into slavery, because I had performed an act of mercy; because compassionately and without thought for creed or politics I had sought to relieve the sufferings of a fellow-creature; because I had dressed the wounds of a man who was convicted of treason. That was all my offence. You'll find it in the records. And for that I was sold into slavery: because by the law of England, as administered by James Stuart in violation of the laws of God, who harbours or comforts a rebel is himself adjudged guilty of rebellion. D'ye dream man, what it is to be a slave?" He checked suddenly at the very height of his passion. |
| 2859 |
Every foot of sail that she could carry had been crowded to the Arabella's yards, to catch the morning breeze. Ahead and on either side stretched the limitless expanse of ocean, sparkling golden in the sun, as yet no more than a half-disc of flame upon the horizon straight ahead. About him in the waist, where all last night had been so peaceful, there was a frenziedly active bustle of some threescore men. By the rail, immediately above and behind Lord Julian, stood Captain Blood in altercation with a one-eyed giant, whose head was swathed in a red cotton kerchief, whose blue shirt hung open at the waist. As his lordship, moving forward, revealed himself, their voices ceased, and Blood turned to greet him. "Good-morning to you," he said, and added "I've blundered badly, so I have. I should have known better than to come so close to Jamaica by night. But I was in haste to land you. Come up here. I have something to show you." Wondering, Lord Julian mounted the companion as he was bidden. Standing beside Captain Blood, he looked astern, following the indication of the Captain's hand, and cried out in his amazement. There, not more than three miles away, was land - an uneven wall of vivid green that filled the western horizon. And a couple of miles this side of it, bearing after them, came speeding three great white ships. "They fly no colours, but they're part of the Jamaica fleet." Blood spoke without excitement, almost with a certain listlessness. "When dawn broke we found ourselves running to meet them. |
| 2860 |
Even now Blood had no eyes for that. He turned to look at Miss Bishop, marvelling a little, after the manner in which yesterday she had avoided him, that she should now venture upon the quarter-deck. Her presence at this moment, and considering the nature of his altercation with Wolverstone, was embarrassing. Very sweet and dainty she stood before him in her gown of shimmering grey, a faint excitement tinting her fair cheeks and sparkling in her clear, hazel eyes, that looked so frank and honest. She wore no hat, and the ringlets of her gold-brown hair fluttered distractingly in the morning breeze. Captain Blood bared his head and bowed silently in a greeting which she returned composedly and formally. "What is happening, Lord Julian?" she enquired. As if to answer her a third gun spoke from the ships towards which she was looking intent and wonderingly. A frown rumpled her brow. She looked from one to the other of the men who stood there so glum and obviously ill at ease. "They are ships of the Jamaica fleet," his lordship answered her. It should in any case have been a sufficient explanation. But before more could be added, their attention was drawn at last to Ogle, who came bounding up the broad ladder, and to the men lounging aft in his wake, in all of which, instinctively, they apprehended a vague menace. At the head of the companion, Ogle found his progress barred by Blood, who confronted him, a sudden sternness in his face and in every line of him. "What's this?" the Captain demanded sharply. |
| 2861 |
Don't think I accept it willingly. For myself, I am entirely of Wolverstone's opinion. I accept it as the only way to save us all from the certain destruction into which my own act may have brought us. And even those of you who do not choose to follow me shall share the immunity of all, and shall afterwards be free to depart. Those are the terms upon which I sell myself to the King. Let Lord Julian, the representative of the Secretary of State, say whether he agrees to them." Prompt, eager, and clear came his lordship's agreement. And that was practically the end of the matter. Lord Julian, the butt now of good-humouredly ribald jests and half-derisive acclamations, plunged away to his cabin for the commission, secretly rejoicing at a turn of events which enabled him so creditably to discharge the business on which he had been sent. Meanwhile the bo'sun signalled to the Jamaica ships to send a boat, and the men in the waist broke their ranks and went noisily flocking to line the bulwarks and view the great stately vessels that were racing down towards them. As Ogle left the quarter-deck, Blood turned, and came face to face with Miss Bishop. She had been observing him with shining eyes, but at sight of his dejected countenance, and the deep frown that scarred his brow, her own expression changed. She approached him with a hesitation entirely unusual to her. She set a hand lightly upon his arm. "You have chosen wisely, sir," she commended him, "however much against your inclinations." He looked with gloomy eyes upon her for whom he had made this sacrifice. |
| 2862 |
I shall be glad to reach Port Royal." Captain Blood thrust a parchment under Calverley's bulging eyes. The officer scanned it, particularly the seals and signature. He stepped back, a baffled, impotent man. He bowed helplessly. "I must return to Colonel Bishop for my orders," he informed them. At that moment a lane was opened in the ranks of the men, and through this came Miss Bishop followed by her octoroon woman. Over his shoulder Captain Blood observed her approach. "Perhaps, since Colonel Bishop is with you, you will convey his niece to him. Miss Bishop was aboard the Royal Mary also, and I rescued her together with his lordship. She will be able to acquaint her uncle with the details of that and of the present state of affairs." Swept thus from surprise to surprise, Captain Calverley could do no more than bow again. "As for me," said Lord Julian, with intent to make Miss Bishop's departure free from all interference on the part of the buccaneers, "I shall remain aboard the Arabella until we reach Port Royal. 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. |
| 2863 |
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. |
| 2864 |
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. |
| 2865 |
Good-bye to you." Lord Julian wrung his hand in silence, went down the ladder, and was pulled ashore. From the distance he waved to Blood, who stood leaning on the bulwarks watching the receding cock-boat. The Arabella sailed within the hour, moving lazily before a sluggish breeze. The fort remained silent and there was no movement from the fleet to hinder her departure. Lord Julian had carried the message effectively, and had added to it his own personal commands. Five miles out at sea from Port Royal, whence the details of the coast of Jamaica were losing their sharpness, the Arabella hove to, and the sloop she had been towing was warped alongside. Captain Blood escorted his compulsory guest to the head of the ladder. Colonel Bishop, who for two hours and more had been in a state of mortal anxiety, breathed freely at last; and as the tide of his fears receded, so that of his deep-rooted hate of this audacious buccaneer resumed its normal flow. But he practised circumspection. If in his heart he vowed that once back in Port Royal there was no effort he would spare, no nerve he would not strain, to bring Peter Blood to final moorings in Execution Dock, at least he kept that vow strictly to himself. Peter Blood had no illusions. He was not, and never would be, the complete pirate. There was not another buccaneer in all the Caribbean who would have denied himself the pleasure of stringing Colonel Bishop from the yardarm, and by thus finally stifling the vindictive planter's hatred have increased his own security. |
| 2866 |
But Blood was not of these. Moreover, in the case of Colonel Bishop there was a particular reason for restraint. Because he was Arabella Bishop's uncle, his life must remain sacred to Captain Blood. And so the Captain smiled into the sallow, bloated face and the little eyes that fixed him with a malevolence not to be dissembled. "A safe voyage home to you, Colonel, darling," said he in valediction, and from his easy, smiling manner you would never have dreamt of the pain he carried in his breast. "It's the second time ye've served me for a hostage. Ye'll be well advised to avoid a third. I'm not lucky to you, Colonel, as you should be perceiving." Jeremy Pitt, the master, lounging at Blood's elbow, looked darkly upon the departure of the Deputy-Governor. Behind them a little mob of grim, stalwart, sun-tanned buccaneers were restrained from cracking Bishop like a flea only by their submission to the dominant will of their leader. They had learnt from Pitt while yet in Port Royal of their Captain's danger, and whilst as ready as he to throw over the King's service which had been thrust upon them, yet they resented the manner in which this had been rendered necessary, and they marvelled now at Blood's restraint where Bishop was concerned. The Deputy-Governor looked round and met the lowering hostile glances of those fierce eyes. Instinct warned him that his life at that moment was held precariously, that an injudicious word might precipitate an explosion of hatred from which no human power could save him. |
| 2867 |
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. |
| 2868 |
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. 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. |
| 2869 |
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. |
| 2870 |
But because my death might cause you pain, because your happiness was the thing that above all things he desired, he surrendered that part of his guarantee of safety which my person afforded him. If his departure should be hindered, and I should lose my life in what might follow, there was the risk that... that you might mourn me. That risk he would not take. Him you deemed a thief and a pirate, he said, and added that - I am giving you his own words always - if in choosing between us two, your choice, as he believed, would fall on me, then were you in his opinion choosing wisely. Because of that he bade me leave his ship, and had me put ashore." She looked at him with eyes that were aswim with tears. He took a step towards her, a catch in his breath, his hand held out. "Was he right, Arabella? My life's happiness hangs upon your answer." But she continued silently to regard him with those tear-laden eyes, without speaking, and until she spoke he dared not advance farther. A doubt, a tormenting doubt beset him. When presently she spoke, he saw how true had been the instinct of which that doubt was born, for her words revealed the fact that of all that he had said the only thing that had touched her consciousness and absorbed it from all other considerations was Blood's conduct as it regarded herself. "He said that!" she cried. "He did that! Oh!" She turned away, and through the slender, clustering trunks of the bordering orange-trees she looked out across the glittering waters of the great harbour to the distant hills. |
| 2871 |
Thus for a little while, my lord standing stiffly, fearfully, waiting for fuller revelation of her mind. At last it came, slowly, deliberately, in a voice that at moments was half suffocated. "Last night when my uncle displayed his rancour and his evil rage, it began to be borne in upon me that such vindictiveness can belong only to those who have wronged. It is the frenzy into which men whip themselves to justify an evil passion. I must have known then, if I had not already learnt it, that I had been too credulous of all the unspeakable things attributed to Peter Blood. Yesterday I had his own explanation of that tale of Levasseur that you heard in St. Nicholas. And now this... this but gives me confirmation of his truth and worth. To a scoundrel such as I was too readily brought to believe him, the act of which you have just told me would have been impossible." "That is my own opinion," said his lordship gently. "It must be. But even if it were not, that would now weigh for nothing. What weighs - oh, so heavily and bitterly - is the thought that but for the words in which yesterday I repelled him, he might have been saved. If only I could have spoken to him again before he went! I waited for him; but my uncle was with him, and I had no suspicion that he was going away again. And now he is lost - back at his outlawry and piracy, in which ultimately he will be taken and destroyed. And the fault is mine - mine!" "What are you saying? The only agents were your uncle's hostility and his own obstinacy which would not study compromise. |
| 2872 |
"This war with France removes all restrictions in the matter of Tortuga. We are free to invest it in the service of the Crown. A victory there and we establish ourselves in the favour of this new government." "Ah!" said Lord Julian, and he pulled thoughtfully at his lip. "I see that you understand," Bishop laughed coarsely. "Two birds with one stone, eh? We'll hunt this rascal in his lair, right under the beard of the King of France, and we'll take him this time, if we reduce Tortuga to a heap of ashes." On that expedition they sailed two days later - which would be some three months after Blood's departure - taking every ship of the fleet, and several lesser vessels as auxiliaries. To Arabella and the world in general it was given out that they were going to raid French Hispaniola, which was really the only expedition that could have afforded Colonel Bishop any sort of justification for leaving Jamaica at all at such a time. His sense of duty, indeed, should have kept him fast in Port Royal; but his sense of duty was smothered in hatred - that most fruitless and corruptive of all the emotions. In the great cabin of Vice-Admiral Craufurd's flagship, the Imperator, the Deputy-Governor got drunk that night to celebrate his conviction that the sands of Captain Blood's career were running out. Meanwhile, some three months before Colonel Bishop set out to reduce Tortuga, Captain Blood, bearing hell in his soul, had blown into its rockbound harbour ahead of the winter gales, and two days ahead of the frigate in which Wolverstone had sailed from Port Royal a day before him. |
| 2873 |
Christian, who commanded the Clotho, came storming to him one day, upbraiding him for his inaction, and demanding that he should take order about what was to do. "Go to the devil!" Blood said, when he had heard him out. Christian departed fuming, and on the morrow the Clotho weighed anchor and sailed away, setting an example of desertion from which the loyalty of Blood's other captains would soon be unable to restrain their men. Sometimes Blood asked himself why had he come back to Tortuga at all. Held fast in bondage by the thought of Arabella and her scorn of him for a thief and a pirate, he had sworn that he had done with buccaneering. Why, then, was he here? That question he would answer with another: Where else was he to go? Neither backward nor forward could he move, it seemed. He was degenerating visibly, under the eyes of all. He had entirely lost the almost foppish concern for his appearance, and was grown careless and slovenly in his dress. He allowed a black beard to grow on cheeks that had ever been so carefully shaven; and the long, thick black hair, once so sedulously curled, hung now in a lank, untidy mane about a face that was changing from its vigorous swarthiness to an unhealthy sallow, whilst the blue eyes, that had been so vivid and compelling, were now dull and lacklustre. Wolverstone, the only one who held the clue to this degeneration, ventured once - and once only - to beard him frankly about it. "Lord, Peter! Is there never to be no end to this?" the giant had growled. |
| 2874 |
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. |
| 2875 |
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. |
| 2876 |
"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. |
| 2877 |
Am I to submit at every turn to the dictates of this man Blood? Is the enterprise upon which we are embarked to be conducted as he decrees? Am I, in short, the King's representative in America, to be at the mercy of these rascals?" "Oh, by no means. I am enrolling volunteers here in Hispaniola, and I am raising a corps of negroes. I compute that when this is done we shall have a force of a thousand men, the buccaneers apart." "But in that case why not dispense with them?" "Because they will always remain the sharp edge of any weapon that we forge. In the class of warfare that lies before us they are so skilled that what Captain Blood has just said is not an overstatement. A buccaneer is equal to three soldiers of the line. At the same time we shall have a sufficient force to keep them in control. For the rest, monsieur, they have certain notions of honour. They will stand by their articles, and so that we deal justly with them, they will deal justly with us, and give no trouble. I have experience of them, and I pledge you my word for that." M. de Rivarol condescended to be mollified. It was necessary that he should save his face, and in a degree the Governor afforded him the means to do so, as well as a certain guarantee for the future in the further force he was raising. "Very well," he said. "Be so good as to recall this Captain Blood." The Captain came in, assured and very dignified. M. de Rivarol found him detestable; but dissembled it. "M. le Capitaine, I have taken counsel with M. |
| 2878 |
Le Gouverneur. From what he tells me, it is possible that a mistake has been committed. Justice, you may be sure, shall be done. To ensure it, I shall myself preside over a council to be composed of two of my senior officers, yourself and an officer of yours. This council shall hold at once an impartial investigation into the affair, and the offender, the man guilty of having given provocation, shall be punished." Captain Blood bowed. It was not his wish to be extreme. "Perfectly, M. le Baron. And now, sir, you have had the night for reflection in this matter of the articles. Am I to understand that you confirm or that you repudiate them?" M. de Rivarol's eyes narrowed. His mind was full of what M. de Cussy had said - that these buccaneers must prove the sharp edge of any weapon he might forge. He could not dispense with them. He perceived that he had blundered tactically in attempting to reduce the agreed share. Withdrawal from a position of that kind is ever fraught with loss of dignity. But there were those volunteers that M. de Cussy was enrolling to strengthen the hand of the King's General. Their presence might admit anon of the reopening of this question. Meanwhile he must retire in the best order possible. "I have considered that, too," he announced. "And whilst my opinion remains unaltered, I must confess that since M. de Cussy has pledged us, it is for us to fulfil the pledges. The articles are confirmed, sir." Captain Blood bowed again. In vain M. de Rivarol looked searchingly for the least trace of a smile of triumph on those firm lips. |
| 2879 |
That would seem the logical order in which this campaign should proceed." He ceased, and there was silence. M. de Rivarol sat back in his chair, the feathered end of a quill between his teeth. Presently he cleared his throat and asked a question. "Is there anybody else who shares Captain Blood's opinion?" None answered him. His own officers were overawed by him; Blood's followers naturally preferred Cartagena, because offering the greater chance of loot. Loyalty to their leader kept them silent. "You seem to be alone in your opinion," said the Baron with his vinegary smile. Captain Blood laughed outright. He had suddenly read the Baron's mind. His airs and graces and haughtiness had so imposed upon Blood that it was only now that at last he saw through them, into the fellow's peddling spirit. 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. |
| 2880 |
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. |
| 2881 |
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. 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. |
| 2882 |
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. 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. |
| 2883 |
But, then, they are secure. Any attempt to land on this side is doomed to failure at the hands of Nature." "Nevertheless, we make the attempt," said the obstinate Baron, whose haughtiness would not allow him to yield before his officers. "If you still choose to do so after what I have said, you are, of course, the person to decide. But I do not lead my men into fruitless danger." "If I command you..." the Baron was beginning. But Blood unceremoniously interrupted him. "M. le Baron, when M. de Cussy engaged us on your behalf, it was as much on account of our knowledge and experience of this class of warfare as on account of our strength. I have placed my own knowledge and experience in this particular matter at your disposal. I will add that I abandoned my own project of raiding Cartagena, not being in sufficient strength at the time to force the entrance of the harbour, which is the only way into the city. The strength which you now command is ample for that purpose." "But whilst we are doing that, the Spaniards will have time to remove great part of the wealth this city holds. We must take them by surprise." Captain Blood shrugged. "If this is a mere pirating raid, that, of course, is a prime consideration. It was with me. But if you are concerned to abate the pride of Spain and plant the Lilies of France on the forts of this settlement, the loss of some treasure should not really weigh for much." M. de Rivarol bit his lip in chagrin. His gloomy eye smouldered as it considered the self-contained buccaneer. |
| 2884 |
The absurd Baron's fierce eyes positively gleamed with satisfaction. "I pray Heaven they may sink all his infernal ships!" he cried in his frenzy. But Heaven didn't hear him. Scarcely had he spoken than there was a terrific explosion, and half the fort went up in fragments. A lucky shot from the buccaneers had found the powder magazine. It may have been a couple of hours later, when Captain Blood, as spruce and cool as if he had just come from a levee, stepped upon the quarter-deck of the Victoriense, to confront M. de Rivarol, still in bedgown and nightcap. "I have to report, M. le Baron, that we are in possession of the fort on Boca Chica. The standard of France is flying from what remains of its tower, and the way into the outer harbour is open to your fleet." M. de Rivarol was compelled to swallow his fury, though it choked him. The jubilation among his officers had been such that he could not continue as he had begun. Yet his eyes were malevolent, his face pale with anger. "You are fortunate, M. Blood, that you succeeded," he said. "It would have gone very ill with you had you failed. Another time be so good as to await my orders, lest you should afterwards lack the justification which your good fortune has procured you this morning." Blood smiled with a flash of white teeth, and bowed. "I shall be glad of your orders now, General, for pursuing our advantage. You realize that speed in striking is the first essential." Rivarol was left gaping a moment. Absorbed in his ridiculous anger, he had considered nothing. |
| 2885 |
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. |
| 2886 |
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. At noon on the morrow, shorn of defences and threatened with bombardment, Cartagena sent offers of surrender to M. |
| 2887 |
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. That done, he went at once in quest of M. de Rivarol. He found him in the offices which the Baron had set up in the town, with a staff of clerks to register the treasure brought in and to cast up the surrendered account-books, with a view to ascertaining precisely what were the sums yet to be delivered up. |
| 2888 |
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. 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. |
| 2889 |
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. |
| 2890 |
De Rivarol might escape them altogether. Their position then - according to Pitt's log - was approximately 75 deg. 30' W. Long. by 17 deg. 45' N. Lat., so that they had Jamaica on their larboard beam some thirty miles to westward, and, indeed, away to the northwest, faintly visible as a bank of clouds, appeared the great ridge of the Blue Mountains whose peaks were thrust into the clear upper air above the low-lying haze. The wind, to which they were sailing very close, was westerly, and it bore to their ears a booming sound which in less experienced ears might have passed for the breaking of surf upon a lee shore. "Guns!" said Pitt, who stood with Blood upon the quarter-deck. Blood nodded, listening. "Ten miles away, perhaps fifteen - somewhere off Port Royal, I should judge," Pitt added. Then he looked at his captain. "Does it concern us?" he asked. "Guns off Port Royal... that should argue Colonel Bishop at work. And against whom should he be in action but against friends of ours I think it may concern us. Anyway, we'll stand in to investigate. Bid them put the helm over." Close-hauled they tacked aweather, guided by the sound of combat, which grew in volume and definition as they approached it. Thus for an hour, perhaps. Then, as, telescope to his eye, Blood raked the haze, expecting at any moment to behold the battling ships, the guns abruptly ceased. They held to their course, nevertheless, with all hands on deck, eagerly, anxiously scanning the sea ahead. And presently an object loomed into view, which soon defined itself for a great ship on fire. |
| 2891 |
The helm was put over hard, and in a moment they were moving, the Elizabeth following, ever in obedience to the signals from the Arabella, whilst Ogle the gunner, whom he had summoned, was receiving Blood's final instructions before plunging down to his station on the main deck. Within a quarter of an hour they had rounded the head, and stood in to the harbour mouth, within saker shot of Rivarol's three ships, to which they now abruptly disclosed themselves. Where the fort had stood they now beheld a smoking rubbish heap, and the victorious Frenchman with the lily standard trailing from his mastheads was sweeping forward to snatch the rich prize whose defences he had shattered. 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. |
| 2892 |
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. |
| 2893 |
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. 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. |
| 2894 |
"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. |
| 2895 |
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. And now he came racing up, his bugler sounding the charge, the main host of the buccaneers following him, whilst the vanguard, led by the gunner Ogle, who had been driven from his guns by water in the gun-deck, leapt shouting to the prow of the Victorieuse, to whose level the high poop of the water-logged Arabella had sunk. Led now by Blood himself, they launched themselves upon the French like hounds upon the stag they have brought to bay. After them went others, until all had gone, and none but Willoughby and the Dutchman were left to watch the fight from the quarter-deck of the abandoned Arabella. For fully half-an-hour that battle raged aboard the Frenchman. Beginning in the prow, it surged through the forecastle to the waist, where it reached a climax of fury. The French resisted stubbornly, and they had the advantage of numbers to encourage them. |
| 2896 |
As he stood there, above the ghastly shambles in the waist of the Victorieuse, some one spoke behind him. "I think, Captain Blood, that it is necessary I should beg your pardon for the second time. Never before have I seen the impossible made possible by resource and valour, or victory so gallantly snatched from defeat." He turned, and presented to Lord Willoughby a formidable front. His head-piece was gone, his breastplate dinted, his right sleeve a rag hanging from his shoulder about a naked arm. He was splashed from head to foot with blood, and there was blood from a scalp-wound that he had taken matting his hair and mixing with the grime of powder on his face to render him unrecognizable. But from that horrible mask two vivid eyes looked out preternaturally bright, and from those eyes two tears had ploughed each a furrow through the filth of his cheeks. When the cost of that victory came to be counted, it was found that of three hundred and twenty buccaneers who had left Cartagena with Captain Blood, a bare hundred remained sound and whole. The Elizabeth had suffered so seriously that it was doubtful if she could ever again be rendered seaworthy, and Hagthorpe, who had so gallantly commanded her in that last action, was dead. Against this, on the other side of the account, stood the facts that, with a far inferior force and by sheer skill and desperate valour, Blood's buccaneers had saved Jamaica from bombardment and pillage, and they had captured the fleet of M. de Rivarol, and seized for the benefit of King William the splendid treasure which she carried. |
| 2897 |
Then bring him here to me. A moment." He wrote a hurried note. "That to Lord Willoughby aboard Admiral van der Kuylen's flagship." Major Mallard saluted and departed. Peter Blood sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, frowning. Time moved on. Came a tap at the door, and an elderly negro slave presented himself. Would his excellency receive Miss Bishop? His excellency changed colour. He sat quite still, staring at the negro a moment, conscious that his pulses were drumming in a manner wholly unusual to them. Then quietly he assented. He rose when she entered, and if he was not as pale as she was, it was because his tan dissembled it. For a moment there was silence between them, as they stood looking each at the other. Then she moved forward, and began at last to speak, haltingly, in an unsteady voice, amazing in one usually so calm and deliberate. "I... I... Major Mallard has just told me..." "Major Mallard exceeded his duty," said Blood, and because of the effort he made to steady his voice it sounded harsh and unduly loud. He saw her start, and stop, and instantly made amends. "You alarm yourself without reason, Miss Bishop. Whatever may lie between me and your uncle, you may be sure that I shall not follow the example he has set me. I shall not abuse my position to prosecute a private vengeance. On the contrary, I shall abuse it to protect him. Lord Willoughby's recommendation to me is that I shall treat him without mercy. My own intention is to send him back to his plantation in Barbados." She came slowly forward now. |
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