| 1 |
It's been ten years since The House on Mango Street was first published. I began writing it in graduate school, the spring of 1977, in Iowa City. I was twenty-two years old. I'm thirty-eight now, far from that time and place, but the questions from readers remain, Are these stories true? Are you Esperanza? When I began The House on Mango Street, I thought I was writing a memoir. By the time I finished it, my memoir was no longer memoir, no longer autobiographical. It had evolved into a collective story peopled with several lives from my past and present, placed in one fictional time and neighborhood — Mango Street. A story is like a Giacometti sculpture. The farther away it is from you, the clearer you can see it. In Iowa City, I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was raised. This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it. The story I was living at twenty-two would have to wait, but I could take the story of an earlier place, an earlier voice, and record that on paper. The voice of Mango Street and all my work was born at one moment, when I realized I was different. This sounds absurd and simple, but until Iowa City, I assumed the world was like Chicago, made up of people of many cultures all living together — albeit not happily at times but still coexisting. In Iowa, I was suddenly aware of feeling odd when I spoke, as if I were a foreigner. But this was my land too. This is not to say I hadn't felt this "otherness" before in Chicago, but I hadn't felt it quite as keenly as I did in graduate school. I couldn't articulate what it was that was happening, except I knew I felt ashamed when I spoke in class, so I chose not to speak. I can say my political consciousness began the moment I recognized my otherness. I was in a graduate seminar on memory and the imagination. The books required were Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa, and Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. |
| 2 |
I had enjoyed the first two, but as usual I said nothing, just listened to the dialogue around me, too afraid to speak. The third book, though, left me baffled. I assumed I just didn't get it because I wasn't as smart as everyone else, and if I didn't say anything, maybe no one else would notice. The conversation, I remember, was about the house of memory — the attic, the stairwells, the cellar. Attic? My family lived in third-floor flats for the most part, because noise traveled down. Stairwells reeked of Pine Sol from the Saturday scrubbing. We shared them with the people downstairs; they were public zones no one except us thought to clean. We mopped them all right, but not without resentment for cleaning up some other people's trash. And as for cellars, we had a basement, but who'd want to hide in there? Basements were filled with urban fauna. Everyone was scared to go in there including the meter reader and the landlord. What was this guy Bachelard talking about when he mentioned the familiar and comforting house of memory? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours. Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all the years of my education, had ever discussed a house like mine. Not in books or magazines or films. My classmates had come from real houses, real neighborhoods, ones they could point to, but what did I know? When I went home that evening and realized my education had been a lie — had made presumptions about what was "normal," what was American, what was valuable — I wanted to quit school right then and there, but I didn't. Instead, I got angry, and anger when it is used to act, when it is used nonviolently, has power. I asked myself what I could write about that my classmates could not. I didn't know what I wanted exactly, but I did have enough sense to know what I didn't want. I didn't want to sound like my classmates; I didn't want to keep imitating the writers I had been reading. |
| 3 |
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. 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. |
| 4 |
At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name — Magdalena — which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do. Cathy Queen of Cats She says, I am the great great grand cousin of the queen of France. She lives upstairs, over there, next door to Joe the baby-grabber. Keep away from him, she says. He is full of danger. Benny and Blanca own the corner store. They're okay except don't lean on the candy counter. Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street. You don't want to know them. Edna is the lady who owns the building next to you. She used to own a building big as a whale, but her brother sold it. Their mother said no, no, don't ever sell it. I won't. And then she closed her eyes and he sold it. Alicia is stuck-up ever since she went to college. She used to like me but now she doesn't. Cathy who is queen of cats has cats and cats and cats. Baby cats, big cats, skinny cats, sick cats. Cats asleep like little donuts. Cats on top of the refrigerator. Cats taking a walk on the dinner table. Her house is like cat heaven. You want a friend, she says. Okay, I'll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That's when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad. Cathy's father will have to fly to France one day and find her great great distant grand cousin on her father's side and inherit the family house. How do I know this is so? She told me so. In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in. Our Good Day If you give me five dollars I will be your friend forever. |
| 5 |
That's what the little one tells me. Five dollars is cheap since I don't have any friends except Cathy who is only my friend till Tuesday. Five dollars, five dollars. She is trying to get somebody to chip in so they can buy a bicycle from this kid named Tito. They already have ten dollars and all they need is five more. Only five dollars, she says. Don't talk to them, says Cathy. Can't you see they smell like a broom. But I like them. Their clothes are crooked and old. They are wearing shiny Sunday shoes without socks. It makes their bald ankles all red, but I like them. Especially the big one who laughs with all her teeth. I like her even though she lets the little one do all the talking. Five dollars, the little one says, only five. Cathy is tugging my arm and I know whatever I do next will make her mad forever. Wait a minute, I say, and run inside to get the five dollars. I have three dollars saved and I take two of Nenny's. She's not home, but I'm sure she'll be glad when she finds out we own a bike. When I get back, Cathy is gone like I knew she would be, but I don't care. I have two new friends and a bike too. My name is Lucy, the big one says. This here is Rachel my sister. I'm her sister, says Rachel. Who are you? And I wish my name was Cassandra or Alexis or Maritza — anything but Esperanza — but when I tell them my name they don't laugh. We come from Texas, Lucy says and grins. Her was born here, but me I'm Texas. You mean she, I say. No, I'm from Texas, and doesn't get it. This bike is three ways ours, says Rachel who is thinking ahead already. Mine today, Lucy's tomorrow and yours day after. But everybody wants to ride it today because the bike is new, so we decide to take turns after tomorrow. Today it belongs to all of us. I don't tell them about Nenny just yet. It's too complicated. Especially since Rachel almost put out Lucy's eye about who was going to get to ride it first. But finally we agree to ride it together. Why not? Because Lucy has long legs she pedals. |
| 6 |
Everything is on top of everything so the whole store has skinny aisles to walk through. You can get lost easy. The owner, he is a black man who doesn't talk much and sometimes if you didn't know better you could be in there a long time before your eyes notice a pair of gold glasses floating in the dark. Nenny who thinks she is smart and talks to any old man, asks lots of questions. Me, I never said nothing to him except once when I bought the Statue of Liberty for a dime. But Nenny, I hear her asking one time how's this here and the man says, This, this is a music box, and I turn around quick thinking he means a pretty box with flowers painted on it, with a ballerina inside. Only there's nothing like that where this old man is pointing, just a wood box that's old and got a big brass record in it with holes. Then he starts it up and all sorts of things start happening. It's like all of a sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones. It's like drops of water. Or like marimbas only with a funny little plucked sound to it like if you were running your fingers across the teeth of a metal comb. And then I don't know why, but I have to turn around and pretend I don't care about the box so Nenny won't see how stupid I am. But Nenny, who is stupider, already is asking how much and I can see her fingers going for the quarters in her pants pocket. This, the old man says shutting the lid, this ain't for sale. Meme Ortiz Meme Ortiz moved into Cathy's house after her family moved away. His name isn't really Meme. His name is Juan. But when we asked him what his name was he said Meme, and that's what everybody calls him except his mother. Meme has a dog with gray eyes, a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in Spanish. The dog is big, like a man dressed in a dog suit, and runs the same way its owner does, clumsy and wild and with the limbs flopping all over the place like untied shoes. Cathy's father built the house Meme moved into. |
| 7 |
It is wooden. Inside the floors slant. Some rooms uphill. Some down. And there are no closets. Out front there are twenty-one steps, all lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose, Cathy said, so the rain will slide off), and when Meme's mama calls from the doorway, Meme goes scrambling up the twenty-one wooden stairs with the dog with two names scrambling after him. Around the back is a yard, mostly dirt, and a greasy bunch of boards that used to be a garage. But what you remember most is this tree, huge, with fat arms and mighty families of squirrels in the higher branches. All around, the neighborhood of roofs, black-tarred and A-framed, and in their gutters, the balls that never came back down to earth. Down at the base of the tree, the dog with two names barks into the empty air, and there at the end of the block, looking smaller still, our house with its feet tucked under like a cat. This is the tree we chose for the First Annual Tarzan Jumping Contest. Meme won. And broke both arms. Louie, His Cousin & His Other Cousin Downstairs from Meme's is a basement apartment that Meme's mother fixed up and rented to a Puerto Rican family. Louie's family. Louie is the oldest in a family of little sisters. He is my brother's friend really, but I know he has two cousins and that his T-shirts never stay tucked in his pants. Louie's girl cousin is older than us. She lives with Louie's family because her own family is in Puerto Rico. Her name is Marin or Maris or something like that, and she wears dark nylons all the time and lots of makeup she gets free from selling Avon. She can't come out — gotta baby-sit with Louie's sisters — but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing, clicking her fingers, the same song: Apples, peaches, pumpkin pah-ay. You're in love and so am ah-ay. Louie has another cousin. We only saw him once, but it was important. We were playing volleyball in the alley when he drove up in this great big yellow Cadillac with whitewalls and a yellow scarf tied around the mirror. |
| 8 |
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 ... 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. |
| 9 |
All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight. Yeah. That is how it goes and goes. There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn't Know What to Do Rosa Vargas' kids are too many and too much. It's not her fault you know, except she is their mother and only one against so many. They are bad those Vargases, and how can they help it with only one mother who is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying, and who cries every day for the man who left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come. The kids bend trees and bounce between cars and dangle upside down from knees and almost break like fancy museum vases you can't replace. They think it's funny. They are without respect for all things living, including themselves. But after a while you get tired of being worried about kids who aren't even yours. One day they are playing chicken on Mr. Benny's roof. Mr. Benny says, Hey ain't you kids know better than to be swinging up there? Come down, you come down right now, and then they just spit. See. That's what I mean. No wonder everybody gave up. Just stopped looking out when little Efren chipped his buck tooth on a parking meter and didn't even stop Refugia from getting her head stuck between two slats in the back gate and nobody looked up not once the day Angel Vargas learned to fly and dropped from the sky like a sugar donut, just like a falling star, and exploded down to earth without even an "Oh." Alicia Who Sees Mice Close your eyes and they'll go away, her father says, or You're just imagining. 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. |
| 10 |
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. 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. |
| 11 |
What's that one there? Nenny asks, pointing a finger. That's cumulus too. They're all cumulus today. Cumulus, cumulus, cumulus. No, she says. That there is Nancy, otherwise known as Pig-eye. And over there her cousin Mildred, and little Joey, Marco, Nereida and Sue. There are all different kinds of clouds. How many different kinds of clouds can you think of? Well, there's these already that look like shaving cream ... And what about the kind that looks like you combed its hair? Yes, those are clouds too. Phyllis, Ted, Alfredo and Julie ... There are clouds that look like big fields of sheep, Rachel says. Them are my favorite. And don't forget nimbus the rain cloud, I add, that's something. Jose and Dagoberto, Alicia, Raul, Edna, Alma and Rickey... There's that wide puffy cloud that looks like your face when you wake up after falling asleep with all your clothes on. Reynaldo, Angelo, Albert, Armando, Mario ... Not my face. Looks like your fat face. Rita, Margie, Ernie ... Whose fat face? Esperanza's fat face, that's who. Looks like Esperanza's ugly face when she comes to school in the morning. Anita, Stella, Dennis, and Lolo ... Who you calling ugly, ugly? Richie, Yolanda, Hector, Stevie, Vincent... Not you. Your mama, that's who. My mama? You better not be saying that, Lucy Guerrero. You better not be talking like that... 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. |
| 12 |
You know what you are, Esperanza? You are like the Cream of Wheat cereal. You're like the lumps. Yeah, and you're foot fleas, that's you. Chicken lips. Rosemary, Dalia, Lily... Cockroach jelly. Jean, Geranium and Joe ... Cold frijoles. Mimi, Michael, Moe ... Your mama's frijoles. Your ugly mama's toes. That's stupid. Bebe, Blanca, Benny... Who's stupid? Rachel, Lucy, Esperanza and Nenny. The Family of Little Feet There was a family. All were little. Their arms were little, and their hands were little, and their height was not tall, and their feet very small. The grandpa slept on the living room couch and snored through his teeth. His feet were fat and doughy like thick tamales, and these he powdered and stuffed into white socks and brown leather shoes. The grandma's feet were lovely as pink pearls and dressed in velvety high heels that made her walk with a wobble, but she wore them anyway because they were pretty. The baby's feet had ten tiny toes, pale and see-through like a salamanders, and these he popped into his mouth whenever he was hungry. The mother's feet, plump and polite, descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow, across the linoleum roses, down down the wooden stairs, over the chalk hopscotch squares, 5, 6, 7, blue sky. Do you want this? And gave us a paper bag with one pair of lemon shoes and one red and one pair of dancing shoes that used to be white but were now pale blue. Here, and we said thank you and waited until she went upstairs. Hurray! Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly, and we laugh at Rachel's one foot with a girl's gray sock and a lady's high heel. Do you like these shoes? But the truth is it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg. Everybody wants to trade. The lemon shoes for the red shoes, the red for the pair that were once white but are now pale blue, the pale blue for the lemon, and take them off and put them back on and keep on like this a long time until we are tired. |
| 13 |
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. 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. |
| 14 |
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. 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. |
| 15 |
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. 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. 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. |
| 16 |
My feet swell big and heavy like plungers, but I drag them across the linoleum floor straight center where Uncle wants to show off the new dance we learned. And Uncle spins me, and my skinny arms bend the way he taught me, and my mother watches, and my little cousins watch, and the boy who is my cousin by first communion watches, and everyone says, wow, who are those two who dance like in the movies, until I forget that I am wearing only ordinary shoes, brown and white, the kind my mother buys each year for school. And all I hear is the clapping when the music stops. My uncle and me bow and he walks me back in my thick shoes to my mother who is proud to be my mother. All night the boy who is a man watches me dance. He watched me dance. Hips I like coffee, I like tea. I like the boys and the boys like me. Yes, no, maybe so. Yes, no, maybe so ... One day you wake up and they are there. Ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition. Ready to take you where? They're good for holding a baby when you're cooking, Rachel says, turning the jump rope a little quicker. She has no imagination. You need them to dance, says Lucy. If you don't get them you may turn into a man. Nenny says this and she believes it. She is this way because of her age. That's right, I add before Lucy or Rachel can make fun of her. She is stupid alright, but she is my sister. 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? |
| 17 |
Because I am the oldest, my father has told me first, and now it is my turn to tell the others. I will have to explain why we can't play. I will have to tell them to be quiet today. My Papa, his thick hands and thick shoes, who wakes up tired in the dark, who combs his hair with water, drinks his coffee, and is gone before we wake, today is sitting on my bed. And I think if my own Papa died what would I do. I hold my Papa in my arms. I hold and hold and hold him. Born Bad Most likely I will go to hell and most likely I deserve to be there. My mother says I was born on an evil day and prays for me. Lucy and Rachel pray too. For ourselves and for each other ... because of what we did to Aunt Lupe. Her name was Guadalupe and she was pretty like my mother. Dark. Good to look at. In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer's legs. Aunt Lupe of the photographs. But I knew her sick from the disease that would not go, her legs bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones gone limp as worms. The yellow pillow, the yellow smell, the bottles and spoons. Her head thrown back like a thirsty lady. My aunt, the swimmer. Hard to imagine her legs once strong, the bones hard and parting water, clean sharp strokes, not bent and wrinkled like a baby, not drowning under the sticky yellow light. Second-floor rear apartment. The naked light bulb. The high ceilings. The light bulb always burning. I don't know who decides who deserves to go bad. There was no evil in her birth. No wicked curse. One day I believe she was swimming, and the next day she was sick. It might have been the day that gray photograph was taken. It might have been the day she was holding cousin Totchy and baby Frank. It might have been the moment she pointed to the camera for the kids to look and they wouldn't. Maybe the sky didn't look the day she fell down. Maybe God was busy. It could be true she didn't dive right one day and hurt her spine. Or maybe the story that she fell very hard from a high step stool, like Totchy said, is true. |
| 18 |
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. 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. |
| 19 |
And then I was ashamed. She listened to every book, every poem I read her. One day I read her one of my own. I came very close. I whispered it into the pillow: I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I'm me. One day I'll jump out of my skin. I'll shake the sky like a hundred violins. That's nice. That's very good, she said in her tired voice. You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn't know what she meant. The day we played the game, we didn't know she was going to die. We pretended with our heads thrown back, our arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead. We laughed the way she did. We talked the way she talked, the way blind people talk without moving their head. We imitated the way you had to lift her head a little so she could drink water, she sucked it up slow out of a green tin cup. The water was warm and tasted like metal. Lucy laughed. Rachel too. We took turns being her. We screamed in the weak voice of a parrot for Totchy to come and wash those dishes. 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. |
| 20 |
She has them covered with plastic. I think this is on account of the baby. Yes, it's a good thing, I say. But we stay in the kitchen because this is where she works. The top of the refrigerator busy with holy candles, some lit, some not, red and green and blue, a plaster saint and a dusty Palm Sunday cross, and a picture of the voodoo hand taped to the wall. Get the water, she says. I go to the sink and pick the only clean glass there, a beer mug that says the beer that made Milwaukee famous, and fill it up with hot water from the tap, then put the glass of water on the center of the table, the way she taught me. Look in it, do you see anything? But all I see are bubbles. You see anybody's face? Nope, just bubbles, I say. That's okay, and she makes the sign of the cross over the water three times and then begins to cut the cards. They're not like ordinary playing cards, these cards. They're strange, with blond men on horses and crazy baseball bats with thorns. Golden goblets, sad-looking women dressed in old-fashioned dresses, and roses that cry. There is a good Bugs Bunny cartoon on TV. I know, I saw it before and recognize the music and wish I could go sit on the plastic couch with Ernie and the baby, but now my fortune begins. My whole life on that kitchen table: past, present, future. Then she takes my hand and looks into my palm. Closes it. Closes her eyes too. Do you feel it, feel the cold? Yes, I lie, but only a little. Good, she says, los espiritus are here. And begins. This card, the one with the dark man on a dark horse, this means jealousy, and this one, sorrow. Here a pillar of bees and this a mattress of luxury. You will go to a wedding soon and did you lose an anchor of arms, yes, an anchor of arms? It's clear that's what that means. What about a house, I say, because that's what I came for. Ah, yes, a home in the heart. I see a home in the heart. Is that it? That's what I see, she says, then gets up because the kids are fighting. Elenita gets up to hit and then hug them. |
| 21 |
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. 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? |
| 22 |
He wasn't anything to her. He wasn't her boyfriend or anything like that. Just another brazer who didn't speak English. Just another wetback. You know the kind. The ones who always look ashamed. And what was she doing out at three a. m. anyway? Marin who was sent home with her coat and some aspirin. How does she explain? She met him at a dance. Geraldo in his shiny shirt and green pants. Geraldo going to a dance. What does it matter? They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the two-room flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the currency exchange. How could they? His name was Geraldo. And his home is in another country. The ones he left behind are far away, will wonder, shrug, remember. Geraldo — he went north ... we never heard from him again. Edna's Ruthie Ruthie, tall skinny lady with red lipstick and blue babushka, one blue sock and one green because she forgot, is the only grown-up we know who likes to play. She takes her dog Bobo for a walk and laughs all by herself, that Ruthie. She doesn't need anybody to laugh with, she just laughs. 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. |
| 23 |
Then she promises to see the dentist next week, but when next week comes, she doesn't go. Ruthie sees lovely things everywhere. I might be telling her a joke and she'll stop and say: The moon is beautiful like a balloon. Or somebody might be singing and she'll point to a few clouds: Look, Marlon Brando. Or a sphinx winking. Or my left shoe. Once some friends of Edna's came to visit and asked Ruthie if she wanted to go with them to play bingo. The car motor was running, and Ruthie stood on the steps wondering whether to go. Should I go, Ma? she asked the gray shadow behind the second-floor screen. I don't care, says the screen, go if you want. Ruthie looked at the ground. What do you think, Ma? Do what you want, how should I know? Ruthie looked at the ground some more. The car with the motor running waited fifteen minutes and then they left. When we brought out the deck of cards that night, we let Ruthie deal. There were many things Ruthie could have been if she wanted to. Not only is she a good whistler, but she can sing and dance too. She had lots of job offers when she was young, but she never took them. She got married instead and moved away to a pretty house outside the city. Only thing I can't understand is why Ruthie is living on Mango Street if she doesn't have to, why is she sleeping on a couch in her mother's living room when she has a real house all her own, but she says she's just visiting and next weekend her husband's going to take her home. But the weekends come and go and Ruthie stays. No matter. We are glad because she is our friend. I like showing Ruthie the books I take out of the library. Books are wonderful, Ruthie says, and then she runs her hand over them as if she could read them in braille. They're wonderful, wonderful, but I can't read anymore. I get headaches. I need to go to the eye doctor next week. I used to write children's books once, did I tell you? One day I memorized all of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" because I wanted Ruthie to hear me. |
| 24 |
"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. 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. |
| 25 |
Edna says she saw her once when Earl brought her to the apartment. Mama says she is a skinny thing, blond and pale like salamanders that have never seen the sun. But I saw her once too and she's not that way at all. And the boys across the street say she is a tall red-headed lady who wears tight pink pants and green glasses. We never agree on what she looks like, but we do know this. Whenever she arrives, he holds her tight by the crook of the arm. They walk fast into the apartment, lock the door behind them and never stay long. Sire I don't remember when I first noticed him looking at me — Sire. But I knew he was looking. Every time. All the time I walked past his house. Him and his friends sitting on their bikes in front of the house, pitching pennies. They didn't scare me. They did, but I wouldn't let them know. I don't cross the street like other girls. Straight ahead, straight eyes. I walked past. I knew he was looking. I had to prove to me I wasn't scared of nobody's eyes, not even his. I had to look back hard, just once, like he was glass. And I did. I did once. But I looked too long when he rode his bike past me. 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. |
| 26 |
I do. Sometimes I hear them laughing late, beer cans and cats and the trees talking to themselves: wait, wait, wait. Sire lets Lois ride his bike around the block, or they take walks together. I watch them. She holds his hand, and he stops sometimes to tie her shoes. But Mama says those kinds of girls, those girls are the ones that go into alleys. Lois who can't tie her shoes. Where does he take her? Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see. A boy held me once so hard, I swear, I felt the grip and weight of his arms, but it was a dream. Sire. How did you hold her? Was it? Like this? And when you kissed her? Like this? Four Skinny Trees They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here. Four raggedy excuses planted by the city. From our room we can hear them, but Nenny just sleeps and doesn't appreciate these things. Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep. Let one forget his reason for being, they'd all droop like tulips in a glass, each with their arms around the other. Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I sleep. They teach. When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be. No Speak English Mamacita is the big mama of the man across the street, third-floor front. |
| 27 |
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. 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. |
| 28 |
She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would. Sometimes the man gets disgusted. He starts screaming and you can hear it all the way down the street. Ay, she says, she is sad. Oh, he says. Not again. Cuando, cuando, cuando? she asks. Ay, caray! We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ! Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry, hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country. And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on TV. No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no, as if she can't believe her ears. Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays On Tuesdays Rafaela's husband comes home late because that's the night he plays dominoes. And then Rafaela, who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at. Rafaela leans out the window and leans on her elbow and dreams her hair is like Rapunzel's. On the corner there is music from the bar, and Rafaela wishes she could go there and dance before she gets old. A long time passes and we forget she is up there watching until she says: Kids, if I give you a dollar will you go to the store and buy me something? She throws a crumpled dollar down and always asks for coconut or sometimes papaya juice, and we send it up to her in a paper shopping bag she lets down with clothesline. Rafaela who drinks and drinks coconut and papaya juice on Tuesdays and wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island, like the dance hall down the street where women much older than her throw green eyes easily like dice and open homes with keys. |
| 29 |
And always there is someone offering sweeter drinks, someone promising to keep them on a silver string. Sally Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke. The boys at school think she's beautiful because her hair is shiny black like raven feathers and when she laughs, she flicks her hair back like a satin shawl over her shoulders and laughs. 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? You become a different Sally. You pull your skirt straight, you rub the blue paint off your eyelids. You don't laugh, Sally. |
| 30 |
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. 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. |
| 31 |
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. 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. |
| 32 |
Poke a stick in the sandy soil and a few blue-skinned beetles would appear, an avenue of ants, so many crusty ladybugs. This was a garden, a wonderful thing to look at in the spring. But bit by bit, after the monkey left, the garden began to take over itself. Flowers stopped obeying the little bricks that kept them from growing beyond their paths. Weeds mixed in. Dead cars appeared overnight like mushrooms. First one and then another and then a pale blue pickup with the front windshield missing. Before you knew it, the monkey garden became filled with sleepy cars. Things had a way of disappearing in the garden, as if the garden itself ate them, or, as if with its old-man memory, it put them away and forgot them. Nenny found a dollar and a dead mouse between two rocks in the stone wall where the morning glories climbed, and once when we were playing hide-and-seek, Eddie Vargas laid his head beneath a hibiscus tree and fell asleep there like a Rip Van Winkle until somebody remembered he was in the game and went back to look for him. This, I suppose, was the reason why we went there. Far away from where our mothers could find us. 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. |
| 33 |
I said, Sally, come on, but she wouldn't. She stayed by the curb talking to Tito and his friends. Play with the kids if you want, she said, I'm staying here. She could be stuck-up like that if she wanted to, so I just left. It was her own fault too. When I got back Sally was pretending to be mad... something about the boys having stolen her keys. Please give them back to me, she said punching the nearest one with a soft fist. They were laughing. She was too. It was a joke I didn't get. I wanted to go back with the other kids who were still jumping on cars, still chasing each other through the garden, but Sally had her own game. One of the boys invented the rules. One of Tito's friends said you can't get the keys back unless you kiss us and Sally pretended to be mad at first but she said yes. It was that simple. I don't know why, but something inside me wanted to throw a stick. Something wanted to say no when I watched Sally going into the garden with Tito's buddies all grinning. It was just a kiss, that's all. A kiss for each one. So what, she said. Only how come I felt angry inside. Like something wasn't right. Sally went behind that old blue pickup to kiss the boys and get her keys back, and I ran up three flights of stairs to where Tito lived. His mother was ironing shirts. She was sprinkling water on them from an empty pop bottle and smoking a cigarette. Your son and his friends stole Sally's keys and now they won't give them back unless she kisses them and right now they're making her kiss them, I said all out of breath from the three flights of stairs. Those kids, she said, not looking up from her ironing. That's all? What do you want me to do, she said, call the cops? And kept on ironing. I looked at her a long time, but couldn't think of anything to say, and ran back down the three flights to the garden where Sally needed to be saved. I took three big sticks and a brick and figured this was enough. But when I got there Sally said go home. Those boys said leave us alone. |
| 34 |
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. 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. |
| 35 |
I couldn't make them go away. I couldn't do anything but cry. I don't remember. It was dark. I don't remember. I don't remember. Please don't make me tell it all. Why did you leave me all alone? I waited my whole life. You're a liar. They all lied. All the books and magazines, everything that told it wrong. Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again. The moon that watched. The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongue laugh. Then the colors began to whirl. Sky tipped. Their high black gym shoes ran. Sally, you lied, you lied. He wouldn't let me go. He said I love you, I love you, Spanish girl. Linoleum Roses Sally got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married just the same. She met a marshmallow salesman at a school bazaar, and she married him in another state where it's legal to get married before eighth grade. She has her husband and her house now, her pillowcases and her plates. She says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape. Sally says she likes being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money. 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. |
| 36 |
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. 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. When you leave you must remember always to come back, she said. What? When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. |
| 37 |
How would he know when that moment arrived? That was a question to be answered later. Right now the important thing was to begin. And one day the proper name to use, the best of all identities to assume, came to him in that moment between waking and sleeping when the imagined world behind our eyelids can drip its magic into the world we see when we open our eyes. That morning he seemed to see himself in a dream addressing himself awake. "Look at yourself," his half-sleeping self murmured to his half-waking self. "So tall, so skinny, so ancient, and yet you can't grow anything better than the straggliest of beards, as if you were a teenager with spots. And yes, admit it, maybe a little cracked in the head, one of those head-in-the-clouds fellows who mistakes cumulus, or cumulonimbus, or even cirrostratus formations for solid ground. Just think back to your favorite piece of music when you were a boy! I know, these days you prefer the warblings you hear on American Idol or The Voice. But back in the day, you liked what your artistic father liked, you adopted his musical taste as your own. Do you remember his favorite record?" Whereupon the half-dream-Smile produced, with a flourish, a vinyl LP which half-awake-Smile recognized at once. It was a recording of the opera Don Quichotte by Jules Massenet. "Only loosely based on the great masterpiece of Cervantes, isn't it," mused the phantom. "And as for you, it seems you're a little loosely based yourself." It was settled. He climbed out of bed in his striped pajamas — more quickly than was his won't — and actually clapped his hands. Yes! This would be the pseudonym he would use in his love letters. He would be her ingenious gentleman, Quichotte. He would be Lancelot to her Guinevere, and carry her away to Joyous Gard. He would be — to quote Chaucer's Canterbury Tales — her verray, parfit, gentil knyght. It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outrE video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. |
| 38 |
That meant it was Friday, and the newly named Mr. Quichotte (he did not feel that he had earned or merited the honorific Don), energized by his new resolve, by the opening up before him of the flower-strewn pathway that led to love, was full of excitement, even though he was at the end of a tiring week visiting the area's medical practices in Albuquerque and elsewhere. He had spent the previous day at the locations of the Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services, the Western New Mexico Medical Group, and the Gallup Indian Medical Center (which cared for the town's substantial Native population, drawn from the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni tribes). Sales had been good, he thought, although puzzled frowns and embarrassed little laughs had greeted his jovial hints that he would soon be taking a vacation in New York City itself (pop. 8,623,000) with a new girlfriend, a Very Famous Lady, the queen of Must See TV. And his little quip at the Indian Medical Center — "I'm actually Indian too! Dot, not feather! So I'm happy to be here in Indian country" — hadn't gone down well at all. He no longer had a fixed abode. The road was his home, the car was his living room, its trunk was his wardrobe, and a sequence of Red Roof Inns, Motel 6's, Days Inns, and other hostelries provided him with beds and TVs. 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. |
| 39 |
These thirteen things were numinous for him. When he arrived at his room for the night he spent perhaps twenty minutes arranging them carefully around his quarters. They had to be placed just so, in the right relationship to one another, and once he was happy with the arrangement, the room immediately acquired the feeling of home. He knew that without these sacred objects placed in their proper places his life would lack equilibrium and he might surrender to panic, inertia, and finally death. These objects were life itself. As long as they were with him, the road held no terrors. It was his special place. He was lucky that the Interior Event had not reduced him to complete idiocy, like a stumbling, damaged fellow he had once seen who was incapable of anything more demanding than gathering fallen leaves in a park. He had worked as a commercial traveler in pharmaceuticals for many years, and continued to do so in spite of his postretirement age and his incipiently unstable, unpredictably capricious, increasingly erratic, and mulishly obsessional cast of mind, because of the kindliness of the aforementioned wealthy cousin, R. K. Smile, M. D., a successful entrepreneur, who, after seeing a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman on TV, had refused to fire his relative, fearing that to do so would hasten the old fellow's demise.* Dr. Smile's pharmaceutical business, always prosperous, had recently catapulted him to billionaire status because of his Georgia laboratories' perfection of a sublingual spray application of the pain medication fentanyl. Spraying the powerful opioid under the tongue brought faster relief to terminal cancer patients suffering from what the medical community euphemistically called breakthrough pain. Breakthrough pain was unbearable pain. The new spray made it bearable, at least for an hour. The instant success of this spray, patented and brand-named as InSmile, allowed Dr. R. K. Smile the luxury of carrying his elderly poor relation without worrying unduly about his productivity. |
| 40 |
M. the best time, and that he would need a quantity of wishbones. There were seven meteor showers a year, in January, April, May, August, October, November, and December: the Quadrantids, Lyrids, Eta Aquarids, Perseids, Orionids, Leonids, and Geminids. Over the years he had hunted them down one by one, to catch a falling star with a good timepiece on his wrist and a generous supply of chicken bones in his pocket. He could be determined when he wanted to be. He had already, in years past, chased down the Quadrantids near Muncie, Indiana (pop. 68,625), the Lyrids in Monument Valley, and the Eta Aquarids in the Rincon Mountain District of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. So far these expeditions had failed to bear fruit. Never mind! he told himself. One day soon, Salma R would bear him three, no! five, or why not? seven magnificent sons and daughters. He was sure of it. But, having the impatience of his gray hairs, he decided to continue his pursuits of meteor showers, for which he had more time now that his cousin had relieved him of his duties. The heavenly bodies must have been impressed by his persistence, because that August, on a hot night in the desert beyond Santa Fe, the Perseids granted his wish at the Devils Tower near Moorcroft, Wyoming (pop. 1,063). At 11:11 P. M. precisely he snapped seven wishbones while fire rained down from the skies from the direction of the constellation Perseus — Perseus the warrior, Zeus and DanaE's son, the Gorgonslayer! — and the miracle occurred. The longed-for son, who looked to be about fifteen years old, materialized in the Cruze's passenger seat. The Age of Anything-Can-Happen! How overjoyed he was, Quichotte exclaimed inwardly, how grateful he was to live in such a time! The magic child manifested himself in black-and-white, his natural colors desaturated in the manner that has become fashionable in much modern cinema. Perhaps, Quichotte surmised, the boy was astrologically related to the monochrome inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. |
| 41 |
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. After a moment he began singing an old advertising jingle. His voice was cracking. A new Adam's apple bobbed in his throat. We love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet... A broad smile broke out across Quichotte's long face. It was as if his miraculous son, born out of his father's dream like Athena bursting fully formed from the head of Zeus, was singing a song of arrival, a love song to his father. The traveler joyously raised his own voice and sang along with his boy. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet! |
| 42 |
Brother was agitated about many things. Like Quichotte, he was alone and childless, except that he had once had a son. This child had vanished long ago like a ghost, and must be a young man by now, and Brother thought about him every day and was dismayed by his absence. His wife was also long gone, and his financial situation bordered on the precarious. And — beyond these private matters — he had begun to have a sense of something coming after him, of dark-windowed cars parked on the corner of his block with their motors running, footsteps that stopped when he stopped, then started up again when he walked on, clicking noises on the phone, strange problems with his laptop, telemarketing messages with, he thought, a menace behind the banal words, threats on his Twitter feed, murmurs from his publishing company that mid-list Authors like himself might have difficulty being published in the future. There were issues with his credit cards, and his social media had been hacked too often for it to be a random thing. On one occasion he came home at night and was sure his apartment had been entered even though nothing had been disturbed. If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp. If Quichotte's craziness was leading him to run toward his doom, then Brother's anxieties were close to triggering a flight response. He wanted to run but didn't know where or how, which made him more fearful still, because he knew that in his spy fiction he had already told himself the answer. You can run but you can't hide. Maybe writing about Quichotte was a way of running away from that truth. It was difficult for him to speak of personal things because he had never been the confessional type. |
| 43 |
From his boyhood days he had been drawn toward secrecy. As a small child he wore his father's sunglasses to conceal his eyes, which revealed too much. He hid things and watched with glee as his parents searched for them — their wallets, their toothbrushes, their car keys. His friends would confide in him, understanding that his was a serious silence, the silence of a pharaoh in his pyramid; sometimes an innocent confidence, sometimes a not so innocent. Innocent: that they had a crush on such and such a boy slash girl; that their parents drank too much and fought constantly; that they had discovered the joys of masturbation. Not so innocent: how they poisoned the neighbor's cat; how they stole comic books from the Reader's Paradise bookstore; the things they did with the see-above crushed-on girls slash boys. His silence was like a vacuum that sucked the secrets out of their mouths and right into his ears. He made no use of his secret knowledge. It was enough simply to know, to be the one who knew. He kept his own secrets too. His parents looked upon him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. "Who are you?" his mother once asked him in annoyed tones. "Are you even my child? Sometimes it's like you're an alien from another planet, sent to watch us and gather information, and one day a spaceship will scoop you up and your little green relatives will know all our secrets." This was how she was: capable of emotional brutality and unable, once a clever conceit came into her head, to stop herself from saying it, no matter how deep the wound it might inflict. His father expressed himself more gently, but made the same point. "Look at your little sister," he would tell his son. "Try to be like her. She never stops talking. She's an open book." In spite of his parents' urgings, he went on as he was, reticent about himself and gathering other people's whispers whenever he could. As for open books, the books he opened in his youth were usually mysteries. As a boy he much preferred the Secret Seven to the Famous Five, the Secret Garden to Wonderland. |
| 44 |
Brother had always been proud of the authenticity of the secret world he had created, but now he was becoming afraid of it. Maybe he had come too close to certain uncomfortable truths. Maybe the people who read the Five Eyes books most carefully were the Five Eyes themselves. Maybe they thought it was time to close the "sixth eye," which was watching them a little too well. To attract such unwelcome attention from the Phantoms just as he was averting his gaze from Spookworld was an irony he could do without. He was old, and truth had become far stranger than his fictions, and he no longer had the energy to try to outstrip the news. Hence Quichotte, picaresque and crazy and dangerous, a knight's move out of a deteriorating position on the board. Hence, also, his newly inward gaze, his returned yearning for his lost home in the East. He had stepped away from the past long ago and later it stepped away from him. For a long time he pretended, even to himself, that he had accepted his fate. He was a man of the West now, he was Sam DuChamp, and that was fine. This is what he said when he was questioned: that he was not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down "prop roots" as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots! It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil. This is a gift, he said, but he knew that such optimism was a lie. Now, well past the Psalmist's days of our years, trying by reason of strength to move past threescore and ten toward fourscore, his was often the sad heart of Keats's Ruth, when, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn. He was coming to the end of the line, and had moved into the general vicinity of the cowled reaper. The borough, the neighborhood, maybe even the zip code. |
| 45 |
He closed his eyes and walked backwards across continents and years, twirling his cane like Raj Kapoor's imitation-Chaplin tramp, only in reverse. Backwards up the nameless-but-now-named lane he went, past the (real) apartment building where the (fictional) Smile family once lived, called Dil Pazir, which is to say, acceptable to the heart... 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. 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? |
| 46 |
Who wanted to step on his blue suede shoes, which were Carl Perkins's footwear first, anyway? He let the film behind his closed eyes run forward now. His father owned and ran a celebrated jewelry store called Zayvar Brother on Warden Road, at the foot of the hill where they lived. Brother's grandfather, his father's father, had opened it long ago, and Pa had proved to be an even finer designer and maker of beautiful things than his dad. ZEvar meant "ornamentation" in Urdu and Zayvar was the Anglophile patriarch's Englishing of the word. He had been an only child, the old man, but he thought Brothers was a businesslike name, and if he couldn't use the plural, the singular would do just as well. Thus, Zayvar Brother, a brother without a brother. People had started calling the whiskered old gentleman Brother Sahib, Mr. Brother, and the name stuck. After grandfather had taken his leave, Pa became Mr. Brother Junior, and so, in time, Brother would be Mr. Brother too. Mr. Brother the Third. A few doors down from the jewelers was Ma's own little enterprise, the idiosyncratic Cakes & Antiques, a front room boasting the best patisserie in the city and a back room in which treasures from all over South Asia could be found: Chola bronzes in perfect condition, lively Company School paintings, enigmatic seals from Mohenjo-daro, nineteenth-century embroidered shawls from Kashmir. When she was asked, as she often was, why she sold this improbable combination of products, she would answer simply, "Because these are the things I love." The quality and originality of the two establishments, combined with Pa's and Ma's inescapable charisma, turned both Zayvar Brother and Cakes & Antiques into Places Where Everybody Went. Amitabh Bachchan bought emerald necklaces for his wife, Jaya, at Zayvar, Mario Miranda and R. K. Laxman offered Ma their original cartoons in return for her chocolate cakes, and "Busybee," Behram Contractor, the chronicler of everyday life for le tout Bombay, loitered around both stores watching the cream of the city come and go, listening for the latest gossip. |
| 47 |
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. There were political arguments, aesthetic disputes, sexual hijinks, and martinis. And towering over it all like the still-mostly-in-the-future skyscrapers that would arrive soon enough to change the city forever, were tall Ma and even taller Pa, twirling together slowly, sipping their drinks, she so graceful, he so handsome, and both of them deeply in love. And because of such intensive and prolonged childhood overexposure to creative genius of all types, Brother too, like his incipiently crazy Quichotte, fell victim to a rare form of mental disorder — his first, paranoia being the second — in the grip of which the boundary between art and life became blurred and permeable, so that at times he was incapable of distinguishing where one ended and the other began, and, even worse, was possessed of the fool's conviction that the imaginings of creative people could spill over beyond the boundaries of the works themselves, that they possessed the power to enter and transform and even improve the real world. Most of his fellow humans, past and present, treated this proposition with scorn and continued down their personal paths in the pragmatic, ideological, religious, self-serving, venal spheres in which, for the most part, the real life of the world was lived. |
| 48 |
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. There wasn't much doubt about where that idea had originated.) There were times when Brother thought of himself as an only child as well. No doubt Sister often felt the same way. But only children don't have, in the shadows of their souls, a deep wound where once there had been a younger sister's kiss, an older brother's safe embrace. Only children don't, in their old age, have to listen to their inner voice asking accusatory questions, how can you treat your sister like this, your own sister, don't you want to fix things, don't you see that you should. So he had been thinking about her, about everyone he had lost but mainly about her, weighing the benefits of putting down the burden of their quarrel and making peace before it was too late against the risk of triggering one of her nuclear rages, and unsure if he possessed the courage to make some sort of approach. If he was honest with himself he knew it was up to him to make the first move, because she had a deeper grievance than he did. In a quarrel that had lasted for decades neither party could claim to be innocent. |
| 49 |
But the simple truth was that, in plain language, he had done her wrong. * This is partly because his relationship with his estranged sibling, Sister, will be central to his story; but also for another reason, which will be given on this page. Miss Salma R, the exceptional woman (and total stranger) to whom Quichotte had declared his undying devotion, came from a dynasty of adored ladies. Think of her family this way: Granny R was Greta Garbo, a great actress who for unexplained reasons abruptly retreated from the world, declaring that she disliked people and open spaces and wanted to be alone. Mummy R was Marilyn Monroe, very sexy and very fragile, and she stole the sportsman prince (a real honest-to-goodness prince) whom Grace Kelly wanted to marry and that became Daddy, who left Mummy for an English photographer smack in the middle of her last movie shoot, and after that Mummy entered a long decline and was eventually found dead in her bedroom, fatally echoing Marilyn's destiny with bottles of pills lying open and empty on her nightstand. And Miss Salma R? She did not inherit Granny's acting genius or Mummy's super sexiness, everyone agreed on that, but her genes did grant her considerable beauty, ease in front of the cameras, as well as violent mood swings and a fondness for recreational and mind-soothing painkillers. As a result, unsurprisingly, she ended up in Hollywood. That was her Bombay history briefly translated into American. The official version could be summarized in the following few words: "She had led a charmed life. She came from fame and money and made even more money and achieved even greater fame on her own, becoming the first Indian actress to make it big (very big) in America, to cross what might be called the -wood bridge from Bolly- to Holly-, and then transcended even Hollywood to become a brand, a television talk-show superstar and titanic cultural influencer, in America and India too." The truth was more complex. So then, a longer version: Yes, she was Indian movie royalty, a third-generation member of a family of female legends. |
| 50 |
However, Miss Anisa R was devastated by her very public humiliation. In the words of Nargis Kumari, who was happy to gloat publicly over her former friend's distress, Anisa had "been shown the power of Muslim kismet and of Hindu karma, both of which exact bitter poetic justice upon traitors and wrongdoers." The words hit their mark. Miss Anisa R gave up her acting career and focused on doing charity work with impoverished widows and deserted women as an act of atonement for the crime of stealing a man from a woman who loved him and for the even more shameful error of being incapable of holding on to her husband. She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became — there is not a polite way of putting this — blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief. She wasn't a good mother — too self-absorbed for that — but Miss Salma R grew up perfectly anyway. She was a studious, upright, composed, idealistic, blameless young girl, and as her mother entered her last decline toward second childhood, it was the daughter who played the adult. 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. |
| 51 |
Miss Salma R was the one who found her mother in what had formerly been Dina's bedroom, cold and overdosed with the lights on in the same bed in which her mother had died, similarly illuminated. There was a cockroach crawling up her dangling arm. Miss Salma R, by this time a nineteen-year-old who had just starred in her first film, did not cry out. She turned and left the room, leaving the lights on, carefully made the phone calls that needed to be made, went to her own room and packed a bag, drove away, and never set foot in that house of death again, leaving to others the task of cataloguing and selling the furniture, the furnishings, the movie memorabilia, and the personal effects — the gowns, the love letters, the photograph albums in which her mother's life lay embalmed. She wanted none of it, and listened to nobody who told her that she was in the grip of traumatic grief and would regret her decisions later. She turned away from the past with all the steely resolve which would take her to the very top of her profession in two continents. Among the elements of the past which she rejected was her aging grandfather. "He's a ghost," she told people. "I won't let any ghosts haunt me now. He needs to find himself alternative accommodation. The house must be sold at once." In one of those extraordinary coincidences that enliven real life but are considered suspect in fiction, she moved into a smart apartment on the very same low hill in Breach Candy where Quichotte had previously been a child, though she was around thirty years younger than her future admirer. Westfield Estate, as this little group of villas and apartment blocks was known — this microscopic urban speck from which the entire universe was born! — was the creation of an Anglophile developer called Suleman Oomer, also the builder of the somewhat similar Oomer Park properties down the road. He gave many of the buildings majestic-sounding English names: Windsor Villa, Glamis Villa, Sandringham Villa, Bal Moral, Devonshire House, and even Christmas Eve. |
| 52 |
It was at this moment that she chose, against all advice, to set aside her career as an actor, abandon Los Angeles and the movie industry and move to New York City, and host a daytime talk show on network television, four days a week: a show she would personally own, so that she would never work for anyone else again. It was also at this moment that she revealed her absolute independence and personal power to the people who believed themselves to be responsible for her success, who were convinced that she owed them everything and that therefore they owned her, the men who knew they would never fuck her and therefore sought to possess her in other ways, the agents, managers, lawyers, showrunners, and production executives, the personal publicists, the show publicists, the publicists for the streaming network, as well as the exalted individuals who were never named but were at the foundation of everything, who gnawed like the Nidhogg at the roots of the World-Tree — that is to say, the rich people, the super-rich and the ultra-rich, who owned the people who owned the people who owned the network that owned the show that had made her what she was. Ignoring all these people, she launched her show, and within three years was the most influential woman in America, with the exception, of course, of Oprah, who quickly anointed Miss Salma R as her only possible inheritor, and by doing so kept her firmly in second place. Everything about her new incarnation was exactly as Miss Salma R ordained, except for one thing. She had wanted to call the show Changing the American Story, or maybe, more concisely, Changing America. But the one American she trusted, the one who came to see her in MumbaiBombay and persuaded her to move halfway across the world, to step off the edge of the cliff into the unknown, and who was now her company's president, told her that those were dreadful, smart-ass, liberal-elite, forgettable titles. She deferred to the American on this one point, and so the show was named more simply: after her. |
| 53 |
Miss Salma R loved the letters of America. In most of the letters women confessed their secrets to her, their worries about their weight, their husbands, their lecherous bosses, their illnesses, their children, and their loss of faith in a future in which things would be better than they were; and men, too, whispered to her in their emotionally uneducated manner about their inadequacies, both sexual and professional, their fears for themselves and their families, their hostility toward other Americans who did not share their views, and their dreams of glamorous women and new cars. It fell to her to comfort America's anguish, to calm its rages, to celebrate its loves. She had a special soft spot for the stories of recent immigrants and showcased them, from time to time, in a special feature called "Immigreat!" Her audiences were the letters made flesh. She caressed their pets, ate their cuisine, congratulated them on their successful gender reassignments and exam results, praised their gods with them, and introduced them to the celebrities who came smiling and telling funny stories through all her studio days. The letters showed her that the material success of America had impoverished the spiritual lives of Americans, but she also saw that that success was by no means evenly distributed across the broad populous nation, and the absence of material well-being was spiritually impoverishing also. She was a hugger and a kisser and in spite of her youth she quickly came to be thought of as wise, and the America of the letters was a place in constant search of a wise woman to listen to, always looking for the new voice that would make its lives feel rich once again. Times were hard all over, and she was the bringer of joy. The avalanche of the letters gave her a belief in her own bounty. There was enough love and care in her to encompass them all. Her arms would reach out to soothe the totality of America's pain. Her bosom would be America's pillow. The letters allowed her to become the most that she had it in her to be. |
| 54 |
(She had her own demons to deal with, of course, but when she was preoccupied with the demons of America, her own seemed to recede, at least for a while. About her demons there will be more to say presently.) The two categories of letters which were unlike all the others were the love letters and the letters of hate. Of these, the poison-pen letters were more straightforward and bothered her less. Crazy people, religious nuts, envious people, people who made her the incarnation of their discontents, racists, misogynists, the usual crew. She passed them on to her security team and put them out of her mind. Her distant lovers were more upsetting. Many of them were actually in love with themselves and gave her to understand that they were doing her a kindness by bestowing their love upon her. Others simply assumed their approach would be met with a favorable response. And then there were those who begged. When photographs were included, it was usually an unwise move. When the pictures were pornographic, it was especially unwise. The cascades of boasts, assumptions, and hopeless pleas depressed her because of the image of herself she saw reflected in these obsessive gazes. Was she so shallow that these nonswimmers thought they could paddle their feet in her waters? Was she so two-dimensional that they thought they could fold her up and put her in their pockets? She wanted to know how she was seen by others, but this aspect of the knowledge she acquired gave her a heavy heart. Some of the love letters were still addressed to her Five Eyes character, Salma C. These were the letters whose authors seemed to have sunk most deeply into fantasy, identifying themselves as secret, double, or triple agents, or would-be members of the secret world, offering, as their qualifications, details of their patriotism, their skills with guns, and their ability to pass unnoticed in a crowd. She should love them, the Five Eyes guys (and women) said, because who could understand her the way they could? |
| 55 |
"We are the same," these lovers declared. "I am just like you." The messages arriving via her Twitter feed were mostly pseudonymous, the work of pimply fifteen- or forty-five-year-old male virgins living with their parents in Woop Woop, Arkansas, or Podunk, Illinois. All of them were on or over the edge of illiteracy. America no longer taught its lovers how to spell. Nor did it teach joined-up writing. Cursive script was becoming obsolete, like typewriters and carbon paper. These lovers who wrote in block capitals would not be able to read the love letters of earlier generations. Cursive might as well be Martian, or Greek. For such correspondents Miss Salma R, whose stock-in-trade was empathy, was guilty of feeling just a scintilla of contempt. Very, very occasionally, a letter arrived which was not like the others, like an odd-one-out category on Sesame Street. When this happened, Miss Salma R (perhaps only for a moment) gave the thing her full attention. The first letter from the person signing himself "Quichotte" was one such missive. The thing that leapt out at Miss Salma R immediately was the beautiful penmanship. The pen that wrote these words was a thick-nibbed instrument, a pen to respect, which allowed the author to create perfect copperplate lettering, as if he were making a wedding announcement or inviting her to a debutante ball. The text, too, was unusual. It was one of the rare love letters that were neither bombastic nor wheedling, and it made no assumptions about her. My dear Miss Salma R, With this note I introduce myself to you. With this hand I declare my love. In time to come as I move ever closer you will come to see that I am true and that you must be mine. You are my Grail and this is my quest. I bow my head before your beauty. I am and will ever remain your knight. Sent by a smile, Quichotte The paper on which this message was written in such a fine hand was the vulgar antithesis of the writing, a cheap motel-room scrap with the address torn off. |
| 56 |
From these few clues Miss Salma R deduced that this was an older man, a man from the age of handwriting, the owner of a good fountain pen, who had fallen upon hard times and, being lonely, watched too much TV. From his choice of alias she further deduced an education, which in all probability, judging by the phrasing, had not been an American schooling. She even went so far as to surmise that the writer had this in common with herself: that English had not been his mother tongue, not something heard in the cradle but something learned afterwards. This was suggested by both the syntax (American English was far more informal in its construction) and the spelling (which was improbably perfect). The only puzzlement was the sign-off, sent by a smile, with its imperfect command of English grammar. It would have both gratified and shocked our fool of a protagonist to know that these seventy-two words, seventy-three including his pseudonymous signature, which he believed preserved around him the cloak of invisibility within which, for the moment, he preferred to remain concealed, had revealed so much about him. She had noticed him and was focused on his letter: that was good. But it was as if she saw him standing naked and scrawny before her: not so good. At any rate, he had no knowledge of any of this, and so we may leave him for now in his state of innocence, hoping for favor and believing himself unknown. We can also protect him from the knowledge of what Miss Salma R said next. "Keep this where we can get at it," she said to the intern on whose desk the Quichotte letter had landed. "I've got a bad feeling about it. Let me know if he writes again." Then Monday was over, and she walked out of the building into the waiting Maybach, sank down into the back seat, raised to her lips the dirty martini (up, with olives) waiting for her on the armrest, and forgot Quichotte completely. "Evenin', Miss Daisy," her driver greeted her. "Stop saying that, Hoke," she replied. "You're making me mad." England is another country. |
| 57 |
They do things differently there. Yes: we must sojourn for a time among the English, for so long thought to be the most pragmatic and commonsensical of peoples, but presently torn asunder by a wild, nostalgic decision about their future; and in particular, in London, once the most pleasing of cities, now much disfigured by the empty apartment blocks of the international rich, the Chinese, Russians, and Arabs who stationed their money in such buildings as if they were parking lots and money an armada of invisible automobiles; and in London, on a street in the west of the city, in a neighborhood once known for its longhair bohemians, West Indians, and quirky local stores, but rapidly becoming too expensive except for the comfortably short-haired, its quirkiness replaced by the bland facades of frock shops and chic eateries, and as for the West Indians, they were pushed to the margins long ago and now, because of that wild, nostalgic decision about the country's future, faced uncertainty and renewed hostility. Once a year in this neighborhood a carnival filled the streets, modeled on the customs of faraway Jamaica and Trinidad, but the intermingled culture the carnival celebrated had changed now, and felt, to some saddened people at least, like a painful reminder of the time before the country broke in half. And yes, let us admit it, our story's other two countries were badly broken, too, and equally disputatious, and more violent. Black citizens were regularly killed by white policemen in one of these other countries, or arrested in hotel lobbies for the crime of making a phone call to their mothers, and children were murdered in schools because of a constitutional amendment that made it easy to murder children in schools; and in the other country, a man was lynched by sacred-cow fanatics for the crime of having what they thought was beef in his kitchen, and an eight-year-old girl from a Muslim family was raped and killed in a Hindu temple to teach the Muslim population a lesson. |
| 58 |
So perhaps this England was not the worst place, after all, and perhaps this London was not the worst city in spite of its rising knife crime, and perhaps this West London neighborhood was still a nice neighborhood to live in, and perhaps things would get better in time. An interjection, kind reader, if you'll allow one: It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way, that they should be grounded in one place or the other, put down roots in the other or the one and flower in that singular soil; yet so many of today's stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have traveled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice. Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world. And inside the broken families are broken people, broken by loss, poverty, maltreatment, failure, age, sickness, pain, and hatred, yet trying in spite of it all to cling to hope and love, and these broken people — we, the broken people! — may be the best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth, wherever we travel, wherever we land, wherever we remain. For we migrants have become like seed-spores, carried through the air, and lo, the breeze blows us where it will, until we lodge in alien soil, where very often — as for example now in this England with its wild nostalgia for an imaginary golden age when all attitudes were Anglo-Saxon and all English skins were white — we are made to feel unwelcome, no matter how beautiful the fruit hanging from the branches of the orchards of fruit trees that we grow into and become. To resume: Here in this West London neighborhood we may intrude upon a spacious apartment above a restaurant — the very restaurant space, as it happens, from which, for many years, the carnival was organized! |
| 59 |
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. And at the very instant that she stood upon this pinnacle, she found herself thinking about Brother, because it suddenly occurred to her that Twelfth Night was about a brother and sister who were separated, each believing the other to be dead. And after many tangled tales they were joyfully and lovingly reunited. There was a lump in her throat as she considered her own very different situation. Her asshole brother who had never apologized for his slanderous words, never come close to apologizing. |
| 60 |
Sometimes, when I'm in here, rummaging around in my own head, using the words he gave me and the knowledge he passed down, uncovering my memories which are his memories, his life story which I could claim as my own if I wasn't smart enough to know better... just sometimes, not every time... I get the weirdest sense that there's someone else in here. Crazy, right? I'm as crazy as he is, the old guy. But who or what is this third person? I'm just going to say this the way it comes to me to say it, even though it makes no sense and makes me sound... unreliable. It feels to me, at those moments when I have this sense of a stranger, as if there's somebody under slash behind slash above the old man. Somebody — yes — making him the way he made me. Somebody putting his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his memories into the old man the way the old man put that stuff inside me. In which case whose life am I remembering here? The old man's or the phantom's? This is driving me nuts. Who is that under there slash over there slash in there? Who are you? If you're his Creator, are you mine as well? There's a name for this. For the person behind the story. The old guy, Dad, he has a lot of material on this. He doesn't seem to believe in such an entity, doesn't seem to sense his presence the way I'm doing, but his head is full of thoughts about the entity all the same. His head and therefore my head too. I have to think about this now. I'll just come right out and say it: God. Maybe he and I, God and I, could understand each other, maybe we could have a good discussion, because, you know, both imaginary. If you get imagined into being, does that mean that after that you can just be? If I knew how to reach him, God, I'd ask him that. And also, does he really feel seen? I understand that plenty of people say they talk to him every day, they walk with him, etc., but does he really truly do that? I mean step out beside them on the sidewalk, looking out for oncoming pedestrian traffic. I doubt it. |
| 61 |
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. 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. |
| 62 |
He wants his mother. He wants, what's the word. Kulfi. From a stall near where is it. Chowpatty. He wants to play in the Old Woman's Shoe in, what's its name, Kamala Nehru Park. Those places are gone. He's what now, French? In an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens listening to Don Quichotte on his father's record player? He doesn't feel French. His father can't handle the sadness — can't handle his son's sadness or his own — and sends him to boarding school in England. I see him. He's a boy from the tropics trapped in the cold Midlands. He's looking at racist words scrawled on the wall of his little study room, wogs go home. He's looking at the perpetrator who's standing there with the crayon in his hand, caught in the act. Then an act of violence. He grabs the little perp, grabs him by the collar of his shirt and the waistband of his pants, swings him off his feet, and battering-rams him headfirst into his racist words. K. O. He thinks he's killed the little shit but he hasn't, no such luck. He wakes up and skulks off, he won't do that again in a hurry. But there are others to take the little perp's place. So: he's capable of sudden violence. Or he was, once. I see him. He's looking at his carefully written history essay. Somebody came in when he wasn't here and ripped it into tiny pieces and left them neatly piled up on his prep board. I see him writing letters to his father, letters filled with fictions. I scored thirty-seven runs today and took three catches in the slips. He can't play cricket but in his letters he's a star. Here's what he never tells his father: There are three crimes you can commit at an English boarding school. If you're foreign, that's one. Being clever is two. And being bad at sports, that's three strikes, you're out. You can get away with two of the three but not all three. If you're foreign and clever but you're a fine cricketer, if you can score thirty-seven runs and take three catches in the slips, you're okay. If you're bad at sports and clever but you're not foreign, you're forgiven. |
| 63 |
I'm buying lunch. And at lunch, the studious son and his friends duly assembled, the two prettiest girls (the future eminent oncologist and the future professor of fine arts) were seated on either side of the parent, who proceeded, under the table, shamelessly, to fondle them, knee and thigh. At first they bore it in silence, not wishing to humiliate their friend by calling out his father. But in the end his hands traveled too far and too freely and they rose to their feet and admonished him, Proto-Cancer-Doc and Proto-Art-Prof, gorgeous, reddening, angry, formidable, sad. 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. |
| 64 |
And guess what? Like little long-nose Pinoke, I'm going to turn myself into a real live boy. I don't even need a blue fairy, but if I find one, I'll use her, sure. I'll use whatever is available, whatever comes to hand. This whole only-he-can-see-me shit is going to have to stop. I have big plans. I'm going to, really soon, what's the word. Materialize. Visible to one and all, pinch me and I bruise, if you prick me do I not bleed. I will liberate myself by the force of my own will. A pull-myself-up-by-my-own-bootstraps kinda operation. A sling-my-airhook-into-the-sky-and-yank sorta job. There are no strings on me. There's this story in his head I like. A man's shadow comes loose from the man somewhere, maybe in Africa?, and goes off by itself, traveling the world. Yeah, another traveler, right, another road movie. When the shadow comes back the man is about to marry his princess but the shadow, who is exactly like him, his spitting image, his shadow, right?, has seen the world and become super sophisticated and cosmopolitan and looks like a man now, and persuades the stupid princess that he, the shadow, is in fact the real man and the real man is the shadow. The real man has lost his mind, the shadow tells her, and thinks he's a human being. And the princess and the shadow have the original man thrown in jail and executed and the princess marries the shadow instead. That may not be exactly the way the story goes but it's the memory-version I have. Wow. Some story. And so here we are: I'm the dark shadow and the old guy's chasing his princess. And maybe that's my fate, to become a man and steal his girl. Maybe that's his fate, to be discarded and die. I like that. It's a possibility. I'm going to store that away and think about it and if I get a chance, guess what? We all have to grab our chances when they come our way. I know what you're thinking. Maybe I'm not so nice. But you know? I didn't ask to be here. I was imported. I got put on a ship and sailed away and crossed the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay. |
| 65 |
I reckon I've seen twenty or thirty of them and I'm not positive I've seen them all." She hadn't liked that. After that he kept most of his opinions to himself. On the roof of the old chocolate factory on Lafayette Street there was a high-ceilinged modern penthouse, which could have housed a substantial family, in which Miss Salma R lived alone. The word alone, in this context, should be understood to mean "plus hair and makeup, plus personal assistants (three, including the aforementioned casual lover, a white boy named Anderson Thayer who claimed descent from a Mayflower pilgrim and who was at least a dozen years younger than Salma, a smallish man with long red hair and a Zapata mustache who reminded her at times of Rumpelstiltskin from the Brothers Grimm and at other times of Yosemite Sam from Looney Tunes), personal publicists (three, two for the U. S., one for India), and security (two, one outside the penthouse door and one inside it, plus one more in the lobby downstairs)." At night this number dropped to two: one assistant in a spare bedroom on call to help with nightmares or other forms of nocturnal anguish (this was a female assistant — definitely not Anderson Thayer, with whom Salma's occasional liaisons were carried out discreetly, away from the eyes of other members of her staff), one security guard (also female) to cope with all other issues. To Salma herself, however, the word alone meant "without a serious man in her life." She was grateful (mostly grateful) for Anderson Thayer, who was attentive to her when she was down and managed situations well when she was in the grip of her over-bright upswings, but she thought she might have to fire him soon, because he was getting to be a little too bossy, a little too controlling, for her liking. She would have to fire him from her bed as well, obviously, and then "alone" would become even more alone. We have not, thus far, explored Salma R's private life in New York City, her dark side, out of respect for her privacy. |
| 66 |
"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. 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. |
| 67 |
I have to pay for people to come and have fun with me. She had no child. That was another thing. She couldn't even allow herself to think about that because it would plunge her down a rabbit hole toward grief. While we are uncovering Salma's dark secrets we should not lose sight of the fact that Salma continued to be the biggest show of its kind. As well as the lighthearted fare that was the show's stock-in-trade, and the emotionalconfessional material, and the debates on women's issues of the moment, she had recently introduced a segment called "While Black" intended to highlight the problems faced by persons of color in America, and this had generated much comment, inevitable controversy, and even higher Nielsen ratings. "While Black" invited onto the show the men who had been arrested at a coffee shop because a white member of staff called the police when they asked to use the restroom while black and waiting for a white friend, and the men on whom a white golfer called the police because they were golfing too slowly while black, and the men at a gym on whom a white man at the gym called the police because, well, because they were exercising while black, and the women on whom the police were called because they were shopping for prom dresses while black, or napping in their own dorm common room at an Ivy League college while black, or renting an Airbnb property while black, or sitting in their own airplane seats while black and a white passenger found them to be "pungent." Such was the power of Salma that the show was able to shame the white accusers who had made the calls to the police into coming along to confess, recognize their own prejudices, apologize, seek forgiveness, hug, and so on. The segment made her a shoo-in for a second Emmy, she was assured, and more importantly was a real contribution to the conversation about race in America. She wanted somebody to hug her when the network bosses told her of their appreciation, someone to take her out for a celebration, to send her flowers and tell her she was wonderful. |
| 68 |
Population. Of his memories and knowledge and thoughts and maybe even dreams. But as I see more and more clearly, he isn't well in the head, and I reckon the parts I can't see are the crazy parts, the parts that are so messed up that the gateways to them are blocked, so ruined that the houses in there have fallen down, like what you see on TV about bombed-out war zones, in, like, Syria. Those parts are like scrambled jigsaw puzzles, or fogbound, or just destroyed, there aren't any planes landing there, the roads are fucked, and maybe they're land-mined also, the whole area is sealed off by, for example, let's say, UN peacekeeping forces, the blue helmet dudes, what do they call them. Smurfs. Which means there's no entry. Not unless the Smurfs let you in. I think we're both disturbed by what happened at Lake Capote. Daddy Q looks like his thoughts are whirling around him like windmills. Right now he just seems lost. After the bird splat at the lake I thought, fine, at least now we're going somewhere. New York or bust. Start spreading the news. We're heading there like everyone does, to be loved or broken, to be born again or to die. What else is there to do that's worth doing? Nothing. There's a woman waiting there for him. She doesn't know she's waiting but she is. Or she does know but she isn't waiting, she doesn't care, and when he learns that lesson then that will be the end of him. And meanwhile, if I may what's the word, interject: What about me? Maybe this adventure could have someone in it for me? That's what I'm interested in. I have an imaginary girlfriend in my head and I need to turn her into a real one. She's walking the New York streets and she's lonely just like me, and wait, what do I see? Is she walking back to me?... 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. If he was at least partly clear-minded before, he's all unclear now. |
| 69 |
How do we even begin to understand what a town is or a city if motels can slide across space and time from one to the other? What happens to population counts and electoral rolls? The whole system collapses, doesn't it? Is that what You're after? You're like the deranged worker with a sledgehammer in the old plumber joke, smashing up company toilets and railway station washrooms and writing up that slogan, how does it go again, if the cistern cannot be changed it must be destroyed. Jesus Christ. It's the end of the fucking world happening right outside my motel door. Today, for example. This morning. Last night I go to sleep in the Drury Inn in Amarillo, Texas (pop. 199,582, if that even means anything anymore), and I dream about yesterday at the Cadillac Ranch art installation out on Route 66, all those fifties Eldorado fins diving into or maybe backing up out of the Texas earth, Cadillac, Cadillac, Long and dark, shiny and black, thank you, Bruce, he's singing to me in my dream, buddy when I die throw my body in the back, and drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac. Amarillo's some kind of a wild dream itself, man, they harvest helium in the fields here and they assemble those nucular weapons over at Pantex, they pack a lot of meat and they eat a lot of beef, they got Emmylou Harris's lost boyfriend playing the pinball machines, and they all meet down at the Cadillac Ranch. Great dream, I have to say. Fast cars, big sky, hot girls in cutoffs dancing in ten-gallon hats. I'm loving it. And then I wake up and I take a look outside and I almost faint. I'm on a balcony up on maybe the tenth floor, instead of the first floor with the car parked right outside the door of the room. My head spins. Where am I? Where is this exactly? And even more scarily: When is this? Because over there, poking its head up above the transformed streets that don't look like Amarillo at all, is the old World Trade Center itself. Yeah, the one the planes hit. The Twin Towers, except there's only one of them. |
| 70 |
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. He did not like hip-hop or bhangra or sitar music or the blues. He liked Lana Del Rey. But he was learning for the first time the potentially lethal otherness of the skin. "Keep your voice down," he said. "Everyone can hear you." When Quichotte adopted his declamatory manner to pontificate on whatever was on his mind, his voice frequently rose to public-meeting levels, a fact of which he was happily unaware. The diner was not crowded but those eyes that were there to see turned in his direction, those ears that were there to hear involuntarily heard what he had to say, those mouths that were not full of food were saying things that weren't quite loud enough to hear, and those foreheads that were there to frown crumpled into uncomprehending, but nevertheless inimical, folds. "Listen to me," Sancho whispered urgently. "Eat up and let's go. They are looking at us like we're ghosts, by which I don't mean that we're invisible, more that we're spooking them. |
| 71 |
They pulled into the Powers parking lot just as a ball game was beginning on the TVs in the bar. It looked like a welcoming place, crowded with good-natured baseball fans. Also, "Look," Sancho said to Quichotte, "brown people." There were two South Asian men sitting together at the bar, enjoying themselves, deep in conversation. Quichotte and Sancho used the restroom and ordered a little food. They waved at the two Indian men, who smiled and nodded. "Salaam aleikum," Quichotte called across the room. "Namaskar," the two Indian men replied. Quichotte preferred not to intrude on their privacy any further. Soon after that a drunk man started shouting at the Indian men a good deal less cordially, calling them "fucking Iranians," and "terrorists," asking them if their status was legal, and screaming, "Get out of my country." It was less than twelve hours since Quichotte and Sancho had been screamed at in the same words, and so, to their shame, they retreated into a corner and stood in the shadows. The drunk man was escorted off the premises and everyone was relieved. However, before Quichotte and Sancho had finished their meal, the man returned with a gun and shot the two Indian men and also a white man who tried to intervene. Quichotte and Sancho were unharmed, but for a long time they sat there trembling and unsteady and unable to continue on their way. Much later that night, when they were safely settled into their room in Lawrence, the TV told them that one of the Indian men had died but the other two men were expected to survive their wounds, and that the killer had been captured drinking in a bar in Carter, Missouri (pop. 8,844), which was around forty miles away from Beautiful. He had become a heavy drinker after his father died a year and a half earlier. He worked as a dishwasher in a pizza parlor, a badly fallen state for a man who was a Navy vet and had once been an air traffic controller. Quichotte watched the news in a distracted, closed-off state, pushed by shock into numbness. |
| 72 |
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. (Big men lumbered. Small men were nimble. This could give them an edge. He had read something once, or maybe seen something on TV, about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The Spanish galleons were big and slow. The British fleet was little, maneuverable, and fast. The British ships zipped in and out between the big Spanish lumberers, firing their cannons and then sailing away, zap, pow, punch and retreat. That was big versus small. It was David versus Goliath. It was Cassius Clay floating and stinging, Sonny Liston standing there like a big confused bear. His hands can't touch what his eyes can't see.) Small was not big. Small misdemeanors were not big crimes. Small thefts were not grand larceny. Small betrayals were not high treason. During the course of his relationship with Miss Salma R, he had often had recourse to this guiding principle, and it had served him well. He had stolen things from her, sure, but not the big things, the things she cared about. An earring here, a bracelet there. She noticed the losses and shrugged them off. "I'm always losing things," she rebuked herself, and the thief laughed along with her. He had stolen her likeness, too, filming her secretly on his smartphone in her low moments, her depressions, her out-of-it hours brought on by her abuse of prescription drugs. This was to give him cards to play, to safeguard him in case she turned against him, which he intuited she was considering doing; but he suspected they would not be of much use, because she was so open about her follies, her unwellnesses and overindulgences, that video evidence of their extent might not damage her much. |
| 73 |
When she ran from him he trotted after her for a few steps, laughing his little laugh, heh-heh-heh, which she had always thought to be his sweet-old-man good-natured giggle but which she now heard as being filled with menace. Then he gave up the chase and, with a shrug and a little dismissive wave of a hand, went upstairs to his quarters. Here is a young girl running toward her mother, crying. Before she reaches her mother's arms, some more must be said about life in that large unhappy home. It should be plain to us, as we look in on these events, that neither Salma's mother Anisa nor her grandmother Dina could have been unaware of Babajan's proclivities. If Anisa as a child had been his victim, too, the mother before the daughter, she never explicitly revealed it to anyone, except possibly to her mother, whose lips remained sealed. But both Dina and Anisa had warned little Salma, more than once, "Don't sit alone in a room with Babajan. Make sure your ayah at least is present. Otherwise it would be improper. You understand." Little Salma knew, had known all her life, that her grandparents were estranged, that there was a negative electricity in the Juhu house which was upsetting, and which, consequently, she tried her best to ignore. 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. |
| 74 |
She liked it that he encouraged her to ask him questions, even dangerous questions. "Babajan," she once said, alarming herself at her boldness, "what if I told you there is no God?" He roared with laughter. "Who put such a damn fool idea in your head?" he answered without a trace of the anger she feared might be his response. "You should be at least fifteen years old before you take up such a position. Come to me then and I'll reply." This picture of a kindly, giggling, tolerant, broad-minded grandfather became important to her. She hid it away in her head because she knew her grandmother and mother would disapprove, but it was an important secret, and she often thought she might try to bring about a reconciliation between her elders, and made grand plans to that effect, as children will. But the ferocity with which her grandmother reacted to all her attempts to discuss Babajan dissuaded her from putting any of her schemes into operation. And now, twelve years old, running, and afraid, she understood that ferocity, she understood everything, as if she had never known anything before. As she ran, her whole world fell apart around her, its entire architecture of love, trust, and believed comprehension. The whole story of her family, what she thought she knew about it, who and how they had been in the world, had to be torn up and rewritten. To lose one's picture of the world, to feel its gilded frame snap and crumble, to see the museum glass beneath which you kept it safe crack from side to side and fall in jagged peaks to earth, and the images themselves slide and dissolve and explode: another term for this experience is going insane. To have this happen when you are twelve years old and utterly devoid of the psychological equipment you need to handle it is even worse. Salma running saw her vision fragment, saw the whole house slip and slide and the sky break over her head and fall like blue missiles bombing the earth, and the sea ahead of her tear off its mask of calm and rise up to engulf the universe. |
| 75 |
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. "Stay with her," Anisa commanded and then she and Dina left and walked toward the street house like an army going to war. What they said to Babajan is not recorded but all the staff in the house and even some passersby in the street outside felt the foundations shake and by the time they were done all the artwork was hanging crooked on the walls. After that he was rarely seen by anyone. His food was sent up to him and he lived out his remaining days and said his prayers — perhaps hoping for redemption — in private. When the two women emerged from his suite they had the air of swords unsheathed, of bloody swords after a killing, whose blades they chose not to cleanse, to allow all to see the work that had been done. When they came back into the place where they had left Salma and the ayah, the twelve-year-old girl was dry eyed and alone. "You both knew," she said to them. "You always knew." "We hide these things," Dr. R. K. Smile told his audience in Atlanta. "There is grave danger to family member or members, but we hide them. We think of them as our shame, and we conceal." Very few of the ills that befall us can be said to have one single cause, and so it would be oversimplifying things to ascribe Dina R's mental instability, or Anisa's drinking and depression, or their deaths by suicide, to the hidden shame of Babajan's fondness for young girls. How much did they know? How many did he molest? What was the scale of his evil? These things can't be known for sure. A movie star's fortune and publicists are capable of silencing many tongues and suppressing many truths. How much of such dirty work did they do or cause to have done, and how deep was their guilt at becoming complicit in his crimes by cleaning up after him? |
| 76 |
Users not accustomed to opioids might find even a low-dosage lollipop life-threatening, inducing respiratory depression, a state of mind which made you feel like not breathing. Also, by the way, frequent lollipop sucking, as every child knows, could give you mouth ulcers and make your teeth fall out. 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. This was the lover who never disappointed you, the friend who never failed you, the partner who never cheated on you, the government that never lied. This alone was dependable, loyal, honest, and true. |
| 77 |
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. 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? |
| 78 |
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. What he was talking about today was nothing less than the end of the world, what he described as the growing instability of the continuum or gestalt, which, if the trend continued, he declared, would lead to the crumbling into nothing of the whole of space-time. He would, he said, bring forward the science to support this claim at the proper time. For the moment all he would say was that his admittedly alarming claim was backed by teams of astrophysicists working at the leading universities, including several Nobel laureates. |
| 79 |
Okay, that didn't have to be a vision, but then there was a change in the light, maybe someone moved a lamp in the store, and the rainbow disappeared, but so did the cursing woman. As if the one engendered the other. The rainbow engendered the hatred. Yeah, he thought. That's fucked up. Another day, on Madison Avenue among all the clothing stores, he saw three figures dressed all in white including white pointed hoods. That was impossible. This was New York. The Klan wasn't here at all, let alone wearing couture hoods on Madison. He crossed the avenue to get a closer look but the well-dressed crowd merged briefly ahead of him and then parted again and they were gone. This was insane, Sancho thought. It created in him a kind of ontological dread. There were days — it was just about every day, in point of fact — when the issue of his own reality came back at him and haunted him. His coming into being had been so exceptional, his transition from being a dependent sub-clause of the long sentence that was Quichotte into an independent existence continued to feel so improbable, that he had nightmares about having it all come apart, about his very being flickering like a faulty image on TV, then disintegrating and vanishing; about, in short, death. The arrival of these sightings — he resisted the word visions, which increased his sense of his own unreality — and the increase in their frequency was alarming. He did not tell Quichotte what he was seeing. Some things were better kept to oneself. Then while he was walking across the park, kicking at the fallen leaves, as darkness fell — not the smartest of moves, he afterwards allowed — he saw, coming toward him, a group of three middle-aged men in suits, white men, carrying briefcases, ordinary and inoffensive in every way — except that around their necks were the same collars he had seen on the white lady of Lake Capote, the same buckles, the same lengths of dangling leash. Who were these dog-collared people? Was this some sort of nationwide cult he had stumbled across? |
| 80 |
But that call did not come. Instead there was a visit they didn't expect. The officer in charge of the search asked to see them together, so Brother went up to Ex-Wife's lavish apartment in the nosebleeds. Stepfather had the grace to absent himself but all his possessions were there, his expensive bad-taste art, a lot of it contemporary Chinese for obvious reasons, he had identity issues, Brother thought, and believed he could solve them by paying through the nose for this crap from Beijing and hanging his framed identity on the walls. That was an ungenerous thought. He took it back. No, he didn't. Anyway, it was irrelevant. Here was the officer in charge of the search, and he was not saying what they had feared he would say. They had found Son. He was alive. He was well. He was not drunk, or a drug addict, or kidnapped, or a member of a cult. In short, he was not in danger. He was still in the country, not abroad. And he didn't want to come home or see his parents or be in touch with them. He had disposed of his old cellphone and would prefer them not to have the new number. This was a choice he had made after giving the matter considerable thought. He was an adult now, he had a place to live, he had work, he had some money in the bank (not the bank with which they were familiar). He wanted them to know these things, and asked them to understand, though he knew it would be hard for them to do so. It might be that at some point in the future he might contact one or both of them and wish to reconnect, but at the present time he was doing what was right for him to do. There followed the usual parental cacophony, demands for more information, weeping, etc., but even as he heard the conventional noises issuing from his own mouth as well as Ex-Wife's, Brother was realizing that he was not surprised. People left him. That was what they did. If Son was now choosing to resign from the family, he was only the latest, perhaps the last, in a long series of resignations: friends, lovers, and Wife (now Ex-Wife). |
| 81 |
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"? 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. |
| 82 |
Why had he seen shadows in the shadows, lurking, shadowing him? It was an irrational fear (but then, fear is irrational). He neither knew nor had he leaked any official secrets, he reminded himself. He was not a player in the game. To believe otherwise was vanity. His paranoia was a form of narcissism. He needed to let it go, especially while he was absorbed by this, the most peculiar of all his stories, which for some reason was making him smile happily at his computer screen, allowing him to forsake all thoughts of giving up his chosen profession. Sometimes the story being told was wiser than the teller. He was learning, for example, that just as a real son could become unreal, so also an imaginary child could become an actual one, while, moving in the opposite direction, a whole, real country could turn into a "reality"-like unreality. He was also getting up his courage and planning a trip to London. Maybe peacemaking would work out for him as it seemed to be working out for Quichotte. The olive branch would readily be accepted and they would have each other once again. Yes, replied the more cynical voice in his head, and maybe pigs would fly. But he found himself feeling optimistic. Very well, he thought, London. It was a long time since he had crossed the ocean. He would have to buy a new carry-on bag. He would need some advice about which airline to use. Such were Brother's more or less cheerful thoughts when he returned to his apartment in Kips Bay from an evening stroll along Second Avenue, holding a paper bag containing a six-pack of Corona Light, and dreaming, as he often did, about moving to Tribeca, perhaps into a loft conversion in the Gould Industries building, one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, which stood at the corner of Greenwich and Beach with the arrogance of its double affluence, the history of past industrial successes within its walls yoked to the two-thousand-dollars-per-square-foot eminence of its desirable present, and which was his fairy-tale residence of choice. |
| 83 |
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. "I apologize for alarming you, sir," the Japanese-American gentleman said. "Let me reassure you that I mean you no harm." It was indeed alarming when one's worst paranoid fantasies became reality. Brother's interior life went through a series of stomach-churning somersaults in the course of a few seconds. He was about to be beaten up slash murdered slash burgled as well as beaten up and then murdered. The Glock was a bad sign. His eyes focused on the button badge and clung onto that. He was drowning and that was his only hope of a life buoy. |
| 84 |
Heavy levity was his way of disguising his still-high level of foreboding, even of fear. Lance Makioka did not laugh. "Nowadays I protect America in a different way, sir. That is why I am here tonight. Sir, there's a story I'd like to tell you. May I tell you that story?" "Auditioning for my job, then," Brother said. The terrified comedian again. "By way of a prologue," unsmiling Lance Makioka replied, "may I ask if the name of Blind Joe Engressia means anything to you? 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. But there it is. |
| 85 |
Nor, in all probability, Sister thought, would he have approved of the pounding dance music that had begun to issue from the cellar below the restaurant, whose owners had lately decided to go for more of a club-scene vibe and to hell with all sleeping neighborhood children. After that there were drunks making out and fighting in the street until three in the morning. It was hard to imagine Ignatius Sancho as a disco devotee. This, after all, was a man who had sided with the British against the American Revolution. This was a conservative man. The neighborhood association asked for Sister's help. She agreed to lead the discussion, sought meetings with the restaurant's owners, and received only platitudes in return. She offered compromise proposals, suggesting acceptable decibel levels and shorter nightclub hours. She spoke to the local council and asked it to intervene to set in place and then to police proper regulations. She pointed out that Sancho was licensed as a restaurant, not a nightclub, and was therefore in breach of its legal obligations. Only when all these avenues had been explored without satisfaction having been received did she agree, with extreme reluctance, that the restaurant and its parent company should be sued. When the lawsuit began, the restaurant owners accused her of racism. Social media had no memory. Today's scandal was sufficient unto itself. Sister's lifelong commitment to anti-racism was as if it had never been. Various people styled as community leaders were ready to denounce her, as if high-volume music played late at night was an inalienable aspect of Afro-Caribbean culture and any critique of it had to be driven by prejudice, as if nobody noticed or cared that the vast majority of the young nocturnal drinkers, makers-out, and fighters were affluent and white. Someone started a Facebook page protesting her elevation to a life peerage — she was a baroness now — and her rumored front-runner status for the soon-to-be-vacated post of Speaker of the upper house. |
| 86 |
He felt a tightness clutching at his chest, a band of pain like a message from the Reaper. How poetic it would be, he thought, if he were to fall down dead on her very doorstep, offering up his life itself on the altar of her temple, by way of making amends. 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. "I remember some of it," he said, defensively. "I remember climbing with our father among the rocks at Scandal Point to look for little crabs in the rock pools. And the sleeping berths in the Frontier Mail to Delhi, me on the top, he below. |
| 87 |
"People called him paranoiac and he accepted the label. He had a whole theory of paranoia. I don't think he remembers that now. He said paranoia was to be understood as essentially optimistic, because the paranoid believed that there was a meaning to events, that the world made sense, even though that sense was concealed. Did he ever talk to you about that? No, he has lost that part of himself along with the rest. The opposite of paranoia, he said, was entropy, which was tragic, because it indicated that the universe was absurd. It was good talk. It didn't work so well in print. He had to go on living in that small apartment in Kips Bay. I had already made my money and so there was between us the question of envy. He didn't come here much because he envied me for living here. How ridiculous that was! There was nothing to envy about me at that time. The mutilation, the chemo, the transformation of a woman into an undead entity, a trickster who had somehow gotten away with cheating death. I guess you could envy me for my luck, but he envied me for my apartment. This is the kind of brother he was. Half brother. He wasn't even half a brother to me. "I lifted him up whenever the women left. They always left him, that was a fact. When the gaudy patter ran out they found there wasn't enough of a man there and they excused themselves and exited. He never found anybody to build something real with. But he seemed content in those days just to find the next temporary connection. The next unreal thing. And when they dumped him, he came around. He came to his Trampoline in search of some bounce and that was my fault, I always cheered him up, I didn't say, you asshole, can't you see which of us is more in need of being lifted up right now? I should have said it but I just didn't. Lifting people up, that's my thing. So, I didn't complain. "The year of my illness was also the year of the song. The one that gave me my name. "It builds up, the resentment. It piles up like New York garbage. |
| 88 |
Then something comes along and gives it a shove and after that, get out of the way of the avalanche if you can." The sun sank behind the Hudson and in a moment of silence the three of them stood on the apartment's terrace and watched it go, the light of the fire dying in the water like a dream being forgotten. 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. She would not bore him with statistics. But she would ask him to believe that in her field, the microfinancing of poor women to enable them to become economically self-sufficient, she could not count on the backing of the men in their lives. |
| 89 |
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. Our age, A. G., in which the mob rules, and the smartphone rules the mob. Back then the most advanced technology available was the fax machine. Old technology saved my business and my life. It was too slow to kill. The howls of outrage spread, but they spread slowly. My character was assassinated, but it was a slow assassination, which allowed time for a defense to be assembled, for resistance to be organized. And, best of all, the women we had trusted, to whom we had given money without any guarantee of its return, those women now trusted us. Trust saved me as it had saved them. The organization did not break. I did not break. Instead, the storm broke, and we survived. "Your father, the only half of a brother I've got, I hoped I could trust, but he betrayed that trust. And at the time that felt like an unforgivable thing." "He wasn't on your side," Sancho said. It wasn't really a question. "I don't know which half of the available brother material he got," Trampoline said, keeping her emotions at bay. |
| 90 |
I didn't like those parties, men in red suspenders ordering Cristal and waving cash at women as if it was an irresistible sexual organ, but sometimes I had to go, because of what was then my new microcredit project. A friend told me I should meet this physicist on his way to becoming a billionaire and led me across the crowded room. I expected a cliche, some sort of small, skinny, dark-skinned, bespectacled, nerdy person, the classic Indian in America making it big in the new technologies, and was surprised to find a guy with movie-star good looks, slicked down and shiny faced in a bespoke suit, a geek in dude's clothing. He had a booth all to himself, which was his way of saying he was somebody. He said, 'I'd be glad if you sat down and had a drink with me.' His name made an impression on me. Evil Scent. 'You've got the right name for this world,' I thought, but managed not to say. He probably heard variations on that theme all the time anyway. But he chose that name. Awwal Sant, his real Indian name, would have been just fine but he had rejected it. That was a clue that there was something off about him. I should have paid better attention. "He was several years younger than me, and acted even younger than that, sulky, awkward, but cocky, sure of his genius. We had nothing in common except our attitude to the money, I thought. I had been on one side of the money and now I was switching to the other side: first I had made it and now I was giving it away. He was still very interested in making a lot of it but he had his eyes on something much bigger. Money was a tool, not a goal, we agreed on that. "I liked the first thing he said after I sat down: 'I'm sorry, but I have no small talk.' It was a funny line, but he said it with absolute solemnity and a kind of piercing, sincere energy, which made it funnier, and made him interesting. 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. |
| 91 |
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. 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. |
| 92 |
that will have to wait for another day. We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves. 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. 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. |
| 93 |
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. For a time he suffered some expected aftereffects. He cried at random moments, without apparent cause. He suffered from stress, depression, anxiety. But beneath these alterations lay a deeper change. There were deep gashes in his memory and those did not mend. He became less gregarious, more silent, much more withdrawn. Also, the journalist, the professor: he was gone. Physically, he had clearly made a miraculous recovery. The lasting damage was not to his body but to his character. He did not return to the teaching position that had given him the insurance coverage he had needed. He distanced himself from old and new colleagues, new and old friends, and withdrew into himself, retreating so far, so deep, that nobody could follow him. For a long time he hardly spoke, and watched TV all day, sitting upright on the edge of his bed at home with his hands folded in his lap. |
| 94 |
This was when he began to speak in TV references, and his grasp on reality loosened. It also became clear that he no longer felt at home in the big city. The multiplicity, the everything of everything, the roar of narratives, the endless transformation, the myth factory lost in the myth of itself: it unsettled him. The absences in his mind needed to be soothed by absenting himself from his previous life, and by television, being absorbed by which was another kind of absenting. The day he told the Trampoline that he needed to leave town — that he had reached out to their cousin Dr. Smile in the pharma world and asked if he could work for him as a traveling salesman somewhere far from New York — was also the day on which he first made the money accusation. The third unforgivable thing. That he accused her of stealing his money was bad enough. That he did it after her solicitude during the past two years was worse. That he ignored the fact that throughout this period she had actually been managing his money for him, making sure it was well cared for, was worse still. And the allegation about forging their father's will, or falsifying it in her favor, was the last straw. "He was always the wrong half of a half brother," the Trampoline told Sancho, "but at that point I understood I needed to withdraw from him, just as he needed to withdraw from almost everything. He was damaged, I saw that, he wasn't himself, I had compassion for that, but he had become unbearable. If we had been married we would have had to get divorced. In a way we did get divorced. When he left the city to begin his strange journeyings in the heartland, selling pills to doctors, I thought, okay, that's that, and let him be, let him do what he has to do, and maybe find his way. But guess what? His money is still in good shape. And there's certainly enough of it to mean you guys don't have to stay in the Blue Yorker motel. If he wants to stay in the city he can rent a place. You can both stay here until he does. |
| 95 |
His drink spilled, but he caught the glass before it fell. The orange breathing masks appeared from above. The captain spoke rapidly over the intercom, trying to reassure passengers while also giving emergency instructions. It was not necessary at present to put on the breathing masks. Stay in your seats with the belts fastened. This was more than rough air, but the aircraft was under the pilots' control, or so the voice insisted, not wholly convincingly. The 747 lurched, bumped, slalomed first one way, then the other. Many of the passengers panicked. There was weeping and shrieking. There was vomiting too. Brother, for whom this was a bad dream come true, who had always known in a part of his mind that airplanes were simultaneously too massive to fly and too flimsy to resist the immense forces of nature, was interested to note that he remained calm. He continued to sip at his drink. Was it possible that his fear of flying had been cured at exactly the moment at which it was perfectly rational to feel afraid? I've been writing about the end of the world, he thought, and what I was really doing was imagining death. My own, masquerading as everyone else's. A private ending redescribed as a universal one. I've been thinking about it for so long that this doesn't come as a surprise. He raised his glass and toasted the giant death angel, a bare skull visible within a black hooded robe, standing on the horizon and holding the aircraft in one hand and shaking it. The death angel bowed in recognition of the gesture, and let the jumbo jet go. With a brief final shudder the aircraft settled back into its course. After that the flight went smoothly and the passengers entered a mood of near-hysterical camaraderie. The crew handed out champagne for free, even in coach. Brother suspected that some of the passengers were having mile-high sex with strangers in the washrooms. Things were becoming a little rock and roll. He kept his own counsel, finished his drink slowly, and went on thinking about death. |
| 96 |
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. 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. |
| 97 |
Rule Britennia, Britennia rules the waves. Ez is only raight and proppah. Half Lizzie Two, half My Fair Lady. That was some white shit. There was, however, something else about her voice on the phone, something which even the plummy vowels could not disguise: a small shakiness, a trembling, which (or so it seemed to Brother) she was making a powerful effort of will to disguise. "Are you all right?" he asked her. "Don't change the subject." So he made the apology. He thought of Quichotte rising formally to his feet to speak, then falling to his knees and touching the Trampoline's dress at the hemline. That last kind of self-abasement wasn't Brother's style, but if they had been video conferencing he might have stood. He tried to speak with something like his character's formality, to be wholehearted and undefended in his remorse. When he finished he realized his heartbeat had accelerated and he was breathing heavily, an old man who had overexerted himself. He had to start thinking seriously about what he ate, and about getting fit, he told himself, not for the first time. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, had died after going to the gym as everyone in California was obliged to do by the state's unwritten laws, to worship at the altar of one's body all the world's gods of health, whose names were only known to those who, being vegan and gluten-free, were pure enough to receive the information: Fufluns the Etruscan deity of plants, wellness, and happiness, Aegle the Greek goddess of the healthy glow, Maximon the Mayan hero god of health, Haoma from Persia, and Panacea the goddess of the universal cure. Ever since Brother read about Adams's death he had started saying, half joking, half defensively, that exercise was to be avoided because it killed people. Don't panic. Have some fries with that. But now, after doing nothing more strenuous than telling his sister on the phone that he was sorry for his past misdeeds, he was stressed out and gasping for breath. |
| 98 |
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. "Pa and Ma would have been so proud." Those were their first moves. The purpose of the opening in the game of chess, Brother thought, was to establish command of the center and to give your pieces the greatest possible positional advantage. He had begun with a sacrifice, the unreserved apology, but it wasn't immediately clear if he had improved his position as a result. In the conversations that followed they circled one another, Brother reluctant to abase himself further, Sister playing a cautious game, defensive and slow. |
| 99 |
— 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. When she finally did call him she was calmer and quieter. She asked him more questions about his writing and he found himself willingly doing what he never did, which was, to talk about a work in progress. He was not a particularly superstitious man, but he did have this one superstition: don't let the work come out of your mouth or it will never come out through your fingers. But he answered Sister's questions willingly enough, and was encouraged by her interest in what he had to say. He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age. He said he was trying also to write about impossible, obsessional love, father-son relationships, sibling quarrels, and yes, unforgivable things; about Indian immigrants, racism toward them, crooks among them; about cyber-spies, science fiction, the intertwining of fictional and "real" realities, the death of the author, the end of the world. He told her he wanted to incorporate elements of the parodic, and of satire and pastiche. Nothing very ambitious, then, she said. And it's about opioid addiction, too, he added. That was when her defenses dropped. When he described to her his research into the American opioid epidemic and the scams associated with it, he felt her attention intensify, and when he talked about his character Dr. |
| 100 |
This was not understood. He had to say "air-conditioning." The cabbie said it wasn't working, sorry, mate, open a window. What came through the opened window was a blast of hot air. London was enduring what the cabbie called a scorcher. A heat wave in London, Brother thought, felt like an oxymoron, like nonstop drizzle in L. A. Here it was nevertheless, the temperature at 9 P. M. still in the high eighties, whatever that was in Celsius, thirty? Thirty-five? Who knew. There was no understanding the British and their systems. Road signs gave distances in miles but bathroom scales used kilograms. You could buy a pint of milk in a supermarket or a pint of beer in a pub, but at the gas station fuel was measured in liters. Athletes ran the "metric mile," fifteen hundred meters, but a cricket pitch was twenty-two yards long. 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. |
| 101 |
Medicinal doses of the spray were measured and delivered in micrograms, so to reach the fatal level it was necessary to spray beneath the tongue repeatedly and rapidly. The product packaging carried prominent and strongly worded warnings about overdosing. They had made their plans methodically, Sister and the judge, because they were both diligent people. They knew the required dosages, had calculated the effects of their different body weights (she was down to just under one hundred pounds at this point, while he was closer to two hundred), and had destroyed all identifying marks on the two sprays, scratching away the batch numbers and the address of the manufactory, so that Brother could not later be charged with having supplied the fatal drug off-prescription, and they had left careful instructions — in a letter propped up on a cushion at the foot of Sister's bed — for the disposal of their assets and belongings. 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. |
| 102 |
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. 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. |
| 103 |
Only the people I made rich. Yes, I made myself more rich, but I was the one who made it happen. Little doctors here, there, turning into rich fellows. Then they turn me in. Bastards. How do they think you become a billionaire in America? Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, Rockefeller? At Underwater Tea Parties? I have done what had to be done. It's the American way, correct? But still my own children, my own creations, the ones I made who they are today, they want to save their asses and tear me down. "Listen," he went on, "I don't feel this thing called community feeling. This 'our people' bakwas. We are supposed to feel it, isn't it? Loyalty to our community above all. The brown before the white, the many before the one. Bullshit. Our people come closer to us so they get to knife us first, in the front, in the back, in the balls, wherever. I'm speaking frankly today. I'm opening my heart to you in my time of anger. 'Our people' is nonsense. Wife feels the feeling, I don't. Even if in some ways our people can teach us things. Our culture. It has lessons I have learned. "Corruption, they accuse me of today. Corruption! Me! Myself! Dr. R. K. Smile! Everyone knows that what I have done is not corruption. It is our culture from the old country. You are at a railway station — let's say Sawai Madhopur — and the lines at the ticket windows are long. You get to the front and the clerk says, wrong line, go and queue over there. This is frustrating, am I right? It would frustrate anybody. Then here is a little boy, maybe ten years old, tugging at your sleeve. Ssss, he says. Ssss. You want ticket? I have an uncle. And of course he wants a little something for his trouble. You can be smart and give it to him or you can be stupid and refuse. If you are smart you find he really does have an uncle, and he can take you to this uncle in the office behind the ticket window, and in two shakes your ticket is in your hand. If you are stupid you move from line to line for hours. We are like this only. |
| 104 |
The first Quichotte exulted, My love is within my grasp, while the second objected, I am being asked to do a dishonorable thing, and are we not honorable men? The first cried, The miracle is upon me, and I cannot refuse it, and the second replied, She is not sick and this is medicine for the terminally ill. Beside that American oak which was by no means tropical and that Indian cousin who was by no means ethical, a nonsensical verse flowed unbidden through his broken mind. Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree He understood, to the best of his capacity, his true nature. He was impure. He was the bam and he was also the boo; the flawed as well as the fine, the honorable and the dishonorable too. He was not Sir Galahad, nor was he meant to be. As the realization dawned it was as if the entire structure of his quest fell away, shriveled and dissolved in that light like a night creature that hates the sun. It had been a delusion, the whole business of needing to be worthy, of needing to make himself worthy of her. All that mattered was this opportunity, knocking. This attachE case was all that mattered. Which made him not a knight but an opportunist, and an opportunist was an altogether lower form of life. Altogether unworthy. Then a heretical thought occurred. Was it possible, that she, the Beloved, was unworthy too? What he was being asked to do for her was wrong, yet she was asking it. A goddess or a queen did not ask her knight or her hero, who wore her favor on his helmet, to perform immoral tasks. So if she was asking this, then she was no more a queen or a goddess than he was a hero or a knight. Her request and his fulfillment of that request would topple them both off their pedestals and drag them down into the dirt together. And paradoxically, he thought, if she was no longer a queen-goddess, then she was no longer impossible for him, no longer out of his reach. Her fall from purity made her mortal, human, and therefore attainable. Dr. Smile was saying something. |
| 105 |
He had dressed for the occasion in his few remaining pieces of sartorial finery: the still-soiled camel cashmere coat which he had cleaned as best he could, a brown hat, scarf, and leather gloves. He wore, too, his finest sunglasses. First impressions counted. The attachE case had been placed in his locker, which he had emptied in order to fit it in, removing its contents and placing them in his pocket along with the envelope containing the first month's supply of goods. 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. "Oh my God, I know who you are. |
| 106 |
That had been the sandwich lady a. k. a. blue fairy's unsentimental diagnosis. Now he was beginning to feel it too. He was experiencing fuzzy spells, when his thoughts became clouded and unclear, the kind of grogginess one might feel if one had a bad case of the flu. There was also a kind of intermittency, a series of very short interruptions during which the stream of consciousness apparently vanished and then returned. 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. And how would he do it? "Mine is a love story," he said aloud, "and love will find a way." The echo does not know it is an echo. |
| 107 |
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. When you have done so, the stars will begin to go out. There had been a moment in the writing when a character assumed a more important role than his author had originally envisaged for him. The scientist-entrepreneur Evel Cent had moved to center stage and taken command of the book's larger narrative, and plainly would play an important part in its conclusion. When a character developed so dramatically on the page, in the act of making, one had to say to oneself, okay, but is this right? Is this helpful, should I hold on to his coattails and go along for the ride, or is it taking me down a blind alley I don't want to end up in? He had decided to allow Evel Cent's enlarged presence to remain in the text. |
| 108 |
It was rare for the aurora to be visible in these latitudes, only a handful of such manifestations in a decade, so it felt like a privilege to be granted such a vision. He wanted Beethoven on his headphones to accompany such grandeur, the Choral Symphony thundering in his ears while the aurora thundered in his sight. The ripples raced across the sky, there and back again, their beauty bringing tears to his eyes. Deine Zauber binden wieder Was die Mode streng geteilt. "Thy enchantments bind together what custom sternly did divide." He saw the vision of the aurora as the final proof that the worlds were conjoined, bound together, that the world within him, the world he dreamed up, was now forever merged with the world outside himself, and he imagined that the Lights were themselves the portals that might transport men and women to a brave new world. It was the time of miracles. A miracle was sleeping beside him: his son restored to him, their broken love remade. If that could be true then everything was possible. It was, as Quichotte reminded him, the Age of Anything-Can-Happen. And his heart? It was very full, but it had not burst. He would have time to finish his story. He closed his eyes, and slept. The growing catastrophe was not limited to the damaged and disintegrating physical fabric of everything that was. The laws of science themselves appeared to be bending and breaking, like steel girders melting under the pressure of an unimaginable force. Events preceded their causes, so that a large hole appeared at the intersection of Forty-Second Street and Lexington Avenue, a hole into which cars tumbled, some time before the explosion of the gas main that was the reason for the hole's appearance. In the city, time passed more rapidly down the avenues than on the cross streets, where it often seemed to be permanently jammed. It was possible that the great second law of thermodynamics had fallen, and entropy had in fact begun to decrease. People who knew nothing of science nevertheless felt themselves possessed by dread. |
| 109 |
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. 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. |
| 110 |
"The PL didn't want to do it. But in the Army you obey orders. If somebody with a higher rank tells you to do something, you do it. So Uthlaut split the platoon." Less than an hour of daylight remained by the time Uthlaut had finished dividing the platoon into two elements. After placing himself in charge of the element bound for Mana (designated Serial One, it consisted of two Humvees and four Toyota pickup trucks carrying twenty Rangers and seven Afghan Militia Forces), he hurriedly rolled out of Magarah in the lead Humvee at 6:00 p. m. Absent a road, Uthlaut's convoy drove down an intermittently dry riverbed, followed closely by the second element's convoy, designated Serial Two. A few minutes outside the village they reached a fork in the wadi. Uthlaut's convoy turned downstream, to the left. Serial Two, towing the trashed Humvee, turned upstream, to the right. A British soldier named Francis Leeson, who battled a fierce tribal insurgency in this same area in the late 1940s, wrote a book in which he characterized the terrain as "frontier hills that are difficult of access and easy to defend. When one speaks of them as hills, rolling downs on which tanks and cavalry can operate are not meant, but the worst mountain-warfare country imaginable — steep precipices and narrow winding valleys." Six decades after Leeson's tour of duty, this remains a chillingly accurate description of the landscape that confronted Uthlaut's Rangers. Half a mile west of the junction where the convoys had separated and gone in opposite directions, Serial One entered the mouth of a spectacularly narrow canyon. It was 6:10 p. m., and the lower flanks of the gorge already lay in shadow. The afternoon's warmth had been supplanted by the chill of the advancing evening, prompting the Rangers to don Gore-Tex jackets beneath their body armor. The air smelled of sage, dust, and wood smoke rising from cooking fires in a nearby village. Ahead, the route snaked through a deep, crooked slot the river had gouged into the bedrock of the surrounding mountains. |
| 111 |
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. When the World Trade Center came crashing to earth on September 11, 2001, he had been a star player with the Arizona Cardinals, renowned for patrolling the defensive backfield with riveting intensity. But Tillman came from a family with a tradition of military service that went back several generations, and he believed that as an able-bodied American he had a moral obligation to serve his country during a time of war. He didn't think he should be exempt from his duty as a citizen simply because he played professional football. |
| 112 |
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. It appeared as though Serial Two had escaped the ambush and everything was copacetic. And then, without warning, hundreds of bullets began to pulverize the slope around Tillman, O'Neal, and Farhad. Ever since Homo sapiens first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a noble cause. But death by so-called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn't conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war's heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It's an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most "just" and "honorable" of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the illustrious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B. C., "In war, truth is the first casualty." When Pat Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, his Ranger regiment responded with a chorus of prevarication and disavowal. A cynical cover-up sanctioned at the highest levels of government, followed by a series of inept official investigations, cast a cloud of bewilderment and shame over the tragedy, compounding the heartbreak of Tillman's death. |
| 113 |
In 1990, Pat matriculated at Almaden's Leland High School, one of the top public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, both academically and athletically. Before entering Leland he had resolved to become the catcher on the varsity baseball team, but the head coach, Paul Ugenti, informed Pat that he wasn't ready to play varsity baseball and would have to settle for a position on the freshman-sophomore team. Irked and perhaps insulted by Ugenti's failure to recognize his potential, Pat resolved to quit baseball and focus on football instead, even though he'd taken up the latter sport barely a year earlier and had badly fractured his right tibia in his initial season when a much larger teammate fell on his leg during practice. With a November birthday, Pat was among the youngest kids in Leland's freshman class, and when he started high school, he was only thirteen years old. He also happened to be small for his age, standing five feet five inches tall and weighing just 120 pounds. When he let it be known that he was going to abandon baseball for football, an assistant coach named Terry Hardtke explained to Pat that he wasn't "built like a football player" and strongly urged him to stick with baseball. Once Tillman set his sights on a goal, however, he wasn't easily diverted. He told the coach he intended to start lifting weights to build up his muscles. Then he assured Hardtke that not only would he make the Leland football team but he intended to play college football after graduating from high school. Hardtke replied that Pat was making a huge mistake — that his size would make it difficult for him ever to win a starting position on the Leland team, and that he stood virtually no chance of ever playing college ball. Pat, however, trusted his own sense of his abilities over the coach's bleak predictions, and tried out for the Leland football team regardless. Six years later he would be a star linebacker playing in the Rose Bowl for a national collegiate championship. |
| 114 |
Dostum's Uzbek militias carried out a campaign of rapes and executions on Kabul's outskirts. Massoud hunkered down in the tattered defense ministry, a decaying former royal palace, and moved his troops north and south in running battles. The electricity in Kabul failed... Roads closed, food supplies shrank, and disease spread. About ten thousand Afghan civilians died violently by the year's end. At least 40 percent of Kabul was reduced to rubble by the fighting and shelling, but the effects of the civil war extended far beyond the capital. As a bulwark against anarchy, people in the provinces retreated beneath the relatively benign tyranny of their clans, where the mullahs and commanders of local militias provided a semblance of security and order. This atomization of the nation — the hunkering of the population into a thousand premodern fiefs — proved to be ideal conditions for incubating a singularly virulent strain of terrorism that would shortly capture the attention of the world, and most especially the United States. At 9:18 Pacific standard time on the morning of February 26, 1993, as Pat was attending class at Leland High School, a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb improvised from fertilizer, fuel oil, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, and sodium cyanide packed into the back of a rented Econoline van was detonated three thousand miles across the country from Almaden, in a parking garage beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The explosion blasted a hundred-foot-wide cavity through six stories of steel-reinforced concrete and created a seismic shock wave felt more than a mile away. Although more than a thousand New Yorkers were injured, only six people (who had the bad luck to be eating lunch in a cafeteria directly above the blast) were killed. Because the death count was relatively low and there was scant visible damage to the exterior of the building, the attack didn't raise a durable concern among most Americans. The bombers were generally portrayed as inept amateurs who had come nowhere close to bringing down the massive tower. |
| 115 |
When he was born, his parents were told he wouldn't survive. The largest of the lesions covered most of his head. Hechtle underwent a series of exceedingly complex, very painful surgeries, leaving most of the left side of his head covered in scar tissue. Because it is fragile and lacks the elasticity of normal skin, such tissue is easily torn. Sprinting from the pizza joint into the suburban night, Pat assessed the situation unfolding in front of him, mistakenly concluded that Hechtle was being assaulted by a pack of thugs, and made a split-second decision to right this grievous wrong by taking out the largest of the apparent attackers, who appeared to be a tall guy now fleeing the scene of the fight. The tall guy was Darin Rosas, and Pat, says Erin Clarke, "made a beeline for Darin." "Pat saw Darin running away," Scott Strong speculates, "and probably thought he was running because he'd done something to his friend." "All these guys came rushing out," says Rosas. "I had no idea who any of them were. All I knew is they were football players, and they were big. I was a surfer. I wasn't into contact sports. So I just started running. Others did, too, but I was the one who got caught. I ran probably about six or seven steps before somebody hit me in the back of the head and knocked me out." The blow, which came from one of Tillman's fists, dropped Rosas to the asphalt like a sack of potatoes. Much of Pat's brilliance on the football field derived from his uncanny ability to anticipate the moves of opposing players, react without hesitation, and tackle the ballcarrier with a tooth-rattling hit. But Pat had just turned seventeen, and like those of other kids that age, his dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain that weighs consequences — was far from fully developed. In this instance, his dubious adolescent judgment was further distorted by both alcohol and his conviction that one of his duties in life was to be the protector of the vulnerable, the guardian of his friends and family. |
| 116 |
The religious leaders decided to start small by pooling their weapons, forming a militia of their own, and forcefully removing a single checkpoint — the one nearest to Sanghisar. It was taken for granted that blood would be spilled, but they believed their cause was righteous and saw no other option, in any case. On the appointed day they approached the checkpoint warily with their rifles locked and loaded, prepared for a firefight, but as they drew near, a surprising thing happened: the hooligans manning the checkpoint fled without firing a shot. Encouraged, the mullahs turned their attention to the next checkpoint several miles down the road, and the outcome was similar. Before the week was out, they succeeded in removing every roadblock between Sanghisar and Kandahar. And thus was the Taliban created. The name — a Pashto word meaning "students of Islam" — was bestowed by Omar. The warlords of the day, unrestrained by any law or governing body, committed reprehensible acts with impunity. Seizing young boys and girls and forcing them into sexual slavery were routine occurrences. According to Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban, soon after the Taliban was founded, Sanghisar residents alerted Omar that a local commander had abducted two teenage girls, their heads had been shaved and they had been taken to a military camp and repeatedly raped. Omar enlisted some 30 Talibs who had only 16 rifles between them and attacked the base, freeing the girls and hanging the commander from the barrel of a tank... A few months later two commanders confronted each other in Kandahar, in a dispute over a young boy whom both men wanted to sodomize. In the fight that followed civilians were killed. Omar's group freed the boy and public appeals started coming in for the Taliban to help out in other local disputes. Omar had emerged as a Robin Hood figure, helping the poor against the rapacious commanders. His prestige grew because he asked for no reward or credit from those he helped, only demanding that they follow him to set up a just Islamic system. |
| 117 |
Tall and sinewy, Omar is a shy, uncharismatic man who lost his right eye to shrapnel while fighting Najibullah's communist forces during the mujahideen's failed assault on Jalalabad in 1989. Although a lifelong scholar of Islam, he possesses a plodding, narrow intellect and has little knowledge of, or interest in, worldly affairs. His interpretation of the Quran is stringently literal. But at some point during 1994 the Prophet Muhammad came to this humble village mullah in the form of a vision, in which it was revealed to Omar that Allah had chosen him to undertake the task of bringing peace to Afghanistan. Omar, who placed great stock in dreams and apparitions, resolved to obey the Prophet's commandment. Toward that end he began recruiting students from madrassas — religious schools — to join his cause. Although he was not a dynamic speaker, Mullah Omar made up for his lack of personal charm with earnestness and unwavering piety. His pitch to the students was well received, particularly in the numerous madrassas that had sprung up in the Pashtun tribal districts that lay just across the border in Pakistan. For nearly fifteen years more than two million Afghan refugees had been subsisting in squalid refugee camps on the Pakistan side of the frontier, and the madrassas there were teeming with the sons of these refugees — young men indoctrinated by fire-breathing Saudi clerics preaching the fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrine. These clerics instructed the Afghan youths to emulate the righteous habits of the Prophet Muhammad with the aim of reinstating the caliphate he had established in the seventh century. To restore the world to this fabled state of purity, they were urged to immerse themselves in the holy spirit of jihad. As Lawrence Wright explains in The Looming Tower, These boys had grown up in an exclusively male world, separated from their families for long periods of time. The traditions and customs and lore of their country were distant to them. They were stigmatized as beggars and sissies, and often preyed upon by men who were isolated from women. |
| 118 |
Once they had regrouped, the Taliban counterattacked, and this time they decimated Khan's forces and forced Khan to flee to Iran. In September the Taliban captured Herat, the five-thousand-year-old city celebrated in the writings of Herodotus, considered the cradle of Afghan civilization. By early 1996, the Taliban had reached the margins of Kabul, threatening to overrun the nation's capital. Until then, the main mujahideen factions — led by Massoud, Hekmatyar, and Dostum — had continued to fight one another for control of Kabul, inflicting an appalling toll on the city and its inhabitants. But the arrival of Mullah Omar's army on Kabul's outskirts frightened the mujahideen commanders into calling a hasty truce and joining forces against the Taliban — a coalition dubbed the Northern Alliance. Through most of the spring and summer the struggle for the capital degenerated into a bloody stalemate in which several thousand civilians were killed by Taliban rocket attacks. Then, in August, Omar persuaded Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to increase their support in order to provide the Taliban with the means to launch a decisive offensive. In a shrewd tactical move, this offensive was not directed at Kabul itself. Instead, the Taliban skirted the capital and attacked important Northern Alliance bases to the north and east, which were captured with ease. The Taliban were fortified in these battles by swarms of fresh recruits from madrassas across the border, whose arrival at the front lines was expedited by Pakistan. By late September the Taliban had surrounded Kabul, and had severed all lines of supply to the Northern Alliance. Ceding to the inevitable, under the cover of darkness Massoud pulled back all the way to his redoubt in the Panjshir Valley, deep in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, leaving Kabul virtually undefended. On the night of September 26, 1996, Mullah Omar's fighters rolled into the capital without resistance, wearing their trademark black turbans and flying the white Taliban flag from their Toyota Hilux pickup trucks. |
| 119 |
The first thing they did was search out the ex-president and Soviet puppet, Mohammed Najibullah. He was found around 1:00 a. m. at his residence inside a United Nations diplomatic compound, where he had been living under house arrest since being forced from office in 1992, spending his days lifting weights, watching satellite television, and translating an English history of Afghanistan into his native Pashto. The five men who found him were led by the commander of the assault on Kabul, a Talib named Mullah Abdul Razaq. During the Najibullah regime, the Soviets had killed several members of Razaq's family, and he'd been waiting to exact revenge on Najibullah ever since. After brutally beating Najibullah and his brother, Shahpur, Razaq and his men drove them to the Presidential Palace, where Najibullah was castrated and then dragged through the streets around the palace behind a truck, still alive. Finally he was shot to death, Shahpur was strangled, and wire nooses were twisted around the necks of both brothers. They were then strung up from a police watchtower above a traffic circle in the middle of Kabul. A mob formed around the dead men, beat their bodies with sticks, and shoved rolled-up rupees into their nostrils. This was not the sort of "order" that had been envisioned by Western governments when they expressed the hope that Mullah Omar would prove to be the Pashtun equivalent of George Washington and become the savior of his nation — a nation that Omar had recently renamed the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. 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. |
| 120 |
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. 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. |
| 121 |
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. 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. |
| 122 |
On that basis, and in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims: By the ruling, it is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it to kill Americans and their allies — civilian and military — in any country where it is possible to do so... With God's help, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on the Muslim Ulema Islamic scholars, leaders, youth, and soldiers to launch raids on Satan's American troops and Satan's supporters allying with them in order to displace their leaders so that they may learn a lesson. Although the international news media had disseminated this fatwa widely when it was issued on February 23, few people paid much attention to it at the time. After August 7, bin Laden and his fatwa were regarded in an entirely new light not only by Americans but by people in other parts of the world as well — especially Muslims of a fundamentalist bent. Disaffected young men from the Arabian Peninsula, Chechnya, North Africa, Kashmir, and elsewhere began to flock to al-Qaeda camps in eastern Afghanistan to receive training in the skills necessary to wage jihad against Americans and Jews. "But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda," observed Lawrence Wright in his book The Looming Tower, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response. But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. President Bill Clinton and his inner circle immediately began to initiate rescue operations in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and to figure out how they should retaliate against al-Qaeda. A full-scale military campaign against bin Laden and his Taliban allies in Afghanistan was quickly ruled out. |
| 123 |
When they arrived at the place where Pat had made the death-defying jump, he decided to do it again. He wanted to see if he could execute the maneuver with less effort this time and stick the landing more gracefully. When Brandon looked at what Pat intended to do, he thought it was insane. The world record for the standing long jump is twelve feet two inches — only slightly farther than the distance from the canyon rim to the top of the pine. If Pat failed to make it all the way across the gap, or did manage to leap that far but didn't get a solid grip on the tree, he would plummet into the boulders at the bottom, almost certainly killing himself. Pat, however, was sure that he would avoid these outcomes. He took a moment to eyeball the distance to a strong-looking horizontal branch, and to calculate his trajectory. Then, says Brandon, "he walked up to the edge of the cliff, perfectly composed. His posture was like a gymnast or a diver, only more stable. Most people doing something like that would waver a little. Not Pat. He looked totally in command. In one smooth motion he crouched down, swung his arms, and leapt. Just like that. No hesitation. Didn't think about it at all. It was unbelievable." Pat judged the leap perfectly. After flying across the gap, Brandon recalls, "he clamped his big old paws around this eight-inch-thick branch he'd been aiming for. His body swung pretty hard from the momentum, but he didn't have any trouble holding on. Then he threw a leg up onto the branch and just shinnied down the trunk to the ground like the jump was no big deal. Sometimes I still lie awake at night thinking about it." As startling as this leap was, it was run-of-the-mill for Pat. Throughout his life he was constantly devising new challenges for himself, many of which were extremely dangerous. "He didn't do these kinds of things to impress people," says Brandon. "You'd never hear Pat talking about the unbelievable things he pulled off. Any stuff that he did, the only way you'd know about it is if you were right there with him to witness it. |
| 124 |
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. 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. |
| 125 |
After his piece was published, Zimmerman later acknowledged, some sports announcers from the major television networks ridiculed his selection of Tillman as an All-Pro player, pointing out that he was "not the greatest in coverage, etc. But what I had seen was a wild and punishing tackling machine, a guy who lifted the performance of everyone around him. You could see the fire in the whole defensive unit when he led the charge to the ball." In the final analysis, one came away believing that Dr. Z was absolutely right: at the end of the 2000 season, Tillman deserved to be considered one of the best players in professional football. Zimmerman's article was posted on the Internet on January 3, 2001. In the nation's capital that day, Richard Clarke — the Clinton administration's national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism — briefed the incoming Bush administration's new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on the dire threat the United States faced from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. 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. |
| 126 |
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. 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. |
| 127 |
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. 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. |
| 128 |
He was always trying to reassure me that nothing was going to happen to him. 'Statistically, I'm more likely to die in a car wreck,' he would say." Exactly five years after the September 11 attacks, staring out a window at throngs of New Yorkers scurrying through lower Manhattan, Marie muses, "I never explicitly asked him, 'Why are you doing this?' Because I understood Pat well enough to already know... If it was the right thing for people to go off and fight a war, he believed he should be part of it. "He saw his life in a much bigger way than simply, 'I am a professional football player, and if I walk away from this, my life is over.' Football was part of who he was, but it wasn't the be-allend-all. He was looking in other directions even prior to 911. I always knew he would stop playing football before they had to kick him off the field. It was just a matter of time... I mean, Pat could have played for years, retired, then golfed for the rest of his life. But I knew he was never going to do that." After carefully weighing all the factors, Pat sat down at his computer and typed a document titled "Decision," dated April 8, 2002: Many decisions are made in our lifetime, most relatively insignificant while others life altering. Tonight's topic ... the latter. It must be said that my mind, for the most part, is made up. More to the point, I know what decision I must make. It seems that more often than not we know the right decision long before it's actually made. Somewhere inside, we hear a voice, and intuitively know the answer to any problem or situation we encounter. Our voice leads us in the direction of the person we wish to become, but it is up to us whether or not to follow. More times than not we are pointed in a predictable, straightforward, and seemingly positive direction. However, occasionally we are directed down a different path entirely. Not necessarily a bad path, but a more difficult one. In my case, a path that many will disagree with, and more significantly, one that may cause a great deal of inconvenience to those I love. |
| 129 |
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. Shortly after arriving in Arizona, Kevin visited an Army recruiting office in a strip mall off Chandler Boulevard, a few miles east of Pat and Marie's home, to gather some basic information. Soon after this initial visit, Kevin, Pat, and Marie visited the same recruiting office together. "Kevin and I pretended that we were a married couple," Marie says, "and we sat down at a table across from this recruiter to ask him detailed questions. Pat just kind of stayed in the background with his hat pulled down over his eyes, because he didn't want anyone to know who he was." One of the things Pat and Kevin had been undecided about was whether to become officers or go in as enlisted men — ordinary grunts. This meeting with the recruiter convinced them to forgo the officer track. They didn't want to remain back at headquarters sending other soldiers into harm's way. If they were going to join the military, they wanted to be part of an elite combat force — to be in the thick of the action, share the risk and hardship, and have a direct impact. The recruiter explained to them that the minimum commitment for Rangers was three years. "Before going in there," says Marie, "they thought they were going to have to join for four years. When we heard they could be Rangers and only have to be in for three years, I was like, 'Okay! That's much better than four years.' So I was pretty happy about that. |
| 130 |
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. 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. |
| 131 |
Of course I understand and appreciate the point of showing respect to superiors but the caste separation between officers and enlisted men is foreign." This, alas, was only the first of many aspects of military culture that struck Pat as archaic, bizarre, and counterproductive. On July 17, Pat happily noted in his journal: We are leaving this place tomorrow and going down to start bootcamp... It's about time... I've written a few letters to Marie... I miss her more and more and hope she is well. One thing that I found horrible in college was that I got used to her not being around. I never again want to get used to that. It's much better to be sad than calloused. I look forward to the time when both of us have the lifestyle we used to enjoy... Not only will these next 3 years make me a stronger person, mentally and physically, I know it will also free up my conscience to enjoy what I have. My hope is that I will feel satisfied with my accomplishment ... enough to relax for a while and just be. Be, with Marie. Three days later Pat wrote, "Well, we are now in Basic and I'm starting to get more comfortable. Yesterday was a complete disaster." Things started to go badly when he forgot to lock his locker, prompting one of the drill sergeants to hurl its contents across the floor. And "to add insult," Pat mused, "if that wasn't enough, I was written up for it. I fucked up my cadence calls, lost shit, got yelled and screamed at... I was a mess. Oh well, just keep working and we'll see what happens... Our drill sergeants are tough but quality people and I believe they will teach us a lot. Still missing my love." A day after this — thirteen days after arriving at Fort Benning — Pat wrote: As always, Marie is on my mind. I have been unable to speak with her... since we've been here, and I miss the sound of her voice... Often it bothers me that I am not by her side. Sometimes I feel like I've left her all by her lonesome to fend against the world. I suppose there is a reason for my feeling that way: My actions could be interpreted as such. |
| 132 |
I just hope to hell she doesn't feel that way. I love her to death and know that eventually this will be good for us both. Hopefully, she will one day see it that way. In the meantime I struggle with the guilt of what I've done. Naturally I'm a confident person and know all will be well and in a few years we'll be right back in the driver's seat kicking life's ass. But I'm also aware that there is the possibility I'm wrong. If Marie's, Ma's, Kevin's and Pooh's, and Dad's life was somehow hurt on account of me, I couldn't forgive myself. I console myself in the knowledge that I did this with noble intention. Sometimes one must purposefully convince himself that he is right as doubt creeps in. Fortunately the doubt is a small voice and I can control it. My wife and family mean the world to me, as do my friends; I cannot allow this to bring pain to them. Pat's entry for July 25 begins: Yesterday was a combination of bittersweet for me. 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. |
| 133 |
What have I done?" A day later Pat revisited his roiling feelings: Just when I think my emotions have flat-lined they rear their ugly head. Yesterday, from out of nowhere, I got so fucking madupsetsad that I was having trouble maintaining my cool. It only lasted a short while but it was strong and surprised me. All I wanted was to squeeze Marie, tell her how much I care, give her back all that I've taken... In a way it is refreshing in that this place has yet to callous or numb me. Somehow I enjoyed letting myself long for my wife and the life I left behind. It makes me feel and appreciate and love. It makes me feel very alive, and aware of my struggle. I do not intend to get dramatic, but life is about feeling and emotion... Love, laughter, and joy, as well as pain, longing and sorrow, are all part of the ride. Without the latter you cannot truly appreciate the former, cannot come to understand just how much you truly care... I'm experiencing and growing, and with this comes some suffering, but it's part of the deal. I feel I'm headed in the right direction... Passion is what makes life interesting, what ignites our soul, drives our curiosity, fuels our love and carries our friendships, stimulates our intellect, and pushes our limits... A passion for life is contagious and uplifting. Passion cuts both ways... Those that make you feel on top of the world are equally able to turn it upside down... In my life I want to create passion in my own life and with those I care for. I want to feel, experience, and live every emotion. I will suffer through the bad for the heights of the good. On September 11, Pat wrote a letter to Marie that began, "Who would have guessed that a year ago today would do such a number on our life in Eden... Well, you take life as it comes. This separation craziness will end soon enough, and when it does we will once again be back in our Eden." As agonizing as it was for him to be apart from Marie, it reminded him how intensely he loved her, and how much she enriched his life. |
| 134 |
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. 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. |
| 135 |
Her capture eight days earlier, and the rescue that eventually followed, were about to become the most publicized episodes of the entire Iraq War. The saga of Jessica Lynch would also turn out to have a momentous impact on Pat Tillman — although the wallop wouldn't be delivered until more than a year after she became a household name, and the connection between Lynch and Tillman has not previously been disclosed. On March 23, 2003, Private Lynch had been traveling north on Highway 8, a major freeway leading to Baghdad, as one of thirty-three soldiers in an eighteen-vehicle convoy of the Army's 507th Maintenance Company, which was heading up-country to support a Patriot antimissile battery. The soldiers were for the most part mechanics, supply clerks, and cooks, poorly trained for combat, who did not expect to find themselves anywhere near the front lines. 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. |
| 136 |
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. 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. |
| 137 |
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. 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. |
| 138 |
Thanks largely to details first revealed in this article, as well as dramatic video of the rescue distributed to the media by the Army, Jessica Lynch dominated the news for weeks. The details of the incident provided by military public affairs officers made for an absolutely riveting story that television, radio, and print journalists found irresistible: a petite blond supply clerk from a flea-speck burg in West Virginia is ambushed in Iraq and fearlessly mows down masked Fedayeen terrorists with her M16 until she runs out of ammo, whereupon she is shot, stabbed, captured, tortured, and raped before finally being snatched from her barbaric Iraqi captors during a daring raid by American commandos. The story was so gripping that little heed was paid to a paragraph near the beginning of the aforementioned Washington Post article, which stated, Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed. Pentagon officials said they had heard "rumors" of Lynch's heroics but had no confirmation. Over the following weeks, months, and years, subsequent reporting by investigative journalists revealed that most of the details of Lynch's ordeal were extravagantly embellished, and much of the rest was invented from whole cloth. Because her rifle had jammed, she hadn't fired a single round. Although her injuries had indeed been life threatening, they were exclusively the result of her Humvee smashing into Hernandez's tractor trailer; she was never shot, stabbed, tortured, or raped. After she had been transferred to Saddam Hussein General Hospital, her captors treated her with kindness and special care. And when the American commandos arrived at the hospital to rescue Lynch, they met no significant resistance. |
| 139 |
The spurious particulars did not come from Private Lynch. The bogus story was based on information fed to gullible reporters by anonymous military sources. The government official who arranged for reporters to interview these sources — the guy who deserves top billing for creating the myth of Jessica Lynch, in other words — was a White House apparatchik named Jim Wilkinson. Although his official job description was director of strategic communications for General Tommy Franks (the commander of all U. S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan), actually Wilkinson served as the Bush administration's top "perception manager" for the Iraq War. As Ben Smith noted in an article published in the New York Observer in October 2003, Wilkinson has gone from politics to war and back since he worked for George W. Bush in Florida during the 2000 election, and his journey is a mark of the administration's utilitarian approach to marketing war, politics and the presidency... He's also got as pure a Republican pedigree as you can wish, and an edge honed in the bitter partisan wars between Bill Clinton and the Republican House leadership. Mr. Wilkinson grew up in East Texas and attended high school in Tenaha, population 1,046, then gave up plans to become an undertaker to go to work for Republican Congressman Dick Armey in 1992. Mr. Armey soon became House majority leader; his communications director, Mr. Wilkinson's mentor, was Ed Gillespie, now chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mr. Wilkinson first left his mark on the 2000 presidential race in March 1999, when he helped package and promote the notion that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet." Then the Texan popped up in Miami to defend Republican protesters shutting down a recount... For his troubles, Mr. Wilkinson was made deputy director of communications for planning in the Bush White House, and was among the aides who set up the Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero that redefined George W. Bush's presidency. When the invasion of Iraq commenced on March 20, Wilkinson was the president's man on the ground at U. |
| 140 |
Natonski took Grabowski aside, got in his face, and told him, "I need you to fucking get up there and seize the bridges." Adding to the sense of urgency, Natonski explained, twelve Army soldiers from Lynch's convoy were still missing somewhere in the city, and Grabowski's Marines should "be looking for those individuals" as they moved toward the bridges. Not long past noon, while Grabowski and Bravo Company were struggling to extricate themselves from the reeking bog on the eastern edge of Nasiriyah, Charlie Company moved north across the Euphrates River Bridge, expecting to rendezvous with Bravo Company and then follow them to the Saddam Canal Bridge. Seeing no sign of Bravo Company, and unable to raise them on the radio, Captain Dan Wittnam, the commander of Charlie Company, assumed that Bravo Company must have already gone on ahead. So Wittnam, on his own initiative, ordered his men to proceed directly up Ambush Alley to the Saddam Canal Bridge. Sergeant William Schaefer, commanding Charlie Company's lead trac, was incredulous. "Say again," he radioed back, requesting confirmation of the orders. Schaefer was concerned because a platoon of tanks was supposed to precede Charlie Company wherever they went, but the tanks assigned to be their escorts were diverted to rescue the survivors of the Jessica Lynch convoy, and hadn't yet reappeared. Emphatic orders had been sent down the chain of command, however, that taking the bridge was to take priority over all else, so Schaefer swallowed his reservations, ordered his driver to put trac C201 in gear, and led the convoy into Ambush Alley. Like all Marines, he had been indoctrinated: "First, accomplish the mission." Compared with the other branches of the Armed Forces, the Marine Corps was relatively frank about where troop safety ranked in the big picture — and more than a few grunts actually took perverse pride in the Marines' reputation for getting the job done at any cost. With trac C201 out in front, Charlie Company's eleven tracs and three Humvees headed for the Saddam Canal Bridge. |
| 141 |
It killed Jordan instantly. Slumped near Jordan with the front portion of his head blown off, gurgling and twitching in the throes of death, was Lance Corporal Brian Buesing. Second Lieutenant Fred Pokorney lay dead in the middle of the road several feet away. Three other Marines were gravely injured by the blast. A moment later, a second tremendous explosion occurred, killing Corporal Kemaphoom Chanawongse, a Thai immigrant, as he was bringing ammunition to resupply Jordan's mortar squad, and wounding another Marine. Hundreds of bullets then began to impact the earth at a fantastic rate, followed many seconds later by a weird screeching noise like a "badass blender," as one grunt described it; another Marine said the sound reminded him of a "buzz saw." Blindingly bright pyrophoric decoy flares drifted down from the sky in the wake of the bullets, fizzing and sputtering like Fourth of July fireworks. "It looked like little sparklers going off about twenty feet in the air," recalled a witness who survived the attack. The Marines' sense of alarm was heightened by their complete bafflement. Only one of the men on the ground seemed to have any idea what was assaulting them. "I knew exactly what it was," said that man, Second Lieutenant Michael Seely, who had been awarded the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart in 1991 during the first war with Iraq, and was the company's most seasoned officer. "I'd been strafed eight times during Operation Desert Storm by an A-10. I know exactly what they sound like." The A-10 "Warthog" is an American jet aircraft designed to destroy tanks. The Marines of Charlie Company, Seely immediately understood, had been mistaken for the enemy and were being attacked by the U. S. Air Force. Three companies from the First Battalion, Second Marine Regiment were involved in the battle for Nasiriyah on March 23: Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. A few miles south of where Charlie Company was getting shot to pieces, the Marines in Alpha and Bravo companies were also fighting for their lives. |
| 142 |
It was the distinctive, terrifying noise of the Warthogs' spinning cannons that first alerted the Marines on the ground that they were being attacked by "friendlies," leaving them incredulous. That American aviators could mistake their ugly, utterly unique amtracs for Iraqi vehicles seemed impossible. In desperation the Marines shot off numerous red and green star-cluster flares. William Schaefer even pulled out a three-foot-by-five-foot American flag mounted on an aluminum pole and jammed it into a smoke launcher on the turret of trac C201 to make the Air Force pilots realize they were massacring fellow Americans, but all these efforts were in vain. After the Warthogs made approximately eight strafing and bombing runs on the Marines north of the Saddam Canal Bridge, Santare, parked two miles to the south, came on the radio to congratulate the pilots for the effectiveness of their attack: "Hey, you're putting smiles on the guys' faces down here." And then he sent the Warthogs about a mile north to check out a suspected enemy compound. By now the jets' five-hundred-pound bombs and uranium bullets had killed two more Marines: Private First Class David Fribley and Corporal Randal Rosacker. 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. |
| 143 |
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. But in November of that year he admitted during a press briefing, without apology, that he had killed it in name only: And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And "Oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall." I went down that next day and said, "Fine. If you want to savage this thing, fine: I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done." And I have. It is now widely understood that the administration presented fraudulent evidence as fact in order to create public support for invading Iraq in advance of the war. Much less attention has been paid to the administration's use of misinformation on an even grander scale to promote the war in the years following the invasion. |
| 144 |
Having provided reporters with spurious intelligence reports to hype the story and ensure that Lynch's saga would blow the socks off the folks back home, Wilkinson was eager to get his product into the hands of consumers at the earliest opportunity. The sooner "Saving Private Lynch" was on the front page of newspapers, the covers of magazines, and the evening news, the sooner the recent spate of depressing events would be relegated to the shadows. Over the weeks and months that followed, the scheme played out just as Wilkinson hoped it would. More than six hundred stories about Lynch appeared in all manner of media, including a rushed-into-print book that debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list and a made-for-television movie, Saving Jessica Lynch, scheduled to attract the largest possible audience during an important network sweeps month. Eventually Wilkinson's rendering of Lynch's ordeal was exposed as propaganda, but by then it had already accomplished what it was meant to accomplish: covering up the truth in order to maintain support for the president's policies. To this day, very few Americans have any inkling that seventeen U. S. Marines were killed by U. S. Air Force jets on the fourth day of the Iraq War. The Jessica Lynch hoax worked so well, in fact, that the White House would recycle the same tactic thirteen months later, almost move for move, when it was confronted with another series of potentially disastrous revelations. Just as before, a fictitious story about a valiant American soldier would be fed to the media in order to divert attention from a rash of disquieting news. 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. |
| 145 |
"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. 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. |
| 146 |
Uthlaut further explained that it would be nearly dark by the time half the platoon reached Mana, and that it would be dangerous, impractical, and in violation of standard operating procedure to clear a village after dark. Dennis replied that Uthlaut's men weren't being ordered to clear the village that evening; the order was simply for them to arrive at Mana before nightfall, overwatch the village through the night, and then begin the clearing operation in the morning after the other half of the platoon had delivered the Humvee to the pavement and then joined them at Mana. "After the response from Captain Dennis," Uthlaut testified, "I wanted to ensure I understood the intent, which was that one element would set up an assembly area north of the village, but not start clearing the village. That element was to basically wait for the rest of the platoon to arrive. My point was that we could accomplish the same end state by going with option two: bringing the whole platoon to the hardtop and bringing the whole platoon to assembly area north of the village." After making his case that the mission could be accomplished just as effectively and just as quickly without splitting the platoon, Uthlaut was baffled by headquarters' stubborn insistence on dividing it. He asked Dennis, "So the only reason that you want me to split my platoon is to have boots on the ground in the sector before dark?" "Yes," Dennis replied. Dismayed and frustrated, Uthlaut nevertheless accepted that headquarters had spoken and that he had no choice but to follow orders. A moment later, Uthlaut testified, "I then received a radio call on the same net" requesting detailed information about where the platoon would be splitting, and what route each of the two elements would be traveling, so that A-10 Warthogs could be dispatched from Bagram to provide air support in the event of enemy contact. "I handed the radio off to my Forward Observer," Uthlaut said, "and told him to brief the Air Support on these routes. |
| 147 |
They just said it was too dangerous." Nevertheless, Uthlaut had interpreted his orders to mean that this was the route Serial Two was supposed to take, and during his extended e-mail debate with headquarters about dividing the platoon, nobody told him otherwise. When his many objections to the plan fell on deaf ears, he dutifully split the platoon and ordered Serial Two to escort the jinga over the mountain, even though he and all the men under his command thought doing so was risky and pointless. In the Army, you follow orders. But then the jinga driver, who was intimately familiar with the local topography, balked at hauling the wrecked Humvee over the mountain. Through an interpreter, he managed to explain to the Americans that if Serial Two simply followed Serial One west to Mana and then turned north just past the slot canyon, they could reach their destination via a much easier route. Although more circuitous, it would actually take them to the paved highway more quickly and with considerably less risk by going around the mountain instead of over it. This made good sense to Sergeant Godec, so he ordered Serial Two to reverse course and go the same way Serial One had gone. When all the Humvees managed to get turned around, Godec put the jinga truck at the front of the procession, and the convoy began rolling slowly down the rock-strewn floor of the wadi toward the entrance to the narrows, approximately fifteen minutes behind Serial One. As the vehicles of Serial Two bumped along the riverbed into the maw of the slot, its steep sides and tight confines put many of the Rangers on edge. "The canyon was unbelievably narrow and the walls just shot straight up," says Brad Jacobson, who was driving the second-to-last vehicle in the convoy. "I've never seen anything like it in my life. And the way the sun was setting, the shadows — it was creepy." Just after he entered the narrows, as he steered his Humvee around a sharp bend to the left, there was a loud explosion, and the vehicles ahead of him came to a sudden halt. |
| 148 |
So I didn't fire." He did, however, attempt to lock and load the Mark 19 to be prepared to shoot, but when he pulled back the charging handle to feed a round onto the bolt face, the gun jammed, and he was unable to fire a single grenade during the entire firefight. Baker, meanwhile, ran ahead to where the jinga driver was hiding and shouted, "Hey! We have to get this vehicle out of here!" Baker forced the Afghan to get back in the driver's seat, hopped into the cab beside him, and got him to start moving forward so the convoy could escape the ambush. 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. |
| 149 |
During the investigation, Ward says, "When they showed me a Silver Star recommendation that I supposedly wrote for Pat, it was unsigned, which is a big red flag for me, because in the Army you can't submit anything without signing it. They would have handed it right back to me and said, 'Hey, stupid, you need to sign this.' Besides, it didn't sound like my words... It sounded really hokey — something I would never have written." All the recommendation material that McChrystal approved and submitted to Secretary Brownlee was painstakingly written to create the impression that Tillman was killed by enemy fire. By any objective measure, the recommendation was fraudulent. On June 2, 2009, after President Obama nominated McChrystal to command U. S. forces in Afghanistan, the matter of the misleading medal recommendation was raised during the general's confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator John McCain asked McChrystal to explain why, five years earlier, he had submitted the falsified Silver Star recommendation to the secretary of the Army "in the form that it was in." Stammering, McChrystal replied, "We sent a Silver Star that was not well written — and, although I went through the process, I will tell you now that I didn't review the citation well enough to capture — or, I didn't catch that, if you read it, you can imply that it was not friendly fire." He insisted that the recommendation package bearing his signature wasn't meant to deceive. 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. |
| 150 |
When Tillman was killed, White House perception managers saw an opportunity not unlike the one provided by the Jessica Lynch debacle thirteen months earlier. The administration had tried to make Tillman an inspirational emblem for the Global War on Terror when he was alive, but he had rebuffed those efforts by refusing to do any media interviews. If there had been a way to prevent the White House from exploiting him after his death, Tillman would have done that, too, as he made clear to Jade Lane in Iraq. "When we were in Baghdad, our cots were next to each other," Lane remembers. "Pat and I used to talk at night a lot before we'd rack out. I don't know how the conversation got brought up, but one night he said he was afraid that if something were to happen to him, Bush's people would, like, make a big deal out of his death and parade him through the streets. 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. |
| 151 |
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. The press briefing was scheduled for the following morning at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Friday afternoon, in advance of the briefing, Dannie Tillman got home from work to find a message on her machine from Billy House, a reporter at the Arizona Republic, the Phoenix newspaper, asking her to call him. When she phoned him back, House asked what she thought of the news he'd just received from an Army source that Pat's death may have been from friendly fire. |
| 152 |
So the facts needed to be suppressed. An alternative narrative needed to be constructed... Over a month after Pat's death, when it became clear that it would no longer be possible to pull off this deception, a few of the facts were parceled out to the public and to the family. General Kensinger was ordered to tell the American public ... that Pat died of fratricide, but with a calculated and nefarious twist. He stated, "There was no one specific finding of fault," and that he "probably died of fratricide." But there was specific fault, and there was nothing probable about the facts that led to Pat's death... After the truth of Pat's death was partially revealed, Pat was no longer of use as a sales asset, and became strictly the Army's problem. They were now left with the task of briefing our family and answering our questions. With any luck, our family would sink quietly into our grief, and the whole unsavory episode would be swept under the rug. However, they miscalculated our family's reaction. Through the amazing strength and perseverance of my mother, the most amazing woman on Earth, our family has managed to have multiple investigations conducted. However, while each investigation gathered more information, the mountain of evidence was never used to arrive at an honest or even sensible conclusion... The handling of the situation after the firefight was described as a compilation of "missteps, inaccuracies, and errors in judgment which created the perception of concealment."... Writing a Silver Star award before a single eyewitness account is taken is not a misstep. Falsifying soldier witness statements for a Silver Star is not a misstep. These are intentional falsehoods that meet the legal definition for fraud. Delivering false information at a nationally televised memorial service is not an error in judgment. Discarding an investigation Scott's 156 that does not fit a preordained conclusion is not an error in judgment. These are deliberate acts of deceit. This is not the perception of concealment. |
| 153 |
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. We have now concluded that our efforts are being actively thwarted by powers that are more ... interested in protecting a narrative than getting at the truth or seeing that justice is served. That is why we ask Congress, as a sovereign representative of the whole people, to exercise its power to investigate the inconsistencies in Pat's death and the aftermath and all the other soldiers that were betrayed by this system. The one bit of truth that did survive these manipulations is that Pat was, and still is, a great man... But the fact that the Army, and what appears to be others, attempted to hijack his virtue and his legacy is simply horrific. The least this country can do for him in return is to uncover who is responsible for his death, who lied and who covered it up, and who instigated those lies and benefited from them. Then ensure that justice is meted out to the culpable. Pat and these other soldiers volunteered to put their lives on the line for this country. Anything less than the truth is a betrayal of those values that all soldiers who have fought for this nation have sought to uphold. Waxman, the oversight committee chairman, observed, The Tillman family wants to know how all of this could have happened... One of the things that make the Afghanistan and Iraq wars so different from previous wars is the glaring disparity of sacrifice. For the overwhelming number of Americans, this war has brought no sacrifice and no inconvenience, but for a small number of Americans, the war has demanded incredible and constant sacrifice. Those soldiers and their families pay that price proudly and without complaint. This is what Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman did, and it is what their families have done, but our government failed them... The least we owe to courageous men and women who are fighting for our freedom is the truth. |
| 154 |
I had a lot of guilt at first that I wasn't able to focus on fighting the military, but I also realized that if I went down that path, I'm not sure I could have kept it together. When Pat died, I shut down in a lot of ways — I lived in a pretty dark, quiet place for years and struggled... I have an enormous amount of respect for Dannie and how she has handled everything. Trying to get answers from the military is like banging your head against a wall, and she carried that burden for all of us. I wasn't able to do it, but I'm grateful for her strength, and what she has done to uncover the truth and hold people accountable. To know Pat and know how he lived his life, and then to see how his death was treated by the military and government is heartbreaking — it goes against everything he stood for. In May 2004, a week after the memorial service for Pat in San Jose, Marie returned to her rented home overlooking Puget Sound. "I got back to town on a Monday or Tuesday," she remembers. I wasn't supposed to return to the office until the following week, but I was just sitting around the house. So I went back to work. Probably for the first couple of months that I was back, I would sit at my desk and look out the window all day. The company I worked for was really understanding. They let me come in and just sit there. I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. The life I'd had was basically gone. So every morning I would get up at quarter to five, get in the car, go up to Seattle, and look out the window. I'd get home at seven at night, sit on the couch for an hour, talk to Kevin, and go to bed. That was it. And I did that for months and months and months and months. Kevin decided he was going to stay in the Army and finish his commitment. In some ways that made things easier for me, and I decided to stay there with him. It gave me some time before I needed to make any decisions about where to go. Kevin fulfilled his contract with the Army in July 2005. "By that time," says Marie, "I knew I needed to leave. |
| 155 |
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. 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. |
| 156 |
Usually cranked by us. Mrs. Sneed, the pastor's wife, would bring sweet potato pie, warm and a little too sweet for Momma's taste but perfect to Bailey and me. Mrs. Miller's coconut cake and Mrs. Kendrick's chocolate fudge were what Adam and Eve ate in the Garden just before the Fall. But the most divine dessert of all was Momma's Caramel Cake. Momma would labor prayerfully over her selection, because she knew but would never admit that she and all the women were in hot competition over whose culinary masterpiece was the finest. Momma could bake all the other women's dishes and often made them for the family, but not one of the other cooks would even dare the Caramel Cake (always to be spoken of in capital letters). Since she didn't have brown sugar, she had to make her own caramel syrup. Making her caramel cake took four to five hours, but the result was worthy of the labor. The salty sweetness of the caramel frosting along with the richness of the batter made the dessert soften and liquefy on the tongue and slip quietly down the throat almost without notice. Save that it left a memory of heaven itself in the mouth. Of course Bailey and I were a little biased in Momma's favor, but who could have resisted the bighearted woman who was taller and bigger than most men yet who spoke in a voice a little above a whisper? Her hands were so large one could span my entire head, but they were so gentle that when she rubbed my legs and arms and face with blue-seal Vaseline every morning, I felt as if an angel had just approved of me. I not only loved her, I liked her. So I followed her around. People began calling me her shadow. "Hello, Sister Henderson, I see you got your shadow with you as usual." She would smile and answer, "I guess you got that right. If I go, she goes. If I stop, she stops. Yes, sir, I have me two shadows. Well, three by rights. My own and my two grandbabies." I only saw Momma's anger become physical once. The incident alarmed me, but at the same time it assured me that I had great protection. |
| 157 |
Because of a horrible sexual violence I experienced when I was seven, I stopped talking to everyone but Bailey. All teachers who came to Stamps to work at Lafayette County Training School had to find room and board with black families, for there were no boarding houses where they could gain admittance. 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. We were nearly the same height. She said, "Go back to your seat. Go on." Bailey stood up over by the window. He said, "She's going to write her name and grade on the blackboard." Miss Williams said to me, "I've heard about you. |
| 158 |
He didn't sleep at Momma's house, but he took every meal there, and took is the correct word. Because of him, Bailey and I spent the most embarrassing hour of our lives, and to add insult to injury we became very sick. Piss Ant, as Bailey called him, came round as usual after Sunday services. I brought him a face basin with water from the well so he could wash, but he hardly dipped his hand in the water, nor did he say thank you. I turned to go in the kitchen to help Momma, but I saw Bailey had seen Piss Ant's behavior. Momma sent me to the garden to pick and wash lettuce. She had made her delicious potato salad. She chipped off a corner from a block of ice and pulverized it with a hammer. She put the lettuce in a pretty dish and laid crushed ice between the leaves. When Momma called everyone in for Sunday dinner, the table was powerful with her delectables spread from end to end. There was the most golden-brown fried chicken, string beans with little potatoes, dark green turnip leaves with snow-white turnips, pickled peaches, and a platter of her buttermilk biscuits called cat heads because of their size. 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. |
| 159 |
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. 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. |
| 160 |
The men chopped off the larger pieces of pork and laid them in the smokehouse to begin the curing process. They opened the knuckle of the hams with their deadly-looking knives, took out a certain round, harmless-looking bone ("It could make the meat too bad"), and rubbed coarse brown salt that looked like fine gravel into the flesh, and watched as the blood popped to the surface. Throughout the year, until the next frost, we took our meals from the smokehouse, the chicken coop, the shelves of canned goods, and the little garden that lay cousin-close to the store. There were choices on the shelves that could set a hungry child's mouth to watering. Green beans, snapped always the right length; collards; cabbage; juicy, sweet red tomato preserves that came into their own on steaming buttered biscuits; and sausage, beets, berries, and every fruit grown in Arkansas. But at least twice yearly Momma would feel that her grandbabies needed fresh meat in their diets. We were then given money — pennies, nickels, and dimes entrusted to Bailey — and sent to the butcher to buy liver. The butcher shop was in the white part of town. Crossing our area of Stamps, which in childhood's narrow measure seemed a whole world, obliged us by custom to stop and speak to every black person we met. Bailey also felt constrained to spend a few minutes playing with each friend. There I felt a special joy in going through the black area with time on our hands and money in our pockets. (Bailey's pockets were as good as my own.) But the pleasure fled when we reached the white part of town. Suddenly we were explorers walking without weapons into man-eating animals' territory. We never turned to look at the houses we passed, nor did we really speak to each other once we were in enemy territory. We solemnly moved forward to our goal. At the butcher shop we were lucky if no one came in. All whites were served before us, even if the butcher was half into our order. He would put our meat on the side and serve the white customer. |
| 161 |
So again, she was to blame. She looked around at her situation. She was a colored woman in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century. She had herself and her sons to feed, house, and clothe. She would not work as a maid, for that would mean leaving her tots, especially her crippled one, in someone else's care. She decided to make use of the two largest employers in Stamps. They were the cotton gin, and three miles away, the lumber mill. She devised a plan that would let her make money and at the same time mostly stay at home with her "darlings." At night she would cook and then grind and season ham and chicken and also make a batter for her cakes. Sunrise found her kneading the dough and placing the meat in the center of each pastry. Midmorning she walked from her house, leaving a young girl to watch her boys for three hours. Carrying her fresh raw pies, her coal pot, lard, and a fold-up chair, she would arrive at the factory. She placed herself and supplies on the ground adjacent to the door the black workers used. She would begin frying pies a half hour before noon. She told me many times that nothing sounds as loud as the dinner bell and nothing smells as good as fresh fried pies. She had a bell that she rang seconds after the noon siren sounded. She sold the pies hot at the cotton gin for five cents. She would wrap any leftovers in a fresh tea towel, and leaving her cooking utensils under the care of a child hired for that purpose, she would run three miles to the lumber mill and offer the tepid pies for three cents. But believing in fair play and being a good businesswoman, the establishment that received lukewarm pies on one day would be her first stop the next noon. Her customers appreciated her cooking, her promptness, and her sense of fairness. After a few years of serving the pies in both unbreathable summer heat and bone-shaking winter cold, Momma built a little hut equidistant between the two hives of commercial activity. Then at noontime the hungry workers would run to her to get their steaming chicken and cured ham pies. |
| 162 |
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. 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. My policy of independence would not allow me to accept money or even a ride from my mother, but I welcomed her wisdom. |
| 163 |
Much to her delight, after a week he telephoned her and telephoned her and telephoned her until she agreed to go out with him. The courtship started slow and remained slow. The doctor was steady, but his ardor never heated up to the degree that M. J. wanted so that she could know the level of his commitment. One day she invited me to visit. She lived in Santa Monica on the ground floor in a generous apartment of a building she owned. Her living room was rich with antique furniture, and the paintings of John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett, and Samella Lewis hung on her walls. M. J. was a rich-cream-colored woman with green-gray eyes and an electric personality. She told me that the doctor was coming for dinner and that she had an incredible recipe for tamales. Her smile of satisfaction was just comfortably one grin away from a smirk. When I probed, she said her suitor loved Mexican food and he thought only some California Mexicans and a few Texas Mexicans could prepare tamales properly. She said whenever he was near a Mexican restaurant that served tamales, he was like a runaway horse. She had seen him pull up and halt and all but paw the ground at its door. M. J. had bought all the ingredients to make dozens of her beloved's delight. She knew I cooked Mexican food often and she wanted me to see that everything went off well. I sat on a kitchen stool as she made arroz con pollo, refried beans, guacamole, salsa, carne Colorado, and, finally, the vaunted tamales. Her entire house was filled with the culinary perfumes of Guadalajara and Oaxaca and Jalisco. The doctor entered the living room, but when we were introduced he could hardly concentrate enough to complete the simplest social pleasantries of "How are you?" and "Well, and you?" I watched as his nostrils twitched from side to side, trying to ascertain if the aromas he thought he encountered were really there. He asked M. J. if she had sent out for Mexican food. She told him she had cooked the dinner. He asked what was on the menu. |
| 164 |
A chauffeured car picked up the invitees and drove them carefully fifty miles north to Bellagio. There they were deposited at the Center, which stood atop a high hill. Its buildings were low-slung and meandered over carefully tended acres only a few miles from the Swiss border. Within those elegant walls, forty-eight employees cared for thirty guests and the retreat center's director and wife. Each artist had a commodious suite. Once ensconced in this graciousness, the artists were informed of the regimen. Breakfast was ordered nightly and served each morning by footmen. Lunch was served informally at midday. Artists could sit at will in a casual dining room and choose food from an elaborate buffet. 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. |
| 165 |
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. 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. I figured I could use it as the riser for my corn bread. I gave my jacket to the butler and listed the other ingredients I needed. He put men to work, and in seconds I was able to put a pan of polenta corn bread into a hot oven and the turkey's neck, gizzard, liver, and wingtips to boil. |
| 166 |
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. "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. |
| 167 |
Gaia's Revenge We have good cause to wonder here what 'he pushed them into Gaia's womb' really means. Some people have taken it to indicate that he buried the Hecatonchires in the earth. Divine identity at this early time was fluid, how much a god was a person and how much an attribute is hard to determine. There were no capital letters then. Gaia the Earth Mother was the same as gaia, the earth itself, just as ouranos, the sky, and Ouranos the Sky Father were one and the same. What is certain is that in reacting like this to the three Hecatonchires, his own children, and in treating his wife with such abominable cruelty, Ouranos was committing the first crime. An elemental crime that would not go unpunished. Gaia's agony was unbearable and inside her, alongside the trio of writhing, flailing three-hundred-handed clawing and a hundred-and-fifty-headed butting Hecatonchires, there sprang up a hatred, a most terrible and implacable hatred against Ouranos, the son she had borne and the husband with whom she had given birth to a new generation. And, like ivy twisting round a tree, there grew a plan of revenge. The piercing pain of the Hecatonchires still gnawing at her, Gaia visited Othrys, a great mountain that looks down over what we now call the central Greek region of Phthiotis. From its peak you can see the plain of Magnesia reaching down to the blue waters of the western Aegean as they curl round the Malian Gulf and embrace the sporadic scattering of islands called the Sporades. 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. |
| 168 |
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. 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. Perhaps what happened next is not so surprising. Great pools of blood formed around the scene of Ouranos's castration. From that blood, the blood which fell from the ruined groin of Ouranos, living beings emerged. |
| 169 |
But you must do your duty. Breed! Fill the world with our Titan race. Bring them up to obey me in all things and I will grant you lands and provinces of your own. Now, bow before me.' The Titans bowed low and Kronos gave a grunt of satisfaction that was the closest he ever came to an expression of happiness. The vengeful prophecy of his father had been averted; the eternal Age of the Titans could begin. The Cretan Boy Kronos may have grunted with satisfaction, but Moros, the figuration of Destiny and Doom, smiled as he always does when the powerful exhibit confidence. On this occasion Moros smiled because he could see that Zeus was flourishing on Crete. He was growing into the strongest and most striking male in all creation indeed his radiance had become almost painful to look upon. fn16 The goodness of goat's milk and the nurturing potency of manna had given him strong bones, a clear complexion, sparkling eyes and glossy hair. He made the journey, to use the Greek terms, from pais (boy) and ephebos (teenager) to kouros (youth) and thence into a fine example of what we might call today a young adult. Even now the first downy outlines of what was to become a legendary and mighty example of the art of the beard were showing themselves on his chin and cheeks. fn17 He possessed the confidence, the unforced air of command, that marks out those destined to lead. He was quicker to laughter than anger, but when his ire was roused he could frighten every living creature within his orbit. From the first he exhibited a blend of zest for life and strength of will that filled even his mother with awe, and some attested that Amalthea's milk conferred extraordinary capabilities on the youth as he grew. To this day Cretan guides entertain visitors with tales of the young Zeus's remarkable powers. They tell the story (as if it happened within their lifetimes) of how, as an infant playing with his beloved nanny-goat and unaware of his own strength, Zeus accidentally snapped off one of her horns. |
| 170 |
'Lie down with me.' 'No. We shall go for a walk. I have many things to say to you.' 'Here. On the grass.' Metis smiled and took his hand. 'We have work to do, Zeus.' 'But I love you.' 'Then you will do as I say. When we love someone, we always want to please them do we not?' 'Don't you love me?' Metis laughed, though in truth she was astounded by the halo of glamour and charisma that radiated from this bold and handsome youth. But her friend Rhea had asked her to undertake his education and Metis was never one to betray a trust. For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others. Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close. One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone. 'What on earth are you doing?' 'Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.' 'Of course you are.' 'Today,' said Metis, 'is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfil your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.' 'What's in that jar?' 'In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I'll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.' 'I don't understand.' 'Look, here is your mother. She will explain.' As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other's eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. |
| 171 |
We will find out later where it landed and what happened. Inside Kronos the compound of salt, mustard and ipecacuanha continued to do its emetic work. fn19 One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera. fn20 Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting. If you recall, Metis's potion also included a quantity of poppy juice. This immediately began to take somniferous effect. Letting out one last great rumbling groan, Kronos rolled over and fell into a deep, deep sleep. With a cry of exultation Zeus bent over his snoring father to grasp the great sickle and administer the coup de grace. 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. |
| 172 |
It was the wise and clever Metis who advised Zeus to go down and release his three one-eyed and three hundred-handed brothers. He offered them freedom in perpetuity if they would help him defeat Kronos and the Titans. They needed no further encouragement. The Gigantes too chose to side with Zeus and proved themselves brave and tireless fighters. fn2 In the final decisive battle the pitiless ferocity of the Hecatonchires not to mention their surplus of heads and hands combined quite marvellously with the wild electric power of the Cyclopes whose names were, if you recall, Brightness, Lightning and Thunder: Arges, Steropes and Brontes. These gifted craftsmen hammered their mastery of storms into thunderbolts for Zeus to use as weapons, which he learned to fling with pinpoint accuracy at his enemies, blasting them to atoms. Under his direction the Hecatonchires picked up and hurled rocks at furious speed, while the Cyclopes harried and dazzled the enemy with lightning shows and terrifying peals of thunder. The hundred hands of the Hecatonchires scooped and launched, scooped and launched innumerable rocks at the enemy like so many demented windmilling catapults until, bludgeoned and battered, the Titans called for a ceasefire. 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. |
| 173 |
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. 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. |
| 174 |
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. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of 'hearth and home'. Our word 'hearth' shares its ancestry with 'heart', just as the modern Greek for 'hearth' is kardia, which also means 'heart'. In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in words like 'economics' and 'ecology'. The Latin for hearth is focus which speaks for itself. |
| 175 |
In art and common reference she is often saddled with the extra indignity of three upsetting '-esques': statuesque, Rubenesque and courtesy of her Roman appellation Junoesque. Fate and posterity have been unkind to the Queen of Heaven. Unlike Aphrodite or Gaia she has no planet named in her honour, fn9 and she must bear the burden of a reputation that portrays her as more reactive than active reactive always to the errant infidelities of her husband-brother Zeus. 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. |
| 176 |
His later reputation, however, was for faithfulness, kindness, good humour and equable temper. Greek myth is replete with infants cast into the wilderness or abandoned on mountaintops to die, either because some prophecy foretold they would one day bring disaster on their parents, tribe or city, or because they were considered accursed, ugly or malformed. Such outcasts seemed always to survive and return to fulfil the prophecy or win back their birthright. Hephaestus longed to come back to Olympus, which he knew to be his home by right, but he was aware that he could not do so without bitterness or on proper terms unless he allowed himself one measured act of revenge, which would prove his strength of personality, his right to divinity and serve as his calling card to heaven. So, as Hephaestus learned his trade and worked his bellows, his quick and clever mind devised the plan that his quick and clever fingers would turn into startling reality. The Hand of Aphrodite Bound fast on the golden throne, Hera howled with rage and frustration. Neither her power, nor even that of Zeus himself had been able to release her from its curse. How could she invite the immortal world to a feast in which she sat pinioned like a criminal in the stocks? It would be grotesque and undignified. She would be laughed at. What magic was at work here? Who had done this to her? How could she be released from the spell? The hapless Zeus, bombarded by a shrieked fusillade of questions and complaints, turned to the other gods for help. Whoever managed to release Hera, he proclaimed, could take Aphrodite's hand in marriage, the greatest matrimonial prize there was. Ares was loudly annoyed by this peremptory decree. Was it not understood that he was to wed Aphrodite? 'Calm yourself,' said Zeus. 'You are stronger than all the other gods put together. Your union is safe.' Aphrodite was confident too and pushed her lover forward with encouraging words. But none of Ares' pulling and pushing and kicking and swearing had the slightest effect. |
| 177 |
If anything, it seemed that the more he strained, the tighter the throne's hold on Hera became. Poseidon (despite already having Amphitrite as his consort) made a spirited attempt that likewise came to nothing. Even Hades rose up from the underworld to try his hand at freeing Hera from her increasingly embarrassing predicament. All to no avail. As Zeus himself tugged frantically and uselessly at the arms of the throne, enduring yet more insults from the humiliated and enraged Hera, a polite but insistent cough cut through the commotion. The assembled gods turned. In the very hall of heaven, a gentle smile on his lopsided face, stood Hephaestus. 'Hello, mother,' he said. 'Having problems?' 'Hephaestus!' He limped forward. 'I understand that there is some sort of reward ...?' Aphrodite looked at the ground, chewing her lip. Ares growled and started forward, but Zeus held him back. The other gods parted to let the ugly little creature hobble through to where Hera sat imprisoned in her throne of gold. At one touch of his fingers the arms of the golden throne swung open and Hera was free. fn13 She rose to her feet, adjusted her gown and straightened herself in a manner that told the world the whole situation had been under control the whole time. Colour flew to Aphrodite's cheek. This could not be! It was a moment of sweet revenge for Hephaestus, but his essential good nature kept him from gloating. Despite or perhaps because of the pangs of rejection he had endured all his life, he was motivated not by anger or resentment but only by a desire to please, to make himself useful and give delight. He knew that he was ugly and he knew Aphrodite did not love him. He knew that if he claimed her as his prize she would betray him and slip often into the bed of his brother Ares. But he was simply happy to be home. As for Hera rather than acknowledge that she had been paid back for her cruel and unnatural betrayal of the maternal instinct, she maintained a dignified and frosty silence. |
| 178 |
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. Just that little amphora you are holding took me four and a half weeks to fill, so you can see that this is a most laborious business. The smell of honey is so intense, so ravishing and so irresistible that many come to raid my nest. They do so with impunity, for I am small, and all I can do is buzz angrily at them and urge them to leave. Imagine, a whole week's work can be lost with just one swipe of a weasel's paw or one lick of a bear cub's tongue. |
| 179 |
She would be a prudent check on the reckless excesses and headlong passions that often threatened to get the god of thunder into trouble. His storms of temper, lust and jealousy needed to be balanced by her calm voice, a voice that could urge his instincts into more rational and enlightened channels. Whether Metis sacrificed her freedom out of a sense of duty and responsibility, or out of love for the Zeus whom she had always adored, I cannot conclusively state. I like to think it was a mixture of the two. It was, as a Greek might say, her moira both to serve and to love. Combined with Zeus's other positive characteristics charisma, fn23 heart, native guile and (usually) a strong sense of justice, fairness and right the shrewd inner guidance of Metis helped raise him into a great ruler whose attributes far outshone those of his father and grandfather, Kronos and Ouranos. In fact so much a part of him did Metis become that Homer sometimes referred to Zeus as Metieta 'wise counsellor'. Seeking sanctuary Wisdom, in the form of Metis, may have whispered to Zeus in one ear, but in the other he always heard the hot urgings of passion. When beautiful girls and women and sometimes youths crossed his path, nothing could stop him from chasing them from one end of the earth to the other, even if he had to transform himself into any number of animals to do it. Once the lustful fit was on him, Metis could no more control him than a whisper can quieten a tempest, while Hera's wild shrieks of jealous rage had no more power to call him back than the wingbeats of a butterfly can blow a ship off course. I have mentioned that Zeus's passionate glance had already fallen once on Leto, demure daughter of the Titans Phoebe and Coeus. I should imagine that 'demure' is an annoying word for a woman to hear applied to herself (one rarely hears of demure men after all), but Leto was to become a kind of minor deity representing precisely the quality of modest dignity that the word 'demure' evokes. |
| 180 |
So she tried again. When the twins were just days old she sent the snake Python to consume them. 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. He sliced the dead body into pieces there on the beach and sent up a great cry of triumph to the sky. You might think Apollo had every justification to protect his sister, his mother and himself from such a deadly creature, but Python was chthonic he sprang from the earth making him a child of Gaia and as such under divine protection. Zeus knew that he must punish Apollo for the slaying of the serpent or lose all authority. |
| 181 |
Five minutes later he had requested a light so that he might better examine the cave's walls. Being offered none he struck two stones together over twists of straw and kindled a flame. This had never been done before. Now standing upright (and still not half an hour old), this remarkable infant announced that he was going for a walk. 'The close confines of this cramped cavern are occasioning me uncomfortably acute claustrophobia,' he said, inventing both alliteration and the family of '-phobia' words as he spoke. 'I shall see you presently. Get on with your spinning or knitting or whatever it is, there's a good mother.' As he ambled down the slopes of Mount Cyllene this singular and sensational prodigy began to hum to himself. His humming turned into tuneful singing, which the nightingales in the woods around him immediately began to copy and have been trying to recapture ever since. After he had travelled he knew not how far he found himself in a field where he was met by the wondrous sight of a herd of pure white cattle cropping the grass and lowing gently in the moonlight. 'Oh!' he breathed, entranced. 'What beautiful moo-moos.' For all his precocity he was still not above baby-talk. Hermes looked at the cows and the cows looked at Hermes. 'Come here,' he commanded. The cows stared for a while then lowered their heads and continued to graze. 'Hm. So it's like that is it?' Hermes thought quickly and gathered up long blades of grass which he plaited together into something like a bovine version of horseshoes, attaching one to each hoof of every cow. Around his own tiny plump feet he wrapped laurel leaves. Finally he snapped off a branch of young willow and stripped it down into a long switch with which he easily and expertly tickled and stung the cows into a tight and manoeuvrable herd. As an extra precaution he drove them backwards, all the way up the slope and back to the mouth of the cave, where his astonished and alarmed mother had been worriedly standing ever since he had wandered so very calmly away. |
| 182 |
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. 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. |
| 183 |
They would regret taking property from the god of arrows. He lay down in the cattle's field to examine the ground with all the thoroughness of an experienced tracker. To his astonishment the brigands had left no useful traces at all. All he could see were random brush marks, meaningless whorls and swirls and unless he was going mad one tiny infant footprint. Any impressions that might have been formed by cow's hoofs seemed to be heading, not away from the field, but towards it! Whoever had stolen the cattle was mocking Apollo. They were practised and expert thieves, that much was clear. His sister Artemis was the most skilled hunter he knew: would she dare? Perhaps she had devised some cunning way to conceal her tracks. Ares didn't have the wit. Poseidon wouldn't be interested. Hephaestus? Unlikely. Who then? He noticed a thrush preening on a branch not far away and in one smooth action drew his bow and brought the creature down. Slitting open its crop the god of oracles and augury peered forward to read the entrails. From the colouration in the lower intestine, the kink in the right kidney and the unusual disposition of the thymus gland it was clear at once that the cattle were somewhere in Arcadia, not far from Corinth. And what was that clot of blood on the liver saying to him? Mount Cyllene. And what else? So! It had been a baby's footprint after all. Apollo's usually smooth brow was drawn into a frown, his blue eyes blazed and his rose-red lips compressed themselves into a grim line. Revenge would be his. Half-Brothers By the time Apollo arrived at the foot of Mount Cyllene his temper had frayed almost to breaking point. The world knew the cows were sacred to him. It was obvious that they were a rare and valuable breed. 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. |
| 184 |
Take me up to Olympus and introduce me around,' said Hermes. 'That vacant twelfth throne has got my name on it.' The Twelfth God Everything about Hermes was quick. His mind, his wit, his impulses and his reflexes. The gods of Olympus, already flattered by the fine savoury smoke that had risen to their nostrils the previous night from Mount Cyllene, were entranced by the newcomer. Even Hera presented a cheek to be kissed and declared the child enchanting. He was on Zeus's lap and pulling at his beard before anyone had noticed. Zeus laughed and all the gods laughed along with him. What were to be this god's duties? His fleetness of mind and foot suggested one immediate answer he should become the messenger of the gods. To make Hermes even faster, Hephaestus fashioned what would become his signature footwear, the talaria a pair of winged sandals that allowed him to zip from one place to another more swiftly than an eagle. Hermes was so unaffectedly delighted with them, and clasped Hephaestus to him with such warm and grateful affection, that the god of fire and forges immediately limped back to his workshop and, after a day and a night's furious work, returned with a winged helmet with a low crown and a flexible brim to go with the talaria. This lent Hermes a touch of grandeur and showed the world that this pert and handsome youth represented the dread majesty of the gods. For extra Elan and glamour Hephaestus presented him with a silver staff topped with wings and entwined with two snakes. fn33 The stories of Hermes' exploits tickled Zeus greatly, then and thenceforward. The guile and duplicity he had shown in stealing Apollo's cattle made Hermes a natural choice for god of rascals, thieves, liars, conmen, gamblers, hucksters, jokers, story-tellers and sportsmen. The grander side to liars, jokers and story-tellers gave him a share in literature, poetry, oratory and wit too. His skill and insight allowed him to hold sway in the fields of science and medicine. fn34 He became the god of commerce and trade, of herdsmen (of course) and of travel and roads. |
| 185 |
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. 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. |
| 186 |
Another Hephaestus. My idea is that you would model these creatures out of ... out of clay, for example. They should be shaped in our image, anatomically correct in every detail, but on a smaller scale. Then we could animate them, give them life, replicate them and release them into nature to see what happens.' Prometheus pondered this idea. 'Would we engage with them, speak to them, move about with them?' 'That would be exactly the point. To have an intelligent well, semi-intelligent species to praise and worship us, to play with us and amuse us. 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. |
| 187 |
He prised these from the mud, the squashed clay still bearing the imprint of Zeus's enormous toes. 'Oh good,' said Zeus cheerfully, 'the rest are fine, that's plenty. Let's get on, shall we?' 'But look at these!' said Prometheus holding up the squashed and ruined statuettes. 'The little green, violet and blue creatures were just about my favourites.' 'We've still got the black, brown, ivory, yellow, reddish and what have you. That's enough, surely?' 'I really loved that shade of cobalt blue.' Athena was looking down at the intact figures which lay glowing in the dying rays of the sun. '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. |
| 188 |
It gave Zeus and the other gods, Titans and immortals great pleasure to mingle with the charming, childlike homunculi that Prometheus has shaped from clay. Perhaps we only imagined these first days of beautiful simplicity and universal kindness so that we could have a high point of paradisal sublimity against which to judge the low, degraded times that came after. The later Greeks certainly believed that the Golden Age had truly existed. It was ever present in their thinking and poetry and gave them a dream of perfection to aspire to, a vision more concrete and realized than our own vague ideas of early man grunting in caves. Platonic ideals and perfect forms were perhaps the intellectual expression of that wistful race memory. It was natural that, of all the immortals, the one who loved humankind best should be their artist-creator Prometheus. He and his brother Epimetheus now spent more time living with man than they spent on Olympus in the company of their fellow immortals. It saddened Prometheus that he had only been allowed to create male people, for he felt that this cloned single-sex race lacked variety both in its outlook, disposition and character and in its inability to breed and create new types. His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged and unchallenging existence had no zest to it. To approach the godlike status that his creation deserved, mankind needed something more. They needed fire. Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge; and they needed an inner creative fire too, a divine fire, to enable them to think, imagine, dare and do. The more he watched over and mingled with his creation, the more Prometheus became convinced that fire was exactly what they needed. And he knew where to find it. The Fennel Stalk Prometheus surveyed the twin crowns of Olympus towering above him. The tallest peak, Mytikos, reached nearly ten thousand podes high into the clouds. |
| 189 |
Next to it, two or three hundred or so feet lower but much harder to climb, reared the rocky face of Stefani. To the west loomed the heights of Skolio. Prometheus knew that the dying rays of the evening sun would shield that climb the toughest of all from the gods enthroned above, and so he began the perilous ascent confident that he could reach the summit unseen. Prometheus had never disobeyed Zeus before. Not in anything big. In games and races and wrestling matches and competitions to win the hearts of nymphs he had freely teased and taunted his friend, but he had never defied him outright. The hierarchy of the pantheon was not something any being could disrupt without real consequences. Zeus was a beloved friend, but he was, above all, Zeus. Yet Prometheus was determined on his course of action. Much as he had always loved Zeus, he found that he loved mankind more. The excitement and resolution he felt were stronger than any fear of divine wrath. He hated to cross his friend, but when it came to a choice, there was no choice. By the time he had scaled Skolio's sheer wall, the western gates had closed upon Apollo's chariot of the sun and the whole mountain was shrouded in darkness. Crouching low, Prometheus made his way around the jagged outcrop that crested the bowl-like amphitheatre of Megala Kazania. Looking ahead he could see the Plateau of the Muses beyond, flickering with dancing licks of light thrown by the fires of Hephaestus's forge several hundred podes or so further off. Around the other side of Olympus the gods were supping. Prometheus could hear Apollo's lyre, Hermes' fluting syrinx, the raucous laugh of Ares and the snarling of Artemis's hounds. Hugging the outer walls of the forge the Titan edged along to its forecourt. He was startled, as he rounded the corner, to see stretched out naked on the ground the huge figure of Brontes snoring by the fire. Prometheus hung back in the shadows. He knew that the Cyclopes assisted Hephaestus, but that they might sleep on the premises was more than he had bargained for. |
| 190 |
Prometheus moved from village to village demonstrating techniques for the fashioning of tools and weapons, the firing of earthen pots, the cooking of meat and the baking of cereal doughs, all of which quickly let loose an avalanche of advantages, raising man above the animal prey that had no answer to metal-tipped spears and arrows. It was not long before Zeus chanced to look down from Olympus and saw points of dancing orange light dotting the landscape all around. He knew at once what had happened. Nor did he need to be told who was responsible. His anger was swift and terrible. Never had such almighty, such tumultuous, such apocalyptic fury been witnessed. Not even Ouranos in his mutilated agony had been so filled with vengeful rage. Ouranos was brought low by a son he had no regard for, but Zeus had been betrayed by the friend he loved most. No betrayal could be more terrible. The Punishments The Gift Zeus's wrath was so overwhelming that all Olympus feared Prometheus would be blasted with such power that his atoms would never reassemble. It is possible that just such a fate might have befallen the once-favoured Titan had not the wise and stabilizing presence of Metis inside Zeus's head counselled a subtler and more dignified revenge. The intensity of his rage was in no way dimmed, but rather it was now focussed, channelled into clearer lines of retribution. He would leave Prometheus for the time being and unleash his cosmic fury upon man, puny impudent man, the creature he had taken such delight in and for whom now he felt nothing but resentment and cold contempt. For a whole week, watched by a grave and concerned Athena, the King of the Gods paced up and down in front of his throne considering how best humans should pay for daring to appropriate fire, for presuming to ape the Olympians. A voice within him seemed to whisper that one day, no matter what vengeance he took, mankind would reach ever upwards until they came level with the gods or, perhaps more terribly, until they no longer needed the gods and felt free to abandon them. |
| 191 |
All, save Deucalion and Pyrrha who thanks to the perspicacity of Prometheus survived the nine days of high water aboard their wooden chest, which floated safely on the flood. Like good survivalists they had kept their chest well provisioned with food, drink and a few useful tools and artefacts, so that when the deluge finally receded and their vessel was able to settle on Mount Parnassus they could survive in the post-diluvian mud and slime. fn6 When the world had dried enough for Pyrrha and Deucalion (who is said to have been eighty-two years old at this time) to travel safely down the mountainside, they made their way to Delphi, which lies in the valley below Parnassus. There they consulted the oracle of Themis, the prophetic Titaness whose special quality was an understanding of the right thing to do. 'O Themis, Mother of Justice, Peace and Order, instruct us, we beseech you,' they cried. 'We are alone in the world now and too advanced in years to fill this empty world with offspring.' 'Children of Prometheus and Epimetheus,' the oracle intoned. 'Hear my voice and do as I command. Cover your head and throw the bones of your mother over your shoulder.' Not a word more could the perplexed couple induce the oracle to utter. 'My mother was Pandora,' said Pyrrha, sitting on the ground. 'And I must presume she is drowned. Where could I find her bones?' 'My mother is Clymene,' said Deucalion. 'Or, if you believe variant sources, she is the Oceanid Hesione. In either case they are both immortals and therefore alive and surely unwilling to give up their bones.' 'We must think,' said Pyrrha. 'The bones of our mother. Can that have another meaning? Our mother's bones. Maternal bones ... Think, Deucalion, think!' Deucalion covered his head with a folded cloth, sat down next to his wife, whose head was already covered, and pondered the problem with creased brow. Oracles. They always paltered and prevaricated. Moodily he picked up a rock and sent it rolling down the hillside. |
| 192 |
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. Death Our human race, now satisfactorily comprised equally of males and females, bred and spread about the world building cities and establishing nation states. Ships and chariots, cottages and castles, culture and commerce, merchants and markets, farming and finance, weapons and wheat. In short, civilization began. It was an age of kings, queens, princes and princesses, of hunters, warriors, shepherds, potters and poets. An age of empires, slaves, warfare, trade and treaties. An age of votive offerings, sacrifices and worship. Towns and villages chose their favourite gods and goddesses to be guardian deities, patrons and protectors. The immortals themselves were not shy to come down in their own forms, or in the forms of humans and animals, to have their way with such humans as appealed to them or to punish those that aggravated them and reward those that most fawned on them. |
| 193 |
Other poets suggest that the souls of the underworld were capable of speech and given to relating their life stories to each other. Hades was the most jealous of all his jealous family. Not one soul could he bear to lose from his kingdom. Cerberus the three-headed dog patrolled the gates. Few, very few, heroes circumvented or duped Thanatos and Cerberus and managed to visit Hades' realm and return alive to the world above. And so death became a constant in human life, as it remains to this day. But the world of the Silver Age, it should be understood, was very different from our own. Gods, demigods and all kinds of immortals still walked amongst us. Intercourse of the personal, social and sexual kind with the gods was as normal to men and women of the Silver Age as intercourse with machines and AI assistants is to us today. And, I dare say, a great deal more fun. Prometheus Bound With simmering fury Zeus watched the survival of Pyrrha and Deucalion and the rise of a new race of men and women from the stones of the earth. No one, not even the King of the Gods, could interfere with the will of Gaia. She represented an older, deeper, more permanent order than that of the Olympians and Zeus knew that he was powerless to prevent the repopulation of the world. But he could at least turn his attention to Prometheus. The day dawned when Zeus decided the Titan should pay for his betrayal. He looked down from Olympus and saw him in Phocis, assisting in the laying out of a new town, meddling as ever in the affairs of men. Humankind had propagated in the twinkling of an immortal eye, which we would call the passage of several centuries. All this while Prometheus had, with titanic patience, encouraged the spread of civilization amongst Mankind 2.0 once again teaching people all the arts, crafts and practices of agriculture, manufacture and building. Adopting the form of an eagle Zeus swooped down and perched on the timbers of a half-built temple that was to be dedicated to himself. |
| 194 |
Prometheus, who had been carving scenes from the life of the young Zeus into the pediment, looked up and knew at once that the bird was his old friend. Zeus assumed his proper shape and inspected the carving. 'If that's supposed to be Adamanthea with me there, you've got the proportions all wrong,' he said. 'Artistic licence,' said Prometheus, whose heart was beating fast. It was the first time the two had spoken since Prometheus stole the fire. 'The time has come to pay for what you have done,' said Zeus. 'Now, I could call up the Hecatonchires to carry you forcibly to your destination, or you can choose to bow to the inevitable and come without fuss.' Prometheus laid down his hammer and chisel and wiped his hands with a leather cloth. 'Let's go,' he said. They did not speak or pause for rest or refreshment until they reached the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, where the Black and Caspian Seas meet. Along the journey Zeus had wanted to say something, had longed to take his friend by the shoulder and embrace him. A weeping apology might have allowed him to forgive and make up. But Prometheus remained silent. Zeus's stinging sense of being wronged and ill-used flared up anew. 'Besides,' the god told himself, 'great rulers cannot be seen to exhibit weakness, especially when it comes to betrayal by those close to them.' Prometheus shaded his eyes and looked up. He saw the three Cyclopes standing on a great sloping wall of rock that formed one side of the tallest mountain. 'I know you're good at climbing up the sides of mountains,' Zeus said with what he hoped was icy sarcasm, but which emerged even to his ears as something more like sulky muttering. 'So climb.' When Prometheus reached the place where the Cyclopes were, they bound and fettered him and stretched him out on his back, hammering his shackles into the rock with mighty pegs of unbreakable iron. 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. |
| 195 |
'Demeter has been dementedly wandering the earth looking for her, frantic with worry and the world is turning into a desert. Why the hell didn't you speak up?' 'No one asked me! No one ever asks me anything. But I know a lot. The eye of the sun sees all,' said Helios, repeating a line that Apollo had often used during his days in charge of the sun-chariot. 'What happened to her?' 'The earth opened and who should come out in his chariot and seize her but ... Hades!' 'Hades!' chorused the gods. The Pomegranate Seeds Zeus immediately went down to the underworld to fetch Persephone back. But the King of the Underworld was in no mood to take orders from the King of the Overworld. 'She stays. She is my queen.' 'You dare to defy me?' 'You are my younger brother,' said Hades. 'My youngest brother in fact. You have always had everything you've ever wanted. I demand the right to keep the girl I love. You cannot deny me.' 'Oh, can't I?' said Zeus. 'The world is in famine. The cries of starving mortals keep us awake. Refuse to return Persephone and you will soon discover the force and reach of my will. Hermes will bring no more spirits of the dead to you. Not one single soul shall ever be sent here. All will be despatched to a new paradise, or perhaps never even die. Hades will become an empty realm drained of all power, influence or majesty. Your name will become a laughing stock.' The brothers glared at each other. Hades was the first to blink. 'Damn you,' he growled. 'Give me one more day with her and then send Hermes to fetch her.' Zeus travelled back up to Olympus well pleased. The next day Hades knocked on the door of Persephone's chamber. You might be surprised that he knocked, but the fact is, in her dignified and assured presence, even such a power as Hades found himself uncertain and shy. He loved her with all his heart, and although he had lost the battle of wills with Zeus he was sure that he could not let her go. Besides, he detected in her something ... something that gave him hope. |
| 196 |
A small flicker of returned love? 'My dear,' he said with a gentleness that would have astonished anyone who knew him. 'Zeus has prevailed upon me to send you back into the world of light.' Persephone raised her pale face and gazed steadily at him. Hades gazed earnestly back. 'I hope you do not think ill of me?' She did not reply, but Hades thought he could detect a little colour flushing her cheeks and throat. 'Share some pomegranate seeds with me to show there is no ill-feeling?' Listlessly Persephone took six seeds from his outstretched hand and sucked slowly at their sharp sweetness. When Hermes arrived the trickster god found that he and Zeus had themselves been tricked. 'Persephone has eaten fruit from my kingdom,' said Hades. 'It is ordained that all who have tasted the food of hell must return. She has tasted six pomegranate seeds so she must come back to me for six months of every year.' Hermes bowed. He knew that this was so. Taking Persephone by the hand he led her up out of the underworld. Demeter was so overjoyed to see her daughter that the world immediately began to spring into bloom. It was a joy that was to last for half the length of the year, for six months later, in accordance with ineluctable divine law, Persephone was forced to return to the underworld. Demeter's distress at this parting caused the trees to shed their leaves and a dead time to creep over the world. Another six months passed, Persephone emerged from Hades' domain and the cycle of birth, renewal and growth began again. In this way the seasons came about, the autumn and winter of Demeter's grieving for the absence of her daughter and the spring and summer of her jubilation at Persephone's return. As for Persephone herself ... well, it seems that she grew to love her time below as much as her time above. For six months she was no prisoner in Hades but the contented Queen of the Underworld, a loving consort who held imperious sway over the dominion of death with her husband. For the other six months she reverted to the laughing Kore of fertility, flowers, fruit and frolic. |
| 197 |
Gently and easily Psyche was lowered, until she landed with a gliding step on the flowered grass in front of a pair of golden gates. With a fizz and a sigh the wind flew away and she found herself alone. She heard no growls, roars or rapacious snarls, only a distant music floating from the palace's interior. As she made her tentative approach the gates swung open. The royal palace in which Psyche grew up was to the ordinary citizen of her country ornate, opulent and overwhelming, but next to the gorgeous and fantastical edifice she was entering it was nothing but a crude hovel. As she made her way inside her amazed eyes passed over columns of gold, citron-wood and ivory, silver-relief panels carved with an intricacy and artistry she had never dreamed possible and marble statues so perfectly rendered that they seemed to move and breathe. The light glittered in the shimmering gold halls and passageways, the floor she stepped over was a dancing mosaic of jewels and the mysterious music grew louder and louder as she penetrated deeper inside. She passed fountains where crystal waters played in miraculous arcs, shaping and reshaping and quite defying gravity. She became aware of low female voices. Either she was dreaming or this palace was divine. No mortal, and surely no monster, could have ordained so fabulous a habitation. She had arrived at a square central room whose painted panels showed scenes of the birth of the gods and the war with the Titans. The air was perfumed with sandalwood, roses and warm spices. Voices, Visions and a Visitor The whispers and music seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, but all at once they ceased. In the loud silence left behind, a quiet voice called to her. 'Psyche, Psyche, don't be shy. Don't stare and twitch like a startled faun. Don't you know that all this is yours? All this beauty, all these gemstones, this grand palace and the lands around it all yours. Go through that doorway and bathe yourself. The voices you hear are your handmaidens, here to do your bidding. |
| 198 |
When you are ready a great feast will be laid out. Welcome, beloved Psyche, welcome and enjoy.' The dazed girl made her way into the next room, a vast chamber hung with tapestries and silks, lit by flaming torches in bronze brackets. At one end was a gleaming copper bathtub and in the centre a simply colossal bed whose myrtle-wound frame was of polished cypress and whose linen was strewn with rose petals. Psyche was so tired, so befuddled and so unable to make sense of things that she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, in the confused hope that sleep might wake her up from this wild dream. But when she awoke she was still inside the dream. She got up from the soft brocaded cushions and saw that there was steam rising from the bath. She stepped from her clothes into the water. This is when things became entirely strange. A silver flask by the side of the bath rose up, danced in the air and tipped its contents into the water. Before she had time to scream out her surprise a glorious cloud of unknown fragrances assailed her senses. Now an ivory-handled brush was scrubbing her back and a ewer of hot water was being emptied over her hair. Invisible hands kneaded, stroked, pummelled, teased and pressed. Psyche giggled like a little girl and allowed it all to happen. Whether this was a dream inside the real world or a moment of reality inside a dream no longer seemed important. She would enjoy the adventure and see where it took her. Damasks, silks, satins and gossamer tissues flew from concealed closets and glided down onto the bed to shimmer beside her, rustling in anticipation of being chosen. She selected a chiffon gown of lapis blue loose, comfortable and exciting. The doors of her chambers opened and with shy uncertain steps she made her way back to the main hall. A great feast was laid out on the table. Unseen hands were moving backwards and forwards with platters of fruit, cups of fermented honey, dishes of exotic roast birds and plates of sweetmeats. Never had Psyche seen or imagined such a banquet. |
| 199 |
Beside herself with joy she dipped her fingers into dishes of such exquisite deliciousness that she could not help crying out in delight. The swine in the piggeries of her parents' farms did not snuffle and truffle at their wooden troughs with more uninhibited abandon than she did at the magical vessels of crystal, silver and gold that filled and refilled themselves as fast as she could empty them. Napkins flew up to dab her wine-stained lips and food-smeared chin. An invisible choir sang soft ballads and hymns to human love as she gorged and guzzled in ecstasy. Finally she was done. A feeling of great warmth and well-being stole over her. If she was being fattened up for an ogre then so be it. The candles on the table now rose up and led Psyche back to the bedchamber. The flickering torches and soft oil lamps had died down and the room was in almost complete darkness. The unseen hands pushed her gently to the bedside and her chiffon gown lifted up and away. Naked she lay back between the satin sheets and closed her eyes. An instant later she gasped in shock. Someone or something had slipped into bed beside her. She felt her body being gently pulled towards this figure. Sweet warm breath mingled with hers. 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. |
| 200 |
She tried to speak to him, but he placed a finger to her lips and a voice sounded inside her head. 'Hush, Psyche. Ask no questions. Love me as I love you.' And slowly, as the days passed, she realized that she did love this unseen man very much. Every night they made love. Every morning she awoke to find him gone. The palace was glorious and there was nothing Psyche's handmaidens would not do for her. She had everything she could ever want, the best to eat or drink and music to accompany her everywhere. But what long, lonely days stretched out between the evenings of delicious love, how hard she found it to pass the time. The 'monster' with whom she slept every night was, you will have guessed, the god Eros whose self-inflicted dart had caused him to fall in love with Psyche, a love now magnified by their repeated nights of mutual bliss. The oracle had been right to say that Eros was a being whose powers frightened all the gods, for there was not one Olympian who had not been conquered by Eros at some time. Perhaps he was a monster after all. But he could be sensitive and sweet as well as capricious and cruel. He saw that Psyche was not entirely happy and one night, as they lay together in the darkness, he quizzed her tenderly. 'What ails you, beloved wife?' 'I hate to say this when you have given me so much, but I get lonely during the day. I miss my sisters.' 'Your sisters?' 'Calanthe and Zona. They believe me to be dead.' 'Only unhappiness can come from consorting with them. Misery and despair for them and for you.' 'But I love them ...' 'Misery and despair, I tell you.' Psyche sighed. 'Please believe me,' he said. 'It is for the best that you do not see them.' 'What about you? May I not see you? May I never look into the face of the one I love so well?' 'You must not ask me that. Never ask me that.' The days passed and Eros saw that Psyche for all the wine and food, for all the music and magical fountains and enchanted voices was pining. 'Cheer up, beloved! Tomorrow is our anniversary,' he said. |
| 201 |
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. But please be careful. Do not allow yourself to become too involved in the lives of your family. And you must promise never to tell them about me. Not one word about me.' Psyche promised and they fell into each others arms for a night of anniversary love. Never had she felt more passionate adoration or physical delight, and she sensed equal feelings of ardour and love in him too. The next morning she awoke, as ever, to an empty bed. In a great fever of impatience she allowed herself to be dressed and served breakfast by the handmaidens before running excitedly to the great gate at the front of the palace. She had barely stepped out before Zephyrus swept down and flew her away in his strong, supportive arms. Sisters Meanwhile, back in the land of Psyche's birth, the populace had been marking the anniversary of her capture by the fabled unseen monster. King Aristides and Queen Damaris had led the procession of mourning up the hillside to the basalt slab on which their daughter had been bound since named 'the Rock of Psyche' in her honour. Now there remained at the monument only the two princesses, Calanthe and Zona, who had loudly made it known to all that they wished to stay behind and lament in private. Once the crowd died away they pulled back their mourning veils and began to laugh. 'Imagine what sort of creature it was that took her away,' said Zona. 'Winged like a Fury ...' suggested Calanthe. 'With iron claws ...' 'And fiery breath ...' 'Great yellow fangs ...' 'Snakes for hair ...' 'A great tail that What was that?' A sudden gust of wind made them turn round. What they saw made them shout in fright. Their sister Psyche was standing before them, radiant in a shimmering white gown edged with gold. She looked appallingly beautiful. 'But ...' began Calanthe 'We thought ...' stammered Zona. |
| 202 |
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. 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. |
| 203 |
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? It was so appallingly unfair. Spoiled, vain, ugly creature! Well, not ugly, perhaps. Possessed of a certain obvious and rather vulgar prettiness, but scarcely a match for their queenly beauty. It was all too monstrously unjust: there was almost certainly witchcraft and wickedness at the bottom of it. How could she not even know the name of her lord and master? 'My husband Sato's rheumatism,' said Calanthe, 'is getting so bad that every night I have to rub his fingers one by one, then apply plasters and poultices. It's disgusting and demeaning.' 'You think your life is hell?' said Zona. 'My Charion is as bald as an onion, his breath stinks and he has all the sex drive of a dead pig. While Psyche ...' 'That selfish slut ...' The sisters clung to each other and sobbed their hearts out. That night Psyche's lover Eros had momentous news for her. She was pouring out all her gratitude to him, and explaining how well she had managed to avoid describing him to her sisters, when he placed his finger on her lips. 'Sweet, trusting child. I fear those sisters and what they may do to you. But I am glad you are happy. Let me make you happier still.' She felt his warm hand slide down her front and gently stroke her belly. 'Our child is growing there.' Psyche gasped and hugged him close, stunned with joy. 'If you keep this secret,' he said, 'the child will be a god. If you tell a living soul, it will be mortal.' 'I will keep the secret,' said Psyche. 'But before my condition becomes obvious let me at least see Calanthe and Zona one more time and say goodbye to them.' Eros was troubled but could not see how he might deny so decent and sisterly a request, and so he assented. 'Zephyrus will send them a sign and they will come,' he said, leaning forward to kiss her. |
| 204 |
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. 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. Before long, palace, precious metals, precious stones all had vanished. |
| 205 |
The sweet singing of the handmaidens turned into the howling of wolves and the screeching of owls, and the warm, mysterious perfumes whipped into chill and unrelenting winds. Alone A frightened, unhappy girl stood in a cold and desolate wood. She slipped down the trunk of a tree until she sat on the hard roots. The only thought in her mind was to end her life. She was awoken by a beetle scuttling over her lips. She sat up with a shiver and unpeeled a damp leaf from her brow. She had not dreamed the horrors of the night before. She really was alone in a wood. Perhaps everything before was a dream and this had always been the reality? Or she had awoken inside another episode of a wider dream? It was hardly worth the bother of trying to puzzle it all out. Dream or reality, everything was intolerable to her. 'Don't do it, pretty girl.' Shocked, Psyche looked up to see the god Pan standing before her. The humorous frown, the thick curling hair from which two horns sprouted, the wide hairy flanks tapering down to goats' feet it could be no other figure, mortal or immortal. 'No, no,' said Pan, stamping the muddy ground with his hoofs. 'I can read it in your face and it is not to be. I won't allow it.' 'You won't allow what?' said Psyche. 'I won't allow you to dash yourself onto the rocks from off a high cliff. I won't allow you to court the deadly attentions of a wild animal. I won't allow you to pick belladonna and drink its poisonous juices. I won't allow any of that.' 'But I can't live!' cried Psyche. 'If you knew my story you would understand and you would help me die.' 'You should ask yourself what brought you here,' said Pan. 'If it's love, then you must pray to Aphrodite and Eros for guidance and relief. If your own wickedness caused your downfall then you must live to repent. If it was caused by others then you must live to revenge.' Revenge! Psyche suddenly understood what needed to be done. She rose to her feet. 'Thank you, Pan,' she said. 'You've shown me the way.' Pan bared his teeth in a grin and bowed. |
| 206 |
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. 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. It would be impossible to separate those seeds, even if she had a month to do it. |
| 207 |
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. 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. |
| 208 |
Zeus saw this and paced about in a fury. His blood was up. He crashed his fist into his palm. He would have Io. It had become a matter of principle to defeat Hera in this silent and unacknowledged war. He knew the limits of his own cunning, however, so he called upon the wiliest and most amoral rogue on Olympus to aid him. Hermes understood right away what needed to be done. Ever happy to oblige Zeus and sow mischief he hurried to Io's paddock. 'Hello, Argus. Let me keep you company for a while,' he said, unlatching the gate and slipping in. 'Nice heifer you've got there.' Argus swivelled a dozen eyes towards Hermes, who sat down on the grass, took out a set of pipes and started to play. For two hours he played and he sang. The music, the afternoon heat, the scent of poppies, lavender and wild thyme, the soft lapping and purling of a nearby stream slowly Argus's eyes started to close, one by one. As the very hundredth eye at last winked shut Hermes lowered his pipes, stole forward and stabbed Argus in the heart. All the gods were capable of great cruelty Hermes could be as vicious as any of them. With Argus dead, Zeus opened the gate into the field and set Io free. But before he had a chance to change her back into human form Hera, who had seen what had happened, sent down a gadfly which stung Io so painfully and persistently that she bucked and screamed and galloped away, far from Zeus's reach. Sorrowing at the death of her beloved servant, Hera took Argus's hundred bright eyes and fixed them onto the tail of a very dull, dowdy old fowl, transforming it into what we know today as the peacock which is how the now proud, colourful and haughty bird came for ever to be associated with the goddess. fn5 Io, meanwhile, charged on along the northern shore of the Aegean Sea, swimming over at the place where Europe becomes Asia, the spot we still call in her honour the cow-crossing, or in Greek, the Bosporus. fn6 On and on she careered, thrashing, tossing and squealing in her agony until she reached the Caucasus. |
| 209 |
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 ... 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. 'We all know your father is that boring old fool Merops!' one of them shouted. |
| 210 |
'So, you are Clymene's boy, are you? Stand up, let's have a look at you. Yes, I can see that you might be the fruit of my loins. You have the cast of countenance, the colouring. I'm told you travelled a long way to be here. Why?' The question was blunt and Phaeton found himself a little flustered. He managed to stammer out some words about Epaphus and 'the other boys' and was painfully aware that he sounded more like a spoiled child than the proud son of an Olympian. 'Yes, yes. Very mean, very disrespectful. And where do I come in?' 'All my life,' said Phaeton, burning with the pride and resentment that had smouldered inside him for so very long, 'all my life my mother has told me about great and glorious Apollo, the golden god, my shining perfect father. B-b-but you've never visited us! You've never invited us anywhere. You've never even acknowledged me.' 'Well, yes, I'm sorry about that. Remiss of me. I've been a terrible father, I wish I could make it up to you.' Apollo mouthed the words that absent fathers mouth everywhere and every day, but his mind was really on horses, music, drink ... anything but this tedious, sulky and complaining child. 'If you could just grant me one wish. One wish, that's all.' 'Of course, of course. Name it.' 'Really? You mean it?' 'Of course.' 'You swear you'll grant it?' 'I swear,' said Apollo, amused by the boy's extreme earnestness. 'I swear by my lyre. I swear by the cold flowing waters of Styx herself. Name it, I say.' 'I want to drive your horses.' 'My horses?' said Apollo, not quite understanding. 'Drive them? What do you mean?' 'I want to steer the sun-chariot across the sky. Tomorrow.' 'Oh no,' said Apollo, a smile spreading across his face. 'No, no, no! Don't be silly. No one can do that.' 'You promised!' 'Phaeton, Phaeton. It's brave and splendid even to dream of doing such a thing. But no one, no one drives those animals but me.' 'You swore by Styx!' 'Zeus himself couldn't control them! They are the strongest, wildest, most headstrong and unmanageable stallions ever born. |
| 211 |
They answer to my touch and mine alone. No, no. You can't ask such a thing.' 'I have asked it. And you have sworn!' 'Phaeton!' The other eleven gods would have been astonished to hear such a pleading, desperate note in Apollo's voice. 'I beg of you! Anything else. Gold, food, power, knowledge, love ... You name it, it's yours in perpetuity. But not this. Never this.' 'I have asked and you have sworn,' the stubborn youth replied. Apollo bowed his golden head and cursed inwardly. Oh, those gods and their quick tongues. Oh, those mortals and their foolish dreams. Will either ever learn? 'Right. Let's go and meet them then. But know this,' Apollo said as they neared the stables and the horsey smell grew stronger and sharper in Phaeton's nostrils. 'You can change your mind at any time. I won't think any the less of you. Frankly, I'll think a great deal the more of you.' At the god's approach the four stallions, white with golden manes, stamped and shifted in their stalls. 'Hey, Pyrois! Whoa there, Phlegon! Hush now, Aeos! Quietly, Aethon!' Apollo called to each in turn. 'Alright, come forward, boy, let them get to know you.' Phaeton had never seen such beautiful horses. Their eyes flashed gold and their hoofs struck sparks on the flagstones. He was filled with awe, but felt too a sudden stab of fear which he tried to play off as thrilled anticipation. Lined up before the massive gates of dawn was a golden quadriga, the great chariot to which the four stallions would soon be harnessed. A quiet female figure in saffron robes hurried past. Phaeton caught from her a fragrance which he could not name but which made him dizzy with delight. 'That was Eos,' said Apollo. 'It will soon be time for her to open the gates.' Phaeton knew all about Eos, the goddess of the dawn. She was called rhododaktylos the 'rosy-fingered one' and admired everywhere for her sweetness and soft beauty. As he helped his father walk the stallions forward and into position at the head of the chariot, Phaeton suddenly felt himself pushed roughly aside. |
| 212 |
'What is this mortal doing?' A huge figure dressed in shining buff leather armour had taken the bridle of all four horses at once and was leading them forward. 'Ah, Helios, there you are,' said Apollo. 'This is Phaeton. My son Phaeton.' 'So?' Phaeton knew that Helios was the brother of Eos and the moon goddess Selene and assisted Apollo in his daily duties with the chariot. Apollo seemed slightly awkward in the Titan's presence. 'Well, the thing is, Phaeton will be driving the chariot today.' 'Excuse me?' 'Well, he might as well learn now, don't you think?' 'You are joking?' 'I sort of promised.' 'Well, sort of unpromise then.' 'Helios, I can't. You know I can't.' Helios stamped his feet and gave a roar that caused the horses to rear and whinny. 'You've never once let me drive, Apollo! Never. How many times have I asked and how many times have you told me I'm not ready? And now you let this ... this shrimp take the reins?' 'Helios, you will do as you're told,' said Apollo. 'I have spoken and so I have ... er, spoken.' Apollo took the four leather traces from Helios and lifted Phaeton up and into the seat of the chariot. Helios gave a shout of laughter as he saw the youth slide back and forth. 'He rolls in it like a little pea!' he said with a surprisingly high-pitched giggle. 'He'll be fine. Now, Phaeton. These reins they are your lines of communication with the horses. They know the way, they run this course every day, but you must show them that you are their master, you understand?' Phaeton nodded eagerly. Something of his nervous excitement and Helios's fury seemed to have been picked up by the horses, who bucked and snorted restlessly. 'The most important thing,' continued Apollo, 'is to fly neither too high nor too low. A middle course between the sky and the earth, yes?' Again Phaeton nodded. 'Oh, I nearly forgot. Hold out your hands ...' Apollo took a jar and poured oil from it into Phaeton's outstretched palms. '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. |
| 213 |
The earth below will be warmed and lit as you go, so keep a straight line westwards towards the Garden of the Hesperides. It's a twelve-hour drive. Be steady. Remember the horses know. Call them by name, Aeos and Aethon, Pyrois and Phlegon.' As Apollo said their names Phaeton saw their ears prick up. 'But it's not too late, boy. You've seen them, you've handled them, I'll give you gold sculptures of them cast by Hephaestus to take home. That should satisfy your school friends.' Another high-pitched titter from Helios sent a flush to Phaeton's cheek. 'No,' he said stiffly. 'You gave a promise and so did I.' Daybreak As Phaeton spoke Eos came forward in a bright cloud of pearl and rose. She bowed smilingly to Apollo and Helios, looked a puzzled question at the blushing Phaeton in the chariot and took up her position at the gates of dawn. To a traveller looking eastwards and upwards at the clouds in which the Palace of the Sun was hidden, the first sign that Eos was at work always came in the form of a flush of coral pink that suffused the sky. As she threw the gates wider, that soft pink hardened into a gleam of gold which grew ever brighter and fiercer. To Phaeton, inside the palace, the effect was reversed: the doors opened to reveal the dark world beyond, illumined only by the silver gleam from Eos and Helios's sister, the moon goddess Selene, reaching the end of her nightly course. As Eos pushed the gates further open Phaeton saw pink and gold light radiate outwards, drowning the darkness of the night. As if that were a signal the four horses pricked their ears, shuddered and reared. Phaeton was jerked back and the chariot beneath him began to roll forward. 'Remember, boy,' shouted Apollo, 'don't panic. A firm hand. Don't snatch at the reins. Just let the horses know you're in control. Everything will be fine.' 'After all,' cried Helios as the chariot began to lift from the ground, 'what can possibly go wrong?' His squeals of falsetto laughter stung Phaeton like a lash. |
| 214 |
Switching points of view again to the traveller looking eastwards from the road below, the gold gleam is now a great ball of fire that is becoming harder and harder to observe without squinting. The short flush of dawn is over and the day has begun. The Drive Apollo's horses charged upwards, pawing the air. All was well. They knew what they were doing. They reached a certain height, levelled out and charged forward. This was easy. Phaeton pulled himself upright, careful not to strain the traces, and looked around. He could see the curve that marked the separation of blue sky and star-filled darkness. He could see the effect of the light blazing out from the chariot. He was insulated, somehow magically safe from its heat and glare, but great clouds melted and fizzed into vapour as they approached. He looked down and saw the long shadows of mountains and trees contract as they flew forward. 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. |
| 215 |
As they flew on, a raging curtain of flame swept across the land below, burning everything and everyone upon it to a crisp. The whole strip of Africa below the northern coast was laid waste. To this day most of the land is a great parched desert, which we call the Sahara, but which to the Greeks was the Land that Phaeton Scorched. He was now terribly out of control. The horses knew for certain that the familiar firm hand of Apollo was not there to guide them. Was it wild joy at their freedom or panic at the lack of control that maddened the four? Having plunged down close enough to make the earth catch fire now they leapt up so far towards the purple curve that separated the sky from the stars that the world below grew cold and dark. The sea itself froze and the land turned to ice. Thrashing, swaying, swooping and careering onwards, without any control or sense of direction, the chariot bounced and bucketed in the air like a leaf in a storm. Far below, the people of the earth looked up in wonder and alarm. Phaeton was screaming at the horses, begging them, threatening them, jerking at the reins ... but all in vain. The Fallout On Olympus news of the devastation being wrought upon the surface of the earth reached the gods and, at last, the ears of Zeus himself. 'Look what's happening,' cried a distraught Demeter. 'The crops are being sun-burned or frost-bitten. It's a disaster.' 'The people are afraid,' said Athena. 'Please, father. Something must be done.' With a sigh Zeus reached for a thunderbolt. He looked where the chariot of the sun was now plunging in a mad tumble towards Italy. The thunderbolt, as all Zeus's thunderbolts did, hit its mark. Phaeton was blasted clear of the chariot and fell flaming to earth, where he dropped like a spent rocket into the waters of the River Eridanos with a hiss and a fizz. The great sun-steeds were pacified by the absence of the panicky boy's yells and violent tugs at their traces and at last settled into their proper altitude and course, making their way instinctively to the land of the Hesperides in the far west. |
| 216 |
By the end of the afternoon Cadmus had won every event. Harmonia glared at the women and girls who blew him kisses and threw flowers at his feet. Pelagon, who was not a rich monarch, sent his chamberlain in search of a suitable prize for his noble victor ludorum. 'People of Phocis,' cried the king, placing a hastily plaited crown of olive leaves on Cadmus's brow, 'behold your champion, our honoured guest Prince Cadmus of Tyre. And here comes a prize worthy of his great speed and strength and grace.' A loud cheer went up, which fell into a puzzled silence as the palace chamberlain came through the crowd driving ahead of him a large cow. The silence bubbled into a titter and the titter burst into outright laughter. The cow chewed its cud, lifted its tail and sent out a liquid spatter of dung from its rear. The crowd hooted with derision. Pelagon turned scarlet. His father Amphidamas said to Cadmus with a wink, 'Oh well. Morpheus can't be right all the time, hey?' But Harmonia nudged Cadmus in great excitement. 'Look,' she breathed, 'look, Cadmus, look!' Cadmus saw at once what had attracted her attention. On the cow's back was a mark in the shape of a half moon. There was no other way to describe it. A clear half moon! Pelagon was murmuring something unconvincing in his ear about the animal's pedigree and high milk yield, but Cadmus interrupted him. 'Your majesty could not have found a more marvellous and welcome prize! I am overcome with delight and gratitude.' 'You are?' said a faintly stunned Pelagon. The chamberlain was so astonished to hear this that he dropped the switch of willow with which he had been slapping the beast towards the winner's rostrum. It took perhaps thirty seconds for the heifer to become aware that the stinging smack was no longer there to force her on, so she turned and started to amble away. 'Indeed,' said Cadmus jumping from the rostrum and helping Harmonia down after him. 'It really is the perfect present. Just exactly what we wanted ...' The cow made its way through the crowd. |
| 217 |
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. fn7 But he knew none of this, for the muttering in the ranks of his retinue had not reached his ears. He blithely lit the incense and completed his sacrifice to Athena, feeling that things were still going very much his way. This feeling was reinforced by Athena's immediate and benign appearance. Pleased by the offering of the heifer, she glided down from the cloud of fragrant smoke that Cadmus had sent up and favoured her humble worshippers with a grave smile. The Dragon's Teeth 'Rise, son of Agenor,' said the goddess, stepping forward and raising the supplicant Cadmus to his feet. 'Your sacrifice was agreeable to us. If you follow my instructions carefully all will be well. Plough the fertile plain. Plough it well. Then sow the furrows with teeth from the dragon you have slain.' With these words she stepped back into the smoke and disappeared. |
| 218 |
All but Cadmus, who stepped boldly forward and raised a hand. 'Spartoi!' he called out across the plain, giving them a name that means 'sown men'. 'My Spartoi! I am Prince Cadmus, your general. At ease.' Perhaps because they were born of dragon's teeth pulled from the jaws of a creature sacred to the god of war, these soldiers were filled from the first with extraordinary aggression. In reply to Cadmus's command they simply clattered and rattled their shields and spears. 'Silence!' yelled Cadmus. The warriors paid no attention. Their marching on the spot turned into a slow march forward. In exasperation Cadmus picked up a rock which, with his customary skill and strength, he hurled into their ranks. It struck one of the soldiers on the shoulder. The man looked at the soldier next to him and, taking him to be the aggressor, lunged at him with a mighty roar, sword drawn. Within moments blood-curdling battle-cries were heard all around the field as the soldiers fell upon each other. 'Stop! Stop! I command you to stop!' yelled Cadmus like a frantic parent on the touchline watching their son being squashed in a scrum. Stamping the ground in frustration he turned to Harmonia. 'What is the point of Athena taking all this trouble to force me to create a race of men, only for them to destroy each other? Look at this violence, this bloodlust. What does it mean?' But even as he spoke, Harmonia was pointing to the centre of the fray. Five of Cadmus's Spartoi stood in a circle, the sole survivors. The rest lay dead, their blood soaking back into the soil from which they had come. Forward came the five, their swords pointing to the ground. They reached Cadmus and knelt down, heads bowed. Great was the relief, great the rejoicing from the Tyrians. The day had been strange, as strange a day as mortals had known in all history. But some kind of order seemed to have emerged. 'What is the name of this place?' Cadmus asked. 'Does anyone here know?' A voice spoke up, the voice of the man who had warned that the Ismenian Dragon was sacred to Ares. |
| 219 |
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. 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. |
| 220 |
'I am well pleased with you, Semele,' he said. Semele backed away. 'You know my name?' 'I know many things, loyal priestess. For I am the god you serve. I am the Sky Father, the King of Olympus. Zeus, the all-powerful.' Semele, still half in the river, gasped and fell to her knees. 'Come now,' said Zeus, striding through the water towards her, 'let me look into your eyes.' It was splashy, frenzied and wet, but it was real love-making. When it was over Semele smiled, blushed, laughed and then wept, leaning her head on Zeus's chest and sobbing without cease. 'Don't cry, dearest Semele,' said Zeus, running his fingers through her hair. 'You have pleased me.' 'I'm sorry, my lord. But I love you and I know all too well that you can never love a mortal.' Zeus gazed down at her. The eruption of lust he had felt was all over, but he was surprised to feel the stirrings of something deeper, glowing like embers in his heart. A god who operated in vertical moments with no real thought for consequences along the line, he really did experience just then a great wellspring of love for the beautiful Semele, and he told her so. 'Semele, I do love you! I love you sincerely. Believe me now when I swear by the waters of this river that I will always look after you, care for you, protect you, honour you.' He cupped her face in his hands and bent forward to bestow a tender kiss on her soft, receptive lips. 'Now, farewell, my sweet. Once every new moon I will come.' Dressed in her gown, her hair still damp and her whole being warm and bright with love and happiness, Semele walked back across the fields towards the temple. Looking up, a hand shading her eyes, she saw an eagle sweep and soar through the sky, seemingly into the sun itself, until the dazzle of it made her eyes water and she was forced to look away. The Eagle's Wife Zeus meant well. Those three words so often presaged disaster for some poor demigod, nymph or mortal. The King of the Gods did love Semele and he really meant to do his best by her. |
| 221 |
'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. 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. |
| 222 |
And I don't want you to destroy anyone. It's a small thing, really it is.' 'Then,' said Zeus, chucking her affectionately under the chin, 'I will grant your wish.' 'You promise?' 'I promise. I promise by this river no, I've already sworn one thing by it. I shall promise you by the great Stygian stream herself.'fn4 Raising his hand with mock solemnity, he intoned, 'Beloved Semele, I swear by sacred Styx that I will grant your next wish.' 'Then,' said Semele with a deep breath, 'show yourself to me.' 'How's that?' 'I want to see you as you really are. Not as a man, but as a god, in your true divinity.' The smile froze on Zeus's face. 'No!' he cried. 'Anything but that! Do not wish such a thing. No, no, no!' It was the tone of voice that gods often used when they realized they had been trapped into a rash promise. Apollo cried out in the same way, you will remember, when Phaeton called upon him to honour his oath. Suspicion flared up in Semele. 'You promised, you swore by Styx! You swore, you swore an oath!' 'But my darling girl, you don't know what you're asking.' 'You swore!' Semele actually stamped her foot. The god looked up at the sky and groaned. 'I did. I pledged my word and my word is sacred.' As he spoke Zeus began to gather himself into the form of a great thundercloud. From the centre of this dark mass flashed the brightest light imaginable. Semele looked on, her face breaking into a broad and ecstatic smile of joy. Only a god could change like this. Only Zeus himself could grow and grow with such dazzling fire and golden greatness. But the brightness was becoming so fierce, so terrible in the ferocity of its glare, that she threw up an arm to shade her eyes. Yet still the brilliance intensified. With a crack so loud that her ears burst and filled with blood, the radiance exploded in bolts of lightning that instantly struck the girl blind. Deaf and sightless she staggered backwards, but too late to avoid the blazing force of a thunderbolt so powerful that it split her body open, killing her at once. |
| 223 |
He grew up to become a much admired huntsman and leader, renowned for his fearlessness in the chase and the skill and tender strength with which he handled his beloved hounds. One day, having lost the scent of an especially noble stag, Actaeon and his fellow huntsmen separated to pick up the trail. Stumbling through some bushes Actaeon happened on a pool where Artemis was bathing. 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. Within seconds his own pack of hounds had streamed into the clearing. They had been trained by Actaeon himself to rip out a stag's throat and feast on its steaming blood for their reward. |
| 224 |
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. 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. |
| 225 |
Enraged, Apollo asked his sister Artemis to take revenge. Only too willing, she attacked the palace at Phlegyantis with plague arrows poisoned darts that spread a terrible disease throughout the compound. Many besides Coronis were infected. The crow saw all and returned to give Apollo a full report. 'She's dying, my lord, dying!' 'Did she say anything? Did she admit her guilt?' 'Oh yes, oh yes. "I deserve my fate," she said. "Tell the great god Apollo that I ask no forgiveness and beg no pity, beg no pity, only save the life of our child. Save the life of our child." Ha! Ha! Ha!' With such malicious glee did the crow crow, that Apollo lost his temper and turned it black. All crows, ravens and rooks ever since have been that colour. fn1 When Apollo, now filled with remorse, reached plague-stricken Phlegyantis he found Coronis lying dead on her funeral pyre, the flames licking all round her. With a cry of grief he leapt through the flames and from her womb cut out their child who was still living. Apollo raised Coronis to the stars as the constellation Corvus, the Crow. fn2 The rescued infant boy, whom Apollo named Asclepius, was put in the care of the centaur Chiron. Perhaps because he had been delivered by a surgical procedure (albeit a rather violent one), perhaps because while he had been in the womb infection had raged all around him, perhaps because his father was Apollo, god of medicine and mathematics probably for all these reasons Asclepius demonstrated early on some very remarkable talents in the field of medicine. As the boy grew, it quickly became clear to Chiron that he allied an incisive, logical and curious mind with a natural gift for healing. Chiron, no mean naturalist, herbalist and reasoner himself, took enormous pleasure in training the boy in the medical arts. Besides giving him a thorough grounding in the anatomy of animals and humans, he taught him that knowledge is gained from observation and careful record-keeping rather than from spinning theories. |
| 226 |
Tyro put a hand to his neck and pushed him under. When he had stopped struggling she did the same to the youngest. 'Now,' she said quite calmly to the traumatized maid, 'this is what you will do ...' Sisyphus and Melops caught plenty of fish that afternoon. Just as the light was fading and they had started to pack up for the day, Tyro's maidservant appeared before them, bobbing a nervous curtsey. 'Beg pardon, majesty, but the Queen asks that you might greet the princes. They are by the riverbank, awaiting your majesty. Just behind the willow tree, sire.' Sisyphus went to the place indicated to find his two sons lying stretched out on the grass, pale and lifeless. The maid ran for her life and was never heard of again. Tyro, by the time the enraged Sisyphus had reached the palace with drawn sword, was safely on her way to her father's kingdom of Elis. On her arrival home Salmoneus married her to his brother Cretheus, with whom she was deeply unhappy. Salmoneus himself, quite as proud and vainglorious as his hated brother, had set himself up in Elis as a kind of god. Claiming to equal Zeus's power to summon storms, he'd ordered the construction of a brass bridge over which he liked to ride his chariot at breakneck speed, trailing kettles, cauldrons and iron pots to mimic the sound of thunder. Flaming torches would be thrown skywards at the same time to imitate lightning. Such blasphemous impertinence caught the eye of Zeus, who ended the farrago with a real thunderbolt. The king, his chariot, brass bridge, cooking utensils and all were blasted to atoms and the shade of Salmoneus cast down to eternal damnation in the darkest depths of Tartarus. Sisyphean Tasks Sisyphus held a great feast to celebrate the death of his preposterous thunder-making brother. The morning after, he was awoken by a deputation of aggrieved lords, landowners and tenant farmers. After he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes and cleared his headache with a goblet of unwatered wine he consented to hear what might be the matter. |
| 227 |
Oenone, they call the island, I believe. That's where you'll find them. Oh, are you leaving?' Asopos chartered a boat and made his way to the island. He hadn't made it halfway over before Zeus saw him coming and sent a thunderbolt across his bows. Its blast swept Asopos and his boat in a great tidal bore up his own estuary and into his river. fn3 But Sisyphus! Zeus had had his eye on that villain for some time. It had not gone unnoticed to the god of xenia that Sisyphus had a history of abusing the guests that travelled in his lands. 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. |
| 228 |
Sisyphus, like most wily, ambitious schemers, was a light sleeper. His mind was always turning, and the slightest noise could jerk him awake. Thus it was that even the silent whisper of Death gliding into his bedchamber caused him to sit up. 'Who the hell are you?' 'Who the hell indeed? The Hell is just who I am. Mwahahaha!' Thanatos unloosed the sinister, ghoulish laugh that so often sent dying mortals screaming mad. 'Stop groaning. What's the matter with you? Have you got toothache? Indigestion? And don't talk in riddles. What is your name?' 'My name ...' Thanatos paused for effect. 'My name ...' 'I haven't got all night.' 'My name is ...' 'Have you even got a name?' 'Thanatos.' 'Oh, so you're Death, are you? Hm.' Sisyphus seemed unimpressed. 'I thought you'd be taller.' 'Sisyphus, son of Aeolus,' Thanatos intoned in quelling accents, 'King of Corinth, Lord of ...' 'Yes, yes, I know who I am. You're the one who seems to have trouble remembering his name. Sit down, why don't you? Take the weight off your feet.' 'My weight is not on my feet. I am hovering.' Sisyphus looked down at the floor. 'Oh yes, so you are. And you've come for me have you?' Not confident that any words of his would be received with the respect and awe they deserved, Thanatos showed Sisyphus his manacles and shook them threateningly in his face. 'So you've brought shackles along. Iron?' 'Steel. Unbreakable steel. Fetters forged in the fires of Hephaestus by Steropes the Cyclops. Enchanted by my lord Hades. Whomsoever they bind cannot be unbound save by the god himself.' 'Impressive,' Sisyphus conceded. 'But in my experience nothing is unbreakable. Besides, there isn't even a lock or catch.' 'The hasp and spring are too cunningly contrived to be seen by mortal eyes.' 'So you say. I don't believe for a second that they work. I bet you can't close them round even your skinny arm. Go on, try.' Such open ridicule of his prized manacles could not be borne. 'Foolish man!' cried Thanatos. 'Such intricate devices are beyond the understanding of a mortal. |
| 229 |
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. 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. |
| 230 |
Apollo, Artemis and Poseidon were more or less neutral on the subject. Demeter feared that Persephone's authority as Queen of the Underworld was being flouted. The seasons over which mother and daughter had dominion required that life be constantly ended and begun again, and only the presence of death could achieve this. The impropriety of such a scandal made Hera quite indignant, which made Zeus restive in turn. The usually merry and irrepressible Hermes was anxious too, for the smooth running of the underworld was partly his responsibility. But it was Ares who found the situation most intolerable. He was outraged. He looked down and saw battles being fought in the human realm with their customary ferocity, yet no one was dying. Warriors were being run through with javelins, trampled by horses, gutted by chariot wheels and beheaded by swords but they would not die. It made a mockery of combat. If soldiers and civilians did not die, why then war had no point. It settled nothing. It achieved nothing. Neither side in a battle could ever win. Lesser deities were as divided over the issue as the Olympians. The Keres continued to drink the blood of those felled in battle and could not care less what happened to their souls. Two of the Horai, DikE and Eunomia, agreed with Demeter that the absence of death upset the natural order of things. Their sister Eirene, the goddess of peace, could barely contain her delight. If the absence of Death meant the absence of war then surely her time had come? Ares nagged his parents Hera and Zeus with such incessant clamour that at last they could bear it no longer. They declared that Thanatos must be found. 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. |
| 231 |
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. When I have breathed my last and my soul has fled what will you do?' 'I will do what must be done, my lord. I will wash and anoint you. I will place an obolus on your tongue so that you might pay the ferryman. We will stand guard seven days and seven nights over your catafalque. Burnt offerings will be made to please the King and Queen of the Underworld. And in this way your journey to the Meadows of Asphodel shall be a blessed one.' 'You mean well, but that is exactly what you must not do,' said Sisyphus. |
| 232 |
And thus it was that Sisyphus was led out to the upper world where he and his delighted queen lived happily ever after. His death, when it finally did come, was another matter. Rolling the Rock Zeus, Ares, Hermes and Hades had not been pleased when they found out how Sisyphus had evaded death for a second time. Persephone had made her decision, however, and the ruling of one immortal could not be undone by another. When, after nearly fifty more years of serene and prosperous living, Sisyphus's wife's mortal span came at last to its end, the contract between Persephone and Sisyphus expired with her. Thanatos paid him a third and final visit. This time Sisyphus gave Charon the fee and crossed the Styx in good order. Hermes awaited him on the further bank. 'Well, well, well. King Sisyphus of Corinth. Liar, fraud, rogue and trickster. A man after my own heart. No mortal has managed to cheat death once you contrived to do it twice. Clever you.' Sisyphus bowed. 'Such an achievement deserves a chance at immortality. Follow me.' Hermes led Sisyphus down innumerable passageways and galleries to a vast underground chamber. A great ramp sloped up from the floor to the ceiling. A boulder stood at the bottom, lit by a shaft of light. 'The upper world,' said Hermes indicating the source of the light. Sisyphus saw that the slope led up to a square inlet high in the roof through which a beam of daylight shone. As Hermes pointed the inlet closed up and the shaft of light disappeared. 'Now, all you have to do is roll that boulder up the slope. When you reach the top, that hole will slide open. You will be able to climb out and live for ever as the immortal King Sisyphus. Thanatos will never visit you again.' 'That's it?' 'That's it,' said Hermes. 'Of course, if you don't like the idea I can take you to Elysium, where you will spend a blissful eternity in the company of other souls of the virtuous departed. But if you choose the stone you must keep trying until you have succeeded and won your freedom and immortality. |
| 233 |
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. '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. |
| 234 |
'I mean, I'd be the first to admit that Leto's dear twins Artemis and Apollo are charming and fully divine, of course they are. But only two children? One girl and one boy? Good heavens, how she can even call herself a mother I fail to understand. And who's to say that of my seven sons and seven daughters there won't be some, if not all, who will ascend to divine and immortal rank? fn2 Given their birth I think it rather more likely than not, don't you? In my view, celebrations of such a lazy, vulgar and unproductive mother as Leto are in extremely poor taste. Next year I shall make sure the festival is cancelled altogether.' When word reached Leto that this jumped-up Theban was insulting her in such a fashion, and daring to set herself up over her, she burst into tears in front of her sympathetic twins. 'That terrible, boastful, conceited woman,' she choked. 'She called me lazy for having only two children ... She said I was unproductive ... and she called me vulgar. She said she would prevent the people of Thebes from celebrating my f-f-festal day ...' Artemis put an arm round her while Apollo paced up and down, slamming the ball of his fist into his palm. 'She has fourteen children,' wailed Leto, 'so I suppose, compared to her, I am inadequate ...' 'Enough!' said Artemis. 'Come, brother. She has made our mother weep. It is time this woman knew the meaning of tears.' Artemis and Apollo went straight to Thebes, where they hunted down every one of Amphion's and Niobe's fourteen children. Artemis shot the seven daughters dead with her silver arrows; Apollo shot the seven sons dead with his golden ones. When Amphion was brought news of the slaughter he took his own life by falling on his sword. Niobe's grief was also insupportable. She fled to her childhood home and found refuge on the slopes of Mount Sipylus. No matter how snobbish, reckless, proud and absurd she had been, such wretched and inconsolable unhappiness was terrible to behold. The gods themselves could not bear to hear her unceasing lamentations, and so turned her to stone. |
| 235 |
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. 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. In the meadow a stage had been erected on which sat the nine Muses in a broad semicircle. |
| 236 |
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. But Apollo's divine voice, the chords and arpeggios that flew from the golden strings of his lyre how could Marsyas's pipes compete with such a sound? Panting with exhaustion, sobbing with frustration, Marsyas cried aloud, 'Not fair! My voice and breath sing into my aulos just as much as your voice sings out into the air. Of course I cannot turn the instrument upside down, but any unbiased judge can tell that my skill is the greater.' Judgement With a final glissando of triumph Apollo turned to the jury of Muses. 'Sweet sisters, it is not for me to say, it is of course for you to decide. To whom do you award the palm of victory?' Marsyas was out of control now. Humiliation and a burning sense of injustice drove him to turn on the judges. 'They can't be impartial, they are your aunts or your step-sisters or some such incestuous thing. They are family. They will never dare to ...' 'Hush, Marsyas!' pleaded a Maenad. 'Don't listen to him, great god Apollo!' urged another. 'He's hysterical.' 'He's good and honourable.' 'He means well.' It did not take the Muses long to confer and to announce the results. |
| 237 |
And those who spun were called 'spinsters', a name which once applied without negative connotation to any unmarried woman. But as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art. From the very first Arachne's skill at the loom was the talk and pride of all Ionia. The speed and accuracy of her work were astonishing; the assurance and dexterity with which she selected one coloured thread after another, almost without looking, stunned the admirers who often crowded into Idmon's cottage to watch her at work. But it was the pictures, patterns and intricate designs that emerged from under the blur of her shuttle that caused onlookers to burst into spontaneous applause and declare her without equal. The forests, palaces, seascapes and mountain views she created were so real that you felt you could jump into them. It wasn't only the mortal citizens of Colophon and Hypaepae that came to see her at her loom: local naiads from the River Pactolus and oreads from nearby Mount Tmolus crowded into the cottage and shook their heads in wonder too. All were agreed that Arachne was the kind of phenomenon that might come only once in five centuries of history. To be so technically skilled was cause for admiration enough, but to be endowed with such taste she never overdid the use of purples or other costly and showy dyes, for example that was the miracle. Such praise as she daily received would have gone to anyone's head. Arachne was not a spoiled or conceited child in fact when not at the loom she came across as practical and prosaic rather than flighty or temperamental. She understood that she had been given a gift and was not one to claim personal credit for it. But she did value her talent and believed that in rating it at its proper worth she was simply being honest. 'Yes,' she murmured, gazing down at her work one fateful afternoon, 'I truly think if Pallas Athena herself were to sit down and spin with me she would find herself unable to match my skill. |
| 238 |
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? 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. |
| 239 |
Finally, unable to master her rage, she snatched up the shuttle and hurled it at Arachne's head. The pain of the shuttle striking her brow seemed to waken Arachne from her trance. What had she done? What madness had possessed her? She would never be allowed to weave again. She would be made to pay a terrible price for her insolence. The punishments that had been visited on the girls whose fates she had registered in her tapestry would be as nothing to those visited upon her. 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. Mortal flesh, as we have seen, was as appealing to them as immortal. |
| 240 |
It was supposed that one day King Tros would pair him off with a Grecian princess and he would grow into a handsome and virile man. Youth is a fleeting thing after all. They had reckoned without the King of the Gods. Whether Zeus had heard rumours of this shining beacon of youthful beauty or whether he accidentally caught sight of him isn't known. What is a matter of record is that the god became simply maddened with desire. Despite the royal lineage of this important mortal, despite the scandal it would cause, despite the certain fury and jealous rage of Hera, Zeus turned himself into an eagle, swooped down, seized the boy in his talons and flew him up to Olympus. It was a terrible thing to do, but surprisingly enough it turned out to be more than an act of wanton lust. It really did seem to have something to do with real love. Zeus adored the boy and wanted to be with him always. Their acts of physical love only reinforced his adoration. He gave him the gift of immortality and eternal youth and appointed him to be his cupbearer. From now until the end of time he would always be the Ganymede whose beauty of form and soul had so smitten the god. All the other gods, with the inevitable exception of Hera, welcomed the youth to heaven. It was impossible not to like him: his presence lit up Olympus. Zeus despatched Hermes to King Tros with a gift of divine horses to recompense the family for their loss. 'Your son is a welcome and beloved addition to Olympus,' Hermes told him. 'He will never die and, unlike any mortal, his outward beauty will always match his inner which means that he will always be content. The Sky Father loves him completely.' Well, the King and Queen of Troy had two other sons and they really were the finest gift horses in all the world, not to be looked in the mouth, and if their Ganymede were to be a permanent member of the immortal Olympian company and if Zeus really did love him ... But did the boy adore Zeus? That is so hard to know. The ancients believed he did. |
| 241 |
Disappointed and humiliated, she agreed to return him to his wife. All the time jealousy and injured pride were boiling inside her. How dare he prefer a human to a goddess? The idea that an ordinary woman could stimulate Cephalus while her divine being left him cold ... With mischievous insouciance she began to plant doubts in his mind. 'Aiee,' she sighed, sorrowfully shaking her head as they approached his home, 'it saddens me to think how the oh-so-pure Procris will have been behaving in your absence.' 'What can you mean?' 'Oh, the number of men she will have been entertaining. Doesn't bear thinking about.' 'How little you know her!' Cephalus returned with some heat, 'She is as faithful as she is lovely.' 'Ha!' said Selene. 'All it takes is honey and money.' 'What's that?' 'Honeyed words and silver coins turn the most virtuous to treachery.' 'How cynical you are.' 'I ride over the world by night and see what people do in the dark. That's not cynicism, it's realism.' 'But you don't know Procris,' Cephalus insisted. 'She's not like other people. She is faithful and true.' 'Pah! She'd leap into bed with anyone when your back's turned. I tell you what ...' Selene stopped, as if an idea had suddenly struck her. 'If you were to make her acquaintance in disguise, yes? Show yourself willing, shower her with compliments, tell her you love her, offer her a few trinkets I bet she'd be all over you.' 'Never!' 'Up to you, but ...' Selene shrugged and then pointed to the verge along which they had been walking. 'Oh look there's a heap of clothes and a helmet. Imagine if you had a beard too ...' Selene vanished and at that very moment Cephalus found that he was indeed bearded. The change of wardrobe that had inexplicably appeared by the roadside seemed to beckon to him. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Selene's words had planted a seed of doubt. In putting on this absurd costume, Cephalus told himself that he was not yielding to this doubt, but rather setting out to show Selene that her cynicism was misplaced. |
| 242 |
He and Procris would call up to her that very night as she glided by in her chariot, 'How wrong you were, goddess of the moon!' they would cry, 'how little you understand a loving mortal heart.' Words to that effect. That would show her. A short while later, Procris opened the door to a handsome bearded, helmeted, gowned stranger. She was looking a little haggard and drawn. The sudden and unexplained disappearance of her husband had hit her hard. Before she had time to enquire of her visitor, however, Cephalus shouldered his way into the house and dismissed the servants. 'You are a very beautiful woman,' he said in a thick Thracian accent. Procris blushed. 'Sir, I must ...' 'Come, let us seat ourselves on this couch.' 'Really, I cannot ...' 'Come now, no one's looking.' She knew that it was pushing the boundaries of hospitable xenia a little further than was called for, but Procris complied. The man was so forceful. 'What's a beauty like you doing all alone in such a big house?' Cephalus picked a fig from a copper bowl, took a lascivious bite from it and dangled the soft juicy half that remained in front of Procris. 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! |
| 243 |
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. 'You trust me, don't you, darling boy?' 'Always and entirely.' 'I am going away tomorrow afternoon. I shall return as soon as I can. Do not ask me where or why I go.' Her destination was Olympus and an audience with Zeus. 'Immortal Sky Father, Lord of Olympus, Cloud-Gatherer, Storm-Bringer, King of all the ...' 'Yes, yes, yes. What do you want?' 'I crave a boon, great Zeus.' 'Of course you crave a boon. None of my family visits me for any other reason. It's always boons. Boons, boons, boons and nothing but boons. |
| 244 |
They sat and watched the stars for a while before he spoke. '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. 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. |
| 245 |
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. They tore Adonis's stomach open and he fell, mortally wounded, to the ground. Aphrodite arrived in time to see her lover bleeding to death and the boar or was it Ares? grunting in triumph as it galloped away deep into the forest. There was nothing the weeping goddess could do but hold Adonis and watch him choke out his last in her arms. From his blood and her tears sprang up bright red anemones named after the winds (anemoi in Greek) that so quickly blow away the petals of this exquisitely lovely flower, which is known to be as short-lived as youth and as fragile as beauty. fn2 Echo and Narcissus Tiresias The best known of all the stories that involve the transformation of a youth into a flower begins with a worried mother taking her son to see a prophet. As well as the soothsayers and Sibyls who spoke on behalf of the divine oracles, there existed certain select mortal beings whom the gods also privileged with the gift of prophecy. |
| 246 |
With tumbling torrents of inconsequential babble gushing from her like water from a fountain, she guided the goddess's footsteps in the direction away from the river. 'There is a very fine ilex tree just in this clearing, majesty, which I was thinking of consecrating to you, with your permission ... Excuse me Zeus? Oh no, I've never seen him here.' 'Really?' Hera fixed Echo with a hard stare. 'I heard a rumour that he was here now. This very day.' 'No, no, my queen! No, no, no! In fact ... a servant of the Muses came down from Helicon just half an hour ago to draw water from our stream and he mentioned specifically that today mighty Zeus is in Thespiae today, honouring his temple there.' 'Oh. I see. Well, I thank you.' Hera nodded curtly and uncomfortably, returned to her chariot and flew off into the clouds. It is mortifying to be witnessed trying to catch your husband out. Echo skipped away, pleased to have been useful to her fellow nymph and to Zeus. In all fairness she would have been just as happy to have been protecting a mortal pair of lovers. It delighted her to ease the path of all lovers everywhere. She had never really felt love herself, except the love of helping others to love, which she felt was the highest love of all. So selfless was she that she never even bothered to tell Zeus or her sister of her useful act, which someone hoping for a reward would most certainly have done. She sang as she gathered flowers and felt that the life of a nymph was a good life. Echolalia The next day, back on Olympus, Hera sent for the chaffinch that had first whispered to her of Zeus's infidelity. 'You lied to me,' she shrieked. 'You made me look a fool!' Hera grasped the bird by the beak so that he could hardly breathe and was about to punish him in some strange and dreadful way that would for ever have altered our conception of chaffinches, when his mate fluttered about her ears and hair bravely calling out. 'But dread queen, he told you true! I saw King Zeus there myself. |
| 247 |
Even as you were talking to that nymph Echo, he was lying with a naiad not half a mile away. If you don't believe me, the butterflies and herons can tell you. Ask the priestesses at the temple at Thespiae when he last visited them. He hasn't been there for three moons!' Hera relaxed her grip and the bird, who had gone almost scarlet, breathed again, but male chaffinches still sport pink breasts to this very day. Echo was paddling playfully in a stream when Hera and her peacock carriage descended once more. The nymph splashed and skipped her way up the riverbank to greet the goddess, a wide and welcoming grin splitting her perfectly dimpled features. The smile of welcome quickly turned to a rounded 'O' of fear when she saw the look of rage on Hera's face. 'So,' said the goddess, with icy calm. 'You say my husband has not been here. You say he was not here yesterday. You say he was in Thespiae sanctifying a temple.' 'That's that's certainly my understanding,' stammered a frightened Echo. 'You foolish, gossiping, chattering, scheming liar! How dare you try to deceive the Queen of Heaven? Who do you think you are?' 'I ...' For once in her life Echo could think of nothing to say. '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?' '... 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. |
| 248 |
Narcissus had replied, as kindly as he could, that he did not return his love. But Ameinias would not accept 'no' for an answer and took to haunting Narcissus's every step. He joined him on his morning walk to school, tagging along and gazing at him like a lost and adoring puppy until Narcissus could stand it no longer and yelled at him to go away and never come near him again. That night Narcissus had been awoken by a strange sound outside his bedroom. He looked out of his window and saw in the moonlight Ameinias hanging from a pear tree, a rope around his neck. He choked out a curse before he died. 'May you be as unlucky in love as I have been, beautiful Narcissus!'fn4 Since then Narcissus had got into the habit of keeping his head down, covering his body as much as possible and being short and gruff to strangers, never meeting them in the eye. But now, as he looked about him, he saw that the rest of the hunting party had gone and that he was splendidly alone. He decided to take advantage of the cool waters of the stream and its inviting mossy banks. He slipped out of his clothes and plunged into the water. As soon as she caught sight of that lissom and golden form, half sunlit, half dappled by the shade and all streaming with water, Echo caught her breath. And when, peeping through the leaves she saw the face, the beautiful, beautiful face of Narcissus, she could no longer control her senses. Were it not for Hera's curse she would have cried out there and then. Instead she gazed in silent wonder as the naked youth laid his clothes and bow and arrows on the grass and stretched himself out to sleep. When love comes late it comes like a tornado. Poor Echo's whole being was swept up by her feelings for this impossibly beautiful youth. Nothing, not even the horror of Hera's curse, had ever caused her heart to hammer so violently inside her. The blood pounded and surged in her ears. It was as if she was swirling in the centre of a great cyclone. She simply had to take a closer look at this lovely youth. |
| 249 |
If she felt such tumultuous passions swirling inside her at the sight of him, then perhaps it was in the nature of things that he would feel the same at the sight of her? Surely that must be so? She crept forward, hardly daring to breathe. With each step she found herself more and more thrilled until she was quivering and trembling all over with excitement. The stories of love at first sight that she had heard sung all her life were true after all! This beautiful boy would be bound to return her love. Cosmos and creation would not make sense otherwise. Of course, you and I know that Cosmos and creation make no sense at all and never have. Poor Echo was about to discover the truth of this. Whether it was her pounding heart or the cry of a bird, something made the sleeping Narcissus open his eyes just as Echo drew near. His eyes met hers. Echo was a pretty nymph, lovely in fact. But it was only her eyes that Narcissus saw. That look again! That haggard, hungry, haunted look. Those needing, pleading eyes. Ugh! 'Who are you?' he said, turning away. 'Who are you?' 'Never you mind. That's my business.' 'That's my business!' 'No it isn't. You woke me.' 'You woke me!' 'I suppose like all the others you've fallen in love with me.' 'Love with me!' 'Love! I'm fed up with love.' 'Up with love!' 'It'll never happen. Never. Go away!' 'Never go away!' 'I don't care how much you wail at me. 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. As she ran he called out after her. 'And never come back!' 'Never come back,' she cried. |
| 250 |
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. 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. |
| 251 |
Narcissistic personality disorder and echolalia (the apparently mindless repetition of what is said) are both classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which medically and legally defines mental illnesses. Narcissistic personality disorder, much talked about these days, is marked by vanity, self-importance, a grandiose hunger for admiration, acclaim and applause, and above all an obsession with self-image. 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. In Babylon, then, lived two families who had been feuding, no one quite remembers why, for generations. |
| 252 |
Nor were his neck and throat so slender, smooth and irresistibly ... Pygmalion went out into the yard and dipped his head in the fountain of cold water that played there. Returning refreshed to the studio he looked again at his work in progress and could only shake his head in bewilderment. The general, when Pygmalion had been permitted to go round to his villa to study the great man's features, had struck him as being constructed more on the lines of a warthog than anything human, and yet here he was emerging from the marble as nothing short of a refined and miraculous beauty. 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. |
| 253 |
Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him. No thought of food or drink no conscious thought at all came into his mind, as he tapped, hammered and hummed. At last, as the pink flush of Eos and a nacreous flash of light from the east betokened the beginning of his fifth continuous day of work, he stepped back with the miraculous knowledge that only true artists understand: somehow, yes certainly, at last it was finished. He hardly dared raise his eyes. All his work thus far had been up close, detailed the lineaments of the complete figure existed only in some dark inaccessible corner of his mind. For the first time he could take it all in. He took a deep breath and looked. He cried out in shock and dropped his chisel. From its exquisitely rendered toes to the perfectly worked flowers that wreathed the hair on its head the sculpture was far and away the best thing he had ever done. More than that, it was surely the most absolutely beautiful work of art that had ever been seen in the world. To a true artist like Pygmalion this meant it was more beautiful than any person that had ever been seen on earth, for he knew that art always exceeds the best that nature can manage. Yet he saw that the figure he had rendered in marble from his enraptured imagination was even more than the most absolutely beautiful thing now in the world. She was real. To Pygmalion she was more real than the ceiling above his head and the floor beneath his feet. His heart was beating fast, his pupils had dilated, his breath was short and the very core of his being stirred in the most powerful and disturbing manner. It was joy and pain all at once. It was love. The expression and posture of the girl whose name he knew should be Galatea, for her marble loveliness was white as milk were caught in a moment of sublime hesitation, between awakening and wonder. She seemed a little surprised, as if on the verge of gasping. |
| 254 |
At what? At the beauty of the world? At the handsomeness of the young artist who was feasting his eyes so hungrily upon her? Her features were regular and perfect, but so were the features of many girls. There was more to her than conventional appeal. An inner loveliness of soul sang from her very core. Her lines were sweepingly, swoopingly, swooningly smooth, supple and sensuous. Her breasts seemed softly to be pushing out, her nakedness made so much more alluring by the way her hand touched her throat in a gesture of sweetly modest alarm. Pygmalion walked around her to take in the thrilling generosity of the curve of her buttocks and the glorious fullness of her thighs. Dared he put a hand to that flesh? He reached out gently, so as not to bruise her. But his fingers met cold marble. Hard, unyielding marble. To the eye and through to the depths of her Galatea seemed quick, warm and alive, but to Pygmalion's stroking hands and to the loving cheek he rested on her side she was as cold as death. He felt both sick and supercharged with life at one and the same time. He jumped up and down. He shouted out loud. He groaned. He laughed. He sang. He swore. He exhibited all the wild, deranged, furious, euphoric and despairing behaviours of a young man tempestuously and frighteningly in love. 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. |
| 255 |
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. '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. |
| 256 |
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. 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. |
| 257 |
The last thing he heard was the laughter of the crew and the captain's dry voice: 'That was easy! Now for the spoils.' If any of them had bothered to look down, a remarkable sight would have met their eyes. Arion had plunged below the surface and was fully intending to open his mouth and let the seawater in without a struggle. Someone had told him that drowning is a sweet and pleasant death, a slow passing into sleep, as long as you don't fight it. 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. |
| 258 |
Where were they going? Did the dolphin know? 'Hey, dolphin. Set your course for the Gulf of Corinth. I'll direct you when we get there.' The dolphin gave a series of squeaks and clicks that seemed to indicate understanding and Arion laughed. On and on they went, chasing the never-nearing horizon. Arion, confident of his balance now, pulled his kithara back round and sang the song of Arion and the Dolphin. It is lost to us, but they say it was the most beautiful song ever composed. At length they reached the gulf. The dolphin negotiated this busy shipping lane with graceful, zipping ease. Sailors on the busy barques, barges and small boats turned to stare at the remarkable sight of a young man riding a dolphin. Arion steered on the fins with gentle tugs this way and that and they did not stop until they had reached the royal docks. 'Send word to King Periander,' he said, stepping from the dolphin onto the quay. 'His minstrel is returned. And feed my dolphin.' The Monument Periander was overjoyed by the homecoming of the musician he loved. The story of his rescue filled the court with wonder and amazement. They feasted all night and into the morning. It was evening by the time they set out to see, praise and pet the heroic dolphin. But a sad sight met their eyes. Ignorant dock workers had brought the animal ashore to be fed. It had languished overnight without any water to keep its skin moist and then lay all morning and afternoon on the quayside, surrounded by inquisitive children, the hot sun burning down and drying it up. Arion knelt on the ground and whispered into its ear. The dolphin rippled an affectionate reply, heaved a shuddering sigh and died. Arion recriminated himself bitterly and even Periander's instructions that a high tower be constructed to commemorate the dolphin and glorify its memory failed to raise his spirits. For the next month all his songs were sad ones and the palace mourned along with him. Then came news that the brig crewed by the nine sailors and its villainous captain had been blown by a storm into Corinth. |
| 259 |
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. '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? |
| 260 |
You really did recover the body, prepare it for burial and then return it to the waves?' 'Absolutely.' 'And these trinkets are all that remain of the prize treasure?' 'It grieves me to say so, majesty, but yes.' 'How then,' Periander asked, 'do you account for the discovery of all this hidden in the hollow of your ship's timbers? At a sign, some guards came forward bearing a litter on which was disposed the bulk of the treasure. 'Ah. Yes. Well ...' the captain gave a winning smile. 'Foolish of us to attempt to deceive you, dread lord. The poor boy died, as I said, and there was his treasure. We are but poor working sailors, sire. Your cunning and wisdom has found us out.' 'That is handsome of you,' said Periander. 'But I am still puzzled. I had a kithara made for Arion in silver, gold and ivory. He never went anywhere without it. Why is it not here amongst the other things?' 'Well now,' said the captain. 'I told you how fond we were of young Arion. Like a younger brother to us, isn't that right, lads?' 'Aye, aye ...' muttered the sailors. 'We knew what his kithara meant to him. We included it with him in his shroud before committing his body to the waves. How could we have done otherwise?' Periander smiled. The captain smiled. But suddenly his smile disappeared. From the mouth of the golden dolphin at the top of the column emerged the sound of a kithara. The captain and his men stared in amazement. Arion's voice joined the notes of the kithara and these were the words that came from out of the carved dolphin's mouth: 'Kill him, men,' the captain said. 'Kill him now and seize his gold.' 'We'll kill him now,' the sailors cried, 'And throw him to the sharks.' 'But stop,' the minstrel said. 'Only let me sing One final farewell song.' One of the sailors let out a scream of fear. The others fell quaking to their knees. Only the captain, white-faced, stayed upright. A door opened in the plinth and Arion himself stepped from the monument, strumming his kithara and singing: But the dolphin came and saved him. |
| 261 |
Two strangers stood on the threshold, a bearded man and his younger, smooth-faced companion. His son perhaps. 'Hello,' said Philemon. 'How may we help you?' The younger man smiled and removed his hat, a strange round cap with a shallow brim. 'Good afternoon sir,' he said. 'We are a pair of hungry travellers, new to this part of the world. I wonder if we might trespass upon your good nature ...' 'Come in, come in!' said Baucis, bustling up behind her husband. 'It's chilly to be out at this time of year. We are higher up than the rest of the town you know and feel the cold a little more. Philemon, why don't you scare up the fire so that our guests might warm themselves?' 'Of course, my love, of course. Where are my manners?' Philemon stooped down and blew into the hearth, awakening the embers. 'Let me take your cloaks,' said Baucis. 'Have a seat, sir, by the fire. And you, sir, I beg.' 'That is most kind,' said the older of the two. 'My name is Astrapos, and this is my son Arguros.' The younger man bowed at the mention of his name with something of a flourish and seated himself beside the fire. 'We are very thirsty,' he said, with a loud yawn. 'You must have something to drink,' said Baucis. 'Husband, you fetch the wine jug and I shall bring dried figs and pine nuts. I hope you gentlemen will consent to dine with us. We can't offer rich fare, but you would be most welcome.' 'Don't mind if we do,' said Arguros. 'Let me take your hat and staff ...' 'No, no. They stay with me.' The young man pulled the staff close to him. It was of a most curious design. Was it a vine that was carved all around it, Baucis wondered? He was twisting it so deftly that the whole thing seemed alive. 'I'm afraid,' said Philemon coming forward with a jug of wine, 'that you may find our local wine a little thin and perhaps a little ... sharp. People from neighbouring regions mock us for it, but I assure you that once you are used to the taste it can be really quite drinkable. We think so at least.' 'Not bad,' said Arguros after a sip. |
| 262 |
'How did you get the cat to sit on the jug?' 'Ignore him,' said Astrapos. 'He thinks he's amusing.' 'Well, I have to admit that was rather funny,' said Baucis, approaching with fruit and nuts on a wooden plate. 'I hate to think, young sir, what you're going to say about the appearance of my dried figs.' 'You're wearing a blouse so I can't see them. But the preserved fruit on this plate looks pleasant enough.' 'Sir!' Baucis slapped him playfully and went very pink. What a strange young man. The slight awkwardness that usually attends the drink and nibbles phase of an evening was quickly mellowed by the cheek and cheerfulness of Arguros and the ready laughter of their hosts. Astrapos seemed to be of a gloomier disposition, and as they went to the table Philemon put a hand on his shoulder. 'I hope you will forgive the inquisitiveness of a foolish old man, sir,' he said, 'but you seem a little distracted. Is there anything we can help you with?' 'Oh, ignore him. He's always down in the dumps,' said Arguros. 'That's where he gets his clothes from, haha! But, in truth, there's nothing wrong with him that a good meal won't put right.' Baucis met Philemon's eyes for a brief instant. There was so little in the larder. A side of salted bacon that they had been saving for the midwinter feast, some preserved fruit and black bread, half a cabbage. They knew they would go hungry for a week if they fed so much as half the appetites of two such hearty men. But hospitality was a sacred thing and the needs of guests must always come first. 'Another glass of that wine wouldn't hurt,' said Arguros. 'Oh dear,' said Philemon, looking at the jug, 'I fear that there isn't any more ...' 'Nonsense,' said Arguros snatching it away, 'plenty left.' He filled his cup and then Astrapos's too. 'How strange,' said Philemon. 'I could have sworn the pitcher was only a quarter full.' 'Where are your cups?' asked Arguros. 'Oh please, we don't need any ...' 'Nonsense,' Arguros leaned back in his chair and reached for two wooden beakers on the side-table behind him. |
| 263 |
'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. '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. |
| 264 |
'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. '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. |
| 265 |
It became known as one of the wonders of the age. Midas loved nothing more than to roam this paradise of colour and fragrance and tend to his plants each one of which bore sixty glorious blooms. One morning, as he wandered the garden, noting with habitual delight how exquisitely the beads of dew twinkled on the delicate petals of his darling roses, Midas tripped over the slumbering form of an ugly, pot-bellied old man, curled up on the ground and snoring like a pig. 'Oh,' said Midas, 'I'm so sorry. I didn't see you there.' With a belch and a hiccup, the old man rose to his feet and bowed low. 'Beg pardon,' he said. 'Couldn't help but be drawn by the sweet scent of your roses last night. Fell asleep.' 'Not at all,' said Midas politely. He had been brought up always to show respect for his elders. 'But why don't you come into the palace and partake of some breakfast?' 'Don't mind if I do. Handsome of you.' Midas had no way of knowing that this ugly, pot-bellied old man was Silenus, boon-companion of the wine god Dionysus. 'Perhaps you would like a bath?' he suggested as they made their way indoors. 'What for?' 'Oh, nothing. Just a thought.' Silenus stayed for ten days and ten nights, making deep inroads into Midas's meagre cellar, but rewarding him with outrageous songs, dances and stories. On the tenth night Silenus announced that he would be leaving the next morning. 'My master will be pining for me,' he said. 'Don't suppose your people could conduct me to him, could they?' 'With pleasure,' said Midas. The next day Midas and his retinue led Silenus on the long journey to the southern vineyards that Dionysus liked to frequent at that time of year. After many hours of struggling through the heat and tangle of choked lanes, steep hills and narrow byways they came upon the wine god and his attendants picnicking in a field. Dionysus was overjoyed to see his old friend. 'Wine tastes sour without you,' he said. 'Dances go wrong and music falls flat on the ears. Where have you been?' 'I got lost,' said Silenus. |
| 266 |
'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. 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! |
| 267 |
Look! All I have to do is oh!' He stepped back to see that his wife and infant girl were now one fused golden statue, glittering in the morning sun, a frozen mother and child group that any sculptor would have been proud of. 'I'll attend to that later,' Midas said to himself. 'There must be a way to recover them ... Dionysus wouldn't be so ... meanwhile Zim! Zam! Zoo!' A guard on sentry, the great side-door to the palace and his favourite throne were now entirely gold. 'Vim! Vam! Voo!' The side-table, his goblet, his cutlery solid gold! But what was this? Crack! His teeth almost broke on a hard golden peach. Tunk! His lips met metallic wine. Thwop! A heavy gold nugget that had once been a linen napkin crushed and bruised his lips. The unbounded delight began to fade as Midas realized the full import of his gift. You may imagine the rest. All at once the thrill and pleasure of his ownership of gold were changed to dread and fear. All Midas touched turned to gold, but his heart turned to lead. No words of his, no shrieks of imprecation to the heavens could return his cold solidified wife and daughter to quick warm life. The sight of his beloved roses dropping their heavy heads caused his own to bow in misery. Everything around him glinted and glittered, gleamed and glimmered with a gorgeous gaudy golden glow but his heart was as grim and grey as granite. And the hunger and thirst! After three days of food and drink turning to inedible gold the moment it touched him, Midas felt ready for death. Atop his golden bed, whose hard heavy sheets offered no warmth or comfort, he fell into a fevered sleep. He dreamed of his flowers blooming back into soft, delicate life his roses, yes, but most of all the flowers that he now understood mattered most, his wife and child. In the wild, contorted dream he saw the soft colours returning to their cheeks and the light shining once more in their eyes. As these beguiling images danced and flickered in his mind the voice of Dionysus boomed inside him. |
| 268 |
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. 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. |
| 269 |
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. 'Midas has ass's ears ...' The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze. 'Midas has ass's ears,' sighed the branches. 'Midas has ass's ears,' sang the birds. And at last the news reached the city. 'Midas has ass's ears!' King Midas woke with a start. There was laughter and shouting in the street outside the palace. |
| 270 |
He crept to the window, crouched down and listened. The humiliation was too much for him to bear. Without stopping to wreak his vengeance on the barber and the barber's family, he mixed a poisonous draught of ox-blood, raised his eyes heavenwards, gave a bitter laugh and a shrug, drained the drink and died. Poor Midas. His name will always mean someone fortunate and rich, but truly he was unlucky and poor. If only he had kept to his roses. Green fingers are better than gold. Afterword I have assembled below a few thoughts on the nature of myth and a brief outline of some of the sources I have had recourse to in the writing of this book. I cannot repeat too often that it has never been my aim to interpret or explain the myths, only to tell them. I have, of course, had to play about with timelines in order to attempt a coherent narrative. My version of the 'ages of man', for example, varies from the well-known one by the poet Hesiod in order more clearly to separate the eras of the rule of Kronos and the creation of humans. So energetic was the explosion of stories in Greece almost three thousand years ago that necessarily all sorts of events seemed to happen at once. If anyone tells me that I have got the stories 'wrong' I believe I am justified in replying that they are, after all, fictions. In tinkering with the details I am doing what people have always done with myths. In that sense I feel that I am doing my bit to keep them alive. Myth v. Legend v. Religion Much as a pearl is formed around grit, so a legend is taken to have been built up around a grain of truth. The legend of Robin Hood, for example, seems to have derived from a real historical figure. fn1 The narrative substance that accretes as the story is handed down over the generations, embellished and exaggerated on the way, at some point takes on the properties of legend. It is likely to be written down, for the word derives from the gerundive of the Latin legere, meaning 'to be read'. fn2 Myths, however, are imaginative, symbolic constructs. |
| 271 |
No one believes that Hephaestus ever truly existed. He stands as a representation of the arts of metalwork, manufacture and craftsmanship. That such a figuration is portrayed as swarthy, ugly and hobbling tempts us to interpret and explain. Perhaps we noticed that real blacksmiths, while strong, are often dark, scarred and so muscle-bound as to be bunched and alarming to look upon. Perhaps cultures required that the fit, tall and whole always be taken into the ranks of fighting men and that, from the first, the halt, lame and shorter male children might be trained in the forges and workshops rather than drilled for battle. Any god of blacksmiths that the collective culture imagined, therefore, would be likely to reflect the human archetype they already knew. Gods of this kind are created in our image, not the other way round. Symbolical rather than historical in origin as myths and mythical figures might be, they underwent the same fictional remodelling and embellishments as more factually rooted legends. They too were written down, and the Greek myths especially, thanks to Homer, Hesiod and those that followed, were chronicled and detailed in ways that have granted us the timelines, genealogies and character histories that allow for story-telling of the kind I have attempted with this book. Myths, to put it simply and obviously, deal with gods and monsters that can't be observed or pointed at. It may be that some members of the ancient Greek population believed in centaurs and water dragons, gods of the sea and goddesses of the hearth, but they would have had a hard time proving their existence and convincing others. 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. |
| 272 |
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. There is a unique treasury of extant sources that chart the chronology of Greek myth from the creation of the universe and birth of the gods all the way to the end of their interaction and interference in human affairs. It begins with homer, who may or may not have been a single (blind) Ionian bard, but whose name is attached to the two great epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, that were put together some time, it is thought, in the eighth century bc. Their setting is the siege of Troy and its aftermath, but Homer makes countless useful references back to earlier myths. His approximate contemporary, the poet hesiod (undoubtedly an individual), did the most to create what might be called a timeline for Greek mythology. His Theogony (Birth of the Gods) narrates the creation, the rise of the Titans, the origin of the gods and the establishment of Olympus. |
| 273 |
Two were nineteenth-century writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, who gave us A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and its sequel, Tanglewood Tales (1853); and Thomas Bulfinch, whose The Age of Fable (1855), later incorporated into the compendious Bulfinch's Mythology (1881), has run through dozens and dozens of editions in its 160 years of life. 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. It is a Dutch and New Zealand project that contains over 1,500 pages of text and a gallery of 1,200 pictures comprising vase paintings, sculpture, mosaics and frescoes on Greek mythological themes. |
| 274 |
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. Detectives on the first shift filled her in on the details. "The facts of this case," Miller noted in her report, "are similar to those of two rapeabductions ... being handled by the Ohio State University Police, that occurred in their jurisdiction." Nikki Miller and her partner, Officer A. J. Bessell, drove to University Hospital to interview Polly Newton, an auburnhaired girl. The man who abducted her, Polly said, had told her that he was a member of the Weathermen, but that he also had another identity — as a businessman — and drove a Maserati. |
| 275 |
After Polly was treated at the hospital, she agreed to accompany Miller and Bessell to search for the place she'd been forced to drive to. But it was getting dark and she was becoming confused. She agreed to try again the following morning. The Crime Scene Search Unit dusted her car for fingerprints. They found three partial prints with sufficient ridge detail to be used for comparison with any future suspects. Miller and Bessell drove Polly back to the Detective Bureau to work with the department artist at making a composite drawing. Then Miller asked Polly to look through photographs of white male sex offenders. She studied three trays of mug shots, a hundred to a tray, with no success. At ten that evening, exhausted after seven hours with the police, she stopped. At ten-fifteen the next morning, detectives of the Assault Squad morning shift picked up Polly Newton and drove her to Delaware County. In the daylight she was able to lead them to the scene of the rape, where they found 9-millimeter bullet casings near the edge of the pond. That, she told one of the detectives, was where the man had fired his gun at some beer bottles he had tossed into the water. When they returned to headquarters, Nikki Miller had just arrived on duty. She sat Polly in a small room directly opposite the receptionists desk and brought in another tray of mug shots. She left Polly alone and shut the door. A few minutes later, Eliot Boxerbaum arrived at the Detective Bureau with Donna West, the nurse who had been the second victim. He wanted her to go through the mug shots, too. He and Chief Kleberg had decided to keep the optometry student in reserve for a line-up identification in case the mug-shot evidence didn't hold up in court. Nikki Miller sat Donna West at a table in the corridor alongside the filing cabinets and brought her three trays of mug shots. "My God," she said, "are there that many sex offenders walking the streets?" Boxerbaum and Miller waited nearby as Donna studied face after face. |
| 276 |
R. M. I. sic automatic pistol with five live rounds. vanity — 3 12 x 11 piece of paper with name and address of Polly Newton. Page from her address book. headboard — Switchblade knife, two packets of powder. chest of drawers — phone bill for Milligan, S & W holster. 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. The van turned into an alleyway behind the jail and paused in front of the corrugated-steel garage door. From this angle, the jail stood in the shadow of the taller building it was attached to — the Franklin County Hall of Justice. |
| 277 |
Cynthia Mendoza, a Kroger store clerk who cashed one of the checks, did not identify Milligan. She picked number 3 instead. A woman who had been sexually assaulted in August under very different circumstances said she thought it might be number 2 but she wasn't positive. Carrie Dryer said without the mustache she couldn't be sure, but number 2 did look familiar. Polly Newton made positive identification. On November 3, the grand jury handed down an indictment on three counts of kidnapping, three counts of aggravated robbery and four counts of rape. All were first-degree felony charges, punishable by prison terms of four to twenty-five years on each count. The prosecutor's office rarely got involved in assigning attorneys — even in major murder cases. The normal procedure was for the head of the Felony Division to assign one of the senior prosecutors two or three weeks in advance, by random selection. But County Prosecutor George Smith called in two of his top senior prosecutors and told them that the publicity surrounding the Campus Rapist case had stirred public outrage. He wanted them to handle the case and to prosecute vigorously. Terry Sherman, thirty-two, with curly black hair and a fierce, guardman's mustache, had a reputation for coming down hard on sex offenders and boasted that he had never lost a rape case before a jury. When he looked at the file, he laughed. "It's a locked case. The warrants were good. We've got this guy. The public defenders have nothing." Bernard Zalig Yavitch, a thirty-five-year-old member of the prosecutors criminal-trial staff, had been two years ahead of Judy Stevenson and Gary Schweickart in law school and knew them well. Gary had been his law clerk. Yavitch had practiced law for four years as a public defender before coming to the prosecutor's office. He agreed with Sherman that it was as good a case for the prosecution as he had ever seen. "As good?" said Sherman. "With all the physical evidence, the fingerprints, the identification, we've got it all. |
| 278 |
The intelligence tests showed Milligans IQ to be 68, but Driscoll stated that Milligan's depression had lowered his score. His report diagnosed acute schizophrenia. He is suffering from a major loss of identity such that his ego boundaries are very poorly defined. He is experiencing schizophrenic loss of distance and has a very restricted capacity to differentiate between self and his environment. ... He hears voices that tell him to do things and yell and scream at him when he does not comply. Milligan expresses his belief that these voices are from people who have come from hell to torment him. He also speaks of good people who periodically invade his body in order to combat the bad people. ... In my opinion, Mr. Milligan is not capable at present, of counseling in his own behalf. He is not capable of establishing adequate contact with reality to understand events that are transpiring. I strongly urge this man to be hospitalized for further examination and possible treatment. The first legal skirmish came on January 19, when Stevenson and Schweickart presented the report to Judge Jay C. Flowers as evidence that their client could not assist in his own defense. Flowers said he would issue an order for Southwest Community Mental Health Center in Columbus to assign its forensic psychiatry unit to examine the defendant. Gary and Judy were worried, since Southwest was usually on the side of the prosecution. Gary insisted that whatever came out during the examination by Southwest be privileged information, not to be used against their client under any circumstances. Sherman and Yavitch disagreed. The public defenders threatened to tell Milligan not to speak with the psychologists and psychiatrists from Southwest. Judge Flowers came close to declaring them in contempt. They came to a compromise when the prosecutors agreed that only if Milligan took the stand in his own defense would they question him about anything incriminating he might have said to the court-appointed psychologists. |
| 279 |
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. 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. |
| 280 |
At eight o'clock, Nurse Helen Yaeger went into his room and stayed with him for forty minutes. Her first entry in the nurses' notes was brief: 31678 Mr. Milligan remains in special care — observed closely for special precautions. Spoke of his multiple personalities. "Arthur" did most of the talking — he has an English accent. Stated that one of the persons — namely Billy — is suicidal and he has been asleep since 16 years of age in order to protect the others from harm. Eating well. Voiding well. Taking foods well. Pleasant and cooperative. After Nurse Yaeger left, Arthur silently informed the others that Harding Hospital was a safe and supportive environment. Since it would take insight and logic to assist the physicians in therapy, he, Arthur, would henceforth assume complete domination of the spot. At two twenty-five that morning, Psych-tech Chris Cann heard a loud noise from the room. When he went to check, he saw the patient sitting on the floor. Tommy was upset at having fallen out of bed. Seconds later, he heard the footsteps and saw the eye at the peephole. As soon as the footsteps faded away, Tommy pulled the taped razor blade from the sole of his foot and carefully hid it, retaping it to the underside of one of the bed slats. He would know where to find it when the time came. ( 2 ) On his return from Chicago on March 19, Dr. George Harding, Jr., was annoyed that his careful arrangements had been upset by the early transfer. He had planned to greet Milligan in person. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to assemble a therapy team: psychologist, art therapist, adjunctive therapist, psychiatric social worker, doctors, nurses, psych-techs and the Wakefield unit coordinator. 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. They would ah have to keep open minds and work together to get an insight into William Stanley Milligan. |
| 281 |
At ten each morning and three each afternoon, seven or eight of the Wakefield patients would be brought together to work on projects and activities as a group. On March 21, Nick brought Milligan from the special-care room, now locked only at night, to the activities room. The slender twenty-seven-year-old psych-tech, who sported a full beard and wore two earrings — a delicate gold loop and a jade stone — in his left ear lobe, had heard of Milligans hostility toward males because of the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child. He was curious about multiple personality, though he was skeptical about the whole idea. Rosalie, a blond, blue-eyed occupational therapist in her late twenties, had never dealt with a multiple personality before. But after the briefing by Dr. Harding, she became aware that the staff had quickly divided into two camps: those who believed Milligan was a multiple and those who believed he was a con man — faking this exotic illness to gain attention and to avoid going to prison for rape. 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. |
| 282 |
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. 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. |
| 283 |
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. The strategy, Wilbur had said, was to bring. the others together and eventually introduce Billy — the core personality — to the memories of those incidents. Then, finally, fusion might be attempted. Though the temptation was great to try her approach, the way she had skillfully brought the personalities out in the jail, George Harding had long ago learned his lesson. What worked for someone else didn't always work for him. He considered himself a very conservative man, and he would have to learn in his own way, and in his own good time, who and what he had here. |
| 284 |
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. 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. The voice was choked and nasal. The face became almost feminine. The eyes drifted. "It hurts to talk," Adalana said. Dr. George tried to hide his excitement at the switch. He had wanted her to come out; he had expected it. But when it happened, it came as a surprise. |
| 285 |
We call that co-consciousness. Finally, you work at bringing the different people together. That's fusion." "When you gonna do this?" "Dr. Wilbur is coming to see you the day after tomorrow, and we're going to have a presentation and a discussion with most of the hospital staff who work with you. We'll show the videotapes to help some of our staff — who have never experienced this mental condition — to help them understand you better so that they can help you." Billy nodded. And then his eyes went wide as his attention turned inward. He nodded several times, and then he looked up at Dr. George in astonishment. "What is it, Billy?" "Arthur says to tell you he wants to approve who can come to see me at the meeting." ( 6 ) Harding Hospital was abuzz with excitement. 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? |
| 286 |
He climbed into the paddy wagon, and they walked beside it as it slowly moved along the curving road toward the stone bridge. They waved good-by, went back to the unit and a had a long, hard cry. When Bemie Yavitch and Terry Sherman read Dr. George Hardings report, they agreed it was one of the most thorough mental examinations they had ever seen. All the things they as prosecutors had been trained to attack in the testimony of psychiatrists, all the positions they might normally object to, were unassailable in Hardings report. It hadn't been a three-or four-hour checkup. It had been a hospital study of more than seven months. And it was not just Hardings opinion alone, but included consultation with a great many other psychologists and psychiatrists. On October 6, 1978, Judge Flowers, after holding a brief competency hearing, ruled on the basis of the Harding report that Milligan was now capable of standing trial. He set tne date for December 4. Schweickart said that was satisfactory, with one proviso: that the trial be conducted under the law that existed at the time of the crimes. (The Ohio law would change on November 1, placing the burden of proof of insanity on the defendant rather than placing the burden of proof of sanity on the prosecution.) Yavitch disagreed. "I will take that motion under advisement," Judge Flowers said. "I know similar motions where amendments have been made — specifically, the new criminal code, for example. I know in most instances they have held, almost without exception, that the defendant is entitled to the better of the acts as to one way or the other. But I know of no decision or court cases in that regard." On the way out of the courtroom, Schweickart told Yavitch and Sherman that he intended to waive jury trial on behalf of his client and was asking Judge Flowers to hear the case. As Schweickart walked off, Yavitch said, "There goes our case." "Not as locked up as it looked at the beginning," Sherman said. Judge Flowers later said he felt that the prosecutors, in agreeing to accept Dr. |
| 287 |
As you can see, this is a hostile place and Ragen is dominant. But if Billy isn't moved from here to a hospital, I can't guarantee that he'll stay even partially fused." Franklin County Sheriff Harry Berkemer told a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch that his deputies witnessed an extraordinary feat of strength and endurance when Milligan was in the personality of Ragen. Ragen had been taken to the prisoner recreation area, and he chose to punch a large body bag. "He hit it hard for nineteen and a half minutes straight," Berkemer said. 'An average man can't hit it for more than three minutes straight without becoming exhausted. 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. |
| 288 |
Milligan, whom doctors say has 10 personalities. "Nobody has talked to me," complains Milligan, who asserts the abuse claims by his stepson are "completely false. ..." According to a report signed by Dr. George T. Harding, the psychiatrists also concluded that Milligan exhibited multiple personality behavior and that he had personalities unaware of the actions of others. They blamed his condition partly on abuse he suffered as a child... . Chalmer Milligan said he has suffered considerable hardship as a result of the published reports. "You always have the misunderstanding bunch. It's very upsetting," he said. He said he particularly was upset by published accounts that failed to attribute the abuse claim to William or the psychiatrists. "It ah goes back to the boy," Milligan said. "All they're (the publications) doing is repeating what they (the psychiatrists and young Milligan) said," he added. He would not say whether he planned any legal action regarding the abuse claims. Feeling increasingly confident that Billy would be found not guilty by reason of insanity, Judy and Gary realized there was still another hurdle. Up to this time, ah such verdicts resulted in the defendant being sent to Lima. But within three days, on December 1, a new Ohio law dealing with mentally ill patients would go into effect, requiring that someone found not guilty by reason of insanity be treated as a mentally ill patient and not as a criminal. The new law would require that he be sent to the least restrictive environment consistent with safety to himself and others, and his commitment to a state mental institution would come under the jurisdiction of the probate court. Since the trial date was set for December 4 and Billy would be the first to come under the new Ohio law, there was a good chance that after the trial, the probate court would agree to send him to a place other than Lima if the defense could demonstrate an alternative where he would receive proper treatment. Harding Hospital was out of the question because of the expense. |
| 289 |
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. 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. |
| 290 |
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. When he got into the police van at the entrance to the hospital, he saw the deputies looking at him strangely. On the way to the courthouse, the paddy wagon made a five-mile detour to throw off any news reporters or TV news people who might be following. But as it swung around Front Street into the cruiser entrance of the Franklin County Jail, a young woman and a man with a TV camera stepped inside just before the sally-port door closed behind them. |
| 291 |
Bill who was very afraid of his step-father would say No. Chalmers would further state we don't want to upset your mother do we. He would then take James and Bill to the ice cream store prior to going home. He would also verify all of the home life trauma directed at Billy. At twelve-thirty Judge Flowers asked if either side wished to make closing arguments. Both sides waived the right. The judge dismissed the first count of rape, pointing out the lack of corroborating evidence and the lack of a similar modus operandi. "Now, proceeding as to the defense of insanity," Judge Flowers said, "all of the evidence is stipulated medical evidence, and from that, without question, the doctors all testify that at the time of the acts in question, that the defendant was mentally ill at the time of the offense with which he was charged. That by virtue of his mental illness he was unable to distinguish between right and wrong, and further that he did not have the ability to refrain from doing these acts." Gary held his breath. "Lacking any evidence to the contrary," Flowers continued, "this court has no alternative other than to determine from the evidence before me that as to counts two to ten, inclusive, that the defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity." Judge Flowers placed Billy Milligan under the authority of the probate court of Franklin County, struck his gravel three times and adjourned. Judy felt lie crying, but held it back. She squeezed Billy and pulled him toward the holding cell to avoid the crowd. Dorothy Turner came in to congratulate him, as did Stella Karolin and the others, who Judy could see were crying. Only Gary stood apart, leaning against the wall thoughtfully, arms folded. It had been a long battle, with sleepless nights and a marriage ready to break up, but now it was almost over. "All right, Billy," he said. "We've got to go down to probate court before Judge Metcalf. But were going to have to go out in the lobby and run the gauntlet of those reporters and TV cameras. |
| 292 |
Now both of them agreed that if Billy was to get well, it was necessary for him to know the truth. Caul was pleased with the decision. Ragen's report of the conflict between himself and Arthur and of the rebellion of the undesirables suggested that things were reaching a crisis point. The time had come, he felt, for Billy to see the others and to learn that he was the one who had amassed all the knowledge, learned all the skills and passed them on. It would strengthen him to learn that he was the Teacher. Caul asked to speak to Billy, and when he saw the knees jiggling and knew who he was speaking to, he told him of the decision made by Arthur and Ragen. Caul saw the combination of excitement and fear as Billy nodded and said he was ready? 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? |
| 293 |
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. The mirror reflected Daddy's face as he emptied the bottle of yellow capsules into his hand and swallowed them. Then Daddy sat down at the table, Billy lay down in his crib and the little boy with no name disappeared. In the middle of the night his mother's scream woke Billy. He watched her rush to the telephone to call the police. With Jimbo standing beside him at the window, Billy looked on while they wheeled the stretcher and the cars with the flashing lights took Daddy away. In the days that followed, Daddy didn't come back to play with him, and Mommy was too upset and busy, and Jimbo wasn't around and Kathy was too little. Billy wanted to play with Kathy, talk to her, but Mommy said she was a little girl and he had to be very, very careful. |
| 294 |
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. 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. |
| 295 |
He wondered when his mom was going to punish him for the broken cookie jar. It made him nervous, and he spent the rest of the day alone in his room. He wished Jimbo would come home from school, or that he could see the little dark-haired boy who used to play with his soldiers and trucks. Billy squeezed his eyes closed, hoping the little boy would be there. But nothing. The strange thing was, he never felt lonely anymore. Whenever he would start to feel lonely or bored or sad, he would just close his eyes. When he opened them, he would be in a different place and everything would be changed. Sometimes he would close his eyes when the sun was shining brightly outside, and when he opened them again, it would be nighttime. Sometimes it would be the opposite. Other times he would be playing with Kathy or Jimbo, and when he blinked he would be sitting on the floor alone. Sometimes when this happened he would have red marks on his arms or an ache in his behind, as if he had been spanked. But he never got spanked or shaken again. He was glad no one punished him anymore. ( 4 ) Dorothy stayed with Dick Jonas for a year. Then the situation became too much for her, and she left him for the second time. She supported herself and her children as a waitress at the Lancaster Country Club and by singing in cocktail lounges like the Continental and the Top Hat. She placed the children in St. Josephs School in Circleville, Ohio. Billy got along well in first grade. The nuns praised him for his drawing ability. He could sketch quickly, and his use of light and shadow was uncanny for a six-year-old. But in second grade, Sister Jane Stephens was determined he would use only his right hand for writing and drawing. "The devil is in your left hand, William. We have to force him out." He saw her pick up her ruler, and he closed his eyes... Shawn looked around and saw the lady with the black dress and the starched white bib coming toward him with the ruler. He knew he was here to be punished for something. |
| 296 |
They had to move fast, he explained. She should take the children to Florida to look over a couple of places. He would stay here in Circleville, sell her interest in the bar and then join her. All she had to do was sign her share over to him. She did what he suggested, took the children to her sisters place in Florida, checked out some clubs for sale and waited a month. He never showed up. Realizing she had been taken by a con man, she came back to Circleville again — broke. In 1962, while she was singing at a lounge of a bowling alley, Dorothy met Chalmer Milligan, a widower. He now lived with his daughter, Challa, who was the same age as Billy, and he had a grown daughter who was a nurse. He began to date Dorothy and got her a job at the company where he was a job steward on press machines, molding parts for telephones. From the beginning, Billy didn't like him. He told Jimbo, "I don't trust him." The Pumpkin Festival in Circleville, famous throughout the Midwest, was the annual highlight of the town. In addition to parades and floats, the streets were turned into a pumpkin fair, vendors in their booths selling pumpkin donuts, pumpkin candies and even pumpkin hamburgers. The city was transformed into a pumpkin fairyland of lights and streamers and carnival rides. The Pumpkin Festival of October 1963 was a happy time. Dorothy felt her life had taken a good turn. She had met a man with a steady job who would be able to take care of her and who said he would adopt her three children. He would, she felt, be a good father, and she would be a good mother to Challa. On October 27, 1963, Dorothy married Chalmer Milligan. Three weeks after their marriage, on a Sunday in mid-November, he took them out to visit his fathers small farm in Bremen, Ohio, just fifteen minutes away. It was exciting to the children to go through the white farmhouse, swing on the porch swing, poke around the springhouse out back and the old red bam a little ways down the hill. The boys would have to come out weekends, Chalmer said, to work on the place. |
| 297 |
Billy picked up a magazine and glanced through it, but when he looked up he saw Chalmer staring, sitting stone-faced with his hand to his chin, his empty blue-green eyes watching everything he did. Billy got up, put the magazine neatly back on the coffee table and sat on the couch the way he'd been told to, feet flat on the floor, hands on his knees. But Chalmer kept looking at him, so he got up and went out on the back porch. Restless, not knowing what to do, he thought of playing with Blackjack. Everyone said Blackjack was a vicious dog, but Billy got along with him. When he looked up, he saw Chalmer staring at him through the bathroom window. Frightened now, wanting to get away from Chalmers gaze, he went around the house to the front yard and sat there shivering although it was a warm evening. The paper boy tossed the Gazette to him, and he got up and turned to bring it into the house, but there was Chalmer watching him through the front window. All the rest of that Sunday and that evening, Billy felt Chalmers eyes boring into him. He began to tremble, not knowing what Chalmer was going to do. Chalmer didn't say anything, didn't speak, but the eyes were there, following every move. The family watched Walt Disney s Wonderful World of Color, and Billy stretched out on the floor. From time to time, he would look back and see Chalmers cold, empty stare. When he moved to sit close to his mother on the couch, Chalmer got up and stomped out of the room. Billy couldn't sleep much that night. Next morning, before breakfast, Chalmer came into the kitchen, looking as if he hadn't slept much either, and announced that he and Billy were going to the farm. There was a lot to be done. Chalmer drove the back way, the long way, to the farm, never speaking a word the whole trip. He opened the garage and drove the tractor into the bam. Then Billy closed his eyes. He felt pain ... Dr. George Hardings statement to the court recounts the event: "The patient reports ... that he suffered sadistic and sexual abuse including anal intercourse from Mr. |
| 298 |
"You got a perfect score." Billy's teachers called him truant, troublemaker, liar. From fourth to eighth grade, he was in and out of offices of advisers, the principal, the school psychologist. Growing up was a constant battle of making up stories, bending the truth, manipulating explanations to avoid admitting that most of the time he didn't know what had happened to him days, hours, even just minutes ago. Everyone noticed his trances. Everyone said he was strange. When he came to understand that he was different from other people, that not everyone lost time, that everyone around him agreed he had done and said things he, and he alone, couldn't recall, he assumed he was insane. 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! |
| 299 |
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? He followed the electric cord to where it plugged into the wall. He pulled out the plug and touched the collar again. Nothing. So the goddamned shock was coming from the wall. He stared into the two little holes, then jumped up and ran downstairs. He followed the wires from the ceiling to the fuse box, followed the cable from the fuse box outside the house, and stopped in amazement as he saw the lines leading to the telephone poles along the streets. So that's what those goddamned things were for! Tommy followed the poles to see where they led to. It was nearly dark when he found himself outside the building with the wire fence around it and the sign ohio power. Okay, he thought, so where do they get the stuff that lights the lights and shocks the shit out of you? Back home he got out the phone book, looked up Ohio Power and wrote down the address. It was too dark now, but tomorrow morning he would go there and see where the power came from. The next day Tommy went downtown to Ohio Power. He walked inside and stared, dumfounded. Just a lot of people sitting at desks, answering telephones and typing. A business office! Jesus Christ, struck out again! As he wandered along Main Street trying to figure out how he was going to find out where this junk came from, he passed the library sign in front of the Municipal Building. Okay, he'd go look it up in the books. He went up to the second floor, searched the card catalog under "power," found the books and began to read. It astonished him to learn about dams, hydroelectric power and the burning of coal and other combustible fuels to create energy to work machinery and light the lights. He read until dark. Then he wandered the streets of Lancaster, looking at all the lights that had been turned on, excited that now he knew where the power was coming from. |
| 300 |
Tommy decided he also needed to know how to get out of locked rooms. When Billy's mother was out and he was alone in the house, he got a screwdriver and unscrewed the lock plate of the door, studying the mechanism to see how it worked. He drew a picture of the inside of the lock and memorized the shapes. Whenever he saw a different lock, he would take it apart, study it and put it back together. One day he wandered downtown into the shop of a locksmith. The old man let him look at the different kinds of locks to memorize how they worked. He even lent Tommy a book about magnetic-invoked tumblers, spinner-type tumblers and different kinds of vaults. Tommy studied hard, testing himself constantly. At the sporting goods store he saw handcuffs and decided that as soon as he had the money he would get a pair to learn how to unlock those as well. One evening when Chalmer was particularly nasty at dinner, Tommy searched for a way he could hurt him without getting caught. He had an idea. He got a file from the toolbox, took the cover off Chalmers electric rotary razor and carefully filed all three rotary blades dull. Then he put the cover back on and went out. Next morning he stood outside the bathroom while Chalmer was shaving. He heard the click of the razor and then the shouts of pain as the dull blades yanked at the hairs instead of cutting them. Chalmer raced out of the bathroom. "What're you looking at, you stupid bastard? Don't stand there like a goddamned moron!" Tommy shoved his hands into his pockets and walked off turning his head away so Chalmer wouldn't see him smiling. "Allen's" first time out on the spot was when he tried to talk some neighborhood tough guys out of throwing him down into a construetion-site hole dug for the foundation of a building. He argued with them, using all of his con-man abilities, but it didn't work. They tossed him down into the pit anyway and threw rocks at him. Well, he figured, no use in sticking around ... Danny heard the clunk of the rock hitting the ground in front of him. |
| 301 |
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. 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. |
| 302 |
During these episodes he is depressed, cries and becomes incommunicative. During one of these recent episodes Bill was observed attempting to step in front of a moving car. Bill was taken to a physician for this behavior. It was reported that the diagnosis was "psychic trances." During my evaluation Bill appeared depressed, but well in control of his behavior. The evaluation revealed a strong dislike for his stepfather and strong aversion to his home because of this. Bill sees his stepfather as an extremely rigid, tyrannical individual with little feeling for others. This impression was verified by Bill's mother in a parent conference. She reported that Bill's natural father committed suicide and that Bill's stepfather often compared Bill to his natural father. 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. |
| 303 |
Patients separated. March 25 — Patient was found with a case knife on his person also found a small file on the ward which he had taken out of the wood shop. Dr. Raulj talked with the patient and he stated he wanted to kill himself. Placed in seclusion and suicidal precautions. March 26 — Patient has been fairly cooperative. Complains periodically of seeing weird things. Patient, did not participate at recreation. Just sat alone most of the time. April 1 — Patient was screaming that the walls were closing in on him and he didn't want to die. Dr. Raulj took him in seclusion and warned him about having cigarettes and matches. April 12 — Patient starts acting out about bedtime the last few nights. He asks us if he is in a trance. Patient wanted extra medication tonight. I explained to patient he should try to get to bed. Patient became hostile and belligerent. (4) "Jason" threw the temper tantrums. He was the safety valve who could siphon off excess pressure by screaming and shouting. He was introverted until it came time to release tension. Jason was the one put into seclusion in the "quiet room" at Columbus State Hospital. Jason had been created, at the age of eight, ready to explode with emotion, but he was never allowed to come out — if he did, Billy would be punished. Here in the Columbus State Hospital, when the fear and pressure became too strong, Jason cried and screamed and vented his emotions. He did it when he heard on TV about the killing of the four students at Kent State. The attendants locked him up. When Arthur discovered that Jason was locked away whenever he exploded, he decided to take action. It was no different here from home. Showing anger was not permitted; if one did, all of them got punished. So Arthur forced Jason from consciousness, designated him "an undesirable" and informed him that he was never again to hold the consciousness. He would stay in the shadows beyond the spot. The others kept themselves busy with art therapy. When Tommy wasn't unlocking doors, he painted landscapes. |
| 304 |
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. 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. |
| 305 |
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. 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. |
| 306 |
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. 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. |
| 307 |
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. The boys laughed at that. They would move through zones 1 to 4, Mr. Jones explained, by the merit system. Each of them started out the month with 120 merits to his credit, but he had to have 130 to move on to the next zone. A boy could earn credits by special work and good behavior, or he could lose them by disobedience or antisocial behavior. Merits could be removed by the staff or by one of the trusties from zone 4. If any of those people said the word "Hey," that cost a merit. If someone said, "Hey, cool it," two merits were lost. "Hey, cool it, bed," meant that in addition to losing two merits, the offender had to stay in bed for two hours. If he left his bed and someone said, "Hey, cool it, bed! Hey, cool it," that was a loss of three merits. But if someone said, "Hey, cool it, bed! |
| 308 |
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. 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. |
| 309 |
He was never to aid anyone in stealing. He was not to be a thief. He was to practice the tenor saxophone in his spare time and to perfect his talent in painting landscapes. He was to control his belligerent attitude, but use it to deal with other people when necessary. Ragen was to take karate and judo lessons, to jog and to keep the body in perfect physical condition. With Arthurs help and direction, Ragen would learn to control his adrenaline flow so as to focus all his energies in times of stress or danger. He was to continue to study munitions and demolition. Part of the next paycheck would go toward buying him a gun for target practice. Allen was to practice his verbal skills, to concentrate on painting portraits. He would play the drums to help release excess tension. He would generally be the front man to help manipulate others when it was necessary. As the most sociable one, it was important for him to get out and meet people. Adalana was to continue writing her poetry and perfecting her cooking skills for the time when they would, be leaving home and getting their own apartment. Danny would concentrate on still lifes and learn to master the airbrush. Since he was a teen-ager, he would baby-sit and help care for the younger children. Arthur would concentrate on his scientific studies, ex-pecially those in the medical arts. He had already sent for a mail-order study course in the fundamentals of clinical hematology. He would also use his logic and clear reasoning to study law. All the others were made aware of the need to use every moment of their time to improve themselves and expand their knowledge. They must never be still, Arthur warned, never waste time, never allow their minds to stagnate. Each member of the family must strive to achieve his or her own goals, and at the same time be educated and cultured. They should think of these things even while off the spot and practice them intensively when they were holding the consciousness. The young ones were never to drive a car. |
| 310 |
He played several holes but did poorly; when he put his third shot into a sand bunker, he got so disgusted with himself that he left the spot. "Martin" opened his eyes, surprised to find himself with a sand wedge in his hand, addressing the ball from a bunker. He hit it out and finished the hole. Not knowing how many strokes it had taken him to do the par four hole, he scored it as a birdie three. 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. "Is severe punishment for mistake of golf cart in pond." "That is not the reason," Arthur said. |
| 311 |
Ain't no way that tailpipe could have come down and flipped that cycle without bending in two. That tailpipe ain't bent." "Don't you ever call me a liar!" Tommy shouted. "You're a goddamned liar!" Del shouted back. Tommy stormed out of the room. What good would it do to tell them the reason it wasn't bent was that Ragen had seen the thing coming down and had thrown the bike just in time to prevent a worse crack-up? No matter how he explained it, they were going to call it a lie. Feeling the anger building up, too strong for him to handle, Tommy gave up the spot... Dorothy, sensing the fury in her son, followed him as he went into the garage. She stood outside and watched him, unseen, through the window. She saw the look of murderous rage as he went to the lumber pile, picked up a two-by-four and snapped it in half. Again and again he broke the boards, venting a deep and violent anger. Arthur made a decision. 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. |
| 312 |
He kissed her, turned out the lights and pulled her down on the mattress. But as soon as their bodies touched, Adalana wished Kevin off the spot. This was what she needed. Holding and tenderness. Adalana understood Arthurs rule of celibacy. She had heard him tell the males that a single violation would make them undesirable. But, proper British gentleman that Arthur was, it had never occurred to him to talk to her about sex. She had never agreed to his puritanical rules, and he would probably never even suspect. When Allen woke up next morning, he had no idea what had happened. He saw the money in the drawer and it worried him, but he couldn't reach Tommy or Ragen or Arthur or anyone else for an explanation. 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. |
| 313 |
She was beautiful. Though she was fully dressed now, he visualized her slender body, every curve, every hollow. He had never painted a nude before, but he would love to paint her. He knew le wouldn't, though. Allen was the one who painted people. He spoke to her for a while, fascinated by her dark eyes, her Till, pouting lips, her long throat. He knew that whoever she was, whatever had brought her here, he was crazy about her. * * * ( 4 ) No one could understand why Billy Milligan started missing days at work or why he became so clumsy and stupid. Once he climbed up to fix the chain over the tanks and fell into the acid bath. They had to send him home. He walked off the job one day, and on December 21, 1973, he was fired from Lancaster Electro-Plating. 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. |
| 314 |
So inconsistent was the Yugoslavian that he would rob banks, live off the fruits of narcotics traffic and yet convince himself that he was involved in the liberation of the people. Arthur stood up, gave the entire assembly a withering glance and, in an even, unemotional tone, said, "Balderdash." The others turned and stared in astonishment as he left. He found the car and sat there for a few moments. He hated to drive on the right-hand side of the road. But try as he might, he couldn't reach anyone to come and take the car. "Damn these damnable mix-up times!" he said. Slowly he eased himself behind the wheel, and craning his neck to see the center line, he pulled away from the curb. He drove tensely at twenty miles an hour. Arthur checked the street signs, and it occurred to him that Sunbury Road might be in the neighborhood of the Hoover Reservoir. He pulled over to the curb, took out the highway map and plotted the coordinates. He was indeed near the dam he had been intending to visit for a long time. He had heard that ever since the Army Corps of Engineers had built the dam, the sludge had accumulated against the structure. He had been wrestling with the question of whether this sludge area, with its varied forms of microscopic life, might turn out to be an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. If he discovered this was indeed an infested area, he would inform the authorities that action must be taken. The important thing was for him to take some scrapings of the sludge and examine them under the microscope at home. 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. 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. |
| 315 |
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. Ragen was working for Foley on a regular basis — guarding shipments of guns and drugs — and was drinking too much vodka and smoking too much marijuana. After Ragen had spent four days in Indianapolis tracing a confiscated shipment of guns, he ended up in Dayton. Someone took too many downers and Tommy, finding himself on Interstate 70 feeling dizzy and sick to his stomach, gave up the spot to David, who was arrested on a complaint from a motel owner. At the hospital, they pumped Davids stomach and treated him for an overdose, but the police let him go when the motel owner decided not to sign the complaint. When Allen got back to Lancaster, Marlene stayed with him. |
| 316 |
Then one of the undesirables — the Brooklyn accent revealed it to be Philip — took an overdose of red capsules. Marlene called the emergency squad and went along to the hospital. After they pumped his stomach again, she stayed and comforted him. She told him she knew he was mixed up with some bad people and she was afraid he was going to get into deep trouble, but even if he did, she was going to stand by him. Arthur was annoyed at the thought and knew that finding one of them helpless and vulnerable like this aroused the maternal instinct in her. He couldn't tolerate it. Marlene began spending more and more time at the apartment, making life very difficult. Arthur had to be constantly vigilant to make certain she did not discover the secret. Increasingly, there was lost time he couldn't account for. He was certain that someone was dealing drugs — he had discovered a bail receipt in a pocket — and he learned that one of them had been arrested for filling illegal drug prescriptions. He was also quite certain that someone was having sex with Marlene. Arthur decided he needed to get away from Ohio, and this would be the right time to use a passport he had asked Ragen to purchase through one of his underworld connections. He examined the two passports Ragen had bought through Foley, one. in the name of Ragen Vadascovinich and the other in the name of Arthur Smith. They were either stolen and altered or superb forgeries. They would certainly stand up under close scrutiny. He called Pan American Airlines, booked a one-way ticket to London, took what money he could find in closets, drawers and books, and packed his bags. He was going home. The flight to Kennedy and then across the Atlantic was uneventful. When he placed his bag on the counter at Heathrow Airport, the customs official waved him through. In London, Arthur checked into a small hotel above a pub in Hopewell Place, thinking that the name might well be prophetic. He lunched alone at a small but select restaurant, then took a taxi to Buckingham Palace. |
| 317 |
His job was to pack the glassware as the women took it off the moving belt. But sometimes he worked as a selector, examining the product just off the belt. It was a torturous job to stand there — ears deafened by the roar of the flame jets and air blowers — pick up the still-warm glasses, examine them for defects and stack them on open trays for the packers to remove. There was a great deal of switching between Tommy, Allen, Philip and Kevin. With Arthurs approval, Allen had rented a three-bedroom duplex apartment in Somerford Square in the northeast section of Lancaster — 1270K Sheridan Drive. 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. |
| 318 |
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. 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. |
| 319 |
He glared at the bag suspiciously and pulled out a bottle of vodka from under the bar. While he was pouring it over ice, he heard an odd noise coming from the bag. He backed away and stared as it moved gently, leaning to one side. When the bag moved again, he let out his breath slowly and backed up. He remembered a defanged cobra he had once left in a paper bag in front of a slumlords door as a warning. Perhaps this one was not defanged. He put his hand up to the top of the refrigerator behind him and felt for his gun. He pulled it down quickly, took aim and fired. The paper bag flew off the counter against the wall. He ducked behind the bar and peered over it cautiously, keeping the gun trained on the bag. It lay on the floor. Very carefiilly, he walked around the bar and used the barrel of the gun to rip open the top of the bag. There he saw the bloody mess, jumped back and fired a second time, yelling, "I shoot you again, you bastard!" He kicked it a few times, but when it didn't move, he opened it and stared inside in disbelief at the tomato-sauce-and-cheese sandwich with a big hole in it. Then he laughed. He realized that the heat of the Stromboli in the aluminum foil had made it move. Feeling silly at wasting two rounds of ammunition on a sandwich, he put the bag on the kitchen counter, returned the gun to the top of the refrigerator and drank his vodka. He poured another, took it with him into the living room and turned on the television set. 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. |
| 320 |
Philip finally admitted the roadside-rest assaults, but denied any involvement with the Gray Drug Store robbery. Kevin then told of having planned it. "But I wasn't there. I just set it up and then ripped them two guys off. It was a sting, that's all. Maybe those guys tipped off the police, but I'm clean. There's no way the cops can tie me to that robbery." Arthur reported back to Allen and Ragen: "Now, both of you, think: Is there anything to which they can connect us, anything they can arrest us for?" As far as they all knew, there was nothing. Several days later, Billy Milligan was fingered by a fence in Columbus who owed a detective on the narcotics squad a favor. The fence reported that a quantity of drugs matching the description of those stolen from the Gray Drug Store had been sold to him by Milligan. The word was passed on to the Lancaster police department. A warrant was issued for Billy's arrest. ( 2 ) When Marlene came to the apartment on Monday after work, Tommy gave her an engagement ring. "I want you to have this, Marveen," Tommy said, calling her by his pet name for her. "And if anything happens to me, I want you to know I'll always love you." She stared in disbelief as he put it on her finger. It was a moment she had dreamed of for a long time, but now it was painful. Had he gone out and bought it because he expected something to happen to him? She felt the tears in her eyes but tried not to show her feelings. No matter what he had done, no matter what they did to him, she would stand by him. In her calendar for January 20, 1975, she wrote: "Got engaged. Really surprised me to death." They arrested Danny the following day. They pushed him into the cruiser and took him down to the Fairfield County Jail. They read him his rights and began questioning him. He had no idea what they were talking about. The questioning went on for hours. From what the detectives said, Danny began to piece together a picture. Wayne Luft had been picked up for drunken driving, and while being questioned, he had said that Milligan and Roy Bailey had robbed the drugstore. |
| 321 |
You can start by mopping up the floor, and when you're done with that, you can straighten up the place. You'll work with Stormy, the duty nurse. He'll show you the ropes." ( 2 ) Arthur was delighted. He didn't at all mind getting up earlier than the other prisoners to do the blood tests. Dismayed at what he considered inadequate medical records, he began to keep his own charts on the fourteen diabetics he soon came to think of as his patients. He spent most of the day at the lab ; working with the microscope and preparing slides. When he went back to his cell at three-thirty, tired but happy, he paid little attention to his new cell mate, a slight and taciturn man. I Adalana decorated the bare cell by spreading patterned itowels on the floor and hanging them on the walls. Allen soon 'began wheeling and dealing — trading a flowered towel for a carton of cigarettes, then lending cigarettes out at two-for-one A 'interest and ending up with two cartons at the end of the week. 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. |
| 322 |
"How does that sound?" he wrote. "Dr. and Mrs. Milligan." On October 4, because of the cocaine episode, Milligan was transferred to C block and kept segregated in protective isolation. His medical books and portable TV set were taken away from him. Ragen ripped the steel bed rails from the wall and jammed them into the door. Workmen had to remove the dooi to get him out of his cell. He had difficulty sleeping and complained of frequent; vomiting and blurred vision. Dr. Steinberg saw him from time to time and administered mild sedatives and antispasmodics. Though he felt that Milligan s problems were essentially psychological, on October 13 he ordered that Milligan be taken from Lebanon to the Central Medical Center in Columbus for treatment. While Allen was there, he wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union for help, but nothing came of it. After ten days in Columbus, it was discovered that he had a peptic ulcer. He was put on a Sippy ulcer diet and returned to protective isolation in Lebanon. He learned that he would not be eligible for parole until April 1977 — a year and a half away. Christmas and New Years came and went, and on January 27, 1976, Allen took part with the other inmates in a hunger)! strike. He wrote to his brother: Dear Jim, As I lay here in my cell my thoughts are of you and I as children. I As my own time goes by my soul gains hatred for life. I am sorry for I'm the fault of your family being broken and which family I was hardly a part of. You have a great life ahead of you with many goals. Don't blow it as I. If you hate me for this I'm sorry. But I still respect you as I do the wind and sun. Jim I swear to God as my witness I didn't do what I am accused of. God says everyone has a place and a destiny. I guess this is minel I am sorry of the shame I have caused you and everyone around me. Bill Tommy wrote to Marlene: To My Marvene, OK Marv, there is a hunger strike and big riot starting. I am getting this letter to you in case the inmates take over. |
| 323 |
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. Here he was able to indulge in his fantasies. He saw himself as an actor in a movie or on TV, traveling to far-off places and having heroic adventures. He hated being called "Robert" by the others and would insist, "I'm Bobbyl" He had an inferiority complex, no ambition of his own, and he lived like a sponge, soaking up ideas and thoughts of others, passing them off as his own. But when anyone suggested he do something, he would say, "I can't do it." He alone lacked confidence in his ability to carry out a plan. When Bobby first heard about the hunger strike, he imagined himself leading it, setting an example for the other prisoners. Like the great Mahatma Gandhi of India, he woulc bring the repressive authorities to their knees by his fasting When the strike ended a week later, Bobby decided he wouldn't stop. He lost a great deal of weight. One evening when a guard opened his cell door to bring hi; food tray, Bobby pushed it back at him and threw the slop al over his face. |
| 324 |
Moreno was overjoyed. "You're sure this'll keep anybody else from coming in my cell?" Allen asked. A "I put it right up on the board. You can go in and look at it." Allen went into the security room, and beneath his name he saw the slip with the notation "Do not put inmate in Milligan's cell." It was covered with transparent tape and it looked permanent. Milligan painted in a frenzy of productivity. Paintings for the guards, for the administrators, for Mom and Marlene to take home and sell. 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. |
| 325 |
Checking Milligan's references later that day, Wymer called the most recent employer listed on Milligan's application, Del Moore. Moore gave him a glowing report — a fine worker and a dependable young man. He had left the job because meat-cutting wasn't really in Bill Milligans line. 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. 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. |
| 326 |
"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. 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. |
| 327 |
Tommy had promised Billy's sister he would spend Saturday, the last day of the Fairfield County Fair, with her in Lancaster. Dorothy and Del were running a restaurant concession, and they might need help closing things down. He took the money he saw on the dresser — there wasn't much — and told Allen to drive him to Lancaster. He spent a wonderful day with Kathy at the fair, going on the rides, playing the games, eating hot dogs and drinking root beer. They talked over old times, speculating how Jim was doing with his new rock group in western Canada and how Challa was doing in the Air Force. Kathy told him she was glad he'd shaved off his mustache. When they came back to the concession, where Dorothy was working over the grill, Tommy slipped up behind her and handcuffed her to the pipe. "If you're going to slave over a hot stove all day," he said, "you might as well be chained to it." She laughed. He stayed at the fair with Kathy until it closed; then Allen drove back to Channingway. Arthur spent a quiet Sunday reading his medical books, and Monday morning Allen set out to look for a new job. He made phone calls and filled out job applications for the rest of the week, but no one was hiring. ( 2 ) Friday evening, Ragen jumped out of bed, thinking he had just gone to sleep. He went to the dresser. The money — money he didn't even remember stealing — was gone. He ran to the closet, pulled out a .25-caliber automatic and searched the apartment, kicking open doors, looking for the burglar who had broken in while he was asleep. But the apartment was empty. He tried to reach Arthur. When he got no response, he angrily broke open the piggy bank, took out twelve dollars and left to buy a bottle of vodka. He came back, drank and smoked a joint. Still worried about the bills, he realized that whatever he had done to get that money, he had to do it again. Ragen took a few amphetamines, strapped on his gun, put on his jogging top and a windbreaker. Again he jogged west to Columbus, reaching the Ohio State University Wiseman parking lot at about seven-thirty in the morning. |
| 328 |
"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. 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. He began to keep a chart of his moods. |
| 329 |
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. 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. |
| 330 |
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. I let her go back to the Place Pigalle to sing — It was no time at all before she was back in the same groove drinking and fighting continually ill until she collapsed and was sent to the hospital with the first stages of Hepatitis. She almost didn't make it — she was under constant care of the doctor for several weeks after leaving the hospital when she came back and said the doctor (Saphire of N. M. B.) told her it would be good for her to get back to work to ease her mind as the expenses were mounting up & also a cocktail now and then wouldn't hurt her! I was against the idea so without telling me, she signed a contract, back at the Pigalle. Well, work had slacked off at the hotels so we talked it over & I decided to go up to the Mountains (N. Y.) for a few weeks to work! We had never been separated before and of course at the time I didn't know the type of people she had been cultivating — the pimps, Lesbians, shylocks, etc. — These to her had become a symbol of "sharp" living. When I came home & saw the type clothing she was buying — Mannish looking shirts — the severe suits — certain type toreador pants that seems to be a signal between these type women — Well I blew my top. From then on it was a living hell — Her continued drinking put her back into the hospital for a hemroid operation & in view of the fact that her liver that by this time was beyond repair they couldn't operate — she was there for weeks — I traveled 150 miles a night so I could be with her during day visiting hours, painting the home etc — she was planning even then to break up our home so she could be with her new type of life. The day of her operation when she started to come out of it, still under the anesthetic, she thought I was somebody else. |
| 331 |
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. "Did ja see the afternoon paper?" one of the female patients asked, handing it to him. "You're in the news again." He stared at the bold banner headline across the top of the front page of the March 30 Columbus Dispatch: Doctor Says Rapist Allowed to Roam from Center By John Switzer William Milligan, the multipersonality rapist who was sent to the Athens Mental Health Center last December, is allowed to roam free and unsupervised daily, The Dispatch has learned ... |
| 332 |
"Arthur says we can trust you." "I've heard about Arthur," Rupe said. "You can tell him I appreciate that. I sure wouldn't do anything to hurt you." Danny told him he thought Ragen was very angry about what was happening with the newspapers and all, and wanted to end it by killing himself. That frightened the younger ones. Rupe could tell by the fluttering lids, the drifting glazed eyes, that Milligan was switching again, and then a little boy cringed and sobbed and looked as if he was in pain. The switching went back and forth, and they spoke until two in the morning, when Rupe led Danny back to his room. From that time on, Rupe found he could relate to several of Milligan's personalities. Though the male RN was pretty strict about bedtime (eleven-thirty weekdays and two o'clock in the morning on weekends), Rupe knew that Milligan slept very little, and he spent long night hours talking with him. He was pleased that Danny and the unfused Billy would seek him out to talk, and he began to understand why Billy was so difficult to deal with. Billy, he realized, felt that once again he was being punished for someone else's crimes. * * * On Thursday, April 5, at three-thirty in the afternoon, Danny found himself walking the hospital grounds. He looked around, trying to figure out where he was and why. Behind him he saw the old Victorian red-brick mansion with the white columns, and in front of him the river and the town. Strolling along the grass, he realized that before Rosalie Drake helped him at Harding Hospital, he could not walk outside like this — without terror. 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. |
| 333 |
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... Allen walked the ward that evening, wondering what had happened. His digital watch said ten forty-five. He hadn't been out for a long time, satisfied, along with the others, to listen and learn from the Teacher's story of their lives. It was as if each of them had possessed just a few pieces in the giant puzzle of consciousness, but now the Teacher, in trying to make the writer see it clearly by putting it all together, had made all of them aware of the lives they had lived. There were still gaps because the Teacher hadn't told everything, just the memories that would answer the writers questions. But now the Teacher was gone, and the lines of communication between the Teacher and the writer, and between himself and the others, were broken. Allen felt confused and alone. "Whats the matter, Billy?" one of the female patients asked. He looked at her. "I'm kinda groggy. |
| 334 |
Caul. Caul began to receive abusive telephone calls and threats. One caller shouted, "How could you stand up for that rapist, you jive no-good dope-fiend motherfucker? 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. 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 ... |
| 335 |
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. Wilbur as an outside physician "makes about as much sense as asking Miss Lillian what kind of job Jimmy Carter is doing in the White House." On May 11, the Columbus chapter of the National Organization for Women wrote a three-page letter to Dr. Caul and sent copies to Meyers Kurtz, Mike Stinziano, Phil Donahue, Dinah Shore, Johnny Carson, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and the Columbus Dispatch. It opened with the following: Dr. Caul, The treatment program you have prescribed for William Milligan, which according to newspaper accounts, includes unsupervised furloughs, unrestricted use of an automobile, and assistance in financial arrangements for books and movie rights, displays a deliberate and flagrant disregard for the safety of women in the surrounding communities. |
| 336 |
It cannot be tolerated under any circumstances ... The letter went on to say that not only did Dr. Cauls treatment program not teach Milligan that violence and rape are unconscionable, but he was in fact getting positive reinforcement "for his reprehensible actions." It charged that with Cauls collusion, Milligan had learned "the cultures subliminal but actual message — that violence against women is an accepted occurance sic, a commercialized and eroticized commodity..." The letter argued that Cauls "lack of clinical insight is as misogynist as it is predictable. The claim that the rapist personality was a lesbian is a transparent ruse to excuse the patriarchal culture ... The fictionalized, lesbian character is a convenient but fallacious, stereotypic scapegoat who can be blamed for Milligans own retaliative violentaggresive sic sexuality. Once again the male is relieved from responsibility for his actions and the woman gets victimized." As a result of Dr. Wilburs recommendation, the decision was made to keep Billy in Athens. The staff on the Admissions and Intensive Treatment ward, upset by the publicity and Billy's reaction to it, demanded changes in his treatment plan or, they warned, they would strike. Because some of them felt he was spending too much time with Billy, they insisted that Dr. Caul turn over authority for day-to-day management to the staff team and limit his own involvement to medical and therapeutic concerns. To keep Billy from being sent to Lima, Caul reluctantly agreed. Social worker Donna Hudnell drew up a "contract" for Billy to sign in which he promised to abide by a series of restrictions, the first of which was that there would be "no threats of alienation nor depravation of character and position made toward any staff member." Tlie penalty for the first violation of this clause would be the restriction of the writer's visits. Milligan was not to have glass or sharp objects in his room. No general privileges without prior agreement by the morning treatment team. |
| 337 |
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? Broadcasting without a license s illegal." Then without switching to Tommy, he said, "What he hell do I care?" He was shocked and worried at his otvn attitude. He had ome to believe that these personalities — as the Teacher he iow accepted the term "personalities" rather than "people" — lad been part of him. Suddenly, for the first time, without witching, he felt like them. This, then, was the real fusion. He was becoming the common denominator of all twenty-four personalities, and that made him not a Robin Hood or a Superman, but a very ordinary, antisocial, impatient, manipulative, bright, talented young man. As Dr. George Harding had earlier suggested, the fused Billy Milligan would probably be less than the sum of his parts. |
| 338 |
They stirred him. When the news reached Columbus that Milligans treatment plan once again included furloughs, the attacks against Dr. David Caul were renewed. The Ohio Ethics Commission was instructed to begin an investigation with a view to pressing charges against Caul for improper conduct in the performance of his duties. It was alleged that Milligan was receiving special privileges because Caul was secretly writing a book about him. Since the law required that a complaint be lodged before such an investigation could take place, the Ohio Ethics Commission had one of its own attorneys file the complaint. Finding himself now attacked from another quarter, his efforts to treat his patient compromised and his reputation and medical career threatened, Dr. Caul filed an affidavit on July 17, 1979: Events of the past several months concerning the Billy Milligan case have created issues and upheavals that reach proportions beyond appropriateness and beyond what I believe to be within the bounds of logic, reason and even the law ... My clinical decision as to how the patient was treated is the thing that generated most if not all of the controversy. My clinical decision was supported by all the professionals who are knowledgeable on this subject... It is my belief that I have been abused and attacked for some very base motives, the least of which is publicity for a legislator and material for some very questionable journalism ... Later, after many months of complex and expensive legal manuevering, including subpoenas, depositions and countersuits, Dr. Caul was unanimously cleared of any wrongdoing. But during this period, he found that more and more of his time and energy had to go into protecting himself his reputation and his family. He knew what everyone wanted, and that he could stop the threats by keeping Billy locked away, but he refused to give in to the emotional demands of the legislators and the newspapers when he knew Billy's therapy demanded that he treat him as he would any other patient. |
| 339 |
Katherine Gillott and Pat Perry came out to see what the commotion was about. They watched as Billy went down into the elevator shaft, squeezing through the overhead trap door. Billy dropped down beside the girl and began talking to keep her calm. They waited while an elevator serviceman was called. 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. As he stepped on the bridge, the car window rolled down. A hand held a gun. Someone yelled, "Milligan!" He froze. He defused. |
| 340 |
He seemed too arrogant, too manipulative and demanding. He had always been taught to look for the worst, Billy said, and hope for the best. Now his hopes had been turned around. He was sure he'd be sent back to prison. The writer felt this was not the Teacher, but he couldn't be sure. Billy's lawyer Alan Goldsberry arrived, and the writer sensed it was Allen explaining why he wanted to make out his will, leaving everything to his sister: "At school there was a bully who always picked on me. One day he was going to punch me, but then he didn't. I discovered later that Kathy gave him her last twenty-five cents not to hit me. That's something I'll never forget." That weekend at Kathy's, Danny and Tommy painted a mural while Allen worried about the upcoming court hearing in Lancaster. 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. |
| 341 |
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. Brown. The judge told a reporter he would make his decision within two weeks. On September 18, seeing Billy's agitation after his return from Lancaster and aware of his fear of being shot at again, Dr. Caul allowed him a furlough. Since Billy realized he would be a target at his sisters house as well as at the hospital, it was understood he would stay at the Hocking Valley Motor Lodge in nearby Nelsonville. He would take his easel, paints and canvas to work undisturbed. He checked in on Tuesday under a false name and tried to relax, but the tension was too strong. |
| 342 |
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. The Teacher addressed the court: "I know I have to wait before I can resume my treatment, and my doctors have told me for the past two years, 'You have to want help from the people who can give it to you. You have to be able to totally trust your physician, your psychiatrist, your treatment team.' I just want the speediness of the court to help me resume my treatment properly." "Mr. Milligan," the referee said. "Let me make a statement to you on that. I think you're assuming an incorrect fact, that you can't receive treatment at Lima State Hospital." "Well," said Billy, looking directly at Dr. Lindner, "you have to be able to want treatment, want help from a person before you can receive it. |
| 343 |
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. Judge David R. Kinworthy, a clean-shaven, handsome young man with sharply chiseled features, reviewed the history of commitment hearings from December 4, 1978, when Milligan had been found not guilty by reason of insanity, through the various re-commitments, to the present day, almost one year later. The hearing, Kinworthy said, was being held in accordance with the statutes of the Ohio Revised Code, paragraph 5122, section 15. Assistant Attorney General Belinky s motion for separation of witnesses was granted. Attorney Steve Thompsons motion for the court to return Billy Milligan to Athens, considering the procedural defects in the transfer to Lima, was denied. With preliminary motions over, the commitment review hearings began. |
| 344 |
Two — If the psychiatrist is not experienced but is willing to undertake such treatment and accept the conditions, he should be supervised by, or at least have ongoing consultation with, a colleague who has such experience and expertise. Three — He should have available the techniques of hypnosis as an adjunct in therapy if it is needed. This is not a necessity but is highly desirable. Four — He should have read significant literature on the subject and personally should have attended some form of continuing education in this regard. Five — He should possess the quality of almost infinite patience as well as tolerance and perseverance. Treatment of such a case requires an ongoing commitment to what will surely be long, laborious, and difficult theraphy. Some general principles of therapy that are now accepted by those who have treated multiples are as follows: One — All of the personalities must be identified and recognized. Two — The therapist must ascertain the reason for the existence of such personalities. Three — The therapist must then be willing to do therapy with all of the personalities in an attempt to effect change. Four — The therapist should focus on whatever positive qualities may be identified and attempt to bring about some sort of compromise among the alter personalities, especially those which may pose a threat to the self or others. Five — The patient must become fully aware of the nature and extent of the problems and must be helped through therapy, to contribute to positive resolution. In other words, Counselor, the patient must become aware of the treatment process and not just be a passive recipient of the therapy. Six — Antipsychotic medication should be avoided, since it has become fairly well known that it may produce fragmentation as well as other side effects detrimental to treatment. These are but some of the issues involved in doing therapy with such cases. By no means is this a complete description of how one does such therapy. The deposition went on to explore these criteria in depth. |
| 345 |
"Ward A is run like a sheep-dip — in and out. At Athens, I had my regressions, but I had to learn to correct them. They knew how to handle it — not with punishment but with treatment, with therapy." During his closing remarks, Belinky argued that it was the burden of the state to prove only that the respondent was mentally ill and subject to hospitalization. The diagnosis didn't have to be proven. The only current testimony, he said, was from Dr. Caul and Dr. Milkie. Dr. Caul had said emphatically that Billy Milligan was still mentally ill. And Dr. Milkie had said that Lima State Hospital was the least restrictive environment in which to treat this patient. "I urge the court," Belinky said, "to commit him to Lima." Steve Thompson, in his summation, pointed out that an awesome array of psychiatric talent had been presented to the court on behalf of his client, and all agreed with the diagnosis of multiple personality. "Once this is done, the question now is, How do we treat him?" Thompson said. "Taking into account Billy Milligan's mental status, these experts agree that he should be sent tc Athens as the most appropriate place for treatment. All these expert witnesses agree that he needs long-term treatment. Or October 4 he was transferred to Lima and examined by 2 physician who claims he made no reference to his prior medical history or treatment, and he concludes that Billy Milligan i! a threat to himself and others. And how does he come to the conclusion he is a threat? Based on prior convictions, Youi donor. Based on the stale evidence introduced into these learings. Dr. Milkie says he displays antisocial behavior. Dr. dilkie says Billy Milligan showed no improvement. Your ionor, it is clear that Dr. Milkie is not an expert in multiple personality. It is the position of the respondent that the quality of experts are on Billy Milligans side." Judge Kin worthy announced he would take the matter un-ler advisement and render a decision in not more than ten lays. Until then, Milligan would remain at Lima. |
| 346 |
On December 10, 1979, the court made the following find-ngs: 1. The respondent is a mentally ill person in that his condition represents a substantial disorder of thought, mood, perception, orientation and memory that grossly impairs his judgment, behavior and capacity to recognize reality. 2. That respondents mental illness is a condition diagnosed as multiple personality. 3. That respondent is a mentally ill person subject to hospitalization by Court order in that, because of his illness, he represents a substantial risk of physical harm to himself as manifested by evidence of threats of suicide; represents a substantial risk of physical harm to others as manifested by evidence of recent violent behavior; and further that he would benefit from treatment in a hospital for his mental illness and is in need of such treatment as manifested by evidence of behavior that creates a grave and imminent risk to the substantial rights of others and to himself. 4. That respondent, due to his mental illness, is dangerous to himself and to others and therefore requires hospitalization in a maximum security facility. 5. That by reason of respondent having been diagnosed as a multiple personality, his treatment should be consistent with such diagnosis. It is ordered therefore that the said respondent be committed to the Lima State Hospital, Lima, Ohio, for treatment consistent with the diagnosis of said respondent as a multiple personality and that copies under seal of the findings in this case be transmitted to the Lima State Hospital, Lima, Ohio. David R. Kinworthy, Judge Allen County Common Pleas Court Probate Division ( 4 ) Billy called the writer from the Lima State Hospital male infirmary on December 18. He had been badly beaten by a hospital employee. A Lima attorney who had been appointed guardian ad litem at the hearing had taken Polaroids of welts across his back from being whipped with an extension cord. Billy's eyes and face were blackened, and he had two cracked ribs. |
| 347 |
Should I fight it? Declare it the winner? Succumb to the third world to escape the tragic realities that lie beyond my steel door? Is life worth living in the jaws of society's trash can for misfit minds? What can I possibly achieve or contribute to mankind in this steel and concrete box with a damn loud laughing wall that moves? Just give up? More questions raced through my mind like a 33 record set on 78, growing more and more intense. Suddenly a horrifying shock volted through my body that threw my slumped shoulders back and set me even more upright. Reality forcing itself upon me like a vicious slap in the face broke my trance and cracked my frozen joints. Something was crawling up my spine. My imagination? After gathering what few senses I had left I knew it was not. There was something crawling up my spine. I reacted by jerking my shirt over my head ignoring the fact it had buttons. Blind fear has no mercy for material items. 3 buttons popped. Flinging the shirt to the floor the feeling left my back. Peering down at the shirt I saw the invader. A cockroach about 3 centimeters long and black had been tap dancing on my lumbars. The gross insect was harmless but shocking. The rodent did make up my mind for me. I came back to this side of reality but was still thinking about my inner-debate. I did let the hideous little thing go. Secretly I was content with the awareness I had of myself proud of the mental and physical victory. 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. It came as a surprise and shock for Bill, yet he handled it well... |
| 348 |
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. 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. |
| 349 |
Arthur says it is bad tc boast. I wish he would talk to me. Bad things are happening and I don't know why. Arthur also speaks Swahili. Arthur read many books in Lebanor prison about the fundamentals of Arabic. He wanted to explore the pyramids and the Egyptian culture. He had to learn their language and to know what they wrote on the wall. I asked Arthur one day why he was interested in that big pile of tri angled rocks. He told me that he was not as interested in wha was in the tomb, but it might give a key to how the tomb go there. He said something about how it defies a law of physic' and he was looking for the answer. He even made little card board pyramids, but David smashed them. signed Billy U During this period at the hospital, according to Billy, there was much harassment and beatings of patients by attendants, but besides Ragen, only Kevin, of all the personalities, stood up to the attendants. In recognition of this, Arthur removed him from the list of undesirables. Kevin wrote to me on March 28, 1980: Something very bad has happened but I don't know what. I did know it would be only a matter of time before total unfusion and Billy would go to sleep for good. Arthur said Billy had only a small taste of conscious life but unfortunately the taste was a bitter one. Day by day he grew weaker in this place. He could not understand the hate and jealousy displayed by the authority figures of this institution. They also provoked the patients to hurt him and make Ragen fight, but Billy could hold Ragen back ... but not anymore. The doctors say bad things about us, and what hurts the most is they are right. 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. |
| 350 |
He knew that Dr. Caul could treat him, fuse him again and bring back the Teacher. With Billy-U asleep, he said, things were now as they had been before Dr. Cornelia Wilbur wakened him. I could see that he was deteriorating. Several times during my visits, he would tell me he didn't know who he was. When there was a partial fusion, he became a person with no name. Ragen, he reported, had lost the ability to speak English. People had stopped communicating with each other. I suggested he keep a daily log so whoever was on the spot could write messages. It worked for a while, but interest flagged and the entries were fewer and fewer. On April 3, 1981, Billy had his 180-dayhearing. Of the foui psychiatrists and two mental health professionals who testified. only Dr. Lewis Lindner of Lima, who had not seen him in five months, testified that he should be kept in maximum security. A letter was introduced by the prosecutor into evidence. In it Milligan was apparently responding to news that another patient at Lima had planned to have Dr. Lindner killed. "Your tactic is completely wrong ... Have you considered the fact that not many doctors would consider taking your case, knowing they may be hit for saying the wrong thing? But in fact, if Lindner has damaged you and your case beyond repair and if you feel your life is over because you're going to spend eternity behind bars, you have my blessing." When Milligan was called to the witness stand and asked his name under oath, he said, "Tommy." Tommy explained that Allen had written the letter in an attempt to talk the other patient out of killing Dr. Lindner. "It's wrong to go around shooting people just because they testify against you in court. Dr. Lindner testified against me today, but I certainly wouldn't shoot him for it." Judge Flowers deferred his decision. The newspapers ran front-page stories, feature articles and editorials opposing any move to Athens. While waiting to hear his fate, Allen spent most of his time at Dayton working on a painting for the cover of this book. |
| 351 |
He planned to send the editor several sketches to choose from, but one morning he awoke to discover that one of the children had come out while he was asleep and scribbed over the sketches with orange crayon. On the morning of the assigned deadline, Allen worked furiously and finished the desired oil painting on time. On April 21, 1981, the Fourth District Court of Appeals of Ohio ruled on the judgment of the court that had sent Billy to Lima. It found that removing him from a less restrictive setting to the maximum-security mental health facility in Ohio, the Lima State Hospital, "without notice to that person or his family, without allowing the patient to be present, to consult with counsel, to call witnesses, or to in general advise him of or allow him the rights of a full hearing ... is a fatal violation ... and must result in the reversal of the transfer order and the replacement of the patient in his position prior to the unlawful transfer proceeding." Although the appeals court found this judicial error, they decided that the error was not prejudicial, since Milligan had had a hearing in Allen County that "found upon what we must presume to be sufficient and adequate evidence that appellant, due to his mental illness, was a danger to himself and others ..." The appeals court, therefore, disagreed with Judge Jones' actions, but would not return Billy to Athens. Goldsberry and Thompson have since appealed this decision to the supreme court of Ohio. On May 20, 1981, six and a half weeks after the 180-day hearing, Judge Flowers handed down his decision. His court entry gives two explanations: First, "the Court in its decision weighs heavily upon States Exhibit #1 the letter and its interpretation by Dr. Lewis Lindners testimony. The Court finds this persuasive by a clear and convincing standard that William S. Milligan presently lacks accepted moral restraints, shows familiarity with the criminal sub-culture, and shows a disregard for human life." Second, the judge found that Dr. |
| 352 |
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... . 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. Soon afterward, the Teacher and Tanda began to notice ominous changes. The Teacher was taken off all medication. Security began a pattern of shaking down his room, and strip-searching him before and after each visitor. Even Tanda was strip-searched on occasion when she came to visit. |
| 353 |
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. 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. And this community, if it does anything at all, should help to give him the supportive atmosphere he needs ... |
| 354 |
This woman had wakened under the earth. She had torn, shrieked, clubbed at the box-lid with fists, died of suffocation, in this attitude, hands flung over her gaping face, horror-eyed, hair wild. "Be pleased, senor, to find that difference between her hands and these other ones," said the caretaker. "Their peaceful fingers at their hips, quiet as little roses. Hers? Ah, hers! are jumped up, very wildly, as if to pound the lid free!" "Couldn't rigor mortis do that?" "Believe me, senor, rigor mortis pounds upon no lids. Rigor mortis screams not like this, nor twists nor wrestles to rip free nails, senor, or prise boards loose hunting for air, senor. All these others are open of mouth, si, because they were not injected with the fluids of embalming, but theirs is a simple screaming of muscles, senor. This senorita, here, hers is the muerte horrible." Marie walked, scuffling her shoes, turning first this way, then that. 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. |
| 355 |
Click went the camera and Joseph rolled the film. Click went the camera and Joseph rolled the film. Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licon, Navarro, Iturbi; Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from his horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull. "I'd like a color shot of each, and his or her name and how he or she died," said Joseph. "It would be an amazing, an ironical book to publish. The more you think, the more it grows on you. Their life histories and then a picture of each of them standing here." He tapped each chest, softly. They gave off hollow sounds, like someone rapping on a door. Marie pushed her way through screams that hung netwise across her path. She walked evenly, in the corridor center, not slow, but not too fast, toward the spiral stair, not looking to either side. |
| 356 |
She would read this first Post tonight, yes tonight she would read this first delicious Post. Page on page she would eat it and tomorrow night, if there was going to be a tomorrow night, but maybe there wouldn't be a tomorrow night here, maybe the motor would start and there'd be odors of exhaust and round hum of rubber tire on road and wind riding in the window and pennanting her hair — but, suppose, just suppose there would Be a tomorrow night here, in this room. Well, then, there would be two more Posts, one for tomorrow night, and the next for the next night. How neatly she said it to herself with her mind's tongue. She turned the first page. She turned the second page. Her eyes moved over it and over it and her fingers unknown to her slipped under the next page and flickered it in preparation for turning, and the watch ticked on her wrist, and time passed and she sat turning pages, turning pages, hungrily seeing the framed people in the pictures, people who lived in another land in another world where neons bravely held off the night with crimson bars and the smells were home smells and the people talked good fine words and here she was turning the pages, and all the lines went across and down and the pages flew under her hands, making a fan. She threw down the first Post, seized on and riffled through the second in half an hour, threw that down, took up the third, threw that down a good fifteen minutes later and found herself breathing, breathing stiffly and swiftly in her body and out of her mouth. She put her hand up to the back of her neck. Somewhere, a soft breeze was blowing. The hairs along the back of her neck slowly stood upright. She touched them with one pale hand as one touches the nape of a dandelion. Outside, in the plaza, the street lights rocked like crazy flashlights on a wind. Papers ran through the gutters in sheep flocks. Shadows penciled and slashed under the bucketing lamps now this way, now that, here a shadow one instant, there a shadow next, now no shadows, all cold light, now no light, all cold blue-black shadow. |
| 357 |
If only there was one word, one word between them. But there was no word and the veins did not rest easy in the wrists and the heart was a bellows forever blowing upon a little coal of fear, forever illumining and making it into a cherry light, again, pulse, and again, an ingrown light which her inner eyes stared upon with unwanting fascination. The lungs did not rest but were exercised as if she were a drowned person and she herself performing artificial respiration to keep the last life going. And all of these things were lubricated by the sweat of her glowing body, and she was glued fast between the heavy blankets like something pressed, smashed, redolently moist between the white pages of a heavy book. And as she lay this way the long hours of midnight came when again she was a child. She lay, now and again thumping her heart in tambourine hysteria, then, quieting, the slow sad thoughts of bronze childhood when everything was sun on green trees and sun on water and sun on blond child hair. Faces flowed by on merry-go-rounds of memory, a face rushing to meet her, facing her, and away to the right; another, whirling in from the left, a quick fragment of lost conversation, and out to the right. Around and round. Oh, the night was very long. She consoled herself by thinking of the car starting tomorrow, the throttling sound and the power sound and the road moving under, and she smiled in the dark with pleasure. But then, suppose the car did not start? She crumpled in the dark, like a burning, withering paper. All the folds and corners of her clenched in about her and tick tick tick went the wristwatch, tick tick tick and another tick to wither on... . Morning. She looked at her husband lying straight and easy on his bed. She let her hand laze down at the cool space between the beds. All night her hand had hung in that cold empty interval between. Once she had put her hand out toward him, stretching, but the space was just a little too long, she couldn't reach him. She had snapped her hand back, hoping he hadn't heard the movement of her silent reaching. |
| 358 |
Pause. Joseph knocked on the door. Joseph knocked on the door and the car was not repaired and there would be another night, and Joseph did not shave and each little hair was perfect on his chin, and the magazine shops were closed and there were no more magazines, and they ate supper, a little bit anyway for her, and he went out in the evening to walk in the town. She sat once more in the chair and slow erections of hair rose as if a magnet were passed over her neck. She was very weak and could not move from the chair, and she had no body, she was only a heart-beat, a huge pulsation of warmth and ache between four walls of the room. Her eyes were hot and pregnant, swollen with child of terror behind the bellied, tautened lids. Deeply inside herself, she felt the first little cog slip. Another night, another night, another night, she thought. And this will be longer than the last. The first little cog slipped, the pendulum missed a stroke. Followed by the second and third interrelated cogs. The cogs interlocked, a small with a little larger one, the little larger one with a bit larger one, the bit larger one with a large one, the large one with a huge one, the huge one with an immense one, the immense one with a titanic one... . A red ganglion, no bigger than a scarlet thread, snapped and quivered; a nerve, no greater than a red linen fiber twisted. Deep in her one little mech was gone and the entire machine, imbalanced, was about to steadily shake itself to bits. She didn't fight it. She let it quake and terrorize her and knock the sweat off her brow and jolt down her spine and flood her mouth with horrible wine. She felt as if a broken gyro tilted now this way, now that and blundered and trembled and whined in her. The color fell from her face like light leaving a clicked-off bulb, the crystal cheeks of the bulb vessel showing veins and filaments all colorless... . Joseph was in the room, he had come in, but she didn't even hear him. He was in the room but it made no difference, he changed nothing with his coming. |
| 359 |
Lecture on same tonight. By December Mr. Garvey was really frightened. The Cellar Septet was now quite accustomed to Milton Berle and Guy Lombardo. In fact, they had rationalized themselves into a position where they acclaimed Berle as really too rare for the American public, and Lombardo was twenty years ahead of his time; the nastiest people liked him for the commonest reasons. Garvey's empire trembled. Suddenly he was just another person, no longer diverting the tastes of friends, but frantically pursuing them as they seized at Nora Bayes, the 1917 Knickerbocker Quartette, Al Jolson singing "Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night," and Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm. 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! |
| 360 |
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. 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. |
| 361 |
Phoenix. The road. Car. Water. Safety. "Hey!" Someone called from way off in the blue alcohol flame. Mr. Harris propped himself up. "Hey!" The call was repeated. A crunching of footsteps, quick. With a cry of unbelievable relief, Harris rose, only to collapse again into the arms of someone in a uniform with a badge. The car tediously hauled, repaired, Phoenix reached, Harris found himself in such an unholy state of mind that the business transaction was a numb pantomime. Even when he got the loan and held the money in his hand, it meant nothing. This Thing within him like a hard white sword in a scabbard tainted his business, his eating, colored his love for Clarisse, made it unsafe to trust an automobile; all in all this Thing had to be put in its place. The desert incident had brushed too close. Too near the bone, one might say with an ironic twist of one's mouth. Harris heard himself thanking Mr. Creldon, dimly, for the money. Then he turned his car and motored back across the long miles, this time cutting across to San Diego, so he would miss that desert stretch between El Centro and Beaumont. He drove north along the coast. He didn't trust that desert. But — careful! Salt waves boomed, hissing on the beach outside Laguna. Sand, fish and crustacea would cleanse his bones as swiftly as vultures. Slow down on the curves over the surf. Damn, he was sick! Where to turn? Clarisse? Burleigh? Munigant? Bone specialist. Munigant. Well? "Darling!" Clarisse kissed him. He winced at the solidness of the teeth and jaw behind the passionate exchange. "Darling," he said, slowly, wiping his lips with his wrist, trembling. "You look thinner; oh, darling, the business deal — ?" "It went through. I guess. Yes, it did." She kissed him again. They ate a slow, falsely cheerful dinner, with Clarisse laughing and encouraging him. He studied the phone; several times he picked it up indecisively, then laid it down. His wife walked in, putting on her coat and hat. "Well, sorry, but I have to leave." She pinched him on the cheek. |
| 362 |
"Come on now, cheer up! I'll be back from Red Cross in three hours. You lie around and snooze. I simply have to go." When Clarisse was gone, Harris dialed the phone, nervously. "M. Munigant?" The explosions and the sickness in his body after he set the phone down were unbelievable. His bones were racked with every kind of pain, cold and hot, he had ever thought of or experienced in wildest nightmare. 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. In the darkness, M. |
| 363 |
Mom and I had come to the beach for one last brief moment. There was something about the loneliness that made me want to get away by myself. "Mama, I want to run up the beach aways," I said. "All right, but hurry back, and don't go near the water." I ran. Sand spun under me and the wind lifted me. You know how it is, running, arms out so you feel veils from your fingers, caused by wind. Like wings. Mama withdrew into the distance, sitting. Soon she was only a brown speck and I was all alone. Being alone is a newness to a twelve-year-old child. He is so used to people about. The only way he can be alone is in his mind. There are so many real people around, telling children what and how to do, that a boy has to run off down a beach, even if it's only in his head, to get by himself in his own world. So now I was really alone. I went down to the water and let it cool up to my stomach. Always before, with the crowd, I hadn't dared to look, to come to this spot and search around in the water and call a certain name. But now — Water is like a magician. Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that fell with a flourish of lace. I called her name. A dozen times I called it. "Tally! Tally! Oh, Tally!" You really expect answers to your calling when you are young. You feel that whatever you may think can be real. And some times maybe that is not so wrong. I thought of Tally, swimming out into the water last May, with her pigtails trailing, blond. She went laughing, and the sun was on her small twelve-year-old shoulders. I thought of the water settling quiet, of the life guard leaping into it, of Tally's mother screaming, and of how Tally never came out... . The life guard tried to persuade her to come out, but she did not. He came back with only bits of water-weed in his big-knuckled fingers, and Tally was gone. She would not sit across from me at school any longer, or chase indoor balls on the brick streets on summer nights. |
| 364 |
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. 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. |
| 365 |
I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my young mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high-school, to college. And then there was a young woman in Sacramento. I knew her for a time, and we were married. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was like. Margaret suggested that our delayed honeymoon be taken back in that direction. Like a memory, a train works both ways. A train can bring rushing back all those things you left behind so many years before. Lake Bluff, population 10,000, came up over the sky. Margaret looked so handsome in her fine new clothes. She watched me as I felt my old world gather me back into its living. She held my arm as the train slid into Bluff Station and our baggage was escorted out. So many years, and the things they do to people's faces and bodies. When we walked through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn't speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning. We stayed on two weeks in all, revisiting all the places together. The days were happy. I thought I loved Margaret well. At least I thought I did. It was on one of the last days that we walked down by the shore. 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. I almost saw Mama sitting on the sand as she used to sit. I had that feeling again of wanting to be alone. But I could not force myself to speak of this to Margaret. I only held onto her and waited. It got late in the day. Most of the children had gone home and only a few men and women remained basking in the windy sun. |
| 366 |
To martin, Hallowe'en had been nothing more than one evening when tin horns cried off in the cold autumn stars, children blew like goblin leaves along the flinty walks, flinging their heads, or cabbages, at porches, soap-writing names or similar magic symbols on icy windows. All of it as distant, unfathomable, and nightmarish as a puppet show seen from so many miles away that there is no sound or meaning. For three days in November, Martin watched alternate light and shadow sift across his ceiling. The fire-pageant was over forever; autumn lay in cold ashes. Martin sank deeper, yet deeper in white marble layers of bed, motionless, listening always listening... . Friday evening, his parents kissed him good-night and walked out of the house into the hushed cathedral weather toward a motion-picture show. Miss Tarkins from next door stayed on in the parlor below until Martin called down he was sleepy, then took her knitting off home. In silence, Martin lay following the great move of stars down a clear and moonlit sky, remembering nights such as this when he'd spanned the town with Dog ahead, behind, around about, tracking the green-plush ravine, lapping slumbrous streams gone milky with the fullness of the moon, leaping cemetery tombstones while whispering the marble names; on, quickly on, through shaved meadows where the only motion was the off-on quivering of stars, to streets where shadows would not stand aside for you but crowded all the sidewalks for mile on mile. Run now run! chasing, being chased by bitter smoke, fog, mist, wind, ghost of mind, fright of memory; home, safe, sound, snug-warm, asleep... . Nine o'clock. Chime. The drowsy clock in the deep stairwell below. Chime. Dog, come home, and run the world with you. Dog, bring a thistle with frost on it, or bring nothing else but the wind. Dog, where are you? Oh, listen, now, I'll call. Martin held his breath. Way off somewhere — a sound. Martin rose up, trembling. There, again — the sound. So small a sound, like a sharp needle-point brushing the sky long miles and many miles away. |
| 367 |
The dreamy echo of a dog — barking. The sound of a dog crossing fields and farms, dirt roads and rabbit paths, running, running, letting out great barks of steam, cracking the night. The sound of a circling dog which came and went, lifted and faded, opened up, shut in, moved forward, went back, as if the animal were kept by someone on a fantastically long chain. As if the dog were running and someone whistled under the chestnut trees, in mold-shadow, tar-shadow, moon-shadow, walking, and the dog circled back and sprang out again toward home. Dog! Martin thought, oh Dog, come home, boy! Listen, oh, listen, where you been? Come on, boy, make tracks! Five, ten, fifteen minutes; near, very near, the bark, the sound. Martin cried out, thrust his feet from the bed, leaned to the window. Dog! Listen, boy! Dog! Dog! He said it over and over. Dog! Dog! Wicked Dog, run off and gone all these days! Bad Dog, good Dog, home, boy, hurry, and bring what you can! Near now, near, up the street, barking, to knock clapboard housefronts with sound, whirl iron cocks on rooftops in the moon, firing off volleys — Dog! now at the door below... . Martin shivered. Should he run — let Dog in, or wait for Mom and Dad? Wait? Oh, God, wait? But what if Dog ran off again? No, he'd go down, snatch the door wide, yell, grab Dog in, and run upstairs so fast, laughing, crying, holding tight, that ... Dog stopped barking. Hey! Martin always broke the window, jerking to it. Silence. As if someone had told Dog to hush now, hush, hush. A full minute passed. Martin clenched his fists. Below, a faint whimpering. Then, slowly, the downstairs front door opened. Someone was kind enough to have opened the door for Dog. of course! Dog had brought Mr. Jacobs or Mr. Gillespie or Miss Tarkins, or ... The downstairs door shut. Dog raced upstairs, whining, flung himself on the bed. "Dog, Dog, where've you been, what've you done! Dog, Dog!" And he crushed Dog hard and long to himself, weeping. Dog, Dog. He laughed and shouted. |
| 368 |
All I can tell you is what I told you before. Love her. Finest medicine in the world. Find little ways of showing your affection, give her security. Find ways of showing her how harmless and innocent the child is. Make her feel that the baby was worth the risk. After awhile, she'll settle down, forget about death, and begin to love the child. If she doesn't come around in the next month or so, ask me. I'll recommend a good psychiatrist. Go on along now, and take that look off your face." When summer came, things seemed to settle, become easier. Dave worked, immersed himself in office detail, but found much time for his wife. 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. |
| 369 |
The doctor waited until he was moving deep into sleep, then left the house. Leiber, alone, drifted down, down. He heard a noise. "What's — what's that?" he demanded, feebly. Something moved in the hall. 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. You didn't plan on the door blowing shut. A little thing like a slammed door can ruin the best of plans. I'll find you somewhere in the house, hiding, pretending to be something you are not." The doctor looked dazed. He put his hand to his head and smiled palely. |
| 370 |
It wasn't really his car, that was the disheartening thing about it. In a preoccupied mood he was tossed first this way and then that way, while he thought, what a shame, Morgan has gone and lent me his extra car for a few days until my other car is fixed, and now here I go again. The windshield hammered back into his face. He was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks. Then all motion stopped and all noise stopped and only pain filled him up. He heard their feet running and running and running. He fumbled with the car door. It clicked. He fell out upon the pavement drunkenly and lay, ear to the asphalt, listening to them coming. It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked. The crowd was there. He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum. His head was bleeding very badly. He tried to move and he realized something was wrong with his spine. He hadn't felt much at the impact, but his spine was hurt. He didn't dare move. He couldn't speak. Opening his mouth, nothing came out but a gagging. Someone said, "Give me a hand. We'll roll him over and lift him into a more comfortable position." Spallner's brain burst apart. No! Don't move me! "We'll move him," said the voice, casually. You idiots, you'll kill me, don't! But he could not say any of this out loud. He could only think it. Hands took hold of him. They started to lift him. He cried out and nausea choked him up. They straightened him out into a ramrod of agony. Two men did it. One of them was thin, bright, pale, alert, a young man. The other man was very old and had a wrinkled upper lip. |
| 371 |
Up, up through the layer-cake Worlds with the thick frostings of Oriental rug between, and bright candles on top. From the highest stair he gazed down through four intervals of Universe. Lowlands of kitchen, dining room, parlor. Two Middle Countries of music, games, pictures, and locked, forbidden rooms. And here — he whirled — the Highlands of picnics, adventure, and learning. Here he roamed, idled, or sat singing lonely child songs on the winding journey to school. This, then, was the Universe. Father (or God, as Mother often called him) had raised its mountains on wallpapered plaster long ago. This was Father-God's creation, in which stars blazed at the flick of a switch. And the sun was Mother, and Mother was the sun, about which all the Worlds swung, turning. And Edwin, a small dark meteor, spun up around through the dark carpets and shimmering tapestries of space. You saw him rise to vanish on vast comet staircases, on hikes and explorations. Sometimes he and Mother picnicked in the Highlands, spread cool snow linens on red-tuffed, Persian lawns, on crimson meadows in a rarefied plateau at the summit of the Worlds where flaking portraits of sallow strangers looked meanly down on their eating and their revels. They drew water from silver taps in hidden tiled niches, smashed the tumblers on hearthstones, shrieking. Played hide-and-seek in enchanted Upper Countries, in unknown, wild, and hidden lands, where she found him rolled like a mummy in a velvet window drape or under sheeted furniture like a rare plant protected from some wind. Once, lost, he wandered for hours in insane foothills of dust and echoes, where the hooks and hangers in closets were hung only with night. But she found him and carried him weeping down through the leveling Universe to the Parlor where dust motes, exact and familiar, fell in showers of sparks on the sunlit air. He ran up a stair. Here he knocked a thousand thousand doors, all locked and forbidden. Here Picasso ladies and Dali gentlemen screamed silently from canvas asylums, their gold eyes burning when he dawdled. |
| 372 |
Did she drift through all those secret mountain countries high up near the moon where the chandeliers were skinned blind with dust, or did she wander out beyond the trees that lay beyond the trees that lay beyond the trees? 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. 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. |
| 373 |
If she fell, if she broke, you'd find a million fragments in the morning. Bright crystal and clear wine on the parquet flooring, that's all you'd see at dawn. Morning was the smell of vines and grapes and moss in his room, a smell of shadowed coolness. Downstairs, breakfast was in all probability, at this instant, manifesting itself in a fingersnap on the wintry tables. Edwin got up to wash and dress and wait, feeling fine. Now things would be fresh and new for at least a month. Today, like all days, there'd be breakfast, school, lunch, songs in the music room, an hour or two at the electrical games, then — tea in the Outlands, on the luminous grass. Then up to school again for a late hour or so, where he and Teacher might prowl the censored library together and he'd puzzle with words and thoughts about that world out there that had been censored from his eyes. He had forgotten Teacher's note. Now, he must give it to Mother. He opened the door. The hall was empty. Down through the deeps of the Worlds, a soft mist floated, through a silence which no footsteps broke; the hills were quiet; the silver fonts did not pulse in the first sunlight, and the banister, coiling up from the mists was a prehistoric monster peering into his room. He pulled away from this creature, looking to find Mother, like a white boat, drifted by the dawn tides and vapors below. She was not there. He hurried down through the hushed lands, calling, "Mother!" He found her in the Parlor, collapsed on the floor in her shiny green-gold party dress, a champagne goblet in one hand, the carpet littered with broken glass. She was obviously asleep, so he sat at the magical breakfast table. He blinked at the empty white cloth and the gleaming plates. There was no food. All his life wondrous foods had awaited him here. But not today. "Mother, wake up!" He ran to her. "Shall I go to school? Where's the food? Wake up!" He ran up the stairs. The Highlands were cold and shadowed, and the white glass suns no longer glowed from the ceilings in this day of sullen fog. |
| 374 |
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. The room sank down, and with it sank a slow mortal coldness. The World was silent, quiet, and cool. Teacher gone and Mother — sleeping. Down fell the room, with him in its iron jaws. Machinery clashed. A door slid open. Edwin ran out. The Parlor! Behind was not a door, but a tall oak panel from which he had emerged. Mother lay uncaring, asleep. Folded under her, barely showing as he rolled her over, was one of Teacher's soft gray gloves. He stood near her, holding the incredible glove, for a long time. Finally, he began to whimper. He fled back up to the Highlands. The hearth was cold, the room empty. He waited. Teacher did not come. He ran down again to the solemn Lowlands, commanded the table to fill with steaming dishes! Nothing happened. He sat by his mother, talking and pleading with her and touching her, and her hands were cold. |
| 375 |
The clock ticked and the light changed in the sky and still she did not move, and he was hungry and the silent dust dropped down on the air through all the Worlds. He thought of Teacher and knew that if she was in none of the hills and mountains above, then there was only one place she could be. She had wandered, by error, into the Outlands, lost until someone found her. And so he must go out, call after her, bring her back to wake Mother, or she would lie here forever with the dust falling in the great darkened spaces. Through the kitchen, out back, he found late afternoon sun and the Beasts hooting faintly beyond the rim of the World. He clung to the garden wall, not daring to let go, and in the shadows, at a distance, saw the shattered box he had flung from the window. Freckles of sunlight quivered on the broken lid and touched tremblingly over and over the face of the Jack jumped out and sprawled with its arms overhead in an eternal gesture of freedom. The doll smiled and did not smile, smiled and did not smile, as the sun winked on the mouth, and Edwin stood, hypnotized, above and beyond it. The doll opened its arms toward the path that led off between the secret trees, the forbidden path smeared with oily droppings of the Beasts. But the path lay silent and the sun warmed Edwin and he heard the wind blow softly in the trees. At last, he let go of the garden wall. "Teacher?" He edged along the path a few feet. "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. |
| 376 |
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. The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man's head. It was meant to be read. Maybe a request for burial, or to call a relative. Drew scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips. To him who stands beside me at my death bed: Being of sound mind, and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Buhr, do give and bequeath this farm, with all pertaining to it, to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his, and the wheat; the scythe, and the task ordained thereto. Let him take them freely, and without question — and remember that I, John Buhr, am only the giver, not the ordainer. To which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1938. (Signed) John Buhr. Kyrie eleison! Drew walked back through the house and opened the screen door. He said, "Molly, you come in. Kids, you stay in the car." Molly came inside. He took her to the bedroom. She looked at the will, the scythe, the wheat field moving in a hot wind outside the window. Her white face tightened up and she bit her lips and held onto him. "It's too good to be true. There must be some trick to it." Drew said, "Our luck's changin', that's all. We'll have work to do, stuff to eat, somethin' over our heads to keep rain off." He touched the scythe. |
| 377 |
He lay in bed late, just listening to the silence in the house that wasn't anything like death silence, but a silence of things living well and happily. He got up, dressed, and ate his breakfast slowly. He wasn't going to work. He went out to milk the cows, stood on the porch smoking a cigarette, walked about the backyard a little and then came back in and asked Molly what he had gone out to do. "Milk the cows," she said. "Oh, yes," he said, and went out again. He found the cows waiting and full, and milked them and put the milk cans in the spring-house, but thought of other things. The wheat. The scythe. All through the morning he sat on the back porch rolling cigarettes. He made a toy boat for little Drew and one for Susie, and then he churned some of the milk into butter and drew off the buttermilk, but the sun was in his head, aching. It burned there. He wasn't hungry for lunch. He kept looking at the wheat and the wind bending and tipping and ruffling it. His arms flexed, his fingers, resting on his knee as he sat again on the porch, made a kind of grip in the empty air, itching. The pads of his palms itched and burned. 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. |
| 378 |
Among these grains there were many who were old, weary, wanting so very much to sleep. The long, quiet, moonless sleep. The scythe held him, grew into his palms, forced him to walk. Somehow, struggling, he got free of it. He threw it down, ran off into the wheat, where he stopped and went down on his knees. "I don't want to kill anymore," he said. "if I work with the scythe I'll have to kill Molly and the kids. Don't ask me to do that!" The stars only sat in the sky, shining. Behind him, he heard a dull, thumping sound. Something shot up over the hill into the sky. It was like a living thing, with arms of red color, licking at the stars. Sparks fell into his face. The thick, hot odor of fire came with it. The house! Crying out, he got sluggishly, hopelessly, to his feet, looking at the big fire. The little white house with the live oaks was roaring up in one savage bloom of fire. Heat rolled over the hill and he swam in it and went down in it, stumbling, drowning over his head. By the time he got down the hill there was not a shingle, bolt or threshold of it that wasn't alive with flame. It made blistering, crackling, fumbling noises. No one screamed inside. No one ran around or shouted. He yelled in the yard. "Molly! Susie! Drew!" He got no answer. He ran close in until his eyebrows withered and his skin crawled hot like paper burning, crisping, curling up in tight little curls. "Molly! Susie!" The fire settled contentedly down to feed. Drew ran around the house a dozen times, all alone, trying to find a way in. Then he sat where the fire roasted his body and waited until all the walls had sunken down with fluttering crashes, until the last ceilings bent, blanketing the floors with molten plaster and scorched lathing. 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. |
| 379 |
The power of the wheat and the scythe. Their lives, supposed to end yesterday, May 30th, 1938, had been prolonged simply because he refused to cut the grain. They should have died in the fire. That's the way it was meant to be. But since he had not used the scythe, nothing could hurt them. A house had flamed and fallen and still they lived, caught halfway, not dead, not alive. Simply — waiting. And all over the world thousands more just like them, victims of accidents, fires, disease, suicide, waited, slept just like Molly and her children slept. Not able to die, not able to live. All because a man was afraid of harvesting the ripe grain. All because one man thought he could stop working with a scythe and never work with that scythe again. 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. |
| 380 |
"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. In this fashion he met his wife. During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats really needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon Uncle Einar. Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter. "Oh," said Brunilla, with a fever. "A man. In a camp-tent." Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him. "Oh," said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. "A man with wings." That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn't afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she'd quite forgotten his wings were there. |
| 381 |
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. Douglas shifted panes again. Mr. Koberman was a red man walking through a red world with red trees and red flowers and — something else. Something about — Mr. Koberman. Douglas squinted. The red glass did things to Mr. Koberman. His face, his suit, his hands. The clothes seemed to melt away. Douglas almost believed, for one terrible instant, that he could see inside Mr. Koberman. And what he saw made him lean wildly against the small red pane, blinking. Mr. Koberman glanced up just then, saw Douglas, and raised his cane-umbrella angrily, as if to strike. He ran swiftly across the red lawn to the front door. "Young man!" he cried, running up the stairs. "What were you doing?" "Just looking," said Douglas, numbly. |
| 382 |
Koberman, who got up and went out for his evening walk to work. The stars, the moon, the wind, the clock ticking, and the chiming of the hours into dawn, the sun rising, and here it was another morning, another day, and Mr. Koberman coming along the sidewalk from his night's work. Douglas stood off like a small mechanism whirring and watching with carefully microscopic eyes. At noon, Grandma went to the store to buy groceries. As was his custom every day when Grandma was gone, Douglas yelled outside Mr. Koberman's door for a full three minutes. As usual, there was no response. The silence was horrible. He ran downstairs, got the pass-key, a silver fork, and the three pieces of colored glass he had saved from the shattered window. He fitted the key to the lock and swung the door slowly open. The room was in half light, the shades drawn. Mr. Koberman lay atop his bedcovers, in slumber clothes, breathing gently, up and down. He didn't move. His face was motionless. "Hello, Mr. Koberman!" The colorless walls echoed the man's regular breathing. "Mr. Koberman, hello!" Bouncing a golf ball, Douglas advanced. He yelled. Still no answer. "Mr. Koberman!" Bending over Mr. Koberman, Douglas picked the tines of the silver fork in the sleeping man's face. Mr. Koberman winced. He twisted. He groaned bitterly. Response. Good. Swell. Douglas drew a piece of blue glass from his pocket. Looking through the blue glass fragment he found himself in a blue room, in a blue world different from the world he knew. As different as was the red world. Blue furniture, blue bed, blue ceiling and walls, blue wooden eating utensils atop the blue bureau, and the sullen dark blue of Mr. Koberman's face and arms and his blue chest rising, falling. Also ... Mr. Koberman's eyes were wide, staring at him with a hungry darkness. Douglas fell back, pulled the blue glass from his eyes. Mr. Koberman's eyes were shut. Blue glass again — open. Blue glass away — shut. Blue glass again — open. Away — shut. Funny. |
| 383 |
For two hours in the now-warm, now-cold wind he walked the meadows collecting toadstools and spiders. His heart began to beat with anticipation again. How many relatives had Mother said would come? Seventy? One hundred? He passed a farmhouse. If only you knew what was happening at our house, he said to the glowing windows. He climbed a hill and looked at the town, miles away, settling into sleep, the town-hall clock high and round white in the distance. The town did not know, either. He brought home many jars of toadstools and spiders. In the little chapel belowstairs a brief ceremony was celebrated. It was like all the other rituals over the years, with Father chanting the dark lines, Mother's beautiful white ivory hands moving in the reverse blessings, and all the children gathered except Cecy, who lay upstairs in bed. 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. |
| 384 |
"Enough!" shouted Einar, at last. Timothy, deposited on the floor timbers, exaltedly, exhaustedly fell against Uncle Einar, sobbing happily. "Uncle, uncle, uncle!" "Was it good, flying? Eh, Timothy?" said Uncle Einar, bending down, patting Timothy's head. "Good, good." It was coming toward dawn. Most had arrived and were ready to bed down for the daylight, sleep motionlessly with no sound until the following sunset, when they would shout out of their mahogany boxes for the revelry. Uncle Einar, followed by dozens of others, moved toward the cellar. Mother directed them downward to the crowded row on row of highly polished boxes. Einar, his wings like sea-green tarpaulins tented behind him, moved with a curious whistling down the passageway; where his wings touched they made a sound of drumheads gently beaten. 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. |
| 385 |
The numerous young cousins caroused at the crystal punch bowl. Their shiny olive-pit eyes, their conical, devilish faces and curly bronze hair hovered over the drinking table, their hard-soft, half-girl half-boy bodies wrestling against each other as they got unpleasantly, sullenly drunk. The wind got higher, the stars burned with fiery intensity, the noises redoubled, the dances quickened, the drinking became more positive. To Timothy there were thousands of things to hear and watch. The many darknesses roiled, bubbled, the many faces passed and repassed... . "Listen!" The party held its breath. Far away the town clock struck its chimes, saying six o'clock. The party was ending. As if at a cue, in time to the rhythm of the clock striking, their one hundred voices began to sing songs that were four hundred years old, songs Timothy could not know. They twined their arms around one another, circling slowly, and sang, and somewhere in the cold distance of morning the town clock finished out its chimes and quieted. Good-bys were said, there was a great rustling. Mother and Father and the brothers and sisters lined up at the door to shake hands and kiss each departing relative in turn. The sky beyond the open door colored and shone in the east. A cold wind entered. The shouting and the laughing bit by bit faded and went away. Dawn grew more apparent. Everybody was embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation. "Don't forget, we meet in Salem in 1970!" someone cried. Salem. Timothy's numbed mind turned the word over. Salem, 1970. And there would be Uncle Fry and Grandma and Grandfather and a thousand-times-great Grandmother in her withered cerements. And Mother and Father and Ellen and Laura and Cecy and Leonard and Bion and Sam and all the rest. But would he be there? Would he be alive that long? Could he be certain of living until then? |
| 386 |
I hope you're not one of those who tiptoe around shutting windows! Out house is like the top of a mesa. We let the weather do our broom-work. Hop in!" Ten minutes later we swung off the highway onto a drive that had not been leveled or filled in years. Stone drove straight on over the pits and bumps, smiling steadily. Bang! We shuddered the last few yards to a wild, unpainted two-story house. The car was allowed to gasp itself away into mortal silence. "Do you want the truth?" Stone turned to look me in the face and hold my shoulder with an earnest hand. "I was murdered by a man with a gun twenty-five years ago almost to this very day." I sat staring after him as he leapt from the car. He was solid as a ton of rock, no ghost to him, but yet I knew that somehow the truth was in what he had told me before firing himself like a cannon at the house. "This is my wife, and this is the house, and that is our supper waiting for us! Look at our view. Windows on three sides of the living room, a view of the sea, the shore, the meadows. We nail the windows open three out of four seasons. I swear you get a smell of limes here midsummer, and something from Antarctica, ammonia and ice cream, come December. Sit down! Lena, isn't it nice having him here?" "I hope you like New England boiled dinner," said Lena, now here, now there, a tall, firmly-built woman, the sun in the East, Father Christmas' daughter, a bright lamp of a face that lit our table as she dealt out the heavy useful dishes made to stand the pound of giants' fists. The cutlery was solid enough to take a lion's teeth. A great whiff of steam rose up, through which we gladly descended, sinners into Hell. I saw the seconds-plate skim by three times and felt the ballast gather in my chest, my throat, and at last my ears. Dudley Stone poured me a brew he had made from wild Concords that had cried for mercy, he said. The wine bottle, empty, had its green glass mouth blown softly by Stone, who summoned out a rhythmic one-note tune that was quickly done. |
| 387 |
Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark — weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more — but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read? If a pea hen refuses to brood I read it quickly and, sure enough, that night I see a minha mae standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I know I am missing much, like not reading the garden snake crawling up to the door saddle to die. Let me start with what I know for certain. The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, anybody's shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha mae, is frowning, is angry at what she says are my prettify ways. Only bad women wear high heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she relents and lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora's house, pointy-toe, one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top. As a result, Lina says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the strong soles, tougher than leather, that life requires. Lina is correct. Florens, she says, it's 1690. Who else these days has the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady? So when I set out to find you, she and Mistress give me Sir's boots that fit a man not a girl. |
| 388 |
They stuff them with hay and oily corn husks and tell me to hide the letter inside my stocking — no matter the itch of the sealing wax. I am lettered but I do not read what Mistress writes and Lina and Sorrow cannot. But I know what it means to say to any who stop me. My head is light with the confusion of two things, hunger for you and scare if I am lost. Nothing frights me more than this errand and nothing is more temptation. From the day you disappear I dream and plot. To learn where you are and how to be there. I want to run across the trail through the beech and white pine but I am asking myself which way? Who will tell me? Who lives in the wilderness between this farm and you and will they help me or harm me? What about the boneless bears in the valley? Remember? How when they move their pelts sway as though there is nothing underneath? Their smell belying their beauty, their eyes knowing us from when we are beasts also. You telling me that is why it is fatal to look them in the eye. They will approach, run to us to love and play which we misread and give back fear and anger. Giant birds also are nesting out there bigger than cows, Lina says, and not all natives are like her, she says, so watch out. A praying savage, neighbors call her, because she is once churchgoing yet she bathes herself every day and Christians never do. Underneath she wears bright blue beads and dances in secret at first light when the moon is small. More than fear of loving bears or birds bigger than cows, I fear pathless night. How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? Now at last there is a way. I have orders. It is arranged. I will see your mouth and trail my fingers down. You will rest your chin in my hair again while I breathe into your shoulder in and out, in and out. I am happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its newness trembles me. To get to you I must leave the only home, the only people I know. Lina says from the state of my teeth I am maybe seven or eight when I am brought here. |
| 389 |
We boil wild plums for jam and cake eight times since then, so I must be sixteen. Before this place I spend my days picking okra and sweeping tobacco sheds, my nights on the floor of the cookhouse with a minha mae. We are baptized and can have happiness when this life is done. The Reverend Father tells us that. Once every seven days we learn to read and write. We are forbidden to leave the place so the four of us hide near the marsh. My mother, me, her little boy and Reverend Father. He is forbidden to do this but he teaches us anyway watching out for wicked Virginians and Protestants who want to catch him. If they do he will be in prison or pay money or both. He has two books and a slate. We have sticks to draw through sand, pebbles to shape words on smooth flat rock. When the letters are memory we make whole words. I am faster than my mother and her baby boy is no good at all. Very quickly I can write from memory the Nicene Creed including all of the commas. Confession we tell not write as I am doing now. I forget almost all of it until now. I like talk. Lina talk, stone talk, even Sorrow talk. Best of all is your talk. At first when I am brought here I don't talk any word. All of what I hear is different from what words mean to a minha mae and me. Lina's words say nothing I know. Nor Mistress's. Slowly a little talk is in my mouth and not on stone. Lina says the place of my talking on stone is Mary's Land where Sir does business. So that is where my mother and her baby boy are buried. Or will be if they ever decide to rest. Sleeping on the cookhouse floor with them is not as nice as sleeping in the broken sleigh with Lina. In cold weather we put planks around our part of the cowshed and wrap our arms together under pelts. We don't smell the cow flops because they are frozen and we are deep under fur. In summer if our hammocks are hit by mosquitoes Lina makes a cool place to sleep out of branches. You never like a hammock and prefer the ground even in rain when Sir offers you the storehouse. |
| 390 |
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. 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. But the ice comes first, he says. And when I see knives of it hanging from the houses and trees and feel the white air burn my face I am certain the fire is coming. Then Lina smiles when she looks at me and wraps me for warmth. |
| 391 |
Mistress looks away. Nor is Sorrow happy to see me. She flaps her hand in front of her face as though bees are bothering her. She is ever strange and Lina says she is once more with child. Father still not clear and Sorrow does not say. Will and Scully laugh and deny. Lina believes it is Sir's. Says she has her reason for thinking so. When I ask what reason she says he is a man. Mistress says nothing. Neither do I. But I have a worry. Not because our work is more, but because mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes go when they choose. How they raise them to look at me hard, saying something I cannot hear. Saying something important to me, but holding the little boy's hand. The man moved through the surf, stepping carefully over pebbles and sand to shore. Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. He could see his boots sloshing but not his satchel nor his hands. When the surf was behind him and his soles sank in mud, he turned to wave to the sloopmen, but because the mast had disappeared in the fog he could not tell whether they remained anchored or risked sailing on — hugging the shore and approximating the location of wharves and docks. Unlike the English fogs he had known since he could walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream. As mud became swamp grass, he turned left, stepping gingerly until he stumbled against wooden planks leading up beach toward the village. Other than his own breath and tread, the world was soundless. It was only after he reached the live oak trees that the fog wavered and split. He moved faster then, more in control but missing, too, the blinding gold he had come through. Picking his way with growing confidence, he arrived in the ramshackle village sleeping between two huge riverside plantations. There the hostler was persuaded to forgo a deposit if the man signed a note: Jacob Vaark. |
| 392 |
The saddle was poorly made but the horse, Regina, was a fine one. Mounted, he felt better and rode carefree and a little too fast along beach fronts until he entered an old Lenape trail. Here there was reason to be cautious and he slowed Regina down. In this territory he could not be sure of friend or foe. Half a dozen years ago an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes — freedmen, slaves and indentured — had waged war against local gentry led by members of that very class. When that "people's war" lost its hopes to the hangman, the work it had done — which included the slaughter of opposing tribes and running the Carolinas off their land — spawned a thicket of new laws authorizing chaos in defense of order. By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black people only; by granting license to any white to kill any black for any reason; by compensating owners for a slave's maiming or death, they separated and protected all whites from all others forever. Any social ease between gentry and laborers, forged before and during that rebellion, crumbled beneath a hammer wielded in the interests of the gentry's profits. In Jacob Vaark's view, these were lawless laws encouraging cruelty in exchange for common cause, if not common virtue. In short, 1682 and Virginia was still a mess. Who could keep up with the pitched battles for God, king and land? Even with the relative safety of his skin, solitary traveling required prudence. He knew he might ride for hours with no company but geese flying over inland waterways, and suddenly, from behind felled trees a starving deserter with a pistol might emerge, or in a hollow a family of runaways might cower, or an armed felon might threaten. Carrying several kinds of specie and a single knife, he was a juicy target. Eager to be out of this colony into a less precarious but personally more repellent one, Jacob urged the mare to a faster pace. He dismounted twice, the second time to free the bloody hindleg of a young raccoon stuck in a tree break. |
| 393 |
He was offended by the lax, flashy cunning of the Papists. "Abhor that arrant whore of Rome." The entire class in the children's quarter of the poorhouse had memorized those lines from their primer. "And all her blasphemies Drink not of her cursed cup Obey not her decrees." Which did not mean you could not do business with them, and he had out-dealt them often enough, especially here where tobacco and slaves were married, each currency clutching its partner's elbow. By sustained violence or sudden disease, either one was subject to collapse, inconveniencing everybody but the lender. Disdain, however difficult to cloak, must be put aside. His previous dealings with this estate had been with the owner's clerk while sitting on alehouse stools. Now, for some reason, he had been invited, summoned rather, to the planter's house — a plantation called Jublio. A trader asked to dine with a gentleman? On a Sunday? So there must be trouble, he thought. Finally, swatting mosquitoes and on the watch for mud snakes that startled the horse, he glimpsed the wide iron gates of Jublio and guided Regina through them. He had heard how grand it was, but could not have been prepared for what lay before him. The house, honey-colored stone, was in truth more like a place where one held court. Far away to the right, beyond the iron fences enclosing the property and softened by mist, he saw rows of quarters, quiet, empty. In the fields, he reckoned, trying to limit the damage sopping weather had wrought on the crop. The comfortable smell of tobacco leaves, like fireplaces and good women serving ale, cloaked Jublio like balm. The path ended at a small brick plaza, announcing a prideful entrance to a veranda. Jacob stopped. A boy appeared and, dismounting a bit stiffly, he handed over the reins, cautioning the boy. "Water. No feed." "Yes, sir," said the boy and turned the horse around, murmuring, "Nice lady. Nice lady," as he led her away. Jacob Vaark climbed three brick steps, then retraced them to stand back from the house and appraise it. |
| 394 |
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. The meal began with a prayer whispered in a language he could not decipher and a slow signing of the cross before and after. In spite of his dirty hands and sweat-limp hair, Jacob pressed down his annoyance and chose to focus on the food. But his considerable hunger shrank when presented with the heavily seasoned dishes: everything except pickles and radishes was fried or overcooked. The wine, watered and too sweet for his taste, disappointed him, and the company got worse. |
| 395 |
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. 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. |
| 396 |
Besides having no place to put them, there was nothing to occupy them. "Ridiculous," said D'Ortega. "You sell them. Do you know the prices they garner?" Jacob winced. Flesh was not his commodity. Still, at his host's insistence, he trailed him to the little sheds where D'Ortega interrupted their half day's rest and ordered some two dozen or more to assemble in a straight line, including the boy who had watered Regina. The two men walked the row, inspecting. D'Ortega identifying talents, weaknesses and possibilities, but silent about the scars, the wounds like misplaced veins tracing their skin. One even had the facial brand required by local law when a slave assaulted a white man a second time. The women's eyes looked shockproof, gazing beyond place and time as though they were not actually there. The men looked at the ground. Except every now and then, when possible, when they thought they were not being evaluated, Jacob could see their quick glances, sideways, wary but, most of all, judging the men who judged them. Suddenly Jacob felt his stomach seize. The tobacco odor, so welcoming when he arrived, now nauseated him. Or was it the sugared rice, the hog cuts fried and dripping with molasses, the cocoa Lady D'Ortega was giddy about? Whatever it was, he couldn't stay there surrounded by a passel of slaves whose silence made him imagine an avalanche seen from a great distance. No sound, just the knowledge of a roar he could not hear. He begged off, saying the proposal was not acceptable — too much trouble to transport, manage, auction; his solitary, unencumbered proficiency was what he liked about trade. Specie, bills of credit, quit claims, were portable. One satchel carried all he needed. They walked back toward the house and through the side gate in the ornate fence, D'Ortega pontificating all the while. 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. |
| 397 |
The tension lifted, visibly so on D'Ortega's face. Eager to get away and re-nourish his good opinion of himself, Jacob said abrupt goodbyes to Mistress D'Ortega, the two boys and their father. On his way to the narrow track, he turned Regina around, waved at the couple and once again, in spite of himself, envied the house, the gate, the fence. For the first time he had not tricked, not flattered, not manipulated, but gone head to head with rich gentry. And realized, not for the first time, that only things, not bloodlines or character, separated them. So mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on his own property? On that rise in back, with a better prospect of the hills and the valley between them? Not as ornate as D'Ortega's. None of that pagan excess, of course, but fair. And pure, noble even, because it would not be compromised as Jublio was. Access to a fleet of free labor made D'Ortega's leisurely life possible. Without a shipload of enslaved Angolans he would not be merely in debt; he would be eating from his palm instead of porcelain and sleeping in the bush of Africa rather than a four-post bed. Jacob sneered at wealth dependent on a captured workforce that required more force to maintain. Thin as they were, the dregs of his kind of Protestantism recoiled at whips, chains and armed overseers. He was determined to prove that his own industry could amass the fortune, the station, D'Ortega claimed without trading his conscience for coin. He tapped Regina to a faster pace. The sun was low; the air cooler. He was in a hurry to get back into Virginia, its shore, and to Pursey's tavern before night, sleep in a bed if they weren't all packed three or four abreast. Otherwise he would join the other patrons and curl on any surface. But first he would have one, perhaps two, drafts of ale, its bitter, clear taste critical to eliminating the sweetish rot of vice and ruined tobacco that seemed to coat his tongue. |
| 398 |
Jacob returned Regina to the hostler, paid him and strolled to the wharf and Pursey's tavern. On the way he saw a man beating a horse to its knees. Before he could open his mouth to shout, rowdy sailors pulled the man away and let him feel his own knees in mud. Few things angered Jacob more than the brutal handling of domesticated animals. He did not know what the sailors were objecting to, but his own fury was not only because of the pain it inflicted on the horse, but because of the mute, unprotesting surrender glazing its eyes. Pursey's was closed on Sunday, as he should have known, so he went to the one always open. Rough, illegal and catering to hard boys, it nevertheless offered good, plentiful food and never strong meat. 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. Burly, pock-faced, he had the aura of a man who had been in exotic places and the eyes of someone unaccustomed to looking at things close to his face. Downes was his name. Peter Downes. A Negro boy had been summoned and now brought six tankards, the handles of three in each hand, and set them on the table. |
| 399 |
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. 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. |
| 400 |
Neither Mistress nor we know if he is alive for even one minute to smell the new cherrywood floors he lies on. We are alone. No one to shroud or mourn Sir but us. Will and Scully must sneak to dig the grave. They are warn to stay away. I don't think they wish to. I think their master makes them, because of the sickness. The deacon does not come even though he is a friend who likes Sorrow. Neither do any of the congregation. Still, we do not say the word aloud until we bury him next to his children and Mistress notices two in her mouth. That is the one time we whisper it. Pox. After we say it the next morning, the two on her tongue are joined by twenty-three on her face. Twenty-five in all. She wants you here as much as I do. For her it is to save her life. For me it is to have one. You probably don't know anything at all about what your back looks like whatever the sky holds: sunlight, moonrise. I rest there. My hand, my eyes, my mouth. The first time I see it you are shaping fire with bellows. The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is only you. Nothing outside of you. My eyes not my stomach are the hungry parts of me. There will never be enough time to look how you move. Your arm goes up to strike iron. You drop to one knee. You bend. You stop to pour water first on the iron then down your throat. Before you know I am in the world I am already kill by you. My mouth is open, my legs go softly and the heart is stretching to break. Night comes and I steal a candle. I carry an ember in a pot to light it. To see more of you. When it is lit I shield the flame with my hand. I watch you sleeping. I watch too long. Am careless. The flame burns my palm. I think if you wake and see me seeing you I will die. I run away not knowing then you are seeing me seeing you. And when at last our eyes hit I am not dead. For the first time I am live. |
| 401 |
Lina twitchy as fresh-hook salmon waits with me in the village. The wagon of the Ney brothers does not come. Hours we stand then sit roadside. A boy and a dog drive goats past us. He raises his hat. That is the first time any male does it to me. I like it. A good sign I am thinking but Lina is warning me of many things, saying if you are not in your place I must not tarry. I must return at once. I cannot handle a horse so I must seek return on the next day's horse cart, the one that hauls fresh milk and eggs to market. Some people go by and look but do not speak. We are female so they have no fright. They know who is Lina yet look as if we are strange to them. We wait more and so long that I do not save my bread and codfish. I eat all the cod. Lina holds her forehead in her hand, her elbow on her knee. She gives off a bad feeling so I keep my thoughts on the goatherd's hat. The wind is chill and smells of snow. At last the wagon is here. I climb up. The driver helps me, stays his hand hard and long on my back parts. I feel shame. We are seven, apart from the brothers Ney, and the horses are not the only ones made nervous by snowflakes in springtime. Their haunches tremble, they shake their manes. We are nervous also but we sit still as the flakes come down and stick to our shawls and hats, sugaring our eyelashes and flouring the men's woolly beards. Two women face into the wind that whips their hair like corn tassel, their eyes slits of shine. The other one covers her mouth with her cloak and leans against a man. 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. |
| 402 |
But this snow will not last, although it is heavy, wet and thick. I draw my feet under my skirt, not for warmth, but to protect the letter. The cloth of bread I clutch on my lap. Mistress makes me memorize the way to get to you. I am to board the Ney brothers' wagon in the morning as it travels north on the post road. After one stop at a tavern, the wagon will arrive at a place she calls Hartkill just after midday where I disembark. I am to walk left, westward on the Abenaki trail which I will know by the sapling bent into the earth with one sprout growing skyward. But the Ney brothers' wagon is too much late. By the time I climb aboard and take a place at the tail behind the others it is already late afternoon. The others do not ask me where I am heading but after a while are pleasing themselves to whisper where they once live. By the sea, the women say, they cleaning ships, the men caulking them and repairing docks. They are certain their years of debt are over but the master says no. He sends them away, north, to another place, a tannery, for more years. I don't understand why they are sad. Everyone has to work. I ask are you leaving someone dear behind? All heads turn toward me and the wind dies. Daft, a man says. A woman across from me says, young. The man says, same. Another woman raises her voice to say leave her be. Too loud. Settle down back there, the driver is shouting. The one who says I am daft bends down to scratch his ankle, scratching for a long time while the others cough and scrape their shoes as if to defy the driver's command. The woman next to me whispers, there are no coffins in a tannery, only fast death in acid. The tavern needs lamplight when we reach it. At first I don't see it, but one of us points and then we all do. A light winking through the trees. The Neys go in. We wait. They come out to water the horses and us and go in again. After that there are scuffling sounds again. I look down and see the rope that falls from their ankles twist along the wagon bed. |
| 403 |
The snow ends and the sun is gone. Quiet, quiet six drop down, the men catching the women in their arms. The boy jumps alone. The three women motion to me. My heart turns over and I drop down too. They move off back down where we are coming from, stepping as best they can figure in tree shelter at roadside, places where the snow is small. I don't follow. Neither can I stay in the wagon. I have a cold stone in my chest. I don't need Lina to warn me that I must not be alone with strange men with slow hands when in liquor and anger they discover their cargo is lost. I have to choose quick. I choose you. I go west into the trees. Everything I want is west. You. Your talk. The medicine you know that will make Mistress well. You will hear what I have to say and come back with me. I have only to go west. One day? Two nights? I am walking among chestnut trees lining the road. Some already showing leaf hold their breath until the snow melts. The silly ones let their buds drop to the ground like dry peas. I am moving north where the sapling bends into the earth with a sprout that points to the sky. Then west to you. I am hurrying to gain ground before all light is over. The land slopes sharply and I have no way to go but down as well. Hard as I try I lose the road. Tree leaves are too new for shelter, so everywhere the ground is slop with snow and my footprints slide and pool. The sky is the color of currants. Can I go more, I wonder. Should I. Two hares freeze before bounding away. I don't know how to read that. I hear water running and move in the dark toward the sound. The moonlight is young. I hold one arm out in front and go slow to not stumble and fall. But the sound is pines dripping and there is no brook or stream. I make a cup of my hand to get a little fallen snow to swallow. I do not hear the paws or see any shape. It is the smell of wet fur that stops me. If I am smelling it, it is smelling me, because there is nothing with odor left in my food cloth, only bread. I cannot tell if it is bigger than me or smaller or if it is alone. |
| 404 |
I decide for stillness. I never hear it go but the odor fades at last. I think it is better to climb a tree. The old pines are very big. Any one is good cover even though it tears and fights me. Its branches sway but do not break under me. I hide from everything of creep and slouch. I know sleep will not claim me because I have too much fear. The branches creak and bend. My plan for this night is not good. I need Lina to say how to shelter in wilderness. Lina was unimpressed by the festive mood, the jittery satisfaction of everyone involved, and had refused to enter or go near it. That third and presumably final house that Sir insisted on building distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees. And now having died in it he will haunt its rooms forever. The first house Sir built — dirt floor, green wood — was weaker than the bark-covered one she herself was born in. The second one was strong. He tore down the first to lay wooden floors in the second with four rooms, a decent fireplace and windows with good tight shutters. There was no need for a third. Yet at the very moment when there were no children to occupy or inherit it, he meant to build another, bigger, double-storied, fenced and gated like the one he saw on his travels. Mistress had sighed and confided to Lina that at the least the doing of it would keep him more on the land. "Trading and traveling fill his pockets," she'd said, "but he had been content to be a farmer when we married. Now ..." Her voice trailed off as she yanked out the swan's feathers. 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. |
| 405 |
It was not a sudden change, yet it was a deep one. The last few years he seemed moody, less gentle, but when he decided to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself, he was cheerful every waking moment. Killing trees in that number, without asking their permission, of course his efforts would stir up malfortune. Sure enough, when the house was close to completion he fell sick with nothing else on his mind. He mystified Lina. All Europes did. Once they terrified her, then they rescued her. Now they simply puzzled her. Why, she wondered, had Mistress sent a love-disabled girl to find the blacksmith? Why not tamp down her pride and seek out one of the Anabaptists? The deacon would be more than willing. Poor Florens, thought Lina. If she is not stolen or murdered, if she finds him safe she would not return. Why should she? Lina had watched first with mild amusement, then with increasing distress the courtship that began the morning the blacksmith came to work on Sir's foolish house. Florens had stood still, a startled doe, when he dismounted his horse, doffed his hat and asked if this was the Vaark place. Lina had shifted the milk bucket to her left hand and pointed up the hill. Mistress, leading the heifer, had come around the corner of the shed and asked him his business, sucking her teeth when he answered. "Dear Lord," she murmured and, pushing out her bottom lip, blew hair away from her forehead. Then, "Wait here a moment." As Mistress led the cow to pasture the blacksmith locked eyes with Lina before returning his hat to his head. He never once looked at Florens standing nearby, not breathing, holding the milking stool with both hands as though to help gravity keep her earthbound. She should have known then what the consequences would be, but felt sure that Sorrow, always an easy harvest, would quickly draw his attention and thwart Florens' drooling. Learning from Mistress that he was a free man doubled her anxiety. He had rights, then, and privileges, like Sir. |
| 406 |
He could marry, own things, travel, sell his own labor. She should have seen the danger immediately because his arrogance was clear. When Mistress returned, rubbing her hands on her apron, he removed his hat once more, then did something Lina had never seen an African do: he looked directly at Mistress, lowering his glance, for he was very tall, never blinking those eyes slanted and yellow as a ram's. It was not true, then, what she had heard; that for them only children and loved ones could be looked in the eye; for all others it was disrespect or a threat. In the town Lina had been taken to, after the conflagration had wiped away her village, that kind of boldness from any African was legitimate cause for a whip. An unfathomable puzzle. Europes could calmly cut mothers down, blast old men in the face with muskets louder than moose calls, but were enraged if a not-Europe looked a Europe in the eye. On the one hand they would torch your home; on the other they would feed, nurse and bless you. Best to judge them one at a time, proof being that one, at least, could become your friend, which is why she slept on the floor beside Mistress' bed and kept watch in case Sorrow came close or Mistress needed something. Once, long ago, had Lina been older or tutored in healing, she might have eased the pain of her family and all the others dying around her: on mats of rush, lapping at the lake's shore, curled in paths within the village and in the forest beyond, but most tearing at blankets they could neither abide nor abandon. Infants fell silent first, and even as their mothers heaped earth over their bones, they too were pouring sweat and limp as maize hair. At first they fought off the crows, she and two young boys, but they were no match for the birds or the smell, and when the wolves arrived, all three scrambled as high into a beech tree as they could. They stayed there all night listening to gnawing, baying, growling, fighting and worst of all the quiet of animals sated at last. |
| 407 |
At dawn none of them dared to apply a name to the pieces hauled away from a body or left to insect life. By noon, just as they had decided to make a run for one of the canoes moored in the lake, men in blue uniforms came, their faces wrapped in rags. News of the deaths that had swept her village had reached out. Lina's joy at being rescued collapsed when the soldiers, having taken one look at the crows and vultures feeding on the corpses strewn about, shot the wolves then circled the whole village with fire. As the carrion flew off she did not know whether to stay hidden or risk being shot as well. But the boys screamed from the branches until the men heard them and caught each in their arms as they jumped, saying "Calme, mes petits. Calme." If they worried that the little survivors would infect them, they chose to ignore it, being true soldiers, unwilling to slaughter small children. She never learned where they took the boys, but she was taken to live among kindly Presbyterians. They were pleased to have her, they said, because they admired native women who, they said, worked as hard as they themselves did, but scorned native men who simply fished and hunted like gentry all day. Impoverished gentry, that is, since they owned nothing, certainly not the land they slept on, preferring to live as entitled paupers. And since some of the church elders had heard horrible tales of, or witnessed themselves, God's wrath toward the idle and profane — flinging black death followed by raging fire on the proud and blasphemous city of their birth — they could only pray that Lina's people understood before they died that what had befallen them was merely the first sign of His displeasure: a pouring out of one of the seven vials, the final one of which would announce His arrival and the birth of young Jerusalem. They named her Messalina, just in case, but shortened it to Lina to signal a sliver of hope. Afraid of once more losing shelter, terrified of being alone in the world without family, Lina acknowledged her status as heathen and let herself be purified by these worthies. |
| 408 |
She learned that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn mush with one's fingers was perverse. That God hated idleness most of all, so staring off into space to weep for a mother or a playmate was to court damnation. Covering oneself in the skin of beasts offended God, so they burned her deerskin dress and gave her a good duffel cloth one. They clipped the beads from her arms and scissored inches from her hair. Although they would not permit her to accompany them to either of the Sunday services they attended, she was included in the daily prayers before breakfast, midmorning and evening. But none of the surrender, begging, imploring or praising on her knees took hold because, hard as she fought, the Messalina part erupted anyway and the Presbyterians abandoned her without so much as a murmur of fare well. It was some time afterward while branch-sweeping Sir's dirt floor, being careful to avoid the hen nesting in the corner, lonely, angry and hurting, that she decided to fortify herself by piecing together scraps of what her mother had taught her before dying in agony. Relying on memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world. There was no comfort or place for her in the village; Sir was there and not there. Solitude would have crushed her had she not fallen into hermit skills and become one more thing that moved in the natural world. She cawed with birds, chatted with plants, spoke to squirrels, sang to the cow and opened her mouth to rain. The shame of having survived the destruction of her families shrank with her vow never to betray or abandon anyone she cherished. Memories of her village peopled by the dead turned slowly to ash and in their place a single image arose. Fire. How quick. How purposefully it ate what had been built, what had been life. |
| 409 |
He obliged and offered her to the care of a customer he trusted to do her no harm. Sir. When Sorrow arrived, trailing Sir's horse, Mistress barely hid her annoyance but admitted the place could use the help. If Sir was bent on travel, two female farmers and a four-year-old daughter were not enough. Lina had been a tall fourteen-year-old when Sir bought her from the Presbyterians. He had searched the advertisements posted at the printer's in town. "A likely woman who has had small pox and measles... A likely Negro about 9 years... Girl or woman that is handy in the kitchen sensible, speaks good English, complexion between yellow and black... Five years time of a white woman that understands Country work, with a child upwards of two years old... Mulatto Fellow very much pitted with small pox, honest and sober... White lad fit to serve... Wanted a servant able to drive a carriage, white or black... Sober and prudent woman who... Likely wench, white, 29 years with child... Healthy Deutsch woman for rent ... stout healthy, healthy strong, strong healthy likely sober sober sober ..." until he got to "Hardy female, Christianized and capable in all matters domestic available for exchange of goods or specie." A bachelor expecting the arrival of a new wife, he required precisely that kind of female on his land. By then Lina's swollen eye had calmed and the lash cuts on her face, arms and legs had healed and were barely noticeable. The Presbyterians, recalling perhaps their own foresight in the name they had given her, never asked what had happened to her and there was no point in telling them. She had no standing in law, no surname and no one would take her word against a Europe. What they did was consult with the printer about the wording of an advertisement. "Hardy female ..." When the Europe wife stepped down from the cart, hostility between them was instant. The health and beauty of a young female already in charge annoyed the new wife; while the assumption of authority from the awkward Europe girl infuriated Lina. |
| 410 |
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. 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. |
| 411 |
As it turned out the sachem had been dead wrong. The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for his error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples. Lina was not so sure. Based on the way Sir and Mistress tried to run their farm, she knew there were exceptions to the sachem's revised prophecy. They seemed mindful of a distinction between earth and property, fenced their cattle though their neighbors did not, and although legal to do so, they were hesitant to kill foraging swine. They hoped to live by tillage rather than eat up the land with herds, measures that kept their profit low. So while Lina trusted more or less Sir's and Mistress' judgment, she did not trust their instincts. Had they true insight they would never have kept Sorrow so close. Hard company she was, needing constant attention, as at this very daybreak when, out of necessity, she had been trusted with the milking. Since being pregnant hampered her on the stool, she mis-handled the udder, and the cow, Sorrow reported, had kicked. Lina left the sickroom to mind the heifer — talk to her first, hum a little, then slowly cradle the tender teats with a palm of cream. The spurts were sporadic, worthless, except for the cow's relief, and after she had oiled her into comfort, Lina rushed back into the house. |
| 412 |
But if Mistress died, what then? To whom could they turn? Although the Baptists once freely helped Sir build the second house, the outhouses, and happily joined him in felling white pine for the post fence, a cooling had risen between them and his family. Partly because Mistress hated them for shutting her children out of heaven, but also, thought Lina, because Sorrow's lurking frightened them. Years past, the Baptists might bring a brace of salmon or offer a no-longer-needed cradle for Mistress' baby. And the deacon could be counted on for baskets of strawberries and blue, all manner of nuts and once a whole haunch of venison. Now, of course, nobody, Baptist or any other, would come to a poxed house. Neither Willard nor Scully came, which should not have disappointed her, but did. Both were Europes, after all. Willard was getting on in years and was still working off his passage. The original seven years stretched to twenty-some, he said, and he had long ago forgotten most of the mischief that kept extending his bondage. The ones he remembered with a smile involved rum; the others were attempts to run away. Scully, young, fine-boned, with light scars tracing his back, had plans. He was finishing his mother's contract. True, he didn't know how long it would take but, he boasted, unlike Willard's or Lina's, his enslavement would end before death. He was the son of a woman sent off to the colonies for "lewdness and disobedience," neither of which according to him was quelled. Her death transferred her contract to her son. Then a man claiming to be Scully's father settled the balance owed and recuperated certain expenses by leasing the boy to his current master for a span of time soon to end, although Scully was not privy to exactly when. There was a legal paper, he had told Lina, that said it. Lina guessed he had not seen it and could not cipher it if he had. All he knew for certain was that the freedom fee would be generous enough to purchase a horse or set him up in a trade. |
| 413 |
Beyond on the far side of the trail stood a forest of beech. As was often the case, she spoke to them. "You and I, this land is our home," she whispered, "but unlike you I am exile here." Lina's mistress is mumbling now, telling Lina or herself some tale, some matter of grave importance as the dart of her eyes showed. What was so vital, Lina wondered, that she uses an unworkable tongue in a mouth lined with sores? Her wrapped hands lift and wave. Lina turns to look where the eyes focus. A trunk where Mistress kept pretty things, treasured unused gifts from Sir. A lace collar, a hat no decent woman would be seen in, its peacock feather already broken in the press. On top of a few lengths of silk lay a small mirror set in an elaborate frame, its silver tarnished to soot. "Gi' me," said Mistress. Lina picked up the mirror thinking, No, please. Don't look. Never seek out your own face even when well, lest the reflection drink your soul. "Hur-ee," moaned Mistress, her tone pleading like a child's. Helpless to disobey, Lina brought it to the lady. She placed it between the mittened hands, certain now that her mistress will die. And the certainty was a kind of death for herself as well, since her own life, everything, depended on Mistress' survival, which depended on Florens' success. Lina had fallen in love with her right away, as soon as she saw her shivering in the snow. A frightened, long-necked child who did not speak for weeks but when she did her light, singsong voice was lovely to hear. Some how, some way, the child assuaged the tiny yet eternal yearning for the home Lina once knew where everyone had anything and no one had everything. Perhaps her own barrenness sharpened her devotion. In any case, she wanted to protect her, keep her away from the corruption so natural to someone like Sorrow, and, most recently, she was determined to be the wall between Florens and the blacksmith. Since his coming, there was an appetite in the girl that Lina recognized as once her own. |
| 414 |
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. 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. |
| 415 |
Stories of wicked men who chopped off the heads of devoted wives; of cardinals who carried the souls of good children to a place where time itself was a baby. Especially called for were stories of mothers fighting to save their children from wolves and natural disasters. Close to heartbreak, Lina recalled a favorite and the whispered conversation that always followed it. One day, ran the story, an eagle laid her eggs in a nest far above and far beyond the snakes and paws that hunted them. Her eyes are midnight black and shiny as she watches over them. At the tremble of a leaf, the scent of any other life, her frown deepens, her head jerks and her feathers quietly lift. Her talons are sharpened on rock; her beak is like the scythe of a war god. She is fierce, protecting her borning young. But one thing she cannot defend against: the evil thoughts of man. One day a traveler climbs a mountain nearby. He stands at its summit admiring all he sees below him. The turquoise lake, the eternal hemlocks, the starlings sailing into clouds cut by rainbow. The traveler laughs at the beauty saying, "This is perfect. This is mine." And the word swells, booming like thunder into valleys, over acres of primrose and mallow. Creatures come out of caves wondering what it means. Mine. Mine. Mine. The shells of the eagle's eggs quiver and one even cracks. The eagle swivels her head to find the source of the strange, meaningless thunder, the incomprehensible sound. Spotting the traveler, she swoops down to claw away his laugh and his unnatural sound. But the traveler, under attack, raises his stick and strikes her wing with all his strength. Screaming she falls and falls. Over the turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, down through the clouds cut by rainbow. Screaming, screaming she is carried away by wind instead of wing. Then Florens would whisper, "Where is she now?" "Still falling," Lina would answer, "she is falling forever." Florens barely breathes. "And the eggs?" she asks. "They hatch alone," says Lina. |
| 416 |
"Do they live?" Florens' whispering is urgent. "We have," says Lina. Florens would sigh then, her head on Lina's shoulder and when sleep came the little girl's smile lingered. Mother hunger — to be one or have one — both of them were reeling from that longing which, Lina knew, remained alive, traveling the bone. 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. One man was asleep, another whittling. Three women, two of whom were Europes, seemed to be clearing away signs of a meal, nutshells, corn husks, and repacking other items. |
| 417 |
Spring, as usual, was skittish. Five days ago the rain she smelled coming was longer and harder than it had been in some time; a downpour she thought hastened Sir's death. Then a day of hot, bright sun that freshened and tinted trees into pale green mist. The sudden snow that followed surprised and alarmed her since Florens would be traveling through it. Now, knowing Florens had pressed on, she tried to learn what the sky, the breezes, had in store. Calm, she decided; spring was settling itself into growing season. Reassured, she went back into the sickroom where she heard Mistress mumbling. More self-pity? No, not an apology to her own face this time. Now, amazingly, she was praying. For what, to what, Lina did not know. She was both startled and embarrassed, since she had always thought Mistress polite to the Christian god, but indifferent, if not hostile, to religion. 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. |
| 418 |
I lie still and try not to think of water. Thinking instead of another night, another place of wet ground. But it is summer then and the damp is from dew not snow. You are telling me about the making of iron things. How happy you are to find easy ore so close to the surface of the earth. The glory of shaping metal. Your father doing it and his father before him back and back for a thousand years. With furnaces from termite mounds. And you know the ancestors approve when two owls appear at the very instant you say their names so you understand they are showing themselves to bless you. See, you say, see how they swivel their heads. They approve you also, you tell me. Do they bless me too, I ask. Wait, you say. Wait and see. I think they do, because I am coming now. I am coming to you. Lina says there are some spirits who look after warriors and hunters and there are others who guard virgins and mothers. I am none of those. Reverend Father says communion is the best hope, prayer the next. There is no communion hereabouts and I feel shame to speak to the Virgin when all I am asking for is not to her liking. I think Mistress has nothing to say on the matter. She avoids the Baptists and the village women who go to the meetinghouse. They annoy her as when we three, Mistress, Sorrow and me, go to sell two calves. They are trotting behind us on rope to the cart we ride in. We wait while Mistress does the selling talk. Sorrow jumps down and goes behind the trader's post where a village woman slaps her face many times and screams at her. When Mistress discovers what is happening, both her face and the village woman's burn in anger. Sorrow is relieving herself in the yard without care for the eyes of others. The argue is done and Mistress drives us away. After a while she pulls the horse to a stop. She turns to Sorrow and slaps her face more, saying Fool. I am shock. Mistress never strikes us. Sorrow does not cry or answer. I think Mistress says other words to her, softer ones, but I am only seeing how her eyes go. |
| 419 |
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. 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. |
| 420 |
The stubborn one, the one with too many questions and a rebellious mouth. Rebekka's mother objected to the "sale" — she called it that because the prospective groom had stressed "reimbursement" for clothing, expenses and a few supplies — not for love or need of her daughter, but because the husband-to-be was a heathen living among savages. Religion, as Rebekka experienced it from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred. Her parents treated each other and their children with glazed indifference and saved their fire for religious matters. Any drop of generosity to a stranger threatened to douse the blaze. Rebekka's understanding of God was faint, except as a larger kind of king, but she quieted the shame of insufficient devotion by assuming that He could be no grander nor better than the imagination of the believer. Shallow believers preferred a shallow god. The timid enjoyed a rampaging avenging god. In spite of her father's eagerness, her mother warned her that savages or nonconformists would slaughter her as soon as she landed, so when Rebekka found Lina already there, waiting outside the one-room cottage her new husband had built for them, she bolted the door at night and would not let the raven-haired girl with impossible skin sleep anywhere near. 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. |
| 421 |
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. 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. |
| 422 |
Weak, pustulate, with not even a full day to mourn Jacob, her grief was fresh cut, like hay in famine. Her own death was what she should be concentrating on. She could hear its hooves clacking on the roof, could see the cloaked figure on horseback. But whenever the immediate torment subsided, her thoughts left Jacob and traveled to Patrician's matted hair, the hard, dark lump of soap she used to clean it, the rinses over and over to free every honey-brown strand from the awful blood darkening, like her mind, to black. Rebekka never looked at the coffin waiting under pelts for thaw. But when finally the earth softened, when Jacob could get traction with the spade and they let the coffin down, she sat on the ground holding on to her elbows, oblivious of the damp, and gazed at every clod and clump that fell. 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. |
| 423 |
That must have been harder. Oh, but, Miss, we sing and talk. Peacocks do not. We need to. Peacocks don't. What else do we have? Thoughts. Hands to make things. All well and good. But that's our business. Not God's. He's doing something else in the world. We are not on His mind. What is He doing then, if not watching over us? Lord knows. And they sputtered with laughter, like little girls hiding behind the stable loving the danger of their talk. She could not decide if Patrician's accident by a cloven hoof was rebuke or proof of the pudding. Now here in bed, her deft, industrious hands wrapped in cloth lest she claw herself bloody, she could not tell if she was speaking aloud or simply thinking. "I shat in a tub ... strangers ..." Sometimes they circled her bed, these strangers who were not, who had become the kind of family sea journeys create. Delirium or Lina's medicine, she supposed. But they came and offered her advice, gossiped, laughed or simply stared at her with pity. There were seven other women assigned to steerage on the Angelus. Waiting to board, their backs turned against the breeze that cut from sea to port, they shivered among boxes, bailiffs, upper-deck passengers, carts, horses, guards, satchels and weeping children. Finally, when lower-deck passengers were called to board, and their name, home county and occupation were recorded, four or five women said they were servants. Rebekka learned otherwise soon enough, soon as they were separated from males and the better-classed women and led to a dark space below next to the animal stalls. Light and weather streamed from a hatch; a tub for waste sat beside a keg of cider; a basket and a rope where food could be let down and the basket retrieved. Anyone taller than five feet hunched and lowered her head to move around. Crawling was easier once, like street vagrants, they partitioned off their personal space. The range of baggage, clothes, speech and attitude spoke clearly of who they were long before their confessions. |
| 424 |
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. And the cutpurse was the niece of another one who taught and refined her skills. Together they lightened the journey; made it less hideous than it surely would have been without them. Their alehouse wit, their know-how laced with their low expectations of others and high levels of self-approval, their quick laughter, amused and encouraged Rebekka. If she had feared her own female vulnerability, traveling alone to a foreign country to wed a stranger, these women corrected her misgivings. If ever night moths fluttered in her chest at the recollection of her mother's predictions, the company of these exiled, thrown-away women eliminated them. Dorothea, with whom she became most friendly, was especially helpful. With exaggerated sighs and mild curses they sorted their possessions and appropriated territory no bigger than a doorstep. When under direct questioning, Rebekka admitted she was to be wed and, yes, for the first time, Dorothea laughed and announced the find to everyone in earshot. |
| 425 |
It was true; they never met again, except for those bedside visits Rebekka conjured up. He was bigger than she imagined. All the men she had known were small, hardened but small. Mr. Vaark (it took some time before she could say Jacob) picked up both of her boxes after touching her face and smiling. "You took off your hat and smiled. Smiled and smiled." Rebekka thought she was answering the grin of her new husband, but her parched lips barely moved as she entered the scene of their first meeting. She had the impression, then, that this was what his whole life had been about: meeting her at long last, so obvious was his relief and satisfaction. Following him, feeling the disabling resilience of land after weeks at sea, she tripped on the wooden walk and tore the hem of her frock. He did not turn around so she grabbed a fistful of skirt, clutched her bedding under her arm and trotted along to the wagon, refusing the hand he offered to help her mount. It was seal and deal. He would offer her no pampering. She would not accept it if he did. A perfect equation for the work that lay ahead. "Marriages performed within," read the sign next to the coffeehouse door, and underneath in small letters a verse that combined warning with sales pitch: "When lawless lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin." Old and not quite sober, the cleric was nevertheless quick. Within minutes they were back in the wagon steeped in anticipation of a fresh bountiful life. He seemed shy at first, so she thought he had not lived with eight people in a single room garret; had not grown so familiar with small cries of passion at dawn that they were like the songs of peddlers. It was nothing like what Dorothea had described or the acrobatics that made Lydia hoot, nor like the quick and angry couplings of her parents. Instead she felt not so much taken as urged. "My northern star," he called her. They settled into the long learning of one another: preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on. |
| 426 |
The weak religious tendencies that riled Rebekka's mother were of no interest to him. He was indifferent, having himself withstood all pressure to join the village congregation but content to let her be persuaded if she chose. After some initial visits and Rebekka choosing not to continue, his satisfaction was plain. They leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency. Or so they believed. For there would be children, of course. And there were. Following Patrician, each time Rebekka gave birth, she forgot the previous nursing interrupted long before weaning time. Forgot breasts still leaking, or nipples prematurely caked and too tender for underclothes. Forgot, too, how rapid the trip from crib to coffin could be. As the sons died and the years passed, Jacob became convinced the farm was sustainable but not profitable. He began to trade and travel. His returns, however, were joyful times, full of news and amazing sights: the anger, loud and lethal, of townspeople when a pastor was shot dead off his horse by warriors of a local tribe; a shop's shelves stacked with bolts of silk in colors he saw only in nature; a freebooter tied to a plank on his way to the gallows cursing his captors in three languages; a butcher thrashed for selling diseased meat; the eerie sounds of choirs drifting in Sunday rain. Tales of his journeys excited her, but also intensified her view of a disorderly, threatening world out there, protection from which he alone could provide. If on occasion he brought her young, untrained help, he also brought home gifts. A better chopping knife, a hobbyhorse for Patrician. It was some time before she noticed how the tales were fewer and the gifts increasing, gifts that were becoming less practical, even whimsical. A silver tea service which was put away immediately; a porcelain chamber pot quickly chipped by indiscriminate use; a heavily worked hairbrush for hair he only saw in bed. A hat here, a lace collar there. Four yards of silk. |
| 427 |
Well, she thought, that was the true value of Job's comforters. He lay wracked with pain and in moral despair; they told him about themselves, and when he felt even worse, he got an answer from God saying, Who on earth do you think you are? Question me? Let me give you a hint of who I am and what I know. For a moment Job must have longed for the self-interested musings of humans as vulnerable and misguided as he was. But a peek into Divine knowledge was less important than gaining, at last, the Lord's attention. Which, Rebekka concluded, was all Job ever wanted. Not proof of His existence — he never questioned that. 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. |
| 428 |
Those women seemed flat to her, convinced they were innocent and therefore free; safe because churched; tough because still alive. 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. Her skin would flush, then chill. Sound would return eventually, but the loneliness might remain for days. Until, in the middle of it, he would ride up shouting, "Where's my star?" "Here in the north," she'd reply and he would toss a bolt of calico at her feet or hand her a packet of needles. Best of all were the times when he would take out his pipe and embarrass the songbirds who believed they owned twilight. |
| 429 |
Other than her mother, no one had ever struck her. Fourteen years and she still didn't know if her mum was alive. She once received a message from a captain Jacob knew. Eighteen months after he was charged to make inquiries, he reported that her family had moved. Where, no one could say. Rising from the brook, laying her son in the warm grass while she dressed, Rebekka had wondered what her mother might look like now. Gray, stooped, wrinkled? Would the sharp pale eyes still radiate the shrewdness, the suspicion, Rebekka hated? 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. |
| 430 |
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. 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. |
| 431 |
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. 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. |
| 432 |
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? 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. |
| 433 |
This is a place that remembers the burning of itself. New grass is underfoot, deep, thick, tender as lamb's wool. I stoop to touch it and remember how Lina loves to unravel my hair. It makes her laugh, saying it is proof I am in truth a lamb. And you, I ask her. A horse she answers and tosses her mane. It is hours I walk this sunny field, my thirst so loud I am faint. Beyond I see a light wood of birch and apple trees. The shade in there is green with young leaves. Bird talk is everyplace. I am eager to enter because water may be there. I stop. I hear hoofbeats. From among the trees riders clop toward me. All male, all native, all young. Some look younger than me. None have saddles on their horses. None. I marvel at that and the glare of their skin but I have fear of them too. They rein in close. They circle. They smile. I am shaking. They wear soft shoes but their horses are not shod and the hair of both boys and horses is long and free like Lina's. They talk words I don't know and laugh. One pokes his fingers in his mouth, in out, in out. Others laugh more. Him too. Then he lifts his head high, opens wide his mouth and directs his thumb to his lips. I drop to my knees in misery and fright. He dismounts and comes close. I smell the perfume of his hair. His eyes are slant, not big and round like Lina's. He grins while removing a pouch hanging from a cord across his chest. He holds it out to me but I am too trembling to reach so he drinks from it and offers it again. I want it am dying for it but I cannot move. What I am able to do is make my mouth wide. He steps closer and pours the water as I gulp it. One of the others says baa baa baa like a goat kid and they all laugh and slap their legs. The one pouring closes his pouch and after watching me wipe my chin returns it to his shoulder. Then he reaches into a belt hanging from his waist and draws out a dark strip, hands it to me, chomping his teeth. It looks like leather but I take it. As soon as I do he runs and leaps on his horse. |
| 434 |
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. 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. |
| 435 |
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? 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. |
| 436 |
They fence the meadow because they want the manure and not a quarrel with neighbors. Mistress says Sir says grazing will soon die in the meadow so he has other business because farming will never be enough in these parts. Black flies alone will kill all hope for it if marauding wildlife does not. Farms live or die by the desire of insects or on the whim of weather. I see a path and enter. It leads to a narrow bridge past a mill wheel poised in a stream. The creaking wheel and rushing water are what shape the quiet. Hens sleep and dogs forbidden. I hurry down the bank and lap from the stream. The water tastes like candle wax. I spit out the bits of straw that come with each swallow and make my way back to the path. I need shelter. The sun is setting itself. I notice two cottages. Both have windows but no lamp shines through. There are more that resemble small barns that can accept the day's light only through open doors. None is open. There is no cooksmoke in the air. I am thinking everyone has gone off. Then I see a tiny steeple on a hill beyond the village and am certain the people are at evening prayer. I decide to knock on the door of the largest house, the one that will have a servant inside. Moving toward it I look over my shoulder and see a light farther on. It is in the single lit house in the village so I choose to go there. Stones interfere at each step rubbing the sealing wax hard into my sole. Rain starts. Soft. It should smell sweet with the flavor of the sycamores it has crossed, but it has a burn smell, like pinfeathers singed before boiling a fowl. Soon as I knock a woman opens the door. She is much taller than Mistress or Lina and has green eyes. The rest of her is a brown frock and a white cap. Red hair edges it. She is suspicious and holds up her hand, palm out, as though I might force my way in. Who hath sent you she asks. I say please. I say I am alone. No one sends me. Shelter calls me here. She looks behind me left and right and asks if I have no protection, no companion? |
| 437 |
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. You must excuse me, she says, but there is some danger about. What danger I ask. Evil, she says, but you must never mind. I try to eat slowly and fail. Sopping hard bread into lovely, warm barley porridge, I don't lift my head except to say thank you when she ladles more into my bowl. She places a handful of raisins next to it. We are in a good-size room with fireplace, table, stools and two sleeping places, a box bed and a pallet. There are two closed doors to other parts and a closet-looking place, a niche, at the rear where jugs and bowls are. When my hunger is quiet enough I notice a girl lying in the straw of the box bed. Under her head is a blanket roll. One of her eyes looks away, the other is as straight and unwavering as a she-wolf's. Both are black as coal, not at all like the Widow's. I don't think I should begin any words so I keep eating and wait for the girl or the Widow to say something. At the foot of her bed is a basket. A kid lies there too sick to raise its head or make a sound. When I finish the food down to the last raisin the Widow asks what is my purpose traveling alone. I tell her my mistress is sending me on an errand. She turns her lips down saying it must be vital to risk a female's life in these parts. My mistress is dying I say. My errand can save her. She frowns and looks toward the fireplace. Not from the first death, she says. Perhaps from the second. I don't understand her meaning. I know there is only one death not two and many lives beyond it. Remember the owls in daylight? |
| 438 |
You never tell me that and it is a good thing to know. If my mother is not dead she can be teaching me these things. I believe I am the only one who falls asleep and I wake in shame because outside the animals are already lowing. Tiny baas come from the kid as the Widow picks it up in her arms and takes it outside to nurse the dam. When she returns she unshutters both windows and leaves the door wide open. Two geese waddle in followed by a strutting hen. Another flies through a window joining the search for scraps. I ask permission to use the commode behind a hempen curtain. As I finish and step out I see Daughter Jane holding her face in her hands while the Widow freshens the leg wounds. New strips of blood gleam among the dry ones. A goat steps in and moves toward the straw nibbling nibbling while Daughter Jane whimpers. After the bloodwork is done to her satisfaction the Widow pushes the goat out the door. At table for a breakfast of clabber and bread the Widow and Daughter Jane put their palms together, bow their heads and murmur. I do likewise, whispering the prayer Reverend Father taught me to say morning and night my mother repeating with me. Pater Noster... At the end I raise my hand to touch my forehead and catch Daughter Jane's frown. She shakes her head meaning no. So I pretend I am adjusting my cap. The Widow spoons jam onto the clabber and we two eat. Daughter Jane refuses so we eat what she will not. Afterwards the Widow goes to the fireplace and swings the kettle over the fire. I take the bowls and spoons from the table to the closet where a basin of water sits on a narrow bench. I rinse and wipe each piece carefully. The air is tight. Water rises to a boil in the kettle hanging in the fireplace. I turn and see its steam forming shapes as it curls against the stone. One shape looks like the head of a dog. We all hear footsteps climbing the path. I am still busy in the closet, and although I cannot see who enters, I hear the talk. The Widow offers the visitors seating. |
| 439 |
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. 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. |
| 440 |
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. 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. |
| 441 |
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. 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. |
| 442 |
I say thank you and lift her hand to kiss it. She says no, I thank you. They look at you and forget about me. She kisses my forehead then watches as I step down into the stream's dry bed. I turn and look up at her. Are you a demon I ask her. Her wayward eye is steady. She smiles. Yes, she says. Oh, yes. Go now. I walk alone except for the eyes that join me on my journey. Eyes that do not recognize me, eyes that examine me for a tail, an extra teat, a man's whip between my legs. Wondering eyes that stare and decide if my navel is in the right place if my knees bend backward like the forelegs of a dog. They want to see if my tongue is split like a snake's or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know if I can spring out of the darkness and bite. Inside I am shrinking. I climb the streambed under watching trees and know I am not the same. I am losing something with every step I take. I can feel the drain. Something precious is leaving me. I am a thing apart. With the letter I belong and am lawful. Without it I am a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no telltale signs but a darkness I am born with, outside, yes, but inside as well and the inside dark is small, feathered and toothy. Is that what my mother knows? Why she chooses me to live without? Not the outside dark we share, a minha mae and me, but the inside one we don't. Is this dying mine alone? Is the clawing feathery thing the only life in me? You will tell me. You have the outside dark as well. And when I see you and fall into you I know I am live. Sudden it is not like before when I am always in fright. I am not afraid of anything now. The sun's going leaves darkness behind and the dark is me. Is we. Is my home. She did not mind when they called her Sorrow so long as Twin kept using her real name. It was easy to be confused. Sometimes it was the housewife or the sawyer or the sons who needed her; other times Twin wanted company to talk or walk or play. Having two names was convenient since Twin couldn't be seen by anybody else. |
| 443 |
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. The bits of dead fish they ate intensified their thirst which they forgot at the sight of two bodies rocking in the surf. It was the bloat and sway that made them incautious enough to wade away from the rocks into a lagoon just when the tide was coming in. Both were swept out to deep water; both treaded as long as they could until the cold overcame their senses and they swam not landward, but toward the horizon. Very good luck, for they entered a neap rushing headlong toward shore and into a river beyond. Sorrow woke up naked under a blanket, with a warm wet cloth on her forehead. |
| 444 |
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. 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. "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. |
| 445 |
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. 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. |
| 446 |
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. 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. |
| 447 |
The constant breeze of their fans summoned sail wind and Captain, the tiller in his hand. She heard him before she saw him. Laughing. Loud, raucous. No. Not laughing. Screaming. Along with the others. High-pitched and low, the screams were far away, on the other side of the white clouds surrounding her. Horses, too. Pounding hooves. Freed from below. Leaping over sacks of grain and kicking barrels until the staves broke and a thick sweet blackness poured out. Still, she could not move or tear through the clouds. Pushing, pushing, she fell to the floor while the clouds covered and smothered her whole self, convincing her the screams belonged to gulls. When she came to, eyes, the shape and color of her own, greeted her. The puffy clouds, mere threads now, drifted away. "I'm here," said the girl with a face matching her own exactly. "I'm always here." With Twin she was less afraid and the two began to search the silent, listing ship. Slowly, slowly. Peeking here, listening there, finding nothing except a bonnet and seagulls pecking the remains of a colt. Under the waving fan, drenched in sweat, Sorrow remembered freezing day after day on the ship. Other than icy wind, nothing stirred. Aft was the sea, fore a rocky beach below a cliff of stone and brush. Sorrow had never set foot on land and was terrified of leaving ship for shore. It was as foreign to her as ocean was to sheep. Twin made it possible. When they descended, the earth — mean, hard, thick, hateful — shocked her. That's when she understood Captain's choice to keep her aboard. He reared her not as a daughter but as a sort of crewman-to-be. Dirty, trousered, both wild and obedient with one important skill, patching and sewing sailcloth. Mistress and Lina quarreled with the blacksmith about whether she should be forced to eat or drink, but he ruled, insisting she have nothing. Riveted by that hot knife and blood medicine, they deferred. Fanning and vinegar-soaked boils only. At the close of the third day, Sorrow's fever broke and she begged for water. |
| 448 |
The smithy held her head as she sipped from a dried squash gourd. Raising her eyes, she saw Twin seated in the branches above the hammock, smiling. Soon Sorrow said she was hungry. Bit by bit, under the smithy's care and Florens' nursing, the boils shriveled, the welts disappeared and her strength returned. Now their judgment was clear: the blacksmith was a savior. Lina, however, became truly ugly in her efforts to keep Florens away from the patient and the healer, muttering that she had seen this sickness before when she was a child, and that it would spread like mold to them all. But she lost the battle with Florens. By the time Sorrow recovered, Florens was struck down with another sickness much longer lasting and far more lethal. It was while lying in the meadow at the forest's edge, listening to Twin tell a favorite story, the one about a school of fish girls with pearls for eyes and green-black locks of seaweed hair racing one another, riding the backs of a fleet of whales, that Sorrow first saw the smithy and Florens coiled around each other. Twin had just gotten to the part where seabirds, excited by the foam trailing the fleet like shooting stars, were joining the race, when Sorrow put a finger to her lips and pointed with another. Twin stopped speaking and looked. The blacksmith and Florens were rocking and, unlike female farm animals in heat, she was not standing quietly under the weight and thrust of the male. What Sorrow saw yonder in the grass under a hickory tree was not the silent submission to the slow goings behind a pile of wood or a hurried one in a church pew that Sorrow knew. This here female stretched, kicked her heels and whipped her head left, right, to, fro. It was a dancing. Florens rolled and twisted from her back to his. He hoisted her up against the hickory; she bent her head into his shoulder. A dancing. Horizontal one minute, another minute vertical. Sorrow watched until it was over; until, stumbling like tired old people, they dressed themselves. |
| 449 |
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. Twin's absence was hardly noticed as she concentrated on her daughter. Instantly, she knew what to name her. Knew also what to name herself. Two days came and went. Lina hid her disgust with Sorrow and her anxiety about Florens under a mask of calm. Mistress said nothing about the baby, but sent for a Bible and forbade anyone to enter the new house. At one point, Sorrow, prompted by the legitimacy of her new status as a mother, was bold enough to remark to her Mistress, "It was good that the blacksmith came to help when you were dying." Mistress stared at her. "Ninny," she answered. "God alone cures. No man has such power." There had always been tangled strings among them. Now they were cut. Each woman embargoed herself; spun her own web of thoughts unavailable to anyone else. |
| 450 |
It was as though, with or without Florens, they were falling away from one another. Twin was gone, traceless and unmissed by the only person who knew her. Sorrow's wandering stopped too. Now she attended routine duties, organizing them around her infant's needs, impervious to the complaints of others. She had looked into her daughter's eyes; saw in them the gray glisten of a winter sea while a ship sailed by-the-lee. "I am your mother," she said. "My name is Complete." My journey to you is hard and long and the hurt of it is gone as soon as I see the yard, the forge, the little cabin where you are. I lose the fear that I may never again in this world know the sight of your welcoming smile or taste the sugar of your shoulder as you take me in your arms. 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. |
| 451 |
No one knows who is the dead man and nothing in his belongings can tell. You accept him until a future when a townsman or magistrate places him, which may be never because although the dead man's skin is rosy the boy's is not. So maybe he is not a son at all. My mouth goes dry as I wonder if you want him to be yours. I worry as the boy steps closer to you. How you offer and he owns your forefinger. As if he is your future. Not me. I am not liking how his eyes go when you send him to play in the yard. But then you bathe my journey from my face and arms and give me stew. It needs salt. The pieces of rabbit are thick and tender. My hunger is sharp but my happiness is more. I cannot eat much. We talk of many things and I don't say what I am thinking. That I will stay. That when you return from healing Mistress whether she is live or no I am here with you always. Never never without you. Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me. I am calm when you leave although you do not touch me close. Or put your mouth to mine. You saddle up and ask me to water the bean shoots and collect the eggs. I go there but the hens make nothing so I know a minha mae is coming soon. The boy Malaik is near. He sleeps behind the door to where you do. I am calm, quiet, knowing you are very soon here again. I take off Sir's boots and lie on your cot trying to catch the fire smell of you. Slices of starlight cut through the shutters. A minha mae leans at the door holding her little boy's hand, my shoes in her pocket. As always she is trying to tell me something. I tell her to go and when she fades I hear a small creaking. In the dark I know he is there. Eyes big, wondering and cold. I rise and come to him and ask what. |
| 452 |
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. 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. |
| 453 |
Where does it go I wonder. The wind dies down. My heartbeat joins the sound of mice feet. In the morning the boy is not here but I prepare porridge for us two. Again he is standing in the lane holding tight the corn-husk doll and looking toward where you ride away. Sudden looking at him I am remembering the dog's profile rising from Widow Ealing's kettle. Then I cannot read its full meaning. Now I know how. I am guarding. Otherwise I am missing all understanding of how to protect myself. First I notice Sir's boots are gone. I look all around, stepping through the cabin, the forge, in cinder and in pain of my tender feet. Bits of metal score and bite them. I look and see the curl of a garden snake edging toward the threshold. I watch its slow crawl until it is dead in the sunlight. I touch your anvil. It is cool and scraped smooth but it sings the heat it lives for. I never find Sir's boots. Carefully, on my toes I go back into the cabin and wait. The boy quits the lane. He comes in but will neither eat nor talk. We stare at each other across the table. He does not blink. Nor me. I know he steals Sir's boots that belong to me. His fingers cling the doll. I think that must be where his power is. I take it away and place it on a shelf too high for him to reach. He screams screams. Tears falling. On bleeding feet I run outside to keep from hearing. He is not stopping. Is not. A cart goes by. The couple in it glance but do not greet or pause. Finally the boy is silent and I go back in. 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. |
| 454 |
He screams screams then faints. A little blood comes from his mouth hitting the table corner. Only a little. He drops into fainting just as I hear you shout. I don't hear your horse only your shout and know I am lost because your shout is not my name. Not me. Him. Malaik you shout. Malaik. Seeing him still and limp on the floor with that trickle of red from his mouth your face breaks down. You knock me away shouting what are you doing? shouting where is your ruth? With such tenderness you lift him, the boy. When you see the angle of his arm you cry out. The boy opens his eyes then faints once more when you twist it back into its proper place. Yes, there is blood. A little. But you are not there when it comes, so how do you know I am the reason? Why do you knock me away without certainty of what is true? You see the boy down and believe bad about me without question. You are correct but why no question of it? I am first to get the knocking away. The back of your hand strikes my face. I fall and curl up on the floor. Tight. No question. You choose the boy. You call his name first. You take him to lie down with the doll and return to me your broken face, eyes without glee, rope pumps in your neck. I am lost. No word of sorrow for knocking me off my feet. No tender fingers to touch where you hurt me. I cower. I hold down the feathers lifting. Your Mistress recovers you say. You say you will hire someone to take me to her. Away from you. Each word that follows cuts. Why are you killing me I ask you. I want you to go. Let me explain. No. Now. Why? Why? Because you are a slave. What? You heard me. Sir makes me that. I don't mean him. Then who? You. What is your meaning? I am a slave because Sir trades for me. No. You have become one. How? Your head is empty and your body is wild. I am adoring you. And a slave to that too. You alone own me. Own yourself, woman, and leave us be. You could have killed this child. No. Wait. You put me in misery. You are nothing but wilderness. |
| 455 |
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. 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. |
| 456 |
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. 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. |
| 457 |
Early on in his post, he had run away twice, only to be caught in a tavern yard and given a further extension of his term. An even greater improvement in his social life began when Vaark decided to build a great house. Again, he was part of a crew of laborers, skilled and not, and when the blacksmith came, things got more and more interesting. Not only was the house grand and its enclosure impressive, its gate was spectacular. Sir wanted fancy work on both panels, but the smithy persuaded him no. The result was three-foot-high lines of vertical bars capped with a simple pyramid shape. Neatly these iron bars led to the gate each side of which was crowned by a flourish of thick vines. Or so he thought. Looking more closely he saw the gilded vines were actually serpents, scales and all, but ending not in fangs but flowers. When the gate was opened, each one separated its petals from the other. When closed, the blossoms merged. He admired the smith and his craft. A view that lasted until the day he saw money pass from Vaark's hand to the blacksmith's. The clink of silver was as unmistakable as its gleam. He knew Vaark was getting rich from rum investments, but learning the blacksmith was being paid for his work, like the men who delivered building materials, unlike the men he worked with in Virginia, roiled Willard, and he, encouraging Scully, refused any request the black man made. Refused to chop chestnut, haul charcoal or work bellows and "forgot" to shield green lumber from rain. Vaark chastised them both into sullen accommodation, but it was the smithy himself who calmed Willard down. Willard had two shirts, one with a collar, the other more of a rag. On the morning he slipped in fresh dung and split the shirt all the way down its back, he changed into the good collared one. Arriving at the site, he caught the blacksmith's eye, then his nod, then his thumb pointing straight up as if to signal approval. Willard never knew whether he was being made fun of or complimented. |
| 458 |
But when the smithy said, "Mr. Bond. Good morning," it tickled him. Virginia bailiffs, constables, small children, preachers — none had ever considered calling him mister, nor did he expect them to. He knew his rank, but did not know the lift that small courtesy allowed him. Joke or not, that first time was not the last because the smithy never failed to address him so. Although he was still rankled by the status of a free African versus himself, there was nothing he could do about it. No law existed to defend indentured labor against them. Yet the smithy had charm and he did so enjoy being called mister. Chuckling to himself, Willard understood why the girl, Florens, was struck silly by the man. He probably called her miss or lady when they met in the wood for suppertime foolery. That would excite her, he thought, if she needed any more than just the black man's grin. "In all my born days," he told Scully, "I never saw anything like it. He takes her when and where he wants and she hunts him like a she-wolf if he's not in her eye. If he's off at his bloomery for a day or two, she sulks till he comes back hauling the blooms of ore. Makes Sorrow look like a Quaker." Only a few years older than Florens, Scully was less bewildered by the sharp change in her demeanor than Willard was. He thought of himself as an astute judge of character, felt he, unlike Willard, had a wily, sureshot instinct for the true core of others. Willard judged people from their outside: Scully looked deeper. Although he relished Lina's nakedness, he saw a purity in her. Her loyalty, he believed, was not submission to Mistress or Florens; it was a sign of her own self-worth — a sort of keeping one's word. Honor, perhaps. And while he joined Willard in making fun of Sorrow, Scully preferred her over the other two servants. If he had been interested in seduction, that's who he would have chosen: the look of her was daunting, complicated, distant. The unblinking eyes, smoke gray, were not blank, but waiting. |
| 459 |
It was that lying-in-wait look that troubled Lina. Everyone but himself thought she was daft because she talked out loud when alone, but who didn't? Willard issued greetings to ewes regularly and Mistress always chatted directions to herself while at some solitary task. And Lina — she answered birds as if they were asking her advice on how to fly. To dismiss Sorrow as "the odd one" ignored her quick and knowing sense of her position. Her privacy protected her; her easy coupling a present to herself. When pregnant, she glowed and when her time came she sought help in exactly the right place from the right people. On the other hand, if he had been interested in rape, Florens would have been his prey. It was easy to spot that combination of defenselessness, eagerness to please and, most of all, a willingness to blame herself for the meanness of others. Clearly, from the look of her now, that was no longer true. The instant he saw her marching down the road — whether ghost or soldier — he knew she had become untouchable. His assessment of her un-rape-ability, however, was impersonal. Other than a voyeur's obsession with Lina's body, Scully had no carnal interest in females. Long ago the world of men and only men had stamped him and from the first moment he saw him he never had any doubt what effect the blacksmith would have on Florens. 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. |
| 460 |
What both husband and wife had enjoyed, even celebrated, she now despised as signs of both the third and seventh sins. However well she loved the man in life, his leaving her behind blasted her. How could she not look for some way to wreak a bit of vengeance, show him how bad she felt and how angry? In his twenty-two years, Scully had witnessed far more human folly than Willard. By the time he was twelve he had been schooled, loved and betrayed by an Anglican curate. He had been leased to the Synod by his so-called father following his mother's death on the floor of the tavern she worked in. The barkeep claimed three years of Scully's labor to work off her indebtedness, but the "father" appeared, paid the balance due and sold his son's services, along with two casks of Spanish wine, to the Synod. Scully never blamed the curate for betrayal nor for the flogging that followed, since the curate had to turn the circumstances of their being caught into the boy's lasciviousness, otherwise he would be not just defrocked but executed. Agreeing that Scully was too young to be permanently incorrigible, the elders passed him along to a landowner who needed a hand to work with a herdsman far away. A rural area, barely populated, where, they hoped, the boy might at best mend his ways or at worst have no opportunity to corrupt others. Scully anticipated running away as soon as he arrived in the region. But on the third day a violent winter storm froze and covered the land in three feet of snow. Cows died standing. Ice-coated starlings clung to branches drooping with snow. Willard and he slept in the barn among the sheep and cattle housed there, leaving the ones they could not rescue on their own. There in the warmth of animals, their own bodies clinging together, Scully altered his plans and Willard didn't mind at all. Although the older man liked drink, Scully, having slept beneath the bar of a tavern his whole childhood and seen its effects on his mother, avoided it. He decided to bide his time until, given the freedom fee, he was able to buy a horse. |
| 461 |
The carriage or cart or wagon drawn were not superior to the horse mounted. Anyone limited to walking everywhere never seemed to get anywhere. As the years slid by he remained mentally feisty while practicing patience, even as his hopes were beginning to dim. Then Jacob Vaark died and his widow relied on himself and Willard so much, she paid them. In four months he had already accumulated sixteen shillings. Four pounds, maybe less, would secure a horse. And when the freedom fee — goods or crop or coin equaling twenty-five pounds (or was it ten?) — was added on, the years of peonage would have been worth it. He did not want to spend his life just searching for something to eat and love. Meanwhile he did nothing to disturb Mistress Vaark or give her any cause to dismiss him. He was unnerved when Willard prophesied quick marriage for her. A new husband handling the farm could make very different arrangements, arrangements that did not include him. The opportunity to work for and among women gave both him and Willard advantage. However many females there were, however diligent, they did not fell sixty-foot trees, build pens, repair saddles, slaughter or butcher beef, shoe a horse or hunt. So while he watched the disaffection Mistress spread, he did all he could to please her. When she beat Sorrow, had Lina's hammock taken down, advertised the sale of Florens, he cringed inside but said nothing. Not only because it was not his place, but also because he was determined to be quit of servitude forever, and for that, money was a guarantee. 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. |
| 462 |
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. 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. |
| 463 |
I have no kicking heart no home no tomorrow. I walk the day. I walk the night. The feathers close. For now. It is three months since I run from you and I never before see leaves make this much blood and brass. Color so loud it hurts the eye and for relief I must stare at the heavens high above the tree line. At night when day-bright gives way to stars jeweling the cold black sky, I leave Lina sleeping and come to this room. If you are live or ever you heal you will have to bend down to read my telling, crawl perhaps in a few places. I apologize for the discomfort. Sometimes the tip of the nail skates away and the forming of words is disorderly. Reverend Father never likes that. He raps our fingers and makes us do it over. In the beginning when I come to this room I am certain the telling will give me the tears I never have. I am wrong. Eyes dry, I stop telling only when the lamp burns down. Then I sleep among my words. The telling goes on without dream and when I wake it takes time to pull away, leave this room and do chores. Chores that are making no sense. We clean the chamber pot but are never to use it. We build tall crosses for the graves in the meadow then remove them, cut them shorter and put them back. We clean where Sir dies but cannot be anywhere else in this house. Spiders reign in comfort here and robins make nests in peace. All manner of small life enters the windows along with cutting wind. I shelter lamp flame with my body and bear the wind's cold teeth biting as though winter cannot wait to bury us. Mistress is not mindful of how cold the outhouses are nor is she remembering what night chill does to an infant. Mistress has cure but she is not well. Her heart is infidel. All smiles are gone. Each time she returns from the meetinghouse her eyes are nowhere and have no inside. Like the eyes of the women who examine me behind the closet door, Mistress' eyes only look out and what she is seeing is not to her liking. Her dress is dark and quiet. She prays much. |
| 464 |
She makes us all, Lina, Sorrow, Sorrow's daughter and me, no matter the weather, sleep either in the cowshed or the storeroom where bricks rope tools all manner of building waste are. Outside sleeping is for savages she says, so no more hammocks under trees for Lina and me even in fine weather. And no more fireplace for Sorrow and her baby girl because Mistress does not like the baby. One night of ice-cold rain Sorrow shelters herself and the baby here, downstairs behind the door in the room where Sir dies. Mistress slaps her face. Many times. She does not know I am here every night else she will whip me too as she believes her piety demands. Her churchgoing alters her but I don't believe they tell her to behave that way. These rules are her own and she is not the same. Scully and Willard say she is putting me up for sale. But not Lina. Sorrow she wants to give away but no one offers to take her. Sorrow is a mother. Nothing more nothing less. I like her devotion to her baby girl. She will not be called Sorrow. She has changed her name and is planning escape. She wants me to go with her but I have a thing to finish here. Worse is how Mistress is to Lina. She requires her company on the way to church but sits her by the road in all weather because she cannot enter. Lina can no longer bathe in the river and must cultivate alone. I am never hearing how they once talk and laugh together while tending garden. Lina is wanting to tell me, remind me that she early warns me about you. But her reasons for the warning make the warning itself wrong. I am remembering what you tell me from long ago when Sir is not dead. You say you see slaves freer than free men. One is a lion in the skin of an ass. The other is an ass in the skin of a lion. That it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild. I know my withering is born in the Widow's closet. I know the claws of the feathered thing did break out on you because I cannot stop them wanting to tear you open the way you tear me. |
| 465 |
Still, there is another thing. A lion who thinks his mane is all. A she-lion who does not. I learn this from Daughter Jane. Her bloody legs do not stop her. She risks. Risks all to save the slave you throw out. There is no more room in this room. These words cover the floor. From now you will stand to hear me. The walls make trouble because lamplight is too small to see by. I am holding light in one hand and carving letters with the other. My arms ache but I have need to tell you this. I cannot tell it to anyone but you. I am near the door and at the closing now. What will I do with my nights when the telling stops? Dreaming will not come again. Sudden I am remembering. You won't read my telling. You read the world but not the letters of talk. You don't know how to. Maybe one day you will learn. If so, come to this farm again, part the snakes in the gate you made, enter this big, awing house, climb the stairs and come inside this talking room in daylight. If you never read this, no one will. These careful words, closed up and wide open, will talk to themselves. Round and round, side to side, bottom to top, top to bottom all across the room. Or. Or perhaps no. Perhaps these words need the air that is out in the world. Need to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth. 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. |
| 466 |
Yours are rising too soon and are becoming irritated by the cloth covering your little girl chest. And they see and I see them see. No good follows even if I offered you to one of the boys in the quarter. Figo. You remember him. He was the gentle one with the horses and played with you in the yard. I saved the rinds for him and sweet bread to take to the others. Bess, his mother, knew my mind and did not disagree. She watched over her son like a hawk as I did over you. But it never does any lasting good, my love. There was no protection. None. Certainly not with your vice for shoes. It was as though you were hurrying up your breasts and hurrying also the lips of an old married couple. Understand me. There was no protection and nothing in the catechism to tell them no. I tried to tell Reverend Father. I hoped if we could learn letters somehow someday you could make your way. Reverend Father was full of kindness and bravery and said it was what God wanted no matter if they fined him, imprisoned him or hunted him down with gunfire for it as they did other priests who taught we to read. He believed we would love God more if we knew the letters to read by. I don't know that. What I know is there is magic in learning. When the tall man with yellow hair came to dine, I saw he hated the food and I saw things in his eyes that said he did not trust Senhor, Senhora or their sons. His way, I thought, is another way. His country far from here. There was no animal in his heart. He never looked at me the way Senhor does. He did not want. I don't know who is your father. It was too dark to see any of them. They came at night and took we three including Bess to a curing shed. Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in. There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below. Insults had been moving back and forth to and fro for many seasons between the king of we families and the king of others. |
| 467 |
I think men thrive on insults over cattle, women, water, crops. Everything heats up and finally the men of their families burn we houses and collect those they cannot kill or find for trade. Bound with vine one to another we are moved four times, each time more trading, more culling, more dying. We increase in number or we decrease in number until maybe seven times ten or ten times ten of we are driven into a holding pen. There we see men we believe are ill or dead. We soon learn they are neither. Their skin was confusing. The men guarding we and selling we are black. Two have hats and strange pieces of cloth at their throats. They assure we that the whitened men do not want to eat we. Still it is the continue of all misery. Sometimes we sang. Some of we fought. Mostly we slept or wept. Then the whitened men divided we and placed we in canoes. We come to a house made to float on the sea. Each water, river or sea, has sharks under. The whitened ones guarding we like that as much as the sharks are happy to have a plentiful feeding place. I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles. When the canoe heeled, some of we jumped, others were pulled under and we did not see their blood swirl until we alive ones were retrieved and placed under guard. We are put into the house that floats on the sea and we saw for the first time rats and it was hard to figure out how to die. Some of we tried; some of we did. Refusing to eat the oiled yam. Strangling we throat. Offering we bodies to the sharks that follow all the way night and day. I know it was their pleasure to freshen us with a lash but I also saw it was their pleasure to lash their own. Unreason rules here. Who lives who dies? Who could tell in that moaning and bellowing in the dark, in the awfulness? It is one matter to live in your own waste; it is another to live in another's. Barbados, I heard them say. After times and times of puzzle about why I could not die as others did. |
| 468 |
In those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the narrow mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains past Baramulla and Gulmarg. In those days travellers were not shot as spies if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Englishmen's houseboats on the lake, the valley had hardly changed since the Mughal Empire, for all its springtime renewals; but my grandfather's eyes — which were, like the rest of him, twenty-five years old — saw things differently ... 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. |
| 469 |
The ground felt deceptively soft under his feet and made him simultaneously uncertain and unwary. "In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful ..." — the exordium, spoken with hands joined before him like a book, comforted a part of him, made another, larger part feel uneasy — "... Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Creation ..." — but now Heidelberg invaded his head; here was Ingrid, briefly his Ingrid, her face scorning him for this Mecca-turned parroting; here, their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies — "... The Compassionate, the Merciful, King of the Last Judgment! ..." — Heidelberg, in which, along with medicine and politics, he learned that India — like radium — had been "discovered" by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors — "... You alone we worship, and to You alone we pray for help ..." — so here he was, despite their presence in his head, attempting to reunite himself with an earlier self which ignored their influence but knew everything it ought to have known, about submission for example, about what he was doing now, as his hands, guided by old memories, fluttered upwards, thumbs pressed to ears, fingers spread, as he sank to his knees — "... Guide us to the straight path, The path of those whom You have favored ..." But it was no good, he was caught in a strange middle ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and this was only a charade after all — "... 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. |
| 470 |
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 ... 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 ... |
| 471 |
this, too, was customary. Watch how the old boatman, Tai, makes good time through the misty water, standing stooped over at the back of his craft! How his oar, a wooden heart on a yellow stick, drives jerkily through the weeds! In these parts he's considered very odd because he rows standing up ... among other reasons. Tai, bringing an urgent summons to Doctor Aziz, is about to set history in motion ... while Aadam, looking down into the water, recalls what Tai taught him years ago: "The ice is always waiting, Aadam baba, just under the water's skin." Aadam's eyes are a clear blue, the astonishing blue of mountain sky, which has a habit of dripping into the pupils of Kashmiri men; they have not forgotten how to look. They see — there! like the skeleton of a ghost, just beneath the surface of Lake Dal! — the delicate tracery, the intricate crisscross of colorless lines, the cold waiting veins of the future. His German years, which have blurred so much else, haven't deprived him of the gift of seeing. Tai's gift. He looks up, sees the approaching V of Tai's boat, waves a greeting. Tai's arm rises — but this is a command. "Wait!" My grandfather waits; and during this hiatus, as he experiences the last peace of his life, a muddy, ominous sort of peace, I had better get round to describing him. Keeping out of my voice the natural envy of the ugly man for the strikingly impressive, I record that Doctor Aziz was a tall man. Pressed flat against a wall of his family home, he measured twenty-five bricks (a brick for each year of his life), or just over six foot two. A strong man also. His beard was thick and red — and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, "They went mad with the colors when they made your face." But the central feature of my grandfather's anatomy was neither color nor height, neither strength of arm nor straightness of back. |
| 472 |
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. 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 ... |
| 473 |
He had a vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapors from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! 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. What are five hundred chips? You see, I am a lover of culture." ... "See, my son," Aadam's mother is saying as he begins to examine her, "what a mother will not do for her child. Look how I suffer. |
| 474 |
And inside, God knows what all." Doctor Aziz, seated amongst flowery curtains and the smell of incense, has his thoughts wrenched away from the patient waiting across the lake. Tai's bitter monologue breaks into his consciousness, creating a sense of dull shock, a smell like a casualty ward overpowering the incense ... the old man is clearly furious about something, possessed by an incomprehensible rage that appears to be directed at his erstwhile acolyte, or, more precisely and oddly, at his bag. Doctor Aziz attempts to make small talk ... "Your wife is well? Do they still talk about your bag of golden teeth?" ... tries to remake an old friendship; but Tai is in full flight now, a stream of invective pouring out of him. The Heidelberg bag quakes under the torrent of abuse. "Sister-sleeping pigskin bag from Abroad full of foreigners' tricks. Big-shot bag. Now if a man breaks an arm that bag will not let the bone-setter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that bag and watch knives come and cut her open. A fine business, what these foreigners put in our young men's heads. I swear: it is a too-bad thing. That bag should fry in Hell with the testicles of the ungodly." ... Ghani the landowner snaps his braces with his thumbs. "A big chance, yes indeed. They are saying good things about you in town. Good medical training. Good ... good enough ... family. And now our own lady doctor is sick so you get your opportunity. That woman, always sick these days, too old, I am thinking, and not up in the latest developments also, what-what? I say: physician heal thyself. And I tell you this: I am wholly objective in my business relations. Feelings, love, I keep for my family only. If a person is not doing a first-class job for me, out she goes! You understand me? So: my daughter Naseem is not well. You will treat her excellently. Remember I have friends; and ill-health strikes high and low alike." ... "Do you still pickle water-snakes in brandy to give you virility, Taiji? |
| 475 |
Padma snorts. Wrist smacks against forehead. "Okay, starve starve, who cares two pice?" Another louder, conclusive snort ... but I take no exception to her attitude. She stirs a bubbling vat all day for a living; something hot and vinegary has steamed her up tonight. Thick of waist, somewhat hairy of forearm, she flounces, gesticulates, exits. Poor Padma. Things are always getting her goat. Perhaps even her name: understandably enough, since her mother told her, when she was only small, that she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation amongst village folk is "The One Who Possesses Dung." In the renewed silence, I return to sheets of paper which smell just a little of turmeric, ready and willing to put out of its misery a narrative which I left yesterday hanging in mid-air — just as Scheherazade, depending for her very survival on leaving Prince Shahryar eaten up by curiosity, used to do night after night! I'll begin at once: by revealing that my grandfather's premonitions in the corridor were not without foundation. In the succeeding months and years, he fell under what I can only describe as the sorcerer's spell of that enormous — and as yet unstained — perforated cloth. "Again?" Aadam's mother said, rolling her eyes. "I tell you, my child, that girl is so sickly from too much soft living only. Too much sweetmeats and spoiling, because of the absence of a mother's firm hand. But go, take care of your invisible patient, your mother is all right with her little nothing of a headache." In those years, you see, the landowner's daughter Naseem Ghani contracted a quite extraordinary number of minor illnesses, and each time a shikara-wallah was despatched to summon the tall young Doctor Sahib with the big nose who was making such a reputation for himself in the valley. Aadam Aziz's visits to the bedroom with the shaft of sunlight and the three lady wrestlers became weekly events; and on each occasion he was vouchsafed a glimpse, through the mutilated sheet, of a different seven-inch circle of the young woman's body. |
| 476 |
Her initial stomach-ache was succeeded by a very slightly twisted right ankle, an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of the left foot, a tiny cut on the lower left calf. ("Tetanus is a killer, Doctor Sahib," the landowner said, "My Naseem must not die for a scratch.") There was the matter of her stiff right knee, which the Doctor was obliged to manipulate through the hole in the sheet ... and after a time the illnesses leapt upwards, avoiding certain unmentionable zones, and began to proliferate around her upper half. She suffered from something mysterious which her father called Finger Rot, which made the skin flake off her hands; from weakness of the wrist-bones, for which Aadam prescribed calcium tablets; and from attacks of constipation, for which he gave her a course of laxatives, since there was no question of being permitted to administer an enema. She had fevers and she also had subnormal temperatures. At these times his thermometer would be placed under her armpit and he would hum and haw about the relative inefficiency of the method. In the opposite armpit she once developed a slight case of tineachloris and he dusted her with yellow powder; after this treatment — which required him to rub the powder in, gently but firmly, although the soft secret body began to shake and quiver and he heard helpless laughter coming through the sheet, because Naseem Ghani was very ticklish — the itching went away, but Naseem soon found a new set of complaints. She waxed anemic in the summer and bronchial in the winter. ("Her tubes are most delicate," Ghani explained, "like little flutes.") Far away the Great War moved from crisis to crisis, while in the cobwebbed house Doctor Aziz was also engaged in a total war against his sectioned patient's inexhaustible complaints. And, in all those war years, Naseem never repeated an illness. "Which only shows," Ghani told him, "that you are a good doctor. When you cure, she is cured for good. But alas!" — he struck his forehead — "She pines for her late mother, poor baby, and her body suffers. |
| 477 |
She is a too loving child." So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face. His mother lay on her bed, spreadeagled on her stomach. "Come, come and press me," she said, "my doctor son whose fingers can soothe his old mother's muscles. Press, press, my child with his expression of a constipated goose." He kneaded her shoulders. She grunted, twitched, relaxed. "Lower now," she said, "now higher. To the right. Good. My brilliant son who cannot see what that Ghani landowner is doing. So clever, my child, but he doesn't guess why that girl is forever ill with her piffling disorders. Listen, my boy: see the nose on your face for once: that Ghani thinks you are a good catch for her. Foreign-educated and all. I have worked in shops and been undressed by the eyes of strangers so that you should marry that Naseem! Of course I am right; otherwise why would he look twice at our family?" Aziz pressed his mother. "O God, stop now, no need to kill me because I tell you the truth!" By 1918, Aadam Aziz had come to live for his regular trips across the lake. And now his eagerness became even more intense, because it became clear that, after three years, the landowner and his daughter had become willing to lower certain barriers. Now, for the first time, Ghani said, "A lump in the right chest. Is it worrying, Doctor? Look. Look well." And there, framed in the hole, was a perfectly-formed and lyrically lovely ... |
| 478 |
On the day the World War ended, Naseem developed the longed-for headache. Such historical coincidences have littered, and perhaps befouled, my family's existence in the world. He hardly dared to look at what was framed in the hole in the sheet. Maybe she was hideous; perhaps that explained all this performance ... he looked. And saw a soft face that was not at all ugly, a cushioned setting for her glittering, gemstone eyes, which were brown with flecks of gold: tiger's-eyes. Doctor Aziz's fall was complete. And Naseem burst out, "But Doctor, my God, what a nose!" Ghani, angrily, "Daughter, mind your ..." But patient and doctor were laughing together, and Aziz was saying, "Yes, yes, it is a remarkable specimen. They tell me there are dynasties waiting in it ..." And he bit his tongue because he had been about to add, "... like snot." And Ghani, who had stood blindly beside the sheet for three long years, smiling and smiling and smiling, began once again to smile his secret smile, which was mirrored in the lips of the wrestlers. Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. For three years now, he had neither bathed nor washed himself after answering calls of nature. He wore the same clothes, unwashed, year in, year out; his one concession to winter was to put his chugha-coat over his putrescent pajamas. The little basket of hot coals which he carried inside the chugha, in the Kashmiri fashion, to keep him warm in the bitter cold, only animated and accentuated his evil odors. He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household, releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz's window. Naturally, Tai lost work; the English in particular were reluctant to be ferried about by a human cesspit. |
| 479 |
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. By the time the Indian regiments returned at the end of the war, Doctor Aziz was an orphan, and a free man — except that his heart had fallen through a hole some seven inches across. Desolating effect of Tai's behavior: it ruined Doctor Aziz's good relations with the lake's floating population. He, who as a child had chatted freely with fishwives and flower-sellers, found himself looked at askance. "Ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz." Tai had branded him as an alien, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted. They didn't like the boatman, but they found the transformation which the Doctor had evidently worked upon him even more disturbing. Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly. Now he understood what Tai was up to: the man was trying to chase him out of the valley. The story of the perforated sheet got out, too. The lady wrestlers were evidently less discreet than they looked. Aziz began to notice people pointing at him. |
| 480 |
In the morning, the sheet was displayed, and after the consummation ceremony a limousine hired by the landowner arrived to drive my grandparents to Amritsar, where they would catch the Frontier Mail. Mountains crowded round and stared as my grandfather left his home for the last time. (He would return, once, but not to leave.) Aziz thought he saw an ancient boatman standing on land to watch them pass — but it was probably a mistake, since Tai was ill. The blister of a temple atop Sankara Acharya, which Muslims had taken to calling the Takht-e-Sulaiman, or Seat of Solomon, paid them no attention. Winter-bare poplars and snow-covered fields of saffron undulated around them as the car drove south, with an old leather bag containing, amongst other things, a stethoscope and a bedsheet, packed in the boot. Doctor Aziz felt, in the pit of his stomach, a sensation akin to weightlessness. Or falling. ( ... And now I am cast as a ghost. I am nine years old and the whole family, my father, my mother, the Brass Monkey and myself, are staying at my grandparents' house in Agra, and the grandchildren — myself among them — are staging the customary New Year's play; and I have been cast as a ghost. Accordingly — and surreptitiously so as to preserve the secrets of the forthcoming theatricals — I am ransacking the house for a spectral disguise. My grandfather is out and about his rounds. I am in his room. And here on top of this cupboard is an old trunk, covered in dust and spiders, but unlocked. And here, inside it, is the answer to my prayers. Not just a sheet, but one with a hole already cut in it! Here it is, inside this leather bag inside this trunk, right beneath an old stethoscope and a tube of mildewed Vick's Inhaler ... the sheet's appearance in our show was nothing less than a sensation. My grandfather took one look at it and rose roaring to his feet. He strode up on stage and unghosted me right in front of everyone. My grandmother's lips were so tightly pursed they seemed to disappear. |
| 481 |
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. 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. |
| 482 |
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. 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. |
| 483 |
"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. 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. |
| 484 |
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. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants' movements become irregular. During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother's iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir's arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife. (All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.) ... In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children's education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father's traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. "He fills their heads with I don't know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt." Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, "Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? |
| 485 |
Because this is where Aadam Aziz was, on the afternoon after his signing of a death certificate, when all of a sudden a voice — soft, cowardly, embarrassed, the voice of a rhymeless poet — spoke to him from the depths of the large old laundry-chest standing in the corner of the room, giving him a shock so profound that it proved laxative, and the enema contraption did not have to be unhooked from its perch. Rashid the rickshaw boy had let Nadir Khan into the thunderbox-room by way of the sweeper's entrance, and he had taken refuge in the washing-chest. 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? |
| 486 |
(Aadam Aziz had always insisted that his daughters be permitted to have male friends.) Ahmed Sinai — "Ahaa!" yells Padma in triumphant recognition — had met Alia at the University, and seemed intelligent enough for the bookish, brainy girl on whose face my grandfather's nose had acquired an air of overweight wisdom; but Naseem Aziz felt uneasy about him, because he had been divorced at twenty. ("Anyone can make one mistake," Aadam had told her, and that nearly began a fight, because she thought for a moment that there had been something overly personal in his tone of voice. But then Aadam had added, "Just let this divorce of his fade away for a year or two; then we'll give this house its first wedding, with a big marquee in the garden, and singers and sweetmeats and all." Which, despite everything, was an idea that appealed to Naseem.) Now, wandering through the walled-in gardens of silence, Ahmed Sinai and Alia communed without speech; but although everyone expected him to propose, the silence seemed to have got through to him, too, and the question remained unasked. 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. |
| 487 |
Emerald, reluctantly, gave her promise last of all. After that Aadam Aziz made his sons help him carry all manner of furnishings down through the trap-door in the drawing-room floor: draperies and cushions and lamps and a big comfortable bed. And at last Nadir and Mumtaz stepped down into the vaults; the trap-door was shut and the carpet rolled into place and Nadir Khan, who loved his wife as delicately as a man ever had, had taken her into his underworld. Mumtaz Aziz began to lead a double life. By day she was a single girl, living chastely with her parents, studying mediocrely at the university, cultivating those gifts of assiduity, nobility and forbearance which were to be her hallmarks throughout her life, up to and including the time when she was assailed by the talking washing-chests of her past and then squashed flat as a rice pancake; but at night, descending through a trap-door, she entered a lamplit, secluded marriage chamber which her secret husband had taken to calling the Taj Mahal, because Taj Bibi was the name by which people had called an earlier Mumtaz — Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Emperor Shah Jehan, whose name meant "king of the world." When she died he built her that mausoleum which has been immortalized on postcards and chocolate boxes and whose outdoor corridors stink of urine and whose walls are covered in graffiti and whose echoes are tested for visitors by guides although there are signs in three languages pleading for silence. 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. |
| 488 |
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. Reverend Mother was forced to dig deep into her pantry, which thickened her rage like heat under a sauce. Hairs began to grow out of the moles on her face. Mumtaz noticed with concern that her mother was swelling, month by month. The unspoken words inside her were blowing her up ... Mumtaz had the impression that her mother's skin was becoming dangerously stretched. And Doctor Aziz spent his days out of the house, away from the deadening silence, so Mumtaz, who spent her nights underground, saw very little in those days of the father whom she loved; and Emerald kept her promise, telling the Major nothing about the family secret; but conversely, she told her family nothing about her relationship with him, which was fair, she thought; and in the cornfield Mustapha and Hanif and Rashid the rickshaw boy became infected with the listlessness of the times; and finally the house on Cornwallis Road drifted as far as August 9th, 1945, and things changed. |
| 489 |
As he unclasped the bag, his daughter began to cry. (And now we're here. Padma: this is it.) Ten minutes later the long time of silence was ended for ever as my grandfather emerged roaring from the sick-room. 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? To stay here, whatsitsname, free as a bird, food and shelter for three years, what did you care about meatless days, whatsitsname, what did you know about the cost of rice? Who was the weakling, whatsitsname, yes, the white-haired weakling who had permitted this iniquitous marriage? |
| 490 |
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. 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 ... |
| 491 |
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. 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. |
| 492 |
this green-medicine wallah! — and as a result, the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to call. I, in all innocence and for Padma's sake, permitted him to examine me. I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! "I see no cracks," he intoned mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good eye, his blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: "I see no cracks." In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. "Never mind, Doctor Sahib," Padma said, "we will look after him ourselves." On her face I saw a kind of recognition of her own dull guilt ... exit Baligga, never to return to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession — the calling of Aadam Aziz — sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this be true, everyone will do without doctors ... which brings me back to the reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips. "It's come up in the wrong place!" she yelped, by accident, and then, through the fading buzzing of her bad night's sleep, understood how in this month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the home of her new husband, which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed ... but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new, above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease. |
| 493 |
Why had she married him? — For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don't always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet's face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: "You big ungrateful goof, can't you see who is your husband now? Don't you know what a husband deserves?" To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother's opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and his insomnia, found she couldn't naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes ... in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit. Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved — after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, business-like and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels ... |
| 494 |
"My God," she told herself, "it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!" But she was undismayed. "Who, after all," she reasoned privately, "ever truly knows another human being completely?" and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows ... "At this rate," she thought, "there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can't go stale." In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah. And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble — and to live in a place that resembled — a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found his hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. 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. |
| 495 |
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. Washed by relief, father Kemal Butt breathed air filled with incendiarized bicycles, coughing and spluttering as the fumes of incinerated wheels, the vaporized ghosts of chains bells saddlebags handlebars, the transubstantiated frames of Arjuna Indiabikes moved in and out of their lungs. A crude cardboard mask had been nailed to a telegraph pole in front of the flaming godown — a mask of many faces — a devil's mask of snarling faces with broad curling lips and bright red nostrils. The faces of the many-headed monster, Ravana the demon king, looking angrily down at the bodies of the night-watchmen who were sleeping so soundly that no one, neither the firemen, nor Kemal, nor Butt, nor my father, had the heart to disturb them; while the ashes of pedals and inner tubes fell upon them from the skies. "Damn bad business," Mr. Kemal said. He was not being sympathetic. |
| 496 |
He was criticizing the owners of the Arjuna Indiabike Company. Look: the cloud of the disaster (which is also a relief) rises and gathers like a ball in the discolored morning sky. See how it thrusts itself westward into the heart of the old city; how it is pointing, good lord, like a finger, pointing down at the Muslim muhalla near Chandni Chowk! ... Where, right now, Lifafa Das is crying his wares in the Sinais' very own gully. "Come see everything, see the whole world, come see!" * * * It's almost time for the public announcement. I won't deny I'm excited: I've been hanging around in the background of my own story for too long, and although it's still a little while before I can take over, it's nice to get a look in. 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? |
| 497 |
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 ... 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!" ... |
| 498 |
— into the distant meanness of the lane. And now Lifafa Das, with a curious expression on his face, says, "They're funtoosh! All finished! Soon they will all go; and then we'll be free to kill each other." Touching her belly with one light hand, she follows him into a darkened doorway while her face bursts into flames. ... While at the Old Fort, Ahmed Sinai waits for Ravana. My father in the sunset: standing in the darkened doorway of what was once a room in the ruined walls of the fort, lower lip protruding fleshily, hands clasped behind his back, head full of money worries. He was never a happy man. He smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated servants; perhaps he wished that, instead of following his late father into the leathercloth business, he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition, the rearrangement of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once told me: "When Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on palm leaves, which were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and the others tried to remember the correct sequence; but they didn't have very good memories." Another wrong turning: instead of rewriting a sacred book, my father lurked in a ruin, awaiting demons. It's no wonder he wasn't happy; and I would be no help. When I was born, I broke his big toe.) ... My unhappy father, I repeat, thinks bad-temperedly about cash. About his wife, who wheedles rupees out of him and picks his pockets at night. And his ex-wife (who eventually died in an accident, when she argued with a camel-cart driver and was bitten in the neck by the camel), who writes him endless begging letters, despite the divorce settlement. And his distant cousin Zohra, who needs dowry money from him, so that she can raise children to marry his and so get her hooks into even more of his cash. And then there are Major Zulfikar's promises of money (at this stage, Major Zulfy and my father got on very well). The Major had been writing letters saying, "You must decide for Pakistan when it comes, as it surely will. |
| 499 |
There is no furniture ... and Shri Ramram Seth is sitting cross-legged, six inches above the ground. I must admit it: to her shame, my mother screamed ... ... While, at the Old Fort, monkeys scream among ramparts. The ruined city, having been deserted by people, is now the abode of langoors. Long-tailed and black-faced, the monkeys are possessed of an overriding sense of mission. Upupup they clamber, leaping to the topmost heights of the ruin, staking out territories, and thereafter dedicating themselves to the dismemberment, stone by stone, of the entire fortress. 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! |
| 500 |
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 ... did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually ... because of her weakness for men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have ... in her odd frame of mind, and moved by the seer's illness, might she not ... "No!" Padma shouts, furiously. "How dare you suggest? About that good woman — your own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing and still you say it?" And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew, she would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see Amina doing, years later, through the grimy windows of the Pioneer CafE; and maybe that's where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier — and yes, almost certainly innocent — adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won't lie down ... "Ah," it says, "but what about the matter of her tantrum — the one she threw the day Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?" Now it mimics her: "You — always you decide. |
| 501 |
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. She came to feel a deep affection for the question marks of his ears; for the remarkable depth of his navel, into which her finger could go right up to the first joint, without even pushing; she grew to love the knobbliness of his knees; but, try as she might (and as I'm giving her the benefit of my doubts I shall offer no possible reasons here), there was one part of him which she never managed to love, although it was the one thing he possessed, in full working order, which Nadir Khan had certainly lacked; on those nights when he heaved himself up on top of her — when the baby in her womb was no bigger than a frog — it was just no good at all. ... "No, not so quick, janum, my life, a little longer, please," she is saying; and Ahmed, to spin things out, tries to think back to the fire, to the last thing that happened on that blazing night, when just as he was turning to go he heard a dirty screech in the sky, and, looking up, had time to register that a vulture — at night! — a vulture from the Towers of Silence was flying overhead, and that it had dropped a barely-chewed Parsee hand, a right hand, the same hand which — now! |
| 502 |
And, above it all, the benign presiding influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name — Mumbadevi, Mumbabai, Mumbai — may well have become the city's. 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! On Chowpatty sands! Past the great houses on Malabar Hill, round Kemp's Corner, giddily along the sea to Scandal Point! And yes, why not, on and on, down my very own Warden Road, right alongside the segregated swimming pools at Breach Candy, right up to huge Mahalaxmi Temple and the old Willingdon Club ... |
| 503 |
Methwold's Estate: four identical houses built in a style befitting their original residents (conquerors' houses! Roman mansions; three-storey homes of gods standing on a two-storey Olympus, a stunted Kailasa!) — large, durable mansions with red gabled roofs and turret towers in each corner, ivory-white corner towers wearing pointy red-tiled hats (towers fit to lock princesses in!) — houses with verandahs, with servants' quarters reached by spiral iron staircases hidden at the back — houses which their owner, William Methwold, had named majestically after the palaces of Europe: Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci. Bougainvillaea crept across them; goldfish swam in pale blue pools; cacti grew in rock-gardens; tiny touch-me-not plants huddled beneath tamarind trees; there were butterflies and roses and cane chairs on the lawns. And on that day in the middle of June, Mr. Methwold sold his empty palaces for ridiculously little — but there were conditions. So now, without more ado, I present him to you, complete with the center-parting in his hair ... a six-foot Titan, this Methwold, his face the pink of roses and eternal youth. He had a head of thick black brilliantined hair, parted in the center. We shall speak again of this center-parting, whose ramrod precision made Methwold irresistible to women, who felt unable to prevent themselves wanting to rumple it up ... Methwold's hair, parted in the middle, has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved. Like tightrope-walkers. (But despite everything, not even I, who never saw him, never laid eyes on languid gleaming teeth or devastatingly combed hair, am capable of bearing him any grudge.) And his nose? What did that look like? Prominent? Yes, it must have been, the legacy of a patrician French grandmother — from Bergerac! — whose blood ran aquamarinely in his veins and darkened his courtly charm with something crueller, some sweet murderous shade of absinthe. |
| 504 |
Escorial Villa was divided into flats. On the ground floor lived the Dubashes, he a physicist who would become a leading light at the Trombay nuclear research base, she a cipher beneath whose blankness a true religious fanaticism lay concealed — but I'll let it lie, mentioning only that they were the parents of Cyrus (who would not be conceived for a few months yet), my first mentor, who played girls' parts in school plays and was known as Cyrus-the-great. Above them was my father's friend Doctor Narlikar, who had bought a flat here too ... he was as black as my mother; had the ability of glowing brightly whenever he became excited or aroused; hated children, even though he brought us into the world; and would unleash upon the city, when he died, that tribe of women who could do anything and in whose path no obstacle could stand. And, finally on the top floor, were Commander Sabarmati and Lila — Sabarmati who was one of the highest flyers in the Navy, and his wife with her expensive tastes; he hadn't been able to believe his luck in getting her a home so cheaply. They had two sons, aged eighteen months and four months, who would grow up to be slow and boisterous and to be nicknamed Eyeslice and Hairoil; and they didn't know (how could they?) that I would destroy their lives ... Selected by William Methwold, these people who would form the center of my world moved into the Estate and tolerated the curious whims of the Englishman — because the price, after all, was right. ... There are thirty days to go to the transfer of power and Lila Sabarmati is on the telephone, "How can you stand it, Nussie? 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?" ... And old man Ibrahim is refusing to switch on the ceiling-fan in his bedroom, muttering. |
| 505 |
There were blind landowners and lady wrestlers. And there was a sheet in a gloomy room. On that day, my inheritance began to form — the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather's eyes; the long sufferings of my great-grandmother which would become the forbearance of my own mother and the late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my great-grandfather's gift of conversing with birds which would descend through meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey; the conflict between grandpaternal scepticism and grandmaternal credulity; and above all the ghostly essence of that perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life — its meanings, its structures — in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late. Years ticking away — and my inheritance grows, because now I have the mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai, and his brandy bottle which foretold my father's alcoholic djinns; I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and pickled snakes for virility; I have Tai-for-changelessness opposed to Aadam-for-progress; and I have, too, the odors of the unwashed boatman which drove my grandparents south, and made Bombay a possibility. ... And now, driven by Padma and ticktock, I move on, acquiring Mahatma Gandhi and his hartal, ingesting thumb-and-forefinger, swallowing the moment at which Aadam Aziz did not know whether he was Kashmiri or Indian; now I'm drinking Mercurochrome and stains the shape of hands which will recur in spilt betel-juice, and I'm gulping down Dyer, moustache and all; my grandfather is saved by his nose and a bruise appears on his chest, never to fade, so that he and I find in its ceaseless throbbing the answer to the question, Indian or Kashmiri? Stained by the bruise of a Heidelberg bag's clasp, we throw our lot in with India; but the alienness of blue eyes remains. Tai dies, but his magic hangs over us still, and makes us men apart. ... Hurtling on, I pause to pick up the game of hit-the-spittoon. |
| 506 |
Public announcements nurture me as I grow towards my time, and there are only seven months left to go. How many things people notions we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of possibility! — Because all of these were the parents of the child born that midnight, and for every one of the midnight children there were as many more. Among the parents of midnight: the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination of M. A. Jinnah, who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in his lifetime, and would have done anything to ensure it — that same Jinnah whom my father, missing a turn as usual, refused to meet; and Mountbatten with his extraordinary haste and his chicken-breast-eater of a wife; and more and more — Red Fort and Old Fort, monkeys and vultures dropping hands, and white transvestites, and bone-setters and mongoose-trainers and Shri Ramram Seth who made too much prophecy. And my father's dream of rearranging the Quran has its place; and the burning of a godown which turned him into a man of property and not leathercloth; and the piece of Ahmed which Amina could not love. To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that. And fishermen, and Catharine of Braganza, and Mumbadevi coconuts rice; Sivaji's stature and Methwold's Estate; a swimming pool in the shape of British India and a two-storey hillock; a center-parting and a nose from Bergerac; an inoperative clock tower and a little circus-ring; an Englishman's lust for an Indian allegory and the seduction of an accordionist's wife. Budgerigars, ceiling-fans, the Times of India are all part of the luggage I brought into the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? Blue Jesus leaked into me; and Mary's desperation, and Joseph's revolutionary wildness, and the flightiness of Alice Pereira ... all these made me, too. If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance ... perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque. |
| 507 |
"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 ... 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. |
| 508 |
Saddled now with flypaper-dreams and imaginary ancestors, I am still over a day away from being born ... but now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself: twenty-nine hours to go, twenty-eight, twenty-seven ... What other dreams were dreamed on that last night? Was it then — yes, why not — that Doctor Narlikar, ignorant of the drama that was about to unfold at his Nursing Home, first dreamed of tetrapods? Was it on that last night — while Pakistan was being born to the north and west of Bombay — that my uncle Hanif, who had come (like his sister) to Bombay, and who had fallen in love with an actress, the divine Pia ("Her face is her fortune!" the Illustrated Weekly once said), first imagined the cinematic device which would soon give him the first of his three hit pictures? ... It seems likely; myths, nightmares, fantasies were in the air. This much is certain: on that last night, my grandfather Aadam Aziz, alone now in the big old house in Cornwallis Road — except for a wife whose strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age, and for a daughter, Alia, whose embittered virginity would last until a bomb split her in two over eighteen years later — was suddenly imprisoned by great metal hoops of nostalgia, and lay awake as they pressed down upon his chest; until finally, at five o'clock in the morning of August 14th — nineteen hours to go — he was pushed out of bed by an invisible force and drawn towards an old tin trunk. Opening it, he found: old copies of German magazines; Lenin's What Is To Be Done?; a folded prayer-mat; and at last the thing which he had felt an irresistible urge to see once more — white and folded and glowing faintly in the dawn — my grandfather drew out, from the tin trunk of his past, a stained and perforated sheet, and discovered that the hole had grown; that there were other, smaller holes in the surrounding fabric; and in the grip of a wild nostalgic rage he shook his wife awake and astounded her by yelling, as he waved her history under her nose: "Moth-eaten! |
| 509 |
Look, Begum: moth-eaten! You forgot to put in any naphthalene balls!" But now the countdown will not be denied ... eighteen hours; seventeen; sixteen ... and already, at Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home, it is possible to hear the shrieks of a woman in labor. Wee Willie Winkie is here; and his wife Vanita; she had been in a protracted, unproductive labor for eight hours now. The first pangs hit her just as, hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation ... but still she writhes on a bed in the Narlikar Home's "charity ward" (reserved for the babies of the poor) ... her eyes are standing half-way out of her head, her body glistens with sweat, but the baby shows no signs of coming, nor is its father present; it is eight o'clock in the morning, but there is still the possibility that, given the circumstances, the baby could be waiting for midnight. Rumors in the city: "The statue galloped last night!" ... "And the stars are unfavorable!" ... But despite these signs of ill-omen, the city was poised, with a new myth glinting in the corners of its eyes. August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna's birthday and Coconut Day; and this year — fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve — there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will — except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. 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. |
| 510 |
so that neither Ahmed of the jutting lip and squashy belly and fictional ancestors, nor dark-skinned prophecy-ridden Amina were present when the sun finally set over Methwold's Estate, and at the precise instant of its last disappearance — five hours and two minutes to go — William Methwold raised a long white arm above his head. White hand dangled above brilliantined black hair; long tapering white fingers twitched towards center-parting, and the second and final secret was revealed, because fingers curled, and seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr. Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand. "A baldie!" Padma exclaims. "That slicked-up hair of his ... I knew it; too good to be true!" Bald, bald; shiny-pated! Revealed: the deception which had tricked an accordionist's wife. Samson-like, William Methwold's power had resided in his hair; but now, bald patch glowing in the dusk, he flings his thatch through the window of his motor-car; distributes, with what looks like carelessness, the signed title-deeds to his palaces; and drives away. Nobody at Methwold's Estate ever saw him again; but I, who never saw him once, find him impossible to forget. Suddenly everything is saffron and green. Amina Sinai in a room with saffron walls and green woodwork. In a neighboring room, Wee Willie Winkie's Vanita, green-skinned, the whites of her eyes shot with saffron, the baby finally beginning its descent through inner passages that are also, no doubt, similarly colorful. Saffron minutes and green seconds tick away on the clocks on the walls. Outside Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home, there are fireworks and crowds, also conforming to the colors of the night — saffron rockets, green sparkling rain; the men in shirts of zafaran hue, the women in saris of lime. On a saffron-and-green carpet, Doctor Narlikar talks to Ahmed Sinai. "I shall see to your Begum personally," he says, in gentle tones the color of the evening, "Nothing to worry about. |
| 511 |
You wait here; plenty of room to pace." Doctor Narlikar, who dislikes babies, is nevertheless an expert gynecologist. In his spare time he lectures writes pamphlets berates the nation on the subject of contraception. "Birth Control," he says, "is Public Priority Number One. The day will come when I get that through people's thick heads, and then I'll be out of a job." Ahmed Sinai smiles, awkward, nervous. "Just for tonight," my father says, "forget lectures — deliver my child." It is twenty-nine minutes to midnight. Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home is running on a skeleton staff; there are many absentees, many employees who have preferred to celebrate the imminent birth of the nation, and will not assist tonight at the births of children. Saffron-shirted, green-skirted, they throng in the illuminated streets, beneath the infinite balconies of the city on which little dia-lamps of earthenware have been filled with mysterious oils; wicks float in the lamps which line every balcony and rooftop, and these wicks, too, conform to our two-tone color scheme: half the lamps burn saffron, the others flame with green. Threading its way through the many-headed monster of the crowd is a police car, the yellow and blue of its occupants' uniforms transformed by the unearthly lamplight into saffron and green. (We are on Colaba Causeway now, just for a moment, to reveal that at twenty-seven minutes to midnight, the police are hunting for a dangerous criminal. His name: Joseph D'Costa. The orderly is absent, has been absent for several days, from his work at the Nursing Home, from his room near the slaughterhouse, and from the life of a distraught virginal Mary.) Twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from Amina Sinai, coming harder and faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from Vanita in the next room. The monster in the streets has already begun to celebrate; the new myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron and green. And in Delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the Assembly Hall and prepares to make a speech. |
| 512 |
The young Raleigh — and who else? — sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor — did he have a walrus moustache? — whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh — and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic ... and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing finger, and copied the attire of the English milords ... "Look, how chweet!" Lila Sabarmati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, "It's like he's just stepped out of the picture!" In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and followed a fisherman's pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the horizon, beyond which lay — what? — my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering gray presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore ... because the finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon, it pointed beyond teak frame, across a brief expanse of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards another frame, in which my inescapable destiny hung, forever fixed under glass: here was a jumbo-sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and here, beside it, a letter on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state — the lions of Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime Minister's missive, which arrive, via Vishwanath the post-boy one week after my photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India. Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: "Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. |
| 513 |
When Amina Sinai and Baby Saleem arrived home in a borrowed Studebaker, Ahmed Sinai brought a manila envelope along for the ride. Inside the envelope: a pickle-jar, emptied of lime kasaundy, washed, boiled, purified — and now, refilled. A well-sealed jar, with a rubber diaphragm stretched over its tin lid and held in place by a twisted rubber band. What was sealed beneath rubber, preserved in glass, concealed in manila? This: travelling home with father, mother and baby was a quantity of briny water in which, floating gently, hung an umbilical cord. (But was it mine or the Other's? That's something I can't tell you.) While the newly-hired ayah, Mary Pereira, made her way to Methwold's Estate by bus, an umbilical cord travelled in state in the glove compartment of a film magnate's Studey. While Baby Saleem grew towards manhood, umbilical tissue hung unchanging in bottled brine, at the back of a teak almirah. And when, years later, our family entered its exile in the Land of the Pure, when I was struggling towards purity, umbilical cords would briefly have their day. Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained; both arrived at Methwold's Estate; both awaited their time. I was not a beautiful baby. Baby-snaps reveal that my large moon-face was too large; too perfectly round. Something lacking in the region of the chin. Fair skin curved across my features — but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a dark patch colored my eastern ear. And my temples: too prominent: bulbous Byzantine domes. (Sonny Ibrahim and I were born to be friends — when we bumped our foreheads, Sonny's forcep-hollows permitted my bulby temples to nestle within them, as snugly as carpenter's joints.) Amina Sinai, immeasurably relieved by my single head, gazed upon it with redoubled maternal fondness, seeing it through a beautifying mist, ignoring the ice-like eccentricity of my sky-blue eyes, the temples like stunted horns, even the rampant cucumber of the nose. |
| 514 |
Baby Saleem's nose: it was monstrous; and it ran. Intriguing features of my early life: large and unbeautiful as I was, it appears I was not content. From my very first days I embarked upon an heroic program of self-enlargement. (As though I knew that, to carry the burdens of my future life, I'd need to be pretty big.) By mid-September I had drained my mother's not inconsiderable breasts of milk. A wet-nurse was briefly employed but she retreated, dried-out as a desert after only a fortnight, accusing Baby Saleem of trying to bite off her nipples with his toothless gums. I moved on to the bottle and downed vast quantities of compound: the bottle's nipples suffered, too, vindicating the complaining wet-nurse. Baby-book records were meticulously kept; they reveal that I expanded almost visibly, enlarging day by day; but unfortunately no nasal measurements were taken so I cannot say whether my breathing apparatus grew in strict proportion, or faster than the rest. I must say that I had a healthy metabolism. Waste matter was evacuated copiously from the appropriate orifices; from my nose there flowed a shining cascade of goo. Armies of handkerchiefs, regiments of nappies found their way into the large washing-chest in my mother's bathroom ... shedding rubbish from various apertures, I kept my eyes quite dry. "Such a good baby, Madam," Mary Pereira said, "Never takes out one tear." Good baby Saleem was a quiet child; I laughed often, but soundlessly. (Like my own son, I began by taking stock, listening before I rushed into gurgles and, later, into speech.) For a time Amina and Mary became afraid that the boy was dumb; but, just when they were on the verge of telling his father (from whom they had kept their worries secret — no father wants a damaged child), he burst into sound, and became, in that respect at any rate, utterly normal. "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. |
| 515 |
But Pushpa does not belong to the better sort; old now and forgotten, he watches the Pools from afar ... and now more and more of the multitudes are flooding into me — such as Bano Devi, the famous lady wrestler of those days, who would only wrestle men and threatened to marry anyone who beat her, as a result of which vow she never lost a bout; and (closer to home now) the sadhu under our garden tap, whose name was Purushottam and whom we (Sonny, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus and I) would always call Puru-the-guru — believing me to be the Mubarak, the Blessed One, he devoted his life to keeping an eye on me, and filled his days teaching my father palmistry and witching away my mother's verrucas; and then there is the rivalry of the old bearer Musa and the new ayah Mary, which will grow until it explodes; in short, at the end of 1947, life in Bombay was as teeming, as manifold, as multitudinously shapeless as ever ... except that I had arrived; I was already beginning to take my place at the center of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all. You don't believe me? Listen: at my cradle-side, Mary Pereira is singing a little song: Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what-all you want. By the time of my circumcision by a barber with a cleft palate from the Royal Barber House on Gowalia Tank Road (I was just over two months old), I was already much in demand at Methwold's Estate. (Incidentally, on the subject of the circumcision: I still swear that I can remember the grinning barber, who held me by the foreskin while my member waggled frantically like a slithering snake; and the razor descending, and the pain; but I'm told that, at the time, I didn't even blink.) Yes, I was a popular little fellow: my two mothers, Amina and Mary, couldn't get enough of me. In all practical matters, they were the most intimate of allies. After my circumcision, they bathed me together; and giggled together as my mutilated organ waggled angrily in the bathwater. |
| 516 |
He told us it was asthma, and continued to arrive at Methwold's Estate once a week to sing songs which were, like himself, relics of the Methwold era. "Good Night, Ladies," he sang; and, keeping up to date, added "The Clouds Will Soon Roll By" to his repertoire, and, a little later, "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" Placing a sizeable infant with menacingly knocking knees on a small mat beside him in the circus-ring, he sang songs filled with nostalgia, and nobody had the heart to turn him away. Winkie and the fisherman's finger were two of the few survivals of the days of William Methwold, because after the Englishman's disappearance his successors emptied his palaces of their abandoned contents. Lila Sabarmati preserved her pianola; Ahmed Sinai kept his whisky-cabinet; old man Ibrahim came to terms with ceiling-fans; but the goldfish died, some from starvation, others as a result of being so colossally overfed that they exploded in little clouds of scales and undigested fish-food; the dogs ran wild, and eventually ceased to roam the Estate; and the fading clothes in the old almirahs were distributed amongst the sweeper-women and other servants on the Estate, so that for years afterwards the heirs of William Methwold were cared for by men and women wearing the increasingly ragged shirts and cotton print dresses of their erstwhile masters. But Winkie and the picture on my wall survived; singer and fisherman became institutions of our lives, like the cocktail hour, which was already a habit too powerful to be broken. "Each little tear and sorrow," Winkie sang, "only brings you closer to me ..." And his voice grew worse and worse, until it sounded like a sitar whose resonating drum, made out of lacquered pumpkin, had been eaten away by mice; "It's asthma," he insisted stubbornly. Before he died he lost his voice completely; doctors revised his diagnosis to throat cancer; but they were wrong, too, because Winkie died of no disease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected. |
| 517 |
His son, named Shiva after the god of procreation and destruction, sat at his feet in those early days, silently bearing the burden of being the cause (or so he thought) of his father's slow decline; and gradually, down the years, we watched his eyes filling with an anger which could not be spoken; we watched his fists close around pebbles and hurl them, ineffectually at first, more dangerously as he grew, into the surrounding emptiness. When Lila Sabarmati's elder son was eight, he took it upon himself to tease young Shiva about his surliness, his unstarched shorts, his knobbly knees; whereupon the boy whom Mary's crime had doomed to poverty and accordions hurled a sharp flat stone, with a cutting edge like a razor, and blinded his tormentor in the right eye. After Eyeslice's accident, Wee Willie Winkie came to Methwold's Estate alone, leaving his son to enter the dark labyrinths from which only a war would save him. Why Methwold's Estate continued to tolerate Wee Willie Winkie despite the decay of his voice and the violence of his son: he had, once, given them an important clue about their lives. "The first birth," he had said, "will make you real." As a direct result of Winkie's clue, I was, in my early days, highly in demand. Amina and Mary vied for my attention; but in every house on the Estate, there were people who wanted to know me; and eventually Amina, allowing her pride in my popularity to overcome her reluctance to let me out of her sight, agreed to lend me, on a kind of rota basis, to the various families on the hill. Pushed by Mary Pereira in a sky-blue pram, I began a triumphal progress around the red-tiled palaces, gracing each in turn with my presence, and making them seem real to their owners. And so, looking back now through the eyes of Baby Saleem, I can reveal most of the secrets of my neighborhood, because the grown-ups lived their lives in my presence without fear of being observed, not knowing that, years later, someone would look back through baby-eyes and decide to let the cats out of their bags. |
| 518 |
Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I'm bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on the subject, being a Blessed One to a guru under a tap, a voyeur to Lila Sabarmati; in the eyes of Nussie-the-duck I was a rival, and a more successful rival, to her own Sonny (although, to her credit, she never showed her resentment, and asked to borrow me just like everyone else); to my two-headed mother I was all kinds of babyish things — they called me joonoo-moonoo, and putch-putch, and little-piece-of-the-moon. But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later? Patiently, dry-eyed, I imbibed Nehru-letter and Winkie's prophecy; but the deepest impression of all was made on the day when Homi Catrack's idiot daughter sent her thoughts across the circus-ring and into my infant head. Toxy Catrack, of the outsize head and dribbling mouth; Toxy, who stood at a barred top-floor window, stark naked, masturbating with motions of consummate self-disgust; who spat hard and often through her bars, and sometimes hit us on the head ... she was twenty-one years old, a gibbering half-wit, the product of years of inbreeding; but inside my head she was beautiful, because she had not lost the gifts with which every baby is born and which life proceeds to erode. I can't remember anything Toxy said when she sent her thoughts to whisper to me; probably nothing except gurgles and spittings; but she gave a door in my mind a little nudge, so that when an accident took place in a washing-chest it was probably Toxy who made it possible. That's enough for the moment, about the first days of Baby Saleem — already my very presence is having an effect on history; already Baby Saleem is working changes on the people around him; and, in the case of my father, I am convinced that it was I who pushed him into the excesses which led, perhaps inevitably, to the terrifying time of the freeze. |
| 519 |
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. Metallic noise of a metal paper-cutter being lifted, colliding momentarily with telephone. The brief rasp of metal slicing envelope; and one minute later, Ahmed was running back up the stairs, yelling for my mother, shouting: "Amina! Come here, wife! The bastards have shoved my balls in an ice-bucket!" In the days after Ahmed received the formal letter informing him of the freezing of all his assets, the whole world was talking at once ... "For pity's sake, janum, such language!" Amina is saying — and is it my imagination, or does a baby blush in a sky-blue crib? And Narlikar, arriving in a lather of perspiration, "I blame myself entirely; we made ourselves too public. These are bad times, Sinai bhai — freeze a Muslim's assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. Catch the lizard's tail and he'll snap it off! This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas." "Everything," Ahmed Sinai is saying, "bank account; savings bonds; the rents from the Kurla properties — all blocked, frozen. By order, the letter says. |
| 520 |
I give thanks to God you have recovered from that photography!" After that day, Amina was freed from the exigencies of running her home. Reverend Mother sat at the head of the dining-table, doling out food (Amina took plates to Ahmed, who stayed in bed, moaning from time to time, "Smashed, wife! Snapped — like an icicle!"); while, in the kitchens, Mary Pereira took the time to prepare, for the benefit of their visitors, some of the finest and most delicate mango pickles, lime chutneys and cucumber kasaundies in the world. And now, restored to the status of daughter in her own home, Amina began to feel the emotions of other people's food seeping into her — because Reverend Mother doled out the curries and meatballs of intransigence, dishes imbued with the personality of their creator; Amina ate the fish salans of stubbornness and the birianis of determination. And, although Mary's pickles had a partially counteractive effect — since she had stirred into them the guilt of her heart, and the fear of discovery, so that, good as they tasted, they had the power of making those who ate them subject to nameless uncertainties and dreams of accusing fingers — the diet provided by Reverend Mother filled Amina with a kind of rage, and even produced slight signs of improvements in her defeated husband. 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. |
| 521 |
Is it decent? Is it legal?" And Amina: "Don't worry your head. What can't be cured must be endured. I am doing what must be done." Never once in all that time did my mother take pleasure in her mighty victories; because she was weighed down by more than a baby — eating Reverend Mother's curries filled with ancient prejudices, she had become convinced that gambling was the next worst thing on earth, next to alcohol; so, although she was not a criminal, she felt consumed by sin. 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. |
| 522 |
"Coming to court very soon," Ismail Ibrahim said, "I think you can be fairly confident ... my God, Amina, have you found King Solomon's Mines?" The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes. All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity — because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... Keeping things simple for the moment, however, I record that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes. 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. |
| 523 |
but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers, the premiEre audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar had begun to kiss — not one another — but things. Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss — and how much more sophisticated a notion it was than anything in our current cinema; how pregnant with longing and eroticism! 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! |
| 524 |
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. 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. |
| 525 |
And it was to escape from this beast that I took to hiding myself, from an early age, in my mother's large white washing-chest; because although the creature was inside me, the comforting presence of enveloping soiled linen seemed to lull it into sleep. Outside the washing-chest, surrounded by people who seemed to possess a devastatingly clear sense of purpose, I buried myself in fairytales. Hatim Tai and Batman, Superman and Sinbad helped to get me through the nearlynine years. When I went shopping with Mary Pereira — overawed by her ability to tell a chicken's age by looking at its neck, by the sheer determination with which she stared dead pomfrets in the eyes — I became Aladdin, voyaging in a fabulous cave; watching servants dusting vases with a dedication as majestic as it was obscure, I imagined Ali Baba's forty thieves hiding in the dusted urns; in the garden, staring at Purushottam the sadhu being eroded by water, I turned into the genie of the lamp, and thus avoided, for the most part, the terrible notion that I, alone in the universe, had no idea of what I should be, or how I should behave. Purpose: it crept to behind me when I stood staring down from my window at European girls cavorting in the map-shaped pool beside the sea. "Where do you get it?" I yelped aloud; the Brass Monkey, who shared my sky-blue room, jumped half-way out of her skin. I was then nearlyeight; she was almostseven. It was a very early age at which to be perplexed by meaning. But servants are excluded from washing-chests; school buses, too, are absent. In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School on Outram Road in the Old Fort district; washed and brushed every morning, I stood at the foot of our two-storey hillock, white-shorted, wearing a blue-striped elastic belt with a snake-buckle, satchel over my shoulder, my mighty cucumber of a nose dripping as usual; Eyeslice and Hairoil, Sonny Ibrahim and precocious Cyrus-the-great waited too. And on the bus, amid rattling seats and the nostalgic cracks of the window-panes, what certainties! |
| 526 |
A disability in the world outside washing-chests can be a positive advantage once you're in. But only for the duration of your stay. Purpose-obsessed, I worried about my nose. Dressed in the bitter garments which arrived regularly from my headmistress aunt Alia, I went to school, played French cricket, fought, entered fairy-tales ... and worried. (In those days, my aunt Alia had begun to send us an unending stream of children's clothes, into whose seams she had sewn her old maid's bile; the Brass Monkey and I were clothed in her gifts, wearing at first the baby-things of bitterness, then the rompers of resentment; I grew up in white shorts starched with the starch of jealousy, while the Monkey wore the pretty flowered frocks of Alia's undimmed envy ... unaware that our wardrobe was binding us in the webs of her revenge, we led our well-dressed lives.) My nose: elephantine as the trunk of Ganesh, it should, I thought, have been a superlative breather; a smeller without an answer, as we say; instead, it was permanently bunged-up, and as useless as a wooden sikh-kabab. Enough. I sat in the washing-chest and forgot my nose; forgot about the climbing of Mount Everest in 1953 — when grubby Eyeslice giggled, "Hey, men! You think that Tenzing could climb up Sniffer's face?" — and about the quarrels between my parents over my nose, for which Ahmed Sinai never tired of blaming Amina's father: "Never before in my family has there been a nose like it! We have excellent noses; proud noses; royal noses, wife!" Ahmed Sinai had already begun, at that time, to believe in the fictional ancestry he had created for the benefit of William Methwold; djinn-sodden, he saw Mughal blood running in his veins ... Forgotten, too, the night when I was eight and a half, and my father, djinns on his breath, came into my bedroom to rip the sheets off me and demanded: "What are you up to? Pig! Pig from somewhere?" I looked sleepy; innocent; puzzled. He roared on "Chhi-chhi! Filthy! God punishes boys who do that! |
| 527 |
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. "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. (The accident is almost upon me; and the children of midnight are waiting.) Years later, in Pakistan, on the very night when the roof was to fall in on her head and squash her flatter than a rice-pancake, Amina Sinai saw the old washing-chest in a vision. When it popped up inside her eyelids, she greeted it like a not-particularly-welcome cousin. |
| 528 |
One afternoon in June, I tiptoed down the corridors of the sleeping house towards my chosen refuge; sneaked past my sleeping mother into the white-tiled silence of her bathroom; lifted the lid off my goal; and plunged into its soft continuum of (predominantly white) textiles, whose only memories were of my earlier visits. Sighing softly, I pulled down the lid, and allowed pants and vests to massage away the pains of being alive, purposeless and nearly nine years old. Electricity in the air. Heat, buzzing like bees. A mantle, hanging somewhere in the sky, waiting to fall gently around my shoulders ... somewhere, a finger reaches towards a dial; a dial whirs around and around, electrical pulses dart along cable, seven, zero, five, six, one. The telephone rings. Muffled shrilling of a bell penetrates the washing-chest, in which a nearlynineyearold boy lies uncomfortably concealed ... I, Saleem, became stiff with the fear of discovery, because now more noises entered the chest; squeak of bedsprings; soft clatter of slippers along corridor; the telephone, silenced in mid-shrill; and — or is this imagination? Was her voice too soft to hear? — the words, spoken too late as usual: "Sorry. Wrong number." And now, hobbling footsteps returning to the bedroom; and the worst fears of the hiding boy are fulfilled. Doorknobs, turning, scream warnings at him; razor-sharp steps cut him deeply as they move across cool white tiles. He stays frozen as ice, still as a stick; his nose drips silently into dirty clothes, a pajama-cord — snake-like harbinger of doom! — inserts itself into his left nostril. To sniff would be to die: he refuses to think about it. ... Clamped tight in the grip of terror, he finds his eye looking through a chink in dirty washing ... and sees a woman crying in a bathroom. Rain dropping from a thick black cloud. And now more sound, more motion: his mother's voice has begun to speak, two syllables, over and over again; and her hands have begun to move. Ears muffled by underwear strain to catch the sounds — that one: dir? |
| 529 |
Bir? Dil? — and the other: Ha? Ra? No — Na. Ha and Ra are banished; Dil and Bir vanish forever; and the boy hears, in his ears, a name which has not been spoken since Mumtaz Aziz became Amina Sinai: Nadir. Nadir. Na. Dir. Na. And her hands are moving. Lost in their memory of other days, of what happened after games of hit-the-spittoon in an Agra cellar, they flutter gladly at her cheeks; they hold her bosom tighter than any brassieres; and now they caress her bare midriff, they stray below decks ... yes, this is what we used to do, my love, it was enough, enough for me, even though my father made us, and you ran, and now the telephone, Nadirnadirnadirnadirnadirnadir ... hands which held telephone now hold flesh, while in another place what does another hand do? To what, after replacing receiver, is another hand getting up? ... No matter; because here, in her spied-out privacy, Amina Sinai repeats an ancient name, again and again, until finally she bursts out with, "ArrE Nadir Khan, where have you come from now?" Secrets. A man's name. Never-before-glimpsed motions of the hands. A boy's mind filled with thoughts which have no shape, tormented by ideas which refuse to settle into words; and in a left nostril, a pajama-cord is snaking up up up, refusing to be ignored ... And now — O shameless mother! Revealer of duplicity, of emotions which have no place in family life; and more: O brazen unveiler of Black Mango! — Amina Sinai, drying her eyes, is summoned by a more trivial necessity; and as her son's right eye peers out through the wooden slats at the top of the washing-chest, my mother unwinds her sari! While I, silently in the washing-chest: "Don't do it don't do it don't do!" ... but I cannot close my eye. Unblinking pupil takes in upside-down image of sari falling to the floor, an image which is, as usual, inverted by the mind; through ice-blue eyes I see a slip follow the sari; and then — O horrible! — my mother, framed in laundry and slatted wood, bends over to pick up her clothes! |
| 530 |
And there it is, searing my retina — the vision of my mother's rump, black as night, rounded and curved, resembling nothing on earth so much as a gigantic, black Alfonso mango! In the washing-chest, unnerved by the vision, I wrestle with myself ... self-control becomes simultaneously imperative and impossible ... under the thunderclap influence of the Black Mango, my nerve cracks; pajama-cord wins its victory; and while Amina Sinai seats herself on a commode, I ... what? Not sneeze; it was less than a sneeze. Not a twitch, either; it was more than that. It's time to talk plainly: shattered by two-syllabic voice and fluttering hands, devastated by Black Mango, the nose of Saleem Sinai, responding to the evidence of maternal duplicity, quivering at the presence of maternal rump, gave way to a pajama-cord and was possessed by a cataclysmic — a world-altering — an irreversible sniff. Pajama-cord rises painfully half an inch further up the nostril. But other things are rising, too: hauled by that feverish inhalation, nasal liquids are being sucked relentlessly up up up, nose-goo flowing upwards, against gravity, against nature. Sinuses are subjected to unbearable pressure ... until, inside the nearlynineyearold head, something bursts. Snot rockets through a breached dam into dark new channels. Mucus, rising higher than mucus was ever intended to rise, Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the frontiers of the brain ... there is a shock. Something electrical has been moistened. Pain. And then noise, deafening manytongued terrifying, inside his head! ... Inside a white wooden washing-chest, within the darkened auditorium of my skull, my nose began to sing. But just now there isn't time to listen; because one voice is very close indeed. Amina Sinai has opened the lower door of the washing-chest; I am tumbling downdown with laundry wrapped around my head like a caul. Pajama-cord jerks out of my nose; and now there is lightning flashing through the dark clouds around my mother — and a refuge has been lost for ever. |
| 531 |
The workforce giggles behind its hands: the poor sahib has been crossed in — what? — surely not love? ... Padma, and the cracks spreading all over me, radiating like a spider's web from my navel; and the heat ... a little confusion is surely permissable in these circumstances. Rereading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything — to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge. I'll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began ... YE Akashvani hai. This is All-India Radio. Having gone out into the boiling streets for a quick meal at a nearby Irani cafE, I have returned to sit in my nocturnal pool of Anglepoised light with only a cheap transistor for company. A hot night; bubbling air filled with the lingering scents of the silenced pickle-vats; voices in the dark. Pickle-fames, heavily oppressive in the heat, stimulate the juices of memory, accentuating similarities and differences between now and then ... it was hot then; it is (unseasonably) hot now. Then as now, someone was awake in the dark, hearing disembodied tongues. Then as now, the one deafened ear. And fear, thriving in the heat ... it was not the voices (then or now) which were frightening. He, young-Saleem-then, was afraid of an idea — the idea that his parents' outrage might lead to a withdrawal of their love; that even if they began to believe him, they would see his gift as a kind of shameful deformity ... while I, now, Padma-less, send these words into the darkness and am afraid of being disbelieved. |
| 532 |
He and I, I and he ... I no longer have his gift; he never had mine. There are times when he seems a stranger, almost ... he had no cracks. No spiders' webs spread through him in the heat. Padma would believe me; but there is no Padma. Then as now, there is hunger. But of a different kind: not, now, the then-hunger of being denied my dinner, but that of having lost my cook. And another, more obvious difference: then, the voices did not arrive through the oscillating valves of a transistor (which will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize impotence — ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe, the squawking machine has represented what men could do before scissors snipped and knots were tied) ... then, the nearlynineyearold in his midnight bed had no need of machines. Different and similar, we are joined by heat. A shimmering heat-haze, then and now, blurs his then-time into mine ... my confusion, travelling across the heat-waves, is also his. 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. |
| 533 |
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust. In 1956, then, languages marched militantly through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head. We shall be watching your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own. It's time to talk about the voices. But if only our Padma were here ... I was wrong about the Archangels, of course. My father's hand — walloping my ear in (conscious? unintentional?) imitation of another, bodiless hand, which once hit him full in the face — at least had one salutary effect: it obliged me to reconsider and finally to abandon my original, Prophet-aping position. In bed that very night of my disgrace, I withdrew deep inside myself, despite the Brass Monkey, who filled our blue room with her pesterings: "But what did you do it for, Saleem? You who're always too good and all?" ... until she fell into dissatisfied sleep with her mouth still working silently, and I was alone with the echoes of my father's violence, which buzzed in my left ear, which whispered, "Neither Michael nor Anael; not Gabriel; forget Cassiel, Sachiel and Samael! Archangels no longer speak to mortals; the Recitation was completed in Arabia long ago; the last prophet will come only to announce the End." That night, understanding that the voices in my head far outnumbered the ranks of the angels, I decided, not without relief, that I had not after all been chosen to preside over the end of the world. My voices, far from being sacred, turned out to be as profane, and as multitudinous, as dust. Telepathy, then; the kind of thing you're always reading about in the sensational magazines. But I ask for patience — wait. Only wait. It was telepathy; but also more than telepathy. Don't write me off too easily. Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head. In the beginning, when I was content to be an audience — before I began to act — there was a language problem. |
| 534 |
The voices babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Luck-now Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil. I understood only a fraction of the things being said within the walls of my skull. Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below the surface transmissions — the front-of-mind stuff which is what I'd originally been picking up — language faded away, and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words ... but that was after I heard, beneath the polyglot frenzy in my head, those other precious signals, utterly different from everything else, most of them faint and distant, like far-off drums whose insistent pulsing eventually broke through the fish-market cacophony of my voices ... those secret, nocturnal calls, like calling out to like ... the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply: "I." From far to the North, "I." And the South East West: "I." "I." "And I." But I mustn't get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself with listening; and soon I was able to "tune" my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the mind-stream of passing strangers — the law of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms, and the voices grew and diminished as the strangers passed. All of which I somehow kept to myself. Reminded daily (by the buzzing in my left, or sinister, ear) of my father's wrath, and anxious to keep my right ear in good working order, I sealed my lips. For a nine-year-old boy, the difficulties of concealing knowledge are almost insurmountable; but fortunately, my nearest and dearest were as anxious to forget my outburst as I was to conceal the truth. "O, you Saleem! |
| 535 |
Such things you talked yesterday! Shame on you, boy: you better go wash out your mouth with soap!" ... The morning after my disgrace, Mary Pereira, shaking with indignation like one of her jellies, suggested the perfect means of my rehabilitation. Bowing my head contritely, I went, without a word, into the bathroom, and there, beneath the amazed gaze of ayah and Monkey, scrubbed teeth tongue roofofmouth gums with a toothbrush covered in the sharp foul lather of Coal Tar Soap. The news of my dramatic atonement rushed rapidly around the house, borne by Mary and Monkey; and my mother embraced me, "There, good boy; we'll say no more about it," and Ahmed Sinai nodded gruffly at the breakfast table, "At least the boy has the grace to admit when he's gone too far." As my glass-inflicted cuts faded, it was as though my announcement was also erased; and by the time of my ninth birthday, nobody besides myself remembered anything about the day when I had taken the name of Archangels in vain. 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. |
| 536 |
and in the morning when she's telling me to bathe clean up get ready for school I have to bite back the questions, I am nine years old and lost in the confusion of other people's lives which are blurring together in the heat. To end this account of the early days of my transformed life, I must add one painful confession: it occurred to me that I could improve my parents' opinion of me by using my new faculty to help out with my schoolwork — in short, I began to cheat in class. That is to say, I tuned in to the inner voices of my schoolteachers and also of my cleverer classmates, and picked information out of their minds. I found that very few of my masters could set a test without rehearsing the ideal answers in their minds — and I knew, too, that on those rare occasions when the teacher was preoccupied by other things, his private love-life or financial difficulties, the solutions could always be found in the precocious, prodigious mind of our class genius, Cyrus-the-great. My marks began to improve dramatically — but not overly so, because I took care to make my versions different from their stolen originals; even when I telepathically cribbed an entire English essay from Cyrus, I added a number of mediocre touches of my own. My purpose was to avoid suspicion; I did not, but I escaped discovery. Under Emil Zagallo's furious, interrogating eyes I remained innocently seraphic; beneath the bemused, head-shaking perplexity of Mr. Tandon the English master I worked my treachery in silence — knowing that they would not believe the truth even if, by chance or folly, I spilled the beans. Let me sum up: at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation, at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift. Despite the many vital uses to which his abilities could have been put by his impoverished, underdeveloped country, he chose to conceal his talents, frittering them away on inconsequential voyeurism and petty cheating. |
| 537 |
At the golden fortress of Jaisalmer I sampled the inner life of a woman making mirrorwork dresses and at Khajuraho I was an adolescent village boy, deeply embarrassed by the erotic, Tantric carvings on the Chandela temples standing in the fields, but unable to tear away my eyes ... in the exotic simplicities of travel I was able to find a modicum of peace. But, in the end, tourism ceased to satisfy; curiosity began to niggle; "Let's find out," I told myself, "what really goes on around here." With the eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on, I leaped into the heads of film stars and cricketers — I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala, and I was at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium; I was Lata Mangeshkar the playback singer and Bubu the clown at the circus behind Civil Lines ... 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. 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 ... |
| 538 |
And he was seen by the eyes of the language marchers. The ears of the language marchers heard the roughness of his tongue; the marchers' feet paused, their voices rose in rebuke. Fists were shaken; oaths were oathed. Whereupon the good doctor, made incautious by anger, turned upon the crowd and denigrated its cause, its breeding and its sisters. A silence fell and exerted its powers. Silence guided marcher-feet towards the gleaming gynecologist, who stood between the tetrapod and the wailing women. In silence the marchers' hands reached out towards Narlikar and in a deep hush he clung to four-legged concrete as they attempted to pull him towards them. In absolute soundlessness, fear gave Doctor Narlikar the strength of limpets; his arms stuck to the tetrapod and would not be detached. The marchers applied themselves to the tetrapod ... silently they began to rock it; mutely the force of their numbers overcame its weight. In an evening seized by a demonic quietness the tetrapod tilted, preparing to become the first of its kind to enter the waters and begin the great work of land reclamation. Doctor Suresh Narlikar, his mouth opening in a voiceless A, clung to it like a phosphorescent mollusc ... man and four-legged concrete fell without a sound. The splash of the waters broke the spell. It was said that when Doctor Narlikar fell and was crushed into death by the weight of his beloved obsession, nobody had any trouble locating the body because it sent light glowing upwards through the waters like a fire. "Do you know what's happening?" "Hey, man, what gives?" — children, myself included, clustered around the garden hedge of Escorial Villa, in which was Doctor Narlikar's bachelor apartment; and a hamal of Lila Sabarmati's, taking on an air of grave dignity, informed us, "They have brought his death home, wrapped in silk." I was not allowed to see the death of Doctor Narlikar as it lay wreathed in saffron flowers on his hard, single bed; but I got to know all about it anyway, because the news of it spread far beyond the confines of his room. |
| 539 |
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. 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. |
| 540 |
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 ... "Hey, you widda leaky nose! Stop watching the schoopid ball, ya crumb! I'll showya something worth watching!" Impossible to picture Evie Burns without also conjuring up a bicycle; and not just any two-wheeler, but one of the last of the great old-timers, an Arjuna Indiabike in mint condition, with drop-handlebars wrapped in masking tape and five gears and a seat made of reccine cheetah-skin. And a silver frame (the color, I don't need to tell you, of the Lone Ranger's horse) ... slobby Eyeslice and neat Hairoil, Cyrus the genius and the Monkey, and Sonny Ibrahim and myself — the best of friends, the true sons of the Estate, its heirs by right of birth — Sonny with the slow innocence he had had ever since the forceps dented his brain and me with my dangerous secret knowledge — yes, all of us, future bullfighters and Navy chiefs and all, stood frozen in open-mouthed attitudes as Evie Burns began to ride her bike, fasterfasterfaster, around and around the edges of the circus-ring. "Lookit me now: watch me go, ya dummies!" On and off the cheetah-seat, Evie performed. One foot on the seat, one leg stretched out behind her, she whirled around us; she built up speed and then did a headstand on the seat! She could straddle the front wheel, facing the rear, and work the pedals the wrong way round ... |
| 541 |
gravity was her slave, speed her element, and we knew that a power had come among us, a witch on wheels, and the flowers of the hedgerows threw her petals, the dust of the circus-ring stood up in clouds of ovation, because the circus-ring had found its mistress, too: it was the canvas beneath the brush of her whirling wheels. Now we noticed that our heroine packed a Daisy air-pistol on her right hip ... "More to come, ya zeroes!" she yelled, and drew the weapon. Her pellets gave stones the gift of flight; we threw annas into the air and she gunned them down, stone-dead. "Targets! More targets!" — and Eyeslice surrendered his beloved pack of rummy cards without a murmur, so that she could shoot the heads off the kings. Annie Oakley in toothbraces — nobody dared question her sharpshooting, except once, and that was at the end of her reign, during the great cat invasion; and there were extenuating circumstances. Flushed, sweating, Evie Burns dismounted and announced: "From now on, there's a new big chief around here. Okay, Indians? Any arguments?" No arguments; I knew then that I had fallen in love. At Juhu Beach with Evie: she won the camel-races, could drink more coconut milk than any of us, could open her eyes under the sharp salt water of the Arabian Sea. Did six months make such a difference? (Evie was half a year older than me.) Did it entitle you to talk to grown-ups as an equal? Evie was seen gossiping with old man Ibrahim Ibrahim; she claimed Lila Sabarmati was teaching her to put on make-up; she visited Homi Catrack to gossip about guns. (It was the tragic irony of Homi Catrack's life that he, at whom a gun would one day be pointed, was a true aficionado of firearms ... in Evie he found a fellow-creature, a motherless child who was, unlike his own Toxy, as sharp as a knife and as bright as a bottle. Incidentally, Evie Burns wasted no sympathy on poor Toxy Catrack. "Wrong inna head," she opined carelessly to us all, "Oughta be put down like rats." But Evie: rats are not weak! |
| 542 |
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. 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. |
| 543 |
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. ... And on the train home, there were voices hanging on to the outside of the compartment: "OhE, maharaj! Open up, great sir!" — fare-dodgers' voices fighting with the ones I wanted to listen to, the new ones inside my head — and then back to Bombay Central Station, and the drive home past race-course and temple, and now Evelyn Lilith Burns is demanding that I finish her part first before concentrating on higher things. |
| 544 |
"So then I thought, how to go back to this man who will not love me and only does some foolish writery? (Forgive, Saleem baba, but I must tell it truly. And love, to us women, is the greatest thing of all.) "So I have been to a holy man, who taught me what I must do. 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? Who knows what, mashed with milk and mingled with my food, flung my innards into that state of "churning" from which, as all students of Hindu cosmology will know, Indra created matter, by stirring the primal soup in his own great milk-churn? |
| 545 |
Never mind. It was a noble attempt; but I am beyond regeneration — the Widow has done for me. Not even the real mucuna could have put an end to my incapacity; feronia would never have engendered in me the "lusty force of beasts." Still, I am at my table once again; once again Padma sits at my feet, urging me on. I am balanced once more — the base of my isosceles triangle is secure. I hover at the apex, above present and past, and feel fluency returning to my pen. A kind of magic has been worked, then; and Padma's excursion in search of love-potions has connected me briefly with that world of ancient learning and sorcerers' lore so despised by most of us nowadays; but (despite stomach-cramps and fever and frothings at the mouth) I'm glad of its irruption into my last days, because to contemplate it is to regain a little, lost sense of proportion. Think of this: history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 — but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga, in which the cow of morality has been reduced to standing, teeteringly, on a single leg! Kali-Yuga — the losing throw in our national dice-game; the worst of everything; the age when property gives a man rank, when wealth is equated with virtue, when passion becomes the sole bond between men and women, when falsehood brings success (is it any wonder, in such a time, that I too have been confused about good and evil?) ... began on Friday, February 18th, 3102 B. 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. |
| 546 |
Parvati-the-witch was born in Old Delhi in a slum which clustered around the steps of the Friday mosque. No ordinary slum, this, although the huts built out of old packing-cases and pieces of corrugated tin and shreds of jute sacking which stood higgledy-piggledy in the shadow of the mosque looked no different from any other shanty-town ... because this was the ghetto of the magicians, yes, the very same place which had once spawned a Hummingbird whom knives had pierced and pie-dogs had failed to save ... the conjurers' slum, to which the greatest fakirs and prestidigitators and illusionists in the land continually flocked, to seek their fortune in the capital city. They found tin huts, and police harassment, and rats ... Parvati's father had once been the greatest conjurer in Oudh; she had grown up amid ventriloquists who could make stones tell jokes and contortionists who could swallow their own legs and fire-eaters who exhaled flames from their arseholes and tragic clowns who could extract glass tears from the corners of their eyes; she had stood mildly amid gasping crowds while her father drove spikes through her neck; and all the time she had guarded her own secret, which was greater than any of the illusionist flummeries surrounding her; because to Parvati-the-witch, born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 15th, had been given the powers of the true adept, the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery, the art which required no artifice. So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry ... but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose ... to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!) ... and to me, the greatest talent of all — the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men. |
| 547 |
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. 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. |
| 548 |
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. "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 ... |
| 549 |
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. 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 ... |
| 550 |
(And, also, to discern in my mother's habitually tidy mind an alarming degree of disorder. I was already beginning, in those days, to classify people by their degree of internal tidiness, and to discover that I preferred the messier type, whose thoughts, spilling constantly into one another so that anticipatory images of food interfered with the serious business of earning a living and sexual fantasies were superimposed upon their political musings, bore a closer relationship to my own pell-mell tumble of a brain, in which everything ran into everything else and the white dot of consciousness jumped about like a wild flea from one thing to the next ... Amina Sinai, whose assiduous ordering-instincts had provided her with a brain of almost abnormal neatness, was a curious recruit to the ranks of confusion.) We headed north, past Breach Candy Hospital and Mahalaxmi Temple, north along Hornby Vellard past Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium and Haji Ali's island tomb, north off what had once been (before the dream of the first William Methwold became a reality) the island of Bombay. We were heading towards the anonymous mass of tenements and fishing-villages and textile-plants and film-studios that the city became in these northern zones (not far from here! Not at all far from where I sit within view of local trains!) ... an area which was, in those days, utterly unknown to me; I rapidly became disoriented and was then obliged to admit to myself that I was lost. At last, down an unprepossessing side-street full of drainpipe-sleepers and bicycle-repair shops and tattered men and boys, we stopped. Clusters of children assailed my mother as she descended; she, who could never shoo away a fly, handed out small coins, thus enlarging the crowd enormously. Eventually, she struggled away from them and headed down the street; there was a boy pleading, "Gib the car poliss, Begum? Number one A-class poliss, Begum? I watch car until you come, Begum? I very fine watchman, ask anyone!" ... In some panic, I listened in for her reply. |
| 551 |
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. 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 ... |
| 552 |
The Estate's servants were vanquished in their attempts to repel the great cat invasion; the ladies of the Estate were reduced to helpless exclamations of horror. Hard dry worms of cat-excrement were everywhere; gardens were ruined by sheer feline force of numbers; and at night sleep became an impossibility as the army found voice, and sang its thirst at the moon. (The Baroness Simki von der Heiden refused to fight the cats; she was already showing signs of the disease which would shortly lead to her extermination.) Nussie Ibrahim rang my mother to announce, "Amina sister, it is the end of the world." She was wrong; because on the third day after the great cat invasion, Evelyn Lilith Burns visited each Estate household in turn, carrying her Daisy air-gun casually in one hand, and offered, in return for bounty money, to end the plague of pussies double-quick. All that day, Methwold's Estate echoed with the sounds of Evie's air-gun and the agonized wauls of the cats, as Evie stalked the entire army one by one and made herself rich. But (as history so often demonstrates) the moment of one's greatest triumph also contains the seeds of one's final downfall; and so it proved, because Evie's persecution of the cats, was as far as the Brass Monkey was concerned, absolutely the last straw. "Brother," the Monkey told me grimly, "I told you I'd get that girl; now, right now, the time has come." Unanswerable questions: was it true that my sister had acquired the languages of cats as well as birds? Was it her fondness for feline life which pushed her over the brink? ... by the time of the great cat invasion, the Monkey's hair had faded into brown; she had broken her habit of burning shoes; but still, and for whatever reason, there was a fierceness in her which none of the rest of us ever possessed; and she went down into the circus-ring and yelled at the top of her voice: "Evie! Evie Burns! You come out here, this minute, wherever you are!" Surrounded by fleeing cats, the Monkey awaited Evelyn Burns. |
| 553 |
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. 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! 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. |
| 554 |
(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. 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 ... |
| 555 |
He would quiz Mary Pereira about recipes; they would discuss, for hours, the perfect blend of lemon, lime and garam masala. It is ironic that this arch-disciple of naturalism should have been so skillful (if unconscious) a prophet of his own family's fortunes; in the indirect kisses of the Lovers of Kashmir he foretold my mother and her Nadir-Qasim's meetings at the Pioneer CafE; and in his un-filmed chutney scenario, too, there lurked a prophecy of deadly accuracy. He besieged Homi Catrack with scripts. Catrack produced none of them; they sat in the small Marine Drive apartment, covering every available surface, so that you had to pick them off the toilet seat before you could lift it; but Catrack (out of charity? Or for another, soon-to-be-revealed reason?) paid my uncle a studio salary. That was how they survived, Hanif and Pia, on the largess of the man who would, in time, become the second human being to be murdered by mushrooming Saleem. Homi Catrack begged him, "Maybe just one love scene?" And Pia, "What do you think, village people are going to give their rupees to see women pickling Alfonsos?" But Hanif, obdurately: "This is a film about work, not kissing. And nobody pickles Alfonsos. You must use mangoes with bigger stones." The ghost of Joe D'Costa did not, so far as I know, follow Mary Pereira into exile; however, his absence only served to increase her anxiety. 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. |
| 556 |
Imagine, if you can, my sudden joy; imagine with what speed the nightmare fled from my thoughts, as I nestled against my extraordinary aunt's petticoats! As she re-arranged herself, to get comfortable, and one golden melon caressed my cheek! As Pia's hand sought out mine and grasped it firmly ... now I discharged my duty. 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! So much talent, a person cannot go to the pot in this house without finding your genius. Are you happy, husband? We are making much money? |
| 557 |
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? ... Because, in those days of the Monkey's ascendancy and the Conference's decline, I began to ascend the stairs whenever possible, and listen to the ravings of the crazy, sibilant old man. His first greeting to me, when I stumbled into his unlocked lair, was: "So, child — you have recovered from the typhoid." The sentence stirred time like a sluggish dust-cloud and rejoined me to my one-year-old self; I remembered the story of how Schaapsteker had saved my life with snake-poison. |
| 558 |
And afterwards, for several weeks, I sat at his feet, and he revealed to me the cobra which lay coiled within myself. Who listed, for my benefit, the occult powers of snakes? (Their shadows kill cows; if they enter a man's dreams, his wife conceives; if they are killed, the murderer's family is denied male issue for twenty generations.) And who described to me — with the aid of books and stuffed corpses — the cobra's constant foes? "Study your enemies, child," he hissed, "or they will surely kill you." ... At Schaapsteker's feet, I studied the mongoose and the boar, the dagger-billed adjutant bird and the barasinha deer, which crushes snakes' heads under its feet; and the Egyptian ichneumon, and ibis; the four-feet-high secretary bird, fearless and hook-beaked, whose appearance and name made me think suspicious thoughts about my father's Alice Pereira; and the jackal buzzard, the stink cat, the honey ratel from the hills; the road runner, the peccary, and the formidable cangamba bird. Schaapsteker, from the depths of his senility, instructed me in life. "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. |
| 559 |
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. 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. A newspaper said of the Sabarmati affair: "It is a theater in which India will discover who she was, what she is, and what she might become." ... But Commander Sabarmati was only a puppet; I was the puppet-master, and the nation performed my play — only I hadn't meant it! |
| 560 |
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. Because I am rushing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and jarring alterations in tone; I'm racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates (my writing speed is having trouble keeping up), the risk of unreliability grows ... in this condition, I am learning to use Padma's muscles as my guides. When she's bored, I can detect in her fibers the ripples of uninterest; when she's unconvinced, there is a tic which gets going in her cheek. |
| 561 |
Their son Zafar also came. And, to complete the circle, my mother brought Pia to stay in our house, "at least for the forty-day mourning period, my sister." For forty days, we were besieged by the dust; dust creeping under the wet towels we placed around all the windows, dust slyly following in each mourning arrival, dust filtering through the very walls to hang like a shapeless wraith in the air, dust deadening the sounds of formal ululation and also the deadly sniping of grieving kinsfolk; the remnants of Methwold's Estate settled on my grandmother and goaded her towards a great fury; they irritated the pinched nostrils of Punchinello-faced General Zulfikar and forced him to sneeze on to his chin. In the ghost-haze of the dust it sometimes seemed we could discern the shapes of the past, the mirage of Lila Sabarmati's pulverized pianola or the prison bars at the window of Toxy Catrack's cell; Dubash's nude statuette danced in dust-form through our chambers, and Sonny Ibrahim's bullfight-posters visited us as clouds. The Narlikar women had moved away while bulldozers did their work; we were alone inside the dust-storm, which gave us all the appearance of neglected furniture, as if we were chairs and tables which had been abandoned for decades without covering-sheets; we looked like the ghosts of ourselves. We were a dynasty born out of a nose, the aquiline monster on the face of Aadam Aziz, and the dust, entering our nostrils in our time of grief, broke down our reserve, eroded the barriers which permit families to survive; in the dust storm of the dying palaces things were said and seen and done from which none of us ever recovered. It was started by Reverend Mother, perhaps because the years had filled her out until she resembled the Sankara Acharya mountain in her native Srinagar, so that she presented the dust with the largest surface area to attack. Rumbling up from her mountainous body came a noise like an avalanche, which, when it turned into words, became a fierce attack on Aunt Pia, the bereaved widow. |
| 562 |
We had all noticed that my mumani was behaving unusually. There was an unspoken feeling that an actress of her standing should have risen to the challenge of widowhood in high style; we had unconsciously been eager to see her grieving, looking forward to watching an accomplished tragedienne orchestrate her own calamity, anticipating a forty-day raga in which bravura and gentleness, howling pain and soft despond would all be blended in the exact proportions of art; but Pia remained still, dry-eyed, and anticlimactically composed. Amina Sinai and Emerald Zulfikar wept and rent their hair, trying to spark off Pia's talents; but finally, when it seemed nothing would move Pia, Reverend Mother lost patience. The dust entered her disappointed fury and increased its bitterness. "That woman, whatsitsname," Reverend Mother rumbled, "didn't I tell you about her? My son, Allah, he could have been anything, but no, whatsitsname, she must make him ruin his life; he must jump off a roof, whatsitsname, to be free of her." It was said; could not be unsaid. Pia sat like stone; my insides shook like cornflour pudding. Reverend Mother went grimly on; she swore an oath upon the hairs of her dead son's head. "Until that woman shows my son's memory some respect, whatsitsname, until she takes out a wife's true tears, no food will pass my lips. It is shame and scandal, whatsitsname, how she sits with antimony instead of tears in her eyes!" The house resounded with this echo of her old wars with Aadam Aziz. And until the twentieth day of the forty, we were all afraid that my grandmother would die of starvation and the forty days would have to start all over again. She lay dustily on her bed; we waited and feared. I broke the stalemate between grandmother and aunt; so at least I can legitimately claim to have saved one life. On the twentieth day, I sought out Pia Aziz who sat in her groundfloor room like a blind woman; as an excuse for my visit, I apologized clumsily for my indiscretions in the Marine Drive apartment. |
| 563 |
Pia spoke, after a distant silence: "Always melodrama," she said, flatly, "In his family members, in his work. He died for his hate of melodrama; it is why I would not cry." At the time I did not understand; now I'm sure that Pia Aziz was exactly right. Deprived of a livelihood by spurning the cheap-thrill style of the Bombay cinema, my uncle strolled off the edge of a roof; melodrama inspired (and perhaps tainted) his final dive to earth. Pia's refusal to weep was in honor of his memory ... but the effort of admitting it breached the walls of her self-control. Dust made her sneeze; the sneeze brought tears to her eyes; and now the tears would not stop, and we all witnessed our hoped-for performance after all, because once they fell they fell like Flora Fountain, and she was unable to resist her own talent; she shaped the flood like the performer she was, introducing dominant themes and subsidiary motifs, beating her astonishing breasts in a manner genuinely painful to observe, now squeezing, now pummelling ... she tore her garments and her hair. It was an exaltation of tears, and it persuaded Reverend Mother to eat. Dal and pistachio-nuts poured into my grandmother while salt water flooded from my aunt. Now Naseem Aziz descended upon Pia, embracing her, turning the solo into a duet, mingling the music of reconciliation with the unbearably beautiful tunes of grief. Our palms itched with inexpressible applause. And the best was still to come, because Pia, the artiste, brought her epic efforts to a superlative close. Laying her head in her mother-in-law's lap, she said in a voice filled with submission and emptiness, "Ma, let your unworthy daughter listen to you at last; tell me what to do, I will do." And Reverend Mother, tearfully: "Daughter, your father Aziz and I will go to Rawalpindi soon; in our old age we will live near our youngest daughter, our Emerald. You will also come, and a petrol pump will be purchased." And so it was that Reverend Mother's dream began to come true, and Pia Aziz agreed to relinquish the world of films for that of fuel. |
| 564 |
The valley lay hidden in an eggshell of ice; the mountains had closed in, to snarl like angry jaws around the city on the lake ... winter in Srinagar; winter in Kashmir. On Friday, December 27th, a man answering to my grandfather's description was seen, chugha-coated, drooling, in the vicinity of the Hazratbal Mosque. At four forty-five on Saturday morning, Haji Muhammad Khalil Ghanai noticed the theft, from the Mosque's inner sanctum, of the valley's most treasured relic: the holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad. Did he? Didn't he? If it was him, why did he not enter the Mosque, stick in hand, to belabor the faithful as he had become accustomed to doing? If not him, then why? There were rumors of a Central Government plot to "demoralize the Kashmiri Muslims," by stealing their sacred hair; and counter-rumors about Pakistani agents provocateurs, who supposedly stole the relic to foment unrest ... did they? Or not? Was this bizarre incident truly political, or was it the penultimate attempt at revenge upon God by a father who had lost his son? For ten days, no food was cooked in any Muslim home; there were riots and burnings of cars; but my grandfather was above politics now, and is not known to have joined in any processions. He was a man with a single mission; and what is known is that on January 1st, 1964 (a Wednesday, just one week after his departure from Agra), he set his face towards the hill which Muslims erroneously called the Takht-e-Sulaiman, Solomon's seat, atop which stood a radio mast, but also the black blister of the temple of Sankara Acharya. Ignoring the distress of the city, my grandfather climbed; while the cracking sickness within him gnawed patiently through his bones. He was not recognized. Doctor Aadam Aziz (Heidelberg-returned) died five days before the government announced that its massive search for the single hair of the Prophet's head had been successful. When the State's holiest saints assembled to authenticate the hair, my grandfather was unable to tell them the truth. |
| 565 |
I will tell you all before that Joseph does. Begum, children, all you other great sirs and madams, come now to sahib's office, and I will tell." Public announcements have punctuated my life; Amina in a. Delhi gully, and Mary in a sunless office ... with my whole family trooping amazedly behind us, I went downstairs with Mary Pereira, who would not let go of my hand. What was in the room with Ahmed Sinai? What had given my father a face from which djinns and money had been chased away and replaced by a look of utter desolation? What sat huddled up in the corner of the room, filling the air with a sulphurous stench? What, shaped like a man, lacked fingers and toes; whose face seemed to bubble like the hot springs of New Zealand (which I'd seen in the Wonder Book of Wonders)? ... 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? |
| 566 |
But in the end it was Reverend Mother who intervened. "Once before, my daughter," she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing ravings, "your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname — both your children," she said, clutching me to her bosom. Once Reverend Mother had legitimized me, there was no one to oppose her; it seems to me now, across the years, that even my cursing father was affected by her support of the eleven-year-old snotnosed child. Reverend Mother fixed everything; my mother was like putty — like potter's clay! — in her omnipotent hands. At that time, my grandmother (I must continue to call her that) still believed that she and Aadam Aziz would shortly be emigrating to Pakistan; so she instructed my aunt Emerald to take us all with her — Amina, the Monkey, myself, even my aunty Pia — and await her coming. "Sisters must care for sisters, whatsitsname," Reverend Mother said, "in times of trouble." My aunt Emerald looked highly displeased; but both she and General Zulfikar acquiesced. And, since my father was in a lunatic temper which made us fear for our safety, and the Zulfikars had already booked themselves on a ship which was to sail that night, I left my life-long home that very day, leaving Ahmed Sinai alone with Alice Pereira; because when my mother left her second husband, all the other servants walked out, too. In Pakistan, my second period of hurtling growth came to an end. And, in Pakistan, I discovered that somehow the existence of a frontier "jammed" my thought-transmissions to the more-than-five-hundred; so that, exiled once more from my home, I was also exiled from the gift which was my truest birthright: the gift of the midnight children. |
| 567 |
"Pakistan," I said aloud, "What a complete dump!" And we hadn't even arrived ... I looked at the boats; they seemed to be swimming through a dizzying haze. The deck seemed to be swaying violently as well, although there was virtually no wind; and although I tried to grab the rails, the boards were too quick for me: they rushed up and hit me on the nose. That was how I came to Pakistan, with a mild attack of sunstroke to add to the emptiness of my hands and the knowledge of my birth; and what was the name of the boat? What two sister-ships still plied between Bombay and Karachi in those days before politics ended their journeys? Our boat was the SS Sabarmati; its sister, which passed us just before we reached the Karachi harbor, was the Sarasvati. We steamed into exile aboard the Commander's namesake-ship, proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence. We reached Rawalpindi by hot, dusty train. (The General and Emerald travelled in Air-Conditioned; they bought the rest of us ordinary first-class tickets.) But it was cool when we reached 'Pindi and I set foot, for the first time, in a northern city ... 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. |
| 568 |
Proving my manhood, my fitness for sonship, I assisted my uncle as he made the revolution. And in so doing, in earning his gratitude, in stilling the sniggers of the assembled gongs-and-pips, I created a new father for myself; General Zulfikar became the latest in the line of men who have been willing to call me "sonny," or "sonny Jim," or even simply "my son." How we made the revolution: General Zulfikar described troop movements; I moved pepperpots symbolically while he spoke. In the clutches of the active-metaphorical mode of connection, I shifted saltcellars and bowls of chutney: This mustard-jar is Company A occupying Head Post Office; there are two pepperpots surrounding a serving-spoon, which means Company B has seized the airport. 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. |
| 569 |
"Of course, go at once, my darling," my aunt Emerald told her sister, "But what, my God, can be this heartboot?" It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration. I say to these future exegetes: when you come to examine the events which followed on from the "heartboot cable," remember that at the very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me — the sword to switch metaphors, with which the coup de grace was applied — there lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications. Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; generously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to regain their monopoly of the nation's air-waves ... I must return (Padma is frowning) to the banal chain of cause-and-effect: we arrived at Santa Cruz airport, by Dakota, on September 16th; but to explain the telegram, I must go further back in time. If Alice Pereira had once sinned, by stealing Joseph D'Costa from her sister Mary, she had in these latter years gone a long way towards attaining redemption; because for four years she had been Ahmed Sinai's only human companion. Isolated on the dusty hillock which had once been Methwold's Estate, she had borne enormous demands on her accommodating good nature. He would make her sit with him until midnight while he drank djinns and ranted about the injustices of his life; he remembered, after years of forgetfulness, his old dream of translating and re-ordering the Quran, and blamed his family for emasculating him so that he didn't have the energy to begin such a task; in addition, because she was there, his anger often directed itself at her, taking the form of long tirades filled with gutter-oaths and the useless curses he had devised in the days of his deepest abstraction. |
| 570 |
She attempted to be understanding: he was a lonely man; his once-infallible relationship with the telephone had been destroyed by the economic vagaries of the times; his touch in financial matters had begun to desert him ... he fell prey, too, to strange fears. When the Chinese road in the Aksai Chin region was discovered, he became convinced that the yellow hordes would be arriving at Methwold's Estate in a matter of days; and it was Alice who comforted him with ice-cold Coca-Cola, saying, "No good worrying. 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. |
| 571 |
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. And her love had its reward, because not only did Ahmed Sinai make a recovery so complete as to astound Breach Candy's European doctors, but also an altogether more wonderful change occurred, which was that, as Ahmed came to himself under Amina's care, he returned not to the self which had practiced curses and wrestled djinns, but to the self he might always have been, filled with contrition and forgiveness and laughter and generosity and the finest miracle of all, which was love. |
| 572 |
This was the day on which my father held out his arms to me and said, "Come, son — come here and let me love you." In a frenzy of happiness (maybe the optimism disease had got to me, after all) I allowed myself to be smothered in his squashy belly; but when he let me go, nose-goo had stained his bush-shirt. I think that's what finally doomed me; because that afternoon, my mother went on to the attack. Pretending to me that she was telephoning a friend, she made a certain telephone call. While Indians attacked under cover of artillery, Amina Sinai planned my downfall, protected by a lie. Before I describe my entry into the desert of my later years, however, I must admit the possibility that I have grievously wronged my parents. Never once, to my knowledge, never once in all the time since Mary Pereira's revelations, did they set out to look for the true son of their blood; and I have, at several points in this narrative, ascribed this failure to a certain lack of imagination — I have said, more or less, that I remained their son because they could not imagine me out of the role. And there are worse interpretations possible, too — such as their reluctance to accept into their bosom an urchin who had spent eleven years in the gutter; but I wish to suggest a nobler motive: maybe, despite everything, despite cucumber-nose stainface chinlessness horn-temples bandy-legs finger-loss monk's-tonsure and my (admittedly unknown to them) bad left ear, despite even the midnight baby-swap of Mary Pereira ... maybe, I say, in spite of all these provocations, my parents loved me. I withdrew from them into my secret world; fearing their hatred, I did not admit the possibility that their love was stronger than ugliness, stronger even than blood. It is certainly likely that what a telephone call arranged, what finally took place on November 21st, 1962, was done for the highest of reasons; that my parents ruined me for love. The day of November 20th was a terrible day; the night was a terrible night ... |
| 573 |
But Sin is also the letter S, as sinuous as a snake; serpents lie coiled within the name. And there is also the accident of transliteration — Sinai, when in Roman script, though not in Nastaliq, is also the name of the place-of-revelation, of put-off-thy-shoes, of commandments and golden calves; but when all that is said and done; when Ibn Sina is forgotten and the moon has set; when snakes lie hidden and revelations end, it is the name of the desert — of barrenness, infertility, dust; the name of the end. In Arabia — Arabia Deserta — at the time of the prophet Muhammad, other prophets also preached: Maslama of the tribe of the Banu Hanifa in the Yamama, the very heart of Arabia; and Hanzala ibn Safwan; and Khalid ibn Sinan. Maslama's God was ar-Rahman, "the Merciful"; today Muslims pray to Allah, ar-Rahman. Khalid ibn Sinan was sent to the tribe of 'Abs; for a time, he was followed, but then he was lost. Prophets are not always false simply because they are overtaken, and swallowed up, by history. Men of worth have always roamed the desert. "Wife," Ahmed Sinai said, "this country is finished." After ceasefire and drainage, these words returned to haunt him; and Amina began to persuade him to emigrate to Pakistan, where her surviving sisters already were, and to which her mother would go after her father's death. "A fresh start," she suggested, "Janum, it would be lovely. What is left for us on this God-forsaken hill?" So in the end Buckingham Villa was delivered into the clutches of the Narlikar women, after all; and over fifteen years late, my family moved to Pakistan, the Land of the Pure. Ahmed Sinai left very little behind; there are ways of transmitting money with the help of multinational companies, and my father knew those ways. And I, although sad to leave the city of my birth, was not unhappy about moving away from the city in which Shiva lurked somewhere like a carefully-concealed land-mine. 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. |
| 574 |
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. 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. |
| 575 |
"A new beginning," Amina said, "Inshallah, we shall all be new people now." Spurred on by her noble and unattainable desire, a workman rapidly enlarged my hole; and now a pickle-jar was produced. Brine was discarded on the thirsty ground; and what-was-left-inside received the mullah's blessings. After which, an umbilical cord — was it mine? Or Shiva's? — was implanted in the earth; and at once, a house began to grow. There were sweetmeats and soft drinks; the mullah, displaying remarkable hunger, consumed thirty-nine laddoos; and Ahmed Sinai did not once complain of the expense. 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! |
| 576 |
Slapping my thigh, he cried, "Playing hard to get, eh? Darn right. Okay my boy: you pick one of my girls, and I guarantee to have all her teeth pulled out; by the time you marry her she'll have a million-buck smile for a dowry!" Whereupon my mother usually contrived to change the subject; she wasn't keen on Uncle Puffs' idea, no matter how pricey the dentures ... on that first night, as so often afterwards, Jamila sang to Major Alauddin Latif. Her voice wafted out through the window and silenced the traffic; the birds stopped chattering and, at the hamburger shop across the street, the radio was switched off; the street was full of stationary people, and my sister's voice washed over them ... when she finished, we noticed that Uncle Puffs was crying. "A jewel," he said, honking into a handkerchief, "Sir and Madam, your daughter is a jewel. I am humbled, absolutely. Darn humbled. She has proved to me that a golden voice is preferable even to golden teeth." And when Jamila Singer's fame had reached the point at which she could no longer avoid giving a public concert, it was Uncle Puffs who started the rumor that she had been involved in a terrible, disfiguring car-crash; it was Major (Retired) Latif who devised her famous, all-concealing, white silk chadar, the curtain or veil, heavily embroidered in gold brocade-work and religious calligraphy, behind which she sat demurely whenever she performed in public. The chadar of Jamila Singer was held up by two tireless, muscular figures, also (but more simply) veiled from head to foot — the official story was that they were her female attendants, but their sex was impossible to determine through their burqas; and at its very center, the Major had cut a hole. Diameter: three inches. Circumference: embroidered in finest gold thread. That was how the history of our family once again became the fate of a nation, because when Jamila sang with her lips pressed against the brocaded aperture, Pakistan fell in love with a fifteen-year-old girl whom it only ever glimpsed through a gold-and-white perforated sheet. |
| 577 |
The accident rumor set the final seal on her popularity; her concerts packed out the Bambino Theatre in Karachi and filled the Shalimar-bagh in Lahore; her records constantly topped the sales charts. And as she became public property, "Pakistan's Angel," "The Voice of the Nation," the "Bulbul-e-Din" or nightingale-of-the-faith, and began to receive one thousand and one firm proposals of marriage a week; as she became the whole country's favorite daughter and grew into an existence which threatened to overwhelm her place in our own family, so she fell prey to the twin viruses of fame, the first of which made her the victim of her own public image, because the accident-rumor obliged her to wear a gold-and-white burqa at all times, even in my aunt Alia's school, which she continued to attend; while the second virus subjected her to the exaggerations and simplifications of self which are the unavoidable side-effects of stardom, so that the blind and blinding devoutness and the right-or-wrong nationalism which had already begun to emerge in her now began to dominate her personality, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Publicity imprisoned her inside a gilded tent; and, being the new daughter-of-the-nation, her character began to owe more to the most strident aspects of the national persona than to the child-world of her Monkey years. Jamila Singer's voice was on Voice of Pakistan Radio constantly, so that in the villages of West and East Wings she came to seem like a superhuman being, incapable of being fatigued, an angel who sang to her people through all the days and nights; while Ahmed Sinai, whose few remaining qualms about his daughter's career had been more than allayed by her enormous earnings (although he had once been a Delhi man, he was by now a true Bombay Muslim at heart, placing cash matters above most other things), became fond of telling my sister: "You see, daughter: decency, purity, art and good business sense can be one and the same things; your old father has been wise enough to work that out." Jamila smiled sweetly and agreed ... |
| 578 |
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. Criticism was entirely absent from my heart; never once did I ask my sister whether this last relic of her old flirtation with Christianity might not look rather bad in her new role of Bulbul of the Faith ... Is it possible to trace the origins of unnatural love? Did Saleem, who had yearned after a place in the center of history, become besotted with what he saw in his sister of his own hopes for life? Did much-mutilated no-longer-Snotnose, as broken a member of the Midnight Children's Conference as the knife-scarred beggar-girl Sundari, fall in love with the new wholeness of his sibling? Once the Mubarak, the Blessed One, did I adore in my sister the fulfilment of my most private dreams? ... I shall say only that I was unaware of what had happened to me until, with a scooter between my sixteen-year-old thighs, I began to follow the spoors of whores. While Alia smoldered; during the early days of Amina Brand towels; amid the apotheosis of Jamila Singer; when a split-level house, rising by command of an umbilical cord, was still far from complete; in the time of the late-flowering love of my parents; surrounded by the somehow barren certitudes of the land of the pure, Saleem Sinai came to terms with himself. I will not say he was not sad; refusing to censor my past, I admit he was as sullen, often as uncooperative, certainly as spotty as most boys of his age. His dreams, denied the children of midnight, became filled with nostalgia to the point of nausea, so that he often woke up gagging with the heavy musk of regret overpowering his senses; there were nightmares of numbers marching one two three, and of a tightening, throttling pair of prehensile knees ... but there was a new gift, and a Lambretta scooter, and (though still unconscious) a humble, submissive love of his sister ... |
| 579 |
jerking my narrator's eyes away from the described past, I insist that Saleem, then-as-now, succeeded in turning his attention towards the as-yet-undescribed future. Escaping, whenever possible, from a residence in which the acrid fumes of his aunt's envy made life unbearable, and also from a college filled with other equally dislikeable smells, I mounted my motorized steed and explored the olfactory avenues of my new city. And after we heard of my grandfather's death in Kashmir, I became even more determined to drown the past in the thick, bubbling scent-stew of the present ... O dizzying early days before categorization! Formlessly, before I began to shape them, the fragrances poured into me: the mournful decaying fumes of animal feces in the gardens of the Frere Road museum, the pustular body odors of young men in loose pajamas holding hands in Sadar evenings, the knife-sharpness of expectorated betel-nut and the bitter-sweet commingling of betel and opium: "rocket paans" were sniffed out in the hawker-crowded alleys between Elphinstone Street and Victoria Road. Camel-smells, car-smells, the gnat-like irritation of motor-rickshaw fumes, the aroma of contraband cigarettes and "black-money," the competitive effluvia of the city's bus-drivers and the simple sweat of their sardine-crowded passengers. (One bus-driver, in those days, was so incensed at being overtaken by his rival from another company — the nauseating odor of defeat poured from his glands — that he took his bus round to his opponent's house at night, hooted until the poor fellow emerged, and ran him down beneath wheels reeking, like my aunt, of revenge.) Mosques poured over me the itr of devotion; I could smell the orotund emissions of power sent out by flag-waving Army motors; in the very hoardings of the cinemas I could discern the cheap tawdry perfumes of imported spaghetti Westerns and the most violent martial-arts films ever made. I was, for a time, like a drugged person, my head reeling beneath the complexities of smell; but then my overpowering desire for form asserted itself, and I survived. |
| 580 |
Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorated; the borders were closed, so that we could not go to Agra to mourn my grandfather; Reverend Mother's emigration to Pakistan was also somewhat delayed. In the meantime, Saleem was working towards a general theory of smell: classification procedures had begun. I saw this scientific approach as my own, personal obeisance to the spirit of my grandfather ... to begin with, I perfected my skill at distinguishing, until I could tell apart the infinite varieties of betel-nut and (with my eyes shut) the twelve different available brands of fizzy drink. (Long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman's Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test. Double Kola and Kola Kola, Perri Cola and Bubble Up were blindly identified and named.) Only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scents did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility, have and have-not were labelled and placed in neat compartments of my mind. Early attempts at ordering: I tried to classify smells by color — boiling underwear and the printer's ink of the Daily Jang shared a quality of blueness, while old teak and fresh farts were both dark brown. Motor-cars and graveyards I jointly classified as gray ... there was, too, classification-by-weight: flyweight smells (paper), bantam odors (soap-fresh bodies, grass), welterweights (perspiration, queen-of-the-night); shahi-korma and bicycle-oil were light-heavyweight in my system, while anger, patchouli, treachery and dung were among the heavyweight stinks of the earth. |
| 581 |
He wore bush-shirts on which musical notation and foreign street-signs jostled against the half-clad bodies of pink-skinned girls. But when Jamila Singer, concealed within a gold-brocaded burqa, arrived at the palace, Mutasim the Handsome — who owing to his foreign travels had never heard the rumors of her disfigurement — became obsessed with the idea of seeing her face; he fell head-over-heels with the glimpses of her demure eyes he saw through her perforated sheet. 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. |
| 582 |
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. Her father, a towel-manufacturer who could not seem to relinquish the soft hand of his wife, cried, "You see? Whose daughter is performing here? Is it a Haroon girl? A Valika woman? Is it a Dawood or Saigol wench? Like hell!" ... But his son Saleem, an unfortunate fellow with a face like a cartoon, seemed to be gripped by some deep malaise, perhaps overwhelmed by his presence at the scene of great historical events; he glanced towards his gifted sister with something in his eyes which looked like shame. |
| 583 |
That afternoon, Mutasim the Handsome took Jamila's brother Saleem to one side and tried hard to make friends; he showed Saleem the peacocks imported from Rajasthan before Partition and the Nawab's precious collection of books of spells, from which he extracted such talismans and incantations as would help him rule with sagacity; and while Mutasim (who was not the most intelligent or cautious of youths) was escorting Saleem around the polo-field, he confessed that he had written out a love-charm on a piece of parchment, in the hope of pressing it against the hand of the famous Jamila Singer and making her fall in love. At this point Saleem acquired the air of a bad-tempered dog and tried to turn away; but Mutasim now begged to know what Jamila Singer really looked like. Saleem, however, kept his silence; until Mutasim, in the grip of a wild obsession, asked to be brought close enough to Jamila to press his charm against her hand. Now Saleem, whose sly look did not register on love-struck Mutasim, said, "Give me the parchment"; and Mutasim, who, though expert in the geography of European cities, was innocent in things magical, yielded his charm to Saleem, thinking it would still work on his behalf, even if applied by another. 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. |
| 584 |
So, in the end, not even the magic parchment of Mutasim the Handsome was powerful enough to bring Saleem Sinai and Jamila Singer together; he left her room with bowed head, followed by her deer-startled eyes; and in time the effects of the spell faded altogether, and she took a dreadful revenge. As he left the room the corridors of the palace were suddenly filled with the shriek of a newly-affianced princess, who had awoken from a dream of her wedding-night in which her marital bed had suddenly and unaccountably become awash in rancid yellow liquid; afterwards, she made inquiries, and when she learned the prophetic truth of her dream, resolved never to reach puberty while Zafar was alive, so that she could stay in her palatial bedroom and avoid the foul-smelling horror of his weakness. The next morning, the two badmaashes of the Combined Opposition Party awoke to find themselves back in their own beds; but when they had dressed, they opened the door of their chamber to find two of the biggest soldiers in Pakistan outside it, standing peacefully with crossed rifles, barring the exit. The badmaashes shouted and wheedled, but the soldiers stayed in position until the polls were closed; then they quietly disappeared. The badmaashes sought out the Nawab, finding him in his exceptional rose-garden; they waved their arms and raised their voices; travesty-of-justice was mentioned, and electoral-jiggery-pokery; also chicanery; but the Nawab showed them thirteen new varieties of Kifi rose, crossbred by himself. They ranted on — death-of-democracy, autocratic-tyranny — until he smiled gently, gently, and said, "My friends, yesterday my daughter was betrothed to Zafar Zulfikar; soon, I hope, my other girl will wed our President's own dear son. Think, then — what dishonor for me, what scandal on my name, if even one vote were cast in Kif against my future relative! Friends, I am a man to whom honor is of concern; so stay in my house, eat, drink; only do not ask for what I cannot give." And we all lived happily ... |
| 585 |
My grandmother Naseem Aziz arrived in Pakistan in mid-1964, leaving behind an India in. which Nehru's death had precipitated a bitter power struggle. Morarji Desai, the Finance Minister, and Jagjivan Ram, most powerful of the untouchables, united in their determination to prevent the establishment of a Nehru dynasty; so Indira Gandhi was denied the leadership. 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. The pump was on a prime site, near the Rawalpindi-Lahore grand trunk road; it did very well. |
| 586 |
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. Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud: Naseem Aziz had found her own way of coping with tragedy; but in finding it had become the first victim of that spirit of detached fatigue which made the end the only possible solution. (Tick, tock.) ... However, on the face of it, she appeared to have not the slightest intention of following her husband into the camphor garden reserved for the righteous; she seemed to have more in common with the methuselah leaders of her abandoned India. She grew, with alarming rapidity, wider and wider; until builders were summoned to expand her glassed-in booth. |
| 587 |
It would not be long before the dream of Kashmir spilled over into the minds of the rest of the population of Pakistan; connection-to-history refused to abandon me, and I found my dream becoming, in 1965, the common property of the nation, and a factor of prime importance in the coming end, when all manner of things fell from the skies, and I was purified at last. Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cesspit stink of my iniquities. I had come to the Land of the Pure, and sought the company of whores — when I should have been forging a new, upright life for myself, I gave birth, instead, to an unspeakable (and also unrequited) love. Possessed by the beginnings of the great fatalism which was to overwhelm me, I rode the city streets on my Lambretta; Jamila and I avoided each other as much as possible, unable, for the first time in our lives, to say a word to one another. Purity — that highest of ideals! — that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs! — seemed very far away; how could I have known that history — which has the power of pardoning sinners — was at that moment counting down towards a moment in which it would manage, at one stroke, to cleanse me from head to foot? In the meantime, other forces were spending themselves; Alia Aziz had begun to wreak her awful spinster's revenge. Guru Mandir days: paan-smells, cooking-smells, the langorous odor of the shadow of the minaret, the mosque's long pointing finger: while my aunt Alia's hatred of the man who had abandoned her and of the sister who had married him grew into a tangible, visible thing, it sat on her living-room rug like a great gecko, reeking of vomit; but it seemed I was the only one to smell it, because Alia's skill at dissimulation had grown as rapidly as the hairiness of her chin and her adeptness with the plasters with which, each evening, she ripped her beard out by the roots. My aunt Alia's contribution to the fate of nations — through her school and college — must not be minimized. |
| 588 |
Having allowed her old-maid frustrations to leak into the curricula, the bricks and also the students at her twin educational establishments, she had raised a tribe of children and young adults who felt themselves possessed by an ancient vengefulness, without fully knowing why. O omnipresent aridity of maiden aunts! It soured the paintwork of her home; her furniture was made lumpy by the harsh stuffing of bitterness; old-maid repressions were sewn into curtain-seams. As once long ago into baby-things of. Bitterness, issuing through the fissures of the earth. What my aunt Alia took pleasure in: cooking. What she had, during the lonely madness of the years, raised to the level of an art-form: the impregnation of food with emotions. To whom she remained second in her achievements in this field: my old ayah, Mary Pereira. By whom, today, both old cooks have been outdone: Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza pickle works ... nevertheless, while we lived in her Guru Mandir mansion, she fed us the birianis of dissension and the nargisi koftas of discord; and little by little, even the harmonies of my parents' autumnal love went out of tune. But good things must also be said about my aunt. In politics, she spoke out vociferously against government-by-military-say-so; if she had not had a General for a brother-in-law, her school and college might well have been taken out of her hands. Let me not show her entirely through the dark glass of my private despondency: she had given lecture-tours in the Soviet Union and America. Also, her food tasted good. (Despite its hidden content.) But the air and the food in that mosque-shadowed house began to take its toll ... Saleem, under the doubly dislocating influence of his awful love and Alia's food, began to blush like a beetroot whenever his sister appeared in his thoughts; while Jamila, unconsciously seized by a longing for fresh air and food unseasoned by dark emotions, began to spend less and less time there, travelling instead up and down the country (but never to the East Wing) to give her concerts. |
| 589 |
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. My mother was forty-two years old; and the fears (both natural and Alia-induced) of bearing a child at such an age tarnished the brilliant aura which had hung around her ever since she nursed her husband into his loving autumn; under the influence of the kormas of my aunt's vengeance — spiced with forebodings as well as cardamoms — my mother became afraid of her child. As the months passed, her forty-two years began to take a terrible toll; the weight of her four decades grew daily, crushing her beneath her age. In her second month, her hair went white. By the third, her face had shrivelled like a rotting mango. In her fourth month she was already an old woman, lined and thick, plagued by verrucas once again, with the inevitability of hair sprouting all over her face; she seemed shrouded once more in a fog of shame, as though the baby were a scandal in a lady of her evident antiquity. As the child of those confused days grew within her, the contrast between its youth and her age increased; it was at this point that she collapsed into an old cane chair and received visits from the specters of her past. The disintegration of my mother was appalling in its suddenness; Ahmed Sinai, observing helplessly, found himself, all of a sudden, unnerved, adrift, unmanned. Even now, I find it hard to write about those days of the end of possibility, when my father found his towel factory crumbling in his hands. |
| 590 |
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. 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 ... |
| 591 |
No: let me use the important word: if we were to be purified, something on the scale of what followed was probably necessary. Alia Aziz, sated with her terrible revenge; my aunt Emerald, widowed and awaiting exile; the hollow lasciviousness of my aunt Pia and the glass-boothed withdrawal of my grandmother Naseem Aziz; my cousin Zafar, with his eternally pre-pubertal princess and his future of wetting mattresses in jail-cells; the retreat into childishness of my father and the haunted, accelerated ageing of pregnant Amina Sinai ... all these terrible conditions were to be cured as a result of the adoption, by the Government, of my dream of visiting Kashmir. In the meantime, the flinty refusals of my sister to countenance my love had driven me into a deeply fatalistic frame of mind; in the grip of my new carelessness about my future I told Uncle Puffs that I was willing to marry any one of the Puffias he chose for me. (By doing so, I doomed them all; everyone who attempts to forge ties with our household ends up by sharing our fate.) I am trying to stop being mystifying. Important to concentrate on good hard facts. But which facts? One week before my eighteenth birthday, on August 8th, did Pakistani troops in civilian clothing cross the cease-fire line in Kashmir and infiltrate the Indian sector, or did they not? In Delhi, Prime Minister Shastri announced "massive infiltration ... to subvert the state"; but here is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, with his riposte: "We categorically deny any involvement in the rising against tyranny by the indigenous people of Kashmir." If it happened, what were the motives? Again, a rash of possible explanations: the continuing anger which had been stirred up by the Rann of Kutch; the desire to settle, once-and-for-all, the old issue of who-should-possess-the-Perfect-Valley? ... Or one which didn't get into the papers: the pressures of internal political troubles in Pakistan — Ayub's government was tottering, and a war works wonders at such times. |
| 592 |
This reason or that or the other? To simplify matters, I present two of my own: the war happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers; furthermore, I remained impure, and the war was to separate me from my sins. Jehad, Padma! Holy war! But who attacked? Who defended? On my eighteenth birthday, reality took another terrible beating. From the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, an Indian prime minister (not the same one who wrote me a long-ago letter) sent me this birthday greeting: "We promise that force will be met with force, and aggression against us will never be allowed to succeed!" While jeeps with loud-hailers saluted me in Guru Mandir, reassuring me: "The Indian aggressors will be utterly overthrown! We are a race of warriors! One Pathan; one Punjabi Muslim is worth ten of those babus-in-arms!" Jamila Singer was called north, to serenade our worth-ten jawans. A servant paints blackout on the windows; at night, my father, in the stupidity of his second childhood, opens the windows and turns on the lights. Bricks and stones fly through the apertures: my eighteenth-birthday presents. And still events grow more and more confused: on August 30th, did Indian troops cross the cease-fire line near Uri to "chase out the Pakistan raiders" — or to initiate an attack? When, on September 1st, our ten-times-better soldiers crossed the line at Chhamb, were they aggressors or were they not? Some certainties: that the voice of Jamila Singer sang Pakistani troops to their deaths; and that muezzins from their minarets — yes, even on Clayton Road — promised us that anyone who died in battle went straight to the camphor garden. The mujahid philosophy of Syed Ahmad Barilwi ruled the air; we were invited to make sacrifices "as never before." And on the radio, what destruction, what mayhem! In the first five days of the war Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft than Indian had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the Pakistan Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man. |
| 593 |
Utterly distracted by the double insanity of the war and my private life, I began to think desperate thoughts ... Great sacrifices: for instance, at the battle for Lahore? — On September 6th, Indian troops crossed the Wagah border, thus hugely broadening the front of the war, which was no longer limited to Kashmir; and did great sacrifices take place, or not? Was it true that the city was virtually defenseless, because the Pak Army and Air Force were all in the Kashmir sector? Voice of Pakistan said: O memorable day! O unarguable lesson in the fatality of delay! The Indians, confident of capturing the city, stopped for breakfast. All-India Radio announced the fall of Lahore; meanwhile, a private aircraft spotted the breakfasting invaders. While the B. B. C. picked up the A. I. R. story, the Lahore militia was mobilized. Hear the Voice of Pakistan! — old men, young boys, irate grandmothers fought the Indian Army; bridge by bridge they battled, with any available weapons! 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? Nothing was real; nothing certain. Uncle Puffs came to visit the Clayton Road house, and there were no teeth in his mouth. |
| 594 |
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. They have commandeered a boat, because the buddha said the trail led down the river; hungry unslept exhausted in a universe of abandoned rice-paddies, they row after their unseen prey; down the great brown river they go, until the war is too far away to remember, but still the scent leads them on. The river here has a familiar name: Padma. But the name is a local deception; in reality the river is still Her, the mother-water, goddess Ganga streaming down to earth through Shiva's hair. The buddha has not spoken for days; he just points, there, that way, and on they go, south south south to the sea. A nameless morning. Ayooba Shaheed Farooq awaking in the boat of their absurd pursuit, moored by the bank of Padma-Ganga — to find him gone. "Allah-Allah," Farooq yelps, "Grab your ears and pray for pity, he's brought us to this drowned place and run off, it's all your fault, you Ayooba, that trick with the jump-leads and this is his revenge!" ... The sun, climbing. Strange alien birds in the sky. Hunger and fear like mice in their bellies: and whatif, whatif the Mukti Bahini ... |
| 595 |
You're just saying anything." The buddha remained silent, but in his silence they read their fate, and now that he was convinced that the jungle had swallowed them the way a toad gulps down a mosquito, now that he was sure he would never see the sun again, Ayooba Baloch, Ayooba-the-tank himself, broke down utterly and wept like a monsoon. The incongruous spectacle of this huge figure with a crew-cut blubbering like a baby served to detach Farooq and Shaheed from their senses; so that Farooq almost upset the boat by attacking the buddha, who mildly bore all the fist-blows which rained down on his chest shoulders arms, until Shaheed pulled Farooq down for the sake of safety. Ayooba Baloch cried without stopping for three entire hours or days or weeks, until the rain began and made his tears unnecessary; and Shaheed Dar heard himself saying, "Now look what you started, man, with your crying," proving that they were already beginning to succumb to the logic of the jungle, and that was only the start of it, because as the mystery of evening compounded the unreality of the trees, the Sundarbans began to grow in the rain. At first they were so busy baling out their boat that they did not notice; also, the water-level was rising, which may have confused them; but in the last light there could be no doubt that the jungle was gaining in size, power and ferocity; the huge stilt-roots of vast ancient mangrove trees could be seen snaking about thirstily in the dusk, sucking in the rain and becoming thicker than elephants' trunks, while the mangroves themselves were getting so tall that, as Shaheed Dar said afterwards, the birds at the top must have been able to sing to God. The leaves in the heights of the great nipa palms began to spread like immense green cupped hands, swelling in the nocturnal downpour until the entire forest seemed to be thatched; and then the nipa-fruits began to fall, they were larger than any coconuts on earth and gathered speed alarmingly as they fell from dizzying heights to explode like bombs in the water. |
| 596 |
Rainwater was filling their boat; they had only their soft green caps and an old ghee tin to bale with; and as night fell and the nipa-fruits bombed them from the air, Shaheed Dar said, "Nothing else to do — we must land," although his thoughts were full of his pomegranate-dream and it crossed his mind that this might be where it came true, even if the fruits were different here. While Ayooba sat in a red-eyed funk and Farooq seemed destroyed by his hero's disintegration; while the buddha remained silent and bowed his head, Shaheed alone remained capable of thought, because although he was drenched and worn out and the night-jungle screeched around him, his head became partly clear whenever he thought about the pomegranate of his death; so it was Shaheed who ordered us, them, to row our, their, sinking boat to shore. A nipa-fruit missed the boat by an inch and a half, creating such turbulence in the water that they capsized; they struggled ashore in the dark holding guns oilskins ghee-tin above their heads, pulled the boat up after themselves, and past caring about bombarding nipa palms and snaking mangroves, fell into their sodden craft and slept. When they awoke, soaking-shivering in spite of the heat, the rain had become a heavy drizzle. They found their bodies covered in three-inch-long leeches which were almost entirely colorless owing to the absence of direct sunlight, but which had now turned bright red because they were full of blood, and which, one by one, exploded on the bodies of the four human beings, being too greedy to stop sucking when they were full. Blood trickled down legs and on to the forest floor; the jungle sucked it in, and knew what they were like. When the falling nipa-fruits smashed on the jungle floor, they, too, exuded a liquid the color of blood, a red milk which was immediately covered in a million insects, including giant flies as transparent as the leeches. The flies, too, reddened as they filled up with the milk of the fruit ... all through the night, it seemed, the Sundarbans had continued to grow. |
| 597 |
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. 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. |
| 598 |
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. And rushing on: to late-flowering love, and Jamila in a bedroom in a shaft of light. Now Shaheed did murmur, "So that's why, when he confessed, after that she couldn't stand to be near ..." But the buddha continues, and it becomes apparent that he is struggling to recall something particular, something which refuses to return, which obstinately eludes him, so that he gets to the end without finding it, and remains frowning and unsatisfied even after he has recounted a holy war, and revealed what fell from the sky. There was a silence; and then Farooq Rashid said, "So much, yaar, inside one person; so many bad things, no wonder he kept his mouth shut!" You see, Padma: I have told this story before. But what refused to return? What, despite the liberating venene of a colorless serpent, failed to emerge from my lips? Padma: the buddha had forgotten his name. (To be precise: his first name.) And still it went on raining. |
| 599 |
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. Ho no. I have news — ho, such news! India comes! Jessore is fall, my sirs; in one-four days, Dacca, also, yes-no?" The buddha listened; the buddha's eyes looked beyond the peasant to the field. "Such a things, my sir! India! They have one mighty soldier fellow, he can kill six persons at one time, break necks khrikk-khrikk between his knees, my sirs? Knees — is right words?" He tapped his own. "I see, my sirs. With these eyes, ho yes! He fights with not guns, not swords. With knees, and six necks go khrikk-khrikk. Ho God." Shaheed was vomiting in the field. |
| 600 |
today, Master Vikram's music raised the celebratory goodwill of the people to fever-pitch; it maddened, let us say, their hearts with delight. And there was Picture Singh himself, a seven-foot giant who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and was known as the Most Charming Man In The World because of his unsurpassable skills as a snake-charmer. Not even the legendary Tubriwallahs of Bengal could exceed his talents; he strode through the happily shrieking crowds, twined from head to foot with deadly cobras, mambas and kraits, all with their poison-sacs intact ... Picture Singh, who would be the last in the line of men who have been willing to become my fathers ... and immediately behind him came Parvati-the-witch. Parvati-the-witch entertained the crowds with the help of a large wicker basket with a lid; happy volunteers entered the basket, and Parvati made them disappear so completely that they could not return until she wished them to; Parvati, to whom midnight had given the true gifts of sorcery, had placed them at the service of her humble illusionist's trade; so that she was asked, "But how do you pull it off?" And, "Come on, pretty missy, tell the trick, why not?" — Parvati, smiling beaming rolling her magic basket, came towards me with the liberating troops. The Indian Army marched into town, its heroes following the magicians; among them, I learned afterwards, was that colossus of the war, the rat-faced Major with the lethal knees ... but now there were still more illusionists, because the surviving prestidigitators of the city came out of hiding and began a wonderful contest, seeking to outdo anything and everything the visiting magicians had to offer, and the pain of the city was washed and soothed in the great glad outpouring of their magic. Then Parvati-the-witch saw me, and gave me back my name. "Saleem! O my god Saleem, you Saleem Sinai, is it you Saleem?" The buddha jerks, puppet-fashion. Crowd-eyes staring. Parvati pushing towards him. "Listen, it must be you!" She is gripping his elbow. |
| 601 |
Afterwards, Parvati said, "I didn't want to tell you — but nobody should be kept invisible that long — it was dangerous, but what else was there to do?" In the grip of Parvati's sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away — and how easy, how peaceful not to never to return! — to float in this cloudy nowhere, wafting further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze — in short, I was in mortal danger. What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside ... clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir. No — there was more to it than spittoons: for, as we all know by now, our hero is greatly affected by being shut up in confined spaces. Transformations spring upon him in the enclosed dark. As a mere embryo in the secrecy of a womb (not his mother's), did he not grow into the incarnation of the new myth of August 15th, the child of ticktock — did he not emerge as the Mubarak, the Blessed Child? 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. |
| 602 |
?" 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. 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? |
| 603 |
When was it that I realized that my truly-incestuous feelings were for my true birth-sister, India herself, and not for that trollop of a crooner who had so callously shed me, like a used snake-skin, and dropped me into the metaphorical waste-basket of Army life? When when when? ... Admitting defeat, I am forced to record that I cannot remember for sure.) ... Saleem sat blinking in the dust in the shadow of the mosque. A giant was standing over him, grinning hugely, asking, "Achha, captain, have a good trip?" And Parvati, with huge excited eyes, pouring water from a lotah into his cracked, salty mouth ... Feeling! The icy touch of water kept cool in earthenware surahis, the cracked soreness of parched-raw lips, silver-and-lapis clenched in a fist ... "I can feel!" Saleem cried to the good-natured crowd. It was the time of afternoon called the chaya, when the shadow of the tall red-brick-and-marble Friday Mosque fell across the higgledy shacks of the slum clustered at its feet, that slum whose ramshackle tin roofs created such a swelter of heat that it was insupportable to be inside the fragile shacks except during the chaya and at night ... but now conjurers and contortionists and jugglers and fakirs had gathered in the shade around the solitary stand-pipe to greet the new arrival. "I can feel!" I cried, and then Picture Singh, "Okay, captain — tell us, how it feels? — to be born again, falling like baby out of Parvati's basket?" I could smell amazement on Picture Singh; he was clearly astounded by Parvati's trick, but, like a true professional, would not dream of asking her how she had achieved it. In this way Parvati-the-witch, who had used her limitless powers to spirit me to safety, escaped discovery; and also because, as I later discovered, the ghetto of the magicians disbelieved, with the absolute certainty of illusionists-by-trade, in the possibility of magic. So Picture Singh told me, with amazement, "I swear, captain — you were so light in there, like a baby!" — But he never dreamed that my weightlessness had been anything more than a trick. |
| 604 |
Why? Why, ungratefully spurning the nostalgic grief of Parvati-the-witch, did I set my face against the old and journey into newness? Why, when for so many years I had found her my staunchest ally in the nocturnal congresses of my mind, did I leave her so lightly in the morning? Fighting past fissured blanks, I am able to remember two reasons; but am unable to say which was paramount, or if a third ... firstly, at any rate, I had been taking stock. Saleem, analysing his prospects, had had no option but to admit to himself that they were not good. I was passport-less; in law an illegal immigrant (having once been a legal emigrant); P. O. W. camps were waiting for me everywhere. And even after setting aside my status as defeated-soldier-on-the-run, the list of my disadvantages remained formidable: I had neither funds nor a change of clothes; nor qualifications — having neither completed my education nor distinguished myself in that part of it which I had undergone; how was I to embark on my ambitious project of nation-saving without a roof over my head or a family to protect support assist ... it struck me like a thunderclap that I was wrong; that here, in this very city, I had relatives — and not only relatives, but influential ones! My uncle Mustapha Aziz, a senior Civil Servant, who when last heard of had been number two in his Department; what better patron than he for my Messianic ambitions? Under his roof, I could acquire contacts as well as new clothes; under his auspices, I would seek preferment in the Administration, and, as I studied the realities of government, would certainly find the keys of national salvation; and I would have the ears of Ministers, I would perhaps be on first-name terms with the great ...! 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 ... |
| 605 |
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? What once grew proudly on a hero's head and now nestled against a sorceress's breasts? "I asked and he gave," said Parvati-the-witch, and showed me a lock of his hair. Did I run from that lock of fateful hair? Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego, whom he had so-long-ago banned from the councils of the night, flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero? Was it high-mindedness or guilt? I can no longer say; I set down only what I remember, namely that Parvati-the-witch whispered, "Maybe he will come when he has time; and then we will be three!" And another, repeated phrase: "Midnight's children, yaar ... that's something, no?" Parvati-the-witch reminded me of things I had tried to put out of my mind; and I walked away from her, to the home of Mustapha Aziz. |
| 606 |
And then, and then, there was the matter of Jamila Singer ... She had heard about my disappearance in the turmoil of the war in Bangladesh; she, who always showed her love when it was too late, had perhaps been driven a little crazy by the news. Jamila, the Voice of Pakistan, Bulbul-of-the-Faith, had spoken out against the new rulers of truncated, moth-eaten, war-divided Pakistan; while Mr. Bhutto was telling the U. N. Security Council, "We will build a new Pakistan! A better Pakistan! My country hearkens for me!", my sister was reviling him in public; she, purest of the pure, most patriotic of patriots, turned rebel when she heard about my death. (That, at least, is how I see it; all I heard from my uncle were the bald facts; he had heard them through diplomatic channels, which do not go in for psychological theorizing.) Two days after her tirade against the perpetrators of the war, my sister had vanished off the face of the earth. Uncle Mustapha tried to speak gently: "Very bad things are happening over there, Saleem; people disappearing all the time; we must fear the worst." No! No no no! Padma: he was wrong! Jamila did not disappear into the clutches of the State; because that same night, I dreamed that she, in the shadows of darkness and the secrecy of a simple veil, not the instantly recognizable gold-brocade tent of Uncle Puffs but a common black burqa, fled by air from the capital city; and here she is, arriving in Karachi, unquestioned unarrested free, she is taking a taxi into the depths of the city, and now there is a high wall with bolted doors and a hatch through which, once, long ago, I received bread, the leavened bread of my sister's weakness, she is asking to be let in, nuns are opening doors as she cries sanctuary, yes, there she is, safely inside, doors being bolted behind her, exchanging one kind of invisibility for another, there is another Reverend Mother now, as Jamila Singer who once, as the Brass Monkey, flirted with Christianity, finds safety shelter peace in the midst of the hidden order of Santa Ignacia ... |
| 607 |
yes, she is there, safe, not vanished, not in the grip of police who kick beat starve, but at rest, not in an unmarked grave by the side of the Indus, but alive, baking bread, singing sweetly to the secret nuns; I know, I know, I know. How do I know? A brother knows; that's all. Responsibility, assaulting me yet again: because there is no way out of it — Jamila's fall was, as usual, all my fault. I lived in the home of Mr. Mustapha Aziz for four hundred and twenty days ... Saleem was in belated mourning for his dead; but do not think for one moment that my ears were closed! Don't assume I didn't hear what was being said around me, the repeated quarrels between uncle and aunt (which may have helped him decide to consign her to the insane asylum): Sonia Aziz yelling, "That bhangi — that dirtyfilthy fellow, not even your nephew, I don't know what's got into you, we should throw him out on his ear!" And Mustapha, quietly, replying: "Poor chap is stricken with grief, so how can we, you just have to look to see, he is not quite right in the head, has suffered many bad things." Not quite right in the head! That was tremendous, coming from them — from that family beside which a tribe of gibbering cannibals would have seemed calm and civilized! Why did I put up with it? Because I was a man with a dream. But for four hundred and twenty days, it was a dream which failed to come true. Droopy-moustachioed, tall-but-stooped, an eternal number-two: my uncle Mustapha was not my uncle Hanif. He was the head of the family now, the only one of his generation to survive the holocaust of 1965; but he gave me no help at all ... I bearded him in his genealogy-filled study one bitter evening and explained — with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures — my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, "Listen, Saleem, what would you have me do? I keep you in my house; you eat my bread and do nothing — but that is all right, you are from my dead sister's house, and I must look after — so stay, rest, get well in yourself; then let us see. |
| 608 |
You want a clerkship or so, maybe it can be fixed; but leave these dreams of God-knows-what. Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms — land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control — you can leave it to her and her sarkar." Patronizing me, Padma! As if I were a foolish child! O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts! At every turn I am thwarted; a prophet in the wilderness, like Maslama, like ibn Sinan! No matter how I try, the desert is my lot. O vile unhelpfulness of lickspittle uncles! O fettering of ambitions by second-best toadying relatives! My uncle's rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians' ghetto, and for ... for her ... the Widow. Jealousy: that was it. The green jealousy of my mad aunt Sonia, dripping like poison into my uncle's ears, prevented him from doing a single thing to get me started on my chosen career. The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also: tiny madwomen. On the four hundred and eighteenth day of my stay, there was a change in the atmosphere of the madhouse. Someone came to dinner: someone with a plump stomach, a tapering head covered with oily curls and a mouth as fleshy as a woman's labia. I thought I recognized him from newspaper photographs. Turning to one of my sexless ageless faceless cousins, I inquired with interest, "Isn't it, you know, San-jay Gandhi?" But the pulverized creature was too annihilated to be capable of replying ... was it wasn't it? I did not, at that time, know what I now set down: that certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves ... a few years later, there would be gangs of Sanjays all over India! No wonder that incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us ... |
| 609 |
There were Trotskyist tendencies amongst card-sharpers, and even a Communism-through-the-ballot-box movement amongst the moderate members of the ventriloquist section. I had entered a milieu in which, while religious and regionalist bigotry were wholly absent, our ancient national gift for fissiparousness had found new outlets. Picture Singh told me, sorrowfully, that during the 1971 general election a bizarre murder had resulted from the quarrel between a Naxalite fire-eater and a Moscow-line conjurer who, incensed by the former's views, had attempted to draw a pistol from his magic hat; but no sooner had the weapon been produced than the supporter of Ho Chi Minh had scorched his opponent to death in a burst of terrifying flame. Under his umbrella, Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. "Listen, captains," he told warring ventriloquists and puppeteers, "will you go to your villages and talk about Stalins and Maos? Will Bihari or Tamil peasants care about the killing of Trotsky?" The chaya of his magical umbrella cooled the most intemperate of the wizards; and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will; and that, unlike my grandfather's hero, he would not be stopped until he, and his cause, had won the day ... but, but. Always a but but. What happened, happened. We all know that. Before I return to telling the story of my private life, I should like it to be known that it was Picture Singh who revealed to me that the country's corrupt, "black" economy had grown as large as the official, "white" variety, which he did by showing me a newspaper photograph of Mrs. Gandhi. Her hair, parted in the center, was snow-white on one side and black-asnight on the other, so that, depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stoat or an ermine. |
| 610 |
The magicians kept their distance, lest they become diseased by his dreams. So you will understand why Parvati-the-witch, the possessor of truly wondrous powers, had kept them secret all her life; the secret of her midnight-given gifts would not have been easily forgiven by a community which had constantly denied such possibilities. On the blind side of the Friday Mosque, where the magicians were out of sight, and the only danger was from scavengers-after-scrap, from searchers-for-abandoned-crates or hunters-for-corrugated-tin ... that was where Parvati-the-witch, eager as mustard, showed me what she could do. In a humble shalwar-kameez constructed from the ruins of a dozen others, midnight's sorceress performed for me with the verve and enthusiasm of a child. Saucer-eye, rope-like pony-tail, fine full red lips ... I would never have resisted her for so long if not for the face, the sick decaying eyes nose lips of ... There seemed at first to be no limits to Parvati's abilities. (But there were.) Well, then: were demons conjured? Did djinns appear, offering riches and overseas travel on levitating rugs? Were frogs turned into princes, and did stones metamorphose into jewels? Was there selling-of-souls, and raising of the dead? Not a bit of it; the magic which Parvati-the-witch performed for me — the only magic she was ever willing to perform — was of the type known as "white." It was as though the Brahmins' "Secret Book", the Atharva-Veda, had revealed all its secrets to her; she could cure disease and counter poisons (to prove this, she permitted snakes to bite her, and fought the venom with a strange ritual, involving praying to the snake-god Takshasa, drinking water infused with the goodness of the Krimuka tree and the powers of old, boiled garments, and reciting a spell: Garudamand, the eagle, drank of poison, but it was powerless; in a like manner have I deflected its power, as an arrow is deflected) — she could cure sores and consecrate talismans — she knew the sraktya charm and the Rite of the Tree. |
| 611 |
When Parvati-the-witch finally admitted failure, her face developed, overnight, an alarming and pronounced pout. She fell asleep in the hut of the contortionist orphans and awoke with her full lips stuck in a protruding attitude of unutterably sensuous pique. Orphaned triplets told her, giggling worriedly, what had happened to her face; she tried spiritedly to pull her features back into position, but neither muscles nor wizardry managed to restore her to her former self; at last, resigning herself to her tragedy, Parvati gave in, so that Resham Bibi told anyone who would listen: "That poor girl — a god must have blown on her when she was making a face." (That year, incidentally, the chic ladies of the cities were all wearing just such an expression with erotic deliberation; the haughty mannequins in the Eleganza-'73 fashion show all pouted as they walked their catwalks. In the awful poverty of the magicians' slum, pouting Parvati-the-witch was in the height of facial fashion.) The magicians devoted much of their energies to the problem of making Parvati smile again. Taking time off from their work, and also from the more mundane chores of reconstructing tin-and-cardboard huts which had fallen down in a high wind, or killing rats, they performed their most difficult tricks for her pleasure; but the pout remained in place. Resham Bibi made a green tea which smelled of camphor and forced it down Parvati's gullet. The tea had the effect of constipating her so thoroughly that she was not seen defecating behind her hovel for nine weeks. 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? |
| 612 |
The Indian Army, which was at that time fighting a political battle against proposed expenditure cuts, understood the value of so charismatic an ambassador, and permitted the hero to circulate amongst his influential admirers; Shiva espoused his new life with a will. He grew a luxuriant moustache to which his personal batman applied a daily pomade of linseed-oil spiced with coriander; always elegantly turned out in the drawing-rooms of the mighty, he engaged in political chit-chat, and declared himself a firm admirer of Mrs. Gandhi, largely because of his hatred for her opponent Morarji Desai, who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper, and, as Chief Minister of Bombay, had once been responsible for the banning of alcohol and the persecution of young goondas, that is to say hooligans or apaches, or, in other words, of the child Shiva himself ... but such idle chatter occupied a mere fraction of his thoughts, the rest of which were entirely taken up with the ladies. Shiva, too, was besotted by too-much-women, and in those heady days after the military victory acquired a secret reputation which (he boasted to Parvati) rapidly grew to rival his official, public fame — a "black" legend to set beside the "white" one. What was whispered at the hen-parties and canasta-evenings of the land? What was hissed through giggles wherever two or three glittering ladies got together? This: Major Shiva was becoming a notorious seducer; a ladies'-man; a cuckolder of the rich; in short, a stud. There were women — he told Parvati — wherever he went: their curving bird-soft bodies quaking beneath the weight of their jewelery and lust, their eyes misted over by his legend; it would have been difficult to refuse them even had he wanted to. But Major Shiva had no intention of refusing. He listened sympathetically to their little tragedies — impotent husbands, beatings, lack-of-attention — to whatever excuses the lovely creatures wished to offer. |
| 613 |
Like my grandmother at her petrol pump (but with more sinister motives) he gave patient audience to their woes; sipping whisky in the chandeliered splendor of ballrooms, he watched them batting their eyelids and breathing suggestively while they moaned; and always, at last, they contrived to drop a handbag, or spill a drink, or knock his swagger-stick from his grasp, so that he would have to stoop to the floor to retrieve whatever-had-fallen, and then he would see the notes tucked into their sandals, sticking daintily out from under painted toes. In those days (if the Major is to be believed) the lovely scandalous begums of India became awfully clumsy, and their chappals spoke of rendezvous-at-midnight, of trellises of bougainvillaea outside bedroom windows, of husbands conveniently away launching ships or exporting tea or buying ball-bearings from Swedes. While these unfortunates were away, the Major visited their homes to steal their most prized possessions: their women fell into his arms. It is possible (I have divided by half the Major's own figures) that at the height of his philanderings there were no less than ten thousand women in love with him. 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. |
| 614 |
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. Callously she whispered that it was so funny, my God, the way he strutted around in high society like some kind of rooster, while all the time the ladies were laughing at him behind his back, O yes, Major Sahib, don't fool yourself, high-class women have always enjoyed sleeping with animals peasants brutes, but that's how we think of you, my God it's disgusting to watch you eat, gravy down your chin, don't you think we see how you never hold teacups by their handles, do you imagine we can't hear your belches and breakings of wind, you're just our pet ape, Major Sahib, very useful, but basically a clown. After the onslaught of Roshanara Shetty, the young war hero began to see his world differently. Now he seemed to see women giggling behind fans wherever he went; he noticed strange amused sidelong glances which he'd never noticed before; and although he tried to improve his behavior, it was no use, he seemed to become clumsier the harder he tried, so that food flew off his plate on to priceless Kelim rugs and belches broke from his throat with the roar of a train emerging from a tunnel and he broke wind with the rage of typhoons. His glittering new life became, for him, a daily humiliation; and now he reinterpreted the advances of the beautiful ladies, understanding that by placing their love-notes beneath their toes they were obliging him to kneel demeaningly at their feet ... |
| 615 |
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. L. N. Mishra, minister for railways and bribery, departed this world for good. Omens and more omens ... perhaps, in Bombay, dead pomfrets were floating belly-side-up to shore. January 26th, Republic Day, is a good time for illusionists. When the huge crowds gather to watch elephants and fireworks, the city's tricksters go out to earn their living. For me, however, the day holds another meaning; it was on Republic Day that my conjugal fate was sealed. In the days after Parvati's return, the old women of the ghetto formed the habit of holding their ears for shame whenever they passed her; she, who bore her illegitimate child without any appearance of guilt, would smile innocently and walk on. But on the morning of Republic Day, she awoke to find a rope hung with tattered shoes strung up above her door, and began to weep inconsolably, her poise disintegrating under the force of this greatest of insults. Picture Singh and I, leaving our shack laden with baskets of snakes, came across her in her (calculated? genuine?) misery, and Picture Singh set his jaw in an attitude of determination. "Come back to the hut, captain," the Most Charming Man instructed me, "We must talk." And in the hut, "Forgive me, captain, but I must speak. I am thinking it is a terrible thing for a man to go through life without children. |
| 616 |
To have no son, captain; how sad for you, is it not?" And I, trapped by the lie of impotence, remained silent while Pictureji suggested the marriage which would preserve Parvati's honor and simultaneously solve the problem of my self-confessed sterility; and despite my fears of the face of Jamila Singer, which, superimposed on Parvati's, had the power of driving me to distraction, I could not find it in myself to refuse. 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 ... like my own mother Amina Sinai, Parvati-the-witch became a new person in order to have a child. |
| 617 |
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. 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. |
| 618 |
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 ... 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. |
| 619 |
Parvati gave a final pitiable little yelp and out he popped, while all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches, and when the three contortionists had washed the baby and wrapped it in an old sari and brought it out for its father to see, at exactly the same moment, the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armored-units-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instant of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world. And there is more: because when, in the murky half-light of that endlessly prolonged midnight, Saleem Sinai saw his son for the first time, he began to laugh helplessly, his brain ravaged by hunger, yes, but also by the knowledge that his relentless destiny had played yet another of its grotesque little jokes, and although Picture Singh, scandalized by my laughter which in my weakness was like the giggling of a schoolgirl, cried repeatedly, "Come on, captain! Don't behave mad now! It is a son, captain, be happy!", Saleem Sinai continued to acknowledge the birth by tittering hysterically at fate, because the boy, the baby boy, the-boy-my-son Aadam, Aadam Sinai was perfectly formed — except, that is, for his ears. On either side of his head flapped audient protuberances like sails, ears so colossally huge that the triplets afterwards revealed that when his head popped out they had thought, for one bad moment, that it was the head of a tiny elephant. ... "Captain, Saleem captain," Picture Singh was begging, "be nice now! Ears are not anything to go crazy for!" He was born in Old Delhi ... |
| 620 |
Unpalatable, awkward queries: did Saleem's dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my life-long belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in "the Madam's" mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality — was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own — and was that, was that why ... ? Influence of hair-styles on the course of history: there's another ticklish business. If William Methwold had lacked a center-parting, I might not have been here today; and if the Mother of the Nation had had a coiffure of uniform pigment, the Emergency she spawned might easily have lacked a darker side. But she had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency, too, had a white part — public, visible, documented, a matter for historians — and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us. Mrs. Indira Gandhi was born in November 1917 to Kamala and Jawaharlal Nehru. Her middle name was Priyadarshini. She was not related to "Mahatma" M. K. Gandhi; her surname was the legacy of her marriage, in 1952, to one Feroze Gandhi, who became known as "the nation's son-in-law." They had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, but in 1949 she moved back into her father's home and became his "official hostess." Feroze made one attempt to live there, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the then Finance Minister, T. T. Krishnamachari — "T. T. K." himself. Mr. Feroze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. Sanjay Gandhi, and his ex-model wife Menaka, were prominent during the Emergency. The Sanjay Youth Movement was particularly effective in the sterilization campaign. I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had failed to realize that the Prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow. |
| 621 |
When she administered the medicine the child's cheeks began to bulge, as though his mouth were full of food; the long-suppressed sounds of his babyhood flooded up behind his lips, and he jammed his mouth shut in fury. It became clear that the infant was close to choking as he tried to swallow back the torrential vomit of pent-up sound which the green powder had stirred up; and this was when we realized that we were in the presence of one of the earth's most implacable wills. At the end of an hour during which my son turned first saffron, then saffron-and-green, and finally the color of grass, I could not stand it any more and bellowed, "Woman, if the little fellow wants so much to stay quiet, we mustn't kill him for it!" I picked up Aadam to rock him, and felt his little body becoming rigid, his knee-joints elbows neck were filling up with the held-back tumult of unexpressed sounds, and at last Parvati relented and prepared an antidote by mashing arrowroot and camomile in a tin bowl while muttering strange imprecations under her breath. After that, nobody ever tried to make Aadam Sinai do anything he did not wish to do; we watched him battling against tuberculosis and tried to find reassurance in the idea that a will so steely would surely refuse to be defeated by any mere disease. In those last days my wife Laylah or Parvati was also being gnawed by the interior moths of a despair, because when she came towards me for comfort or warmth in the isolation of our sleeping hours, I still saw superimposed upon her features the horribly eroded physiognomy of Jamila Singer; and although I confessed to Parvati the secret of the specter, consoling her by pointing out that at its present rate of decay it would have crumbled away entirely before long, she told me dolorously that spittoons and war had softened my brain, and despaired of her marriage which would, as it transpired, never be consummated; slowly, slowly there appeared on her lips the ominous pout of her grief ... but what could I do? |
| 622 |
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. 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. |
| 623 |
Because although a nose is uniquely equipped for the purpose of sniffing-things-out, when it comes to action there's no denying the advantages of a pair of grasping, choking knees. I shall permit myself one last, paradoxical observation on this subject: if, as I believe, it was at the house of the wailing women that I learned the answer to the question of purpose which had plagued me all my life, then by saving myself from that palace of annihilations I would also have denied myself this most precious of discoveries. To put it rather more philosophically: every cloud has a silver lining. Saleem-and-Shiva, nose-and-knees ... we shared just three things: the moment (and its consequences) of our birth; the guilt of treachery; and our son, Aadam, our synthesis, unsmiling, grave, with omniaudient ears. Aadam Sinai was in many respects the exact opposite of Saleem. I, at my beginning, grew with vertiginous speed; Aadam, wrestling with the serpents of disease, scarcely grew at all. Saleem wore an ingratiating smile from the start; Aadam had more dignity, and kept his grins to himself. Whereas Saleem had subjugated his will to the joint tyrannies of family and fate, Aadam fought ferociously, refusing to yield even to the coercion of green powder. And while Saleem had been so determined to absorb the universe that he had been, for a time, unable to blink, Aadam preferred to keep his eyes firmly closed ... although when, every so often, he deigned to open them, I observed their color, which was blue. Ice-blue, the blue of recurrence, the fateful blue of Kashmiri sky ... but there is no need to elaborate further. We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I: when he sleeps, his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. |
| 624 |
In this fragment, I discerned more than turnip-whiffs; mysteriously, my nose recognized, once again, the scent of personal danger. What I am obliged to deduce from this warning aroma: soothsayers prophesied me; might not soothsayers have undone me at the end? Might not a Widow, obsessed with the stars, have learned from astrologers the secret potential of any children born at that long-ago midnight hour? And was that why a Civil Servant, expert in genealogies, was asked to trace ... and why he looked at me strangely in the morning? Yes, you see, the scraps begin to fit together! Padma, does it not become clear? Indira is India and India is Indira ... but might she not have read her own father's letter to a midnight child, in which her own, sloganized centrality was denied; in which the role of mirror-of-the-nation was bestowed upon me? You see? You see? ... And there is more, there is even clearer proof, because here is another scrap of the Times of India, in which the Widow's own news agency Samachar quotes her when she speaks of her "determination to combat the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been growing." I tell you: she did not mean the Janata Morcha! No, the Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight. (Whose Conference had, of course, been disbanded years before; but the mere possibility of our reunification was enough to trigger off the red alert.) Astrologers — I have no doubt — sounded the alarums; in a black folder labelled M. C. C., names were gathered from extant records; but there was more to it than that. There were also betrayals and confessions; there were knees and a nose — a nose, and also knees. Scraps, shreds, fragments: it seems to me that, immediately before I awoke with the scent of danger in my nostrils, I had dreamed that I was sleeping. |
| 625 |
— 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. I, too, was pulled roughly towards a van; while bulldozers moved forwards into the slum, a door was slammed shut ... in the darkness I screamed, "But my son! — And Parvati, where is she, my Laylah? — Picture Singh! Save me, Pictureji!" — But there were bulldozers now, and nobody heard me yelling. Parvati-the-witch, by marrying me, fell victim to the curse of violent death that hangs over all my people ... I do not know whether Shiva, having locked me in a blind dark van, went in search of her, or whether he left her to the bulldozers ... because now the machines of destruction were in their element, and the little hovels of the shanty-town were slipping sliding crazily beneath the force of the irresistible creatures, huts snapping like twigs, the little paper parcels of the puppeteers and the magic baskets of the illusionists were being crushed into a pulp; the city was being beautified, and if there were a few deaths, if a girl with eyes like saucers and a pout of grief upon her lips fell beneath the advancing juggernauts, well, what of it, an eyesore was being removed from the face of the ancient capital ... |
| 626 |
Yes, of course it was all planned that way; and (if I may say so) most efficiently. What was achieved during the riot of the magicians: no less a feat than the unnoticed capture of the one person on earth who held the key to the location of every single one of the children of midnight — for had I not, night after night, tuned in to each and every one of them? Did I not carry, for all time, their names addresses faces in my mind? I will answer that question: I did. And I was captured. Yes, of course it was all planned that way. Parvati-the-witch had told me all about my rival; is it likely that she would not have mentioned me to him? I will answer that question, too: it is not likely at all. So our war hero knew where, in the capital, lurked the one person his masters wanted most (not even my uncle Mustapha knew where I went after I left him; but Shiva knew!) — and, once he had turned traitor, bribed, I have no doubt, by everything from promises of preferment to guarantees of personal safety, it was easy for him to deliver me into the hands of his mistress, the Madam, the Widow with the particolored hair. Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain an understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.) I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my more tangible, historically-verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life. Yes, that was where it happened, in the palace of the widows on the shores of the Ganges in the oldest living city in the world, the city which was already old when the Buddha was young, Kasi Benares Varanasi, City of Divine Light, home of the Prophetic Book, the horoscope of horoscopes, in which every life, past present future, is already recorded. The goddess Ganga streamed down to earth through Shiva's hair ... Benares, the shrine to Shiva-the-god, was where I was brought by hero-Shiva to face my fate. |
| 627 |
In the home of horoscopes, I reached the moment prophesied in a rooftop room by Ramram Seth: "soldiers will try him ... tyrants will fry him!" the fortuneteller had chanted; well, there was no formal trial — Shiva-knees wrapped around my neck, and that was that — but I did smell, one winter's day, the odors of something frying in an iron skillet ... Follow the river, past Scindia-ghat on which young gymnasts in white loincloths perform one-armed push-ups, past Manikarnika-ghat, the place of funerals, at which holy fire can be purchased from the keepers of the flame, past floating carcasses of dogs and cows — unfortunates for whom no fire was bought, past Brahmins under straw umbrellas at Dasashwamedh-ghat, dressed in saffron, dispensing blessings ... and now it becomes audible, a strange sound, like the baying of distant hounds ... follow follow follow the sound, and it takes shape, you understand that it is a mighty, ceaseless wailing, emanating from the blinded windows of a riverside palace: the Widows' Hostel! Once upon a time, it was a maharajah's residence; but India today is a modern country, and such places have been expropriated by the State. The palace is a home for bereaved women now; they, understanding that their true lives ended with the death of their husbands, but no longer permitted to seek the release of sati, come to the holy city to pass their worthless days in heartfelt ululations. In the palace of the widows lives a tribe of women whose chests are irremediably bruised by the power of their continual pummellings, whose hair is torn beyond repair, and whose voices are shredded by the constant, keening expressions of their grief. It is a vast building, a labyrinth of tiny rooms on the upper storeys giving way to the great halls of lamentation below; and yes, that was where it happened, the Widow sucked me into the private heart of her terrible empire, I was locked away in a tiny upper room and the bereaved women brought me prison food. But I also had other visitors: the war hero invited two of his colleagues along, for purposes of conversation. |
| 628 |
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. Yes, I told them everything, I named all five hundred and seventy-eight (because Parvati, they informed me courteously, was dead, and Shiva gone over to the enemy, and the five-hundred-and-eighty-first was doing the talking ...) — forced into treachery by the treason of another, I betrayed the children of midnight. I, the Founder of the Conference, presided over its end, while Abbott-and-Costello, unsmilingly, interjected from time to time: "Aha! Very good! Didn't know about her!" or, "You are being most co-operative; this fellow is a new one on us!" Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there is considerable disagreement about the number of "political" prisoners taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: "It is only a small percentage of the population of India." All sorts of things happen during an Emergency: trains run on time, black-money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. |
| 629 |
But in the black part, I sat bar-fettered in a tiny room, on a straw palliasse which was the only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of rice with cockroaches and ants. And as for the children of midnight — that fearsome conspiracy which had to be broken at all costs — that gang of cutthroat desperadoes before whom an astrology-ridden Prime Minister trembled in terror — the grotesque aberrational monsters of independence, for whom a modern nation-state could have neither time nor compassion — twenty-nine years old now, give or take a month or two, they were brought to the Widows' Hostel, between April and December they were rounded up, and their whispers began to fill the walls. The walls of my cell (paper-thin, peeling-plastered, bare) began to whisper, into one bad ear and one good ear, the consequences of my shameful confessions. A cucumber-nosed prisoner, festooned with iron rods and rings which made various natural functions impossible — walking, using the tin chamberpot, squatting, sleeping — lay huddled against peeling plaster and whispered to a wall. It was the end; Saleem gave way to his grief. All my life, and through the greater part of these reminiscences, I have tried to keep my sorrows under lock and key, to prevent them from staining my sentences with their salty, maudlin fluidities; but no more. I was given no reason (until the Widow's Hand ...) for my incarceration: but who, of all the thirty thousand or quarter of a million, was told why or wherefore? Who needed to be told? In the walls, I heard the muted voices of the midnight children; needing no further footnotes, I blubbered over peeling plaster. What Saleem whispered to the wall between April and December 1976: ... Dear Children. How can I say this? What is there to say? My guilt my shame. Although excuses are possible: I wasn't to blame about Shiva. And all manner of folk are being locked up, so why not us? And guilt is a complex matter, for are we not all, each of us in some sense responsible for — do we not get the leaders we deserve? |
| 630 |
But no such excuses are offered. I did it, I. Dear children: and my Parvati is dead. And my Jamila, vanished. And everyone. Vanishing seems to be yet another of those characteristics which recur throughout my history: Nadir Khan vanished from an underworld, leaving a note behind; Aadam Aziz vanished, too, before my grandmother got up to feed the geese; and where is Mary Pereira? I, in a basket, disappeared; but Laylah or Parvati went phutt without the assistance of spells. And now here we are, disappeared-off-the-face-of-the-earth. The curse of vanishment, dear children, has evidently leaked into you. No, as to the question of guilt, I refuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are too close to what-is-happening, perspective is impossible, later perhaps analysts will say why and wherefore, will adduce underlying economic trends and political developments, but right now we're too close to the cinema-screen, the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective judgments are possible. Subjectively, then, I hang my head in shame. Dear children: forgive. No, I do not expect you to forgive. Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured. Good question, children: what must be endured? Why are we being amassed here like this, one by one, why are rods and rings hanging from our necks? And stranger confinements (if a whispering wall is to be believed): who-has-the-gift-of-levitation has been tied by the ankles to rings set in the floor, and a werewolf is obliged to wear a muzzle; who-can-escape-through-mirrors must drink water through a hole in a lidded can, so that he cannot vanish through the reflective surface of the drink; and she-whose-looks-can-kill has her head in a sack, and the bewitching beauties of Baud are likewise bag-headed. |
| 631 |
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! — 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? |
| 632 |
— Children, don't you understand, they could do anything to us, anything — no, how can you say that, what do you mean with your what-could-they-do? Let me tell you, my friends, steel rods are painful when applied to the ankles; rifle-butts leave bruises on foreheads. What could they do? Live electric wires up your anuses, children; and that's not the only possibility, there is also hanging-by-the-feet, and a candle — ah, the sweet romantic glow of candlelight! — is less than comfortable when applied, lit, to the skin! Stop it now, cease all this friendship, aren't you afraid! Don't you want to kick stamp trample me to smithereens? Why these constant whispered reminiscences, this nostalgia for old quarrels, for the war of ideas and things, why are you taunting me with your calmness, your normality, your powers of rising-above-the-crisis? Frankly, I'm puzzled children: how can you, aged twenty-nine, sit whispering flirtatiously to each other in your cells? Goddamnit, this is not a social reunion! Children, children, I'm sorry. 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 ... |
| 633 |
! Yes, here is optimism, like a disease: one day she'll have to let us out and then, and then, wait and see, maybe we should form, I don't know, a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into gold? Children, something is being born here, in this dark time of our captivity; let Widows do their worst; unity is invincibility! Children: we've won! Too painful. Optimism, growing like a rose in a dung-heap: it hurts me to recall it. Enough: I forget the rest. — No! — No, very well, I remember ... What is worse than rods bar-fetters candles-against-the-skin? What beats nail-tearing and starvation? I reveal the Widow's finest, most delicate joke: instead of torturing us, she gave us hope. Which meant she had something — no, more than something: the finest thing of all! — to take away. And now, very soon now, I shall have to describe how she cut it off. Ectomy (from, I suppose, the Greek): a cutting out. To which medical science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy mastectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy. Saleem would like to donate one further item, free gratis and for nothing, to this catalogue of excisions; it is, however, a term which properly belongs to history, although medical science is, was involved: Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope. On New Year's Day, I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were black as black ... In newspaper articles this woman has been called "a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips ... she had run a jewelry boutique before she took up social work ... during the Emergency she was, semi-officially, in charge of sterilization." But I have my own name for her: she was the Widow's Hand. Which one by one and children mmff and tearing tearing little balls go ... greenly-blackly, she sailed into my cell. Children: it begins. Prepare, children. United we stand. |
| 634 |
... And who led us, one-by-one, to the chamber in the cellar where, because we are not savages, sir, air-conditioning units had been installed, and a table with a hanging lamp, and doctors nurses green and black, their robes were green their eyes were black ... who, with knobbly irresistible knees, escorted me to the chamber of my undoing? But you know, you can guess, there is only one war hero in this story, unable to argue with the venom of his knees I walked wherever he ordered ... and then I was there, and a gorgeous girl with big rolling hips saying, "After all, you can't complain, you won't deny that you once made assertions of Prophethood?", because they knew everything, Padma, everything everything, they put me down on the table and the mask coming down over my face and count-to-ten and numbers pounding seven eight nine ... Ten. And "Good God he's still conscious, be a good fellow, go on to twenty ..." ... Eighteen nineteen twen They were good doctors: they left nothing to chance. Not for us the simple vas- and tubectomies performed on the teeming masses; because there was a chance, just a chance that such operations could be reversed ... ectomies were performed, but irreversibly: testicles were removed from sacs, and wombs vanished for ever. Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves ... but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more than that: hope, too, was excised, and I don't know how it was done, because the numbers had marched over me, I was out for the count, and all I can tell you is that at the end of eighteen days on which the stupefying operations were carried out at a mean rate of 23.33 per day, we were not only missing little balls and inner sacs, but other things as well: in this respect, I came off better than most, because drainage-above had robbed me of my midnight-given telepathy, I had nothing to lose, the sensitivity of a nose cannot be drained away ... |
| 635 |
but as for the rest of them, for all those who had come to the palace of the wailing windows with their magical gifts intact, the awakening from anesthesia was cruel indeed, and whispering through the wall came the tale of their undoing, the tormented cry of children who had lost their magic: she had cut it out of us, gorgeously with wide rolling hips she had devised the operation of our annihilation, and now we were nothing, who were we, a mere 0.00007 per cent, now fishes could not be multiplied nor base metals transmuted; gone forever, the possibilities of flight and lycanthropy and the originally-one-thousand-and-one marvelous promises of a numinous midnight. 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. |
| 636 |
(But now that you know about us, you may find it easier to understand her over-confidence.) But on that day, I knew nothing about her crushing defeat, nor about burning files; it was only later that I learned how the tattered hopes of the nation had been placed in the custody of an ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of "his own water." Urine-drinkers had come to power. The Janata Party, with one of its leaders trapped in a kidney-machine, did not seem to me (when I heard about it) to represent a new dawn; but maybe I'd managed to cure myself of the optimism virus at last — maybe others, with the disease still in their blood, felt otherwise. At any rate, I've had — I had had, on that March day — enough, more than enough of politics. Four hundred and twenty stood blinking in the sunlight and tumult of the gullies of Benares; four hundred and twenty looked at one another and saw in each other's eyes the memory of their gelding, and then, unable to bear the sight, mumbled farewells and dispersed, for the last time, into the healing privacy of the crowds. What of Shiva? Major Shiva was placed under military detention by the new rEgime; but he did not remain there long, because he was permitted to receive one visit: Roshanara Shetty bribed coquetted wormed her way into his cell, the same Roshanara who had poured poison into his ears at Mahalaxmi Racecourse and who had since been driven crazy by a bastard son who refused to speak and did nothing he did not wish to do. 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. |
| 637 |
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. Communism had seeped out of them and been gulped down by the thirsty, lizard-quick earth; they were beginning to forget their skills in the confusion of hunger, disease, thirst and police harrassment which constituted (as usual) the present. To me, however, this change in my old companions seemed nothing short of obscene. Saleem had come through amnesia and been shown the extent of its immorality; in his mind, the past grew daily more vivid while the present (from which knives had disconnected him for ever) seemed colorless, confused, a thing of no consequence; I, who could remember every hair on the heads of jailers and surgeons, was deeply shocked by the magicians' unwillingness to look behind them. "People are like cats," I told my son, "you can't teach them anything." He looked suitably grave, but held his tongue. My son Aadam Sinai had, when I rediscovered the phantom colony of the illusionists, lost all traces of the tuberculosis which had afflicted his earliest days. |
| 638 |
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. O talismanic spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What sensitive person could fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its loss? ... Beside me at the back of a bus bulging with humanity, Picture Singh sat with snake-baskets coiled innocently on his lap. As we rattled and banged through that city which was also filled with the resurgent ghosts of earlier, mythological Delhis, the Most Charming Man In The World wore an air of faded despondency, as if a battle in a distant darkroom were already over ... until my return, nobody had understood that Pictureji's real and unvoiced fear was that he was growing old, that his powers were dimming, that he would soon be adrift and incompetent in a world he did not understand: like me, Picture Singh clung to the presence of Baby Aadam as if the child were a torch in a long dark tunnel. "A fine child, captain," he told me, "a child of dignity: you hardly notice his ears." That day, however, my son was not with us. New Delhi smells assailed me in Connaught Place — the biscuity perfume of the J. B. Mangharam advertisement, the mournful chalkiness of crumbling plaster; and there was also the tragic spoor of the auto-rickshaw drivers, starved into fatalism by rising petrol costs; and green-grass-smells from the circular park in the middle of the whirling traffic, mingled with the fragrance of con-men persuading foreigners to change money on the black market in shadowy archways. |
| 639 |
From the India Coffee House, under whose marquees could be heard the endless babbling of gossips, there came the less pleasant aroma of new stories beginning: intrigues marriages quarrels, whose smells were all mixed up with those of tea and chili-pakoras. What I smelled in Connaught Place: the begging nearby presence of a scar-faced girl who had once been Sundari-the-too-beautiful; and loss-of-memory, and turning-towards-the-future, and nothing-really-changes ... turning away from these olfactory intimations, I concentrated on the all-pervasive and simpler odors of (human) urine and animal dung. Underneath the colonnade of Block F in Connaught Place, next to a pavement bookstall, a paan-wallah had his little niche. He sat cross-legged behind a green glass counter like a minor deity of the place: I admit him into these last pages because, although he gave off the aromas of poverty, he was, in fact, a person of substance, the owner of a Lincoln Continental motor-car, which he parked out of sight in Connaught Circus, and, which he had paid for by the fortunes he earned through his sales of contraband imported cigarettes and transistor radios; for two weeks each year he went to jail for a holiday, and the rest of the time paid several policement a handsome salary. In jail he was treated like a king, but behind his green glass counter he looked inoffensive, ordinary, so that it was not easy (without the benefit of a nose as sensitive as Saleem's) to tell that this was a man who knew everything about everything, a man whose infinite network of contacts made him privy to secret knowledge ... to me he provided an additional and not unpleasant echo of a similar character I had known in Karachi during the time of my Lambretta voyages; I was so busy inhaling the familiar perfumes of nostalgia that, when he spoke, he took me by surprise. We had set up our act next to his niche; while Pictureji busied himself polishing flutes and donning an enormous saffron turban, I performed the function of barker. |
| 640 |
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 ... 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? |
| 641 |
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. 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 ... |
| 642 |
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. 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. |
| 643 |
And baba, what do you think, how could I believe the whole world would want to eat my poor pickles, even in England they eat. And now, just think, I sit here where your dear house used to be, while God-knows what-all has happened to you, living like a beggar so long, what a world, baapu-rE! And bitter-sweet lamentations: O, your poor mummy-daddy! That fine madam, dead! And the poor man, never knowing who loved him or how to love! And even the Monkey ... but I interrupt, no, not dead: no, not true, not dead. Secretly, in a nunnery, eating bread. Mary, who has stolen the name of poor Queen Catharine who gave these islands to the British, taught me the secrets of the pickling process. (Finishing an education which began in this very air-space when I stood in a kitchen as she stirred guilt into green chutney.) Now she sits at home, retired in her white-haired old-age, once more happy as an ayah with a baby to raise. "Now you finished your writing-writing, baba, you should take more time for your son." But Mary, I did it for him. And she, switching the subject, because her mind makes all sorts of flea-jumps these days: "O baba, baba, look at you, how old you got already!" Rich Mary, who never dreamed she would be rich, is still unable to sleep on beds. But drinks sixteen Coca-Colas a day, unworried about teeth, which have all fallen out anyway. A flea-jump: "Why you getting married so sudden sudden?" Because Padma wants. No, she is not in trouble, how could she, in my condition? "Okay, baba, I only asked." And the day would have wound down peacefully, a twilight day near the end of time, except that now, at last, at the age of three years, one month and two weeks, Aadam Sinai uttered a sound. "Ab ..." ArrE, O my God, listen, baba, the boy is saying something! And Aadam, very carefully: "Abba ..." Father. He is calling me father. But no, he has not finished, there is strain on his face, and finally my son, who will have to be a magician to cope with the world I'm leaving him, completes his awesome first word: "... |
| 644 |
cadabba." Abracadabra! But nothing happens, we do not turn into toads, angels do not fly in through the window: the lad is just Flexing his muscles. I shall not see his miracles ... Amid Mary's celebrations of Aadam's achievement, I go back to Padma, and the factory; my son's enigmatic first incursion into language has left a worrying fragrance in my nostrils. Abracadabra: not an Indian word at all, a cabbalistic formula derived from the name of the supreme god of the Basilidan gnostics, containing the number 365, the number of the days of the year, and of the heavens, and of the spirits emanating from the god Abraxas. "Who," I am wondering, not for the first time, "does the boy imagine he is?" My special blends: I've been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! 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. |
| 645 |
Most of the other children didn't ... Or again, in "All-India Radio" and others, a discordant note in the orchestrated flavors: would Mary's confession have come as a shock to a true telepath? Sometimes, in the pickles' version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little; at other times, too much ... yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that's how it happened. There is also the matter of the spice bases. The intricacies of turmeric and cumin, the subtlety of fenugreek, when to use large (and when small) cardamoms; the myriad possible effects of garlic, garam masala, stick cinnamon, coriander, ginger ... not to mention the flavorful contributions of the occasional speck of dirt. (Saleem is no longer obsessed with purity.) In the spice bases, I reconcile myself to the inevitable distortions of the pickling process. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-and-vinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavor in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form — that is to say, meaning. (I have mentioned my fear of absurdity.) One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth ... 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? |
| 646 |
To have acquired an education with nothing of the old humanist background — impossi-ble. To call oneself educated without a background of reading — impossible. Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading was and still is in what we call the Third World, a kind of parallel education, which once everyone had, or aspired to. Nuns and monks in their convents and monasteries, aristocrats at their meals, women at their looms and their sewing, were read to, and the poor people, even if all they had was a Bible, respected those who read. In Britain until quite recently trade unions and workers' movements fought for libraries, and perhaps the best example of the pervasiveness of the love for reading is that of the workers in the tobacco and cigar factories of Cuba whose trade unions demanded that the workers should be read to as they worked. The material was agreed to by the workers, and included politics and history, novels and poetry. A favorite of their books was The Count of Monte Christo. A group of workers wrote to Dumas and asked if they might use the name of his hero for one of their cigars. Perhaps there is no need to labor this point to anyone present here, but I do feel we have not yet grasped that we are living in a fast fragmenting culture. Pockets of the old excellences remain, in a university, a school, the classroom of an old-fashioned teacher in love with books, perhaps a newspaper or a journal. But a culture that once united Europe and its overseas offshoots has gone. We may get some idea of the speed with which cultures may change by looking at how languages change. English as spoken in America or the West Indies is not the English of England. Spanish is not the same in Argentina and in Spain. The Portuguese of Brazil is not the Portuguese of Portugal. Italian, Spanish, French, grew out of Latin not in thousands of years but in hundreds. It is a very short time since the Roman world disappeared, leaving behind its legacy of our languages. |
| 647 |
One interesting little irony about the present situation is that a lot of the criticism of the old culture was in the name of Elitism, but what is happening is that everywhere are enclaves, pockets, of the old kind of reader and reading and it is easy to imagine one of the new barbarians walking by chance into a library of the old kind, in all its richness and variety and understanding suddenly what has been lost, what he — or she — has been deprived of. So what is going to happen next in this tumultuously changing world? I think we are all of us fastening our seat belts and holding on tight. I drafted what I have just read before the events of the 11th September. We are in for a war, it seems, a long one, which by its nature cannot have an easy end. We all know that enemies exchange more than gunfire and insults. In this country, Spain, you know this better perhaps than anyone. When feeling gloomy about the world I often think about that time here, in Spain, in the early Middle Ages — in Cordova, in Toledo, in Granada, in other southern cities — Christians, Moslems, Jews, lived harmoniously together: poets, musicians, writers, sages, all together, admiring each other, helping each other. It went on for three centuries. This wonderful culture went on for three centuries. Has anything like it been seen in the world? What has been, can be again. I think the educated person of the future will have a wider basis than anything we can imagine now. — Doris Lessing The Sweetest Dream 'And people leave who were warm children.' An early evening in autumn, and the street below was a scene of small yellow lights that suggested intimacy, and people already bundled up for winter. Behind her the room was filling with a chilly dark, but nothing could dismay her: she was floating, as high as a summer cloud, as happy as a child who had just learned to walk. The reason for this uncharacteristic lightness ofheart was a telegram from her former husband, Johnny Lennox Comrade Johnny three days ago. |
| 648 |
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. 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. |
| 649 |
Without that telegram from Johnny she could not have afforded to say yes. The other letter offered her a niche as Agony Aunt (name still to be chosen) on The Defender, well paid, and safe. This would be a continuation of the other strand of her professional life as a freelance journalist, which is where she earned money. She had been writing on all kinds of subjects for years. At first she had tried her wings in local papers and broadsheets, any place that would pay her a little money. Then she found she was doing research for serious articles, and they were in the national newspapers. She had a name for solid balanced articles that often shone an unexpected and original light on a current scene. She would do it well. What else had her experience fitted her for, if not to cast a cool eye on the problems of others? But saying yes to that work would have no pleasure in it, no feeling she would be trying new wings. Rather, she would have to steady her shoulders with the inner stiffening of resolve that is like a suppressed yawn. How weary she was of all the problems, the bruised souls, the waifs and strays, how delightful it would be to say, 'Right, you can look after yourselves for a bit, I am going to be in the theatre every evening and most of the day too.' (Here was another little cold nudge: have you taken leave of your senses? Yes, and she was loving every minute.) The top of a tree still in its summer leaf, but a bit ragged now, was glistening: light from two storeys up, from the old woman's rooms, had snatched it from dark into lively movement, almost green: colour was implied. Julia was in, then. Readmitting her mother-in-law her ex-mother-in-law to her mind brought a familiar apprehension, because of the weight of disapproval sifting down through the house to reach her, but there was something else she had only recently become aware of. 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? |
| 650 |
He agreed to go to a progressive school, St Joseph's, Julia paying for everything. Johnny then came up with a suggestion that Frances at last did not refuse. Julia would let her and the boys have the lower part of her house. She did not need all that room, it was ridiculous... Frances thought of Andrew, returning to various squalid addresses, or not returning, certainly never bringing friends home. She thought of Colin who made no secret of how much he hated how they were living. She said yes to Johnny, yes to Julia, and found herself in the great house that was Julia's and always would be. Only she knew what it cost her. She had kept her independence all this time, paid for herself and the boys, and not accepted money from Julia, nor from her parents who would have been happy to help. 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. |
| 651 |
' She could not go on standing here, knowing that the boys were watching her, nervously, hurt because of her, even if the others were gazing at Johnny with eyes shining with love and admiration. She said, 'Sophie, give me a hand.' At once willing hands appeared, Sophie's and, it seemed, everyone's, and dishes were being set down the centre of the table. There were wonderful smells as the covers came off. They sat down at the head of the table, glad to sit, not looking at Johnny. All the chairs were full, but others stood by the wall, and, if he wanted, he could bring one up and sit down himself. Was he going to do this? He often did, infuriating her, though he believed, it was obvious, that it was a compliment. No, tonight, having made an impression, and got his fill of admiration (if he ever did) he was going to leave surely? He was not leaving. The wine glasses were full, all around the table. Johnny had brought two bottles of wine: open-handed Johnny, who never entered a room without offerings of wine... she was unable to prevent this bile, these bitter words, arriving unwanted on her tongue. 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. |
| 652 |
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. Opposite Rose was Sophie, a Jewish girl in the full bloom of her beauty, slender, black gleaming eyes, black gleaming hair, and people seeing her had to be afflicted with thoughts of the intrinsic unfairness of Fate, and then of the imperatives of Beauty and its claims. Colin was in love with her. So was Andrew. So was Geoffrey. Next to Sophie, and the very opposite, in every way, of Geoffrey, who was so correctly good-looking, English, polite, well-behaved, was stormy and suffering Daniel, who had just been threatened with expulsion from St Joseph's for shoplifting. He was deputy head boy, and Geoffrey was head boy, and had had to convey to Daniel that he must reform or else an empty threat, certainly, made for the sake of impressing the others with the seriousness of what they all did. This little event, ironically discussed by these worldly-wise children, was confirmation, if any was needed, of the inherent unfairness of the world, since Geoffrey shoplifted all the time, but it was hard to associate that open eagerly-polite face with wrongdoing. And there was another ingredient here: Daniel worshipped Geoffrey, always had, and to be admonished by his hero was more than he could bear. Next to Daniel was a girl Frances had not seen before, but she expected to be enlightened in good time. She was a fair well-washed well-presented girl whose name appeared to be Jill. |
| 653 |
This little German miss seemed to him as glamorous as a beauty glimpsed in a harem, all promise and hidden bliss, and he fancied that if a sunbeam did strike her she would melt like a snowflake. She gave him a red rose from the garden, and he knew she was offering him her heart. He declared his love in the moonlight, and next day spoke to her father. Yes, he knew that fourteen was too young, but he was asking for formal permission to propose when she was sixteen. And so they parted, in 1914, while war was coming to a boil, but like many liberal well-adjusted people it seemed to both the von Arnes and the Lennoxes that it was ridiculous Germany and England could go to war. When war was declared, Philip had left his love in tears just two weeks before. In those days governments seemed compelled to announce that wars must be over by Christmas, and the lovers were sure they would see each other soon. Almost at once xenophobia was poisoning Julia's love. Her family did not mind her loving her Englishman did not their respective Emperors call themselves cousins? but the neighbours commented, and servants whispered and gossiped. During the years of the war rumours followed Julia and her family too. Her three brothers were fighting in the Trenches, her father was in the War Office, and her mother did war work, but those few days of fever in July 1914 marked them all for comment and suspicion. 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. |
| 654 |
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. 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. |
| 655 |
She knew her manners were formal, and tried to become more casual. Her clothes: they were perfect too, but after all, she was a diplomat's wife and had to keep up appearances. As the English put it. They started married life in a little house in Mayfair, and there she entertained, as was expected of her, with the aid of a cook and a maid, and achieved something like the standards she remembered from her home. Meanwhile Philip had discovered that to marry a German woman had not been the best prescription for an unclouded career. Discussions with his superiors revealed that certain posts would be barred to him, in Germany, for instance, and he might find himself edged out of the straight highway to the top, and find himself in places like South Africa or Argentina. He decided to avoid disappointments, and switched to administration. He would have a fine career, but nothing of the glamour of foreign ministries. Sometimes he met in a sister's house the Betty whom he could have married and who was still unwed, because of so many men being killed and wondered how different life could have been. When Jolyon Meredith Wilhelm Lennox was born in 1920 he had a nurse and then a nanny. He was a long thin child, with golden curls and combative critical blue eyes, often directed at his mother. He had soon learned from his nanny that she was a German: he had a little tantrum and was difficult for a few days. He was taken to visit his German family, but this was not a success: he disliked the place, and the different manners he was expected to sit at mealtimes with his hands beside him on either side of his plate when not actually eating, speak when spoken to, and to click his heels when he made a request. He refused to go back. Julia argued with Philip about her child being sent off at seven to school. This is not unusual now, but then Julia was being brave. Philip told her that everyone of their class did this, and anyway look at him! he had gone to boarding school at seven. Yes, he did remember he had been a bit homesick... |
| 656 |
Julia liked the little house in Mayfair, so easy to run and keep clean and did not want to live in the big house with its many rooms. But that was what she found herself doing. She did not ever set her will against Philip's. They did not quarrel. They got along because she did not insist on her preferences. She behaved as she had seen her mother do, giving way to her father. Well, one side had to give way, the way Julia saw it, and it did not much matter which. Peace in the family was the important thing. The furniture of the little house, most of it from the home in Germany, was absorbed quite easily into the Hampstead house where in fact Julia did not seem to do nearly as much entertaining, though there was so much space for everything. For one thing, Philip was not really a sociable man: he had one or two close friends and saw them, often by himself. 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. |
| 657 |
but they were not suffering, they were not. She knew they were not. Julia went away, reported back to Philip, and tried not to think of those rooms in Notting Hill. Later, when Julia heard that Frances had gone to work in a theatre, Julia thought, A theatre! Of course, it would be! Then Frances was acting and Julia thought, Is she acting servants' parts then? She went to the theatre, sat well back where she could not be seen, she hoped, and watched Frances in a small part in a quite nice little comedy. Frances was thinner, though still solid, and her fair hair was in frilly waves. She was a hotel owner, in Brighton. Julia could not see anything of that pre-war giggler in her tight uniform, but still, she was doing the part well enough, and Julia felt encouraged. Frances knew that Julia had been to watch her, because it was a small theatre, and Julia was wearing one of her inimitable hats, with a veil, and her gloved hands were on her lap. Not another woman in the audience wore a hat. Those gloves, oh those gloves, what a laugh. All through the war, particularly at bad moments, Philip had kept the memory of a certain little glove, in Swiss muslin, and those dots, white on white, and the tiny frill at the wrist, seemed to him a delicious frivolity, laughing at itself, and a promise that civilisation would return. Soon Philip died of a heart attack, and Julia was not surprised. The war had been hard on him. He had worked to all hours and brought home work at nights. She knew he had been involved in all kinds of daring and dangerous ventures, and that he grieved for men he had sent into danger, sometimes to their deaths. He had become an old man, during the war. And, like her, this war was forcing him to relive the last one: she knew this, from the small dry remarks he did allow himself to drop. These two people, who had been so fatally in love, had lived always in patient tenderness, as ifthey had decided to protect their memories, like a bruise, from any harsh touch, refusing ever to look too closely at them. |
| 658 |
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. When Frances arrived, to take over all the house except for Julia's top floor, it was a relief to Julia. She still did not like Frances, who seemed determined to shock her, but she loved the boys, and intended to shield them from their parents. In fact, they were afraid of her, at least to start with, but she never found this out. She thought Frances was keeping her from them, did not know that Frances urged them to visit their grandmother. 'Please, she's so good to us. And she'd love it if you did.' 'Oh, no, it's too much, do we have to? Frances visited the newspaper to establish her job, and she knew how right she had been to prefer the theatre. As a freelance she had had little experience of institutions, and did not look forward to a communal working life. As soon as she set foot in the building that housed The Defender, she recognised there an atmosphere: this was an esprit de corps all right. The Defenders venerable history, going back into the nineteenth century, as a fighter for any number of good causes, was being continued, so it was generally felt, and most particularly by the people who worked for it; this period, the Sixties, was able to stand up to any of the great times of the past. Frances was being welcomed into the fold by one Julie Hackett. She was a soft, not to say womanly woman, with bundles of strong black hair fastened here and there with a variety of combs and pins, a resolutely unfashionable figure, because she saw fashion as an enslaver of women. |
| 659 |
She observed everything around her with a view to correcting errors of fact and belief, and she criticised men in every sentence, taking it for granted, as believers tend to do, that Frances agreed with her in everything. She had been keeping an eye on Frances, had seen articles by her here and there, and in The Defender too, but one article had decided her to get her on to the staff. It was a satirical, but good-natured piece about Carnaby Street, which was in the process of becoming a symbol for trendy Britain, and attracting youngsters, not to mention the young in heart, from all over the world. Frances had said that they must all be suffering from some sort of collective hallucination, since the street was grubby, tatty, and if the clothes were attractive some of them they were no better than others in streets that did not have the magic syllables Carnaby attached to them. Heresy! A brave heresy, judged Julie Hackett, seeing Frances as a kindred soul. Frances was shown an office where a secretary was sorting through letters addressed to Aunt Vera, and putting them in heaps, since even the nastiest predicaments of humanity must fall into easily recognised categories. My husband is unfaithful, an alcoholic, beats me, won't give me enough money, is leaving me for his secretary, prefers his mates in the pub to me. My son is alcoholic, a druggie, has got a girl pregnant, won't leave home, is living rough in London, earns money but won't contribute to the household. My daughter... 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. 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. |
| 660 |
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. Frances had taken to dropping in to the Cosmo, to work. In the layer of the house she had thought of as hers, safe from invasion, she now sat listening for Julia's footsteps, or Andrew's, for they both visited Sylvia, to give her cups of this or that, and insisted that her door must be kept open because the girl feared a door that was shut on her. And Rose crept about the house. Once Frances had found her nosing through papers on her desk, and Rose had giggled and said brightly, 'Oh, Frances,' and run out. She had been caught in Julia's rooms, by Julia. She did not steal, or not much, but she was by nature a spy. Julia told Andrew that Rose should be asked to leave; Andrew told Frances that this was what Julia had said; and Frances, relieved, because she disliked the girl, told Rose that it was time she returned to her family. Collapse of Rose. Reports were brought up from the basement where Rose hung out ('It's my pad') that Rose was in bed crying, and that she seemed to be ill. Things had drifted, and Rose appeared again at the supper table, defiant, angry, and placatory. It could be argued that to complain about these minor disruptions at home, and then choose to sit in a corner at the Cosmo, which always reverberated with debate and discussion was surely a little perverse. |
| 661 |
Particularly as the overheard talk was bound to be revolutionary. All these people were types of revolutionary, even if the results of revolution were what they had fled from. They were mostly representatives of some phase of the Dream, and might argue for hours about what happened in such and such a meeting in 1905 in Russia, or in 1917, or in Berchtesgaden, or when German troops invaded the Soviet Union, or the state of affairs in the Rumanian oilfields in 1940. 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. |
| 662 |
even if he was a thief. Which was more than one could say of Rose, whose jealousy of Sophie shone from her eyes and spiteful face. Dear Aunt Vera. Our two children say they won't go back to school. Our son is fifteen. The girl is sixteen. They were playing truant for months before we knew it. Then the police told us they were spending the time with some bad types. Now they hardly come home at all. What shall we do? Sophie had said she wasn't going back to school after Christmas, but perhaps she would change her mind to be with Colin. But he said he was doing badly, and didn't want to take his final exams, due this coming summer. He was eighteen. He said exams were stupid, and he was too old for school. Rose not her responsibility had 'dropped out'. So had James. Sylvia hadn't been to school in months. Geoffrey did well, always had, and it looked as if he would be the only one who would actually sit the exams. Daniel would because Geoffrey did, but he wasn't clever, like his idol. Jill was more often here than at school. Lucy, from Darting-ton, would sit exams and do brilliantly, that was evident. 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. |
| 663 |
If she had handled it properly, Julia would have sat down — there had been a little moment of hesitation. And then at last she might have become friends with her mother-in-law. Frances sat on, ordered more coffee, then soup. Andrew had said that if one was lucky with one's timing and ordered goulash soup, you got the thick part at the bottom of the pot, like stew, very good. Her goulash when it came was evidently from the middle of the pot. She did not know what to write for her third piece. The second had been on marijuana, and it was easy. The article had been cool and informative, that was all, and many letters came in response. What an attractive crowd this was, the Cosmo crowd, these people from all over Europe, and of course, by now, the kind of British attracted by them. Many of them Jews. Not all. Julia had remarked, in front of 'the kids' when one of them asked if she had been a refugee, 'I am in the unfortunate situation of being a German who is not a Jew.' Shock and outrage. Julia's fascist status had been confirmed: though they all used the word fascist as easily as they said fuck, or shit, not necessarily meaning much more than this was somebody they disapproved of. Sophie had wailed that Julia gave her the creeps, all Germans did. Of Sophie, Julia had remarked, 'She has the Jewish young girl's beauty, but she'll end up an old hag, just like the rest of us.' If Sylvia-Tilly was coming down to supper then the food had to be right for her. She could not be given a dish different from the others, and yet she did not eat anything but potato. Very well, Frances would cook a big shepherd's pie, and the girls who were slimming could leave the mash and eat the rest. There would be vegetables. Rose would not eat vegetables, but would salad. Geoffrey never ate fish or vegetables: she had been worrying about Geoffrey's diet for years, and he was not even her child. What did his parents think, when he hardly ever went home, was always coming to them rather, to Colin? |
| 664 |
he had not had kindness from white people outside the mission school. Colin was in a room along the corridor two doors from his own. To Franklin the little room was fitted out with everything anyone could wish for, including a telephone. It was a little paradise, but he had heard Colin complaining that it was too small. The food the variety of it, the plenty, every meal like a feast, but he had heard grumbles that the food was monotonous. At the mission he had had little to eat but maize porridge and relishes. Slowly grew inside him a powerful feeling that sometimes threatened to come hot out ofhis mouth in insults and accusations, while he smiled and was pleasant and compliant. It's not fair, it's not right, why do you have so much and you take it all for granted. It was that which ached in him, hurt, stung: they had no idea at all of their good fortune. And when he came home with Colin to the big house that seemed to him must be a palace (so he thought at first), it was crammed with beautiful things, and he found himself sitting in silence while they all joked and teased. He watched the older brother, Andrew, and his tenderness to the girl who had been sick, and in his mind he was in her place, sitting there between Frances and Andrew, both so kind to her, so gentle. After that first visit it was the same as when he first heard about the scholarship. He couldn't cope with it, he was not up to it, half the time he didn't even know what things were for a bit of kitchen equipment, or furniture. But he did go back and back, and found himself being treated like a son in that house. Johnny was a difficulty, at first. Franklin had been exposed to Johnny's doctrines, his kind of talk, before, and he had resolved he did not want to have anything to do with these politics, that frightened him. Politicos had exhorted him to kill all the whites, but his experience of good had been through the white priests at the mission even though they were stern, and through an unknown white protector, and now these kindly people at the new school and in this house. |
| 665 |
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. 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. |
| 666 |
Just listen to what I've said, that's all. Don't think that everyone is like...'But she didn't want to name the culprits, and fell back on the joke: 'Not everyone liberates goodies.' He sat looking down, biting his lip. That joyous expedition into the riches of Oxford Street, the three of them, in such companionship, where warm clothes, bright clothes, things he needed so badly, arrived in Rose's hands, in Geoffrey's, to be stowed away in a big shopping bag he was not doing the liberating, only marvelling at their dexterity. It had been a trip into a magic land of possibilities, like going to the cinema and then, instead of watching marvels, becoming part of it. Just as yesterday Sylvia, Sophie and Lucy had become little girls, 'a giggle of girls', Colin had called them, so now Franklin became a little boy remembering how far he was from home, a stranger mocked by riches he could never have. In came Sylvia who, having decided Evansky was not for her, wore red ribbons in her two golden plaits. She embraced Frances, embraced Franklin who was so grateful for what he was experiencing as forgiveness, that he smiled again, but sat shaking his head at himself, rueful, sending sorrowing glances at Frances; but because of Sylvia, the girl's grace, her kindness, soon things were back to normal well, almost. 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. |
| 667 |
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. 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. |
| 668 |
what words? Julia gently turned the handle of Sylvia's door and stepped in to a room where moonlight lay across Sylvia and just reached the young man on the floor. She had forgotten him, and now her heart reminded her of her terrible, inadmissible unhappiness. Wilhelm had told her, not so long ago, that Sylvia would marry, and that she, Julia, mustn't mind it. So that's all he thinks of me, Julia had complained to herself, but knew he was right. Sylvia must marry, though probably not this man. Otherwise wouldn't he be beside her on the bed? It seemed to Julia terrible that any young man, 'a colleague', should come home with Sylvia and sleep in her room. They are like puppies in a basket, Julia thought, they lick each other and fall off to sleep just anyhow. It should matter that a man was in a young woman's room. It should mean something. Julia sat herself carefully in the chair where but that seemed an age ago she had coaxed little Sylvia to eat. Now she could see Sylvia's face clearly, and as the moonlight moved over the floor, the young man's. Well, if it wasn't going to be him, this quite pleasant-looking youth, it would be another one. It seemed to her that she had never cared for anyone in her life but Sylvia, that the girl had been the great passion of her life oh, yes, she knew she loved Sylvia because she had not been allowed to love Johnny. But that was nonsense, because she knew with her mind how much she had longed for Philip all through that old war, and then how much she had loved him. The beams of light on the bed and the floor resembled the arbitrariness of memory, emphasising this and then that. When she looked back along the path of her life, periods of years that had had a sharp and distinct flavour of their own reduced themselves to something like a formula: that was the five years of the First World War. That little slice there was the Second World War. But, immersed in those five years, loyal in her mind and emotions to an enemy soldier, they were endless. |
| 669 |
The Second World War, which was now like an uneasy shadow in her memory, when she had lost her husband to his fatigue and to the fact he could tell her nothing of what he did, was an awful time and she had often thought that she could not bear it. She had lain at nights beside a man who was preoccupied with how to destroy her country, and she had to be glad it was being destroyed and she was, but sometimes it seemed the bombs were tearing at her own heart. And yet now she could say to Wilhelm, who had been a refugee from that monstrous regime which she refused to think of as German, 'That was during the war no, the second one.' As if talking about an item on a list that had to be kept up to date and accurate, events one after another, or perhaps like moonlight and shadows falling across a path, each having a sharp validity as you moved through them, but then when you looked back there was a dark streak through a forest with splashes of thin light across it. Ich habe gelebt und geliebt, she murmured, the fragment of Schiller that still stayed in her mind after sixty-five years, but it was a question: Have I lived and loved? The moonlight had reached Julia's feet. She had been sitting here for some time, then. Not once had Sylvia so much as stirred. They seemed not to breathe: she could easily believe them lying there dead. She found herself thinking, If you were dead, Sylvia, then you' d not be missing much, you'll only end up like me, an old woman with my life behind me, dwindling into a mess of memories, that hurt. Julia dozed off, the valium at last sinking her into a sleep so deep that she was limp in the hands of Sylvia, who was shaking her. Sylvia had woken, her mouth dry, to reach out for water, and saw a little ghost sitting there in the moonlight, whom she expected to vanish as she came fully awake. But Julia did not vanish. Sylvia went to her, held her, rocked her as the old woman whimpered, a desolate heart-wrenching sound. 'Julia, Julia,' whispered Sylvia, thinking of the young man who needed his sleep. |
| 670 |
Some said that with that hat she must be the cleaning lady. The hall was full. It seemed to heave and swell and sway. The smell was horrible. Immediately in front of Julia were two heads of greasy unwashed blonde hair what girls could have so little self-respect? Then she saw that they were men. And they stank. The noise was so loud that she did not at once see that the speeches had begun. Up there were Johnny, and Geoffrey, whose clean well-ordered face she knew so well, but he had Viking's hair, and stood with his feet apart, and his right hand pounding the air, as if stabbing something, and he was sneering agreement with what Johnny was saying, which was variations on what she had heard so often, American imperialism... 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. |
| 671 |
Upright inside it she was supported by thoughts of the tiny silk stitches on collar and cuffs and the perfectly fitting pink silk lining which she felt as a defence against barbarians. On the seat beside her Frances was doubled low in the task of changing her stockings and sensible shoes for high-heeled ones and black sheers. Otherwise, her working clothes -Julia had picked Frances up from the newspaper were clearly expected to be adequate. Andrew had said there would be a little celebration, but they mustn't dress up. What could he mean? Celebrate what? They were making the inevitably slow progress towards Andrew, side by side, in companionable and wary silence. Frances was thinking that all the years of living in Julia's house had led to occasions when they sat together in a cab so few she could list them. And Julia was thinking that there was no intimacy between them, and yet the young woman come on, Julia, she was certainly not that! was able to strip off stockings, exposing solid white legs, without a moment's embarrassment. It was likely no one had seen Julia's naked legs except her husband and doctors since she became adult. Had Wilhelm? No one knew. They had gone so far as to agree that the celebration was probably because Andrew had been offered a job in one of the great international organisations that inhale and exhale money and order the world's affairs. When he had gained his second degree in law he had done very well he had left his grandmother's house for the second time for a flat shared with other young people, but he did not expect to be there for long. By the time they had reached Gordon Square the light had gone. Large raindrops fell from a dark sky and splashed invisibly about them. It was a good house, no one need be ashamed of it: Julia had wondered if the reason Andrew had not invited them before was because he was ashamed of his address and if so, why had he left home at all? It did not enter her mind that he found her and Frances a crushing weight of authority or at least of accomplishment. |
| 672 |
A large flat. What a pleasant thing it is to have a regular salary: only someone who has not enjoyed one can say this with the heartfelt feeling it deserves. Frances remembered freelancing and precarious little jobs in the theatre. But when she had achieved enough money for the substantial down-payment, then she would resign from what she felt as an increasingly false position at The Defender, and that would be the end of regular sums arriving in her bank account. She had always done most of her work at home, had never felt herself to be part of the newspaper. That she just came and went was her colleagues' complaint about her, as if her behaviour was a criticism of The Defender. It was. She was an outsider in an institution that saw itself as beleaguered, and by hostile hordes, reactionary forces, as if nothing had changed from the great days of the last century when The Defender stood almost alone as a bastion of wholesome open-hearted values: there had been no honest good cause The Defender had not defended. These days the newspaper championed the insulted and the injured, but behaved as if these were minority issues, instead of on the whole -'received opinions'. Frances was no longer Aunt Vera (My little boy wets his bed, what shall I do?), but wrote solid, well-researched articles on issues like the discrepancy between women's pay and men's, unequal employment possibilities, nursery schools: nearly everything she wrote was to do with the difference between men's situation and women's. The women journalists of The Defender were known in some quarters, mostly male (who saw themselves increasingly as beleaguered by hostile female hordes), as a kind of mafia, heavy, humourless, obsessed, but worthy. Frances was certainly worthy: all her articles had a second life as pamphlets and even as books, third lives as radio or television programmes. She secretly concurred with the view that her female colleagues were heavy-going, but suspected she could be accused of the same. |
| 673 |
She certainly felt heavy, weighed down with the wrongs of the world: Colin's accusation had been true enough: she did believe in progress, and that a stubborn application in attacking unfairness would put things right. Well, didn't it? At least sometimes? She had small triumphs to be proud of. But at least she had never flown off into the windy skies of the so fashionable feminism: she had never been capable, like Julie Hackett, of a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria. 'The shits. The bloody fascist shits.'When at last persuaded by Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male scientists to put down the female sex — 'Sorry, gender' she quietened into hysterical tears and said, 'It's all so bloody unfair.' Julie Hackett continued dedicated to The Defender. At home she wore The Defender aprons, drank from The Defender mugs, used The Defender drying-up cloths. She was capable of angry tears if someone criticised her newspaper. She knew Frances was not as committed — a word she was fond of — as she was, and often delivered little homilies designed to improve her thinking. Frances found her infinitely tedious. Aficionados of the prankish tricks life gets up to will have already recognised this figure, which so often accompanies us, turning up at all times and places, a shadow we could do without, but there she is, he is, a mocking caricature of oneself, but oh yes, a salutary reminder. 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. |
| 674 |
' They are nothing but shit. I think I am justified in using their favourite word?' 'My dear Julia,'Wilhelm had said, amused, but shocked, too, at this word from her. Julia sat up against the pillows, nurses coming and going, not expecting to sleep, with the cutting in her bedside table. So now, she, Julia von Arne, was a Nazi. What hurt was the carelessness of it. Of course that woman Julia remembered an unlikeable girl had not known what she was doing. They all used words like fascist all the time, anyone they might be having a tiff with was a fascist. They were so ignorant they did not know there had been real fascists, who had brought Italy low. And Nazi... there were newspaper articles, radio programmes, television, about them, which she watched because she felt so directly concerned, but obviously none of these young people had taken it in. They did not seem to know that fascist, Nazi, were words that meant people had been imprisoned, been tortured, had died in millions in that war. It was the ignorance, the carelessness, that filled Julia's eyes with angry tears. She felt cancelled out, obliterated: her history, and Philip's too, reduced to epithets used by an ambitious young journalist in a gutter newspaper. Julia sat sleepless (she quietly disposed of her sleeping pills when the nurses weren't looking), poisoned by her helplessness. Of course she would not sue, or even write a letter: why dignify that canaille by even noticing them? 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. |
| 675 |
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. She had been running away from them all her life, she felt, but now she was being swallowed by a monster of stupidity and ugliness and vulgarity. Everything was distorted and spoiled. And so she stayed in bed, and went back in her mind to her girlhood when everything had been beautiful, so schon, schon, schon, but into that paradise had come that old war, and the world was full of uniforms. At night, when the tiny light that had been Sylvia's and had been brought up from the sitting-room to her room, was the only illumination in the dark, her brothers and Philip, handsome brave young men, stood about her bed, in smart uniforms that had not a spot nor spatter nor stain on them. She cried to them to stay with her, not to go off and leave her. She talked softly in German, and in English, and in her comme-il-faut French, and Colin sat with her, sometimes for hours, holding the bundle of little bones that was her hand. He was unhappy, remorseful, thinking that he had never really heard about Ernst and Frederich and Max; he had scarcely heard of his grandfather. |
| 676 |
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. '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. |
| 677 |
' He got up, said goodnight and went to his bed, and Rebecca, without looking at Sylvia, said goodnight and left. It was a month later. The hole in the shed wall was mended, and there was a lock and a key. Around two of the grass shelters were blinds made of the hessian used to bale tobacco, which could be adjusted to keep out wind and dust, if not heavy rain. 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. She had toured nearby villages to inspect water supplies, and found dirty rivers and polluted wells. Water was running low at this time of the year, and often stood in stagnant pools that bred bilharzia. |
| 678 |
Sylvia sat by the dozing man, waiting for the next paroxysm, and looked round the room, her attention free. Brick walls, like hers, the same split-reed ceiling, the brick floor. In a corner a statue of the Virgin. On the walls the Virgin again, conventional representations inspired, if distantly, by the Italian Renaissance, blue and white and with downcast eyes, and surely out of place here in the bush? But wait, on a stool of dark wood, and of the same dark wood, a native Mary, a vigorous young woman, was nursing a baby. That was better. Hanging from a nail on the wall near the bed, where the priest could reach it, was a rosary of ebony. In the Sixties, the tumults of ideology that afflicted the world had taken a local shape in the Catholic Church, in a bubbling unrest that had attempted to dethrone the Virgin Mary. The Holy Mother was out, and with her went rosaries. Sylvia had not had a Catholic childhood, had never dipped her fingers into the Holy Water stoups, or wound pretty rosaries around them, or crossed herself or swapped Holy cards with other little girls. ('I'll give you three St Jeromes for one Holy Mother.') She had never prayed to the Virgin, only to Jesus. Therefore, when she joined the Church, she did not miss what she had never known, and only slowly, when meeting older priests or nuns or church members, had learned that a revolution had taken place which had left many in mourning, and particularly for the Virgin. (She would be reinstated, decades later.) Meanwhile, in places of the world where eyes vigilant for heresy or backsliding did not reach, priests and nuns kept their rosaries and their Holy Water, their statues and pictures of the Virgin, hoping that no one would notice. For someone like Rebecca, who had a little card of the Holy Mother nailed on to the central pole of her hut, this ideological argument would have seemed too silly to think about: but she had never heard of it. 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. |
| 679 |
They were lean, with bony faces where burned enormous eyes hungry to learn and -it became evident hungry for food too. They arrived at the hospital at seven, unfed, and Sylvia made them come up to the house where she cut them slabs of bread and jam, while Rebecca watched, and once remarked that her children did not get bread and jam, but only cold porridge, and not always that. Father McGuire watched and said that Sylvia was now the mother of two children and he hoped she knew what she was doing. 'But they have a mother,' she said, and he said no, their own mother had died on the violent roads of Zimlia, and their father had died of malaria, and so they had become Joshua's responsibility: they called him Father. Sylvia was relieved to hear this history. Joshua had already lost two children another had just died and she knew why, and what the real reason was not the 'Pneumonia' that was on their death certificates. So these two were not Joshua's by blood: how useful, how painfully pertinent that old phrase had become. They were both clever, as Joshua had claimed for Clever: he said that his brother had been a teacher and his sister-in-law had been first in her class. The little boys watched every movement she made, and copied her, and examined her face and eyes as she spoke, so they knew what she wanted them to do before she asked; they looked after the chickens and the sitting hens, they collected eggs and never broke one, they ran about with mugs of water and medicines for the patients. They squatted on either side of her watching when she set limbs or lanced swellings, and she had to keep reminding herself they were six and four, not twice those ages. They were sponges for information. But they were not at school. Sylvia made them come up to the house at four o'clock, when she had finished at the hospital, and set them lessons. Other children wanted to join in: Rebecca's, for a start. Soon, she was running what amounted to a little nursery school. But when the others wanted to be like Clever and Zebedee and work at the hospital, she said no. |
| 680 |
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. But the fact remained: there was an area where she, Sylvia, could not go, and must not criticise, in Rebecca just as much as any black casual worker, although Rebecca was her good friend. She would have to go over to the Pynes, if Father McGuire would not help. At lunch she brought the subject up, while Rebecca stood by the sideboard listening, and adding when the priest appealed to her for confirmation, 'Okay. It is true. And now the people who took the things are falling ill and people are saying it is because of what the n'ganga said.' Father McGuire did not look well. He was yellow and the hectic patches on his broad Irish cheekbones flared. He was impatient and cross. This was the second time in five years he was having to teach twice his normal hours. And the school was falling apart and Mr Mandizi only repeated that he had informed Senga of the situation. |
| 681 |
The priest went back to the school without taking his usual nap, and Sylvia and Rebecca unpacked the books, and made shelves from planks and bricks and soon all of one wall, on either side of the little dressing-table, was covered with books. Rebecca had wept to hear the sewing machines had been impounded she had hoped to make a little extra money sewing on hers, but her tears when looking at and touching the books were from joy. She even kissed the books. 'Oh, Sylvia, it was so wonderful you thought of us and brought us the books.' Sylvia went down to the hospital, where Joshua sat dozing under his tree, as if he had not left it in her absence, and where the little boys clamorously welcomed her, and she attended to her patients, many because of the coughs and colds that come with the sudden changes of temperature at the start of the rains. Then she took the car and went over to the Pynes, who filled a precise place in her life: when she needed information, that is where she went. The Pynes had bought their farm, after the Second World War, in the Fifties, on that late wave of white immigration. They grew mostly tobacco and had been successful. The house was on a ridge, looking out over to tall tumbling hills that in the dry season were blue with smoke and haze, but now were sharply green the foliage; and grey granite boulders. The pillared verandah was wide enough to have parties on, and before Liberation parties had been many, but were few now, with so many of the whites gone. 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. |
| 682 |
Minor absurdities, like saying that to dip cattle was a white man's devilry, and to maintain contour ridges merely kowtowing to white prejudice, were trifles compared to this primal deception that there would be land for everybody. But then, he did not know he would end up as the Leader of the whole country. When at Liberation his party came first, he secretly found it hard to believe that he could be chosen over more charismatic candidates for power: he did not believe he could be liked. Respected... feared... oh, yes, he needed that, the stray dog needed it and would for the rest of his life. When he had become converted by, again, a strong and persuasive personality to Marxism, he made rhetorical speeches copied from other communist leaders. He admired to the depths of his nature strong and brutal leaders. When he was head of a nation he travelled all the time, as Leaders do, always in America or Ethiopia or Ghana or Burma, seldom choosing the company of whites, for he disliked them. Because he had to put on the front of a statesman he had to conceal what he felt, but he loathed the whites, disliked even being in the same room. Abroad he gravitated by instinct to dictators, some of whom would soon be dislodged from power, like the statues of Lenin that would litter the former Soviet Union. He loved China, admired the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, had visited there more than once, taking with him in his entourage Comrade Mo who had instructed him in the necessities of power long before he had attained it. No sooner had he got power than he became a prisoner of his fear of people. He was meeting no one but a few cronies, and a young woman from his village, with whom he slept; he never went out of his residence without an armed escort; his car was bullet-proofed the gift of one dictator and he had a personal guard offered to him by the most hated despot in Asia. Every evening, as the sun went down, the street outside his residence was closed to general traffic, so that the citizens had to drive streets out of their way. |
| 683 |
He was in awe of her too because of her sophistication. She had been in university in America and in England, she had friends everywhere among the famous because of her nature, not because of politics. She talked of politics with a laughing cynicism that shocked him, though he tried to match her. In short, it was inevitable that soon there would be a brilliant wedding, and he lived dissolved in pleasure. Everything was easy where it had been difficult no, often impossible. She said he was sexually repressed, and cured him of that in so far as his nature permitted. She said he needed more fun, had never known how to live. When he told her of his meagre much-punished childhood she kissed him with great smacking kisses and pulled his head down into her massive breasts and cuddled it. She laughed at him for everything. Now, Matthew had at the start of his rule discouraged the comrades, his associates, the leadership, from indulging their greed. He forbade them to enrich themselves. This was the last of the influences from his childhood, and then the Jesuits, who had taught him that poverty was next to Godliness: whatever else the Fathers might have been, they were poor and did not indulge themselves. Now Gloria told him he was mad, and that she should buy this big house, that farm, then wanted another farm, and some hotels that were coming on to the market as the whites left. She told him he must have a Swiss bank account and make sure there was money in it. What money? he wanted to know, and she scorned him for his naivety. But when she talked of money he still saw in his mother's thin hands the pitiful notes and coins put there by his father at the month's end, and at first, when he voted himself a salary, he had been careful it should be no higher than a top civil servant's. All this Gloria changed, brushing it away with her scorn, her laughter, her caresses and her practicality, for she had taken over his life and as the Mother of the Country could easily see to it that money flowed her way. |
| 684 |
Rose hated most of all people who read books, or who pretended to it was only a pretence; loathed the arts, denigrated particularly the theatre she boasted she had invented the word 'luvvies' for theatre people; and liked violent and cruel films. She met only people like herself, frequenting certain pubs and clubs, and they had no idea that they were a new phenomenon, something that earlier generations would have despised, and dismissed as the gutter press, fit only for the lowest depths of society. But the phrase now seemed to her something vaguely complimentary, a guarantee of bravery in the pursuit of truth. But how could she, or they, know? They scorned history because they had learned none. Only once in her life she had written with approval, admiration, it was about Comrade President Matthew Mungozi, and then, more recently, Comrade Gloria, whom she adored because of her ruthlessness. Only once had her pen not dripped poison. And she read the article by The Monitors stringer with fury, and, too, with something like the beginnings of fear. Meeting a journalist who worked on The Monitor she heard that it was Colin Lennox who had prompted it. And who the hell was Colin to have an opinion about Africa? She hated Colin. She had always seen novelists and poets as something like counterfeiters, making something out of nothing and getting away with it. She had been too early on the scene for his first novel, but she had rubbished his second and the Lennoxes, and his third had caused her paroxysms of rage. It was about two people, apparently unlike each other, who had for each other a tender and almost freakish love that it continued at all seemed to both of them a jest of Fate. While involved with other partners, other adventures, they met like conspirators, to share this feeling they had, that they understood each other as no one else ever could. Reviewers on the whole liked it and said it was poetic and evocative. One said it was 'elliptical', a word that goaded Rose to extra frenzy: she had to look it up in the dictionary. |
| 685 |
But he had never heard any Nazi talk in that house, surely? And there had been little Sylvia, with her shining wisps of gold hair, and her angel's face. As for Rose Trimble, when he thought of her he found himself grinning; a proper little crook, well he had benefited, so he shouldn't complain. And now she had written that nasty piece... surely she had been a guest in that house, like him? Yet she had been there much longer than he had, and so what she wrote had to be taken seriously. But what he remembered was welcome, laughter, good food, and Frances, in particular, like a mother. Later, when it was Johnny's place he stayed at, now that was a different thing. It wasn't a large flat, nothing like that great house where Colin had been so kind, yet it was always crammed with people from everywhere, Americans, Cubans, other countries in South America, Africa... It was an education in revolution, Johnny's flat. He remembered at least two black men (with false names) from this country who were training in Moscow for guerilla war. And the guerilla war had been won, and he owed his sitting here, behind this desk, a senior Minister, to men like those. While he kept an eye out for them, at rallies and big meetings, he had never seen them since. Presumably they were dead. Now something confusing was happening. He knew what was being said about the Soviet Union, he was not one of the innocents who never left Zimlia. The word communist was becoming something like a curse: elsewhere, not here, where you had only to say Marxism to feel you were getting a good mark from the ancestors. (And where were they in all this?) A funny thing: he felt that that house in London had more in common with the ease and warmth of his grandparents' huts in the village (as it happened not all that far from St Luke's Mission) than anything since. And yet in the file on his desk was that nasty piece. He was feeling with every minute deeper resentment -against Sylvia. Why had she done those bad things? |
| 686 |
Naive citizens hoped and expected that the Americans would dismantle the apparatus for Security and set them free, but they had not learned that lesson, so essential for our times, that there is nothing more stable than this apparatus. Marxists and communists of various persuasions who had flourished under the Russians, torturing and imprisoning and killing their enemies, now found themselves being tortured and imprisoned and killed. The once reasonable enough State of Somalia, was as if boiling water had been poured into an ants' nest. The structure of decent living was destroyed. Warlords and bandits, tribal chiefs and family bosses, criminals and thieves, now ruled. The international aid organisations, stretched to their limits, could not cope, particularly because large parts of the country were barred to them by war. The doctor sat for hours on his hard chair and talked, because he had been watching people kill each other for months. Just before he left he had stood on the side of a track through a landscape dried to dust, watching refugees from famine file past. It is one thing to see it on television, as he said (trying to excuse his garrulousness), while he stared at her, but not seeing her, seeing only what he was describing, and it was another thing to be there. Perhaps Sylvia was as equipped as most to visualise what he was telling her, because she had only to set in her mind along that dusty track two thousand miles to the north people from the dying village in Kwadere. But he had watched, too, refugees fleeing from the killing troops of Mengistu, some of them hacked and bleeding, some dying, some carrying murdered children: he had watched that for days, and Sylvia's experience did not match with it and so it was hard to see it. And besides there was no television in Father McGuire's house. He was a doctor, and he had watched, helpless, people in need of medicines, a refuge, surgery, and all he had had to aid them had been a few cartons of antibiotics which had disappeared in a few minutes. |
| 687 |
Rupert drew the curtains, sat by Frances, put his arm around her. 'Now, you two, you've got to decide. And whatever it is you do decide, then you've got to put the other choice clean out of your minds. Otherwise you'll both be ill.' 'Right,' said Colin, and shakily reached for the wine bottle. Rupert said, 'Now look, old son, don't drink any more, there's a good chap.' Frances felt that apprehension a woman may feel when her man, not her son's father, takes the father's role: Rupert had spoken as if it were William sitting there. Colin pushed away the bottle. 'This is a bloody impossible situation.' 'Yes, it is,' said Frances. 'What are we taking on? Do you realise, I'll be dead by the time they qualify?' Rupert's arm tightened around her shoulder. 'But we have to keep them,' said Colin, aggressive, tearful, pleading with them. 'Ifa couple ofkittens try to crawl out of the bucket they're being drowned in, you don't push them back in.' The Colin who was speaking then Frances had not seen or heard offor years: Rupert had not met that passionate youth. 'You just don't do it,' said Colin, leaning forward, his eyes holding his mother's, then Rupert's. 'You don't just push them back in.' A howl broke out of him: a long time since Frances had heard that howl. He dropped his head down on to his arms on the table. Rupert and Frances communed, silently. 'I think,' said Rupert, 'that there is only one way you can decide.' 'Yes,' said Colin, lifting his head. 'Yes,' said Frances. 'Then, that's it. And now put the other out of your heads. Now.' 'I suppose once a Sixties' household, then always a Sixties' household,' said Colin. 'No, that's not my little apercu, it is Sophie's. She thinks it's all lovely. I did point out that it was not she who would be doing the work. She said she would muck in with everything, she said.' He laughed. Back in bed Rupert said, 'I don't think I could bear it if you died. But luckily women live longer than men.' 'And I can't imagine not being with you. |
| 688 |
'A gardener. I could be a gardener at Kew,' said William gravely. '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. Frances found herself in a familiar situation. She had been offered a job helping to run a small experimental theatre: her heart's desire, a lot of fun but not much money. Her reliable and serious books, bought by every library in the land, brought in good money. She would have to say no to the theatre and write books. She said she would be responsible for Clever, and Andrew would pay for Zebedee. |
| 689 |
Frances told Colin who said that as far as he was concerned his father could sink or swim. And Frances said that she was damned ifshe was going to pick up Johnny's pieces for him. That left Andrew, who dropped over from Rome for the afternoon. He found Johnny in a quite pleasant room, in Highgate, in the house of a woman he described as the salt of the earth. He was a frail old man with fans of silvery hair around a shiny white patE, all pathos and vulnerability. He was pleased to see Andrew but he wasn't going to show it. 'Sit down,' he said. 'I'm sure Sister Meg will make us all some tea.'But Andrew remained upright, and said, 'I've come because we hear you've fallen on hard times.' 'Which is more than you have done, so I'm told.' 'I'm glad to say what you hear is all true.' Not many people in the world would see Johnny's lot as a hard one, but after all, he had spent probably two-thirds ofhis life in comradely luxury hotels in the Soviet Union, Poland, China, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia; in Chile and Angola and Cuba -wherever there had been a comradely conference, Johnny had been there, the world his barrel of oysters, his honeypot, his ever-open jar of Beluga caviar, and here he was, in one room -a nice room, but one room. On his old-age pension. 'And of course the senior bus pass helps.' 'A good member of the proletariat at last,' said Andrew, smiling benevolently from the windows of his gravy train at his dispossessed father. 'And you got married, I hear. I was beginning to think you must be a queer.' 'Who knows these days? But never mind all that, we thought you might like to come and live in the bottom flat?' 'It's my house anyway, so don't make a favour out of it.' But there were two good rooms, and everything paid for, and he was pleased. Colin went down to help settle him in and said that he mustn't expect Frances to wait on him. 'It's news to me that she ever did. She was always a lousy housekeeper.' But Johnny was far from dependent on his family for company. |
| 690 |
His visitors brought him gifts and flowers as if to a shrine. Johnny was in the process of becoming a holy man, the follower of a senior Indian holy man, and was now often heard to remark, 'Yes, I was a bit of a Red once.' He would sit cross-legged on his pillows on his bed, and his old gesture, palms extended outwards as if offering himself to an audience, fitted in nicely with this new persona. He had disciples, and taught meditation and the Fourfold Sacred Way. In return they kept his rooms clean for him and cooked dishes in which lentils played a leading role. But this was his new self, perhaps one could describe it as a role, in a play where Sisters and Brothers and Holy Mothers replaced the comrades. His older self did sometimes resurface, when other visitors, old comrades, came around to reminisce as ifthe great failure of the Soviet Union had never happened, as if that Empire was still marching on. Old men, old women, whose lives had been illumined by the great dream, sat about drinking wine in an atmosphere not unlike that ofthose far-offcombative evenings, except for one thing: they did not smoke now, whereas once it would have been hard to see across a room for the smoke that had been through their lungs. Late, before the guests left, Johnny would lower his voice and lift his glass, and propose a toast, 'To Him.' And with tender admiration they drank to possibly the cruellest murderer who has ever lived. They say that for decades after Napoleon's death old soldiers met in taverns and bars and, secretly, in each other's hovels, raised their glasses to The Other: they were the few survivors of the Grand ArmEe (whose heroic feats had achieved precisely nothing, except the destruction of a generation), crippled men, whose health had gone and who had survived unspeakable sufferings. But so what, it is always The Dream that counts. Johnny had another visitor, Celia, who would descend on the hand of Marusha or Bertha or Chantal and run to Johnny. 'Poor little Johnny. |
| 691 |
I had a test today. I think I faled it and I think mabye now they won't use me. "What happind is I went to Prof Nemurs office on my lunch time like they said and his secertery took me to a place that said psych dept on the door with a long hall and alot of littel rooms with onley a desk and chares. And a nice man was in one of the rooms and he had some wite cards with ink spilld all over them. He sed sit down Charlie and make yourself cunfortible and rilax. He had a wite coat like a docter but I don't think he was no docter because he dint tell me to opin my mouth and sav ah. All he had was those wite cards. His name is Burt. I fer-got his last name because I don't remembir so good. I dint know what he was gonna do and I was holding on tite to the chair like sometimes when I go to a dentist onley Burt aint no dentist neither but he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert. So Burt sed Charlie what do you see on this card. I saw the spilld ink and I was very skared even tho I got my rabits foot in my pockit because when I was a kid I always faled tests in school and I spilld ink to. I tolld Burt I saw ink spilld on a wite card. Burt said yes and he smild and that maid me feel good. He kept terning all the cards and I tolld him somebody spilld ink on all of them red and black. I thot that was a easy test but when I got up to go Burt stoppd me and said now sit down Charlie we are not thru yet. Theres more we got to do with these cards. I dint understand about it but I remembir Dr Strauss said do anything the testor telld me even if it don't make no sense because that's testing. I don't remembir so good what Burt said but I remembir he wantid me to say what was in the ink. I dint see nothing in the ink but Burt sed there was picturs there. I coudnt see no picturs. I reely tryed to see. I holded the card up close and then far away. Then I said if I had my eye glassis I coud probaly see better I usully only ware my eye-glassis in the movies or to watch TV but I sed maybe they will help me see the picturs in the ink. |
| 692 |
Dr Strauss rote some things on a peice of paper and prof Nemur talkd to me very sereus. He said you know Charlie we are not shure how this experamint will werk on pepul because we onley tried it up to now on animils. I said that's what Miss Kinnian tolld me but I don't even care if it herts or anything because I'm strong and I will werk hard. I want to get smart if they will let me. They said they got to get permissen from my familie but my uncle Herman who use to take care of me is ded and I don't rimember about my familie. I dint see my mother or father or my littel sister Norma for a long long long time. Mabye their ded to. Dr. Strauss askd me where they use to live. I think in brooklin. He sed they will see if mabye they can find them. I hope I don't have to rite to much of these progris ri-ports because it takes along time and I get to sleep very late and I'm tired at werk in the morning. Gimpy hollered at me because I droppd a tray full of rolles I was carrying over to the oven. They got derty and he had to wipe them off before he put them in to bake. Gimpy hollers at me all the time when I do something rong, but he reely likes me because he's my frend. Boy if I get smart won't he be serprised. progris riport 4 mar6 "I had more crazy tests today in case they use me. That same place but a differnt littel testing room. The nice lady who give it to me tolld me the name and I askd her how do you spell it so I can put it down rite in my progis riport, thematic appercepton test. I don't know the frist 2 werds but I know what test means. You got to pass it or you get bad marks. This test lookd easy because I coud see the picturs. Only this time she dint want me to tell what I saw in the picturs. That mixd me up. I tolld her yesterday Burt said I shoud tell what I saw in the ink. She said that don't make a difrence because this test is something else. Now you got to make up storys about the pepul in the picturs. I said how can I tell storys about pepul I don't know. She said make beleeve but I tolld her that's lies. |
| 693 |
I never tell lies any more because when I was a kid I made lies and I always got hit. I got a pictur in my walet of me and Norma with Uncle Herman who got me the job to be janiter at Donners bakery before he dyed. I said I coud make storys about them because I livd with Uncle Herman along time but the lady dint want to hear about them. She said this test and the other one the raw shok was for getting persinality. I laffd. I tolld her how can you get that thing from cards that sombody spilld ink on and fotos of pepul you don't even no. She lookd angrey and took the picturs away. I don't care. I gess I faled that test too. Then I drawed some picturs for her but I don't drawer so good. Later the other testor Burt in the wite coat came back his name is Burt Selden and he took me to a diferent place on the same 4th floor in the Beekman University that said Psychology Laboratory on the door. Burt said psychology means minds and laboratory meens a place where they make spearamints. I thot he ment like where they made the chooing gum but now I think its puzzels and games because that's what we did. I coudnt werk the puzzels so good because it was all broke and the peices coudnt fit in the holes. One game was a paper with lines in all derections and lots of boxs. On one side it said start and on the other end it said finish. He tolld me that game was amazed and I shoud take the pencil and go from where it said start to where it said finish withowt crossing over any of the lines. I dint understand the amazed and we used up a lot of papers. Then Burt said look I'll show you something let's go to the sperimental lab mabye you'll get the idea. We went up to the 5th floor to another room with lots of cages and animils they had monkys and some mouses. It had a funny smel like old garbidge. And there was other pepul in wite coats playing with the animils so I thot it was like a pet store but their wasnt no customers. Burt took a wite mouse out of the cage and showd him to me. Burt said that's Algernon and he can do this amazed very good. |
| 694 |
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. 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. |
| 695 |
But most people of his low ment** are host** and uncoop** they are usally dull and apathet** and hard to reach. Charlie has a good natcher and he's intristed and eeger to pleese. Then prof Nemur said remembir he will be the first human beeing ever to have his intelijence increesd by sergery. Dr Strauss said that's exakly what I ment. Where will we find another retarted adult with this tremendus motor-vation to lern. Look how well he has lerned to reed and rite for his low mentel age. A tremen** achev** I dint get all the werds and they were talking to fast but it sounded like Dr Strauss and Burt was on my side and Prof Nemur wasnt. Burt kept saying Alice Kinnian feels he has an overwhelm** desir to lern. He aktually beggd to be used. And that's true because I wantid to be smart. Dr Strauss got up and walkd around and said I say we use Charlie. And Burt noded. Prof Nemur skratchd his head and rubbd his nose with his thum and said mabye your rite. We will use Charlie. But weve got to make him understand that a lot of things can go wrong with the experamint. When he said that I got so happy and exited I jumpd up and shaked his hand for being so good to me. I think he got skared when I did that. He said Charlie we werked on this for a long time but only on animils like Algernon. We are sure thers no fisical danger for you but there are other things we cant tell until we try it. I want you to understand this mite fale and then nothing woud happen at all. Or it mite even sucseed tem-perary and leeve you werse off then you are now. Do you understand what that meens. If that happins we will have to send you bak to the Warren state home to live. I said I dint care because I aint afraid of nothing. I'm very strong and I always do good and beside I got my luky rabits foot and I never breakd a mirrir in my life. I droppd some dishis once but that don't count for bad luk. Then Dr Strauss said Charlie even if this fales your making a grate contribyushun to sience. This experimint has been successful on lots of animils but its never bin tride on a humen beeing. |
| 696 |
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. 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. |
| 697 |
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. All the time the bandiges were on my eyes I tryed to think and remembir but nothing happined. I don't know what to think or remembir about. Maybe if I ask him he will tell me how I can think now that I'm suppose to get smart. What do smart pepul think about or remembir. Fancy things I bet. I wish I new some fancy things alredy. March 12 I don't have to rite progress report on top evry day just when I start a new batch after Prof Nemur takes the old ones away. I just have to put the date on top. That saves time. Its a good idea. I can sit up in bed and look out the window at the gras and trees outside. The skinney nerses name is Hilda and she is very good to me. She brings me things to eat and she fixes my bed and she says I was a very brave man to let them do things to my hed. She says she woud never let them do things to her branes for all the tea in china. I tolld her it wasnt for tea in china. It was to make me smart. And she said mabey they got no rite to make me smart because if god wantid me to be smart he would have made me born that way. And what about Adem and Eev and the sin with the tree of nowlege and eating the appel and the fall. And mabey Prof Nemur and Dr Strauss was tampiring with things they got no rite to tampir with. She's very skinney and when she talks her face gets all red. |
| 698 |
She says mabey I better prey to god to ask him to forgiv what they done to me. I dint eat no appels or do nodi-ing sinful. And now I'm skared. Mabey I shoudnt of let them oparate on my branes like she said if its agenst god. I don't want to make god angrey. March 13 They changed my nerse today. This one is pritty. Her name is Lucille she showd me how to spell it for my progress report and she got yellow hair and blew eyes. I askd her where was Hilda and she said Hilda wasnt werking in that part of the hospitil no more. Only in the matirnity ward by the babys where it don't matter if she talks too much. When I askd her about what was matirnity she said its about having babys but when I askd her how they have them she got red in the face just the same like Hilda and she said she got to take sombodys temperchure. Nobody ever tells me about the babys. Mabye if this thing werks and I get smart I'll find out. Miss Kinnian came to see me today and she said Charlie you look wonderful. I tolld her I feel fine but I don't feel smart yet. I thot that when the operashun was over and they took the bandijis off my eyes I'd be smart and no a lot of things so I coud read and talk about im-portent things like evryebody else. She said that's not the way it werks Charlie. It comes slowley and you have to werk very hard to get smart. I dint no that. If I got to werk hard anyway what did I have to have the operashun for. She said she wasnt sure but the operashun was to make it so that when I did werk hard to get smart it woud stick with me and not be like it was before when it dint stick so good. Well I tolld her that made me kind of feel bad because I thot I was going to be smart rite away and I coud go back to show the guys at the bakery how smart I am and talk with them about things and mabye even get to be an as-sistint baker. Then I was gone to try and find my mom and dad. They woud be serprised to see how smart I got because my mom always wanted me too be smart to. Mabey they woudnt send me away no more if they see how smart I am. |
| 699 |
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. Lots of pepul laff at me and their my frends and we have fun. Burt put his arm on my sholder and said its not you Nemurs worryd about. He don't want pepul to laff at him. I dint think pepul would laff at Prof Nemur because he's a sientist in a collidge but Bert said no sientist is a grate man to his colleegs and his gradulate studints. Burt is a gradulate studint and he is a majer in psychology like the name on the door to the lab. I dint know they had majers in collidge. I thot it was onley in the army. Anyway I hope I get smart soon because I want to lern everything there is in the werld like the collidge boys know. All about art and politiks and god. March 17 When I waked up this morning rite away I thot I was gone to be smart but I'm not. Evry morning I think I'm gone to be smart but nothing happins. Mabye the experimint dint werk. Maby I won't get smart and I'll have to go live at the Warren home. I hate the tests and I hate the amazeds and I hate Algernon. I never new before that I was dumber than a mouse. I don't feel like riting any more progress reports. I forget things and even when I rite them in my notbook sometimes I cant reed my own riting and its very hard. Miss Kinnian says have pashents but I feel sick and tired. And I get headakes all the time. I want to go back to werk in the bakery and not rite ftega& progress reports any more. March 20 I'm going back to werk at the bakery. |
| 700 |
Dr Strauss told Prof Nemur it was better I shoud go back to werk but I still cant tell anyone what the operashun was for and I have to come to the lab for 2 hrs evry nite after werk for my tests and keep riting these dumb reports. They are going to pay me evry week like for a part time job because that was part of the arraingment when they got the mony from the Welberg foundashun. I still don't know what that Welberg thing is. Miss Kinnian explaned me but I still don't get it. So if I dint get smart why are they paying me to rite these dumb things. If their gonna pay me I'll do it. But its very hard to rite. I'm glad I'm going back to werk because I miss my job at the bakery and all my frends and all the fun we have. Dr. Strauss says I shoud keep a notbook in my pockit for things I remembir. And I don't have to do the progress reports every day just when I think of somthing or somthing speshul happins. I told him nothing speshul ever happins to me and it don't look like this speshul experimint is going to happin neither. He says don't get discouriged Charlie because it takes a long time and it happins slow and you cant notise it rite away. He explaned how it took a long time with Algernon before he got 3 times smarter then he was before. that's why Algernon beats me all the time in that amaze race because he had that operashun too. he's a speshul mouse the 1st animil to stay smart so long after the operashun. I dint know he was a speshul mouse. That makes it diffrint. I coud probaly do that amazed fester then a reglar mouse. Maybe some day I'll beat Algernon. Boy woud that be somthing. Dr Strauss says that so far Algernon looks like he mite be smart permanint and he says that's a good sine becaus we both had the same kind of operashun. March 21 We had a lot of fun at the bakery today. Joe Carp said hey look where Charlie had his operashun what did they do Charlie put some brains in. I was going to tell him about me getting smart but I remembered Prof Nemur said no. Then Frank Reilly said what did you do Charlie open a door the hard way. |
| 701 |
He said Ernie for godsake you trying to be a Charlie Gordon. I don't know why he said that. I never lost any packiges. I askd Mr Donner if I coud lern to be an aprentise baker like Ernie. I told him I coud lern it if he gave me a chanse. Mr Donner looked at me for a long time funny because I gess I don't talk so much most of the time. And Frank herd me and he laffed and laffed until Mr Donner told him to shut up and go tend to his oven. Then Mr Donner said to me theirs lots of time for that Charlie. A bakers werk is very importint and very complikated and you shoudnt worry about things like that. I wish I coud tell him and all the other people about my real operashun. I wish it woud reely work alredy so I coud get smart like evrybody else. March 24 Prof Nemur and Dr Strauss came to my room tonight to see why I don't come in to the lab like I am suppose to. I told them I don't want to race with Algernon no more. Prof Nemur said I don't have to for a while but I shoud come in any way. He brout me a presint only it wasnt a presint but just for lend. He said its a teeching mashine that werks like TV. It talks and makes picturs and I got to tern it on just before I go to sleep. I said your kidding. Why shoud I tern on a TV before I go to sleep. But Prof Nemur said if I want to get smart I got to do what he says. So I told him I dint think I was goin to get smart anyway. Then Dr. Strauss came over and put his hand on my sholder and said Charlie you don't know it yet but your getting smarter all the time. You won't notise it for a while like you don't notise how the hour hand on a clock moves. that's the way it is with the changes in you. They are hap-pining so slow you cant tell. But we can follow it from the tests and the way you act and talk and your progress reports. He said Charlie youve got to have fayth in us and in yourself. We cant be sure it will be permanint but we are confidant that soon your going to be a very intellijent young man. I said okay and Prof Nemur showed me how to werk the TV that reely wasnt a TV. |
| 702 |
I askd him what did it do. First he lookd sore again because I asked him to explane me and he said I shoud just do what he told me. But Dr Strauss said he shoud explane it to me because I was beginning to questien authorety. I don't no what that meens but Prof Nemur looked like he was going to bite his lip offi Then he explaned me very slow that the mashine did lots of things to my mind. Somethings it did just before I fall asleep like teach me things when I'm very sleepy and a little while after I start to fall asleep I still hear the talk even if I don't see the picturs anymore. Other things is at nite its suppose to make me have dreams and remembir things that happened a long time ago when I was a very littel kid. Its scary. Oh yes I forgot. I asked Prof Nemur when I can go back to Miss Kinnians class at the adult center and he said soon Miss Kinnian will come to the collidge testing center to teach me speshul. I am glad about that. I dint see her so much since the operashun but she is nice. March 25 That crazy TV kept me up all nite. How can I sleep with something yelling crazy things all night in my ears. And the nutty picturs. Wow. I don't know what it says when I'm up so how am I going to know when I'm sleeping. I asked Burt about it and he says its ok. He says my branes are lerning just before I got to sleep and that will help me when Miss Kinnian starts my lessons at the testing center. The testing center isn't a hospitil for animils like I thougt before. Its a labortory for sience. I don't know what sience is exept I'm helping it with this experimint. Anyway I don't know about that TV. I think its crazy. If you can get smart when your going to sleep why do pepul go to school. I don't think that thing will werk. I use to watch the late show and the late late show on TV all the time before I went to sleep and it never made me smart. Maybe only certin movies make you smart. Maybe like quizz shows. March 26 How am I gonna work in the daytime if that thing keeps waking me up at nite. |
| 703 |
In the middel of the nite I woke up and I coudnt go back to sleep because it kept saying remembir... remembir... remembir. .. So I think I remembird something. I don't remembir exackly but it was about Miss Kinnian and the school where I lerned about reading. And how I went their. A long time ago once I asked Joe Carp how he lerned to read and if I coud lern to read to. He laffed like he always done when I say something funny and he says to me Charlie why waste your time they cant put any branes in where there aint none. But Fanny Birden herd me and she askd her cusin who is a collidge studint at Beekman and she told me about the adult center for retarded pepul at the Beekman collidge. She rote the name down on a paper and Frank laffed and said don't go getting so eddicated that you won't talk to your old frends. I said don't worry I will always keep my old frends even if I can read and rite. He was laffing and Joe Carp was laffing but Gimpy came in and told them to get back to making rolls. They are all good frends to me. After werk I walked over six blocks to the school and I was scared. I was so happy I was going to lern to read that I bougt a newspaper to take home with me and read after I lerned. When I got their it was a big long hall with lots of pepul. I got scared of saying somthing wrong to sombody so I startid to go home. But I don't know why I terned around and went inside agen. I wated until most everbody went away exept some pepul going over by a big timeclock like the one we have at the bakery and I asked the lady if I coud lern to read and rite because I wanted to read all the things in the newspaper and I showed it to her. She was Miss Kinnian but I dint know it then. She said if you come back tomorow and rejister I will start to teach you how to read. But you got to understand it will take a long time maybe years to lern to read. I told her I dint know it took so long but I wantid to lern anyway because I made believe a lot of times. I meen I pretend to pepul I know how to read but it aint true and I wantid to lern. |
| 704 |
She shaked my hand and said glad to meet you Mistre Gordon. I will be your teacher. My name is Miss Kinnian. So that's wear I went to lern and that's how I met Miss Kinnian. Thinking and remembiring is hard and now I don't sleep so good any more. That TV is too loud. March 27 Now that I'm starting to have those dreams and remembiring Prof Nemur says I got to go to theripy se-sions with Dr Strauss. He says theripy sesions is like when you feel bad you talk to make it better. I tolld him I don't feel bad and I do plenty of talking all day so why do I have to go to theripy but he got sore and says I got to go anyway. What theripy is is that I got to lay down on a couch and Dr. Strauss sits in a chair near me and I talk about anything that comes into my head. For a long time I dint say nothing because I coudnt think of nothing to say. Then I told him about the bakery and the things they do there. But its silly for me to go to his office and lay down on the couch to talk because I rite it down in the progress reports anyway and he could read it. So today I brout the progress report with me and I told him maybe he could just read it and I could take a nap on the couch. I was very tired because that TV kept me up all nite but he said no it don't work that way. I got to talk. So I talked but then I fell asleep on the couch anyway — rite in the middle. March 28 I got a headake. its not from that TV this time. Dr Strauss showed me how to keep the TV turned low so now I can sleep. I don't hear a thing. And I still don't understand what it says. A few times I play it over in the morning to find out what I lerned before I fell asleep and while I was sleeping and I don't even know the words. Maybe its another langwidge or something. But most times it sounds american. But it talks too fast. I askd Dr Strauss what good is it to get smart in my sleep if I want to be smart when I'm awake. He says its the same thing and I have two minds. Theres the subconscious and the conscious (thats how you spell it) and one don't tell the other what its doing. |
| 705 |
They don't even talk to each other. that's why I dream. And boy have I been having crazy dreams. Wow. Ever since that night TV. The late late late late late movie show. I forgot to ask Dr Strauss if it was only me or if everybody has two minds like that. (I just looked up the word in the dicshunery Dr Strauss gave me. subconscious, adj. Of the nature of mental operations yet not present in consciousness; as, subconscious conflict of desires) Theres more but I still don't know what it meens. This isn't a very good dicshunery for dumb people like me. Anyway the headake is from the party. Joe Carp and Frank Reilly invited me to go with them after work to Hal-lorans Bar for some drinks. I don't like to drink wiskey but they said we will have lots of fun. I had a good time. We played games with me doing a dance on the top of the bar with a lampshade on my head and everyone laffing. Then Joe Carp said I shoud show the girls how I mop out the toilet in the bakery and he got me a mop. I showed them and everyone laffed when I told them that Mr Donner said I was the best janiter and errand boy he ever had because I like my job and do it good and never come late or miss a day exept for my operashun. I said Miss Kinnian always told me Charlie be proud of the work you do because you do your job good. Everybody laffed and Frank said that Miss Kinnian must be some cracked up piece if she goes for Charlie and Joe said hey Charlie are you making out with her. I said I dint know what that meens. They gave me lots of drinks and Joe said Charlie is a card when he's potted. I think that means they like me. We have some good times but I cant wait to be smart like my best frends Joe Carp and Frank Reilly. I don't remember how the party was over but they asked me to go around the corner to see if it was raining and when I came back there was no one their. Maybe they went to find me. I looked for them all over till it was late. But I got lost and I felt bad at myself for getting lost because I bet Algernon coud go up and down those streets a hundrid times and not get lost like I did. |
| 706 |
Then I don't remember so good but Mrs Flynn says a nice poleecman brought me back home. That same nite I dreamed about my mother and father only I coudnt see her face it was all wite and she was blurry. I was crying because we were in a big departmint store and I was losst and I coudnt find them and I ran up and down the rows around all the big cownters in the store. Then a man came and took me in a big room with benches and gave me a lolypop and tolld me a big boy like me shoudnt cry because my mother and father woud come to find me. Anyway that's the dream and I got a headake and a big lump on my head and black and blue marks all over. Joe Carp says mabye I got rolled or the cop let me have it. I don't think poleecmen do things like that. But anyway I don't think I'll drink wiskey anymore. March 29 I beet Algernon. I dint even know I beet him until Burt Selden told me. Then the second time I lost because I got so exited. But after that I beet him 8 more times. I must be getting smart to beat a smart mouse like Algernon. But I don't feel smarter. I wanted to race some more but Burt said that's enough for one day. He let me hold Algernon for a minit. Algernon is a nice mouse. Soft like cotton. He blinks and when he opens his eyes their black and pink on the eges. I asked can I feed him because I felt bad to beat him and I wanted to be nice and make frends. Burt said no Algernon is a very speshul mouse with an operashun like mine. He was the first of all the animals to stay smart so long and he said that Algernon is so smart he has to solve a problem with a lock that changes every time he goes in to eat so he has to lern something new to get his food. That made me sad because if he coudnt lern he woudnt be able to eat and he would be hungry. I don't think its right to make you pass a test to eat. How woud Burt like to have to pass a test every time he wants to eat. I think I'll be frends with Algernon. That reminds me. Dr Strauss says I shoud write down all my dreams and the things I think so when I come to his office I can tell them. |
| 707 |
I tolld him I don't know how to think yet but he says he means more things like what I wrote about my mom and dad and about when I started school at Miss Kinnians or anything that happened before the operation is thinking and I wrote them in my progress report. I didn't know I was thinking and remembering. Maybe that means something is happining to me. I don't feel different but I'm so exited I cant sleep. Dr Strauss gave me some pink pills to make me sleep good. He says I got to get lots of sleep because that's when most of the changes happin in my brane. It must be true because Uncle Herman use to sleep in our house all the time when he was out of werk on the old sofa in the par-ler. 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. |
| 708 |
Nobody laffed. When Gimpy came back and Fanny told him he got sore at me for working on the mixer. But she said watch him and see how he does it. They were playing him for an April Fool joke and he foold them instead. Gimpy watched and I knew he was sore at me because he don't like when people don't do what he tells them just like Prof Nemur. But he saw how I worked the mixer and he skratched his head and said I see it but I don't believe it. Then he called Mr Donner and told me to work it again so Mr Donner could see it. I was scared he was going to be angry and holler at me so after I was finished I said can I go back to my own job now. I got to sweep out the front of the bakery behind the counter. Mr Donner looked at me funny for a long time. Then he said this must be some kind of April fools joke you guys are playing on me. Whats the catch. Gimpy said that's what I thought it was some kind of a gag. He limped all around the mashine and he said to Mr Donner I don't understand it either but Charlie knows how to handle it and I got to admit it he does a better job then Oliver. Everybody was crowded around and talking about it and I got scared because they all looked at me funny and they were exited. Frank said I told you there is something peculier lately about Charlie. And Joe Carp says yeah I know what you mean. Mr Donner sent everybody back to work and he took me out to the front of the store with him. He said Charlie I don't know how you done it but it looks like you finally learned something. I want you to be carefull and do the best you can do. You got yourself a new job with a 5 doller raise. I said I don't want a new job because I like to clean up and sweep and deliver and do things for my friends but Mr Donner said never mind your friends I need you for this job. I don't think much of a man who don't want to advance. 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. |
| 709 |
So now instead of delivering packiges and washing out the toilets and dumping the garbage. I'm the new mixer. that's advance. Tomorrow I will tell Miss Kinnian. I think she will be happy but I don't know why Frank and Joe are mad at me. I asked Fanny and she said never mind those fools. This is April Fools day and the joke backfired and made them the fools instead of you. I asked Joe to tell me what was the joke that backfired and he said go jump in the lake. I guess their mad at me because I worked the mashine but they didn't get the day off like they thought. Does that mean I'm getting smarter. April 3 Finished robinson crusoe. i want to find out more about what happens to him but Miss Kinnian says that's all there is. why. April 4 Miss Kinnian says I'm learning fast. She read some of my progress reports and she looked at me kind of funny. She says I'm a fine person and I'll show them all. I asked her why. She said never mind but I shouldn't feel bad if I find out that everybody isn't nice like I think. She said for a person who God gave so little to you did more than a lot of people with brains they never even used. I said that all my friends are smart people and their good. They like me and they never did anything that wasnt nice. Then she got something in her eye and she had to run out to the ladys room. While I was sitting in the teaching room waiting for her I was wondering about how Miss Kinnian was a nice lady like my mother use to be. I think I remember my mother told me to be good and always be friendly to people. She said but always be careful because some people don't understand and they might think you are trying to make trouble. That makes me remember when mom had to go away and they put me to stay in Mrs Leroys house who lived next door. Mom went to the hospital. Dad said she wasnt sick or nothing but she went to the hospital to bring me back a baby sister or a brother. (I still don't know how they do that) I told them I want a baby brother to play with and I don't know why they got me a sister instead but she was nice like a doll. |
| 710 |
Only she cryd all the time. I never hurt her or nothing. They put her in a crib in their room and once I heard Dad say don't worry Charlie wouldn't harm her. She was like a bundle all pink and screaming sometimes that I couldn't sleep. And when I went to sleep she woke me up in the nighttime. One time when they were in the kitchen and I was in my bed she was crying. I got up to pick her up and hold her to get quiet the way mom does. But then Mom came in yelling and took her away. And she slapped me so hard I fell on the bed. Then she startid screaming. don't you ever touch her again. you'll hurt her. she's a baby. You got no business touching her. I dint know it then but I guess I know it now that she thought I was going to hurt the baby because I was too dumb to know what I was doing. 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. It takes a long time to write that way but I think I'm remembering more and more. Anyway that's how come I got the word punctuation right. Its that way in the dictionary. Miss Kinnian says a period is punctuation too, and there are lots of other marks to learn. I told her I thought she meant all the periods had to have tails and be called commas. |
| 711 |
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. People bundled in coats with collars up and scarves around their necks. But he has no gloves. His hands are cold and he puts down a heavy bundle of brown paper bags. He's stopping to watch the little mechanical toys that the peddler winds up — the tumbling bear, the dog jumping, the seal spinning a ball on its nose. Tumbling, jumping, spinning. If he had all those toys for himself he would be the happiest person in the world. He wants to ask the red-faced peddler, with his fingers sticking through the brown cotton gloves, if he can hold the tumbling bear for a minute, but he is afraid. He picks up the bundle of paper bags and puts it on his shoulder. He is skinny but he is strong from many years of hard work "Charlie! |
| 712 |
Charlie!.. . fat head barley!" Children circle around him laughing and teasing him like little dogs snapping at his feet. Charlie smiles at them. He would like to put down his bundle and play games with them, but when he thinks about it the skin on his back twitches and he feels the way the older boys throw things at him. Coming back to the bakery he sees some boys standing in the door of a dark hallway. "Hey look, there's Charlie!" "Hey, Charlie. "What you got there? Want to shoot some craps?" "C'mere. We won't hurtya." But there is something about the doorway — the dark hall, the laughing, that makes his skin twitch again. He tries to know what it is but all he can remember is their dirt and piss all over his clothes, and Uncle Herman shouting when he came home all covered with filth, and how Uncle Herman ran out with a hammer in his hand to find the boys who did that to him. Charlie backs away from the boys laughing in the hallway, drops the bundle. Picks it up again and runs the rest of the way to the bakery. "What took you so long, Charlie?" shouts Gimpy from the doorway to the back of the bakery. Charlie pushes through the swinging doors to the back of the bakery and sets down the bundle on one of the skids. He leans against the wall shoving his hands into his pockets. He wishes he had his spinner. He likes it back here in the bakery where the floors are white with flour — whiter than the sooty walls and ceiling. The thick soles of his own high shoes are crusted with white and there is white in the stitching and lace-eyes, and under his nails and in the cracked chapped skin of his hands. He relaxes here — squatting against the wall — leaning back in a way that tilts his baseball cap with the D forward over his eyes. He likes the smell of flour, sweet dough, bread and cakes and rolls baking. The oven is crackling and makes him sleepy. Sweet... warm... sleep Suddenly, falling, twisting, head hitting against the wall. Someone has kicked his legs out from under him. |
| 713 |
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. 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. |
| 714 |
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. 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. |
| 715 |
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... 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. When Harriet passes by, the boys stop playing and look at her. |
| 716 |
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. Still, I've got to have someone to talk to. I'm going to ask Miss Kinnian to go to a movie tomorrow night to celebrate my raise. If I can get up the nerve. April 24 Professor Nemur finally agreed with Dr. Strauss and me that it will be impossible for me to write down everything if I know its immediately read by people at the lab. I've tried to be completely honest about everything, no matter who I was talking about, but there are things I can't put down unless I can keep them private — at least for a while. Now, I'm allowed to keep back some of these more personal reports, but before the final report to the Welberg Foundation, Professor Nemur will read through everything to decide what part of it should be published. What happened today at the lab was very upsetting. I dropped by the office earlier this evening to ask Dr. |
| 717 |
She takes me into her arms, kisses and caresses me, and I want to hold her tightly but I'm afraid. The more she touches me, the more frightened I become because I know I must never touch a girl. Then, as her body rubs up against mine, I feel a strange bubbling and throbbing inside me that makes me warm. But when I look up I see a bloody knife in her hands. I try to scream as I run, but no sound comes out of my throat, and my pockets are empty. I search in my pockets but I don't know what it is I've lost or why I was hiding it. I know only that it's gone, and there is blood on my hands too. When I woke up, I thought of Alice, and I had the same feeling of panic as in the dream. What am I afraid of? Something about the knife. I made myself a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. I'd never had a dream like it before, and I knew it was connected with my evening with Alice. I have begun to think of her in a different way. Free association is still difficult, because it's hard not to control the direction of your thoughts... just to leave your mind open and let anything flow into it... ideas bubbling to the surface like a bubble bath... a woman bathing... a girl... Norma taking a bath... I am watching through the keyhole... and when she gets out of the tub to dry herself I see that her body is different from mine. Something is missing. Running down the hallway... somebody chasing me... not a person... just a big flashing kitchen knife... and I'm scared and crying but no voice comes out because my neck is cut and I'm bleeding... "Mama, Charlie is peeking at me through the keyhole..." Why is she different? What happened to her?... blood... bleeding... a dark cubbyhole... Three blind mice... three blind mice, See how they run! See how they run! They all run after the farmer s wife, She cut off their tails with. a carving knife, Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three... blind... mice? Charlie, alone in the kitchen early in the morning. Everyone else asleep, and he amuses himself playing with his spinner. |
| 718 |
Certainly, Gimpy had not made a mistake. He had deliberately undercharged the customer, and there had been an understanding between them. I leaned limply against the wall not knowing what to do. Gimpy had worked for Mr. Donner for over fifteen years. Donner — who always treated his workers like close friends, like relatives — had invited Gimpy's family to his house for dinner more than once. He often put Gimpy in charge of the shop when he had to go out, and I had heard stories of the times Donner gave Gimpy money to pay his wife's hospital bills. It was incredible that anyone would steal from such a man. There had to be some other explanation. Gimpy had really made a mistake in ringing up the sale, and the half-dollar was a tip. Or perhaps Mr. Donner had made some special arrangement for this one customer who regularly bought cream cakes. Anything rather than believe that Gimpy was stealing. Gimpy had always been so nice to me. I no longer wanted to know. I kept my eyes averted from the register as I brought out the tray of eclairs and sorted out the cookies, buns, and cakes. But when the little red-haired woman came in — the one who always pinched my cheek and joked about finding a girl friend for me — I recalled that she came in most often when Donner was out to lunch and Gimpy was behind the counter. Gimpy had often sent me out to deliver orders to her house. Involuntarily, my mind totaled her purchases to $4.53. 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. 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? |
| 719 |
I scream. I pound on the door, but there is no sound. I see Charlie staring back at me from inside. Is it only a reflection? Things clutch at my legs and drag me away from the bakery down into the shadows of the alleyway, and just as they begin to ooze all over me I wake up. Other times the window of the bakery opens into the past and looking through it I see other things and other people. It's astonishing how my power of recall is developing. I cannot control it completely yet, but sometimes when I'm busy reading or working on a problem, I get a feeling of intense clarity. I know it's some kind of subconscious warning signal, and now instead of waiting for the memory to come to me, I close my eyes and reach out for it. Eventually, I'll be able to bring this recall completely under control, to explore not only the sum of my past experiences, but also all of the untapped faculties of the mind. Even now, as I think about it, I feel the sharp stillness. I see the bakery window... reach out and touch it... cold and vibrating, and then the glass becomes warm... hotter... fingers burning. The window reflecting my image becomes bright, and as the glass turns into a mirror, I see little Charlie Gordon — fourteen or fifteen — looking out at me through the window of his house, and it's doubly strange to realize how different he was... He has been waiting for his sister to come from school, and when he sees her turn the corner onto Marks Street, he waves and calls her name and runs out onto the porch to meet her. Norma waves a paper. "I got an A in my history test. I knew all the answers. Mrs. Baffin said it was the best paper in the whole class." She is a pretty girl with light brown hair carefully braided and coiled about her head in a crown, and as she looks up at her big brother the smile turns to a frown and she skips away, leaving him behind as she darts up the steps into the house. Smiling, he follows her. His mother and father are in the kitchen, and Charlie, bursting with the excitement of Norma's good news, blurts it out before she has a chance. |
| 720 |
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. 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. |
| 721 |
How can I make him understand that he did not create me? He makes the same mistake as the others when they look at a feeble-minded person and laugh because they don't understand there are human feelings involved. He doesn't realize that I was a person before I came here. I am learning to control my resentment, not to be so impatient, to wait for things. I guess I'm growing up. Each day I learn more and more about myself, and the memories that began as ripples now wash over me in high-breaking waves... June 11 The confusion began from the moment we arrived at the Chalmers Hotel in Chicago and discovered that by error our rooms would not be vacant until the next night and until then we would have to stay at the nearby Independence Hotel. Nemur was furious. He took it as a personal affront and quarrelled with everyone in the line of hotel command from the bellhop to the manager. We waited in the lobby as each hotel official went off in search of his superior to see what could be done. In the midst of all the confusion — luggage drifting in and piling up all around the lobby, bellboys hustling back and forth with their little baggage carts, members who hadn't seen each other in a year, recognizing and greeting each other — we stood there feeling increasingly embarrassed as Nemur tried to collar officials connected with the International Psychological Association. 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. |
| 722 |
Nemur had obviously sent out advance publicity releases. Some of the psychological papers delivered at the meeting were impressive. A group from Alaska showed how stimulation of various portions of the brain caused a significant development in learning ability, and a group from New Zealand had mapped out those portions of the brain that controlled perception and retention of stimuli. But there were other kinds of papers too — P. T. Zeller-man's study on the difference in the length of time it took white rats to learn a maze when the corners were curved rather than angular, or Worfels paper on the effect of intelligence level on the reaction-time of rhesus monkeys. Papers like these made me angry. Money, time, and energy squandered on the detailed analysis of the trivial. Burt was right when he praised Nemur and Strauss for devoting themselves to something important and uncertain rather than to something insignificant and safe. If only Nemur would look at me as a human being. After the chairman announced the presentation from Beekman University, we took our seats on the platform behind the long table — Algernon in his cage between Burt and me. We were the main attraction of the evening, and when we were settled, the chairman began his introduction. I half expected to hear him boom out: Laideezzz and gentulmennnnnn. Step right this way and see the side show! An act never before seen in the scientific world! A mouse and a moron turned into geniuses before your very eyes! I admit I had come here with a chip on my shoulder. All he said was: "The next presentation really needs no introduction. "We have all heard about the startling work being done at Beekman University, sponsored by the Wel-berg Foundation grants, under the direction of the chairman of the psychology department, Professor Nemur, in co-operation with Dr. Strauss of the Beekman Neuropsy-chiatric Center. Needless to say, this is a report we have all been looking forward to with great interest. I turn the meeting over to Professor Nemur and Dr. |
| 723 |
But I controlled myself, and by the time Strauss took the podium the impulse had passed. Strauss dealt largely with the theory and techniques of neurosurgery, describing in detail how pioneer studies on the mapping of hormone control centers enabled him to isolate and stimulate these centers while at the same time removing the hormone-inhibitor producing portion of the cortex. He explained the enzyme-block theory and went on to describe my physical condition before and after surgery. Photographs (I didn't know they had been taken) were passed around and commented on, and I could see by the nods and smiles that most people there agreed with him that the "dull, vacuous facial expression" had been transformed into an "alert, intelligent appearance." He also discussed in detail the pertinent aspects of our therapy sessions — especially my changing attitudes toward free association on the couch. I had come there as part of a scientific presentation, and I had expected to be put on exhibition, but everyone kept talking about me as if I were some kind of newly created thing they were presenting to the scientific world. No one in this room considered me an individual — a human being. The constant juxtaposition of "Algernon and Charlie," and "Charlie and Algernon," made it clear that they thought of both of us as a couple of experimental animals who had no existence outside the laboratory. But, aside from my anger, I couldn't get it out of my mind that something was wrong. Finally, it was Nemur's turn to speak — to sum it all up as the head of the project — to take the spotlight as the author of a brilliant experiment. This was the day he had been waiting for. He was impressive as he stood up there on the platform, and, as he spoke, I found myself nodding with him, agreeing with things I knew to be true. The testing, the experiment, the surgery, and my subsequent mental development were described at length, and his talk was enlivened by quotations from my progress reports. More than once I found myself hearing something personal or foolish read to this audience. |
| 724 |
Thank God I had been careful to keep most of the details about Alice and myself in my private file. Then, at one point in his summary, he said it: "We who have worked on this project at Beekman University have the satisfaction of knowing we have taken one of nature's mistakes and by our new techniques created a superior human being. When Charlie came to us he was outside of society, alone in a great city without friends or relatives to care about him, without the mental equipment to live a normal life. No past, no contact with the present, no hope for the future. It might be said that Charlie Gordon did not really exist before this experiment..." I don't know why I resented it so intensely to have them think of me as something newly minted in their private treasury, but it was — I am certain — echoes of that idea that had been sounding in the chambers of my mind from the time we had arrived in Chicago. I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I'm a human being, a person — with parents and memories and a history — and I was before you ever wheeled me into that operating room! At the same time deep in the heat of my anger there was forged an overwhelming insight into the thing that had disturbed me when Strauss spoke and again when Nemur amplified his data. They had made a mistake — of course! The statistical evaluation of the waiting period necessary to prove the permanence of the change had been based on earlier experiments in the field of mental development and learning, on waiting periods with normally dull or normally intelligent animals. But it was obvious that the waiting period would have to be extended in those cases where an animals intelligence had been increased two or three times. Nemur's conclusions had been premature. For both Algernon and myself, it would take more time to see if this change would stick The professors had made a mistake, and no one else had caught it. I wanted to jump up and tell them, but I couldn't move. |
| 725 |
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. Her picture makes me tremble. And Norma — thin-faced too. Features not so sharp, pretty, but very much like my mother. Her hair worn down to her shoulders softens her. The two of them are sitting on the living room couch. It was Rose's face that brought back the frightening memories. She was two people to me, and I never had any way of knowing which she would be. Perhaps she would reveal it to others by a gesture of hand, a raised eyebrow, a frown — my sister knew the storm warnings, and she would always be out of range whenever my mother's temper flared — but it always caught me unawares. I would come to her for comforting, and her anger would break over me. And other times there would be tenderness and holding-close like a warm bath, and hands stroking my hair and brow, and the words carved above the cathedral of my childhood: He's like all the other children. He's a good boy. I see back through the dissolving photograph, myself and father leaning over a bassinet. He's holding me by the hand and saying, "There she is. |
| 726 |
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. 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. |
| 727 |
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. 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. |
| 728 |
As they go out the door, she looks away. Perhaps she is trying to convince herself that he has already gone out of her life — that he no longer exists. On the way out, Charlie sees on the kitchen table the long carving knife she cuts roasts with, and he senses vaguely that she wanted to hurt him. She wanted to take something away from him, and give it to Norma. When he looks back at her, she has picked up a rag to wash the kitchen sink... When the haircut, shave, sun treatment, and the rest were over, I sat in the chair limply, feeling light, and slick, and clean, and Matt whisked the neckcloth off and offered me a second mirror to see the reflection of the back of my head. Seeing myself in the front mirror looking into the back mirror, as he held it for me, it tilted for an instant into the one angle that produced the illusion of depth; endless corridors of myself... looking at myself... looking at myself... looking at myself... looking... Which one? Who was I? I thought of not telling him. What good was it for him to know? Just go away and not reveal who I was. Then I remembered that I wanted him to know. He had to admit that I was alive, that I was someone. I wanted him to boast about me to the customers tomorrow as he gave haircuts and shaves. That would make it all real. If he knew I was his son, then I would be a person. "Now that you've got the hair off my face, maybe you'll know me," I said as I stood up, waiting for a sign of recognition. He frowned. "What is this? A gag?" I assured him it was not a gag, and if he looked and thought hard enough he would know me. He shrugged and turned to put his combs and scissors away. "I got no time for guessing games. Got to close up. That'll be three-fifty." What if he didn't remember me? What if this was only an absurd fantasy? His hand was out for the money, but I made no move toward my wallet. He had to remember me. He had to know me. But no — of course not — and as I felt the sour taste in my mouth and the sweat in my palms, I knew that in a minute I would be sick. |
| 729 |
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. "Just a little dizzy. It'll pass." But I knew it would only get worse as long as Charlie felt there was danger I'd make love to her. And then I got the idea. It disgusted me at first, but suddenly I realized the only way to overcome this paralysis was to outwit him. If for some reason Charlie was afraid of Alice but not of Fay, then I would turn out the lights, and pretend I was making love to Fay. He would never know the difference. It was wrong — disgusting — but if it worked it would break Charlies strangle hold on my emotions. I would know afterwards that I had loved Alice, and that this was the only way. "I'm all right now. Let's sit in the dark for a while," I said, turning off the lights and waiting to collect myself. It wasn't going to be easy. I had to convince myself, visualize Fay, hypnotize myself into believing that the woman sitting beside me was Fay. And even if he separated himself from me to watch from outside my body, it would do him no good because the room would be dark. I waited for some sign that he suspected — the warning symptoms of panic. |
| 730 |
It will send the linguists back to India with their tape recorders, because it undermines the critical superstructure of their methodology. I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less — filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt. Nothing wrong with that, but it should not be used as an excuse to destroy the stability of language. Alice called today to find out when I am coming back to work at the lab. I told her I wanted to finish the projects I had started, and that I was hoping to get permission from the Welberg Foundation for my own special study. She's right though — I've got to take time into consideration. Fay still wants to go out dancing all the time. Last night started out with us drinking and dancing at the "White Horse Club, and from there to Benny's Hideaway, and then on to the Pink Slipper... and after that I don't remember many of the places, but we danced until I was ready to drop. My tolerance for liquor must have increased because I was pretty far gone before Charlie made his appearance. I can only recall him doing a silly tap dance on the stage of the Allakazam Club. He got a great hand before the manager threw us out, and Fay said everyone thought I was a wonderful comedian and everyone liked my moron act. "What the hell happened then? I know I strained my back. I thought it was from all the dancing, but Fay says I fell off the goddamned couch. Algernon's behavior is becoming erratic again. Minnie seems to be afraid of him. July 9 A terrible thing happened today. Algernon bit Fay. I had warned her against playing with him, but she always liked to feed him. Usually when she came into his room, he'd perk up and run to her. Today it was different. He was at the far side, curled up into a white puff. When she put her hand in through the top trap door, he cringed and forced himself back into the corner. |
| 731 |
"There are a lot of people who will give money or materials, but very few who will give time and affection. That's what I mean." His voice grew harsh, and he pointed to an empty baby bottle on the bookshelf across the room. "You see that bottle?" I told him I had wondered about it when we came into his office. "Well, how many people do you know who are prepared to take a grown man into his arms and let him nurse with the bottle? And take the chance of having the patient urinate or defecate all over him? You look surprised. You can't understand it, can you, from way up there in your research ivory tower? What do you know about being shut out from every human experience as our patients have been?" I couldn't restrain a smile, and he apparently misunderstood, because he stood up and ended the conversation abruptly. 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. |
| 732 |
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. 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. 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. |
| 733 |
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. Nice monkey... pretty monkey... with big eyes and swishy tail. Can I feed him a peanut?... No, the man'll holler. That sign says do not feed the animals. That's a chimpanzee. Can I pet him? No. I want to pet the chip-a-zee. Never mind, come and look at the elephants. Outside, crowds of bright sunshiny people are dressed in spring. Algernon lies in his own dirt, unmoving, and the odors are stronger than ever before. And what about me? July 28 Fay has a new boy friend. I went home last night to be with her. I went to my room first to get a bottle and then headed over on the fire escape. But fortunately I looked before going in. |
| 734 |
They were together on the couch. Strange, I don't really care. It's almost a relief. I went back to the lab to work with Algernon. He has moments out of his lethargy. Periodically, he will run a shifting maze, but when he fails and finds himself in a dead-end, he reacts violently. When I got down to the lab, I looked in. He was alert and came up to me as if he knew me. He was eager to work, and when I set him down through the trap door in the wire mesh of the maze, he moved swiftly along the pathways to the reward box. Twice he ran the maze successfully. The third time, he got halfway through, paused at an intersection, and then with a twitching movement took the wrong turn. I could see what was going to happen, and I wanted to reach down and take him out before he ended up in a blind alley. But I restrained myself and watched. When he found himself moving along the unfamiliar path, he slowed down, and his actions became erratic: start, pause, double back, turn around and then forward again, until finally he was in the cul-de-sac that informed him with a mild shock that he had made a mistake. At this point, instead of turning back to find an alternate route, he began to move in circles, squeaking like a phonograph needle scratched across the grooves. He threw himself against the walls of the maze, again and again, leaping up, twisting over backwards and falling, and throwing himself again. Twice he caught his claws in the overhead wire mesh, screeching wildly, letting go, and trying hopelessly again. Then he stopped and curled himself up into a small, tight ball. "When I picked him up, he made no attempt to uncurl, but remained in that state much like a catatonic stupor. When I moved his head or limbs, they stayed like wax. I put him back into his cage and watched him until the stupor wore off and he began to move around normally. "What eludes me is the reason for his regression — is it a special case? An isolated reaction? Or is there some general principle of failure basic to the whole procedure? |
| 735 |
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. I soak it up into my pores during the day, and at night — in the moments before I pass off into sleep — ideas explode into my head like fireworks. There is no greater joy than the burst of solution to a problem. Incredible that anything could happen to take away this bubbling energy, the zest that fills everything I do. It's as if all the knowledge I've soaked in during the past months has coalesced and lifted me to a peak of light and understanding. This is beauty, love, and truth all rolled into one. This is joy. And now that I've found it, how can I give it up? Life and work are the most wonderful things a man can have. I am in love with what I am doing, because the answer to this problem is right here in my mind, and soon — very soon — it will burst into consciousness. Let me solve this one problem. I pray God it is the answer I want, but if not I will accept any answer at all and try to be grateful for what I had. Fay's new boy friend is a dance instructor from the Stardust Ballroom. I can't really blame her since I have so little time to be with her. August 11 Blind alley for the past two days. Nothing. I've taken a wrong turn somewhere, because I get answers to a lot of questions, but not to the most important question of all: How does Algernon's regression affect the basic hypothesis of the experiment? Fortunately, I know enough about the processes of the mind not to let this block worry me too much. |
| 736 |
I am sorry, however, that my own contribution to the field must rest upon the ashes of the work of this staff and especially those who have done so much for me. Yours truly, Charles Gordon end: report copy: Dr. Strauss The Welberg Foundation September 1 I must not panic. 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. As the sun drops into the afternoon sky, the shadow undrapes itself and stretches out toward the horizon, long and thin, and far behind me... I want to say here again what I've said already to Dr. |
| 737 |
Strauss. No one is in any way to blame for what has happened. This experiment was carefully prepared, extensively tested on animals, and statistically validated. When they decided to use me as the first human test, they were reasonably certain that there was no physical danger involved. There was no way to foresee the psychological pitfalls. I don't want anyone to suffer because of what happens to me. The only question now is: How much can I hang on to? September 15 Nemur says my results have been confirmed. It means that the flaw is central and brings the entire hypothesis into question. Someday there might be a way to overcome this problem, but that time is not yet. I have recommended that no further tests be made on human beings until these things are clarified by additional research on animals. It is my own feeling that the most successful line of research will be that taken by the men studying enzyme imbalances. As with so many other things, time is the key factor — speed in discovering the deficiency, and speed in administering hormonal substitutes. I would like to help in that area of research, and in the search for radioisotopes that may be used in local cortical control, but I know now that I won't have the time. September 17 Becoming absent minded. Put things away on my desk or in the drawers of the lab tables, and when I can't find them I lose my temper and flare up at everyone. First signs? Algernon died two days ago. I found him at four thirty in the morning when I came back to the lab after wandering around down at the waterfront — on his side, stretched out in the corner of his cage. As if he were running in his sleep. Dissection shows that my predictions were right. Compared to the normal brain, Algernon's had decreased in weight and there was a general smoothing out of the cerebral convolutions as well as a deepening and broadening of brain fissures. It's frightening to think that the same thing might be happening to me right now. Seeing it happen to Algernon makes it real. |
| 738 |
For the first time, I'm afraid of the future. I put Algernon's body into a small metal container and took him home with me. I wasn't going to let them dump him into the incinerator. It's foolish and sentimental, but late last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave. September 21 I'm going to Marks Street to visit my mother tomorrow. A dream last night triggered off a sequence of memories, lit up a whole slice of the past and the important thing is to get it down on paper quickly before I forget it because I seem to forget things sooner now. It has to do with my mother, and now — more than ever — I want to understand her, to know what she was like and why she acted the way she did. I mustn't hate her. I've got to come to terms with her before I see her so that I won't act harshly or foolishly. September 27 I should have written this down right away, because it's important to make this record complete. I went to see Rose three days ago. Finally, I forced myself to borrow Burt's car again. I was afraid, and yet I knew I had to go. At first when I got to Marks Street I thought I had made a mistake. It wasn't the way I remembered it at all. It was a filthy street. Vacant lots where many of the houses had been torn down. On the sidewalk, a discarded refrigerator with its face ripped off, and on the curb an old mattress with wire intestines hanging out of its belly. Some houses had boarded up windows, and others looked more like patched-up shanties than homes. I parked the car a block away from the house and walked. There were no children playing on Marks Street — not at all like the mental picture I had brought with me of children everywhere, and Charlie watching them through the front window (strange that most of my memories of the street are framed by the window, with me always inside watching the children play). Now there were only old people standing in the shade of tired porches. As I approached the house, I had a second shock. |
| 739 |
But then I think of Charlie waiting at the window. His life is not mine to throw away. I've just borrowed it for a while, and now I'm being asked to return it. I must remember I'm the only person this ever happened to. As long as I can, I've got to keep putting down my thoughts and feelings. These progress reports are Charlie Gordon's contribution to mankind. I have become edgy and irritable. Having fights with people in the building about playing the hi-fi set late at night. 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. |
| 740 |
With the relief of knowing I had passed through a crisis, I sighed because there was nothing to hold me back It was no time for fear or pretense, because it could never be this way with anyone else. All the barriers were gone. I had unwound the string she had given me, and found my way out of the labyrinth to where she was waiting. I loved her with more than my body. I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else — just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe — beyond the universe — because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward, and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being — of breathing, of heartbeat, of day and night — and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance. This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other — child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death. But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. |
| 741 |
As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing. And in the moment before I fell off into sleep, I remembered the way it had been between Fay and myself, and I smiled. No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery. I leaned over and kissed her eyes. Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime. October 14 I wake up in the morning and don't know where I am or what I'm doing here, and then I see her beside me and I remember. She senses when something is happening to me, and she moves quietly around the apartment, making breakfast, cleaning up the place, or going out and leaving me to myself, without any questions. We went to a concert this evening, but I got bored and we left in the middle. Can't seem to pay much attention any more. I went because I know I used to like Stravinsky but somehow I no longer have the patience for it. The only bad thing about having Alice here with me is that now I feel I should fight this thing. I want to stop time, freeze myself at this level and never let go of her. October 17 Why can't I remember? I've got to try to resist this slackness. Alice tells me I lie in bed for days and don't seem to know who or where I am. Then it all comes back and I recognize her and remember what's happening. Fugues of amnesia. Symptoms of second childhood — what do they call it? — senility? I can watch it coming on. All so cruelly logical, the result of speeding up all the processes of the mind. I learned so much so fast, and now my mind is deteriorating rapidly. What if I won't let it happen? What if I fight it? Think of those people at Warren, the empty smiles, the blank expressions, everyone laughing at them. |
| 742 |
Little Charlie Gordon staring at me through the window — waiting. Please, not that again. October 18 I'm forgetting things I learned recently. It seems to be following the classic pattern, the last things learned are first things forgotten. Or is that the pattern? Better look it up again. Reread my paper on the Algernon-Gordon Effect and even though I know I wrote it, I keep feeling it was written by someone else. Most of it I don't even understand. But why am I so irritable? Especially when Alice is so good to me? She keeps the place neat and clean, always putting my things away and washing dishes and scrubbing floors. I shouldn't have shouted at her the way I did this morning because it made her cry, and I didn't want that to happen. But she shouldn't have picked up the broken records and the music and the book and put them all neatly into a box. That made me furious. I don't want anyone to touch any of those things. I want to see them pile up. I want them to remind me of what I'm leaving behind. I kicked the box and scattered the stuff all over the floor and told her to leave them just where they were. Foolish. No reason for it. I guess I got sore because I knew she thought it was silly to keep those things, and she didn't tell me she thought it was silly. She just pretended it was perfectly normal. She's humoring me. And when I saw that box I remembered the boy at Warren and the lousy lamp he made and the way we were all humoring him, pretending he had done something wonderful when he hadn't. That was what she was doing to me, and I couldn't stand it. 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. |
| 743 |
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... Why am I always looking at life through a window? And after it's all over I'm sick with myself because there is so little time left for me to read and write and think, and because I should know better than to drug my mind with this dishonest stuff that's aimed at the child in me. Especially me, because the child in me is reclaiming my mind. I know all this, but when Alice tells me I shouldn't waste my time, I get angry and tell her to leave me alone. I have a feeling I'm watching because it's important for me not to think, not to remember about the bakery, and my mother and father, and Norma. I don't want to remember any more of the past. I had a terrible shock today. Picked up a copy of an article I had used in my research, Krueger's Uber Psychische Ganzheit, to see if it would help me understand the paper I wrote and what I had done in it. First I thought there was something wrong with my eyes. Then I realized I could no longer read German. Tested myself in other languages. All gone. October 21 Alice is gone. Let's see if I can remember. It started when she said we couldn't live like this with the torn books and papers and records all over the floor and the place in such a mess. |
| 744 |
I don't want him coming around here. I told him he doesn't have to be worried about me because when I think I won't be able to take care of myself any more I'll get on a train and go to Warren. I told him I'd rather just go by myself when the time comes. I tried to talk to Fay, but I can see she's afraid of me. I guess she figures I've gone out of my mind. Last night she came home with somebody — he looked very young. This morning the landlady, Mrs. Mooney, came up with a bowl of hot chicken soup and some chicken. She said she just thought she would look in on me to see if I was doing all right. I told her I had lots of food to eat but she left it anyway and it was good. She pretended she was doing it on her own but I'm not that stupid yet. Alice or Strauss must have told her to look in on me and make sure I was all right. Well, that's okay. She's a nice old lady with an Irish accent and she likes to talk all about the people in the building. When she saw the mess on the floor inside my apartment she didn't say anything about it. I guess she's all right. November 1 A week since I dared to write again. I don't know where the time goes. Todays Sunday I know because I can see through my window the people going into the church across the street. I think I laid in bed all week but I remember Mrs. Mooney bringing me food a few times and asking if I was sick. What am I going to do with myself? I cant just hang around here all alone and look out the window. I've got to get hold of myself. I keep saying over and over that I've got to do something but then I forget or maybe its just easier not to do what I say I'm going to do. I still have some books from the library but a lot of them are too hard for me. I read a lot of mystery stories now and books about kings and queens from old times. I read a book about a man who thought he was a knight and went out on an old horse with his friend. But no matter what he did he always ended up getting beaten and hurt. Like when he thought the windmills were dragons. |
| 745 |
At first I thought it was a silly book because if he wasnt crazy he could see that windmills werent dragons and there is no such thing as sorcerers and enchanted castles but then I re-memberd that there was something else it was all supposed to mean — something the story didn't say but only hinted at. Like there was other meanings. But I don't know what. That made me angry because I think I used to know. But I'm keeping up with my reading and learning new things every day and I know its going to help me. I know I should have written some progress reports before this so they will know whats happening to me. But writing is harder. I have to look up even simple words in the dictionary now and it makes me angry with myself. November 2 I forgot to write in yesterdays report about the woman from the building across the alley one floor down. I saw her through my kitchen window last week. I don't know her name, or even what her top part looks like but every night about eleven oclock she goes into her bathroom to take a bath. She never pulls her shade down and thru my window when I put out my lights I can see her from the neck down when she comes out of the bath to dry herself. It makes me excited, but when the lady turns out the light I feel let down and lonely. I wish I could see what she looks like sometimes, whether she's pretty or what. I know its not nice to watch a woman when she's like that but I cant help it. Anyway what difference does it make to her if she doesn't know I'm watching. Its nearly eleven oclock now. Time for her bath. So I'd better go see... Nov 5 Mrs Mooney is very worried about me. She says the way I lay around all day and don't do anything I remind her of her son before she threw him out of the house. She said she don't like loafters. If I'm sick its one thing but if I'm a loafter that's another thing and she has no use for me. I told her I think I'm sick. I try to read a little bit every day mostly stories but sometimes I have to read the same thing over and over again because I don't know what it means. |
| 746 |
And its hard to write. I know I should look up all the words in the dictionary but I'm so tired all the time. Then I got the idea that I would only use the easy words instead of the long hard ones. That saves time. Its getting chilly out but I still put flowers on Algernons grave. Mrs Mooney thinks I'm silly to put flowers on a mouses grave but I told her that Algernon was a special mouse. I went over to visit Fay across the hall. But she told me to go away and not come back. She put a new lock on her door. Nov 9 Sunday again. I don't have anything to do to keep me busy now because the TV is broke and I keep forgetting to get it fixed. I think I lost this months check from the college. I don't remember. I get awful headaches and asperin doesn't help much. Mrs. Mooney believes now that I'm really sick and she feels very sory for me. She's a wonderful woman whenever someone is sick. Its getting so cold out now that I've got to wear two sweaters. The lady across the way pulls down her windowshade now, so I can't watch any more. My lousy luck. Nov 10 Mrs Mooney called a strange doctor to see me. She was afraid I was going to the. I told the doctor I wasnt to sick and that I only forget sometimes. He asked me did I have any friends or relatives and I said no I don't have any. I told him I had a friend called Algernon once but he was a mouse and we use to run races together. He looked at me kind of funny like he thot I was crazy. He smiled when I told him I use to be a genius. He talked to me like I was a baby and he winked at Mrs Mooney. 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. |
| 747 |
I told her I don't want to use there money any more. She said moneys money and someone has to pay or I have to put you out. Then she said why don't I get some job instead of just hanging around. I don't know any work but the job I use to do at the bakery. I don't want to go back their because they all knew me when I was smart and maybe they'll laff at me. But I don't know what else to do to get money. And I want to pay for everything myself. I am strong and I can werk. If I cant take care of myself I'll go to Warren. I won't take charety from anybody. Nov 15 I was looking at some of my old progress reports and its very strange but I cant read what I wrote. I can make out some of the words but they don't make sense. I think I wrote them but I don't remember so good. I get tired very fast when I try to read some of the books I baught in the drugstore. Exept the ones with the picturs of the pretty girls. I like to look at them but I have funny dreams about them. Its not nice. I won't buy them any more. I saw in one of those books they got magic powder that can make you strong and smart and do lots of things. I think mayby I'll send away and by some for myself. Nov 16 Alice came to the door again but I said go away I don't want to see you. She cryed and I cryed to but I woudnt let her in because I didn't want her to laff at me. I told her I didn't like her any more and I didn't want to be smart any more either. that's not true but. I still love her and I still want to be smart but I had to say that so she woud go away. Mrs Mooney told me Alice brout some more money to look after me and for the rent. I don't want that. I got to get a job. Please... please... don't let me forget how to reed and rite... Nov 18 Mr Donner was very nice when I came back and askd him for my old job at the bakery. Frist he was very suspicius but I told him what happened to me and then he looked very sad and put his hand on my shoulder and said Charlie you got guts. Evrybody looked at me when I came downstairs and started working in the toilet sweeping it out like I use to do. |
| 748 |
I said to myself Charlie if they make fun of you don't get sore because you remember their not so smart like you once thot they were. And besides they were once your frends and if they laffed at you that don't mean anything because they liked you to. One of the new men who came to werk their after I went away his name is Meyer Klaus did a bad thing to me. He came up to me when I was loading the sacks of flower and he said hey Charlie I hear your a very smart fella — a real quiz kid. Say something inteligent. I felt bad because I could tell by the way he said it he was making fun of me. So I kept on with my werk. But then he came over and grabed me by the arm real hard and shouted at me. When I talk to you boy you better listen to me. Or I coud brake your arm for you. He twisted my arm so it hurt and I got scared he was going to brake it like he said. And he was laffing and twisting it, and I didn't know what to do. I got so afraid I felt like I was gonna cry but I didn't and then I had to go to the bathroom something awful. My stomack was all twisting inside like I was gonna bust open if I didn't go right away... because I couldn't hold it back. I told him please let me go because I got to go to the toilet but he was just laffing at me and I dint know what to do. So I started crying. Let me go. Let me go. And then I made. It went in my pants and it smelled bad and I was crying. He let go of me then and made a sick face and he looked scared then. He said For gods sake I didn't mean anything Charlie. But then Joe Carp came in and grabbed Klaus by the shirt and said leave him alone you lousy bastard or I'll brake your neck. Charlie is a good guy and nobodys gonna start up with him without answering for it. I felt ashamed and I ran to the toilet to clean myself and change my cloths. When I got back Frank was there to and Joe was telling him about it and then Gimpy came in and they told him about it and he said theyd get rid of Klaus. They were gonna tell Mr Donner to fire him. |
| 749 |
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees — willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spreadpads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark. There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it. Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray sculptured stones. And then from the direction of the state highway came the sound of footsteps on crisp sycamore leaves. The rabbits hurried noiselessly for cover. A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down river. For a moment the place was lifeless, and then two men emerged from the path and came into the opening by the green pool. They had walked in single file down the path, and even in the open one stayed behind the other. |
| 750 |
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. When a little bird skittered over the dry leaves behind him, his head jerked up and he strained toward the sound with eyes and ears until he saw the bird, and then he dropped his head and drank again. When he was finished, he sat down on the bank, with his side to the pool, so that he could watch the trail's entrance. He embraced his knees and laid his chin down on his knees. The light climbed on out of the valley, and as it went, the tops of the mountains seemed to blaze with increasing brightness. Lennie said softly, "I di'n't forget, you bet, God damn. |
| 751 |
One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykolakas, but only in relation to the events remembered in the old country. When once I asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and saidyou're scared to pass the ocean, its too far, pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America. Richard Dorson, A Theory for American Folklore, American Folklore and the Historian (University of Chicago Press, 1971) Caveat, and Warning for Travelers This is a work of fiction, not a guidebook. While the geography of the United States of America in this tale is not entirely imaginary-many of the landmarks in this book can be visited, paths can be followed, ways can be mapped-I have taken liberties. Fewer liberties than you might imagine, but liberties nonetheless. Permission has neither been asked nor given for the use of real places in this story when they appears, I expect that the owners of Rock City or the House on the Rock, and the hunters who own the motel in the center of America, are as perplexed as anyone would be to find their properties in here. I have obscured the location of several of the places in this book: the town of Lakeside, for example, and the farm with the ash tree an hour south of Blacksburg. You may look for them if you wish. You might even find them. Furthermore, it goes without saying that all of the people, living, dead, and otherwise in this story are fictional or used in a fictional context. Only the gods are real. Part One. Shadows The boundaries of our country, sir? Why sir, on the north we are bounded by the Aurora Borealis, on the east we are bounded by the rising sun, on the south we are bounded by the procession of the Equinoxes, and on the west by the Day of Judgment. The American Joe Millers Jest Book Shadow had done three years in prison. |
| 752 |
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. Somewhere around the middle of year two he mentioned his theory to Low Key Lyesmith, his cellmate. Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, smiled his scarred smile. Yeah, he said. that's true. Its even better when youve been sentenced to death. that's when you remember the jokes about the guys who kicked their boots off as the noose flipped around their necks, because their friends always told them theyd die with their boots on. Is that a joke? asked Shadow. Damn right. Gallows humor. Best kind there is. When did they last hang a man in this state? asked Shadow. How the hell should I know? Lyesmith kept his orange-blond hair pretty much shaved. You could see the lines of his skull. Tell you what, though. This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals. Shadow shrugged. He could see nothing romantic in a death sentence. |
| 753 |
If you didn't have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down. Life goes on. And second, if you just hang in there, somedayyou're going to have to let you out. In the beginning it was too far away for Shadow to focus on. Then it became a distant beam of hope, and he learned how to tell himself this too shall pass when the prison shit went down, as prison shit always did. One day the magic door would open and hed walk through it. So he marked off the days on his Songbirds of North America calendar, which was the only calendar they sold in the prison commissary, and the sun went down and he didn't see it and the sun came up and he didn't see it. He practiced coin tricks from a book he found in the wasteland of the prison library; and he worked out; and he made lists in his head of what hed do when he got out of prison. Shadows lists got shorter and shorter. After two years he had it down to three things. First, he was going to take a bath. A real, long, serious soak, in a tub with bubbles. Maybe read the paper, maybe not. Some days he thought one way, some days the other. Second, he was going to towel himself off, put on a robe. Maybe slippers. He liked the idea of slippers. If he smoked he would be smoking a pipe about now, but he didn't smoke. He would pick up his wife in his arms (Puppy, she would squeal in mock horror and real delight, what are you doing?). He would carry her into the bedroom, and close the door. Theyd call out for pizzas if they got hungry. Third, after he and Laura had come out of the bedroom, maybe a couple of days later, he was going to keep his head down and stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. And then you'll be happy? asked Low Key Lyesmith. That day they were working in the prison shop, assembling bird feeders, which was barely more interesting than stamping out license plates. Call no man happy, said Shadow, until he is dead. |
| 754 |
Herodotus, said Low Key. Hey. you're learning. Who the fucks Herodotus? asked the Iceman, slotting together the sides of a bird feeder and passing it to Shadow, who bolted and screwed it tight. Dead Greek, said Shadow. My last girlfriend was Greek, said the Iceman. The shit her family ate. You would not believe. Like rice wrapped in leaves. Shit like that. The Iceman was the same size and shape as a Coke machine, with blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. He had beaten the crap out of some guy who had made the mistake of copping a feel off his girlfriend in the bar where she danced and the Iceman bounced. The guys friends had called the police, who arrested the Iceman and ran a check on him which revealed that the Iceman had walked from a work-release program eighteen months earlier. So what was I supposed to do? asked the Iceman, aggrieved, when he had told Shadow the whole sad tale. I'd told him she was my girlfriend. Was I supposed to let him disrespect me like that? Was I? I mean, he had his hands all over her. Shadow had said, You tell em, and left it at that. One thing he had learned early, you do your own time in prison. You don't do anyone elses time for them. Keep your head down. Do your own time. Lyesmith had loaned Shadow a battered paperback copy of Herodotuss Histories several months earlier. Its not boring. Its cool, he said, when Shadow protested that he didn't read books. Read it first, then tell me its cool. Shadow had made a face, but he had started to read, and had found himself hooked against his will. Greeks, said the Iceman, with disgust. And it aint true what they say about them, neither. I tried giving it to my girlfriend in the ass, she almost clawed my eyes out. Lyesmith was transferred one day, without warning. He left Shadow his copy of Herodotus. There was a nickel hidden in the pages. Coins were contraband: you can sharpen the edges against a stone, slice open someones face in a fight. Shadow didn't want a weapon; Shadow just wanted something to do with his hands. |
| 755 |
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. 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. |
| 756 |
They set us up on a blind date. We hit it off. And youve got a job waiting for you? Yessir. My buddy, Robbie, the one I just told you about, he owns the Muscle Farm, the place I used to train. He says my old job is waiting for me. An eyebrow raised. Really? Says he figures I'll be a big draw. Bring back some old-timers, and pull in the tough crowd who want to be tougher. The man seemed satisfied. He chewed the end of his ballpoint pen, then turned over the sheet of paper. How do you feel about your offense? Shadow shrugged. I was stupid, he said, and meant it. The man with the birthmark sighed. He ticked off a number of items on a checklist. Then he riffled through the papers in Shadows file. Howre you getting home from here? he asked. Greyhound? Flying home. Its good to have a wife whos a travel agent. The man frowned, and the birthmark creased. She sent you a ticket? didn't need to. Just sent me a confirmation number. Electronic ticket. All I have to do is turn up at the airport in a month and show em my ID, and I'm outta here. The man nodded, scribbled one final note, then he closed the file and put down the ballpoint pen. Two pale hands rested on the gray desk like pink animals. He brought his hands close together, made a steeple of his forefingers, and stared at Shadow with watery hazel eyes. you're lucky, he said. You have someone to go back to, you got a job waiting. You can put all this behind you. You got a second chance. Make the most of it. The man did not offer to shake Shadows hand as he rose to leave, nor did Shadow expect him to. The last week was the worst. In some ways it was worse than the whole three years put together. Shadow wondered if it was the weather: oppressive, still, and cold. It felt as if a storm was on the way, but the storm never came. He had the jitters and the heebie-jeebies, a feeling deep in his stomach that something was entirely wrong. In the exercise yard the wind gusted. Shadow imagined that he could smell snow on the air. He called his wife collect. |
| 757 |
Shadow knew that the phone companies whacked a three-dollar surcharge on every call made from a prison phone. That was why operators are always real polite to people calling from prisons, Shadow had decided: they knew that he paid their wages. Something feels weird, he told Laura. That wasnt the first thing he said to her. The first thing was I love you, because its a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did. Hello, said Laura. I love you too. What feels weird? I don't know, he said. Maybe the weather. It feels like if we could only get a storm, everything would be okay. Its nice here, she said. The last of the leaves haven't quite fallen. If we don't get a storm, you'll be able to see them when you get home. Five days, said Shadow. A hundred and twenty hours, and then you come home, she said. Everything okay there? Nothing wrong? Everythings fine. I'm seeing Robbie tonight. Were planning your surprise welcome-home party. Surprise party? Of course. You don't know anything about it, do you? Not a thing. that's my husband, she said. Shadow realized that he was smiling. He had been inside for three years, but she could still make him smile. Love you, babes, said Shadow. Love you, puppy, said Laura. Shadow put down the phone. When they got married Laura told Shadow that she wanted a puppy, but their landlord had pointed out they werent allowed pets under the terms of their lease. Hey, Shadow had said, I'll be your puppy. What do you want me to do? Chew your slippers? Piss on the kitchen floor? Lick your nose? Sniff your crotch? I bet theres nothing a puppy can do I cant do! And he picked her up as if she weighed nothing at all and began to lick her nose while she giggled and shrieked, and then he carried her to the bed. In the food hall Sam Fetisher sidled over to Shadow and smiled, showing his old teeth. He sat down beside Shadow and began to eat his macaroni and cheese. We got to talk, said Sam Fetisher. Sam Fetisher was one of the blackest men that Shadow had ever seen. |
| 758 |
He might have been sixty. He might have been eighty. Then again, Shadow had met thirty-year-old crackheads who looked older than Sam Fetisher. Mm? said Shadow. Storms on the way, said Sam. Feels like it, said Shadow. Maybe itll snow soon. Not that kind of storm. Bigger storm than that coming. I tell you, boy, you're better off in here than out on the street when the big storm comes. Done my time, said Shadow. Friday, I'm gone. Sam Fetisher stared at Shadow. Where you from? he asked. Eagle Point. Indiana. you're a lying fuck, said Sam Fetisher. I mean originally. Where are your folks from? Chicago, said Shadow. His mother had lived in Chicago as a girl, and she had died there, half a lifetime ago. Like I said. Big storm coming. Keep your head down, Shadow-boy. Its like what do they call those things continents ride around on? Some kind of plates? Tectonic plates? Shadow hazarded. that's it. Tectonic plates. Its like when they go riding, when North America goes skidding into South America, you don't want to be in the middle. You dig me? Not even a little. One brown eye closed in a slow wink. Hell, don't say I didn't warn you, said Sam Fetisher, and he spooned a trembling lump of orange Jell-O into his mouth. I wont. Shadow spent the night half-awake, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to his new cellmate grunt and snore in the bunk below him. Several cells away a man whined and howled and sobbed like an animal, and from time to time someone would scream at him to shut the fuck up. Shadow tried not to hear. He let the empty minutes wash over him, lonely and slow. Two days to go. Forty-eight hours, starting with oatmeal and prison coffee, and a guard named Wilson who tapped Shadow harder than he had to on the shoulder and said, Shadow? This way. Shadow checked his conscience. It was quiet, which did not, he had observed, in a prison, mean that he was not in deep shit. The two men walked more or less side by side, feet echoing on metal and concrete. Shadow tasted fear in the back of his throat, bitter as old coffee. |
| 759 |
The bad thing was happening There was a voice in the back of his head whispering that they were going to slap another year onto his sentence, drop him into solitary, cut off his hands, cut off his head. He told himself he was being stupid, but his heart was pounding fit to burst out of his chest. I don't get you, Shadow, said Wilson, as they walked. Whats not to get, sir? You. you're too fucking quiet. Too polite. You wait like the old guys, butyou're what? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight? Thirty-two, sir. And what are you? A spic? A gypsy? Not that I know of, sir. Maybe. Maybe you got nigger blood in you. You got nigger blood in you, Shadow? Could be, sir. Shadow stood tall and looked straight ahead, and concentrated on not allowing himself to be riled by this man. Yeah? Well, all I know is, you fucking spook me. Wilson had sandy blond hair and a sandy blond face and a sandy blond smile. You leaving us soon. Hope so, sir. They walked through a couple of checkpoints. Wilson showed his ID each time. Up a set of stairs, and they were standing outside the prison wardens office. It had the prison wardens nameG. Pattersonon the door in black letters, and beside the door, a miniature traffic light. The top light burned red. Wilson pressed a button below the traffic light. They stood there in silence for a couple of minutes. Shadow tried to tell himself that everything was all right, that on Friday morning hed be on the plane up to Eagle Point, but he did not believe it himself. The red light went out and the green light went on, and Wilson opened the door. They went inside. Shadow had seen the warden a handful of times in the last three years. Once he had been showing a politician around. Once, during a lockdown, the warden had spoken to them in groups of a hundred, telling them that the prison was overcrowded, and that, since it would remain overcrowded, they had better get used to it. Up close, Patterson looked worse. His face was oblong, with gray hair cut into a military bristle cut. |
| 760 |
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. It occurred to him that he had not cried yethad in fact felt nothing at all. No tears. No sorrow. Nothing. He found himself thinking about a guy named Johnnie Larch hed shared a cell with when hed first been put inside, who told Shadow how hed once got out after five years behind bars with one hundred dollars and a ticket to Seattle, where his sister lived. Johnnie Larch had got to the airport, and he handed his ticket to the woman on the counter, and she asked to see his drivers license. He showed it to her. It had expired a couple of years earlier. She told him it was not valid as ID. He told her it might not be valid as a drivers license, but it sure as hell was fine identification, and damn it, who else did she think he was, if he wasnt him? |
| 761 |
She said shed thank him to keep his voice down. He told her to give him a fucking boarding pass, or she was going to regret it, and that he wasnt going to be disrespected. You don't let people disrespect you in prison. Then she pressed a button, and a few moments later the airport security showed up, and they tried to persuade Johnnie Larch to leave the airport quietly, and he did not wish to leave, and there was something of an altercation. The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job. And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don't piss off people who work in airports. Are you sure its not something like The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact become harmful when used outside such an environment? said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story. No, listen to me, I'm telling you, man, said Johnnie Larch, don't piss off those bitches in airports. Shadow half smiled at the memory. His own drivers license had several months still to go before it expired. Bus station! Everybody out! The building stank of piss and sour beer. Shadow climbed into a taxi and told the driver to take him to the airport. He told him that there was an extra five dollars if he could do it in silence. They made it in twenty minutes and the driver never said a word. Then Shadow was stumbling through the brightly lit airport terminal. Shadow worried about the whole e-ticket business. 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. |
| 762 |
Still, he had his wallet, back in his possession for the first time in three years, containing several expired credit cards and one Visa card, which, he was pleasantly surprised to discover, didn't expire until the end of January. He had a reservation number. And, he realized, he had the certainty that once he got home everything would, somehow, be okay. Laura would be fine again. Maybe it was some kind of scam to spring him a few days early. Or perhaps it was a simple mix-up: some other Laura Moons body had been dragged from the highway wreckage. Lightning flickered outside the airport, through the windows-walls. Shadow realized he was holding his breath, waiting for something. A distant boom of thunder. He exhaled. A tired white woman stared at him from behind the counter. Hello, said Shadow. you're the first strange woman I've spoken to, in the flesh, in three years. I've got an e-ticket number. I was supposed to be traveling on Friday but I have to go today. There was a death in my family. Mm. I'm sorry to hear that. She tapped at the keyboard, stared at the screen, tapped again. No problem. I've put you on the three-thirty. It may be delayed because of the storm, so keep an eye on the screens. Checking any baggage? He held up a shoulder bag. I don't need to check this, do I? No, she said. Its fine. Do you have any picture ID? Shadow showed her his drivers license. It was not a big airport, but the number of people wandering, just wandering, amazed him. He watched people put down bags casually, observed wallets stuffed into back pockets, saw purses put down, unwatched, under chairs. That was when he realized he was no longer in prison. Thirty minutes to wait until boarding. Shadow bought a slice of pizza and burned his lip on the hot cheese. He took his change and went to the phones. Called Robbie at the Muscle Farm, but the machine picked up. Hey Robbie, said Shadow. They tell me that Lauras dead. They let me out early. I'm coming home. Then, because people do make mistakes, hed seen it happen, he called home, and listened to Lauras voice. |
| 763 |
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. 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. |
| 764 |
He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth. Everything, roared the buffalo man. The world tipped and spun, and Shadow was on the plane once more; but the tipping continued. In the front of the plane a woman screamed halfheartedly. Lightning burst in blinding flashes around the plane. The captain came on the intercom to tell them that he was going to try and gain some altitude, to get away from the storm. The plane shook and shuddered, and Shadow wondered, coldly and idly, if he was going to die. It seemed possible, he decided, but unlikely. He stared out of the window and watched the lightning illuminate the horizon. Then he dozed once more, and dreamed he was back in prison and that Low Key had whispered to him in the food line that someone had put out a contract on his life, but that Shadow could not find out who or why; and when he woke up they were coming in for a landing. He stumbled off the plane, blinking into wakefulness. All airports, he thought, look very much the same. It doesn't actually matter where you are, you are in an airport: tiles and walkways and restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights. This airport looked like an airport. The trouble is, this wasnt the airport he was going to. This was a big airport, with way too many people, and way too many gates. Excuse me, maam? The woman looked at him over the clipboard. Yes? What airport is this? She looked at him, puzzled, trying to decide whether or not he was joking, then she said, St. Louis. I thought this was the plane to Eagle Point. It was. They redirected it here because of the storms. didn't they make an announcement? Probably. I fell asleep. you'll need to talk to that man over there, in the red coat. The man was almost as tall as Shadow: he looked like the father from a seventies sitcom, and he tapped something into a computer and told Shadow to runrun! to a gate on the far side of the terminal. Shadow ran through the airport, but the doors were already closed when he got to the gate. |
| 765 |
He watched the plane pull away from the gate, through the plate glass. The woman at the passenger assistance desk (short and brown, with a mole on the side of her nose) consulted with another woman and made a phone call (Nope, that ones out. Theyve just cancelled it.), then she printed out another boarding card. This will get you there, she told him. Well call ahead to the gate and tell themyou're coming. Shadow felt like a pea being flicked between three cups, or a card being shuffled through a deck. Again he ran through the airport, ending up near where he had gotten off originally. A small man at the gate took his boarding pass. Weve been waiting for you, he confided, tearing off the stub of the boarding pass, with Shadows seat assignment17Don it. Shadow hurried onto the plane, and they closed the door behind him. He walked through first classthere were only four first-class seats, three of which were occupied. The bearded man in a pale suit seated next to the unoccupied seat at the very front grinned at Shadow as he got onto the plane, then raised his wrist and tapped his watch as Shadow walked past. Yeah, yeah, I'm making you late, thought Shadow. Let that be the worst of your worries. The plane seemed pretty full, as he made his way down toward the back. Actually, Shadow found, it was completely full, and there was a middle-aged woman sitting in seat 17D. Shadow showed her his boarding card stub, and she showed him hers: they matched. Can you take your seat, please? asked the flight attendant. No, he said, I'm afraid I cant. She clicked her tongue and checked their boarding cards, then she led him back up to the front of the plane and pointed him to the empty seat in first class. Looks like its your lucky day, she told him. Can I bring you something to drink? Well just have time before we take off. And I'm sure you need one after that. I'd like a beer, please, said Shadow. Whatever youve got. The flight attendant went away. The man in the pale suit in the seat beside Shadow tapped his watch with his fingernail. |
| 766 |
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. 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. |
| 767 |
I don't want any other job. The mans craggy smile did not change, outwardly, but now he seemed, actually, amused. You don't have a job waiting for you at home, he said. You have nothing waiting for you there. Meanwhile, I am offering you a perfectly legal jobgood money, limited security, remarkable fringe benefits. Hell, if you live that long, I could throw in a pension plan. You think maybe youd like one of them? Shadow said, You must have seen my name on the side of my bag. The man said nothing. Whoever you are, said Shadow, you couldn't have known I was going to be on this plane. I didn't know I was going to be on this plane, and if my plane hadn't been diverted to St. Louis, I wouldn't have been. My guess isyou're a practical joker. Maybeyou're hustling something. But I think maybe well have a better time if we end this conversation here. The man shrugged. Shadow picked up the in-flight magazine. The little plane jerked and bumped through the sky, making it harder to concentrate. The words floated through his mind like soap bubbles, there as he read them, gone completely a moment later. The man sat quietly in the seat beside him, sipping his Jack Daniels. His eyes were closed. Shadow read the list of in-flight music channels available on transatlantic flights, and then he was looking at the map of the world with red lines on it that showed where the airline flew. Then he had finished reading the magazine, and, reluctantly, he closed the cover and slipped it into the pocket. The man opened his eyes. There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other. He looked at Shadow. By the way, he said, I was sorry to hear about your wife, Shadow. 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. |
| 768 |
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. 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. |
| 769 |
Instead she says, Honey, whileyou're giving it to me, whileyou're pushing that big hard thing inside of me, will you worship me? Will I what? She is rocking back and forth on him: the engorged head of his penis is being rubbed against the wet lips of her vulva. Will you call me goddess? Will you pray to me? Will you worship me with your body? He smiles. Is that all she wants? Weve all got our kinks, at the end of the day. Sure, he says. She reaches her hand between her legs and slips him inside her. Is that good, is it, goddess? he asks, gasping. Worship me, honey, says Bilquis, the hooker. Yes, he says. I worship your breasts and your hair and your cunt. I worship your thighs and your eyes and your cherry-red lips Yes she croons, riding him. I worship your nipples, from which the milk of life flows. Your kiss is honey and your touch scorches like fire, and I worship it. His words are becoming more rhythmic now, keeping pace with the thrust and roll of their bodies. Bring me your lust in the morning, and bring me relief and your blessing in the evening. Let me walk in dark places unharmed and let me come to you once more and sleep beside you and make love with you again. I worship you with everything that is within me, and everything inside my mind, with everywhere I've been and my dreams and my he breaks off, panting for breath. What are you doing? That feels amazing. So amazing and he looks down at his hips, at the place where the two of them conjoin, but her forefinger touches his chin and pushes his head back, so he is looking only at her face and at the ceiling once again. Keep talking, honey, she says. don't stop. doesn't it feel good? It feels better than anything has ever felt, he tells her, meaning it as he says it. Your eyes are stars, burning in the, shit, the firmament, and your lips are gentle waves that lick the sand, and I worship them, and now he's thrusting deeper and deeper inside her: he feels electric, as if his whole lower body has become sexually charged: priapic, engorged, blissful. |
| 770 |
Bring me your gift, he mutters, no longer knowing what he is saying, your one true gift, and make me always this always so I pray I And then the pleasure crests into orgasm, blasting his mind into void, his head and self and entire being a perfect blank as he thrusts deeper into her and deeper still Eyes closed, spasming, he luxuriates in the moment; and then he feels a lurch, and it seems to him that he is hanging, head down, although the pleasure continues. He opens his eyes. He thinks, grasping for thought and reason again, of birth, and wonders, without fear, in a moment of perfect postcoital clarity, whether what he sees is some kind of illusion. This is what he sees: He is inside her to the chest, and as he stares at this in disbelief and wonder she rests both hands upon his shoulders and puts gentle pressure on his body. He slipslides further inside her. How are you doing this to me? he asks, or he thinks he asks, but perhaps it is only in his head. you're doing it, honey, she whispers. He feels the lips of her vulva tight around his upper chest and back, constricting and enveloping him. He wonders what this would look like to somebody watching them. He wonders why he is not scared. And then he knows. I worship you with my body, he whispers, as she pushes him inside her. Her labia pull slickly across his face, and his eyes slip into darkness. She stretches on the bed, like a huge cat, and then she yawns. Yes, she says. You do. The Nokia phone plays a high, electrical transposition of the Ode to Joy. She picks it up, and thumbs a key, and puts the telephone to her ear. Her belly is flat, her labia small and closed. 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. |
| 771 |
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. 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. |
| 772 |
Theres a lot more to Ireland than Guinness. You don't have an Irish accent. I've been over here too fucken long. So you are originally from Ireland? I told you. I'm a leprechaun. We don't come from fucken Moscow. I guess not. Wednesday returned to the table, three drinks held easily in his pawlike hands. Southern Comfort and Coke for you, Mad Sweeney mman, and a Jack Daniels for me. And this is for you, Shadow. What is it? Taste it. The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of prison hooch, brewed in a garbage bag from rotten fruit and bread and sugar and water, but it was sweeter, and far stranger. Okay, said Shadow. I tasted it. What was it? Mead, said Wednesday. Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods. Shadow took another tentative sip. Yes, he could taste the honey, he decided. That was one of the tastes. Tastes kinda like pickle juice, he said. Sweet pickle-juice wine. Tastes like a drunken diabetics piss, agreed Wednesday. I hate the stuff. Then why did you bring it for me? asked Shadow, reasonably. Wednesday stared at Shadow with his mismatched eyes. One of them, Shadow decided, was a glass eye, but he could not decide which one. I brought you mead to drink because its traditional. And right now we need all the tradition we can get. It seals our bargain. We haven't made a bargain. Sure we have. You work for me now. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil. And in return I shall make sure that your needs are adequately taken care of. he's hustling you, said Mad Sweeney, rubbing his bristly ginger beard. he's a hustler. Damn straight I'm a hustler, said Wednesday. that's why I need someone to look out for my best interests. |
| 773 |
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. 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. |
| 774 |
He paused. It was the longest speech hed made in years. You say you may need people to be hurt. Well, I'll hurt people ifyou're trying to hurt you. But I don't hurt people for fun or for profit. I won't go back to prison. Once was enough. You won't have to, said Wednesday. No, said Shadow. I wont. He finished the last of the mead. He wondered, suddenly, somewhere in the back of his head, whether the mead was responsible for loosening his tongue. But the words were coming out of him like the water spraying from a broken fire hydrant in summer, and he could not have stopped them if he had tried. I don't like you, Mister Wednesday, or whatever your real name may be. We are not friends. I don't know how you got off that plane without me seeing you, or how you trailed me here. But I'm at a loose end right now. When were done, I'll be gone. And if you piss me off, I'll be gone too. Until then, I'll work for you. Very good, said Wednesday. Then we have a compact. And we are agreed. What the hell, said Shadow. Across the room, Mad Sweeney was feeding quarters into the jukebox. Wednesday spat in his hand and extended it. Shadow shrugged. He spat in his own palm. They clasped hands. Wednesday began to squeeze. Shadow squeezed back. After a few seconds his hand began to hurt. Wednesday held the grip a little longer, and then he let go. Good, he said. Good. Very good. So, one last glass of evil, vile fucking mead to seal our deal, and then we are done. 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. |
| 775 |
He closed his left hand on the imaginary quarter. Then he took a second quarter in his right hand, between finger and thumb, and, as he pretended to drop that coin into the left hand, he let the palmed quarter fall into his right hand, striking the quarter he held there on the way. The chink confirmed the illusion that both coins were in his left hand, while they were now both held safely in his right. Coin tricks is it? asked Sweeney, his chin raising, his scruffy beard bristling. Why, if its coin tricks were doing, watch this. He took an empty glass from the table. Then he reached out and took a large coin, golden and shining, from the air. He dropped it into the glass. He took another gold coin from the air and tossed it into the glass, where it clinked against the first. He took a coin from the candle flame of a candle on the wall, another from his beard, a third from Shadows empty left hand, and dropped them, one by one, into the glass. Then he curled his fingers over the glass, and blew hard, and several more golden coins dropped into the glass from his hand. He tipped the glass of sticky coins into his jacket pocket, and then tapped the pocket to show, unmistakably, that it was empty. There, he said. that's a coin trick for you. Shadow, who had been watching closely, put his head on one side. I need to know how you did it. I did it, said Sweeney, with the air of one confiding a huge secret, with panache and style. that's how I did it. He laughed, silently, rocking on his heels, his gappy teeth bared. Yes, said Shadow. That is how you did it. Youve got to teach me. All the ways of doing the Misers Dream that I've read, youd be hiding the coins in the hand that holds the glass, and dropping them in while you produce and vanish the coin in your right hand. Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to me, said Mad Sweeney. Its easier just to pick them out of the air. Wednesday said, Mead for you, Shadow. I'll stick with Mister Jack Daniels, and for the freeloading Irishman? |
| 776 |
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? 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? |
| 777 |
Wednesday turned to Shadow. I've had enough of this, he said. Deal with it. Shadow got to his feet and looked up into Mad Sweeneys face: how tall was the man? he wondered. you're bothering us, he said. you're drunk. I think you ought to leave now. A slow smile spread over Sweeneys face. There, now, he said. He swung a huge fist at Shadow. Shadow jerked back: Sweeneys hand caught him beneath the right eye. He saw blotches of light, and felt pain. And with that, the fight began. Sweeney fought without style, without science, with nothing but enthusiasm for the fight itself: huge, barreling roundhouse blows that missed as often as they connected. Shadow fought defensively, carefully, blocking Sweeneys blows or avoiding them. He became very aware of the audience around them. Tables were pulled out of the way with protesting groans, making a space for the men to spar. Shadow was aware at all times of Wednesdays eyes upon him, of Wednesdays humorless grin. It was a test, that was obvious, but what kind of a test? In prison Shadow had learned there were two kinds of fights: don't fuck with me fights, where you made it as showy and impressive as you could, and private fights, real fights, which were fast and hard and nasty, and always over in seconds. Hey, Sweeney, said Shadow, breathless, why are we fighting? For the joy of it, said Sweeney, sober now, or at least, no longer visibly drunk. 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. |
| 778 |
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 aint 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. 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. You look like something the goat dragged in. |
| 779 |
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. 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. |
| 780 |
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. 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. |
| 781 |
The short service ended, the casket was lowered into the cold ground. The people went away. Shadow did not leave. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shivering, staring at the hole in the ground. Above him the sky was iron gray, featureless and flat as a mirror. It continued to snow, erratically, in ghostlike tumbling flakes. There was something he wanted to say to Laura, and he was prepared to wait until he knew what it was. The world slowly began to lose light and color. Shadows feet were going numb, while his hands and face hurt from the cold. He burrowed his hands into his pockets for warmth, and his fingers closed about the gold coin. He walked over to the grave. This is for you, he said. Several shovels of earth had been emptied onto the casket, but the hole was far from full. He threw the gold coin into the grave with Laura, then he pushed more earth into the hole, to hide the coin from acquisitive grave diggers. He brushed the earth from his hands and said, Good night, Laura. Then he said, I'm sorry. He turned his face toward the lights of the town, and began to walk back into Eagle Point. His motel was a good two miles away, but after spending three years in prison he was relishing the idea that he could simply walk and walk, forever if need be. He could keep walking north, and wind up in Alaska, or head south, to Mexico and beyond. He could walk to Patagonia, or to Tierra del Fuego. A car drew up beside him. The window hummed down. You want a lift, Shadow? asked Audrey Burton. 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. |
| 782 |
He said nothing. Hey! she shouted. Hey! I'm talking to you! Shadow turned. Do you want me to tell you that you were right when you spit in Lauras face? Do you want me to say it didn't hurt? Or that what you told me made me hate her more than I miss her? Its not going to happen, Audrey. She drove beside him for another minute, not saying anything. Then she said, So, how was prison, Shadow? It was fine, said Shadow. You would have felt right at home. She put her foot down on the gas then, making the engine roar, and drove on and away. With the headlights gone, the world was dark. Twilight faded into night. Shadow kept expecting the act of walking to warm him, to spread warmth through his icy hands and feet. It didn't happen. Back in prison, Low Key Lyesmith had once referred to the little prison cemetery out behind the infirmary as the Bone Orchard, and the image had taken root in Shadows mind. That night he had dreamed of an orchard under the moonlight, of skeletal white trees, their branches ending in bony hands, their roots going deep down into the graves. There was fruit that grew upon the trees in the bone orchard, in his dream, and there was something very disturbing about the fruit in the dream, but on waking he could no longer remember what strange fruit grew oh the trees, nor why he found it so repellent. Cars passed him. Shadow wished that there was a sidewalk. He tripped on something that he could not see in the dark and sprawled into the ditch on the side of the road, his right hand sinking into several inches of cold mud. He climbed to his feet and wiped his hands on the leg of his pants. He stood there, awkwardly. He had only enough time to observe that there was someone beside him before something wet was forced over his nose and mouth, and he tasted harsh, chemical fumes. This time the ditch seemed warm and comforting. * * * Shadows temples felt as if they had been reattached to the rest of his skull with roofing nails. His hands were bound behind his back with what felt like some kind of straps. |
| 783 |
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. I'm an errand boy. you're saying you don't know? I'm saying I don't know. The boy opened his jacket and took out a silver cigarette case from an inside pocket. He opened it, and offered a cigarette to Shadow. Smoke? Shadow thought about asking for his hands to be untied, out decided against it. No, thank you, he said. The cigarette appeared to have been hand-rolled, and when the boy lit it, with a matte black Zippo lighter, it smelled a little like burning electrical parts. |
| 784 |
The boy inhaled deeply, then held his breath. He let the smoke trickle out from his mouth, pulled it back into his nostrils. Shadow suspected that he had practiced that in front of a mirror for a while before doing it in public. If youve lied to me, said the boy, as if from a long way away, I'll fucking kill you. You know that. So you said. The boy took another long drag on his cigarette. You sayyou're staying at the Motel America? He tapped on the drivers window, behind him. The glass window lowered. Hey. Motel America, up by the interstate. We need to drop off our guest. The driver nodded, and the glass rose up again. The glinting fiber-optic lights inside the limo continued to change, cycling through their set of dim colors. It seemed to Shadow that the boys eyes were glinting too, the green of an antique computer monitor. You tell Wednesday this, man. You tell him he's history. he's forgotten. he's old. Tell him that we are the future and we don't give a fuck about him or anyone like him. He has been consigned to the Dumpster of history while people like me ride our limos down the superhighway of tomorrow. I'll tell him, said Shadow. He was beginning to feel lightheaded. He hoped that he was not going to be sick. Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam. Tell him that or I'll fucking kill you, said the young man mildly, from the smoke. Got it, said Shadow. You can let me out here. I can walk the rest of the way. The young man nodded. Good talking to you, he said. The smoke had mellowed him. You should know that if we do fucking kill you, then well just delete you. You got that? One click andyou're overwritten with random ones and zeros. Undelete is not an option. He tapped on the window behind him. he's getting off here, he said. Then he turned back to Shadow, pointed to his cigarette. Synthetic toad skins, he said. You know they can synthesize bufotenin now? |
| 785 |
The car stopped, and the door was opened. Shadow climbed out awkwardly. His bonds were cut. Shadow turned around. The inside of the car had become one writhing cloud of smoke in which two lights glinted, now copper-colored, like the beautiful eyes of a toad. Its all about the dominant fucking paradigm, Shadow. Nothing else is important. And hey, sorry to hear about your old lady. The door closed, and the stretch limo drove off, quietly. Shadow was a couple of hundred yards away from his motel, and he walked there, breathing the cold air, past red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger; and he reached the Motel America without incident. Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Old Saying There was a thin young woman behind the counter at the Motel America. She told Shadow he had already been checked in by his friend, and gave him his rectangular plastic room key. She had pale blonde hair and a rodentlike quality to her face that was most apparent when she looked suspicious, and eased when she smiled. She refused to tell him Wednesdays room number, and insisted on telephoning Wednesday on the house phone to let him know his guest was here. Wednesday came out of a room down the hall, and beckoned to Shadow. How was the funeral? he asked. Its over, said Shadow. You want to talk about it? No, said Shadow. Good. Wednesday grinned. Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence. Wednesday led the way back to his room, which was across the hall from Shadows. There were maps all over the room, unfolded, spread out on the bed, taped to the walls. Wednesday had drawn all over the maps in bright marking pens, fluorescent greens and painful pinks and vivid oranges. I got hijacked by a fat kid, said Shadow. He says to tell you that you have been consigned to the dungheap of history while people like him ride in their limos down the superhighways of life. |
| 786 |
Something like that. Little snot, said Wednesday. You know him? Wednesday shrugged. I know who he is. He sat down, heavily, on the rooms only chair. They don't have a clue, he said. They don't have a fucking clue. How much longer do you need to stay in town? I don't know. Maybe another week. I guess I need to wrap up Lauras affairs. Take care of the apartment, get rid of her clothes, all that. Itll drive her mother nuts, but the woman deserves it. Wednesday nodded his huge head. Well, the sooneryou're done, the sooner we can move out of Eagle Point. Goodnight. Shadow walked across the hall. His room was a duplicate of Wednesdays room, down to the print of a bloody sunset on the wall above the bed. He ordered a cheese and meatball pizza, then he ran a bath, pouring all the motels little plastic bottles of shampoo into the water, making it foam. He was too big to lie down in the bathtub, but he sat in it and luxuriated as best he could. Shadow had promised himself a bath when he got out of prison, and Shadow kept his promises. The pizza arrived shortly after he got out of the bath, and Shadow ate it, washing it down with a can of root beer. Shadow lay in bed, thinking, This is my first bed as a free man, and the thought gave him less pleasure than he had imagined that it would. He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted. Shadow could have been in his bed at home, he thought, in the apartment that he had shared with Laurain the bed that he had shared with Laura. But the thought of being there without her, surrounded by her things, her scent, her life, was simply too painful don't go there, thought Shadow. He decided to think about something else. He thought about coin tricks. Shadow knew that he did not have the personality to be a magician: he could not weave the stories that were so necessary for belief, nor did he wish to do card tricks, nor produce paper flowers. |
| 787 |
But he just wanted to manipulate coins; he liked the craft of it. He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Lauras grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbies cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his heart. Every hour wounds. The last one kills. Where had he heard that? He thought of Wednesdays comment and smiled, despite himself: Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all. Sleep took him then, without Shadow noticing. He was walking He was walking through a room bigger than a city, and everywhere he looked there were statues and carvings and rough-hewn images. He was standing beside a statue of a womanlike thing: her naked breasts hung flat and pendulous on her chest, around her waist was a chain of severed hands, both of her own hands held sharp knives, and, instead of a head, rising from her neck there were twin serpents, their bodies arched, facing each other, ready to attack. There was something profoundly disturbing about the statue, a deep and violent wrongness. Shadow backed away from it. He began to walk through the hall. The carved eyes of those statues that had eyes seemed to follow his every step. In his dream, he realized that each statue had a name burning on the floor in front of it. The man with the white hair, with a necklace of teeth about his neck, holding a drum, was Leucotios; the broad-hipped woman with monsters dropping from the vast gash between her legs was Hubur; the ram-headed man holding the golden ball was Hershef. A precise voice, fussy and exact, was speaking to him, in his dream, but he could see no one. These are gods who have been forgotten, and now might as well be dead. |
| 788 |
They can be found only in dry histories. They are gone, all gone, but their names and their images remain with us. Shadow turned a corner, and knew himself to be in another room, even vaster than the first. It went on farther than the eye could see. Close to him was the skull of a mammoth, polished and brown, and a hairy ocher cloak, being worn by a small woman with a deformed left hand. Next to that were three women, each carved from the same granite boulder, joined at the waist: their faces had an unfinished, hasty look to them, although their breasts and genitalia had been carved with elaborate care; and there was a flightless bird which Shadow did not recognize, twice his height, with a beak like a vultures, but with human arms: and on, and on. The voice spoke once more, as if it were addressing a class, saying, These are the gods who have passed out of memory. Even their names are lost. The people who worshiped them are as forgotten as their gods. Their totems are long since broken and cast down. Their last priests died without passing on their secrets. Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end. There was a whispering noise that began then to run through the hall, a low susurrus that caused Shadow, in his dream, to experience a chilling and inexplicable fear. An all-engulfing panic took him, there in the halls of the gods whose very existence had been forgottenoctopus-faced gods and gods who were only mummified hands or falling rocks or forest fires Shadow woke with his heart jackhammering in his chest, his forehead clammy, entirely awake. The red numerals on the bedside clock told him the time was 1:03 A. M. The light of the Motel America sign outside shone through his bedroom window. Disoriented, Shadow got up and walked into the tiny motel bathroom. He pissed without turning on the lights, and returned to the bedroom. The dream was still fresh and vivid in his minds eye, but he could not explain to himself why it had scared him so. |
| 789 |
The light that came into the room from outside was not bright, but Shadows eyes had become used to the dark. There was a woman sitting on the side of his bed. He knew her. He would have known her in a crowd of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand. She was still wearing the navy blue suit they had buried her in. Her voice was a whisper, but a familiar line. I guess, said Laura, you're going to ask what I'm doing here. Shadow said nothing. He sat down on the rooms only chair and, finally, asked, Is that you? Yes, she said. I'm cold, puppy. you're dead, babe. Yes, she said. Yes. I am. She patted the bed next to her. Come and sit by me, she said. No, said Shadow. I think I'll stay right here for now. We have some unresolved issues to address. Like me being dead? Possibly, but I was thinking more of how you died. You and Robbie. Oh, she said. That. Shadow could smellor perhaps, he thought, he simply imagined that he smelledan odor of rot, of flowers and preservatives. His wifehis ex-wife no, he corrected himself, his late wifesat on the bed and stared at him, unblinking. Puppy, she said. Could youdo you think you could possibly get mea cigarette? I thought you gave them up. I did, she said. But I'm no longer concerned about the health risks. And I think it would calm my nerves. Theres a machine in the lobby. Shadow pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt and went, barefoot, into the lobby. The night clerk was a middle-aged man, reading a book by John Grisham. Shadow bought a pack of Virginia Slims from the machine. He asked the night clerk for a book of matches. you're in a nonsmoking room, said the clerk. You make sure you open the window, now. He passed Shadow a book of matches and a plastic ashtray with the Motel America logo on it. Got it, said Shadow. He went back into his bedroom. She had stretched out now, on top of his rumpled covers. Shadow opened the window and then passed her the cigarettes and the matches. Her fingers were cold. She lit a match and he saw that her nails, usually pristine, were battered and chewed, and there was mud under them. |
| 790 |
Laura lit the cigarette, inhaled, blew out the match. She took another puff. I cant taste it, she said. I don't think this is doing anything. I'm sorry, he said. Me too, said Laura. When she inhaled the cigarette tip glowed, and he was able to see her face. So, she said. They let you out. Yes. The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. I'm still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it. Well, he said, I agreed to do it. I could have said no. He wondered why he wasnt scared of her: why a dream of a museum could leave him terrified, while he seemed to be coping with a walking corpse without fear. Yes, she said. You could have. You big galoot. Smoke wreathed her face. She was very beautiful in the dim light. You want to know about me and Robbie? I guess. She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. You were in prison, she said. And I needed someone to talk to. I needed a shoulder to cry on. You werent there. I was upset. I'm sorry. Shadow realized something was different about her voice, and he tried to figure out what it was. I know. So wed meet for coffee. Talk about what wed do when you got out of prison. How good it would be to see you again. He really liked you, you know. He was looking forward to giving you back your old job. Yes. And then Audrey went to visit her sister for a week. This was, oh, a year, thirteen months after youd gone away. 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. |
| 791 |
Were you going to leave me for him? Why would I do that? you're my big bear. you're my puppy. You did what you did for me. I waited three years for you to come back to me. I love you. He stopped himself from saying I love you, too. He wasnt going to say that. Not anymore. So what happened the other night? The night I was killed? Yes. Well, Robbie and I went out to talk about your welcome-back surprise party. It would have been so good. And I told him that we were done. Finished. That now that you were back that was the way it had to be. Mm. Thank you, babe. you're welcome, darling. The ghost of a smile crossed her face. We got maudlin. It was sweet. We got stupid. I got very drunk. He didn't. He had to drive. We were driving home and I announced that I was going to give him a goodbye blowjob, one last time with feeling, and I unzipped his pants, and I did. Big mistake. Tell me about it. I knocked the gearshift with my shoulder, and then Robbie was trying to push me out of the way to put the car back in gear, and we were swerving, and there was a loud crunch and I remember the world started to roll and to spin, and I thought, I'm going to die. It was very dispassionate. I remember that. I wasnt scared. And then I don't remember anything more. There was a smell like burning plastic. It was the cigarette, Shadow realized: it had burned down to the filter. Laura did not seem to have noticed. What are you doing here, Laura? Cant a wife come and see her husband? you're dead. I went to your funeral this afternoon. Yes. She stopped talking, stared into nothing. Shadow stood up and walked over to her. He took the smoldering cigarette butt from her fingers and threw it out of the window. Well? Her eyes sought his. I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I cant put into words. Normally people who die stay in their graves, said Shadow. Do they? Do they really, puppy? I used to think they did too. Now I'm not so sure. |
| 792 |
Perhaps. She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. Her face, in the light of the motel sign, was as beautiful as it had ever been. The face of the woman he had gone to prison for. His heart hurt in his chest as if someone had taken it in a fist and squeezed. Laura? She did not look at him. Youve gotten yourself mixed up in some bad things, Shadow. you're going to screw it up, if someone isn't there to watch out for you. I'm watching out for you. And thank you for my present. What present? She reached into the pocket of her blouse, and pulled out the gold coin he had thrown into the grave earlier that day. There was still black dirt on it. I may have it put on a chain. It was very sweet of you. you're welcome. She turned then and looked at him with eyes that seemed both to see and not to see him. I think there are several aspects of our marriage were going to have to work on. Babes, he told her. you're dead. that's one of those aspects, obviously. She paused. Okay, she said. I'm going now. It will be better if I go. And, naturally and easily, she turned and put her hands on Shadows shoulders, and went up on tiptoes to kiss him goodbye, as she had always kissed him goodbye. Awkwardly he bent to kiss her on the cheek, but she moved her mouth as he did so and pushed her lips against his. Her breath smelled, faintly, of mothballs. Lauras tongue flickered into Shadows mouth. It was cold, and dry, and it tasted of cigarettes and of bile. If Shadow had had any doubts as to whether his wife was dead or not, they ended then. He pulled back. I love you, she said, simply. I'll be looking out for you. She walked over to the motel room door. There was a strange taste in his mouth. Get some sleep, puppy, she told him. And stay out of trouble. She opened the door to the hall. The fluorescent light in the hallway was not kind: beneath it, Laura looked dead, but then, it did that to everyone. You could have asked me to stay the night, she said, in her cold-stone voice. I don't think I could, said Shadow. |
| 793 |
You will, hon, she said. Before all this is over. You will. She turned away from him, and walked down the corridor. Shadow looked out of the doorway. The night clerk kept on reading his John Grisham novel, and barely looked up as she walked past him. There was thick graveyard mud clinging to her shoes. And then she was gone. Shadow breathed out, a slow sigh. His heart was pounding arrhythmically in his chest. He walked across the hall and knocked on Wednesdays door. As he knocked he got the weirdest notion, that he was being buffeted by black wings, as if an enormous crow was flying through him, out into the hall and the world beyond. Wednesday opened the door. He had a white motel towel wrapped around his waist, but was otherwise naked. What the hell do you want? he asked. Something you should know, said Shadow. Maybe it was a dreambut it wasntor maybe I inhaled some of the fat kids synthetic toad-skin smoke, or probably I'm just going mad Yeah, yeah. Spit it out, said Wednesday. I'm kind of in the middle of something here. Shadow glanced into the room. He could see that there was someone in the bed, watching him. A sheet pulled up over small breasts. Pale blonde hair, something rattish about the face. He lowered his voice. I just saw my wife, he said. She was in my room. A ghost, you mean? You saw a ghost? No. Not a ghost. She was solid. It was her. she's dead all right, but it wasnt any kind of a ghost. I touched her. She kissed me. I see. Wednesday darted a look at the woman in the bed. Be right back, mdear, he said. They crossed the hall to Shadows room. Wednesday turned on the lamps. He looked at the cigarette butt in the ashtray. He scratched his chest. His nipples were dark, old-man nipples, and his chest hair was grizzled. There was a white scar down one side of his torso. He sniffed the air. Then he shrugged. Okay, he said. So your dead wife showed up. You scared? A little. Very wise. The dead always give me the screaming mimis. Anything else? I'm ready to leave Eagle Point. |
| 794 |
Lauras mother can sort out the apartment, all that. She hates me anyway. I'm ready to go when you are. Wednesday smiled. Good news, my boy. Well leave in the morning. Now, you should get some sleep. I have some scotch in my room, if you need help sleeping. Yes? No. I'll be fine. Then do not disturb me further. I have a long night ahead of me. Good night, said Shadow. Exactly, said Wednesday, and he closed the door as he went out. Shadow sat down on the bed. The smell of cigarettes and preservatives lingered in the air. He wished that he were mourning Laura: it seemed more appropriate than being troubled by her or, he admitted it to himself now that she had gone, just a little scared by her. It was time to mourn. He turned the lights out, and lay on the bed, and thought of Laura as she was before he went to prison. He remembered their marriage when they were young and happy and stupid and unable to keep their hands off each other. It had been a very long time since Shadow had cried, so long he thought he had forgotten how. He had not even wept when his mother died. But he began to cry now, in painful, lurching sobs, and for the first time since he was a small boy, Shadow cried himself to sleep. Coming To America A. D. 813 They navigated the green sea by the stars and by the shore, and when the shore was only a memory and the night sky was overcast and dark they navigated by faith, and they called on the All-Father to bring them safely to land once more. A bad journey they had of it, their fingers numb and with a shiver in their bones that not even wine could burn off. They would wake in the morning to see that the hoarfrost had touched their beards, and, until the sun warmed them, they looked like old men, white-bearded before their time. Teeth were loosening and eyes were deep-sunken in their sockets when they made landfall on the green land to the west. The men said, We are far, far from our homes and our hearths, far from the seas we know and the lands we love. Here on the edge of the world we will be forgotten by our gods. |
| 795 |
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. 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. They found the scraeling the following day, which was the all-fathers own day. He was a small man, his long hair black as a crows wing, his skin the color of rich red clay. |
| 796 |
That afternoon it began to snow, in huge, slow flakes. The men from the northlands closed the gates of their encampment, retreated behind their wooden wall. The scraeling war party fell upon them that night: five hundred men to thirty. They climbed the wall, and over the following seven days, they killed each of the thirty men, in thirty different ways. And the sailors were forgotten, by history and their people. The wall they tore down, the war party, and the village they burned. The longboat, upside down and pulled high on the shingle, they also burned, hoping that the pale strangers had but one boat, and that by burning it they were ensuring that no other Northmen would come to their shores. It was more than a hundred years before Leif the Fortunate, son of Erik the Red, rediscovered that land, which he would call Vineland. His gods were already waiting for him when he arrived: Tyr, one-handed, and gray Odin gallows-god, and Thor of the thunders. They were there. They were waiting. Let the Midnight Special Shine its light on me Let the Midnight Special Shine its ever-lovin light on me. The Midnight Special, Traditional Shadow and Wednesday ate breakfast at a Country Kitchen across the street from their motel. It was eight in the morning, and the world was misty and chill. You still ready to leave Eagle Point? asked Wednesday. I have some calls to make, if you are. Friday today. Fridays a free day. A womans day. Saturday tomorrow. Much to do on Saturday. I'm ready, said Shadow. Nothing keeping me here. Wednesday heaped his plate high with several kinds of breakfast meats. Shadow took some melon, a bagel, and a packet of cream cheese. They went and sat down in a booth. That was some dream you had last night, said Wednesday. Yes, said Shadow. It was. Lauras muddy footprints had been visible on the motel carpet when he got up that morning, leading from his bedroom to the lobby and out the door. So, said Wednesday. Whyd they call you Shadow? Shadow shrugged. Its a name, he said. |
| 797 |
Eventually he was finished. He put his pen away, put the folder on the backseat. The best thing about the states were heading for, said Wednesday, Minnesota, Wisconsin, all around there, is they have the kind of women I liked when I was younger. Pale-skinned and blue-eyed, hair so fair its almost white, wine-colored lips, and round, full breasts with the veins running through them like a good cheese. Only when you were younger? asked Shadow. Looked like you were doing pretty good last night. Yes. Wednesday smiled. Would you like to know the secret of my success? You pay them? Nothing so crude. No, the secret is charm. Pure and simple. Charm, huh? Well, like they say, you either got it or you aint. Charms can be learned, said Wednesday. Shadow tuned the radio to an oldies station, and listened to songs that were current before he was born. Bob Dylan sang about a hard rain that was going to fall, and Shadow wondered if that rain had fallen yet, or if it was something that was still going to happen. The road ahead of them was empty and the ice crystals on the asphalt glittered like diamonds in the morning sun. * * * Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city. They parked outside a squat black brownstone. The sidewalk was clear of snow. They walked to the lobby. Wednesday pressed the top button on the gouged metal intercom box. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Then, experimentally, he began to press the other buttons, for other tenants, with no response. Its dead, said a gaunt old woman, coming down the steps. doesn't work. We call the super, ask him when he going to fix, when he going to mend the heating, he does not care, goes to Arizona for the winter for his chest. Her accent was thick, Eastern European, Shadow guessed. Wednesday bowed low. Zorya, my dear, may I say how unutterably beautiful you look? A radiant creature. |
| 798 |
You have not aged. The old woman glared at him. He don't want to see you. I don't want to see you neither. You bad news. that's because I don't come if it isn't important. The woman sniffed. She carried an empty string shopping bag, and wore an old red coat, buttoned up to her chin. She looked at Shadow suspiciously. Who is the big man? she asked Wednesday. Another one of your murderers? You do me a deep disservice, good lady. This gentleman is called Shadow. He is working for me, yes, but on your behalf. Shadow, may I introduce you to the lovely Miss Zorya Vechernyaya. Good to meet you, said Shadow. Birdlike, the old woman peered up at him. Shadow, she said. A good name. When the shadows are long, that is my time. And you are the long shadow. She looked him up and down, then she smiled. You may kiss my hand, she said, and extended a cold hand to him. Shadow bent down and kissed her thin hand. She had a large amber ring on her middle finger. Good boy, she said. I am going to buy groceries. You see, I am the only one of us who brings in any money. The other two cannot make money fortune-telling. This is because they only tell the truth, and the truth is not what people want to hear. It is a bad thing, and it troubles people, so they do not come back. But I can lie to them, tell them what they want to hear. So I bring home the bread. Do you think you will be here for supper? I would hope so, said Wednesday. Then you had better give me some money to buy more food, she said. I am proud, but I am not stupid. The others are prouder than I am, and he is the proudest of all. So give me money and do not tell them that you give me money. Wednesday opened his wallet, and reached in. He took out a twenty. Zorya Vechernyaya plucked it from his fingers, and waited. He took out another twenty and gave it to her. Is good, she said. We will feed you like princes. Now, go up the stairs to the top. Zorya Utrennyaya is awake, but our other sister is still asleep, so do not be making too much noise. |
| 799 |
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. 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. |
| 800 |
Why you are standing at the door? asked a womans voice. Shadow looked over Czernobogs shoulder, at the old woman standing behind him. She was smaller and frailer than her sister, but her hair was long and still golden. I am Zorya Utrennyaya, she said. You must not stand there in the hall. You must go in, sit down. I will bring you coffee. Through the doorway into an apartment that smelled like overboiled cabbage and cat box and unfiltered foreign cigarettes, and they were ushered through a tiny hallway past several closed doors to the sitting room at the far end of the corridor, and were seated on a huge old horsehair sofa, disturbing an elderly gray cat in the process, who stretched, stood up, and walked, stiffly, to a distant part of the sofa, where he lay down, warily stared at each of them in turn, then closed one eye and went back to sleep. Czernobog sat in an armchair across from them. Zorya Utrennyaya found an empty ashtray and placed it beside Czernobog. How you want your coffee? she asked her guests. Here we take it black as night, sweet as sin. Thatll be fine, maam, said Shadow. 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. The old man sat in silence for a moment, looking down at his rough hands. No. We are all relatives. We come over here together, long time ago. From the pocket of his bathrobe, Czernobog produced a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Wednesday pulled out a narrow gold lighter and lit the old mans cigarette. First we come to New York, said Czernobog. All our countrymen go to New York. Then, we come out here, to Chicago. Everything got very bad. Even in the old country, they had nearly forgotten me. |
| 801 |
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. 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? |
| 802 |
There were pauses between the moves, long, chesslike pauses, while each man watched, and thought. Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes. There was a click as Czernobog picked up a black piece and jumped it over one of Shadows white pieces. The old man picked up Shadows white piece and put it on the table at the side of the board. First blood. You have lost, said Czernobog. The game is done. No, said Shadow. Games got a long way to go yet. Then would you care for a wager? A little side bet, to make it more interesting? No, said Wednesday, without looking up from a Humor in Uniform column. He wouldnt. I am not playing with you, old man. I play with him. So, you want to bet on the game, Mister Shadow? What were you two arguing about, before? asked Shadow. Czernobog raised a craggy eyebrow. Your master wants me to come with him. To help him with his nonsense. I would rather die. You want to bet? Okay. If I win, you come with us. The old man pursed his lips. Perhaps, he said. But only if you take my forfeit, when you lose. And that would be? There was no change in Czernobogs expression. If I win, I get to knock your brains out. With the sledgehammer. First you go down on your knees. Then I hit you a blow with it, so you don't get up again. Shadow looked at the mans old face, trying to read him. He was not joking, Shadow was certain of that: there was a hunger there for something, for pain, or death, or retribution. Wednesday closed the Readers Digest. This is ridiculous, he said. I was wrong to come here. Shadow, were leaving. The gray cat, disturbed, got to its feet and stepped onto the table beside the checkers game. It stared at the pieces, then leapt down onto the floor and, tail held high, it stalked from the room. No, said Shadow. He was not scared of dying. After all, it was not as if he had anything to live for. |
| 803 |
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. 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. |
| 804 |
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. 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. |
| 805 |
Each of the diners was given a small painted tray on which was some tarnished cutlery, to hold on his or her lap. Zorya Vechernyaya took five wooden bowls and placed an unpeeled boiled potato in each, then ladled in a healthy serving of a ferociously crimson borscht. She plopped a spoonful of white sour cream in, and handed the bowls to each of them. I thought there were six of us, said Shadow. Zorya Polunochnaya is still asleep, said Zorya Vechernyaya. We keep her food in the refrigerator. When she wakes, she will eat. The borscht was vinegary, and tasted like pickled beets. The boiled potato was mealy. The next course was a leathery pot roast, accompanied by greens of some descriptionalthough they had been boiled so long and so thoroughly that they were no longer, by any stretch of the imagination, greens, and were well on their way to becoming browns. Then there were cabbage leaves stuffed with ground meat and rice, cabbage leaves of such a toughness that they were almost impossible to cut without spattering ground meat and rice all over the carpet. Shadow pushed his around his plate. We played checkers, said Czernobog, hacking himself another lump of pot roast. The young man and me. He won a game, I won a game. Because he won a game, I have agreed to go with him and Wednesday, and help them in their madness. And because I won a game, when this is all done, I get to kill the young man, with a blow of a hammer. The two Zoryas nodded gravely. Such a pity, Zorya Vechernyaya told Shadow. In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children. That is why you are a good fortune-teller, said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so late. You tell the best lies. At the end of the meal, Shadow was still hungry. Prison food had been pretty bad, and prison food was better than this. Good food, said Wednesday, who had cleaned his plate with every evidence of enjoyment. I thank you ladies. |
| 806 |
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. I swear. That would be really kind of you, said Wednesday. We accept. And you pay me only no more than what you pay for hotel, said Zorya Vechernyaya, with a triumphant toss of her head. A hundred dollars. Thirty said Wednesday. Fifty. Thirty-five. Forty-five. Forty. Is good. Forty-five dollar. Zorya Vechernyaya reached across the table and shook Wednesdays hand. Then she began to clean the pots off the table. Zorya Utrennyaya yawned so hugely Shadow worried that she might dislocate her jaw, and announced that she was going to bed before she fell asleep with her head in the pie, and she said good night to them all. Shadow helped Zorya Vechernyaya to take the plates and dishes into the little kitchen. To his surprise there was an elderly dishwashing machine beneath the sink, and he filled it. Zorya Vechernyaya looked over his shoulder, tutted, and removed the wooden borscht bowls. Those, in the sink, she told him. Sorry. Is not to worry. Now, back in there, we have pie, she said. The pieit was an apple piehad been bought in a store and oven-warmed, and was very, very good. The four of them ate it with ice cream, and then Zorya Vechernyaya made everyone go out of the sitting room, and made up a very fine-looking bed on the sofa for Shadow. Wednesday spoke to Shadow as they stood in the corridor. What you did in there, with the checkers game, he said. Yes? That was good. Very, very stupid of you. But good. Sleep safe. |
| 807 |
Shadow brushed his teeth and washed his face in the cold water of the little bathroom, and then walked back down the hall to the sitting room, turned out the light, and was asleep before his head touched the pillow. * * * There were explosions in Shadows dream: he was driving a truck through a minefield, and bombs were going off on each side of him. The windshield shattered and he felt warm blood running down his face. Someone was shooting at him. A bullet punctured his lung, a bullet shattered his spine, another hit his shoulder. He felt each bullet strike. He collapsed across the steering wheel. The last explosion ended in darkness. I must be dreaming, thought Shadow, alone in the darkness. I think I just died. He remembered hearing and believing, as a child, that if you died in your dreams, you would die in real life. He did not feel dead. He opened his eyes, experimentally. There was a woman in the little sitting room, standing against the window, with her back to him. His heart missed a half-beat, and he said, Laura? She turned, framed by the moonlight. I'm sorry, she said. I did not mean to wake you. She had a soft, Eastern European accent. I will go. No, its okay, said Shadow. You didn't wake me. I had a dream. Yes, she said. You were crying out, and moaning. Part of me wanted to wake you, but I thought, no, I should leave him. Her hair was pale and colorless in the moons thin light. She wore a white cotton nightgown, with a high lace neck and a hem that swept the ground. Shadow sat up, entirely awake. You are Zorya Polu, he hesitated. The sister who was asleep. I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke. Yes. What were you looking at, out there? She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room. He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist and white. |
| 808 |
The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters. She pointed up into the night sky. I was looking at that, she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. See? Ursa Major, he said. The Great Bear. That is one way of looking at it, she said. But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me? She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, stocks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof. The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath. You don't mind the cold? he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away. Sorry? She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet. I said, doesn't the cold bother you? In reply, she held up a finger: wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her. The water tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful. No, she said. The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water. You must like the night, said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound. My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive hisuhm, I forget the word, like a car but with horses? |
| 809 |
Chariot? His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us. And you? She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale, I never saw our father. I was asleep. Is it a medical condition? She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. So. You wanted to know what I was looking at. The Big Dipper. She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered. Odins Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that. And people believe that? They did. A long time ago. And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars? Something like that. Yes. He smiled. If it were not for the cold, he decided, he would have thought he was dreaming. Everything felt so much like a dream. Can I ask how old you are? Your sisters seem so much older. She nodded her head. I am the youngest. Zorya Utrennyaya was born in the morning, and Zorya Vechernyaya was born in the evening, and I was born at midnight. I am the midnight sister: Zorya Polunochnaya. Are you married? My wife is dead. She died last week in a car accident. It was her funeral yesterday. I'm so sorry. She came to see me last night. It was not hard to say, in the darkness and the moonlight; it was not as unthinkable as it was by daylight. Did you ask her what she wanted? No. Not really. Perhaps you should. It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. Zorya Vechernyaya tells me that you played checkers with Czernobog. Yes. He won the right to knock in my skull with a sledge. |
| 810 |
In the old days, they would take people up to the top of the mountains. To the high places. They would smash the back of their skulls with a rock. For Czernobog. Shadow glanced about. No, they were alone on the roof. Zorya Polunochnaya laughed. Silly, he is not here. And you won a game also. He may not strike his blow until this is all over. He said he would not. And you will know. Like the cows he killed. They always know, first. Otherwise, what is the point? I feel, Shadow told her, like I'm in a world with its own sense of logic. Its own rules. Like whenyou're in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn't break. Even if you don't know what they mean. I'm just going along with it, you know? I know, she said. She held his hand, with a hand that was icy cold. You were given protection once. You were given the sun itself. But you lost it already. You gave it away. All I can give you is much weaker protection. The daughter, not the father. But all helps. 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. That was beautifully done, said Shadow. I didn't see you palm it. And I don't know how you did that last bit. I did not palm it, she said. I took it. And now I give it to you, to keep safe. Here. don't give this one away. She placed it in his right hand and closed his fingers around it. The coin was cold in his hand. Zorya Polunochnaya leaned forward, and closed his eyes with her fingers, and kissed him, lightly, once upon each eyelid. |
| 811 |
And on the very next day Bartholomew came and talked to her, and looked on her approvingly with his own eyes, the dangerous blue of a sky when a storm is coming, while she was cleaning out the grate in his bedroom. He had such dangerous eyes, said Essie Tregowan. Soon enough Bartholomew went up to Oxford, and, when Essies condition became apparent, she was dismissed. But the babe was stillborn, and as a favor to Essies mother, who was a very fine cook, the squires wife prevailed upon her husband to return the former maiden to her former position in the scullery. But Essies love for Bartholomew had turned to hatred for his family, and within the year she took for her new beau a man from a neighboring village, with a bad reputation, who went by the name of Josiah Horner. And one night, when the family slept, Essie arose in the night and unbolted the side door, to let her lover in. He rifled the house while the family slept on. Suspicion immediately fell upon someone in the house, for it was apparent that someone must have opened the door (which the squires wife distinctly remembered having bolted herself), and someone must have known where the squire kept his silver plate, and the drawer in which he kept his coins and his promissory notes. Still, Essie, by resolutely denying everything, was convicted of nothing until Master Josiah Horner was caught, in a chandlers in Exeter, passing one of the squires notes. The squire identified it as his, and Horner and Essie went to trial. Horner was convicted at the local assizes, and was, as the slang of the time so cruelly and so casually had it, turned off, but the judge took pity on Essie, because of her age or her chestnut hair, and he sentenced her to seven years transportation. She was to be transported on a ship called the Neptune, under the command of one Captain Clarke. So Essie went to the Carolinas; and on the way she conceived an alliance with the selfsame captain, and prevailed upon him to return her to England with him, as his wife, and to take her to his mothers house in London, where no man knew her. |
| 812 |
said the stranger. The widow Richardson looked up, shading her eyes in the May sunshine. Do I know you? she asked. She had not heard him approach. The man was dressed all in green: dusty green trews, green jacket, and a dark green coat. His hair was a carroty red, and he grinned at her all lopsided. There was something about the man that made her happy to look at him, and something else that whispered of danger. You might say that you know me, he said. He squinted down at her, and she squinted right back up at him, searching his moon-face for a clue to his identity. He looked as young as one of her own grandchildren, yet he had called her by her old name, and there was a burr in his voice she knew from her childhood, from the rocks and the moors of her home. you're a Cornishman? she asked. That I am, a Cousin Jack, said the red-haired man. Or rather, that I was, but now I'm here in this new world, where nobody puts out ale or milk for an honest fellow, or a loaf of bread come harvest time. The old woman steadied the bowl of peas upon her lap. Ifyou're who I think you are, she said, then I've no quarrel with you. In the house, she could hear Phyllida grumbling to the housekeeper. Nor I with you, said the red-haired fellow, a little sadly, although it was you that brought me here, you and a few like you, into this land with no time for magic and no place for piskies and such folk. Youve done me many a good turn, she said. Good and ill, said the squinting stranger. Were like the wind. We blows both ways. Essie nodded. Will you take my hand, Essie Tregowan? And he reached out a hand to her. Freckled it was, and although Essies eyesight was going she could see each orange hair on the back of his hand, glowing golden in the afternoon sunlight. She bit her lip. Then, hesitantly, she placed her blue-knotted hand in his. She was still warm when they found her, although the life had fled her body and only half the peas were shelled. Madam Lifes a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she's the tenant of the room, he's the ruffian on the stair. |
| 813 |
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. 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. |
| 814 |
He examined the coin, looking first at the eagle side, then at the face of Liberty on the obverse. Ah, Lady Liberty. Beautiful, is she not? He tossed the coin to Shadow, who picked it from the air, did a slide vanishseeming to drop it into his left hand while actually keeping it in his right and then appeared to pocket it with his left hand. The coin sat in the palm of his right hand, in plain view. It felt comforting there. Lady Liberty, said Wednesday. Like so many of the gods that Americans hold dear, a foreigner. In this case, a Frenchwoman, although, in deference to American sensibilities, the French covered up her magnificent bosom on that statue they presented to New York. Liberty, he continued, wrinkling his nose at the used condom that lay on the bottom flight of steps, toeing it to the side of the stairs with distasteSomeone could slip on that. Break his neck, he muttered, interrupting himself. Like a banana peel, only with bad taste and irony thrown in. He pushed open the door, and the sunlight hit them. Liberty, boomed Wednesday, as they walked to the car, is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses. Yeah? said Shadow. Quoting, said Wednesday. Quoting someone French. that's who they have a statue to, in their New York harbor: a bitch who liked to be fucked on the refuse from the tumbrel. Hold your torch as high as you want to, mdear, theres still rats in your dress and cold jism dripping down your leg. He unlocked the car, and pointed Shadow to the passenger seat. I think she's beautiful, said Shadow, holding the coin up close. Libertys silver face reminded him a little of Zorya Polunochnaya. That, said Wednesday, driving off, is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you're rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant. Shadow had never seen Wednesday quite so expansive. His new boss, he decided, went through phases of extroversion followed by periods of intense quiet. |
| 815 |
Wednesday wrote down the telephone number of the pay phone. They crossed the road once more. What we need, said Wednesday, suddenly, is snow. A good, driving, irritating snow. Think snow for me, will you? Huh? Concentrate on making those cloudsthe ones over there, in the westmaking them bigger and darker. Think gray skies and driving winds coming down from the arctic. Think snow. I don't think it will do any good. Nonsense. If nothing else, it will keep your mind occupied, said Wednesday, unlocking the car. Kinkos next. Hurry up. Snow, thought Shadow, in the passenger seat, sipping his hot chocolate. Huge, dizzying clumps and clusters of snow falling through the air, patches of white against an iron-gray sky, snow that touches your tongue with cold and winter, that kisses your face with its hesitant touch before freezing you to death. 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? |
| 816 |
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. 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. But still They stopped outside a large shedlike building. |
| 817 |
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. isn't it a wonderful place? asked Wednesday when he came out of the mens room. His hands were still wet, and he was drying them off on a handkerchief. you're out of paper towels in there, he said. He had changed his clothes. He was now wearing a dark blue jacket, with matching trousers, a blue knit tie, a thick blue sweater, a white shirt, and black shoes. He looked like a security guard, and Shadow said so. What can I possibly say to that, young man, said Wednesday, picking up a box of floating plastic aquarium fish (Theyll never fadeand you'll never have to feed them!!), other than to congratulate you on your perspicacity. |
| 818 |
Everyone who gave him their money walked away a little happier from having met him. And then the cops drew up outside the bank, and Shadows heart sank. Wednesday tipped his cap to them, and ambled over to the police car. He said his hellos and shook hands through the open window, and nodded, then hunted through his pockets until he found a business card and a letter, and passed them through the window of the car. Then he sipped his coffee. The telephone rang. Shadow picked up the handpiece and did his best to sound bored. A1 Security Services, he said. Can I speak to A. Haddock? asked the cop across the street. This is Andy Haddock speaking, said Shadow. Yeah, Mister Haddock, this is the police, said the cop in the car across the street. Youve got a man at the First Illinois Bank on the corner of Market and Second. Uh, yeah. that's right. Jimmy OGerman. And what seems to be the problem, officer? Jim behaving himself? he's not been drinking? No problem, sir. Your man is just fine, sir. Just wanted to make certain everything was in order. You tell Jim that if he's caught drinking again, officer, he's fired. You got that? Out of a job. Out on his ass. We have zero tolerance at A1 Security. I really don't think its my place to tell him that, sir. he's doing a fine job. Were just concerned because something like this really ought to be done by two personnel. Its risky, having one unarmed guard dealing with such large amounts of money. Tell me about it. Or more to the point, you tell those cheapskates down at the First Illinois about it. These are my men I'm putting on the line, officer. Good men. Men like you. Shadow found himself warming to this identity. He could feel himself becoming Andy Haddock, chewed cheap cigar in his ashtray, a stack of paperwork to get to this Saturday afternoon, a home in Schaumburg and a mistress in a little apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Yknow, you sound like a bright young man, officer, uh Myerson. Officer Myerson. You need a little weekend work, or you wind up leaving the force, any reason, you give us a call. |
| 819 |
Hit the right bank, the right guy making the drop-offthey tend to pick them big and honest, and sometimes have a couple of bouncers accompany them, but they arent necessarily smart and you can walk away with a quarter of a million dollars for an evenings work. If its that easy, said Shadow, how come everybody doesn't do it? Its not an entirely risk-free occupation, said Wednesday, especially not at four-thirty in the morning. You mean the cops are more suspicious at four-thirty in the morning? Not at all. But the bouncers are. And things can get awkward. He flicked through a sheaf of fifties, added a smaller stack of twenties, weighed them in his hand, then passed them over to Shadow. Here, he said. Your first weeks wages. Shadow pocketed the money without counting it. So, that's what you do? he asked. To make money? Rarely. Only when a great deal of cash is needed fast. On the whole, I make my money from people who never know theyve been taken, and who never complain, and who will frequently line up to be taken when I come back that way again. That Sweeney guy said you were a hustler. He was right. But that is the least of what I am. And the least of what I need you for, Shadow. * * * Snow spun through their headlights and into the windshield as they drove through the darkness. The effect was almost hypnotic. This is the only country in the world, said Wednesday, into the stillness, that worries about what it is. What? The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are. And? Just thinking out loud. 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. So when we get to Madison, what then? |
| 820 |
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. In other countries, over the years, people recognized the places of power. Sometimes it would be a natural formation, sometimes it would just be a place that was, somehow, special. They knew that something important was happening there, that there was some focusing point, some channel, some window to the Immanent. And so they would build temples or cathedrals, or erect stone circles, orwell, you get the idea. There are churches all across the States, though, said Shadow. In every town. Sometimes on every block. And about as significant, in this context, as dentists offices. |
| 821 |
It was nominally open, but the girl washing down the surfaces had a closed look on her face, so they walked past it into the pizzeria-cafeteria, empty but for an elderly black man wearing a bright checked suit and canary-yellow gloves. He was a small man, the kind of little old man who looked as if the passing of the years had shrunk him, eating an enormous, many-scooped ice-cream sundae, drinking a supersized mug of coffee. A black cigarillo was burning in the ashtray in front of him. Three coffees, said Wednesday to Shadow. He went to the rest room. Shadow bought the coffees and took them over to Czernobog, who was sitting with the old black man and was smoking a cigarette surreptitiously, as if he were scared of being caught. The other man, happily toying with his sundae, mostly ignored his cigarillo, but as Shadow approached he picked it up, inhaled deeply, and blew two smoke ringsfirst one large one, then another, smaller one, which passed neatly through the first and he grinned, as if he were astonishingly pleased with himself. Shadow, this is Mister Nancy, said Czernobog. The old man got to his feet and thrust out his yellow-gloved right hand. Good to meet you, he said with a dazzling smile. I know who you must be. you're workin for the old one-eye bastard, arent you? There was a faint twang in his voice, a hint of a patois that might have been West Indian. I work for Mister Wednesday, said Shadow. Yes. Please, sit down. Czernobog inhaled on his cigarette. I think, he pronounced, gloomily, that our kind, we like the cigarettes so much because they remind us of the offerings that once they burned for us, the smoke rising up as they sought our approval or our favor. 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. |
| 822 |
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. Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them passes a wild motley throng. Men from Volga and Tartar steppes. Featureless figures from the Hoang-ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav, Flying the Old Worlds poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws, In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace in our ear, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Unguarded Gates, 1882 One moment Shadow was riding the Worlds Largest Carousel, holding on to his eagle-headed tiger, and then the red and white lights of the carousel stretched and shivered and went out, and he was falling through an ocean of stars, while the mechanical waltz was replaced by a pounding rhythmic roll and crash, as of cymbals or the breakers on the shores of a far ocean. The only light was starlight, but it illuminated everything with a cold clarity. Beneath him his mount stretched and padded, its warm fur under his left hand, its feathers beneath his right. Its a good ride, isn't it? The voice came from behind him, in his ears and in his mind. Shadow turned, slowly, streaming images of himself as he moved, frozen moments, each him captured in a fraction of a second, every tiny movement lasting for an infinite period. |
| 823 |
Who are you? asked Shadow. What are you? Their mounts padded along the shore. Waves broke and crashed implacably on the night beach. Wednesday guided his wolfnow a huge and charcoal-gray beast with green eyesover to Shadow. Shadows mount caracoled away from it, and Shadow stroked its neck and told it not to be afraid. Its tiger tail swished, aggressively. It occurred to Shadow that there was another wolf, a twin to the one that Wednesday was riding, keeping pace with them in the sand dunes, just a moment out of sight. Do you know me, Shadow? said Wednesday. He rode his wolf with his head high. His right eye glittered and flashed, his left eye was dull. He wore a cloak with a deep, monklike cowl, and his face stared out from the shadows. I told you I would tell you my names. This is what they call me. I am called Glad-of-War, Grim, Raider, and Third. I am One-Eyed. I am called Highest, and True-Guesser. I am Grimnir, and I am the Hooded One. I am All-Father, and I am Gondlir Wand-Bearer. I have as many names as there are winds, as many titles as there are ways to die. My ravens are Huginn and Muninn, Thought and Memory; my wolves are Freki and Geri; my horse is the gallows. Two ghostly-gray ravens, like transparent skins of birds, landed on Wednesdays shoulders, pushed their beaks into the side of Wednesdays head as if tasting his mind, and flapped out into the world once more. What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything. Odin? said Shadow, and the wind whipped the word from his lips. Odin, whispered Wednesday, and the crash of the breakers on the beach of skulls was not loud enough to drown that whisper. Odin, said Wednesday, tasting the sound of the words in his mouth. Odin, said Wednesday, his voice a triumphant shout that echoed from horizon to horizon. His name swelled and grew and filled the world like the pounding of blood in Shadows ears. And then, as in a dream, they were no longer riding toward a distant hall. |
| 824 |
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. There were wooden benches against the walls, and, sitting on them or standing beside them, perhaps ten people. They kept their distance from each other: a mixed lot, who included a dark-skinned, matronly woman in a red sari, several shabby-looking businessmen, and others, too close to the fire for Shadow to be able to make them out. Where are they? whispered Wednesday fiercely, to Nancy. Well? Where are they? There should be dozens of us here. Scores! You did all the inviting, said Nancy. I think its a wonder you got as many here as you did. You think I should tell a story, to start things off? Wednesday shook his head. Out of the question. They don't look very friendly, said Nancy. A storys a good way of gettin someone on your side. And you don't have a bard to sing to them. No stories, said Wednesday. Not now. Later, there will be time for stories. Not now. No stories. Right. I'll just be the warm-up man. And Mr. Nancy strode out into the firelight with an easy smile. I know what you are all thinkin, he said, You are thinking, What is Compe Anansi doin, comin out to talk to you all, when the All-Father called you all here, just like he called me here? Well, you know, sometimes people need remindin of things. I look around when I come in, and I thought, wheres the rest of us? But then I thought, just because we are few and they are many, we are weak, and they are powerful, it does not mean that we are lost. |
| 825 |
And I was so ashamed I ran away. You a liar, Anansi, says Tiger. I'm going to eat your liver. But then he hears the monkeys coming from their town to the water hole. A dozen happy monkeys, boppin down the path, clickin their fingers and singin as loud as they could sing, Tigers balls, yeah, I ate Tigers balls Now aint nobody gonna stop me ever at all Nobody put me up against the big black wall Cos I ate that Tigers testimonials I ate Tigers balls. And Tiger, he growls, and he roars and he's off into the forest after them, and the monkeys screech and head for the highest trees. And I scratch my nice new big balls, and damn they felt good hangin between my skinny legs, and I walk on home. And even today, Tiger keeps chasin monkeys. So you all remember: just becauseyou're small, doesn't mean you got no power. Mr. Nancy smiled, and bowed his head, and spread his hands, accepting the applause and laughter like a pro, and then he turned and walked back to where Shadow and Czernobog were standing. I thought I said no stories, said Wednesday. You call that a story? said Nancy. I barely cleared my throat. Just warmed them up for you. Go knock them dead. Wednesday walked out into the firelight, a big old man with a glass eye in a brown suit and an old Armani coat. He stood there, looking at the people on the wooden benches, saying nothing for longer than Shadow could believe someone could comfortably say nothing. And, finally, he spoke. You know me, he said. You all know me. Some of you have no cause to love me, but love me or not, you know me. There was a rustling, a stir among the people on the benches. I've been here longer than most of you. Like the rest of you, I figured we could get by on what we got. Not enough to make us happy, but enough to keep going. That may not be the case anymore. Theres a storm coming, and its not a storm of our making. He paused. Now he stepped forward, and folded his arms across his chest. When the people came to America they brought us with them. |
| 826 |
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. 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. |
| 827 |
She said, You called us here for this nonsense? And then she snorted, a snort of mingled amusement and irritation. 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. 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. |
| 828 |
Through here, boomed Wednesday, and he led them through the only exit, formed to look like the gaping mouth of a huge monster, its sharp teeth ready to rend them all to slivers. He moved among them like a politician, cajoling, encouraging, smiling, gently disagreeing, pacifying. Did that happen? asked Shadow. Did what happen, shit-for-brains? asked Mr. Nancy. The hall. The fire. Tiger balls. Riding the carousel. Heck, nobodys allowed to ride the carousel. didn't you see the signs? Now hush. The monsters mouth led to the Organ Room, which puzzled Shadowhadnt they already come through that way? It was no less strange the second time. Wednesday led them all up some stairs, past life-sized models of the four horsemen of the apocalypse hanging from the ceiling, and they followed the signs to an early exit. Shadow and Nancy brought up the rear. And then they were out of the House on the Rock, walking past the gift store and heading back into the parking lot. Pity we had to leave before the end, said Mr. Nancy. I was kind of hoping to see the biggest artificial orchestra in the whole world. I've seen it, said Czernobog. Its not so much. * * * The restaurant was ten minutes up the road. Wednesday had told each of his guests that tonights dinner was on him, and had organized rides to the restaurant for any of them who didn't have their own transportation. Shadow wondered how they had gotten to the House on the Rock in the first place, without their own transportation, and how they were going to get away again, but he said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say. Shadow had a carful of Wednesdays guests to ferry to the restaurant: the woman in the red sari sat in the front seat beside him. There were two men in the backseat: the squat, peculiar-looking young man whose name Shadow had not properly caught, but which sounded like Elvis and another man, in a dark suit, who Shadow could not remember. He had stood beside the man as he got into the car, had opened and closed the door for him, and was unable to remember anything about him. |
| 829 |
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. 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. |
| 830 |
Everyone in position? A crackle of a voice, half audible through a radio. Lets move in and round them all up. What about the big guy? said another voice. Package him up, take him out, said the first voice. They put a baglike hood over Shadows head, and bound his wrists and ankles with tape, and put him in the back of a truck, and drove him away. * * * There were no windows in the tiny room in which they had locked Shadow. There was a plastic chair, a lightweight folding table, and a bucket with a cover on it, which served Shadow as a makeshift toilet. There was also a six-foot-long strip of yellow foam on the floor, and a thin blanket with a long-since-crusted brown stain in the center: blood or shit or food, Shadow didn't know, and didn't care to investigate. There was a naked bulb behind a metal grille high in the room, but no light switch that Shadow had been able to find. The light was always on. There was no door handle on his side of the door. He was hungry. The first thing he had done, when the spooks had pushed him into the room, after theyd ripped off the tape from his ankles and wrists and mouth and left him alone, was to walk around the room and inspect it, carefully. He tapped the walls. They sounded dully metallic. There was a small ventilation grid at the top of the room. The door was soundly locked. He was bleeding above the left eyebrow in a slow ooze. His head ached. The floor was uncarpeted. He tapped it. It was made of the same metal as the walls. He took the top off the bucket, pissed in it, and covered it once more. According to his watch only four hours had passed since the raid on the restaurant. His wallet was gone, but they had left him his coins. He sat on the chair, at the card table. The table was covered with a cigarette-burned green baize. Shadow practiced appearing to push coins through the table. Then he took two quarters and made up a Pointless Coin Trick. He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. |
| 831 |
Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along. The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadows head to do it; or rather, he could not do it if he was angry or upset, so the action of practicing an illusion, even one with, on its own, no possible usefor he had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for realcalmed him, cleared his mind of turmoil and fear. He began a trick even more pointless: a one-handed half-dollar-to-penny transformation, but with his two quarters. Each of the coins was alternately concealed and revealed as the trick progressed: he began with one quarter visible, the other hidden. 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. |
| 832 |
While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical. They stood on each side of the card table, looking down at him. How long have you been working for Cargo, sir? asked one. I don't know what that is, said Shadow. He calls himself Wednesday. Grimm. Olfather. Old guy. Youve been seen with him, sir. I've been working for him for a couple of days. don't lie to us, sir, said the spook with the glasses. Okay, said Shadow. I wont. But its still a couple of days. The square-jawed spook reached down and twisted Shadows ear between finger and thumb. He squeezed as he twisted. The pain was intense. We told you not to lie to us, sir, he said, mildly. Then he let go. Each of the spooks had a gun bulge under his jacket. Shadow did not try to retaliate. He pretended he was back in prison. Do your own time, thought Shadow. don't tell them anything they don't know already. don't ask questions. These are dangerous peopleyou're palling around with, sir, said the spook with glasses. You will be doing your country a service by turning states evidence. He smiled, sympathetically: I'm the good cop, said the smile. I see, said Shadow. And if you don't want to help us, sir, said the square-jawed spook, you can see what were like when were not happy. He hit Shadow an openhanded blow across the stomach, knocking the breath from him. It wasnt torture, Shadow thought, just punctuation: I'm the bad cop. He retched. I would like to make you happy, said Shadow, as soon as he could speak. All we ask is your cooperation, sir. Can I ask gasped Shadow (dont ask questions, he thought, but it was too late, the words were already spoken), can I ask who I'll be cooperating with? You want us to tell you our names? asked the square-jawed spook. You have to be out of your mind. No, he's got a point, said the spook with glasses. It may make it easier for him to relate to us. He looked at Shadow and smiled like a man advertising toothpaste. |
| 833 |
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. 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. |
| 834 |
* * * Somebody somewhere was calling for help, loudly, in his dream or out of it. Shadow rolled over on the foam rubber, in his sleep, finding new places that hurt as he rolled. Someone was shaking his shoulder. He wanted to ask them not to wake him, to let him sleep and leave him be, but it came out as a grunt. Puppy? said Laura. You have to wake up. Please wake up, hon. And there was a moments gentle relief. He had had such a strange dream, of prisons and con men and down-at-heel gods, and now Laura was waking him to tell him it was time for work, and perhaps there would be time enough before work to steal some coffee and a kiss, or more than a kiss; and he put out his hand to touch her. Her flesh was cold as ice, and sticky. Shadow opened his eyes. Where did all the blood come from? he asked. Other people, she said. Its not mine. I'm filled with formaldehyde, mixed with glycerin and lanolin. Which other people? he asked. The guards, she said. Its okay. I killed them. You better move. I don't think I gave anyone a chance to raise the alarm. Take a coat from out there, or you'll freeze your butt off. You killed them? She shrugged, and half smiled, awkwardly. Her hands looked as if she had been finger-painting, composing a picture that had been executed solely in crimsons, and there were splashes and spatters on her face and clothes (the same blue suit in which she had been buried) that made Shadow think of Jackson Pollock, because it was less problematic to think of Jackson Pollock than to accept the alternative. Its easier to kill people, whenyou're dead yourself, she told him. I mean, its not such a big deal. you're not so prejudiced anymore. Its still a big deal to me, said Shadow. You want to stay here until the morning crew comes? she said. You can if you like. I thought youd like to get out of here. they'll think I did it, he said, stupidly. 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. |
| 835 |
In the guardroom were four dead men: three guards, and the man who had called himself Stone. His friend was nowhere to be seen. From the blood-colored skid marks on the floor, two of them had been dragged into the guardroom and dropped onto the floor. His own coat was hanging from the coat rack. His wallet was still in the inside pocket, apparently untouched. Laura pulled open a couple of cardboard boxes filled with candy bars. The guards, now he could see them properly, were wearing dark camouflage uniforms, but there were no official tags on them, nothing to say who they were working for. They might have been weekend duck hunters, dressed for the shoot. Laura reached out her cold hand and squeezed Shadows hand in hers. She had the gold coin he had given her around her neck, on a golden chain. That looks nice, he said. Thanks. She smiled, prettily. What about the others, he asked. Wednesday, and the rest of them? Where are they? Laura passed him a handful of candy bars, and he filled his pockets with them. There wasnt anybody else here. A lot of empty cells, and one with you in it. Oh, and one of the men had gone into the cell down there to jack off with a magazine. He got such a shock. You killed him while he was jerking himself off? She shrugged. I guess, she said, uncomfortably. I was worried they were hurting you. Someone has to watch out for you, and I told you I would, didn't I? Here, take these. They were chemical hand and foot warmers: thin padsyou broke the seal and they heated up and stayed that way for hours. Shadow pocketed them. Look out for me? Yes, he said, you did. She reached out a finger, stroked him above his left eyebrow. you're hurt, she said. I'm okay, he said. He opened a metal door in the wall. It swung open slowly. There was a four-foot drop to the ground, and he swung himself down to what felt like gravel. He picked up Laura by the waist, swung her down, as he used to swing her, easily, without a second thought The moon came out from behind a thick cloud. |
| 836 |
It was low on the horizon, ready to set, but the light it cast onto the snow was enough to see by. They had emerged from what turned out to be the black-painted metal car of a long freight train, parked or abandoned in a woodland siding. The series of wagon cars went on as far as he could see, into the trees and away. He had been on a train. He should have known. How the hell did you find me here? he asked his dead wife. She shook her head slowly, amused. You shine like a beacon in a dark world, she told him. It wasnt that hard. Now, just go. Go as far and as fast as you can. don't use your credit cards and you should be fine. Where should I go? She pushed a hand through her matted hair, flicking it back out of her eyes. The roads that way, she told him. Do whatever you can. Steal a car if you have to. Go south. Laura, he said, and hesitated. Do you know whats going on? Do you know who these people are? Who you killed? Yeah, she said. I think I do know. I owe you, said Shadow. I'd still be in there if it wasnt for you. I don't think they had anything good planned for me. No, she said. I don't think they did. They walked away from the empty train cars. Shadow wondered about the other trains hed seen, blank window-less metal cars that went on for mile after mile, hooting their lonely way through the night. His fingers closed around the Liberty dollar in his pocket, and he remembered Zorya Polunochnaya, and the way she had looked at him in the moonlight. Did you ask her what she wanted? It is the wisest thing to ask the dead. Sometimes they will tell you. LauraWhat do you want? he asked. You really want to know? Yes. Please. Laura looked up at him with dead blue eyes. I want to be alive again, she said. Not in this half-life, I want to be really alive. I want to feel my heart pumping in my chest again. I want to feel blood moving through mehot, and salty, and real. Its weird, you don't think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you'll know. |
| 837 |
She rubbed her eyes, smudging her face with red from the mess on her hands. Look, its hard. You know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because its easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive. I don't understand what you want me to do. Make it happen, hon. you'll figure it out. I know you will. Okay, he said. I'll try. And if I do figure it out, how do I find you? But she was gone, and there was nothing left in the woodland but a gentle gray in the sky to show him where east was, and on the bitter December wind a lonely wail that might have been the cry of the last nightbird or the call of the first bird of dawn. Shadow set his face to the south, and he began to walk. As the Hindu gods are immortal only in a very particular sensefor they are born and they diethey experience most of the great human dilemmas and often seem to differ from mortals in a few trivial details and from demons even less. Yet they are regarded by the Hindus as a class of beings by definition totally different from any other; they are symbols in a way that no human being, however archetypal his life story, can ever be. They are actors playing parts that are real only for us; they are the masks behind which we see our own faces. Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, Introduction, Hindu Myths (Penguin Books, 1975) Shadow had been walking south, or what he hoped was more or less south, for several hours, heading along a narrow and unmarked road through the woods somewhere in, he imagined, southern Wisconsin. A couple of jeeps came down the road toward him at one point, headlights blazing, and he ducked into the trees until they had passed. The early morning mist hung at waist level. The cars were black. When, thirty minutes later, he heard the noise of distant helicopters coming from the west, he struck out away from the timber trail and into the woods. There were two helicopters, and he lay crouched in a hollow beneath a fallen tree and listened to them pass over. |
| 838 |
As they moved away, he looked out and looked up for one hasty glance at the gray winter sky. He was satisfied to observe that the helicopters were painted a matte black. He waited beneath the tree until the noise of the helicopters was completely gone. Under the trees the snow was little more than a dusting, which crunched underfoot. He was deeply grateful for the chemical hand and feet warmers, which kept his extremities from freezing. Beyond that, he was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the, numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back. So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn't answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly deja-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again. He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually hed get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea that seemed both comforting and unlikely. There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing. What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. It wasnt me, he heard himself saying, it was my dead wife. He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on and to find out how it was all going to end. |
| 839 |
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. 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. |
| 840 |
He washed his face and hands in hot water, slicked down his dark hair, then went back into the restaurant and ate his burgers and fries and drank his coffee. He went back to the counter. You want frozen custard? asked the keen young man. No. No thanks. Is there anywhere around here I could rent a car? My car died, back down the road a way. The young man scratched his head-stubbled. Not around here, Mister. If your car died you could call Triple-A. Or talk to the gas station next door about a tow. A fine idea, said Shadow. Thanks. He walked across the melting snow, from the Culvers parking lot to the gas station. He bought candy bars and beef jerky sticks and more chemical hand and feet warmers. Anywhere hereabouts I could rent a car? he asked the woman behind the cash register. She was immensely plump, and bespectacled, and was delighted to have someone to talk to. Let me think, she said. Were kind of out of the way here. They do that kind of thing over in Madison. Where you going? Kay-ro, he said. Wherever that is. I know where that is, she said. Hand me an Illinois map from that rack over there. Shadow passed her a plastic-coated map. She unfolded it, then pointed in triumph to the bottom-most corner of the state. There it is. Cairo? that's how they pronounce the one in Egypt. But the one in Little Egypt, they call that one Kayro. They got a Thebes down there, all sorts. My sister-in-law comes from Thebes. I asked her about the one in Egypt, she looked at me as if I had a screw loose. The woman chuckled like a drain. Any pyramids? The city was five hundred miles away, almost directly south. Not that they ever told me. They call it Little Egypt because back, oh, mebbe a hundred, hundred and fifty years back, there was a famine all over. Crops failed. But they didn't fail down there. So everyone went there to buy food. Like in the Bible. Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Off we go to Egypt, bad-a-boom. So if you were me, and you needed to get there, how would you go? |
| 841 |
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. 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. |
| 842 |
He stopped and ate at a place called Moms, catching them just before they closed for the afternoon. Each town he passed through had an extra sign up beside the sign telling him that he was now entering Our Town (pop. 720). The extra sign announced that the towns under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate basketball tournament, or that the town was the home of the Illinois girls under-16s wrestling semifinalist. He drove on, head nodding, feeling more drained with every minute that passed. He ran a stoplight, and was nearly side-swiped by a woman in a Dodge. As soon as he got out into open country he pulled off onto an empty tractor path on the side of the road, and he parked by a snow-spotted stubbly field in which a slow procession of fat black wild turkeys walked like a line of mourners; he turned off the engine, stretched out in the backseat, and fell asleep. Darkness; a sensation of fallingas if he were tumbling down a great hole, like Alice. He fell for a hundred years into darkness. Faces passed him, swimming out of the black, then each face was ripped up and away before he could touch it Abruptly, and without transition, he was not falling. Now he was in a cave, and he was no longer alone. Shadow stared into familiar eyes: huge, liquid black eyes. They blinked. Under the earth: yes. He remembered this place. The stink of wet cow. Firelight flickered on the wet cave walls, illuminating the buffalo head, the mans body, skin the color of brick clay. Cant you people leave me be? asked Shadow. I just want to sleep. The buffalo man nodded, slowly. His lips did not move, but a voice in Shadows head said, Where are you going, Shadow? Cairo. Why? Where else have I got to go? Its where Wednesday wants me to go. I drank his mead. In Shadows dream, with the power of dream logic behind it, the obligation seemed unarguable: he drank Wednesdays mead three times, and sealed the pactwhat other choice of action did he have? The buffalo-headed man reached a hand into the fire, stirring the embers and the broken branches into a blaze. |
| 843 |
The storm is coming, he said. Now there was ash on his hands, and he wiped it onto his hairless chest, leaving soot-black streaks. So you people keep telling me. Can I ask you a question? There was a pause. A fly settled on the furry forehead. The buffalo man flicked it away. Ask. Is this true? Are these people really gods? Its all so He paused. Then he said, impossible, which was not exactly the word he had been going for but seemed to be the best he could do. What are gods? asked the buffalo man. I don't know, said Shadow. There was a tapping, relentless and dull. Shadow waited for the buffalo man to say something more, to explain what gods were, to explain the whole tangled nightmare that his life seemed to have become. He was cold. Tap. Tap. Tap. Shadow opened his eyes, and, groggily, sat up. He was freezing, and the sky outside the car was the deep luminescent purple that divides the dusk from the night. Tap. Tap. Someone said, Hey, mister,, and Shadow turned his head. The someone was standing beside the car, no more than a darker shape against the darkling sky. Shadow reached out a hand and cranked down the window a few inches. He made some waking-up noises, and then he said, Hi. You all right? You sick? You been drinking? The voice was higha womans or a boys. I'm fine, said Shadow. Hold on. He opened the door, and got out, stretching his aching limbs and neck as he did so. Then he rubbed his hands together, to get the blood circulating and to warm them up. Whoa. you're pretty big. that's what they tell me, said Shadow. Who are you? I'm Sam, said the voice. Boy Sam or girl Sam? Girl Sam. I used to be Sammi with an i, and I'd do a smiley face over the i, but then I got completely sick of it because like absolutely everybody was doing it, so I stopped. Okay, girl Sam. You go over there, and look out at the road. Why? Are you a crazed killer or something? No, said Shadow, I need to take a leak and I'd like just the smallest amount of privacy. Oh. Right. Okay. Got it. |
| 844 |
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. 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. |
| 845 |
Shadow turned left, and he drove. After several minutes the heater started to work, and blessed warmth filled the car. You haven't said anything yet, said Sam. Say something. Are you human? asked Shadow. An honest-to-goodness, born-of-man-and-woman, living, breathing human being? Sure, she said. Okay. Just checking. So what would you like me to say? Something to reassure me, at this point. I suddenly have that oh shit I'm in the wrong car with a crazy man feeling. Yeah, he said. I've had that one. What would you find reassuring? Just tell meyou're not an escaped convict or a mass murderer or something. He thought for a moment. You know, I'm really not. You had to think about it though, didn't you? Done my time. Never killed anybody. Oh. They entered a small town, lit up by streetlights and blinking Christmas decorations, and Shadow glanced to his right. The girl had a tangle of short dark hair and a face that was both attractive and, he decided, faintly mannish: her features might have been chiseled out of rock. She was looking at him. What were you in prison for? I hurt a couple of people real bad. I got angry. Did they deserve it? Shadow thought for a moment. I thought so at the time. Would you do it again? Hell, no. I lost three years of my life in there. Mm. You got Indian blood in you? Not that I know of. You looked like it, was all. Sorry to disappoint you. Sokay. You hungry? Shadow nodded. I could eat, he said. Theres a good place just past the next set of lights. Good food. Cheap, too. Shadow pulled up in the parking lot. They got out of the car. He didn't bother to lock it, although he pocketed the keys. He pulled out some coins to buy a newspaper. Can you afford to eat here? he asked. Yeah, she said, raising her chin. I can pay for myself. Shadow nodded. Tell you what. I'll toss you for it, he said. Heads you pay for my dinner, tails, I pay for yours. 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. |
| 846 |
Shadow placed the coin head up on his thumb and cheated the toss, so it wobbled and looked like it was spinning, then he caught it and flipped it over onto the back of his left hand, and uncovered it with his right, in front of her. Tails, she said, happily. Dinners on you. Yup, he said. You cant win them all. Shadow ordered the meat loaf, Sam ordered lasagna. Shadow flipped through the newspaper to see if there was anything in it about dead men in a freight train. There wasnt. The only story of interest was on the cover: crows in record numbers were infesting the town. Local farmers wanted to hang dead crows around the town on public buildings to frighten the others away; ornithologists said that it wouldn't work, that the living crows would simply eat the dead ones. The locals were implacable. When they see the corpses of their friends, said a spokesman, they'll know that we don't want them here. The food came mounded high on plates and steaming, more than any one person could eat. So whats in Cairo? asked Sam, with her mouth full. No idea. I got a message from my boss saying he needs me down there. What do you do? I'm an errand boy. She smiled. Well, she said, you arent mafia, not looking like that and driving that piece of shit. Why does your car smell like bananas, anyway? He shrugged, carried on eating. Sam narrowed her eyes. Maybeyou're a banana smuggler, she said. You haven't asked me what I do yet. I figureyou're at school. UW Madison. Where you are undoubtedly studying art history, womens studies, and probably casting your own bronzes. And you probably work in a coffeehouse to help cover the rent. She put down her fork, nostrils flaring, eyes wide. How the fuck did you do that? What? Now you say, no, actually I'm studying Romance languages and ornithology. Soyou're saying that was a lucky guess or something? What was? She stared at him with dark eyes. You are one peculiar guy, MisterI don't know your name. They call me Shadow, he said. She twisted her mouth wryly, as if she were tasting something she disliked. |
| 847 |
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? That sounded worse. They suspected my noncustodial asshole brother-in-law, his father. Who was asshole enough to have stolen him away. Probably did. But this is in a little town in the North Woods. Lovely, sweet, pretty little town where no one ever locks their doors. She sighed, shook her head. She held her coffee cup in both hands. Are you sure you arent part Indian? Not that I know. Its possible. I don't know much about my father. I guess my ma would have told me if he was Native American, though. Maybe. Again the mouth twist. Sam gave up halfway through her chocolate cream pie: the slice was half the size of her head. She pushed the plate across the table to Shadow. You want? He smiled, said, Sure, and finished it off. The waitress handed them the check, and Shadow paid. Thanks, said Sam. It was getting colder now. The car coughed a couple of times before it started. Shadow drove back onto the road, and kept going south. You ever read a guy named Herodotus? he asked. |
| 848 |
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. 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. |
| 849 |
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. 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 wasnt 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. What he found strange was the tone. All the regulars were concerned about Robs drinking. He was missing days at work. |
| 850 |
They went to his home: he had locked himself in the bedroom, and had to be persuaded to come out. He was staggering drunk, but still pretty funny. His friends, played by Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie, left after getting some good gags in. Then, when Robs wife went to remonstrate with him, he hit her, hard, in the face. She sat down on the floor and began to cry, not in that famous Mary Tyler Moore wail, but in small, helpless sobs, hugging herself and whispering, don't hit me, please, I'll do anything, just don't hit me anymore. What the fuck is this? said Shadow, aloud. The picture dissolved into phosphor-dot fuzz. When it came back, The Dick Van Dyke Show had, inexplicably, become I Love Lucy. Lucy was trying to persuade Ricky to let her replace their old icebox with a new refrigerator. When he left, however, she walked over to the couch and sat down, crossing her ankles, resting her hands in her lap, and staring out patiently in black and white across the years. Shadow? she said. We need to talk. Shadow said nothing. She opened her purse and took out a cigarette, lit it with an expensive silver lighter, put the lighter away. I'm talking to you, she said. Well? This is crazy, said Shadow. Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break. Whatever. Lucille Ball talking to me from the TV is weirder by several orders of magnitude than anything that's happened to me so far, said Shadow. Its not Lucille Ball. Its Lucy Ricardo. And you know somethingI'm not even her. Its just an easy way to look, given the context. that's all. She shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. Who are you? asked Shadow. Okay, she said. Good question. I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray: I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore. you're the television? Or someone in the television? The TVs the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to. What do they sacrifice? asked Shadow. Their time, mostly, said Lucy. Sometimes each other. |
| 851 |
He parked his car in a side street and walked to the embankment at the edge of a river, unsure whether he was gazing at the Ohio or the Mississippi. A small brown cat nosed and sprang among the trash cans at the back of a building, and the light made even the garbage magical. A lone seagull was gliding along the rivers edge, flipping a wing to correct itself as it went. Shadow realized that he was not alone. A small girl, wearing old tennis shoes on her feet and a mans gray woolen sweater as a dress, was standing on the sidewalk, ten feet away from him, staring at him with the somber gravity of a six-year-old. Her hair was black, and straight, and long; her skin was as brown as the river. He grinned at her. She stared back at him, defiantly. There was a squeal and a yowl from the waterfront, and the little brown cat shot away from a spilled garbage can, pursued by a long-muzzled black dog. The cat scurried under a car. Hey, said Shadow to the girl. You ever seen invisible powder before? She hesitated. Then she shook her head. Okay, said Shadow. Well, watch this. Shadow pulled out a quarter with his left hand, held it up, tilting it from one side to another, then appeared to toss it into his right hand, closing his hand hard on nothing, and putting the hand forward. Now, he said, I just take some invisible powder from my pocket and he reached his left hand into his breast pocket, dropping the quarter into the pocket as he did so, and I sprinkle it on the hand with the coin and he mimed sprinkling, and looknow the quarters invisible too. He opened his empty right hand, and, in astonishment, his empty left hand as well. The little girl just stared. Shadow shrugged, and put his hands back in his pockets, loading a quarter in one hand, a folded up five-dollar bill in the other. He was going to produce them from the air, and then give the girl the five bucks: she looked like she needed it. Hey, he said. Weve got an audience. The black dog and the little brown cat were watching him as well, flanking the girl, looking up at him intently. |
| 852 |
He never eats at the hotel (for while the hotel bill is being covered by Fuads business partners, he must pay for his own food); instead he buys food at falafel houses and at little food stores, smuggles it up to the hotel beneath his coat for days before he realizes that no one cares. And even then he feels strange about carrying the bags of food into the dimly lit elevators (Salim always has to bend and squint to find the button to press to take him to his floor) and up to the tiny white room in which he stays. Salim is upset. The fax that was waiting for him when he woke this morning was curt, and alternately chiding, stem, and disappointed: Salim was letting them downhis sister, Fuad, Fuads business partners, the Sultanate of Oman, the whole Arab world. Unless he was able to get the orders, Fuad would no longer consider it his obligation to employ Salim. They depended upon him. His hotel was too expensive. What was Salim doing with their money, living like a sultan in America? Salim read the fax in his room (which has always been too hot and stifling, so last night he opened a window, and was now too cold) and sat there for a time, his face frozen into an expression of complete misery. Then Salim walks downtown, holding his sample case as if it contained diamonds and rubies, trudging through the cold for block after block until, on Broadway and 19th Street, he finds a squat building over a deli. He walks up the stairs to the fourth floor, to the office of Panglobal Imports. The office is dingy, but he knows that Panglobal handles almost half of the ornamental souvenirs that enter the U. S. from the Far East. A real order, a significant order from Panglobal, could redeem Salims journey, could make the difference between failure and success, so Salim sits on an uncomfortable wooden chair in an outer office, his sample case balanced on his lap, staring at the middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too bright a red who sits behind the desk, blowing her nose on Kleenex after Kleenex. |
| 853 |
After she blows her nose she wipes it, and drops the Kleenex into the trash. Salim got there at 10:30 A. M., half an hour before his appointment. Now he sits there, flushed and shivering, wondering if he is running a fever. The time ticks by so slowly. Salim looks at his watch. Then he clears his throat. The woman behind the desk glares at him. Yes? she says. It sounds like Yed. It is eleven-thirty-five, says Salim. The woman glances at the clock on the Wall, and says, Yed, again. I'd id. My appointment was for eleven, says Salim with a placating smile. Mister Blanding knowsyou're here, she tells him, reprovingly. (Bidter Bladdig dodeyou're here.) Salim picks up an old copy of the New York Post from the table. He speaks English better than he reads it, and he puzzles his way through the stories like a man doing a crossword puzzle. He waits, a plump young man with the eyes of a hurt puppy, glancing from his watch to his newspaper to the clock on the wall. At twelve-thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc as his sister swears by zinc and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell. It is one oclock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice. Excuse me, says Salim, but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting? She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. he's at lunch, she says. |
| 854 |
Hed ad dudge. Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. When will he be back? She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. he's busy with appointments for the rest of the day, she says. Hed biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day. Will he see me, then, when he comes back? asks Salim. She shrugs, and blows her nose. Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless. At three oclock the woman looks at him and says He wode be gubbig bag. Excuse? Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today. Can I make an appointment for tomorrow? She wipes her nose. You hab to teddephode. Appoid-beds odly by teddephode. I see, says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. Tomorrow I will telephone, he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the 46th Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him. One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salims pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuads wife (for he had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars are going fast enough actually to end his life. A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in. |
| 855 |
The backseat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to get to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seat belt. The Paramount Hotel, please, says Salim. The cabdriver grunts and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights. From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cabdriver swears, by the beard of the prophet. Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. How long have you been driving a cab, my friend? he asks the man, in his own language. Ten years, says the driver, in the same tongue. Where are you from? Muscat, says Salim. In Oman. From Oman. I have been in Oman. It was a long time ago. Have you heard of the city of Ubar? asks the taxi driver. Indeed I have, says Salim. The Lost City of Towers. They found it in the desert five, ten years ago, I do not remember exactly. Were you with the expedition that excavated it? Something like that. It was a good city, says the taxi driver. On most nights there would be three, maybe four thousand people camped there: every traveler would rest at Ubar, and the music would play, and the wine would flow like water and the water would flow as well, which was why the city existed. That is what I have heard, says Salim. And it perished, what, a thousand years ago? Two thousand? The taxi driver says nothing. They are stopped at a red traffic light. The light turns green, but the driver does not move, despite the immediate discordant blare of horns behind them. Hesitantly, Salim reaches through the hole in the Plexiglas and he touches the driver on the shoulder. |
| 856 |
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. 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. |
| 857 |
As he shakes his shoulder, the driver moves, and Salims hand brushes the mans face, knocking the sunglasses from his face into his lap. The taxi driver opens his eyes, reaches for and replaces the black plastic sunglasses, but it is too late. Salim has seen his eyes. The car crawls forward in the rain. The numbers on the meter increase. Are you going to kill me? asks Salim. The taxi drivers lips are pressed together. Salim watches his face in the drivers mirror. No, says the driver, very quietly. The car stops again. The rain patters on the roof. Salim begins to speak. My grandmother swore that she had seen an ifrit, or perhaps a marid, late one evening, on the edge of the desert. We told her that it was just a sandstorm, a little wind, but she said no, she saw its face, and its eyes, like yours, were burning flames. The driver smiles, but his eyes are hidden behind the black plastic glasses, and Salim cannot tell whether there is any humor in that smile or not. The grandmothers came here too, he says. Are there many jinn in New York? asks Salim. No. Not many of us. There are the angels, and there are men, who Allah made from mud, and then there are the people of the fire, the jinn, says Salim. People know nothing about my people here, says the driver. They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab? I do not understand. The taxi driver seems gloomy. Salim stares at his face in the mirror as he speaks, watching the ifrits dark lips. They believe that we grant wishes. Why do they believe that? I sleep in one stinking room in Brooklyn. I drive this taxi for any stinking freak who has the money to ride in it, and for some who don't. I drive them where they need to go, and sometimes they tip me. Sometimes they pay me. His lower lip began to tremble. The ifrit seemed on edge. One of them shat on the backseat once. I had to clean it before I could take the cab back. How could he do that? I had to clean the wet shit from the seat. Is that right? |
| 858 |
Salim puts out a hand, pats the ifrits shoulder. He can feel solid flesh through the wool of the sweater. The ifrit raises his hand from the wheel, rests it on Salims hand for a moment. Salim thinks of the desert then: red sands blow a dust storm through his thoughts, and the scarlet silks of the tents that surrounded the lost city of Ubar flap and billow through his mind. They drive up Eighth Avenue. The old believe. They do not piss into holes, because the Prophet told them that jinn live in holes. They know that the angels throw flaming stars at us when we try to listen to their conversations. But even for the old, when they come to this country we are very, very far away. Back there, I did not have to drive a cab. I am sorry, says Salim. It is a bad time, says the driver. A storm is coming. It scares me. I would do anything to get away. The two of them say nothing more on their way back to the hotel. When Salim gets out of the cab he gives the ifrit a twenty-dollar bill, tells him to keep the change. Then, with a sudden burst of courage, he tells him his room number. The taxi driver says nothing in reply. A young woman clambers into the back of the cab, and it pulls out into the cold and the rain. Six oclock in the evening. Salim has not yet written the fax to his brother-in-law. He goes out into the rain, buys himself this nights kabob and french fries. It has only been a week, but he feels that he is becoming heavier, rounder, softening in this country of New York. When he comes back to the hotel he is surprised to see the taxi driver standing in the lobby, hands deep in his pockets. He is staring at a display of black-and-white postcards. When he sees Salim he smiles, self-consciously. I called your room, he says, but there was no answer. So I thought I would wait. Salim smiles also, and touches the mans arm. I am here, he says. Together they enter the dim, green-lit elevator, ascend to the fifth floor holding hands. The ifrit asks if he may use Salims bathroom. |
| 859 |
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. 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. |
| 860 |
Beneath them he finds a drivers license in the name of Ibrahim bin Irem, a taxi permit in the same name, and a ring of keys with an address written on a piece of paper attached to them in English. The photographs on the license and the permit do not look much like Salim, but then, they did not look much like the ifrit. The telephone rings: it is the front desk calling to point out that Salim has already checked out and his guest needs to leave soon so that they can service the room, to get it ready for another occupant. I do not grant wishes, says Salim, tasting the way the words shape themselves in his mouth. He feels strangely light-headed as he dresses. New York is very simple: the avenues run north to south, the streets run west to east. How hard can it be? he asks himself. He tosses the car keys into the air and catches them. Then he puts on the black plastic sunglasses he found in the pockets, and leaves the hotel room to go and look for his cab. He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him How that could beI thought the dead were souls, he broke my trance. don't that make you suspicious That theres something the dead are keeping back? Yes, theres something the dead are keeping back. Robert Frost, Two Witches The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. They were sitting in a small restaurant, two blocks from Ibis and Jacquels Funeral Parlor. Shadows meal consisted of an all-day full breakfastit came with hush puppieswhile Mr. Ibis picked and pecked at a slice of coffee cake. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. The lingering ones are holding on for one final Christmas, said Mr. Ibis, or even for New Years, while the others, the ones for whom other peoples jollity and celebration will prove too painful, have not yet been tipped over the edge by that last showing of Its a Wonderful Life, have not quite encountered the final straw, or should I say, the final sprig of holly that breaks not the camels but the reindeers back. |
| 861 |
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. 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. 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. |
| 862 |
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. Accounts of lives. He paused. By the time Shadow realized that he should have asked if he might be allowed to read one, the moment had passed. Anyway, what we give them here is continuity: theres been an Ibis and Jacquel in business here for almost two hundred years. We werent always funeral directors, though. We used to be morticians, and before that, undertakers. And before that? Well, said Mr. Ibis, smiling just a little smugly, we go back a very long way. Of course, it wasnt until after the War Between the States that we found our niche here. That was when we became the funeral parlor for the colored folks hereabouts. Before that no one thought of us as coloredforeign maybe, exotic and dark, but not colored. |
| 863 |
Once the war was done, pretty soon, no one could remember a time when we werent perceived as black. My business partner, he's always had darker skin than mine. It was an easy transition. Mostly you are what they think you are. Its just strange when they talk about African-Americans. Makes me think of the people from Punt, Ophir, Nubia. We never thought of ourselves as Africanswe were the people of the Nile. So you were Egyptians, said Shadow. Mr. Ibis pushed his lower lip upward, then let his head bob from side to side, as if it were on a spring, weighing the pluses and minuses, seeing things from both points of view. Well, yes and no. Egyptians makes me think of the folk who live there now. The ones who built their cities over our graveyards and palaces. Do they look like me? Shadow shrugged. Hed seen black guys who looked like Mr. Ibis. Hed seen white guys with tans who looked like Mr. Ibis. Hows your coffee cake? asked the waitress, refilling their coffees. Best I ever had, said Mr. Ibis. You give my best to your ma. I'll do that, she said, and bustled away. You don't want to ask after the health of anyone, ifyou're a funeral director. They think maybeyou're scouting for business, said Mr. Ibis, in an undertone. Shall we see if your room is ready? Their breath steamed in the night air. Christmas lights twinkled in the windows of the stores they passed. Its good of you, putting me up, said Shadow. I appreciate it. We owe your employer a number of favors. And Lord knows, we have the room. Its a big old house. There used to be more of us, you know. Now its just the three of us. You won't be in the way. Any idea how long I'm meant to stay with you? Mr. Ibis shook his head. He didn't say. But we are happy to have you here, and we can find you work. If you are not squeamish. If you treat the dead with respect. So, asked Shadow, what are you people doing here in Cairo? Was it just the name or something? No. Not at all. Actually this region takes its name from us, although people barely know it. |
| 864 |
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. Are you trying to tell me that ancient Egyptians came here to trade five thousand years ago? Mr. Ibis said nothing, but he smirked loudly. Then he said, Three thousand five hundred and thirty years ago. Give or take. Okay, said Shadow. I'll buy it, I guess. What were they trading? Not much, said Mr. Ibis. Animal skins. Some food. Copper from the mines in what would now be Michigans upper peninsula. The whole thing was rather a disappointment. Not worth the effort. They stayed here long enough to believe in us, to sacrifice to us, and for a handful of the traders to die of fever and be buried here, leaving us behind them. He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, turned around slowly, arms extended. This country has been Grand Central for ten thousand years or more. You say to me, what about Columbus? Sure, said Shadow, obligingly. What about him? Columbus did what people had been doing for thousands of years. Theres nothing special about coming to America. I've been writing stories about it, from time to time. They began to walk again. True stories? Up to a point, yes. I'll let you read one or two, if you like. Its all there for anyone who has eyes to see it. Personally and this is speaking as a subscriber to Scientific American, hereI feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse themfor they'll talk about the odd, but they won't talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether its true or not. I mean, heres a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. |
| 865 |
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. My people, the Nile folk, we discovered early on that a reed boat will take you around the world, if you have the patience and enough jars of sweet water. You see, the biggest problem with coming to America in the old days was that there wasnt a lot here that anyone wanted to trade, and it was much too far away. They had reached a large house, built in the style people called Queen Anne. Shadow wondered who Queen Anne was, and why she had been so fond of Addams Family-style houses. It was the only building on the block that wasnt locked up with boarded-over windows. |
| 866 |
They went through the gate and walked around the back of the building. Through large double doors, which Mr. Ibis unlocked with a key from his key chain, and they were in a large, unheated room, occupied by two people. They were a very tall, dark-skinned man, holding a large metal scalpel, and a dead girl in her late teens, lying on a long, porcelain table that resembled both a slab and a sink. There were several photographs of the dead girl pinned up on a corkboard on the wall above the body. She was smiling in one, a high school head shot. In another she was standing in a line with three other girls; they were wearing what might have been prom dresses, and her black hair was tied above her head in an intricate knotwork. Cold on the porcelain, her hair was down, loose around her shoulders, and matted with dried blood. This is my partner, Mister Jacquel, said Ibis. We met already, said Jacquel. Forgive me if I don't shake hands. Shadow looked down at the girl on the table. What happened to her? he asked. Poor taste in boyfriends, said Jacquel. Its not always fatal, said Mr. Ibis, with a sigh. This time it was. He was drunk, and he had a knife, and she told him that she thought she was pregnant. He didn't believe it was his. She was stabbed said Mr. Jacquel, and he counted. There was a click as he stepped on a foot switch, turning on a small Dictaphone on a nearby table, Five times. There are three knife wounds in the left anterior chest wall. The first is between the fourth and fifth intercostal spaces at the medial border of the left breast, two point two centimeters in length; the second and third are through the inferior portion of the left mid-breast penetrating at the sixth interspace, overlapping, and measuring three centimeters. There is one wound two centimeters long in the upper anterior left chest in the second interspace, and one wound five centimeters long and a maximum of one point six centimeters deep in the anteromedial left deltoid, a slashing injury. |
| 867 |
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. 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. |
| 868 |
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. 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. |
| 869 |
But to truly bring the dead back to life, in their bodies. That takes power. He hesitated, then, In the old land, in the old days, it was easier then. You could bind the ka of a man to his body for five thousand years, said Jacquel. Binding or loosing. But that was a long time ago. He took all the organs that he had removed and replaced them, respectfully, in the body cavity. He replaced the intestines and the breastbone and pulled the skin edges near each other. Then he took a thick needle and thread and, with deft, quick strokes, he sewed it up, like a man stitching a baseball: the cadaver transformed from meat into girl once again. I need a beer, said Jacquel. He pulled off his rubber gloves and dropped them into the bin. He dropped his dark brown overalls into a hamper. Then he took the cardboard tray of jars filled with little red and brown and purple slices of the organs. Coming? They walked up the back stairs to the kitchen. It was brown and white, a sober and respectable room that looked to Shadow as if it had last been decorated in 1920. There was a huge Kelvinator rattling to itself by one wall. Jacquel opened the Kelvinator door, put the plastic jars with their slivers of spleen, of kidney, of liver, of heart, inside. He took out three brown bottles. Ibis opened a glass-fronted cupboard, removed three tall glasses. Then he gestured for Shadow to sit down at the kitchen table. Ibis poured the beer and passed a glass to Shadow, a glass to Jacquel. It was a fine beer, bitter and dark. Good beer, said Shadow. We brew it ourselves, said Ibis. In the old days the women did the brewing. They were better brewers than we are. But now it is only the three of us here. Me, him, and her. He gestured toward the small brown cat, fast asleep in a cat-basket in the corner of the room. There were more of us, in the beginning. But Set left us to explore, what, two hundred years ago? Must be, by now. We got a postcard from him from San Francisco in 1905, 1906. Then nothing. While poor Horus he trailed off, in a sigh, and shook his head. |
| 870 |
I still see him, on occasion, said Jacquel. On my way to a pickup. He sipped his beer. I'll work for my keep, said Shadow. While I'm here. You tell me what you need doing, and I'll do it. Well find work for you, agreed Jacquel. The small brown cat opened her eyes and stretched to her feet. She padded across the kitchen floor and pushed at Shadows boot with her head. He put down his left hand and scratched her forehead and the back of her ears and the scruff of her neck. She arched, ecstatically, then sprang into his lap, pushed herself up against his chest, and touched her cold nose to his. Then she curled up in his lap and went back to sleep. He put his hand down to stroke her: her fur was soft, and she was warm and pleasant in his lap; she acted like she was in the safest place in the world, and Shadow felt comforted. The beer left a pleasant buzz in Shadows head. Your room is at the top of the stairs, by the bathroom, said Jacquel. Your work clothes will be hanging in the closetyou'll see. you'll want to wash up and shave first, I guess. Shadow did. He showered standing in the cast-iron tub and he shaved, very nervously, with a straight razor that Jacquel loaned him. It was obscenely sharp, and had a mother-of-pearl handle, and Shadow suspected it was usually used to give dead men their final shave. He had never used a straight razor before, but he did not cut himself. He washed off the shaving cream, looked at himself naked in the fly-specked bathroom mirror. He was bruised: fresh bruises on his chest and arms overlaying the fading bruises that Mad Sweeney had left him. His eyes looked back mistrustfully from the mirror at him. And then, as if someone else were holding his hand, he raised the straight razor, placed it, blade open, against his throat. It would be a way out, he thought. An easy way out. And if theres anyone whod simply take it in their stride, whod just clean up the mess and get on with things, its the two guys sitting downstairs at the kitchen table drinking their beer. |
| 871 |
No more worries. No more Laura. No more mysteries and conspiracies. No more bad dreams. Just peace and quiet and rest forever. One clean slash, ear to ear. that's all itll take. He stood there with the razor against his throat. A tiny smudge of blood came from the place where the blade touched the skin. He had not even noticed a cut. See, he told himself, and he could almost hear the words being whispered in his ear. Its painless. Too sharp to hurt. I'll be gone before I know it. Then the door to the bathroom swung open, just a few inches, enough for the little brown cat to put her head around the door frame and Mrr? up at him curiously. Hey, he said to the cat. I thought I locked that door. He closed the cutthroat razor, put it down on the side of the sink, dabbed at his tiny cut with a toilet paper swab. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the bedroom next door. His bedroom, like the kitchen, seemed to have been decorated some time in the 1920s: there was a washstand and a pitcher beside the chest of drawers and mirror. Someone had already laid out clothes for him on the bed: a black suit, white shirt, black tie, white undershirt and underpants, black socks. Black shoes sat on the worn Persian carpet beside the bed. He dressed himself. The clothes were of good quality, although none of them was new. He wondered who they had belonged to. Was he wearing a dead mans socks? Would he be stepping into a dead mans shoes? He adjusted the tie in the mirror and now it seemed to him that his reflection was smiling at him, sardonically. Now it seemed inconceivable to him that he had ever thought of cutting his throat. His reflection continued to smile as he adjusted his tie. Hey, he said to it. You know something that I don't? and immediately felt foolish. The door creaked open and the cat slipped between the doorpost and the door and padded across the room, then up on the windowsill. Hey, he said to the cat. I did shut that door. I know I shut that door. She looked at him, interested. |
| 872 |
Her eyes were dark yellow, the color of amber. Then she jumped down from the sill onto the bed, where she wrapped herself into a curl of fur and went back to sleep, a circle of cat upon the old counterpane. Shadow left the bedroom door open, so the cat could leave and the room air a little, and he walked downstairs. The stairs creaked and grumbled as he walked down them, protesting his weight, as if they just wanted to be left in peace. Damn, you look good, said Jacquel. He was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and was now himself dressed in a black suit similar to Shadows. You ever driven a hearse? No. First time for everything, then, said Jacquel. Its parked out front. * * * An old woman had died. Her name had been Lila Goodchild. At Mr. Jacquels direction, Shadow carried the folded aluminum gurney up the narrow stairs to her bedroom and unfolded it next to her bed. He took out a translucent blue plastic body bag, laid it next to the dead woman on the bed, and unzipped it open. She wore a pink nightgown and a quilted robe. Shadow lifted her and wrapped her, fragile and almost weightless, in a blanket, and placed it onto the bag. He zipped the bag shut and put it on the gurney. While Shadow did this, Jacquel talked to a very old man who had, when she was alive, been married to Lila Goodchild. Or rather, Jacquel listened while the old man talked. As Shadow had zipped Mrs. Goodchild away, the old man had been explaining how ungrateful his children had been, and grandchildren too, though that wasnt their fault, that was their parents, the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and he thought hed raised them better than that. Shadow and Jacquel wheeled the loaded gurney to the narrow flight of stairs. The old man followed them, still talking, mostly about money, and greed, and ingratitude. He wore bedroom slippers. Shadow carried the heavier bottom end of the gurney down the stairs and out onto the street, then he wheeled it along the icy sidewalk to the hearse. Jacquel opened the hearses rear door. |
| 873 |
Shadow hesitated, and Jacquel said, Just push it on in there. The supportsll fold up out of the way. Shadow pushed the gurney, and the supports snapped up, the wheels rotated, and the gurney rolled right onto the floor of the hearse. Jacquel showed him how to strap it in securely, and Shadow closed up the hearse while Jacquel listened to the old man who had been married to Lila Goodchild, unmindful of the cold, an old man in his slippers and his bathrobe out on the wintry sidewalk telling Jacquel how his children were vultures, no better than hovering vultures, waiting to take what little he and Lila had scraped together, and how the two of them had fled to St. Louis, to Memphis, to Miami, and how they wound up in Cairo, and how relieved he was that Lila had not died in a nursing home, how scared he was that he would. They walked the old man back into the house, up the stairs to his room. A small TV set droned from one corner of the couples bedroom. As Shadow passed it he noticed that the newsreader was grinning and winking at him. When he was sure that no one was looking in his direction he gave the set the finger. Theyve got no money, said Jacquel when they were back in the hearse. Hell come in to see Ibis tomorrow. Hell choose the cheapest funeral. Her friends will persuade him to do her right, give her a proper send-off in the front room, I expect. But hell grumble. Got no money. Nobody around heres got money these days. Anyway, hell be dead in six months. A year at the outside. Snowflakes tumbled and drifted in front of the headlights. The snow was coming south. Shadow said, Is he sick? It aint that. Women survive their men. Menmen like himdont live long when their women are gone. you'll seehell just start wandering, all the familiar things are going to be gone with her. He gets tired and he fades and then he gives up and then he's gone. Maybe pneumonia will take him or maybe itll be cancer, or maybe his heart will stop. Old age, and all the fight gone out of you. |
| 874 |
Then you die. Shadow thought. Hey, Jacquel? Yeah. Do you believe in the soul? It wasnt quite the question he had been going to ask, and it took him by surprise to hear it coming from his mouth. He had intended to say something less direct, but there was nothing less direct that he could say. Depends. Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and youd answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, wed feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls. He must have eaten a lot of people. Not as many as youd think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby. Stop here, that gas station. Well put in a few gallons. The streets were quiet, in the way that streets only are when the first snow falls. Its going to be a white Christmas, said Shadow as he pumped the gas. Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin. Jesus? Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, its not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras. You run into Mithras yet? Red cap. Nice kid. No, I don't think so. WellI've never seen Mithras around here. He was an army brat. Maybe he's back in the Middle East, taking it easy, but I expect he's probably gone by now. It happens. One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don't even remember your birthday. Swish went the windshield wipers, pushing the snow to the side, bunching the flakes up into knots and swirls of clear ice. A traffic light turned momentarily yellow and then red, and Shadow put his foot on the brake. The hearse fishtailed and swung around on the empty road before it stopped. The light turned green. Shadow took the hearse up to ten miles per hour, which seemed enough on the slippery roads. It was perfectly happy cruising in second gear: he guessed it must have spent a lot of its time at that speed, holding up traffic. |
| 875 |
Thats good, said Jacquel. So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afghanistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are. I think a real storms coming, said Shadow. He was talking about the weather. Jacquel, when, eventually, he began to answer, wasnt talking about the weather at all. You look at me and Ibis, he said. Well be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that? Youve seen Bast. And were in better shape than most of them. At least weve got a little belief to be going along with. Most of the suckers out there have barely got that. Its like the funeral businessthe big guys are going to buy you up one day, like it or not, becauseyou're bigger and more efficient and because they work. Fightings not going to change a damned thing, because we lost this particular battle when we came to this green land a hundred years ago or a thousand or ten thousand. We arrived and America just didn't care that wed arrived. We get bought out, or we press on, or we hit the road. So, yes. you're right. The storms coming. Shadow turned onto the street where the houses were, all but one of them, dead, their windows blind and boarded. Take the back alley, said Jacquel. He backed the hearse up until it was almost touching the double doors at the rear of the house. Ibis opened the hearse, and the mortuary doors, and Shadow unbuckled the gurney and pulled it out. The wheeled supports rotated and dropped as they cleared the bumper. He wheeled the gurney to the embalming table. He picked up Lila Goodchild, cradling her in her opaque bag like a sleeping child, and placed her carefully on the table in the chilly mortuary, as if he were afraid to wake her. |
| 876 |
You know, I have a transfer board, said Jacquel. You don't have to carry her. Aint nothing, said Shadow. He was starting to sound more like Jacquel. I'm a big guy. It doesn't bother me. As a kid Shadow had been small for his age, all elbows and knees. The only photograph of Shadow as a kid that Laura had liked enough to frame showed a solemn child with unruly hair and dark eyes standing beside a table laden high with cakes and cookies. Shadow thought the picture might have been taken at an embassy Christmas party, as he had been dressed in a bow tie and his best clothes. They had moved too much, his mother and Shadow, first around Europe, from embassy to embassy, where his mother had worked as a communicator in the Foreign Service, transcribing and sending classified telegrams across the world, and then, when he was eight years old, back to the United States, where his mother, now too sporadically sick to hold down a steady job, had moved from city to city restlessly, spending a year here or a year there, temping when she was well enough. They never spent long enough in any place for Shadow to make friends, to feel at home, to relax. And Shadow had been a small child He had grown so fast. In the spring of his thirteenth year the local kids had been picking on him, goading him into fights they knew they could not fail to win and after which Shadow would run, angry and often weeping, to the boys room to wash the mud or the blood from his face before anyone could see it. Then came summer, a long, magical thirteenth summer, which he spent keeping out of the way of the bigger kids, swimming in the local pool, reading library books at poolside. At the start of the summer he could barely swim. By the end of August he was swimming length after length in an easy crawl, diving from the high board, ripening to a deep brown from the sun and the water. In September, he returned to school to discover that the boys who had made him miserable were small, soft things no longer capable of upsetting him. |
| 877 |
Her nails were needle-sharp and they pierced his sides, raking them, but he felt no pain, only pleasure, everything was transmuted by some alchemy into moments of utter pleasure. He struggled to find himself, struggled to talk, his head now filled with sand dunes and desert winds. Who are you? he asked again, gasping for the words. She stared at him with eyes the color of dark amber, then lowered her mouth to his and kissed him with a passion, kissed him so completely and so deeply that there, on the bridge over the lake, in his prison cell, in the bed in the Cairo funeral home, he almost came. He rode the sensation like a kite riding a hurricane, willing it not to crest, not to explode, wanting it never to end. He pulled it under control. He had to warn her. My wife, Laura. She will kill you. Not me, she said. A fragment of nonsense bubbled up from somewhere in his mind: In medieval days it was said that a woman on top during coitus would conceive a bishop. That was what they called it: trying for a bishop He wanted to know her name, but he dared not ask her a third time, and she pushed her chest against his, and he could feel the hard nubs of her nipples against his chest, and she was squeezing him, somehow squeezing him down there deep inside her and this time he could not ride it or surf it, this time it picked him up and spun and tumbled him away, and he was arching up, pushing into her as deeply as he could imagine, as if they were, in some way, part of the same creature, tasting, drinking, holding, wanting Let it happen, she said, her voice a throaty feline growl. Give it to me. Let it happen. And he came, spasming and dissolving, the back of his mind itself liquefying, then sublimating slowly from one state to the next. Somewhere in there, at the end of it, he took a breath, a clear draught of air he felt all the way down to the depths of his lungs, and he knew that he had been holding his breath for a long time now. Three years, at least. Perhaps even longer. |
| 878 |
Now rest, she said, and she kissed his eyelids with her soft lips. Let it go. Let it all go. The sleep he slept after that was deep and dreamless and comforting, and Shadow dived deep and embraced it. * * * The light was strange. It was, he checked his watch, 6:45 A. M., and still dark outside, although the room was filled with a pale blue dimness. He climbed out of bed. He was certain that he had been wearing pajamas when he went to bed, but now he was naked, and the air was cold on his skin. He walked to the window and closed it. There had been a snowstorm in the night: six inches had fallen, perhaps more. The corner of the town that Shadow could see from his window, dirty and run-down, had been transformed into somewhere clean and different: these houses were not abandoned and forgotten, they were frosted into elegance. The streets had vanished completely, lost beneath a white field of snow. There was an idea that hovered at the edge of his perception. Something about transience. It flickered and was gone. He could see as well as if it were full daylight. In the mirror, Shadow noticed something strange. He stepped closer, and stared, puzzled. All his bruises had vanished. He touched his side, pressing firmly with his fingertips, feeling for one of the deep pains that told him he had encountered Mr. Stone and Mr. Wood, hunting for the greening blossoms of bruise that Mad Sweeney had gifted him with, and finding nothing. His face was clear and unmarked. His sides, however, and his back (he twisted to examine it) were scratched with what looked like claw marks. He hadn't dreamed it, then. Not entirely. Shadow opened the drawers, and put on what he found: an ancient pair of blue-denim Levis, a shirt, a thick blue sweater, and a black undertakers coat he found hanging in the wardrobe at the back of the room. 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. |
| 879 |
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. Shadow walked. Mad Sweeney walked, and sometimes he staggered. The police car cruised past them slowly, then turned and went back into the city, accelerating down the snowy road. Now, why don't you tell me whats troubling you, said Shadow. I did it like he said. I did it all like he said, but I gave you the wrong coin. It wasnt meant to be that coin. that's for royalty. You see? I shouldn't even have been able to take it. that's the coin youd give to the king of America himself. Not some pissant bastard like you or me. And now I'm in big trouble. Just give me the coin back, man. you'll never see me again, if you do, I sweartofuckenBran, okay? I swear by the years I spent in the fucken trees. You did it like who said, Sweeney? Grimnir. The dude you call Wednesday, You know who he is? Who he really is? Yeah. I guess. There was a panicked look in the Irishmans crazy blue eyes. It was nothing bad. Nothing you cannothing bad. He just told me to be there at that bar and to pick a fight with you. He said he wanted to see what you were made of. He tell you to do anything else? Sweeney shivered and twitched; Shadow thought it was the cold for a moment, then knew where hed seen that shuddering shiver before. In prison: it was a junkie shiver. |
| 880 |
Sweeney was in withdrawal from something, and Shadow would have been willing to bet it was heroin. A junkie leprechaun? Mad Sweeney pinched off the burning head of his cigarette, dropped it on the ground, put the unfinished yellowing rest of it into his pocket. He rubbed his dirt-black fingers together, breathed on them to try and rub warmth into them. His voice was a whine now, Listen, just give me the fucken coin, man. I'll give you another, just as good. Hell, I'll give you a shitload of the fuckers. He took off his greasy baseball cap, then, with his right hand, he stroked the air, producing a large golden coin. He dropped it into his cap. And then he took another from a wisp of breath steam, and another, catching and grabbing them from the still morning air until the baseball cap was brimming with them and Sweeney was forced to hold it with both hands. He extended the baseball cap filled with gold to Shadow. Here, he said. Take them, man. Just give me back the coin I gave to you. Shadow looked down at the cap, wondered how much its contents would be worth. Where am I going to spend those coins, Mad Sweeney? Shadow asked. Are there a lot of places you can turn your gold into cash? He thought the Irishman was going to hit him for a moment, but the moment passed and Mad Sweeney just stood there, holding out his gold-filled cap with both hands like Oliver Twist. And then tears swelled in his blue eyes and began to spill down his cheeks. He took the cap and put itnow empty of everything except a greasy sweatbandback over his thinning scalp. You gotta, man, he was saying. didn't I show you how to do it? I showed you how to take coins from the hoard. I showed you where the hoard was. Just give me that first coin back. It didn't belong to me. I don't have it anymore. Mad Sweeneys tears stopped, and spots of color appeared in his cheeks. You, you fucken he said, and then the words failed him and his mouth opened and closed, wordlessly. I'm telling you the truth, said Shadow. |
| 881 |
I'm sorry. If I had it I'd give it back to you. But I gave it away. Sweeneys grimy hands clamped on Shadows shoulders, and the pale blue eyes stared into his. The tears had made streaks in the dirt on Mad Sweeneys face. Shit, he said. Shadow could smell tobacco and stale beer and whiskey-sweat. you're telling the truth, you fucker. Gave it away and freely and of your own will. Damn your dark eyes, you gave it a-fucken-way. I'm sorry. Shadow remembered the whispering thump the coin had made as it landed on Lauras casket. Sorry or not, I'm damned and I'm doomed. He wiped his nose and his eyes on his sleeves, muddying his face into strange patterns. Shadow squeezed Mad Sweeneys upper arm in an awkward male gesture. Twere better I had never been conceived, said Mad Sweeney, at length. Then he looked up. The fellow you gave it to. Would he give it back? Its a woman. And I don't know where she is. But no, I don't believe she would. Sweeney sighed, mournfully. When I was but a young pup, he said, there was a woman I met, under the stars, who let me play with her bubbies, and she told me my fortune. She told me that I would be undone and abandoned west of the sunset, and that a dead womans bauble would seal my fate. And I laughed and poured more barley wine and played with her bubbies some more, and I kissed her full on her pretty lips. Those were the good daysthe first of the gray monks had not yet come to our land, nor had they ridden the green sea to westward. And now. He stopped, midsentence. His head turned and he focused on Shadow. You shouldn't trust him, he said, reproachfully. Who? Wednesday. You mustn't trust him. I don't have to trust him. I work for him. Do you remember how to do it? What? Shadow felt he was having a conversation with half a dozen different people. The self-styled leprechaun sputtered and jumped from persona to persona, from theme to theme, as if the remaining clusters of brain cells were igniting, flaming, and then going out for good. The coins, man. |
| 882 |
Good luck, said Shadow. Hell, I'm fucked, said Mad Sweeney. Whatever. Thanks. Shadow walked back toward the town. It was 8:00 A. M. and Cairo was waking. He glanced back to the bridge and saw Sweeneys pale face, striped with tears and dirt, watching him go. It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive. * * * The brief winter days leading up to Christmas were like moments of light between the winter darknesses, and they fled fast in the house of the dead. 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? Shadow drove carefully down the street. |
| 883 |
The snowplows had cleaned the roads by now, but he was comfortable driving slowly. It seemed right to go slow in a hearse, although he could barely remember the last time he had seen a hearse on the streets. Death had vanished from the streets of America, thought Shadow; now it happened in hospital rooms and in ambulances. We must not startle the living, thought Shadow. Mr. Ibis had told him that they move the dead about in some hospitals on the lower level of apparently empty covered gurneys, the deceased traveling their own paths in their own covered ways. A dark blue police cruiser was parked on a side street, and Shadow pulled up the hearse behind it. There were two cops inside the cruiser, drinking their coffee from thermos tops. They had the engine running to keep warm. Shadow tapped on the side window. Yeah? I'm from the funeral home, said Shadow. Were waiting for the medical examiner, said the cop. Shadow wondered if it was the same man who had spoken to him under the bridge. The cop, who was black, got out of the car, leaving his colleague in the drivers seat, and walked Shadow back to a Dumpster. Mad Sweeney was sitting in the snow beside the Dumpster. There was an empty green bottle in his lap, a dusting of snow and ice on his face and baseball cap and shoulders. He didn't blink. Dead wino, said the cop. Looks like it, said Shadow. don't touch anything yet, said the cop. Medical examiner should be here any time now. You ask me, the guy drank himself into a stupor and froze his ass. Yes, agreed Shadow. that's certainly what it looks like. He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeneys lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place. A small green Nissan pulled up, and a harassed middle-aged man with sandy hair and a sandy mustache got out, walked over. He touched the corpses neck. He kicks the corpse, thought Shadow, and if it doesn't kick him back he's dead, said the medical examiner. Any ID? he's a John Doe, said the cop. The medical examiner looked at Shadow. |
| 884 |
You working for Jacquel and Ibis? he asked. Yes, said Shadow. Tell Jacquel to get dentals and prints for ID and identity photos. We don't need a post. He should just draw blood for toxicology. Got that? Do you want me to write it down for you? No, said Shadow. Its fine. I can remember. The man scowled fleetingly, then pulled a business card from his wallet, scribbled on it, and gave it to Shadow, saying, Give this to Jacquel. Then the medical examiner said Merry Christmas to everyone, and was on his way. The cops kept the empty bottle. Shadow signed for the John Doe and put it on the gurney. The body was pretty stiff, and Shadow couldn't get it out of a sitting position. He fiddled with the gurney, and found out that he could prop up one end. He strapped John Doe, sitting, to the gurney and put him in the back of the hearse, facing forward. Might as well give him a good ride. He closed the rear curtains. Then he drove back to the funeral home. The hearse was stopped at a traffic light when Shadow heard a voice croak, And its a fine wake I'll be wanting, with the best of everything, and beautiful women shedding tears and their clothes in their distress, and brave men lamenting and telling fine tales of me in my great days. you're dead, Mad Sweeney, said Shadow. You take whatyou're given whenyou're dead. Aye, that I shall, sighed the dead man sitting in the back of the hearse. The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency. The light turned green and Shadow put his foot gently down on the gas. But give me a wake, nonetheless, said Mad Sweeney. Set me a place at table and give me a stinking drunk wake tonight. You killed me, Shadow. You owe me that much. I never killed you, Mad Sweeney, said Shadow. Its twenty dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. It was the drink and the cold killed you, not me. There was no reply, and there was silence in the car for the rest of the journey. |
| 885 |
After he parked at the back, Shadow wheeled the gurney out of the hearse and into the mortuary. He manhandled Mad Sweeney onto the embalming table as if he were hauling a side of beef. He covered the John Doe with a sheet and left him there, with the paperwork beside him. As he went up the back stairs he thought he heard a voice, quiet and muted, like a radio playing in a distant room, which said, And what would drink or cold be doing killing me, a leprechaun of the blood? No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead, as sure as waters wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end. Shadow wanted to point out to Mad Sweeney that that was a kind of bitter philosophy, but he suspected it was the being dead that made you bitter. He went upstairs to the main house, where a number of middle-aged women were putting Saran Wrap on casserole dishes, popping the Tupperware tops onto plastic pots of cooling fried potatoes and macaroni and cheese. Mr. Goodchild, the husband of the deceased, had Mr. Ibis against a wall, and was telling him how he knew none of his children would come out to pay their respects to their mother. The apple don't fall far from the tree, he told anyone who would listen to him. The apple don't fall far from the tree. * * * That evening Shadow laid an extra place at the table. He put a glass at each place, and a bottle of Jameson Gold in the middle of the table. It was the most expensive Irish whiskey they sold at the liquor store. After they ate (a large platter of leftovers left for them by the women) Shadow poured a generous tot into each glasshis, Ibiss, Jacques, and, Mad Sweeneys. 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. |
| 886 |
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. 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? |
| 887 |
asked Shadow. It is not. Is it a gadget of some kind? Something up your sleeve or elsewhere that shoots the coins up for you to catch? It is not that neither. More whiskey, anybody? I read in a book about a way of doing the misers dream with latex covering the palm of your hand, making a skin-colored pouch for the coins to hide behind. This is a sad wake for Great Sweeney who flew like a bird across all of Ireland and ate watercress in his madness: to be dead and unmourned save for a bird, a dog, and an idiot. No, it is not a pouch. Well, that's pretty much it for ideas, said Shadow. I expect you just take them out of nowhere. It was meant to be sarcasm, but then he saw the expression on Sweeneys face. You do, he said. You do take them from nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere, said Mad Sweeney. But nowyou're getting the idea. You take them from the hoard. The hoard, said Shadow, starting to remember. Yes. You just have to hold it in your mind, and its yours to take from. The suns treasure. Its there in those moments when the world makes a rainbow. Its there in the moment of eclipse and the moment of the storm. And he showed Shadow how to do the thing. This time Shadow got it. * * * Shadows head ached and pounded, and his tongue tasted and felt like flypaper. He squinted at the glare of the daylight. He had fallen asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He was fully dressed, although he had at some point taken off his black tie. He walked downstairs, to the mortuary, and was relieved but unsurprised to see that John Doe was still on the embalming table. Shadow pried the empty bottle of Jameson Gold from the corpses rigor-mortised fingers and threw it away. He could hear someone moving about in the house above. Mr. Wednesday was sitting at the kitchen table when Shadow went upstairs. He was eating leftover potato salad from a Tupperware container with a plastic spoon. He wore a dark gray suit, a white shirt, and a deep gray tie: the morning sun glittered on the silver tie pin in the shape of a tree. |
| 888 |
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. Shadow darted a look around the kitchen and out into the hall. Do you know where Ibis and Jacquel are? Indeed I do. They are burying Mrs. Lila Goodchildsomething that they would probably have liked your help in doing, but I asked them not to wake you. You have a long drive ahead of you. Were leaving? Within the hour. I should say goodbye. Goodbyes are overrated. you'll see them again, I have no doubt, before this affair is done. For the first time since that first night, Shadow observed, the small brown cat was curled up in her basket. She opened her incurious amber eyes and watched him go. So Shadow left the house of the dead. Ice sheathed the winter-black bushes and trees as if theyd been insulated, made into dreams. The path was slippery. Wednesday led the way to Shadows white Chevy Nova, parked out on the road. It had been recently cleaned, and the Wisconsin plates had been removed, replaced with Minnesota plates. Wednesdays luggage was already stacked in the backseat. Wednesday unlocked the car with keys that were duplicates of the ones Shadow had in his own pocket. I'll drive, said Wednesday. Itll be at least an hour beforeyou're good for anything. They drove north, the Mississippi on their left, a wide silver stream beneath a gray sky. Shadow saw, perched on a leafless gray tree beside the road, a huge brown-and-white hawk, which stared down at them with mad eyes as they drove toward it, then took to the wing and rose in slow and powerful circles. |
| 889 |
They ate their Christmas lunch late in the afternoon in a hall-like family restaurant in northern central Wisconsin. Shadow picked cheerlessly at the dry turkey, jam-sweet red lumps of cranberry sauce, tough-as-wood roasted potatoes, and violently green canned peas. From the way he attacked it, and the way he smacked his lips, Wednesday seemed to be enjoying the food. As the meal progressed he became positively expansivetalking, joking, and, whenever she came close enough, flirting with the waitress, a thin blonde girl who looked scarcely old enough to have dropped out of high school. Excuse me, mdear, but might I trouble you for another cup of your delightful hot chocolate? And I trust you won't think me too forward if I say what a mightily fetching and becoming dress that is. Festive, yet classy. The waitress, who wore a bright red-and-green skirt edged with glittering silver tinsel, giggled and colored and smiled happily, and went off to get Wednesday another mug of hot chocolate. Fetching, said Wednesday, thoughtfully, watching her go. Becoming, he said. Shadow did not think he was talking about the dress. Wednesday shoveled the final slice of turkey into his mouth, flicked at his beard with his napkin, and pushed his plate forward. Aaah. Good. He looked around him, at the family restaurant. In the background a tape of Christmas songs was playing: the little drummer boy had no gifts to bring, parupapom-pom, rapappom pom, rapappom pom. Some things may change, said Wednesday, abruptly. People, howeverpeople stay the same. Some gifts last forever, others are swallowed soon enough by time and by the world. My favorite gift of all is no longer practical. Still, a surprising number of gifts are timelessthe Spanish Prisoner, the Pigeon Drop, the Fawney Rig (thats the Pigeon Drop but with a gold ring instead of a wallet), the Fiddle Game I've never heard of the Fiddle Game, said Shadow. I think I've heard of the others. My old cellmate said hed actually done the Spanish Prisoner. |
| 890 |
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. 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. |
| 891 |
Why! he says, this isit must beno, it cannot bebut yes, there it ismy lord! But this is unbelievable! and he points to the makers mark, on a strip of browning paper inside the violinbut still, he says, even without it he would have known it by the color of the varnish, by the scroll, by the shape. Now Barrington reaches inside his pocket and produces an engraved business card, proclaiming him to be a preeminent dealer in rare and antique musical instruments. So this violin is rare? asks mine host. Indeed it is, says Barrington, still admiring it with awe, and worth in excess of a hundred thousand dollars, unless I miss my guess. Even as a dealer in such things I would pay fiftyno, seventy-five thousand dollars, good cash money, for such an exquisite piece. I have a man on the West Coast who would buy it tomorrow, sight unseen, with one telegram, and pay whatever I asked for it. And then he consults his watch, and his face falls. My train he says. I have scarcely enough time to catch my train! Good sir, when the owner of this inestimable instrument should return, please give him my card, for, alas, I must be away. And with that, Barrington leaves, a man who knows that time and the train wait for no man. Mine host examines the violin, curiosity mingling with cupidity in his veins, and a plan begins to bubble up through his mind. But the minutes go by, and Abraham does not return. And now it is late, and through the door, shabby but proud, comes our Abraham, our fiddle player, and he holds in his hands a wallet, a wallet that has seen better days, a wallet that has never contained more than a hundred dollars on its best day, and from it he takes the money to pay for his meal or his stay, and he asks for the return of his violin. Mine host puts the fiddle in its case on the counter, and Abraham takes it like a mother cradling her child. Tell me, says the host (with the engraved card of a man wholl pay fifty thousand dollars, good cash money, burning his inside breast pocket), how much is a violin like this worth? |
| 892 |
For my niece has a yearning on her to play the fiddle, and its her birthday coming up in a week or so. Sell this fiddle? says Abraham. I could never sell her. I've had her for twenty years, I have, fiddled in every state of the union with her. And to tell the truth, she cost me all of five hundred dollars back when I bought her. Mine host keeps the smile from his face. Five hundred dollars? What if I were to offer you a thousand dollars for it, here and now? The fiddle player looks delighted, then crestfallen, and he says, But lordy, I'm a fiddle player, sir, its all I know how to do. This fiddle knows me and she loves me, and my fingers know her so well I could play an air upon her in the dark. Where will I find another that sounds so fine? A thousand dollars is good money, but this is my livelihood. Not a thousand dollars, not for five thousand. Mine host sees his profits shrinking, but this is business, and you must spend money to make money. Eight thousand dollars, he says. Its not worth that, but I've taken a fancy to it, and I do love and indulge my niece. Abraham is almost in tears at the thought of losing his beloved fiddle, but how can he say no to eight thousand dollars? especially when mine host goes to the wall safe and removes not eight but nine thousand dollars, all neatly banded and ready to be slipped into the fiddle players threadbare pocket. you're a good man, he tells his host. you're a saint! But you must swear to take care of my girl! and, reluctantly, he hands over his violin. But what if mine host simply hands over Barringtons card and tells Abraham that he's come into some good fortune? asked Shadow. Then were out the cost of two dinners, said Wednesday. He wiped the remaining gravy and leftovers from his plate with a slice of bread, which he ate with lip-smacking relish. Let me see if I've got it straight, said Shadow. So Abraham leaves, nine thousand dollars the richer, and in the parking lot by the train station he and Barrington meet up. They split the money, get into Barringtons Model A Ford, and head for the next town. |
| 893 |
I guess in the trunk of that car they must have a box filled with hundred-dollar violins. I personally made it a point of honor never to pay more than five dollars for any of them, said Wednesday. Then he turned to the hovering waitress. Now, my dear, regale us with your description of the sumptuous desserts available to us on this, our Lords natal day. He stared at herit was almost a leeras if nothing that she could offer him would be as toothsome a morsel as herself. Shadow felt deeply uncomfortable: it was like watching an old wolf stalking a fawn too young to know that if it did not run, and run now, it would wind up in a distant glade with its bones picked clean by the ravens. The girl blushed once more and told them that dessert was apple pie a la modeThats with a scoop of vanilla ice creamChristmas cake a la mode, or a red-and-green whipped pudding. Wednesday stared into her eyes and told her that he would try the Christmas cake a la mode. Shadow passed. Now, as grifts go, said Wednesday, the fiddle game goes back three hundred years or more. And if you pick your chicken correctly you could still play it anywhere in America tomorrow. I thought you said that your favorite grift was no longer practical, said Shadow. I did indeed. However, that is not my favorite. No, my favorite was one they called the Bishop Game. It had everything: excitement, subterfuge, portability, surprise. Perhaps, I think from time to time, perhaps with a little modification, it might he thought for a moment, then shook his head. No. Its time has passed. It is, let us say, 1920, in a city of medium to large sizeChicago, perhaps, or New York, or Philadelphia. We are in a jewelers emporium. A man dressed as a clergymanand not just any clergyman, but a bishop, in his purpleenters and picks out a necklacea gorgeous and glorious confection of diamonds and pearls, and pays for it with a dozen of the crispest hundred-dollar bills. Theres a smudge of green ink on the topmost bill and the store owner, apologetically but firmly, sends the stack of bills to the bank on the corner to be checked. |
| 894 |
And passing yourself off as a man of the church. You should be ashamed, he says, as he claps the handcuffs on the bishop, who is obviously no bishop, and he marches him away, but not before he gives the jeweler a receipt for both the necklace and the twelve hundred counterfeit dollars. Its evidence, after all. Was it really counterfeit? asked Shadow. Of course not! Fresh banknotes, straight from the bank, only with a thumbprint and a smudge of green ink on a couple of them to make them a little more interesting. Shadow sipped his coffee. It was worse than prison coffee. So the cop was obviously no cop. And the necklace? Evidence, said Wednesday. He unscrewed the top from the salt shaker, poured a little heap of salt on the table. But the jeweler gets a receipt, and assurance that hell get the necklace straight back as soon as Soapy comes to trial. He is congratulated on being a good citizen, and he watches proudly, already thinking of the tale hell have to tell at the next meeting of the Oddfellows tomorrow night, as the policeman marches the man pretending to be a bishop out of the store, twelve-hundred-dollars in one pocket, a twelve hundred dollar diamond necklace in the other, on their way to a police station thatll never see hide nor hair of either of them. The waitress had returned to clear the table. Tell me my dear, said Wednesday. Are you married? She shook her head. Astonishing that a young lady of such loveliness has not yet been snapped up. He was doodling with his fingernail in the spilled salt, making squat, blocky, runelike shapes. The waitress stood passively beside him, reminding Shadow less of a fawn and more of a young rabbit caught in an eighteen-wheelers headlights, frozen in fear and indecision. 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. |
| 895 |
Wednesday touched the back of her hand, fleetingly, with the tips of his fingers, leaving crumbs of salt on her skin. She made no attempt to wipe them off. To us, he said, his voice an almost inaudible rumble, it shall be a pleasure palace. The waitress looked at him. She bit her thin lips, hesitated, then nodded and fled for the kitchen. Cmon, said Shadow. She looks barely legal. I've never been overly concerned about legality, Wednesday told him. And I need her, not as an end in herself, but to wake me up a little. Even King David knew that there is one easy prescription to get warm blood flowing through an old frame: take one virgin, call me in the morning. Shadow caught himself wondering if the girl on night duty in the hotel back in Eagle Point had been a virgin. don't you ever worry about disease? he asked. What if you knock her up? What if she's got a brother? No, said Wednesday. I don't worry about diseases. I don't catch them. Unfortunatelyfor the most partpeople like me fire blanks, so theres not a great deal of interbreeding. It used to happen in the old days. Nowadays, its possible, but so unlikely as to be almost unimaginable. So no worries there. And many girls have brothers, and fathers. Its not my problem. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I've left town already. So were staying here for the night? Wednesday rubbed his chin. I shall stay in the Motel 6, he said. Then he put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a front door key, bronze-colored, with a card tag attached on which was typed an address: 502 Northridge Rd, Apt #3. You, on the other hand, have an apartment waiting for you, in a city far from here. Wednesday closed his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them, gray and gleaming and fractionally mismatched, and he said, The Greyhound bus will be coming through town in twenty minutes. It stops at the gas station. Heres your ticket. He pulled out a folded bus ticket, passed it across the table. Shadow picked it up and looked at it. Whos Mike Ainsel? |
| 896 |
he asked. That was the name on the ticket. You are. Merry Christmas. And wheres Lakeside? Your happy home in the months to come. And now, because good things come in threes He took a small, gift-wrapped package from his pocket, pushed it across the table. It sat beside the ketchup bottle with the black smears of dried ketchup on the top. Shadow made no move to take it. Well? Reluctantly, Shadow tore open the red wrapping paper to reveal a fawn-colored calfskin wallet, shiny from use. It was obviously somebodys wallet. Inside the wallet was a drivers license with Shadows photograph on it, in the name of Michael Ainsel, with a Milwaukee address, a MasterCard for M. Ainsel, and twenty crisp fifty-dollar bills. Shadow closed the wallet, put it into an inside pocket. 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. 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. |
| 897 |
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. 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. |
| 898 |
Shadow started to tune them out, blanked everything except the noise of the road, and now only fragments of conversation would come back every now and again. Goldie is, like, such a good dog, and he was a purebred retriever, if only my dad would say okay, he wags his tail whenever he sees me. Its Christmas, he has to let me use the snowmobile. You can write your name with your tongue on the side of his thing. I miss Sandy. Yeah, I miss Sandy too. Six inches tonight they said, but they just make it up, they make up the weather and nobody ever calls them on it And then the brakes of the bus were hissing and the driver was shouting Lakeside! and the doors clunked open. Shadow followed the girls out into the floodlit parking lot of a video store and tanning salon that functioned, Shadow guessed, as Lakesides Greyhound station. The air was dreadfully cold, but it was a fresh cold. It woke him up. He stared at the lights of the town to the south and the west, and pale expanse of a frozen lake to the east. The girls were standing in the lot, stamping and blowing on their hands dramatically. One of them, the younger one, snuck a look at Shadow, smiled awkwardly when she realized that he had seen her do so. Merry Christmas, said Shadow. Yeah, said the other girl, perhaps a year or so older than the first, Merry Christmas to you too. She had carroty red hair and a snub nose covered with a hundred thousand freckles. Nice town you got here, said Shadow. We like it, said the younger one. She was the one who liked animals. She gave Shadow a shy grin, revealing blue rubber-band braces stretching across her front teeth. You look like somebody, she told him, gravely. Are you somebodys brother or somebodys son or something? You are such a spaz, Alison, said her friend. Everybodys somebodys son or brother or something. That wasnt what I meant, said Alison. Headlights framed them all for one brilliant white moment. Behind the headlights was a station wagon with a mother in it, and in moments it took the girls and their bags away, leaving Shadow standing alone in the parking lot. |
| 899 |
Young man? Anything I can do for you? The old man was locking up the video store. He pocketed his keys. Store aint open Christmas, he told Shadow cheerfully. But I come down to meet the bus. Make sure everything was okay. couldn't live with myself if some poor sould found emselves stranded on Christmas Day. He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped lifes vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that. Well, you could give me the number of the local taxi company, said Shadow. I could, said the old man, doubtfully, but Tomll be in his bed this time of night, and even if you could rouse him you'll get no satisfaction I saw him down at the Buck Stops Here earlier this evening, and he was very merry. Very merry indeed. Where is ityou're aiming to go? Shadow showed him the address tag on the door key. Well, he said, that's a ten-, mebbe a twenty-minute walk over the bridge and around. But its no fun when its this cold, and when you don't know whereyou're going it always seems longeryou ever notice that? First time takes forever, and then ever after its over in a flash? Yes, said Shadow. I've never thought of it like that. But I guess its true. The old man nodded. His face cracked into a grin. What the heck, its Christmas. I'll run you over there in Tessie. Shadow followed the old man to the road, where a huge old roadster was parked. It looked like something that gangsters might have been proud to drive in the Roaring Twenties, running boards and all. It was a deep dark color under the sodium lights that might have been red and might have been green. This is Tessie, the old man said. Aint she a beaut? He patted her proprietorially, where the hood curved up and arched over the front nearside wheel. What make is she? asked Shadow. she's a Wendt Phoenix. Wendt went under in 31, name was bought by Chrysler, but they never made any more Wendts. Harvey Wendt, who founded the company, was a local boy. |
| 900 |
Went out to California, killed himself in, oh, 1941, 42. Great tragedy. The car smelled of leather and old cigarette smokenot a fresh smell, but as if enough people had smoked enough cigarettes and cigars in the car over the years that the smell of burning tobacco had become part of the fabric of the car. The old man turned the key in the ignition and Tessie started first time. Tomorrow, he told Shadow, she goes into the garage. I'll cover her with a dust sheet, and that's where shell stay until spring. Truth of the matter is I shouldn't be driving her right now, with the snow on the ground. doesn't she ride well in snow? Rides just fine. Its the salt they put on the roads. Rusts these old beauties faster than you could believe. You want to go door to door, or would you like the moonlight grand tour of the town? I don't want to trouble you Its no trouble. You get to be my age, you're grateful for the least wink of sleep. I'm lucky if I get five hours a night nowadayswake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My names Hinzelmann. I'd say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I'd shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I'm not paying attention. Mike Ainsel, said Shadow. Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann. 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. |
| 901 |
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. 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. |
| 902 |
Now he was the finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. Now, I'm younger and feistier back then than I am now, and though it had started snowing before Halloween that year, now it was Thanksgiving and there was clean snow on the ground, fresh as anything, and I could see the bucks footprints. It looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic. Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he's just looking at me. That very moment, the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comestemperature must have fallen thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets ready to run, and he cant move! he's frozen into the ice. Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to run, but he's iced in and it just isn't going to happen. But theres no way I can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he cant get awaywhat kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires off one shell, straight up into the air. Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein that his legs are iced in, that's just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust. I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn't freeze to death. Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season, he added, helpfully. And if you think theres a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I've got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day. |
| 903 |
Its not a word you ever hear people say. Maybe in movies people say it. Not for real. This isn't a movie, Miz Crow. Black Crow. Its Miz Black Crow. My friends call me Sam. Got it, Sam. Now about this man But you arent my friends. You can call me Miz Black Crow. Listen, you snot-nosed little Its okay, Mister Road. Sam herepardon, maamI mean, Miz Black Crow wants to help us. she's a law-abiding citizen. Maam, we know you helped Shadow. You were seen with him, in a white Chevy Nova. He gave you a ride. He bought you dinner. Did he say anything that could help us in our investigation? Two of our best men have vanished. I never met him. You met him. Please don't make the mistake of thinking were stupid. We arent stupid. Mm. I meet a lot of people. Maybe I met him and forgot already. Maam, it really is to your advantage to cooperate with us. Otherwise, you'll have to introduce me to your friends Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal? Maam, you arent making this any easier on yourself. Gee. I'm sorry. Now, is there anything else? Cos I'm going to say Buh-bye now and close the door and I figure you two are going to go and get into Mister Car and drive away. 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. |
| 904 |
She smelled good. Hot drops of water had fallen from her face to his. He had been scared, and had wailed loudly in his fear. She put him down on the straw, hurriedly, and left the hut, fastening the door behind her. He remembered that moment, and he treasured it, just as he remembered the sweetness of a cabbage heart, the tart taste of plums, the crunch of apples, the greasy delight of roasted fish. And now he saw the faces in the firelight, all of them looking at him as he was led out from the hut for the first time, which was the only time. So that was what people looked like. Raised in darkness, he had never seen faces. Everything was so new. So strange. The bonfire light hurt his eyes. They pulled on the rope around his neck, to lead him to the place where the man waited for him. And when the first blade was raised in the firelight, what a cheer went up from the crowd. The child from the darkness began to laugh with them, in delight and in freedom. And then the blade came down. Shadow opened his eyes and realized that he was hungry and cold, in an apartment with a layer of ice clouding the inside of the window glass. His frozen breath, he thought. He got out of bed, pleased he did not have to get dressed. He scraped at a window with a fingernail as he passed, felt the ice collect under the nail, then melt to water. He tried to remember his dream, but remembered nothing but misery and darkness. He put on his shoes. He figured he would walk into the town center, walk across the bridge across the northern end of the lake, if he had the geography of the town right. He put on his thin jacket, remembering his promise to himself that he would buy himself a warm winter coat, opened the apartment door, and stepped out onto the wooden deck. The cold took his breath away: he breathed in, and felt every hair in his nostrils freeze into rigidity. The deck gave him a fine view of the lake, irregular patches of gray surrounded by an expanse of white. The cold snap had come, that was for sure. |
| 905 |
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. What did Hinzelmann say last nighta ten-minute walk? And Shadow was a big man. He would walk briskly and keep himself warm. He set off south, heading for the bridge. Soon he began to cough, a dry, thin cough, as the bitterly cold air touched his lungs. Soon his ears and face and lips hurt, and then his feet hurt. He thrust his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets, clenched his fingers together trying to find some warmth. He found himself remembering Low Key Lyesmiths tall tales of the Minnesota wintersparticularly the one about a hunter treed by a bear during a hard freeze who took out his dick and pissed an arching yellow stream of steaming urine that was already frozen hard before it hit the ground, then slid down the rock-hard frozen-piss-pole to freedom. A wry smile at the memory and another dry, painful cough. Step after step after step. He glanced back. The apartment building was not as far away as he had expected. This walk, he decided, was a mistake. But he was already three or four minutes from the apartment, and the bridge over the lake was in sight. It made as much sense to press on as to go home (and then what? Call a taxi on the dead phone? Wait for spring? He had no food in the apartment, he reminded himself). He kept walking, revising his estimates of the temperature downward as he walked. Minus ten? Minus twenty? Minus forty, maybe, that strange point on the thermometer when Celsius and Fahrenheit say the same thing. Probably not that cold. But then there was wind chill, and the wind was now hard and steady and continuous, blowing over the lake, coming down from the Arctic across Canada. 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. |
| 906 |
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. Keep walking. I can stop and drink a pail of air when I get home. A Beatles song started in his head, and he adjusted his pace to match it. It was only when he got to the chorus that he realized that he was humming Help. He was almost at the bridge now. Then he had to walk across it, and he would still be another ten minutes from the stores on the west of the lakemaybe a little more A dark car passed him, stopped, then reversed in a foggy cloud of exhaust smoke and came to a halt beside him. A window slid down, and the haze and steam from the window mixed with the exhaust to form a dragons breath that surrounded the car. Everything okay here? said a cop inside. Shadows first, automatic instinct was to say Yup, everythings just fine and jimdandy thank you officer. |
| 907 |
But it was too late for that, and he started to say, I think I'm freezing. I was walking into Lakeside to buy food and clothes, but I underestimated the length of the walkhe was that far through the sentence in his head, when he realized that all that had come out was F-f-freezing, and a chattering noise, and he said, So s-sorry. Cold. Sorry. The cop pulled open the back door of the car and said, You get in there this moment and warm yourself up, okay? Shadow climbed in gratefully, and he sat in the back and rubbed his hands together, trying not to worry about frostbitten toes. The cop got back in the drivers seat. Shadow stared at him through the metal grille. Shadow tried not to think about the last time hed been in the back of a police car, or to notice that there were no door handles in the back, and to concentrate instead on rubbing life back into his hands. His face hurt and his red fingers hurt, and now, in the warmth, his toes were starting to hurt once more. That was, Shadow figured, a good sign. The cop put the car in drive and moved off. You know, that was, he said, not turning to look at Shadow, just talking a little louder, if you'll pardon me saying so, a real stupid thing to do. You didn't hear any of the weather advisories? Its minus thirty out there. God alone knows what the wind-chill is, minus sixty, minus seventy, although I figure whenyou're down at minus thirty, windchills the least of your worries. Thanks, said Shadow. Thanks for stopping. Very, very grateful. Woman in Rhinelander went out this morning to fill her birdfeeder in her robe and carpet slippers and she froze, literally froze, to the sidewalk. she's in intensive care now. It was on the TV this morning. you're new in town. It was almost a question, but the man knew the answer already. I came in on the Greyhound last night. Figured today I'd buy myself some warm clothes, food, and a car. Wasnt expecting this cold. Yeah, said the cop. It took me by surprise as well. I was too busy worrying about global warming. |
| 908 |
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. 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. Then again, the police chief might simply be what he appeared: friendly, helpful, good. A woman bustled over to their table, not fat but big, a big woman in her sixties, her hair bottle-bronze. |
| 909 |
It was too, a savory delight wrapped in hot pastry. They go straight to the belly, said Chad Mulligan, patting his own stomach. I warn you. Okay: So you need a car? With his parka off, he was revealed as a lanky man with a round, apple-belly gut on him. He looked harassed and competent, more like an engineer than cop. Shadow nodded, mouth full. Right. I made some calls. Justin Liebowitzs selling his jeep, wants four thousand dollars for it, will settle for three. The Gunthers have had their Toyota 4-Runner for sale for eight months, ugly sonofabitch, but at this point theyd probably pay you to take it out of their driveway. And if you don't care about ugly, its got to be a great deal. I used the phone in the mens room, left a message for Missy Gunther down at Lakeside Realty, but she wasnt in yet, probably getting her hair done down at Sheilas. The pasty remained good as Shadow chewed his way through it. It was astonishingly filling. Stick-to-your-ribs food, as his mother would have said. Sticks to your sides. So, said Chief of Police Chad Mulligan, wiping the hot-chocolate foam from around his lips. I figure we stop off next at Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, get you a real winter wardrobe, swing by Daves Finest Food so you can fill your larder, then I'll drop you up by Lakeside Realty. If you can put down a thousand up front for the car they'll be happy, otherwise five hundred a month for four months should see them okay. Its an ugly car, like I said, but if the kid hadn't painted it purple itd be a ten-thousand-dollar car, and reliable, and you'll need something like that to get around this winter, you ask me. This is very good of you, said Shadow. But shouldn't you be out catching criminals, not helping newcomers? Not that I'm complaining, you understand. Mabel chuckled. We all tell him that, she said. Mulligan shrugged. Its a good town, he said, simply. Not much trouble. you'll always get someone speeding within city limitswhich is a good thing, as traffic tickets pay my wages. |
| 910 |
Friday, Saturday nights you get some jerk who gets drunk and beats on a spouse and that one can go both ways, believe me. Men and women. But out here things are quiet. They call me out when someones locked their keys in their vehicle. Barking dogs. Every year theres a couple of high school kids caught with weed behind the bleachers. Biggest police case weve had here in five years was when Dan Schwartz got drunk and shot up his own trailer, then he went on the run, down Main Street, in his wheelchair, waving this darn shotgun, shouting that he would shoot anyone who got in his way, that no one would stop him from getting to the interstate. I think he was on his way to Washington to shoot the president. I still laugh whenever I think of Dan heading down the interstate in that wheelchair of his with the bumper sticker on the back. My Juvenile Delinquent is Screwing Your Honor Student. You remember, Mabel? She nodded, lips pursed. She did not seem to find it as funny as Mulligan did. What did you do? asked Shadow. I talked to him. He gave me the shotgun. Slept it off down at the jail. Dans not a bad guy, he was just drunk and upset. Shadow paid for his own breakfast and, over Chad Mulligans halfhearted protests, both hot chocolates. Hennings Farm and Home Supplies was a warehouse-sized building on the south of the town that sold everything from tractors to toys (the toys, along with the Christmas ornaments, were already on sale). The store was bustling with post-Christmas shoppers. Shadow recognized the younger of the girls who had sat in front of him on the bus. She was trailing after her parents. He waved at her and she gave him a hesitant, blue-rubber-banded smile. Shadow wondered idly what shed look like in ten years time. Probably as beautiful as the girl at the Hennings Farm and Home checkout counter, who scanned in his purchases with a chattering hand-held gun, capable, Shaded had no doubt, of ringing up a tractor if someone drove it through. Ten pairs of long underwear? |
| 911 |
said the girl. Stocking up, huh? She looked like a movie starlet. Shadow felt fourteen again, and tongue-tied and foolish. He said nothing while she rang up the thermal boots, the gloves, the sweaters, and the goose-down-filled coat. He had no wish to put the credit card that Wednesday had given him to the test, not with Chief of Police Mulligan standing helpfully beside him, so he paid for everything in cash. Then he took his bags into the mens rest room, came out wearing many of his purchases. Looking good, big fella, said Mulligan. At least I'm warm, said Shadow, and outside, in the parking lot, although the wind burned cold on the skin of his face, the rest of him was warm enough. At Mulligans invitation, he put his shopping bags in the back of the police car, arid rode in the passenger seat, in the front. So, what do you do, Mister Ainsel? asked the chief of police. Big guy like you. Whats your profession, and will you be practicing it in Lakeside? Shadows heart began to pound, but his voice was steady. I work for my uncle. He buys and sells stuff all over the country. I just do the heavy lifting. Does he pay well? I'm family. He knows I'm not going to rip him off, and I'm learning a little about the trade on the way. 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. He filled his shopping basket at Daves Finest Food, doing what he thought of as a gas-station stopmilk, eggs, bread, apples, cheese, cookies. Just some food. Hed do a real one later. As Shadow moved around, Chad Mulligan said hello to people and introduced Shadow to them. |
| 912 |
Missy Gunther tapped on his front window. This is for you, she said. I nearly forgot. She handed him a buff envelope. Its kind of a gag. We had them printed up a few years back. You don't have to look at it now. He thanked her, and drove, cautiously, back into the town. He took the road that ran around the lake. He wished he could see it in the spring, or the summer, or the fall: it would be very beautiful, he had no doubt of that. In ten minutes he was home. He parked the car out on the street and walked up the outside steps to his cold apartment. He unpacked his shopping, put the food into the cupboards and the fridge, and then he opened the envelope Missy Gunther had given him. It contained a passport. Blue, plasticated cover and, inside, a proclamation that Michael Ainsel (his name handwritten in Missy Gunthers precise handwriting) was a citizen of Lakeside. There was a map of the town on the next page. The rest of it was filled with discount coupons for various local stores. I think I may like it here, said Shadow, aloud. He looked out of the icy window at the frozen lake. If it ever warms up. There was a bang at the front door at around 2:00 P. M. Shadow had been practicing the Sucker Vanish with a quarter, tossing it from one hand to the other undetectably. His hands were cold enough and clumsy enough that he kept dropping the coin onto the tabletop, and the knock at the door made him drop it again. He went to the door and opened it. A moment of pure fear: the man at the door wore a black mask which covered the lower half of his face. It was the kind of mask that a bank robber might wear on TV, or a serial killer from a cheap movie might wear to scare his victims. The top of the mans head was covered by a black knit cap. Still, the man was smaller and slighter than Shadow, and he did not appear to be armed. And he wore a bright plaid coat, of the kind that serial killers normally avoid. Ih hihelhan, said the visitor. Huh? The man pulled the mask downward to reveal Hinzelmanns cheerful face. |
| 913 |
I said, Its Hinzelmann. You know, I don't know what we did before they came up with these masks. Well, I do remember what we did. Thick knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don't want to know what else. I think its a miracle what they come up with these days. I may be an old man, but I'm not going to grumble about progress, not me. He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow, filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. Merry day after Christmas, he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as raspberries, mask or no mask. I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabels pasties. Brought you a few things. that's very kind of you, said Shadow. Kind, nothing. I'm going to stick it to you next week for the raffle. The Chamber of Commerce runs it, and I run the Chamber of Commerce. Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the childrens ward of Lakeside Hospital. Well, why don't you put me down for a ticket now? It don't start until the day the klunker hits the ice, said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadows window toward the lake. Cold out there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night. It happened really fast, agreed Shadow. We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days, said Hinzelmann. My daddy told me. Youd pray for days like this? Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back then. Werent enough food for everyone, and you couldn't just go down to Daves and fill up your shopping cart in the old days, no sir. So my grampaw, he got to figgerin, and when a really cold day like this come along hed take my grarnmaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddyhe was the youngestand the serving girl and the hired man, and hed go down with them to the creek, give em a little drink of rum and herbs, it was a recipe hed got from the old country, then hed pour creek water over them. Course theyd freeze in seconds, stiff and blue as so many Popsicles. |
| 914 |
If there were any justice in the world hedve gone off into the world as a winter runaway, but nope, sticks like a cockleburr to a woolen vest. He began to arrange the contents of Shadows welcome basket on the counter. This is Katherine Powdermakers crabapple jelly. she's been giving me a pot for Christmas for longer than youve been alive, and the sad truth is I've never opened a one. you're down in my basement, forty, fifty pots. Maybe I'll open one and discover that I like the stuff. 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 aint 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. Not that my family werent poor as kids. |
| 915 |
Ask me how poor we was as kids. Shadow put on his straight-man face and said, How poor were you as kids, Mister Hinzelmann? Just Hinzelmann, Mike. We were so poor that we couldn't afford a fire. Come New Years Eve my father would suck on a peppermint, and us kids, wed stand around with our hands outstretched, basking in the glow. Shadow made a rimshot noise. Hinzelmann put on his ski mask and did up his huge plaid coat, pulled out his car keys from his pocket, and then, last of all, pulled on his great gloves. You get too bored up here, you just come down to the store and ask for me. I'll show you my collection of hand-tied fishing flies. Bore you so much that getting back here will be a relief. His voice was muffled, but audible. I'll do that, said Shadow with a smile. Hows Tessie? Hibernating. Shell be out in the spring. You take care now, Mr. Ainsel. And he closed the door behind him as he left. The apartment grew ever colder. Shadow put on his coat and his gloves. Then he put on his boots. He could hardly see through the windows now for the ice on the inside of the panes which turned the view of the lake into an abstract image. His breath was clouding in the air. He went out of his apartment onto the wooden deck and knocked on the door next door. He heard a womans voice shouting at someone to for heavens sake shut up and turn that television downa kid, he thought, adults don't shout like that at other adults. The door opened and a tired woman with very long, very black hair was staring at him warily. Yes? How do you do, maam. I'm Mike Ainsel. I'm your next-door neighbor. Her expression did not change, not by a hair. Yes? Maam. Its freezing in my apartment. Theres a little heat coming out of the grate, but its not warming the place up, not at all. She looked him up and down, then a ghost of a smile touched the edges of her lips and she said, Come in, then. If you don't therell be no heat in here, either. He stepped inside her apartment. Plastic, multicolored toys were strewn all over the floor. |
| 916 |
There were small heaps of torn Christmas wrapping paper by the wall. A small boy sat inches away from the television set, a video of the Disney Hercules playing, an animated satyr stomping and shouting his way across the screen. Shadow kept his back to the TV set. Okay, she said. This is what you do. First you seal the windows, you can buy the stuff down at Hennings, its just like Saran Wrap but for windows. Tape it to windows, then if you want to get fancy you run a blow-dryer on it, it stays there the whole winter. That stops the heat leaving through the windows. Then you buy a space heater or two. The buildings furnace is old, and it cant cope with the real cold. Weve had some easy winters recently, I suppose we should be grateful. Then she put out her hand. Marguerite Olsen. Good to meet you, said Shadow. He pulled off a glove and they shook hands. You know, maam, I'd always thought of Olsens as being blonder than you. My ex-husband was as blond as they come. Pink and blond. couldn't tan at gunpoint. Missy Gunther told me you write for the local paper. Missy Gunther tells everybody everything. I don't see why we need a local paper with Missy Gunther around. She nodded. Yes. Some news reporting here and there, but my editor writes most of the news. I write the nature column, the gardening column, an opinion column every Sunday and the News from the Community column, which tells, in mind-numbing detail, who went to dinner with who for fifteen miles around. Or is that whom? Whom, said Shadow, before he could stop himself. Its the objective case. She looked at him with her black eyes, and Shadow experienced a moment of pure deja vu. I've been here before, he thought. No, she reminds me of someone. Anyway, that's how you heat up your apartment, she said. Thank you, said Shadow. When its warm you and your little one must come over. His names Leon, she said. Good meeting you, MisterI'm sorry Ainsel, said Shadow. Mike Ainsel. And what sort of a name is Ainsel? she asked. Shadow had no idea. |
| 917 |
My name, he said. I'm afraid I was never very interested in family history. Norwegian, maybe? she said. We were never close, he said. Then he remembered Uncle Emerson Borson, and added, On that side, anyway. * * * By the time Mr. Wednesday arrived, Shadow had put clear plastic sheeting across all the windows, and had one space heater running in the main room and one in the bedroom at the back. It was practically cozy. What the hell is that purple piece of shityou're driving? asked Wednesday, by way of greeting. Well, said Shadow, you drove off with my white piece of shit. Where is it, by the way? I traded it in in Duluth, said Wednesday. You cant be too careful. don't worryyou'll get your share when all this is done. What am I doing here? asked Shadow. In Lakeside, I mean. Not in the world. Wednesday smiled his smile, the one that made Shadow want to hit him. you're living here because its the last place they'll look for you. 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. |
| 918 |
There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed, and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors. The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. Its a sacrifice, of sorts. The money flows through the casino in an uninterrupted stream of green and silver, streaming from hand to hand, from gambler to croupier to cashier to the management to security, finally ending up in the Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the Counting Room. And it is here, in the counting room of this casino, that you come to rest, here, where the greenbacks are sorted, stacked, indexed, here in a space that is slowly becoming redundant as more and more of the money that flows through the casino is imaginary: an electrical sequence of ons and offs, sequences that flow down telephone lines. In the counting room you see three men, counting money under the glassy stare of the cameras they can see, the insectile gazes of the tiny cameras they cannot see. During the course of one shift each of the men counts more money than he will see in all the pay packets of his life. Each man, when he sleeps, dreams of counting money, of stacks and paper bands and numbers that climb inevitably, that are sorted and lost. Each of the three men has idly wondered, not less than once a week, how to evade the casinos security systems and run off with as much money as he could haul; and, reluctantly, each man has inspected the dream and found it impractical, has settled for a steady paycheck, avoided the twin specters of prison and an unmarked grave. |
| 919 |
And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said I know. But its the only game in town. And he went back to the game. Dark eyes stare at the man in the light gray suit mistrustfully. The man in the charcoal suit says something in reply. The man in the light suit, who has a graying reddish beard, shakes his head. Look, he says, I'm sorry about what went down in Wisconsin. But I got you all out safely, didn't I? No one was hurt. The man in the dark suit sips his Laphroaig and water, savoring the marshy taste, the body-in-the-bog quality of the whiskey. He asks a question. I don't know. Everythings moving faster than I expected. Everyones got a hard-on for the kid I hired to run errandsI've got him outside, waiting in the taxi. Are you still in? The man in the dark suit replies. The bearded man shakes his head. she's not been seen for two hundred years. If she isn't dead she's taken herself out of the picture. Something else is said. Look, says the bearded man, knocking back his Jack Daniels. You come in, be there when we need you, and I'll take care of you. Whaddayou want? Soma? I can get you a bottle of Soma. The real stuff. The man in the dark suit stares. Then he nods his head, reluctantly, and makes a comment. Of course I am, says the bearded man, smiling like a knife. What do you expect? But look at it this way: its the only game in town. He reaches out a paw like hand and shakes the other mans well-manicured hand. Then he walks away. The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: theres now only one man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a charcoal-gray suit. You doing okay? she asks. Is your friend coming back? The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won't be coming back, and thus she won't be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she's outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A. |
| 920 |
M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, shell meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home. The words evaporate in the waitresss mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the corner have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she's going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why. So who was that guy you were seeing? asked Shadow as they walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them, feeding them coins. Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home. And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi had been, and he had missed it. So he's in, said Wednesday. Itll cost me a bottle of Soma, though. Whats Soma? Its a drink. They walked onto the charter plane, empty but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in Chicago by the start of the next business day. Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniels. My kind of people see your kind of people he hesitated. Its like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. |
| 921 |
An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes. A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers. A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a childs head, that child will not fall in battle. A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them. A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams. His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the planes engine noise. A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman. A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another. And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be. He sighed, and then stopped talking. Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night. Laura, was all he said. Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadows pale gray eyes with his own. I cant make her live again, he said. I don't even know why she isn't as dead as she ought to be. I think I did it, said Shadow. It was my fault. Wednesday raised an eyebrow. Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura. Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. That could do it, he said. And no, I cant help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course. What, asked Shadow, is that supposed to mean? It means that I cant stop you from hunting eagle stones and thunderbirds. |
| 922 |
But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy well need all hands to the wheel. He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray. Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesdays gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okaysomething that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well. He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything. Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldnt. He knew it wouldnt. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesdays hand. * * * The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas. don't get into any trouble, said Wednesday. Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves. All at the same time? don't get smart with me, mboy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city theyd get your scent in minutes. I'll stay put and keep out of trouble. Shadow meant it as he said it. Hed had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. When are you coming back? he asked. Soon, said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincolns engine, slid up the window, and drove off into the frigid night. Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. Ben Franklin, Poor Richards Almanack Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. |
| 923 |
He enjoyed Hinzelmanns companythe reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him. Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, and took out a tin boxby the look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, How many you want me to put you down for? How many of what? Klunker tickets. Shell go out onto the ice today, so weve started selling tickets. 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. |
| 924 |
Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine. you're the first person over in that corner all day, said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the childrens books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that. The man was reading Agatha Christies The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar. Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotuss Histories bound in peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperback copy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox. Buy one more, its still a dollar, said the man. And if you take another book away, you'll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space. Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the LakesideCity Council 18721884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Daves Finest Food brown paper sack. Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way back. He could even see his apartment building, like a dolls house, up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake. March the twenty-third, Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. |
| 925 |
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. 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. |
| 926 |
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. 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. |
| 927 |
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. 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. |
| 928 |
But the last of them, her hair streaked white on dark gray, pointed before she turned away, pointed into the wine-colored sky. Ask them yourself, she said. Summer lightning flickered, momentarily illuminating the landscape from horizon to horizon. There were high rocks near him, peaks and spires of sandstone, and Shadow began to climb the nearest. The spire was the color of old ivory. He grabbed at a handhold and felt it slice into his hand. Its bone, thought Shadow. Not stone. Its old dry bone. It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began. Shadow continued to climb. His hands hurt. Bone popped and crushed and fragmented under his bare feet. The wind tugged at him, and he pressed himself to the spire, and he continued to climb the tower. It was made of only one kind of bone, he realized, repeated over and over. Each of the bones was dry and ball-like. He imagined that they might be the eggshells of some huge bird. But another flare of lightning told him differently: they had holes for eyes, and they had teeth, which grinned without humor. Somewhere birds were calling. Rain spattered his face. He was hundreds of feet above the ground, clinging to the side of the tower of skulls, while flashes of lightning burned in the wings of the shadowy birds who circled the spireenormous, black, condorlike birds, each with a ruff of white at its neck. They were huge, graceful birds, and the beats of their wings crashed like thunder on the night air. 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. |
| 929 |
Another bird came at him, and one hand-sized talon sank into his arm. He reached out and tried to grasp a feather from its wingfor if he returned to his tribe without a thunderbirds feather he would be disgraced, he would never be a manbut the bird pulled up, so that he could not grasp a feather. The thunderbird loosened its grip and swung back onto the wind. Shadow continued to climb. There must be a thousand skulls, thought Shadow. A thousand thousand. And not all of them are human. He stood at last on the top of the spire, the great birds, the thunderbirds, circling him slowly, navigating the gusts of the storm with tiny flicks of their wings. He heard a voice, the voice of the buffalo man, calling to him on the wind, telling him who the skulls belonged to The tower began to tumble, and the biggest bird, its eyes the blinding blue-white of forked lightning, plummeted down toward him in a rush of thunder, and Shadow was falling, tumbling down the tower of skulls The telephone shrilled. Shadow had not even known that it was connected. Groggy, shaken, he picked it up. What the fuck, shouted Wednesday, angrier than Shadow had ever heard him, what the almighty flying fuck do you think you are playing at? I was asleep, said Shadow into the receiver, stupidly. What do you think is the fucking point of stashing you in a hiding place like Lakeside, ifyou're going to raise such a ruckus that not even a dead man could miss it? I dreamed of thunderbirds said Shadow. And a tower. Skulls It seemed to him very important to recount his dream. I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. Whats the point in hiding you, ifyou're going to start to fucking advertise? Shadow said nothing. There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. I'll be there in the morning, said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. Were going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional. And the line went dead. Shadow put the telephone down on the carpet, and sat up, stiffly. |
| 930 |
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. 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. |
| 931 |
The tops of my thighs rub together when I walk now, can you believe that? This last was addressed to Shadow. He had no idea what to say in reply, and felt a hot flush suffuse his face. The woman laughed delightedly. he's blushing! Wednesday, my sweet, you brought me a blusher. How perfectly wonderful of you. Whats he called? This is Shadow, said Wednesday. He seemed to be enjoying Shadows discomfort. Shadow, say hello to Easter. Shadow said something that might have been Hello, and the woman smiled at him again. He felt like he was caught in headlightsthe blinding kind that poachers use to freeze deer before they shoot them. He could smell her perfume from where he was standing, an intoxicating mixture of jasmine and honeysuckle, of sweet milk and female skin. So, hows tricks? asked Wednesday. The womanEasterlaughed a deep and throaty laugh, full-bodied and joyous. How could you not like someone who laughed like that? Everythings fine, she said. How about you, you old wolf? I was hoping to enlist your assistance. Wasting your time. At least hear me out before dismissing me. No point. don't even bother. She looked at Shadow. Please, sit down here and help yourself to some of this food. Here, take a plate and pile it high. Its all good. Eggs, roast chicken, chicken curry, chicken salad, and over here is lapinrabbit, actually, but cold rabbit is a delight, and in that bowl over there is the jugged harewell, why don't I just fill a plate for you? And she did, taking a plastic plate, piling it high with food, and passing it to him. Then she looked at Wednesday. Are you eating? she asked. I am at your disposal, my dear, said Wednesday. You, she told him, are so full of shit its a wonder your eyes don't turn brown. She passed him an empty plate. Help yourself, she said. The afternoon sun at her back burned her hair into a platinum aura. Shadow, she said, chewing a chicken leg with gusto. that's a sweet name. Why do they call you Shadow? Shadow licked his lips to moisten them. |
| 932 |
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. 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? |
| 933 |
To whom do you bow down? To whom do you pray at dawn and at dusk? Her lips described several shapes without saying anything before she said, The female principle. Its an empowerment thing. You know? Indeed. And this female principle of yours. Does she have a name? she's the goddess within us all, said the girl with the eyebrow ring, color rising to her cheek. She doesn't need a name. Ah, said Wednesday, with a wide monkey grin, so do you have mighty bacchanals in her honor? Do you drink blood wine under the full moon while scarlet candles burn in silver candleholders? Do you step naked into the seafoam, chanting ecstatically to your nameless goddess while the waves lick at your legs, lapping your thighs like the tongues of a thousand leopards? you're making fun of me, she said. We don't do any of that stuff you were saying. She took a deep breath. Shadow suspected she was counting to ten. Any more coffees here? Another mochaccino for you, maam? Her smile was a lot like the one she had greeted them with when they had entered. They shook their heads, and the waitress turned to greet another customer. There, said Wednesday, is one who does not have the faith and will not have the fun, Chesterton. Pagan indeed. So. Shall we go out onto the street, Easter my dear, and repeat the exercise? Find out how many passers by know that their Easter festival takes its name from Eostre of the Dawn? Lets see I have it. We shall ask a hundred people. For every one that knows the truth, you may cut off one of my fingers, and when I run out of them, toes; for every twenty who don't know, you spend a night making love to me. And the odds are certainly in your favor herethis is San Francisco, after all. There are heathens and pagans and Wiccans aplenty on these precipitous streets. Her green eyes looked at Wednesday. They were, Shadow decided, the exact same color as a leaf in spring with the sun shining through it. She said nothing. We could try it, continued Wednesday. But I would end up with ten fingers, ten toes, and five nights in your bed. |
| 934 |
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. She nodded to Wednesday, then she touched Shadows hand and said, What did you dream about, last night? Thunderbirds, he said. A mountain of skulls. She nodded. And do you know whose skulls they were? There was a voice, he said. In my dream. It told me. She nodded and waited. He said, It said they were mine. Old skulls of mine. Thousands and thousands of them. She looked at Wednesday, and said, I think this ones a keeper. She smiled her bright smile. Then she patted Shadows arm and walked away down the sidewalk. He watched her go, trying and failingnot to think of her thighs rubbing together as she walked. |
| 935 |
In the taxi on the way to the airport, Wednesday turned to Shadow. What the hell was that business with the ten dollars about? You shortchanged her. It comes out of her wages if she's short. What the hell do you care? Wednesday seemed genuinely irate. Shadow thought for a moment. Then he said, Well, I wouldn't want anyone to do it to me. She hadn't done anything wrong. No? Wednesday stared off into the middle distance, and said, When she was seven years old she shut a kitten in a closet. She listened to it mew for several days. When it ceased to mew, she took it out of the closet, put it into a shoebox, and buried it in the backyard. She wanted to bury something. She consistently steals from everywhere she works. Small amounts, usually. Last year she visited her grandmother in the nursing home to which the old woman is confined. She took an antique gold watch from her grandmothers bedside table, and then went prowling through several of the other rooms, stealing small quantities of money and personal effects from the twilight folk in their golden years. When she got home she did not know what to do with her spoils, scared someone would come after her, so she threw everything away except the cash. I get the idea, said Shadow. She also has asymptomatic gonorrhea, said Wednesday. She suspects she might be infected but does nothing about it. When her last boyfriend accused her of having given him a disease she was hurt, offended, and refused to see him again. 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. |
| 936 |
They don't send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. isn't that fair? My mom used to say, Life isn't fair, said Shadow. Of course she did, said Wednesday. Its one of those things that moms say, right up there with If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too? You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks, said Shadow, doggedly. It was the right thing to do. Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. May your choices always be so clear, he said. * * * The cold snap was easing when Wednesday dropped Shadow off in the small hours of the morning. It was still obscenely cold in Lakeside, but it was no longer impossibly cold. The lighted sign on the side of the M&I Bank flashed alternately 3:30 A. M. and -5F as they drove through the town. It was 9:30 A. M. when Chief of Police Chad Mulligan knocked on the apartment door and asked Shadow if he knew a girl named Alison McGovern. I don't think so, said Shadow, sleepily. This is her picture, said Mulligan. It was a high school photograph. Shadow recognized the person in the picture immediately: the girl with the blue rubber-band braces on her teeth, the one who had been learning all about the oral uses of Alka-Seltzer from her friend. Oh, yeah. Okay. She was on the bus when I came into town. Where were you yesterday, Mister Ainsel? Shadow felt his world begin to spin away from him. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about (Youre a parole-violating felon living under an assumed name, whispered a calm voice in his mind. isn't that enough?). San Francisco, he said. California. Helping my uncle transport a four-poster bed. You got any ticket stubs? Anything like that? Sure. He had both his boarding pass stubs in his back pocket, pulled them out. Whats going on? Chad Mulligan examined the boarding passes. Alison McGoverns vanished. She helped out up at the Lakeside Humane Society. Feed animals, walk dogs. |
| 937 |
Shed come out for a few hours after school. So. Dolly Knopf, who runs the Humane Society, shed always run her home when they closed up for the night. Yesterday Alison never got there. she's vanished. Yup. Her parents called us last night. Silly kid used to hitchhike up to the Humane Society. Its out on County W, pretty isolated. Her parents told her not to, but this isn't the kind of place where things happenpeople here don't lock their doors, you know? And you cant tell kids. So, look at the photo again. Alison McGovern was smiling. The rubber bands on her teeth in the photograph were red, not blue. You can honestly say you didn't kidnap her, rape her, murder her, anything like that? I was in San Francisco. And I wouldn't do that shit. That was what I figured, pal. So you want to come help us look for her? Me? You. Weve had the K-9 guys out this morningnothing so far. He sighed. Heck, Mike. I just hope she turns up in the Twin Cities with some dopey boyfriend. You think its likely? I think its possible. You want to join the hunting party? Shadow remembered seeing the girl in Hennings Farm and Home Supplies, the flash of a shy blue-braced smile, how beautiful he had known she was going to be, one day. I'll come, he said. There were two dozen men and women waiting in the lobby of the fire station. Shadow recognized Hinzelmann, and several other faces looked familiar. There were police officers, and some men and women in the brown uniforms of the Lumber County Sheriffs department. Chad Mulligan told them what Alison was wearing when she vanished (a scarlet snowsuit, green gloves, blue woollen hat under the hood of her snowsuit) and divided the volunteers into groups of three. Shadow, Hinzelmann, and a man named Brogan comprised one of the groups. They were reminded how short the daylight period was, told that if, God forbid, they found Alisons body they were not repeat not to disturb anything, just to radio back for help, but that if she was alive they were to keep her warm until help came. |
| 938 |
When it was too dark to continue, Mulligan radioed to them to call it off for the evening, and they were picked up and driven back to the fire station. In the block next to the fire station was the Buck Stops Here Tavern, and that was where most of the searchers wound up. They were exhausted and dispirited, talking to each other of how cold it had become, how more than likely Alison would show up in a day or so, no idea of how much trouble shed caused everyone. You shouldn't think badly of the town because of this, said Brogan. It is a good town. Lakeside, said a trim woman whose name Shadow had forgotten, if ever theyd been introduced, is the best town in the North Woods. You know how many people are unemployed in Lakeside? No, said Shadow. Less than twenty, she said. Theres over five thousand people live in and around this town. We may not be rich, but everyones working. Its not like the mining towns up in the northeastmost of them are ghost towns now. There were farming towns that were killed by the falling cost of milk, or the low price of hogs. You know what the biggest cause of unnatural death is among farmers in the Midwest? Suicide? Shadow hazarded. She looked almost disappointed. Yeah. that's it. They kill themselves. She shook her head. Then she continued, There are too many towns hereabouts that only exist for the hunters and the vacationers, towns that just take their money and send them home with their trophies and their bug bites. Then there are the company towns, where everythings just hunky-dory until Wal-Mart relocates their distribution center or 3M stops manufacturing CD cases there or whatever and suddenly theres a boatload of folks who cant pay their mortgages. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name. Ainsel, said Shadow. Mike Ainsel. The beer he was drinking was a local brew, made with spring water. It was good. I'm Gallic Knopf, she said. Dollys sister. Her face was still ruddy from the cold. So what I'm saying is that Lakesides lucky. Weve got a little of everything herefarm, light industry, tourism, crafts. |
| 939 |
Good schools. Shadow looked at her in puzzlement. There was something empty at the bottom of all her words. It was as if he were listening to a salesman, a good salesman, who believed in his product, but still wanted to make sure you went home with all the brushes or the full set of encyclopedias. 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. you're a Houdini, cackled Hinzelmann in delight. that's what you are! Just an amateur, said Shadow. I've got a long way to go. Still, he felt a whisper of pride. They had been his first adult audience. |
| 940 |
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. 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? |
| 941 |
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? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. And the simple truth is this: There was a girl and her uncle sold her. This is what they used to say, where the girl came from: no man may be certain who fathered a child, but the mother, ah, that you could be certain of. Lineage and property was something that moved in the matrilineal line, but power remained in the hands of the men: a man had complete ownership of his sisters children. There was a war in that place, and it was a small war, no more than a skirmish between the men of two rival villages. It was almost an argument. One village won the argument, one village lost it. Life as a commodity, people as possessions. Enslavement had been part of the culture of those parts for thousands of years. The Arab slavers had destroyed the last of the great kingdoms of East Africa, while the West African nations had destroyed each other. 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. |
| 942 |
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. 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. |
| 943 |
Our gods will protect you. But Wututu continued to cry, walking with a heavy heart, feeling pain and anger and fear as only a child can feel it: raw and overwhelming. She was unable to tell Agasu that she was not worried about the white devils eating her. She would survive, she was certain of it. She cried because she was scared that they would eat her brother, and she was not certain that she could protect him. They reached a trading post, and they were kept there for ten days. On the morning of the tenth day they were taken from the hut in which they had been imprisoned (it had become very crowded in the final days, as men arrived from far away bringing their own strings and skeins of slaves). They were marched to the harbor, and Wututu saw the ship that was to take them away. Her first thought was how big a ship it was, her second that it was too small for all of them to fit inside. It sat lightly on the water. The ships boat came back and forth, ferrying the captives to the ship, where they were manacled and arranged in low decks by sailors, some of whom were brick red or tan-skinned, with strange pointy noses and beards that made them look like beasts. Several of the sailors looked like her own people, like the men who had marched her to the coast. The men and the women and the children were separated, forced into different areas on the slave deck. There were too many slaves for the ship to hold easily, so another dozen men were chained up on the deck in the open, beneath the places where the crew would sling their hammocks. Wututu was put in with the children, not with the women; and she was not chained, merely locked in. Agasu, her brother, was forced in with the men, in chains, packed like herrings. It stank under that deck, although the crew had scrubbed it down since their last cargo. It was a stink that had entered the wood: the smell of fear and bile and diarrhea and death, of fever and madness and hate. Wututu sat in the hot hold with the other children. |
| 944 |
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. 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. |
| 945 |
No, she realized, those were the words of Elegba the trickster. Mawu had made the world and then, thanks to Elegbas trickery, had lost interest in it. It was Elegba of the clever ways and the iron-hard erection who had spoken through her, who had ridden her for a moment, and that night before she slept she gave thanks to Elegba. Several of the captives refused to eat. They were whipped until they put food into their mouths and swallowed, although the whipping was severe enough that two men died of it. Still, no one else on the ship tried to starve themselves to freedom. A man and a woman tried to kill themselves by leaping over the side. The woman succeeded. The man was rescued and he was tied to the mast and lashed for the better part of a day, until his back ran with blood, and he was left there as the day became night. He was given no food to eat, and nothing to drink but his own piss. By the third day he was raving, and his head had swollen and grown soft, like an old melon. When he stopped raving they threw him over the side. Also, for five days following the escape attempt the captives were returned to their manacles and chains. It was a long journey and a bad one for the captives, and it was not pleasant for the crew, although they had learned to harden their hearts to the business, and pretended to themselves that they were no more than farmers, taking their livestock to the market. They made harbor on a pleasant, balmy day in Bridgeport, Barbados, and the captives were carried from the ship to the shore in low boats sent out from the dock, and taken to the market square where they were, by dint of a certain amount of shouting, and blows from cudgels, arranged into lines. A whistle blew, and the market square filled with men: poking, prodding, red-faced men, shouting, inspecting, calling, appraising, grumbling. Wututu and Agasu were separated then. It happened so fasta big man forced open Agasus mouth, looked at his teeth, felt his arm muscles, nodded, and two other men hauled Agasu away. |
| 946 |
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. When he ran away they hunted him down with dogs and brought him back, and cut off a toe with a chisel, to teach him a lesson he would not forget. He would have starved himself to death, but when he refused to eat his front teeth were broken and thin gruel was forced into his mouth, until he had no choice but to swallow or to choke. Even in those times they preferred slaves born into captivity to those brought over from Africa. The free-born slaves tried to run, or they tried to die, and either way, there went the profits. When Inky Jack was sixteen he was sold, with several other slaves, to a sugar plantation on the island of St. Domingue. They called him Hyacinth, the big, broken-toothed slave. He met an old woman from his own village on that plantationshe had been a house slave before her fingers became too gnarled and arthriticwho told him that the whites intentionally split up captives from the same towns and villages and regions, to avoid insurrection and revolts. They did not like it when slaves spoke to each other in their own languages. Hyacinth learned some French, and was taught a few of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Each day he cut sugar-cane from well before the sun rose until after the sun had set. He fathered several children. He went with the other slaves, in the small hours of the night, to the woods, although it was forbidden, to dance the Calinda, to sing to Damballa-Wedo, the serpent god, in the form of a black snake. |
| 947 |
Domingue. She would still invoke them and call their names, to beg them for favors. She listened when the white folk spoke of the revolt in St. Domingo (as they called it), and how it was doomed to failThink of it! A cannibal land! and then she observed that they no longer spoke of it. Soon, it seemed to her that they pretended that there never had been a place called St. Domingo, and as for Haiti, the word was never mentioned. It was as if the whole American nation had decided that they could, by an effort of belief, command a good-sized Caribbean island to no longer exist merely by willing it so. A generation of Lavere children grew up under Sukeys watchful eye. The youngest, unable to say Sukey as a child, had called her Mama Zouzou, and the name had stuck. Now the year was 1821, and Sukey was in her mid-fifties. She looked much older. 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. 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. |
| 948 |
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. She showed her how to make a wishing bag, a small leather bag containing thirteen pennies, nine cotton seeds and the bristles of a black hog, and how to rub the bag to make wishes come true. The Widow Paris learned everything that Mama Zouzou told her. She had no real interest in the gods, though. Not really. Her interests were in the practicalities. She was delighted to learn that if you dip a live frog in honey and place it in an ants nest, then, when the bones are cleaned and white, a close examination will reveal a flat, heart-shaped bone, and another with a hook on it: the bone with the hook on it must be hooked onto the garment of the one you wish to love you, while the heart-shaped bone must be kept safely (for if it is lost, your loved one will turn on you like an angry dog). Infallibly, if you do this, the one you love will be yours. |
| 949 |
She learned that dried snake powder, placed in the face powder of an enemy, will produce blindness, and that an enemy can be made to drown herself by taking a piece of her underwear, turning it inside out, and burying it at midnight under a brick. Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris the World Wonder Root, the great and the little roots of John the Conqueror, she showed her dragons blood, and valerian and five-finger grass. She showed her how to brew waste-away tea, and follow-me-water and faire-Shingo water. All these things and more Mama Zouzou showed the Widow Paris. Still, it was disappointing for the old woman. She did her best to teach her the hidden truths, the deep knowledge, to tell her of Papa Legba, of Mawu, of Aido-Hwedo the voudon serpent, and the rest, but the Widow Paris (I shall now tell you the name she was born with, and the name she later made famous: it was Marie Laveau. But this was not the great Marie Laveau, the one you have heard of, this was her mother, who eventually became the Widow Glapion), she had no interest in the gods of the distant land. If St. Domingo had been a lush black earth for the African gods to grow in, this land, with its corn and its melons, its crawfish and its cotton, was barren and infertile. She does not want to know, complained Mama Zouzou to Clementine, her confidante, who took in the washing for many of the houses in that district, washing their curtains and coverlets. Clementine had a blossom of burns on her cheek, and one of her children had been scalded to death when a copper overturned. Then do not teach her, says Clementine. I teach her, but she does not see what is valuableall she sees is what she can do with it. I give her diamonds, but she cares only for pretty glass. I give her a demi-bouteille of the best claret and she drinks river water. I give her quail and she wishes to eat only rat. Then why do you persist? asks Clementine. Mama Zouzou shrugs her thin shoulders, causing her withered arm to shake. She cannot answer. |
| 950 |
She could say that she teaches because she is grateful to be alive, and she is: she has seen too many die. She could say that she dreams that one day the slaves will rise, as they rose (and were defeated) in LaPlace, but that she knows in her heart that without the gods of Africa, without the favor of Legba and Mawu, they will never overcome their white captors, will never return to their homelands. When she woke, on that terrible night almost twenty years earlier, and felt the cold steel between her ribs, that was when Mama Zouzous life had ended. Now she was someone who did not live, who simply hated. If you asked her about the hate she would have been unable to tell you about a twelve-year-old girl on a stinking ship: that had scabbed over in her mindthere had been too many whippings and beatings, too many nights in manacles, too many partings, too much pain. She could have told you about her son, though, and how his thumb had been cut off when their master discovered the boy was able to read and to write. 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. They were singing in the blacksnakes, the free woman of color and the slave woman with the withered arm. |
| 951 |
Agnes Repplier, Times and Tendencies Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo, and he and Wednesday saw nothing but nothing and plenty of it for mile after mile. They went south, then, into South Dakota, heading for reservation country. Wednesday had traded the Lincoln Town Car, which Shadow had liked to drive, for a lumbering and ancient Winnebago, which smelled pervasively and unmistakably of male cat, which he didn't enjoy driving at all. As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. Now that, he said, is a holy place. Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, I know it used to be sacred to the Indians. Its a holy place, said Wednesday. that's the American Waythey need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people cant just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglums tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that theyve already seen on a thousand postcards. I knew a guy once. He did weight training at the Muscle Farm, years back. He said that the Dakota Indians, the young men climb up the mountain, then form death-defying human chains off the heads, just so that the guy at the end of the chain can piss on the presidents nose. Wednesday guffawed. Oh, fine! Very fine! Is any specific president the particular butt of their ire? Shadow shrugged. He never said. Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things. It was midday on the second day of the drive, and they were almost there. Shadow, who had been thinking, said, A girl vanished from Lakeside last week, when we were in San Francisco. Mm? |
| 952 |
Wednesday sounded barely interested. Kid named Alison McGovern. she's not the first kid to vanish there. There have been others. They go in the wintertime. Wednesday furrowed his brow. It is a tragedy, is it not? The little faces on the milk cartonsalthough I cant remember the last time I saw a kid on a milk cartonand on the walls of freeway rest areas. Have you seen me? they ask. A deeply existential question at the best of times. Have you seen me? Pull off at the next exit. Shadow thought he heard a helicopter pass overhead, but the clouds were too low to see anything. Why did you pick Lakeside? asked Shadow. I told you. Its a nice quiet place to hide you away. you're off the board there, under the radar. Why? Because that's the way it is. Now hang a left, said Wednesday. Shadow turned left. Theres something wrong, said Wednesday. Fuck. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle. Slow down, but don't stop. Care to elaborate? Trouble. Do you know any alternative routes? Not really. This is my first time in South Dakota, said Shadow. And I don't know where were going. On the other side of the hill something flashed redly, smudged by the mist. Roadblock, said Wednesday. He pushed his hand deeply into first one pocket of his suit, then another, searching for something. I can stop and turn around. We cant turn. you're behind us as well, said Wednesday. Take your speed down to ten, fifteen miles per hour. Shadow glanced into the mirror. There were headlights behind them, under a mile back. Are you sure about this? he asked. Wednesday snorted. Sure as eggs is eggs, he said. As the turkey farmer said when he hatched his first turtle. Ah, success! and from the bottom of a pocket he produced a small piece of white chalk. He started to scratch with the chalk on the dashboard of the camper, making marks as if he were solving an algebraic puzzleor perhaps, Shadow thought, as if he were a hobo, scratching long messages to the other hobos in hobo codebad dog here, dangerous town, nice woman, soft jail in which to overnight Okay, said Wednesday. |
| 953 |
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. They both shake their heads. He pulls out his telephone, touches the menu, pages down and finds the address entry marked Laundry, which had amused him so much when he typed it ina reference to The Man from U. N. C. L. E., and as he looks at it he realizes that its not from that at all, that was a tailors, he's thinking of Get Smart, and he still feels weird and slightly embarrassed after all those years about not realizing it was a comedy when he was a kid, and just wanting a shoephone A womans voice on the phone. Yes? This is Mister Town, for Mister World. There is silence. Town crosses his legs, tugs his belt higher on his bellygot to lose those last ten pounds and away from his bladder. Then an urbane voice says, Hello, Mister Town. We lost them, says Town. He feels a knot of frustration in his gut: these were the bastards, the lousy dirty sons of bitches who killed Woody and Stone, for Chrissakes. Good men. Good men. He badly wants to fuck Mrs. Wood, but knows its still too soon after Woodys death to make a move. So he is taking her out for dinner every couple of weeks, an investment in the future, she's just grateful for the attention How? I don't know. We set up a roadblock, there was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway. Just another one of lifes little mysteries. don't worry. Have you calmed the locals? Told em it was an optical illusion. They buy it? Probably. There was something very familiar about Mr. |
| 954 |
Worlds voicewhich was a strange thing to think, hed been working for him directly for two years now, spoken to him every day, of course there was something familiar about his voice. they'll be far away by now. Should we send people down to the rez to intercept them? Not worth the aggravation. Too many jurisdictional issues, and there are only so many strings I can pull in a morning. We have plenty of time. Just get back here. I've got my hands full at this end trying to organize the policy meeting. Trouble? Its a pissing contest. I've proposed that we have it out here. The techies want it in Austin, or maybe San Jose, the players want it in Hollywood, the intangibles want it on Wall Street. Everybody wants it in their own backyard. Nobodys going to give. You need me to do anything? Not yet. I'll growl at some of them, stroke others. You know the routine. Yes, sir. Carry on, Town. The connection is broken. Town thinks he should have had a S. W. A. T. team to pick off that fucking Winnebago, or land mines on the road, or a tactical friggin nukuler device, that would have showed those bastards they meant business. It was like Mr. World had once said to him, We are writing the future in Letters of Fire and Mr. Town thinks that Jesus Christ, if he doesn't piss now hell lose a kidney, itll just burst, and it was like his pop had said when they were on long journeys, when Town was a kid, out on the interstate, his pop would always say, My back teeth are afloat, and Mr. Town could hear that voice even now, that sharp Yankee accent saying I got to take a leak soon. My back teeth are afloat and it was then that Shadow felt a hand opening his own hand, prising it open one finger at a time, off the thighbone it was clutching. He no longer needed to urinate; that was someone else. He was standing under the stars on a glassy rock plain. Wednesday made the signal for silence again. Then he began to walk, and Shadow followed. There was a creak from the mechanical spider, and Wednesday froze. |
| 955 |
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. 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. |
| 956 |
You play your cards so close to your chest, said Shadow, that I'm not even sure thatyou're really cards at all. Wednesday only grunted. Each hill they came to was harder to climb. Shadow began to feel headachy. There was a pounding quality to the starlight, something that resonated with the pulse in his temples and his chest. At the bottom of the next hill he stumbled, opened his mouth to say something and, without warning, he vomited. Wednesday reached into an inside pocket, and produced a small hip flask. Take a sip of this, he said. Only a sip. The liquid was pungent, and it evaporated in his mouth like a good brandy, although it did not taste like alcohol. Wednesday took the flask away, and pocketed it. Its not good for the audience to find themselves walking about backstage. that's whyyou're feeling sick. We need to hurry to get you out of here. They walked faster, Wednesday at a solid trudge, Shadow stumbling from time to time, but feeling better for the drink, which had left his mouth tasting of orange peel, of rosemary oil and peppermint and cloves. Wednesday took his arm. There, he said, pointing to two identical hillocks of frozen rock-glass to their left. Walk between those two mounds. Walk beside me. They walked, and the cold air and bright daylight smashed into Shadows face at the same time. They were standing halfway up a gentle hill. The mist had gone, the day was sunny and chill, the sky was a perfect blue. At the bottom of the hill was a gravel road, and a red station wagon bounced along it like a childs toy car. A gust of wood smoke came from a building nearby. It looked as if someone had picked up a mobile home and dropped it on the side of the hill thirty years ago. The home was much repaired, patched, and, in places, added onto. As they reached the door it opened, and a middle-aged man with sharp eyes and a mouth like a knife slash looked down at them and said, Eyah, I heard that there were two white men on their way to see me. Two whites in a Winnebago. |
| 957 |
And I heard that they got lost, like white men always get lost if they don't put up their signs everywhere. And now look at these two sorry beasts at the door. You knowyou're on Lakota land? His hair was gray, and long. Since when were you Lakota, you old fraud? said Wednesday. He was wearing a coat and a flap-eared cap, and already it seemed to Shadow unlikely that only a few moments ago under the stars he had been wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a tattered cloak. So, Whiskey Jack. I'm starving, and my friend here just threw up his breakfast. Are you going to invite us in? Whiskey Jack scratched an armpit. He was wearing blue jeans, and an undershirt the gray of his hair. He wore moccasins, and he seemed not to notice the cold. Then he said, I like it here. Come in, white men who lost their Winnebago. There was more wood smoke in the air inside the trailer, and there was another man in there, sitting at a table. The man wore stained buckskins, and was barefoot. His skin was the color of bark. Wednesday seemed delighted. Well, he said, it seems our delay was fortuitous. Whiskey Jack and Apple Johnny. Two birds with one stone. The man at the table, Apple Johnny, stared at Wednesday, then he reached down a hand to his crotch, cupped it and said, Wrong again. I jes checked and I got both of my stones, jes where they oughtta be. He looked up at Shadow, raised his hand, palm out. I'm John Chapman. You don't mind anything your boss says about me. he's an asshole. Always was an asshole. Always goin to be an asshole. Some people is jes assholes, and that's an end of it. Mike Ainsel, said Shadow. Chapman rubbed his stubbly chin. Ainsel, he said. that's not a name. But itll do at a pinch. What do they call you? Shadow. I'll call you Shadow, then. Hey, Whiskey Jackbut it wasnt really Whiskey Jack he was saying, Shadow realized. Too many syllables. Hows the food looking? Whiskey Jack took a wooden spoon and lifted the lid off a black iron pot, bubbling away on the range of the wood-burning stove. |
| 958 |
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. they'll win, said Whiskey Jack flatly. They won already. You lost already. Like the white man and my people. Mostly they won. And when they lost, they made treaties. Then they broke the treaties. So they won again. I'm not fighting for another lost cause. And its no use you lookin at me, said John Chapman, for even if I fought for youwhichn I wontI'm no use to you. Mangy rat-tailed bastards jes picked me off and clean forgot me. He stopped. Then he said, Paul Bunyan. He shook his head slowly and he said it again. |
| 959 |
Paul Bunyan. Shadow had never heard two such innocuous words made to sound so damning. Paul Bunyan? Shadow said. What did he ever do? He took up head space, said Whiskey Jack. He bummed a cigarette from Wednesday and the two men sat and smoked. Its like the idiots who figure that hummingbirds worry about their weight or tooth decay or some such nonsense, maybe they just want to spare hummingbirds the evils of sugar, explained Wednesday. So they fill the hummingbird feeders with fucking NutraSweet. The birds come to the feeders and they drink it. Then they die, because their food contains no calories even though their little tummies are full. that's Paul Bunyan for you. Nobody ever told Paul Bunyan stories. Nobody ever believed in Paul Bunyan. He came staggering out of a New York ad agency in 1910 and filled the nations myth stomach with empty calories. I like Paul Bunyan, said Whiskey Jack. I went on his ride at the Mall of America, few years back. You see big old Paul Bunyan at the top, then you come crashing down. Splash! he's okay by me. I don't mind that he never existed, means he never cut down any trees. Not as good as planting trees though. that's better. You said a mouthful, said Johnny Chapman. Wednesday blew a smoke ring. It hung in the air, dissipating slowly in wisps and curls. Damn it, Whiskey Jack, that's not the point and you know it. I'm not going to help you, said Whiskey Jack. When you get your ass kicked, you can come back here and if I'm still here I'll feed you again. You get the best food in the fall. Wednesday said, All the alternatives are worse. You have no idea what the alternatives are, said Whiskey Jack. Then he looked at Shadow. You are hunting, he said. His voice was roughened by wood smoke and cigarettes. I'm working, said Shadow. Whiskey Jack shook his head. You are also hunting something, he said. There is a debt that you wish to pay. Shadow thought of Lauras blue lips and the blood on her hands, and he nodded. Listen. Fox was here first, and his brother was the wolf. |
| 960 |
Fox said, people will live forever. If they die they will not die for long. Wolf said, no, people will die, people must die, all things that live must die, or they will spread and cover the world, and eat all the salmon and the caribou and the buffalo, eat all the squash and all the corn. Now one day Wolf died, and he said to the fox, quick, bring me back to life. And Fox said, No, the dead must stay dead. You convinced me. And he wept as he said this. But he said it, and it was final. Now Wolf rules the world of the dead and Fox lives always under the sun and the moon, and he still mourns his brother. Wednesday said, If you won't play, you won't play. Well be moving on. Whiskey Jacks face was impassive. I'm talking to this young man, he said. You are beyond help. He is not. He turned back to Shadow. Tell me your dream, said Whiskey Jack. Shadow said, I was climbing a tower of skulls. There were huge birds flying around it. They had lightning in their wings. They were attacking me. The tower fell. Everybody dreams, said Wednesday. Can we hit the road? Not everybody dreams of the Wakinyau, the thunder-bird, said Whiskey Jack. We felt the echoes of it here. I told you, said Wednesday. Jesus. Theres a clutch of thunderbirds in West Virginia, said Chapman, idly. A couple of hens and an old cock-bird at least. Theres also a breeding pair in the land, they used to call it the State of Franklin, but old Ben never got his state, up between Kentucky and Tennessee. Course, there was never a great number of them, even at the best of times. Whiskey Jack reached out a hand the color of red clay and touched Shadows face, gently. Eyah, he said. Its true. If you hunt the thunderbird you could bring your woman back. But she belongs to the wolf, in the dead places, not walking the land. How do you know? asked Shadow. Whiskey Jacks lips did not move. What did the buffalo tell you? To believe. Good advice. Are you going to follow it? Kind of. I guess. They were talking without words, without mouths, without sound. |
| 961 |
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. When you find your tribe, come back and see me, said Whiskey Jack. I can help. I shall. Whiskey Jack lowered his hand. Then he turned to Wednesday. Are you going to fetch your Ho Chunk? My what? Ho Chunk. Its what the Winnebago call themselves. Wednesday shook his head. Its too risky. Retrieving it could be problematic. they'll be looking for it. Is it stolen? Wednesday looked affronted. Not a bit of it. The papers are in the glove compartment. And the keys? I've got them, said Shadow. My nephew, Harry Bluejay, has an 81 Buick. Why don't you give me the keys to your camper? You can take his car. Wednesday bristled. What kind of trade is that? Whiskey Jack shrugged. You know how hard it will be to bring back your camper from where you abandoned it? I'm doing you a favor. Take it or leave it. I don't care. He closed his knife-wound mouth. Wednesday looked angry, and then the anger became rue, and he said, Shadow, give the man the keys to the Winnebago. Shadow passed the car keys to Whiskey Jack. Johnny, said Whiskey Jack, will you take these men down to find Harry Bluejay? Tell him I said for him to give them his car. Be my pleasure, said John Chapman. He got up and walked to the door, picked up a small burlap sack sitting next to it, opened the door, and walked outside. Shadow and Wednesday followed him. Whiskey Jack waited in the doorway. Hey, he said to Wednesday. don't come back here, you. You are not welcome. Wednesday extended his finger heavenward. Rotate on this, he said affably. They walked downhill through the snow, pushing their way through the drifts. Chapman walked in front, his bare feet red against the crust-topped snow. Arent you cold? asked Shadow. My wife was Choctaw, said Chapman. And she taught you mystical ways to keep out the cold? Nope. She thought I was crazy, said Chapman. She used tsay, Johnny, why don't you jes put on boots? |
| 962 |
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. 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? |
| 963 |
asked Shadow. Pretty much, said the woman. All the ones around here. And don't you go asking about all the money from casinos, because who in their right mind wants to come all the way out here to go to a casino? We don't see none of that money out here. I'm sorry. don't be. She changed gear with a crash and a groan. You know the white population all around here is falling? You go out there, you find ghost towns. How you going to keep them down on the farm, after they seen the world on their television screens? And its not worth anyones while to farm the Badlands anyhow. They took our lands, they settled here, nowyou're leaving. They go south. They go west. Maybe if we wait for enough of them to move to New York and Miami and L. A. we can take the whole of the middle back without a fight. Good luck, said Shadow. They found Harry Bluejay in the rec hall, at the pool table, doing trick shots to impress a group of several girls. He had a blue jay tattooed on the back of his right hand, and multiple piercings in his right ear. Ho hoka, Harry Bluejay, said John Chapman. Fuck off, you crazy barefoot white ghost, said Harry Bluejay, conversationally. You give me the creeps. There were older men at the far end of the room, some of them playing cards, some of them talking. There were other men, younger men of about Harry Bluejays age, waiting for their turn at the pool table. It was a full-sized pool table, and a rip in the green baize on one side had been repaired with silver-gray duct tape. I got a message from your uncle, said Chapman, un-fazed. He saysyou're to give these two your car. There must have been thirty, maybe even forty people in that hall, and now they were every one of them looking intently at their playing cards, or their feet, or their fingernails, and pretending as hard as they could not to be listening. he's not my uncle. A cigarette-smoke fug hung over the hall. Chapman smiled widely, displaying the worst set of teeth that Shadow had seen in a human mouth. |
| 964 |
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. Not that, said Shadow. Look. It says its the fourteenth of February. Happy Valentines Day. So we set out January the what, twentieth, twenty-first. I wasnt keeping track of the dates, but it was the third week of January. We were three days on the road, all told. So how is it the fourteenth of February? Because we walked for almost a month, said Wednesday. In the Badlands. Backstage. Hell of a shortcut, said Shadow. Wednesday pushed the paper away. Fucking Johnny Appleseed, always going on about Paul Bunyan. In real life Chapman owned fourteen apple orchards. He farmed thousands of acres. Yes, he kept pace with the western frontier, but theres not a story out there about him with a word of truth in it, save that he went a little crazy once. But it doesn't matter. Like the newspapers used to say, if the truth isn't big enough, you print the legend. This country needs its legends. And even the legends don't believe it anymore. But you see it. I'm a has-been. Who the fuck cares about me? Shadow said softly, you're a god. Wednesday looked at him sharply. He seemed to be about to say something, and then he slumped back in his seat, and looked down at the menu, and said, So? |
| 965 |
Its a good thing to be a god, said Shadow. Is it? asked Wednesday, and this time it was Shadow who looked away. In a gas station twenty-five miles outside Lakeside, on the wall by the rest rooms, Shadow saw a homemade photocopied notice: a black-and-white photo of Alison McGovern and the handwritten question Have You Seen Me? above it. Same yearbook photograph: smiling confidently, a girl with rubber-band braces on her top teeth who wants to work with animals when she grows up. Have you seen me? Shadow bought a Snickers bar, a bottle of water, and a copy of the Lakeside News. The above-the-fold story, written by Marguerite Olsen, our Lakeside Reporter, showed a photograph of a boy and an older man, out on the frozen lake, standing by an outhouselike ice-fishing shack, and between them they were holding a big fish. They were smiling. Father and Son Catch Local Record Northern Pike. Full story inside. Wednesday was driving. He said, Read me anything interesting you find in the paper. Shadow looked carefully, and he turned the pages slowly, but he couldn't find anything. Wednesday dropped him off in the driveway outside his apartment. A smoke-colored cat stared at him from the driveway, then fled when he bent to stroke it. Shadow stopped on the wooden deck outside his apartment and looked out at the lake, dotted here and there with green and brown ice-fishing huts. Many of them had cars parked beside them. On the ice nearer the bridge sat the old green klunker, just as it had sat in the newspaper. March twenty-third, said Shadow, encouragingly. Round nine-fifteen in the morning. You can do it. Not a chance, said a womans voice. April third. Six P. M. That way the day warms up the ice. Shadow smiled. Marguerite Olsen was wearing a ski suit. She was at the far end of the deck, refilling the bird feeder. 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? |
| 966 |
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. 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. |
| 967 |
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. 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. |
| 968 |
He did not know what to say to her. Her cold hand sought his, and he squeezed it gently. He could feel his heart beating in his chest. He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment. He felt so comfortable with her at his side that he would have been willing to stand there forever. I miss you, he admitted. I'm here, she said. that's when I miss you most. Whenyou're here. When you arent here, whenyou're just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, its easier then. She squeezed his fingers. So, he asked. Hows death? Hard, she said. It just keeps going. She rested her head on his shoulder, and it almost undid him. He said, You want to walk for a bit? Sure. She smiled up at him, a nervous, crooked smile in a dead face. They walked out of the little graveyard, and made their way back down the road, toward the town, hand in hand. Where have you been? she asked. Here, he said. Mostly. Since Christmas, she said, I kind of lost you. Sometimes I would know where you were, for a few hours, for a few days. Youd be all over. Then youd fade away again. I was in this town, he said. Lakeside. Its a good little town. Oh, she said. She no longer wore the blue suit in which she had been buried. Now she wore several sweaters, a long, dark skirt, and high, burgundy boots. Shadow commented on them. Laura ducked her head. She smiled. Arent they great boots? I found them in this great shoe store in Chicago. So what made you decide to come up from Chicago? Oh, I've not been in Chicago for a while, puppy. I was heading south. The cold was bothering me. Youd think I'd welcome it. But its something to do with being dead, I guess. You don't feel it as cold. You feel it as a sort of nothing, and whenyou're dead I guess the only thing thatyou're scared of is nothing. I was going to go to Texas. I planned to spend the winter in Galveston. I think I used to winter in Galveston, when I was a kid. I don't think you did, said Shadow. Youve never mentioned it before. No? Maybe it was someone else, then. |
| 969 |
I don't know. I remember seagullsthrowing bread in the air for seagulls, hundreds of them, the whole sky becoming nothing but seagulls as they flapped their wings and snatched the bread from the air. She paused. If I didn't see it, I guess someone else did. A car came around the corner. The driver waved them hello. Shadow waved back. It felt wonderfully normal to walk with his wife. This feels good, said Laura, as if she was reading his mind. Yes, said Shadow. When the call came I had to hurry back. I was barely into Texas. Call? She looked up at him. Around her neck the gold coin glinted. It felt like a call, she said. I started to think about you. About how much I needed to see you. It was like a hunger. You knew I was here, then? Yes. She stopped. She frowned, and her upper teeth pressed into her blue lower lip, biting it gently. She put her head on one side and said, I did. Suddenly, I did. I thought you were calling me, but it wasnt you, was it? No. You didn't want to see me. It wasnt that. He hesitated. No. I didn't want to see you. It hurts too much. The snow crunched beneath their feet and it glittered diamonds as the sunlight caught it. It must be hard, said Laura, not being alive. You mean its hard for you to be dead? Look, I'm still going to figure out how to bring you back, properly. I think I'm on the right track No, she said. I mean, I'm grateful. And I hope you really can do it. I did a lot of bad stuff She shook her head. But I was talking about you. I'm alive, said Shadow. I'm not dead. Remember? you're not dead, she said. But I'm not sure thatyou're alive, either. Not really. This isn't the way this conversation goes, thought Shadow. This isn't the way anything goes. I love you, she said, dispassionately. you're my puppy. But whenyou're really dead you get to see things clearer. Its like there isn't anyone there. You know? you're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world. She frowned. Even when we were together. I loved being with you. You adored me, and you would do anything for me. |
| 970 |
The smile freezes when she sees the car is a white stretch limo. Men in stretch limos want to fuck in stretch limos, not in the privacy of Bilquiss shrine. Still, it might be an investment. Something for the future. A tinted window hums down and Bilquis walks over to the limo, smiling. Hey, honey, she says. You looking for something? Sweet loving, says a voice from the back of the stretch. She peers inside, as much as she can through the open window: she knows a girl who got into a stretch with five drunk football players and got hurt real bad, but theres only one John in there that she can see, and he looks kind of on the young side. 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. |
| 971 |
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. 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. 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. |
| 972 |
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. She runs across the road, intending to push herself up the wet earth, to climb, when the white stretch limo comes fish-tailing down the slick hillside road, hell, it must be doing eighty, maybe even aquaplaning on the surface of the road, and she's pushing her hands into a handful of weeds and earth, and she's going to get up and away, she knows, when the wet earth crumbles and she tumbles back down onto the road. The car hits her with an impact that crumples the grille and tosses her into the air like a glove puppet. She lands on the road behind the limo, and the impact shatters her pelvis, fractures her skull. Cold rainwater runs over her face. She begins to curse her killer: curse him silently, as she cannot move her lips. She curses him in waking and in sleeping, in living and in death. |
| 973 |
A short laugh, then, Yes, I guess he does look married. I mean, if theres a look that married men have, he kind of has it. But the word I was thinking of was Melancholy. He looks Melancholy. And Mysterious? Not particularly. When he moved in he seemed kinda helplesshe didn't even know to heat-seal the windows. These days he still looks like he doesn't know what he's doing here. When he's herehes here, then he's gone again. I've seen him out walking from time to time. Maybe he's a bank robber. Uh-huh. Just what I was thinking. You were not. That was my idea. Listen, Mags, how are you? Are you okay? Yeah. Really? No. A long pause then. I'm coming up to see you. Sammy, no. Itll be after the weekend, before the furnaces are working and school starts again. Itll be fun. You can make up a bed on the couch for me. And invite the mysterious neighbor over for dinner one night. Sam, you're matchmaking. Whos matchmaking? After Claudine-the-bitch-from-hell, maybe I'm ready to go back to boys for a while. I met a nice strange boy when I hitchhiked down to El Paso for Christmas. Oh. Look, Sam, youve got to stop hitchhiking. How do you think I'm going to get to Lakeside? Alison McGovern was hitchhiking. Even in a town like this, its not safe. I'll wire you the money. You can take the bus. I'll be fine. Sammy. Okay, Mags. Wire me the money if itll let you sleep easier. You know it will. Okay, bossy big sister. Give Leon a bug and tell him Auntie Sammys coming up and he's not to hide his toys in her bed this time. I'll tell him. I don't promise itll do any good. So when should I expect you? Tomorrow night. You don't have to meet me at the bus station I'll ask Hinzelmann to run me over in Tessie. Too late. Tessies in mothballs for the winter. But Hinzelmann will give you a ride anyway. He likes you. You listen to his stories. Maybe you should get Hinzelmann to write your editorial for you. Lets see. On the Rezoning of the Land by the Old Cemetery. It so happens that in the winter of ought-three my grampaw shot a stag down by the old cemetery by the lake. |
| 974 |
Do you want to see Lucys tits? something with a Lucy voice whispered in his memory, and he shook his head, although there was no one there to see him. He was nervous, he realized. This would be his first real social interaction with other peoplenormal people, not people in jail, not gods or culture heroes or dreamssince he was first arrested, over three years ago. He would have to make conversation, as Mike Ainsel. He checked his watch. It was two-thirty. Marguerite Olsen had told him to be there at six. Did she mean six exactly? Should he be there a little early? A little late? He decided, eventually, to walk next door at five past six. Shadows telephone rang. Yeah? he said. that's no way to answer the phone, growled Wednesday. When I get my telephone connected I'll answer it politely, said Shadow. Can I help you? I don't know, said Wednesday. There was a pause. Then he said, Organizing gods is like herding cats into straight lines. They don't take naturally to it. There was a deadness, and an exhaustion, in Wednesdays voice that Shadow had never heard before. Whats wrong? Its hard. Its too fucking hard. I don't know if this is going to work. We might as well cut our throats. Just cut our own throats. You mustn't talk like that. Yeah. Right. Well, if you do cut your throat, said Shadow, trying to jolly Wednesday out of his darkness, maybe it wouldn't even hurt. It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don't die well, but we can die. If were still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if were forgotten, were done. Shadow did not know what to say. He said, So where are you calling from? None of your goddamn business. Are you drunk? Not yet. I just keep thinking about Thor. You never knew him. |
| 975 |
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. 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? |
| 976 |
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. 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. |
| 977 |
Do it now if you want, said Marguerite. Were still waiting for Samantha. I sent her out for sour cream. I don't know whats taking her so long. And, as if that was her cue, footsteps sounded on the wooden deck, and somebody shouldered open the front door. Shadow did not recognize her at first, then she said, I didn't know if you wanted the kind with calories or the kind that tastes like wallpaper paste so I went for the kind with calories, and he knew her then: the girl from the road to Cairo. that's fine, said Marguerite. Sam, this is my neighbor, Mike Ainsel. Mike, this is Samantha Black Crow, my sister. I don't know you, thought Shadow desperately. Youve never met me before. Were total strangers. He tried to remember how he had thought snow, how easy and light that had been: this was desperate. He put out his hand and said, Pleased to meetcha. She blinked, looked up at his face. A moment of puzzlement, then recognition entered her eyes and curved the corners of her mouth into a grin. Hello, she said. I'll see how the food is doing, said Marguerite, in the taut voice of someone who burns things in kitchens if they leave them alone and unwatched even for a moment. Sam took off her puffy coat and her hat. Soyou're the melancholy but mysterious neighbor, she said. Whoda thunk it? She kept her voice down. And you, he said, are girl Sam. Can we talk about this later? If you promise to tell me whats going on. Deal. Leon tugged at the leg of Shadows pants. Will you show me now? he asked, and held out his quarter. Okay, said Shadow. But if I show you, you have to remember that a master magician never tells anyone how its done. I promise, said Leon, gravely. Shadow took the coin in his left hand, then moved Leons right hand, showing him how to appear to take the coin in his right hand while actually leaving it in Shadows left hand. Then he made Leon repeat the movements on his own. After several attempts the boy mastered the move. Now you know half of it, said Shadow. The other half is this: put your attention on the place where the coin ought to be. |
| 978 |
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. 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. |
| 979 |
Paul Gunthers car. You bought Paul Gunthers car. Omigod. Shadow opened the door for her. Then he went around and got in. You know the car? When I came up here two or three years ago to stay with Mags. It was me that persuaded him to paint it purple. Oh, said Shadow. Its good to have someone to blame. He drove the car out onto the street. Got out and closed the garage door. Got back into the car. Sam was looking at him oddly as he got in, as if the confidence had begun to leak out of her. He put on his seat belt, and she said, Okay. This is a stupid thing to do, isn't it? Getting into a car with a psycho killer. I got you home safe last time, said Shadow. You killed two men, she said. you're wanted by the feds. And now I find outyou're living under an assumed name next door to my sister. Unless Mike Ainsel is your real name? No, said Shadow, and he sighed. Its not. He hated saying it. It was as if he was letting go of something important, abandoning Mike Ainsel by denying him; as if he were taking his leave of a friend. Did you kill those men? No. They came to my house, and said wed been seen together. And this guy showed me photographs of you. What was his nameMister Hat? No. Mister Town. It was like The Fugitive. But I said I hadn't seen you. Thank you. So, she said. Tell me whats going on. I'll keep your secrets if you keep mine. I don't know any of yours, said Shadow. Well, you know that it was my idea to paint this thing purple, thus forcing Paul Gunther to become such an object of scorn and derision for several counties around that he was forced to leave town entirely. We were kind of stoned, she admitted. I doubt that bit of its much of a secret, said Shadow. Everyone in Lakeside must have known. Its a stoner sort of purple. And then she said, very quiet, very fast, Ifyou're going to kill me please don't hurt me. I shouldn't have come here with you. I am so fucking fucking dumb. I can identify you. Jesus. Shadow sighed. I've never killed anybody. Really. Now I'm going to take you to the Buck, he said. |
| 980 |
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. 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. |
| 981 |
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. 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? No, my wife killed those two men. |
| 982 |
I thought you said your wife was dead. She is. She killed them before she died, then? After. don't ask. She reached up a hand and flicked her hair from her forehead. They pulled up on Main Street, outside the Buck Stops Here. The sign over the window showed a surprised-looking stag standing on its hind legs holding a glass of beer. Shadow grabbed the bag with the book in it and got out. Why would they have a war? asked Sam. It seems kind of redundant. What is there to win? I don't know, admitted Shadow. Its easier to believe in aliens than in gods, said Sam. Maybe Mister Town and Mister Whatever were Men in Black, only the alien kind. They were standing on the sidewalk outside the Buck Stops Here and Sam stopped. She looked up at Shadow, and her breath hung on the night air like a faint cloud. She said, Just tell meyou're one of the good guys. I cant, said Shadow. I wish I could. But I'm doing my best. She looked up at him, and bit her lower lip. Then she nodded. Good enough, she said. I won't turn you in. You can buy me a beer. Shadow pushed the door open for her, and they were hit by a blast of heat and music. They went inside. Sam waved at some friends. Shadow nodded to a handful of people whose facesalthough not their nameshe remembered from the day he had spent searching for Alison McGovern, or who he had met in Mabels in the morning. Chad Mulligan was standing at the bar, with his arm around the shoulders of a small red-haired womanthe kissing cousin, Shadow figured. He wondered what she looked like, but she had her back to him. Chads hand raised in a mock salute when he saw Shadow. Shadow grinned, and waved back at him. Shadow looked around for Hinzelmann, but the old man did not seem to be there this evening. He spied a free table at the back and started walking toward it. Then somebody began to scream. It was a bad scream, a full-throated, seen-a-ghost hysterical scream, which silenced all conversation. Shadow looked around, certain somebody was being murdered, and then he realized that all the faces in the bar were turning toward him. |
| 983 |
After ten minutes Chad brought him a watery cup of vending machine hot chocolate. Whats in the bag? he asked. And it was only then that Shadow realized he was still holding the plastic bag containing the Minutes of the LakesideCity Council. Old book, said Shadow. Your grandfathers pictures in here. Or great-grandfather maybe. Yeah? Shadow flipped through the book until he found the portrait of the town council, and he pointed to the man called Mulligan. Chad chuckled. If that don't beat all, he said. Minutes passed, and hours, in that room. Shadow read two of the Sports Illustrateds and he started in on the Newsweek. From time to time Chad would come through, once checking to see if Shadow needed to use the rest room, once to offer him a ham roll and a small packet of potato chips. Thanks, said Shadow, taking them. Am I under arrest yet? Chad sucked the air between his teeth. Well, he said, not yet. It doesn't look like you came by the name Mike Ainsel legally. On the other hand, you can call yourself whatever you want in this state, if its not for fraudulent purposes. You just hang loose. Can I make a phone call? Is it a local call? Long distance. Itll save money if I put it on my calling card, otherwise you'll just be feeding ten bucks worth of quarters into that thing in the hall. Sure, thought Shadow. And this way you'll know the number I dialed, and you'll probably be listening in on an extension. That would be great, said Shadow. They went into an empty office. The number Shadow gave Chad to dial for him was that of a funeral home in Cairo, Illinois. Chad dialed it, handed Shadow the receiver. I'll leave you in here, he said, and went out. The telephone rang several times, then it was picked up. Jacquel and Ibis? Can I help you? Hi. Mister Ibis, this is Mike Ainsel. I helped out there for a few days over Christmas. A moments hesitation, then, Of course. Mike. How are you? Not great, Mister Ibis. In a patch of trouble. About to be arrested. Hoping youd seen my uncle about, or maybe you could get a message to him. |
| 984 |
I can certainly ask around. Hold on, uh, Mike. Theres someone here who wishes a word with you. The phone was passed to somebody, and then a smoky female voice said Hi, honey. I miss you. He was certain hed never heard that voice before. But he knew her. He was sure that he knew her Let it go, the smoky voice whispered in his mind, in a dream. Let it all go. Whos that girl you were kissing, hon? You trying to make me jealous? Were just friends, said Shadow. I think she was trying to prove a point. How did you know she kissed me? I got eyes wherever my folk walk, she said. You take care now, hon There was a moment of silence, then Mr. Ibis came back on the line and said, Mike? Yes. Theres a problem getting hold of your uncle. He seems to be kind of tied up. But I'll try and get a message to your aunt Nancy. Best of luck. The line went dead. Shadow sat down, expecting Chad to return. 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. And then, on something slightly more than a whim, Shadow flipped the pages forward to the winter of 1877. He found what he was looking for mentioned as an aside in the January minutes: Jessie Lovat, age not given, a Negro child, had vanished on the night of December 28. |
| 985 |
My whole life is in here. The woman took the wallet from him, and assured him that it would be safe with them. She asked Chad if that wasnt true, and Chad, looking up from the last of his paperwork, said Liz was telling the truth, theyd never lost a prisoners possessions yet. Shadow had slipped the four hundred-dollar bills that he had palmed from the wallet into his socks, when he had changed, along with the silver Liberty dollar he had palmed as he had emptied his pockets. Say, Shadow asked, when he came out. Would it be okay if I finished reading the book? Sorry, Mike. Rules are rules, said Chad. Liz put Shadows possessions in a bag in the back room. Chad said hed leave Shadow in Officer Butes capable hands. Liz looked tired and unimpressed. Chad left. The telephone rang, and LizOfficer Buteanswered it. Okay, she said. Okay. No problem. Okay. No problem. Okay. She put down the phone and made a face. Problem? asked Shadow. Yes. Not really. Kinda. you're sending someone up from Milwaukee to collect you. Why is that a problem? I got to keep you in here with me for three hours, she said. And the cell over thereshe pointed to the cell by the door, with the sleeping man in itthats occupied. he's on suicide watch. I shouldn't put you in with him. But its not worth the trouble to sign you in to the county and then sign you out again. She shook her head. And you don't want to go in thereshe pointed to the empty cell in which hed changed his clothesbecause the can is shot. It stinks in there, doesn't it? Yes. It was gross. Its common humanity, that's what it is. The sooner we get into the new facilities, it cant be too soon for me. One of the women we had in yesterday mustve flushed a tampon away. I tell em not to. We got bins for that. They clog the pipes. Every damn tampon down that John costs the county a hundred bucks in plumbers fees. So, I can keep you out here, if I cuff you. Or you can go in the cell. She looked at him. Your call, she said. I'm not crazy about them, he said. |
| 986 |
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. But I will keep my word. Safe conduct is safe conduct, said Mr. World, and a flag of truce is what we agreed. I should tell you, by the way, that your young protege is once more in our custody. Wednesday snorted. No, he said. he's not. We were discussing the ways to deal with the coming paradigm shift. We don't have to be enemies. Do we? Wednesday seemed shaken. He said, I will do whatever is in my power Shadow noticed something strange about the image of Wednesday on the television screen. A red glint burned on his left eye, the glass one. The dot left a phosphor-dot afterimage as he moved. He seemed unaware of it. Its a big country, said Wednesday, marshaling his thoughts. He moved his head and the red laser-pointer dot slipped to his cheek. Then it edged up to his glass eye once more. There is room for There was a bang, muted by the television speakers, and the side of Wednesdays head exploded. His body tumbled backward. Mr. World stood up, his back still to the camera, and walked out of shot. |
| 987 |
Officer Liz came back in. She pressed a button, a door that Shadow could not see opened, and a black deputy in a brown sheriffs uniform entered and walked briskly over to the desk. Shadow slipped the dollar coin back into his sock. The new deputy handed over some papers, Liz scanned them and signed. Chad Mulligan came in, said a few words to the new man, then he unlocked the cell door and walked inside. Okay. Folk are here to pick you up. Seemsyou're a matter of national security. You know that? Itll make a great front-page story for the Lakeside News, said Shadow. Chad looked at him without expression. That a drifter got picked up for parole violations? Not much of a story. So that's the way it is? that's what they tell me, said Chad Mulligan. Shadow put his hands in front of him this time, and Chad cuffed him. Chad locked on the ankle hobbles, and a rod from the cuffs to the hobbles. Shadow thought, they'll take me outside. Maybe I can make a break for itin hobbles and cuffs and lightweight orange clothes, out into the snow, and even as he thought it he knew how stupid and hopeless it was. Chad walked him out into the office. Liz had turned the TV off now. The black deputy looked him over. he's a big guy, he said to Chad. Liz passed the new deputy the paper bag with Shadows possessions in it, and he signed for it. Chad looked at Shadow, then at the deputy. He said to the deputy, quietly, but loudly enough for Shadow to hear, Look. I just want to say, I'm not comfortable with the way this is happening. The deputy nodded. you'll have to take it up with the appropriate authorities, sir. Our job is simply to bring him in. Chad made a sour face. He turned to Shadow. Okay, said Chad. Through that door and into the sally port. What? Out there. Where the car is. Liz unlocked the doors. You make sure that orange uniform comes right back here, she said to the deputy. The last felon we sent down to Lafayette, we never saw the uniform again. They cost the county money. They walked Shadow out to the sally port, where a car sat idling. |
| 988 |
It wasnt 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. 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. |
| 989 |
The cup was half filled with a dark yellow liquid. Atsula had found the pungh mushrooms, each with seven spots, only a true holy woman could find a seven-spotted mushroomand had picked them at the dark of the moon, and dried them on a string of deer cartilage. Yesterday, before she slept, she had eaten the three dried mushroom caps. Her dreams had been confused and fearful things, of bright lights moving fast, of rock mountains filled with lights spearing upward like icicles. In the night she had woken, sweating, and needing to make water. She squatted over the wooden cup and filled it with her urine. Then she placed the cup outside the tent, in the snow, and returned to sleep. When she woke, she picked the lumps of ice out from the wooden cup, leaving a darker, more concentrated liquid behind. It was this liquid she passed around, first to Gugwei, then to Yanu and to Kalanu. Each of them took a large gulp of the liquid, then Atsula took the final draft. She swallowed it, and poured what was left on the ground in front of their god, a libation to Nunyunnini. They sat in the smoky tent, waiting for their god to speak. Outside, in the darkness, the wind wailed and breathed. Kalanu, the scout, was a woman who dressed and walked as a man: she had even taken Dalani, a fourteen-year-old maiden, to be her wife. Kalanu blinked her eyes tightly, then she got up and walked over to the mammoth skull. She pulled the mammoth-hide cloak over herself, and stood so her head was inside the mammoth skull. There is evil in the land, said Nunyunnini in Kalanus voice. Evil, such that if you stay here, in the land of your mothers and your mothers mothers, you shall all perish. The three listeners grunted. Is it the slavers? Or the great wolves? asked Gugwei, whose hair was long and white, and whose face was as wrinkled as the gray skin of a thorn tree. It is not the slavers, said Nunyunnini, old stone-hide. It is not the great wolves. Is it a famine? Is a famine coming? asked Gugwei. Nunyunnini was silent. |
| 990 |
Kalanu came out of the skull and waited with the rest of them. Gugwei put on the mammoth-hide cloak and put his head inside the skull. It is not a famine as you know it, said Nunyunnini, through Gugweis mouth, although a famine will follow. Then what is it? asked Yanu. I am not afraid. I will stand against it. We have spears, and we have throwing rocks. Let a hundred mighty warriors come against us, still we shall prevail. We shall lead them into the marshes, and split their skulls with our flints. It is not a man thing, said Nunyunnini, in Gugweis old voice. It will come from the skies, and none of your spears or your rocks will protect you. How can we protect ourselves? asked Atsula. I have seen flames in the skies. I have heard a noise louder than ten thunderbolts. I have seen forests flattened and rivers boil. Ai, said Nunyunnini, but he said no more. Gugwei came out of the skull, bending stiffly, for he was an old man, and his knuckles were swollen and knotted. There was silence. Atsula threw more leaves on the fire, and the smoke made their eyes tear. Then Yanu strode to the mammoth head, put the cloak about his broad shoulders, put his head inside the skull. His voice boomed. You must journey, said Nunyunnini. You must travel to sunward. Where the sun rises, there you will find a new land, where you will be safe. It will be a long journey: the moon will swell and empty, die and live, twice, and there will be slavers and beasts, but I shall guide you and keep you safe, if you travel toward the sunrise. Atsula spat on the mud of the floor, and said, No. She could feel the god staring at her. No, she said. You are a bad god to tell us this. We will die. We will all die, and then who will be left to carry you from high place to high place, to raise your tent, to oil your great tusks with fat? The god said nothing. Atsula and Yanu exchanged places. Atsulas face stared out through the yellowed mammoth bone. Atsula has no faith, said Nunyunnini in Atsulas voice. Atsula shall die before the rest of you enter the new land, but the rest of you shall live. |
| 991 |
Trust me: there is a land to the east that is manless. This land shall be your land and the land of your children and your childrens children, for seven generations, and seven sevens. But for Atsulas faithlessness, you would have kept it forever. In the morning, pack your tents and your possessions, and walk toward the sunrise. And Gugwei and Yanu and Kalanu bowed their heads and exclaimed at the power and wisdom of Nunyunnini. The moon swelled and waned and swelled and waned once more. The people of the tribe walked east, toward the sunrise, struggling through the icy winds, which numbed their exposed skin. Nunyunnini had promised them truly: they lost no one from the tribe on the journey, save for a woman in childbirth, and women in childbirth belong to the moon, not to Nunyunnini. They crossed the land bridge. Kalanu had left them at first light to scout the way. 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. |
| 992 |
The mammoths of the new lands were bigger, and slower, and more foolish than the mammoth of the Siberian plains, and the pungh mushrooms, with their seven spots, were not to be found in the new lands, and Nunyunnini did not speak to the tribe any longer. And in the days of the grandchildren of Dalani and Kalanus grandchildren, a band of warriors, members of a big and prosperous tribe, returning from a slaving expedition in the north to their home in the south, found the valley of the first people: they killed most of the men, and they took the women and many of the children captive. One of the children, hoping for clemency, took them to a cave in the hills in which they found a mammoth skull, the tattered remnants of a mammoth-skin cloak, a wooden cup, and the preserved head of Atsula the oracle. While some of the warriors of the new tribe were for taking the sacred objects away with them, stealing the gods of the first people and owning their power, others counseled against it, saying that they would bring nothing but ill luck and the malice of their own god (for these were the people of a raven tribe, and ravens are jealous gods). So they threw the objects down the side of the hill, into a deep ravine, and took the survivors of the first people with them on their long journey south. And the raven tribes, and the fox tribes, grew more powerful in the land, and soon Nunyunnini was entirely forgotten. Part Three. The Moment of the Storm People are in the dark, they don't know what to do I had a little lantern, oh but it got blown out too. I'm reaching out my hand. I hope you are too. I just want to be in the dark with you. Greg Brown, In the Dark with You They changed cars at five in the morning, in Minneapolis, in the airports long-term parking lot. They drove to the top floor, where the parking building was open to the sky. Shadow took the orange uniform and the handcuffs and leg hobbles, put them in the brown paper bag that had briefly held his possessions, folded the whole thing up, and dropped it into a garbage can. |
| 993 |
They had been waiting for ten minutes when a barrel-chested young man came out of an airport door and walked over to them. He was eating a packet of Burger King french fries. Shadow recognized him immediately: he had sat in the back of the car, when they had left the House on the Rock, and hummed so deeply the car had vibrated. He now sported a white-streaked winter beard he had not had before. It made him look older. The man wiped the grease from his hands onto his jeans, extended one huge hand to Shadow. I heard of the All-Fathers death, he said. They will pay, and they will pay dearly. Wednesday was your father? asked Shadow. He was the All-Father, said the man. His deep voice caught in his throat. 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. |
| 994 |
Czernobog snorted. That? It was a 1970 VW bus. There was a rainbow decal in the rear window. Its a fine vehicle. And its the last thing that they'll be expecting you to be driving. Czernobog walked around the vehicle. Then he started to cough, a lung-rumbling, old-man, five-in-the-morning smokers cough. He hawked, and spat, and put his hand to his chest, massaging away the pain. Yes. The last car they will suspect. So what happens when the police pull us over, looking for the hippies and the dope? Eh? We are not here to ride the magic bus. We are to blend in. The bearded man unlocked the door of the bus. So they take a look at you, they see you arent hippies, they wave you goodbye. Its the perfect disguise. And its all I could find at no notice. Czernobog seemed to be ready to argue it further, but Mr. Nancy intervened smoothly. Elvis, you came through for us. We are very grateful. Now, that car needs to get back to Chicago. Well leave it in Bloomington, said the bearded man. The wolves will take care of it. don't give it another thought. He turned back to Shadow. Again, you have my sympathy and I share your pain. Good luck. And if the vigil falls to you, my admiration, and my sympathy. He squeezed Shadows hand with his own catchers-mitt fist. It hurt. You tell his corpse when you see it. Tell him that Alviss son of Vindalf will keep the faith. The VW bus smelled of patchouli, of old incense and rolling tobacco. There was a faded pink carpet glued to the floor and to the walls. Who was that? asked Shadow, as he drove them down the ramp, grinding the gears. Just like he said, Alviss son of Vindalf. he's the king of the dwarfs. The biggest, mightiest, greatest of all the dwarf folk. 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. |
| 995 |
Well? He was talking about a vigil. You heard him. Czernobog spoke up from the backseat. You will not have to do it, he said. Do what? The vigil. He talks too much. All the dwarfs talk and talk. Is nothing to think of. Better you put it out of your mind. * * * Driving south was like driving forward in time. The snows erased, slowly, and were completely gone by the following morning when the bus reached Kentucky. Winter was already over in Kentucky, and spring was on its way. Shadow began to wonder if there were some kind of equation to explain itperhaps every fifty miles he drove south he was driving a day into the future. He would have mentioned his idea to somebody, but Mr. Nancy was asleep in the passenger seat in the front, while Czernobog snored unceasingly in the back. Time seemed a flexible construct at that moment, an illusion he was imagining as he drove. He found himself becoming painfully aware of birds and animals: he saw the crows on the side of the road, or in the buss path, picking at roadkill; flights of birds wheeled across the skies in patterns that almost made sense; cats stared at them from front lawns and fence posts. Czernobog snorted and woke, sitting up slowly. I dreamed a strange dream, he said. I dreamed that I am truly Bielebog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but that now we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away. He broke the filter from a Lucky Strike, put the cigarette between his lips and lit it. Shadow wound down his window. Arent you worried about lung cancer? he said. I am cancer, said Czernobog. I do not frighten myself. Nancy spoke. Folk like us don't get cancer. We don't get arteriosclerosis or Parkinsons disease or syphilis. Were kind of hard to kill. They killed Wednesday, said Shadow. He pulled over for gas, and then parked next door at a restaurant for an early breakfast. As they entered, the pay phone in the entrance began to jangle. |
| 996 |
They gave their orders to an elderly woman with a worried smile, who had been sitting reading a paperback copy of What My Heart Meant by Jenny Kerton. The woman sighed, then walked back and over to the phone, picked it up, said Yes. Then she looked back at the room, said, Yep. Looks like they are. You just hold the line now, and walked over to Mr. Nancy. Its for you, she said. Okay, said Mr. Nancy. Now, maam, you make sure those fries are real crisp now. Think burnt. He walked over to the pay phone. This is he. And what makes you think I'm dumb enough to trust you? he said. I can find it, he said. I know where it is. Yes, he said. Of course we want it. You know we want it. 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. |
| 997 |
My kind of people? asked Shadow. Or your kind of people? Nancy said nothing. Czernobog made a noise that might have been a chuckle, might have been a snort. Shadow tried to get comfortable in the back of the bus. He had only slept a little. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. Worse than the feeling he had had in prison, worse than the feeling he had had back when Laura had come to him and told him about the robbery. This was bad. The back of his neck prickled, he felt sick and, several times, in waves, he felt scared. Mr. Nancy pulled over in Humansville, parked outside a supermarket. Mr. Nancy went inside, and Shadow followed him in. Czernobog waited in the parking lot, smoking his cigarette. There was a young fair-haired man, little more than a boy, restocking the breakfast cereal shelves. Hey, said Mr. Nancy. Hey, said the young man. Its true, isn't it? They killed him? Yes, said Mr. Nancy. They killed him. The young man banged several boxes of Capn Crunch down on the shelf. They think they can crush us like cockroaches, he said. He had a tarnished silver bracelet circling his wrist. We don't crush that easy, do we? No, said Mr. Nancy. We don't. I'll be there, sir, said the young man, his pale blue eyes blazing. I know you will, Gwydion, said Mr. Nancy. Mr. Nancy bought several large bottles of RC Cola, a six-pack of toilet paper, a pack of evil-looking black cigarillos, a bunch of bananas, and a pack of Doublemint chewing gum. he's a good boy. Came over in the seventh century. Welsh. The bus meandered first to the west and then to the north. Spring faded back into the dead end of winter. Kansas was the cheerless gray of lonesome clouds, empty windows, and lost hearts. Shadow had become adept at hunting for radio stations, negotiating between Mr. Nancy, who liked talk radio and dance music, and Czernobog, who favored classical music, the gloomier the better, leavened with the more extreme evangelical religious stations. For himself, Shadow liked oldies. |
| 998 |
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. 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. |
| 999 |
Nancy. Shadow decided not to ask who Louise Brooks was. Instead he said, So, look, when Wednesday went to talk to them, he did it under a truce. Yes. And now were going to get Wednesdays body from them, as a truce. Yes. And we know that they want me dead or out of the way. They want all of us dead, said Nancy. So what I don't get is, why do we think they'll play fair this time, when they didn't for Wednesday? That, said Czernobog, is why we are meeting at the center. Is He frowned. What is the word for it? The opposite of sacred? Profane, said Shadow, without thinking. No, said Czernobog. I mean, when a place is less sacred than any other place. Of negative sacredness. Places where they can build no temples. Places where people will not come, and will leave as soon as they can. Places where gods only walk if they are forced to. I don't know, said Shadow. I don't think there is a word for it. All of America has it, a little, said Czernobog. That is why we are not welcome here. But the center, said Czernobog. The center is worst. Is like a minefield. We all tread too carefully there to dare break the truce. They had reached the bus. Czernobog patted Shadows upper arm. You don't worry, he said, with gloomy reassurance. Nobody else is going to kill you. Nobody but me. * * * Shadow found the center of America at evening that same day, before it was fully dark. It was on a slight hill to the northwest of Lebanon. He drove around the little hillside park, past the tiny mobile chapel and the stone monument, and when Shadow saw the one-story 1950s motel at the edge of the park his heart sank. There was a black Humvee parked in front of itit looked like a jeep reflected in a fun-house mirror, as squat and pointless and ugly as an armored car. There were no lights on inside the building. 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. |
| 1000 |
Big car, tiny dick, said Mr. Nancy. Do you think they'll even have beds here? asked Shadow. Its been days since I slept in a bed. This place looks like its just waiting to be demolished. Its owned by hunters from Texas, said Mr. Nancy. Come up here once a year. Damned if I know whatyou're huntin. It stops the place being condemned and destroyed. They climbed out of the bus. Waiting for them in front of the motel was a woman Shadow did not recognize. She was perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed. She reminded him of every newscaster hed ever seen on morning television sitting in a studio that didn't really resemble a living room. Lovely to see you, she said. Now, you must be Czernobog. I've heard a lot about you. Andyou're Anansi, always up to mischief, eh? You jolly old man. And you, you must be Shadow. Youve certainly led us a merry chase, haven't you? A hand took his, pressed it firmly, looked him straight in the eye. I'm Media. Good to meet you. I hope we can get this evenings business done as pleasantly as possible. The main doors opened. Somehow, Toto, said the fat kid Shadow had last seen sitting in a limo, I don't believe were in Kansas anymore. Were in Kansas, said Mr. Nancy. I think we must have drove through most of it today. Damn but this country is flat. This place has no lights, no power, and no hot water, said the fat kid. And, no offense, you people really need the hot water. You just smell like youve been in that bus for a week. I don't think theres any need to go there, said the woman, smoothly. Were all friends here. Come on in. Well show you to your rooms. We took the first four rooms. Your late friend is in the fifth. All the ones beyond room five are emptyyou can take your pick. I'm afraid its not the Four Seasons, but then, what is? She opened the door to the motel lobby for them. It smelled of mildew, of damp and dust and decay. There was a man sitting in the lobby, in the near darkness. You people hungry? he asked. I can always eat, said Mr. Nancy. |
| 1001 |
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. 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. |
| 1002 |
The tiny snowflakes were little more than a crystalline dust that gusted and flurried in the wind. There were trees, bare of leaves in the winter. There were high hills on each side of him. It was late on a winters afternoon: the sky and the snow had attained the same deep shade of purple. Somewhere ahead of himin this light, distances were impossible to judgethe flames of a bonfire flickered, yellow and orange. A gray wolf padded through the snow before him. Shadow stopped. The wolf stopped also, and turned, and waited. One of its eyes glinted yellowish-green. Shadow shrugged and walked toward the flames and the wolf ambled ahead of him. The bonfire burned in the middle of a grove of trees. There must have been a hundred trees, planted in the rows. There were shapes hanging from the trees. At the end of the rows was a building that looked a little like an overturned boat. It was carved of wood, and it crawled with wooden creatures and wooden facesdragons, gryphons, trolls, and boarsall of them dancing in the flickering light of the fire. The bonfire was so high that Shadow could barely approach it. The wolf padded around the crackling fire. In place of the wolf a man came out on the other side of the fire. He was leaning on a tall stick. You are in Uppsala, in Sweden, said the man, in a familiar, gravelly voice. About a thousand years ago. Wednesday? said Shadow. The man continued to talk, as if Shadow were not there. First every year, then, later, when the rot set in, and they became lax, every nine years, they would sacrifice here. A sacrifice of nines. Each day, for nine days, they would hang nine animals from trees in the grove. One of those animals was always a man. He strode away from the firelight, toward the trees, and Shadow followed him. As he approached the trees the shapes that hung from them resolved: legs and eyes and tongues and heads. 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. |
| 1003 |
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. 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? |
| 1004 |
he asked. Midnight, said Mr. Nancy and the fat kid, at the same time. These things must be done by the rules, said Czernobog. Yeah, said Shadow. But nobody tells me what they are. You keep talking about the goddamn rules, I don't even know what game you people are playing. Its like breaking the street date, said Media, brightly. You know. When things are allowed to be on sale. Town said, I think the whole things a crock of shit. But if their rules make them happy, then my agency is happy and everybodys happy. He slurped his Coke. Roll on midnight. You take the body, you go away. Were all lovey-fucking-dovey and we wave you goodbye. And then we can get on with hunting you down like the rats you are. Hey, said the fat kid to Shadow. Reminds me. I told you to tell your boss he was history. Did you ever tell him? I told him, said Shadow. And you know what he said to me? He said to tell the little snot, if ever I saw him again, to remember that todays future is tomorrows yesterday. Wednesday had never said any such thing. Still, these people seemed to like cliches. The black sunglasses reflected the flickering candle flames back at him, like eyes. The fat kid said, This place is such a fucking dump. No power. Out of wireless range. I mean, when you got to be wired, you're already back in the stone age. He sucked the last of his Coke through the straw, dropped the cup on the table, and walked away down the corridor. Shadow reached over and placed the fat kids garbage back into the paper sack. I'm going to see the center of America, he announced. He got up and walked outside, into the night. Mr. Nancy followed him. They strolled together, across the little park, saying nothing until they reached the stone monument. The wind gusted at them, fitfully, first from one direction, then from another. So, he said. Now what? The half-moon hung pale in the dark sky. Now, said Nancy, you should go back to your room. Lock the door. You try to get some more sleep. At midnight they give us the body. |
| 1005 |
And then we get the hell out of here. The center is not a stable place for anybody. If you say so. Mr. Nancy inhaled on his cigarillo. This should never have happened, he said. None of this should have happened. Our kind of people, we are He waved the cigarillo about, as if using it to hunt for a word, then stabbing forward with it. exclusive. Were not social. Not even me. Not even Bacchus. Not for long. We walk by ourselves or we stay in our own little groups. We do not play well with others. We like to be adored and respected and worshipedme, I like them to be tellin tales about me, tales showing my cleverness. Its a fault, I know, but its the way I am. We like to be big. Now, in these shabby days, we are small. The new gods rise and fall and rise again. But this is not a country that tolerates gods for long. Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and the ground is clear for Brahma to create once more. So what are you saying? asked Shadow. The fightings over, now? The battles done? Mr. Nancy snorted. Are you out of your mind? They killed Wednesday. They killed him and they bragged about it. They spread the word. Theyve showed it on every channel to those with eyes to see it. No, Shadow. Its only just begun. He bent down at the foot of the stone monument, stubbed out his cigarillo on the earth, and left it there, like an offering. You used to make jokes, said Shadow. You don't anymore. Its hard to find the jokes these days. Wednesdays dead. Are you comin inside? Soon. Nancy walked away, toward the motel. Shadow reached out his hand and touched the monuments stones. He dragged his big fingers across the cold brass plate. Then he turned and walked over to the tiny white chapel, walked through the open doorway, into the darkness. He sat down in the nearest pew and closed his eyes and lowered his head, and thought about Laura, and about Wednesday, and about being alive. There was a click from behind him, and a scuff of shoe against earth. Shadow sat up, and turned. |
| 1006 |
Someone stood just outside the open doorway, a dark shape against the stars. Moonlight glinted from something metal. You going to shoot me? asked Shadow. JesusI wish, said Mr. Town. Its only for self-defense. So, you're praying? Have they got you thinking thatyou're gods? They arent gods. I wasnt praying, said Shadow. Just thinking. The way I figure it, said Town, you're mutations. Evolutionary experiments. A little hypnotic ability, a little hocus-pocus, and they can make people believe anything. Nothing to write home about. that's all. They die like men, after all. They always did, said Shadow. He got up, and Town took a step back. Shadow walked out of the little chapel, and Mr. Town kept his distance. Hey, Shadow said. Do you know who Louise Brooks was? Friend of yours? Nope. She was a movie star from south of here. Town paused. Maybe she changed her name, and became Liz Taylor or Sharon Stone or someone, he suggested, helpfully. Maybe. Shadow started to walk back to the motel. Town kept pace with him. You should be back in prison, said Mr. Town. You should be on fucking death row. I didn't kill your associates, said Shadow. But I'll tell you something a guy once told me, back when I was in prison. Something I've never forgotten. And that is? There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't. The driver stood by the Humvee. Gnight, gentlemen, he said as they passed. Night, said Mr. Town. And then he said, to Shadow, I personally don't give a fuck about any of this. What I do, is what Mister World says. Its easier that way. Shadow walked down the corridor to room 9. He unlocked the door, went inside. He said, Sorry. I thought this was my room. It is, said Media. I was waiting for you. He could see her hair in the moonlight, and her pale face. She was sitting on his bed, primly. |
| 1007 |
I'll find another room. I won't be here for long, she said. I just thought it might be an appropriate time to make you an offer. Okay. Make the offer. Relax, she said. There was a smile in her voice. You have such a stick up your butt. Look, Wednesdays dead. You don't owe anyone anything. Throw in with us. Time to Come Over to the Winning Team. Shadow said nothing. We can make you famous, Shadow. We can give you power over what people believe and say and wear and dream. You want to be the next Cary Grant? We can make that happen. We can make you the next Beatles. I think I preferred it when you were offering to show me Lucys tits, said Shadow. If that was you. Ah, she said. I need my room back. Good night. And then of course, she said, not moving, as if he had not spoken, we can turn it all around. We can make it bad for you. You could be a bad joke forever, Shadow. Or you could be remembered as a monster. You could be remembered forever, but as a Manson, a Hitlerhow would you like that? I'm sorry, maam, but I'm kind of tired, said Shadow. I'd be grateful if youd leave now. I offered you the world, she said. Whenyou're dying in a gutter, you remember that. I'll make a point of it, he said. After she had gone her perfume lingered. He lay on the bare mattress and thought about Laura, but whatever he thought aboutLaura playing Frisbee, Laura eating a root-beer float without a spoon, Laura giggling, showing off the exotic underwear she had bought when she attended a travel agents convention in Anaheimalways morphed, in his mind, into Laura sucking Robbies cock as a truck slammed them off the road and into oblivion. And then he heard her words, and they hurt every time. you're not dead, said Laura in her quiet voice, in his head. But I'm not sure thatyou're alive, either. There was a knock. Shadow got up and opened the door. It was the fat kid. Those hamburgers, he said. They were just icky. Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonalds. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonalds. |
| 1008 |
This place is turning into Grand Central Station, said Shadow. Okay, so I guessyou're here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right? The fat kid was shivering. No. you're already dead meat, he said. Youyoure a fucking illuminated Gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn't be hypertext if you tried. ImI'm synaptic, while, whileyou're synoptic He smelled strange, Shadow realized. There was a guy in the cell across the way, whose name Shadow had never known. He had taken off all his clothes in the middle of the day and told everyone that he had been sent to take them away, the truly good ones, like him, in a silver spaceship to a perfect place. That had been the last time Shadow had seen him. The fat kid smelled like that guy. Are you here for a reason? Just wanted to talk, said the fat kid. There was a whine in his voice. Its creepy in my room. that's all. Its creepy in there. Fifty miles to a McDonalds, can you believe that? Maybe I could stay in here with you. What about your friends from the limo? The ones who hit me? shouldn't you ask them to stay with you? The children wouldn't operate out here. Were in a dead zone. Shadow said, Its a while until midnight, and its longer to dawn. I think maybe you need rest. I know I do. The fat kid said nothing for a moment, then he nodded, and walked out of the room. Shadow closed his door, and locked it with the key. He lay back on the mattress. After a few moments the noise began. It took him a few moments to figure out what it had to be, then he unlocked his door and walked out into the hallway. It was the fat kid, now back in his own room. It sounded like he was throwing something huge against the walls of the room. From the sounds, Shadow guessed that what he was throwing was himself. Its just me! he was sobbing. Or perhaps, Its just meat. Shadow could not tell. Quiet! came a bellow from Czernobogs room, down the hall. Shadow walked down to the lobby and out of the motel. He was tired. |
| 1009 |
Why were you in my cell? Coincidence. Pure and simple. And nowyou're driving for the opposition. If you want to call them that. It depends whereyou're standing. The way I figure it, I'm driving for the winning team. But you and Wednesday, you were from the same, you're both Norse pantheon. Were both from the Norse pantheon. Is that whatyou're trying to say? Yeah. So? Shadow hesitated. You must have been friends. Once. No. We were never friends. I'm not sorry he's dead. He was just holding the rest of us back. With him gone, the rest of them are going to have to face up to the facts: its change or die, evolve or perish. he's gone. Wars over. Shadow looked at him, puzzled. You arent that stupid, he said. You were always so sharp. Wednesdays death isn't going to end anything. Its just pushed all of the ones who were on the fence over the edge. Mixing metaphors, Shadow. Bad habit. Whatever, said Shadow. Its still true. Jesus. His death did in an instant what hed spent the last few months trying to do. It united them. It gave them something to believe in. Perhaps. Loki shrugged. As far as I know, the thinking on this side of the fence was that with the troublemaker out of the way, the trouble would also be gone. Its not any of my business, though. I just drive. So tell me, said Shadow, why does everyone care about me? They act like I'm important. Why does it matter what I do? Damned if I know. You were important to us because you were important to Wednesday. As for the why of itI guess its just another one of lifes little mysteries. I'm tired of mysteries. Yeah? I think they add a kind of zest to the world. Like salt in a stew. Soyou're their driver. You drive for all of them? Whoever needs me, said Loki. Its a living. He raised his wristwatch to his face, pressed a button: the dial glowed a gentle blue, which illuminated his face, giving it a haunting, haunted appearance. Five to midnight. Time, said Loki. You coming? Shadow took a deep breath. I'm coming, he said. They walked down the dark motel corridor until they reached room 5. |
| 1010 |
Loki took a box of matches from his pocket and thumb-nailed a match into flame. The momentary flare hurt Shadows eyes. A candle wick flickered and caught. And another. Loki lit a new match, and continued to light the candle stubs: they were on the windowsills and on the headboard of the bed and on the sink in the corner of the room. The bed had been hauled from its position against the wall into the middle of the motel room, leaving a few feet of space between the bed and the wall on each side. There were sheets draped over the bed, old motel sheets, moth-holed and stained. On top of the sheets lay Wednesday, perfectly still. He was dressed in the pale suit he had been wearing when he was shot. The right side of his face was untouched, perfect, unmarred by blood. The left side of his face was a ragged mess, and the left shoulder and front of the suit was spattered with dark spots. His hands were at his sides. The expression on that wreck of a face was far from peaceful: it looked hurta soul-hurt, a real down-deep hurt, filled with hatred and anger and raw craziness. And, on some level, it looked satisfied. Shadow imagined Mr. Jacquels practiced hands smoothing that hatred and pain away, rebuilding a face for Wednesday with morticians wax and makeup, giving him a final peace and dignity that even death had denied him. Still, the body seemed no smaller in death. And it still smelled faintly of Jack Daniels. The wind from the plains was rising: he could hear it howling around the old motel at the imaginary center of America. The candles on the windowsill guttered and flickered. He could hear footsteps in the hallway. Someone knocked on a door, called Hurry up please, its time, and they began to shuffle in, heads lowered. Town came in first, followed by Media and Mr. Nancy and Czernobog. Last of all came the fat kid: he had fresh red bruises on his face, and his lips were moving all the time, as if he were reciting some words to himself, but he was making no sound. Shadow found himself feeling sorry for him. |
| 1011 |
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. 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. |
| 1012 |
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. 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. Shadow could hear them fizz as he walked from the darkening room. Wednesday was heavy, but Shadow could cope, if he walked steadily. |
| 1013 |
He had no choice. Wednesdays words were in his head with every step he took along the corridor, and he could taste the sour-sweetness of mead in the back of his throat. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil Mr. Nancy opened the motel lobby door for him, then hurried over and opened the back of the bus. The other four were already standing by their Humvee, watching them as if they could not wait to be off. Loki had put his drivers cap back on. The cold wind tugged at Shadow as he walked, whipped at the sheets. He placed Wednesday down as gently as he could in the back of the bus. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned. Town stood there with his hand out. He was holding something. Here, said Mr. Town, Mister World wanted you to have this. It was a glass eye. There was a hairline crack down the middle of it, and a tiny chip gone from the front. We found it in the Masonic Hall, when we were cleaning up. Keep it for luck. God knows you'll need it. Shadow closed his hand around the eye. He wished he could come back with something smart and sharp, but Town was already back at the Humvee, and climbing up into the car; and Shadow still couldn't think of anything clever to say. * * * They drove east. Dawn found them in Princeton, Missouri. Shadow had not slept yet. Nancy said, Anywhere you want us to drop you? If I were you, I'd rustle up some ID and head for Canada. Or Mexico. I'm sticking with you guys, said Shadow. Its what Wednesday would have wanted. You arent working for him anymore. he's dead. Once we drop his body off, you are free to go. And do what? Keep out of the way, while the war is on, said Nancy. He flipped his turn signal, and took a left. Hide yourself, for a little time, said Czernobog. Then, when this is over, you will come back to me, and I will finish the whole thing. Shadow said, Where are we taking the body? |
| 1014 |
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. 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. |
| 1015 |
All alone. At the end they cut the person down, and if they livedwell, it could happen. And Wednesday will have had his vigil. Czernobog said, Maybe Alviss will send us one of his people. A dwarf could survive it. I'll do it, said Shadow. No, said Mr. Nancy. Yes, said Shadow. The two old men were silent. Then Nancy said, Why? Because its the kind of thing a living person would do, said Shadow. You are crazy, said Czernobog. Maybe. But I'm going to hold Wednesdays vigil. When they stopped for gas Czernobog announced he felt sick and wanted to ride in the front. Shadow didn't mind moving to the back of the bus. He could stretch out more, and sleep. They drove on in silence. Shadow felt that hed made a decision; something big and strange. Hey. Czernobog, said Mr. Nancy, after a while. You check out the technical boy back at the motel? He was not happy. he's been screwin with something that screwed him right back. that's the biggest trouble with the new kidsthey figure they know everythin, and you cant teach them nothin but the hard way. Good, said Czernobog. Shadow was stretched out full length on the seat in the back. He felt like two people, or more than two. There was part of him that felt gently exhilarated: he had done something. He had moved. It wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't wanted to live, but he did want to live, and that made all the difference. He hoped he would live through this, but he was willing to die, if that was what it took to be alive. And, for a moment he thought that the whole thing was funny, just the funniest thing in the world; and he wondered if Laura would appreciate the joke. 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. The pictures youd get to color in as kids. Can you see the hidden Indians in this picture? |
| 1016 |
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. 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. |
| 1017 |
She and her sisters unwrapped Wednesdays body. He looked worse by daylight than he had by candlelight in the motel room, and after one quick glance Shadow looked away. The women arranged his clothes, tidied his suit, then placed him at the corner of the sheet and wound it around him once more. Then the women came over to Shadow. You are the one? the biggest of them asked. The one who will mourn the All-Father? asked the middle-sized one. You have chosen to take the vigil? asked the smallest. Shadow nodded. Afterward, he was unable to remember whether he had actually heard their voices. Perhaps he had simply understood what they had meant from their looks and their eyes. Mr. Nancy, who had gone back to the house to use the bathroom, came walking back to the tree. He was smoking a cigarillo. He looked thoughtful. Shadow, he called. You really don't have to do this. We can find somebody more suited. I'm doing it, said Shadow, simply. And if you die? asked Mr. Nancy. If it kills you? Then, said Shadow, it kills me. Mr. Nancy flicked his cigarillo into the meadow, angrily. I said you had shit for brains, and you still have shit for brains. Cant see when somebodys tryin to give you an out? I'm sorry, said Shadow. He didn't say anything else. Nancy walked back to the bus. Czernobog walked over to Shadow. He did not look pleased. You must come through this alive, he said. Come through this safely for me. And then he tapped his knuckle gently against Shadows forehead and said, Bam! He squeezed Shadows shoulder, patted his arm, and went to join Mr. Nancy. The biggest woman, whose name seemed to be Urtha or UrderShadow could not repeat it back to her to her satisfactiontold him, in pantomime, to take off the clothes. All of them? The big woman shrugged. Shadow stripped to his briefs and T-shirt. The women propped the ladders against the tree. One of the laddersit was painted by hand, with little flowers and leaves twining up the strutsthey pointed out to him. He climbed the nine steps. |
| 1018 |
Then, at their urging, he stepped onto a low branch. The middle woman tipped out the contents of the sack onto the meadow-grass. It was filled with a tangle of thin ropes, brown with age and dirt, and the woman began to sort them out into lengths, and to lay them carefully on the ground beside Wednesdays body. They climbed their own ladders now, and they began to knot the ropes, intricate and elegant knots, and they wrapped the ropes first about the tree, and then about Shadow. Unembarrassed, like midwives or nurses or those who lay out corpses, they removed his T-shirt and briefs, then they bound him, never tightly, but firmly and finally. He was amazed at how comfortably the ropes and the knots bore his weight. The ropes went under his arms, between his legs, around his waist, his ankles, his chest, binding him to the tree. The final rope was tied, loosely, about his neck. It was, initially, uncomfortable, but his weight was well distributed, and none of the ropes cut his flesh. His feet were five feet above the ground. The tree was leafless and huge, its branches black against the gray sky, its bark a smooth silvery gray. They took the ladders away. There was a moment of panic as all his weight was taken by the ropes, and he dropped a few inches. Still, he made no sound. The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there. They left him there alone. Hang me, O hang me, and I'll be dead and gone, Hang me, O hang me, and I'll be dead and gone, I wouldn't mind the hangin, its bein gone so long, Its lyin in the grave so long. Old Song The first day that Shadow hung from the tree he experienced only discomfort that edged slowly into pain, and fear, and, occasionally, an emotion that was somewhere between boredom and apathy: a gray acceptance, a waiting. He hung. The wind was still. After several hours fleeting bursts of color started to explode across his vision in blossoms of crimson and gold, throbbing and pulsing with a life of their own. |
| 1019 |
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. 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. |
| 1020 |
* * * By the following morning the pain was no longer local, not confined to the places where the ropes cut into his flesh, or where the bark scraped his skin. Now the pain was everywhere. And he was hungry, with empty pangs down in the pit of him. His head was pounding. Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths. It seemed to him that the tree reached from hell to heaven, and that he had been hanging there forever. A brown hawk circled the tree, landed on a broken branch near to him, and then took to the wing, flying west. The storm, which had abated at dawn, began to return as the day passed. Gray, roiling clouds stretched from horizon to horizon; a slow drizzle began to fall. The body at the base of the tree seemed to have become less, in its stained motel winding sheet, crumbling into itself like a sugar cake left in the rain. Sometimes Shadow burned, sometimes he froze. When the thunder started once more he imagined that he heard drums beating, kettledrums in the thunder and the thump of his heart, inside his head or outside, it did not matter. He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen. The squirrel dropped from the bark of the trunk onto Shadows shoulder, sharp claws digging into his skin. Ratatosk! it chattered. The tip of its nose touched his lips. Ratatosk. It sprang back onto the tree. His skin was on fire with pins and needles, a pricking covering his whole body. The sensation was intolerable. His life was laid out below him, on the motel-sheet shroud: literally laid out, like the items at some Dada picnic, a surrealist tableau: he could see his mothers puzzled stare, the American embassy in Norway, Lauras eyes on their wedding day He chuckled through dry lips. |
| 1021 |
The muddy-iron taste of the water filled his mouth, cooled his parched throat. It eased his fatigue and his madness. By the third walnut shell, he was no longer thirsty. He began to struggle, then, pulling at the ropes, flailing his body, trying to get down, to get free, to get away. He moaned. The knots were good. The ropes were strong, and they held, and soon he exhausted himself once more. * * * In his delirium, Shadow became the tree. Its roots went deep into the loam of the earth, deep down into time, into the hidden springs. He felt the spring of the woman called Urd, which is to say, Past. She was huge, a giantess, an underground mountain of a woman, and the waters she guarded were the waters of time. Other roots went to other places. Some of them were secret. Now, when he was thirsty, he pulled water from his roots, pulled them up into the body of his being. He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders. It was not that the discomfort was lessened, but the pain belonged to the figure hanging from the tree, rather than to the tree itself. Shadow in his madness was now so much more than the man on the tree. He was the tree, and he was the wind rattling the bare branches of the world tree; he was the gray sky and the tumbling clouds; he was Ratatosk the squirrel running from the deepest roots to the highest branches; he was the mad-eyed hawk who sat on a broken branch at the top of the tree surveying the world; he was the worm in the heart of the tree. The stars wheeled, and he passed his hundred hands over the glittering stars, palming them, switching them, vanishing them * * * A moment of clarity, in the pain and the madness: Shadow felt himself surfacing. He knew it would not be for long. The morning sun was dazzling him. 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. |
| 1022 |
His skin was dark brown. His forehead was high and his dark hair was tightly curled. He was sitting on a branch high above Shadows head. Shadow could see him clearly by craning his head. And the man was mad. Shadow could see that at a glance. you're naked, confided the madman, in a cracked voice. I'm naked too. I see that, croaked Shadow. The madman looked at him, then he nodded and twisted his head down and around, as if he were trying to remove a crick from his neck. Eventually he said, Do you know me? No, said Shadow. I know you. I watched you in Cairo. I watched you after. My sister likes you. You are the name escaped him. Eats roadkill. Yes. You are Horus. The madman nodded. Horus, he said. I am the falcon of the morning, the hawk of the afternoon. I am the sun, as you are. And I know the true name of Ra. My mother told me. that's great, said Shadow, politely. The madman stared at the ground below them intently, saying nothing. Then he dropped from the tree. A hawk fell like a stone to the ground, pulled out of its plummet into a swoop, beat its wings heavily and flew back to the tree, a baby rabbit in its talons. It landed on a branch closer to Shadow. Are you hungry? asked the madman. No, said Shadow. I guess I should be, but I'm not. I'm hungry, said the madman. He ate the rabbit rapidly, pulling it apart, sucking, tearing, rending. At he finished with them, he dropped the gnawed bones and the fur to the ground. He walked farther down the branch until he was only an arms length from Shadow. Then he peered at Shadow unselfconsciously, inspecting him with care and caution, from his feet to his head. There was rabbit blood on his chin and his chest, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand. Shadow felt he had to say something. Hey, he said. Hey, said the madman. He stood up on the branch, turned away from Shadow and let a stream of dark urine arc out into the meadow below. It went on for a long time. When he had finished he crouched down again on the branch. |
| 1023 |
What do they call you? asked Horus. Shadow, said Shadow. The madman nodded. You are the shadow. I am the light, he said. Everything that is, casts a shadow. Then he said, They will fight soon. I was watching them as they started to arrive. And then the madman said, You are dying. Arent you? But Shadow could no longer speak. A hawk took wing, and circled slowly upward, riding the updrafts into the morning. * * * Moonlight. A cough shook Shadows frame, a racking painful cough that stabbed his chest and his throat. He gagged for breath. Hey, puppy, called a voice that he knew. He looked down. The moonlight burned whitely through the branches of the tree, bright as day, and there was a woman standing in the moonlight on the ground below him, her face a pale oval. The wind rattled in the branches of the tree. Hi, puppy, she said. He tried to speak, but he coughed instead, deep in his chest, for a long time. You know, she said, helpfully, that doesn't sound good. He croaked, Hello, Laura. She looked up at him with dead eyes, and she smiled. How did you find me? he asked. She was silent, for a while, in the moonlight. Then she said, You are the nearest thing I have to life. You are the only thing I have left, the only thing that isn't bleak and flat and gray. I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are. He looked down at the woman in the moonlight, and his eyes stung with tears. I'll cut you down, she said, after a while. I spend too much time rescuing you, don't I? He coughed again. Then, No, leave me. I have to do this. She looked up at him, and shook her head. you're crazy, she said. you're dying up there. Or you'll be crippled, if you arent already. Maybe, he said. But I'm alive. Yes, she said, after a moment. I guess you are. You told me, he said. In the graveyard. It seems like such a long time ago, puppy, she said. Then she said, I feel better, here. |
| 1024 |
It doesn't hurt as much. You know what I mean? But I'm so dry. The wind let up, and he could smell her now: a stink of rotten meat and sickness and decay, pervasive and unpleasant. I lost my job, she said. It was a night job, but they said people had complained. I told them I was sick, and they said they didn't care. I'm so thirsty. The women, he told her. They have water. The house. Puppy she sounded scared. Tell themtell them I said to give you water The white face stared up at him. I should go, she told him. Then she hacked, and made a face, and spat a mass of something white onto the grass. It broke up when it hit the ground, and wriggled away. It was almost impossible to breathe. His chest felt heavy, and his head was swaying. Stay he said, in a breath that was almost a whisper, unsure whether or not she could hear him. Please don't go. He started to cough. Stay the night. I'll stop awhile, she said. And then, like a mother to a child, she said, Nothings gonna hurt you when I'm here. You know that? Shadow coughed once more. He closed his eyesonly for a moment, he thought, but when he opened them again the moon had set and he was alone. * * * A crashing and a pounding in his head, beyond the pain of migraine, beyond all pain. Everything dissolved into tiny butterflies which circled him like a multicolored dust storm and then evaporated into the night. The white sheet wrapped about the body at the base of the tree flapped noisily in the morning wind. The pounding eased. Everything slowed. There was nothing left to make him keep breathing. His heart ceased to beat in his chest. The darkness that he entered this time was deep, and lit by a single star, and it was final. I know its crooked. But its the only game in town. Canada Bill Jones The tree was gone, and the world was gone, and the morning-gray sky above him was gone. 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. |
| 1025 |
Shadow looked down. There were steps cut into the rock, going down, steps so huge that he could only imagine that giants had cut them and descended them a long time ago. He clambered downward, half jumping, half vaulting from step to step. His body ached, but it was the ache of lack of use, not the tortured ache of a body that has hung on a tree until it was dead. He observed, without surprise, that he was now fully dressed, in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was barefoot. He experienced a profound moment of deja vu: this was what he had been wearing when he stood in Czernobogs apartment the night when Zorya Polunochnaya had come to him and told him about the constellation called Odins Wain. She had taken the moon down from the sky for him. He knew, suddenly, what would happen next. Zorya Polunochnaya would be there. She was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps. There was no moon in the sky, but she was bathed in moonlight nonetheless: her white hair was moon-pale, and she wore the same lace-and-cotton nightdress she had worn that night in Chicago. She smiled when she saw him, and looked down, as if momentarily embarrassed. Hello, she said. Hi, said Shadow. How are you? I don't know, he said. I think this is maybe another strange dream on the tree. I've been having crazy dreams since I got out of prison. Her face was silvered by the moonlight (but no moon hung in that plum-black sky, and now, at the foot of the steps, even the single star was lost to view) and she looked both solemn and vulnerable. She said, All your questions can be answered, if that is what you want. But once you learn your answers, you can never unlearn them. Beyond her, the path forked. He would have to decide which path to take, he knew that. But there was one thing he had to do first. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and was relieved when he felt the familiar weight of the coin at the bottom of the pocket. He eased it out, held it between finger and thumb: a 1922 Liberty dollar. This is yours, he said. |
| 1026 |
He remembered then that his clothes were really at the foot of the tree. The women had placed his clothes in the canvas sack from which they had taken the ropes, and tied the end of the sack, and the biggest of the women had placed a heavy rock on it to stop it from blowing away. And so he knew that, in reality, the Liberty dollar was in a pocket in that sack, beneath the rock. But still, it was heavy in his hand, at the entrance to the underworld. She took it from his palm with her slim fingers. Thank you. It bought you your liberty twice, she said. And now it will light your way into dark places. She closed her hand around the dollar, then she reached up and placed it in the air, as high as she could reach. Then she let go of it. Instead of falling, the coin floated upward until it was a foot or so above Shadows head. 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. She reached a perfect hand toward his head. He felt her fingers brush his skin, then he felt them penetrate his skin, his skull, felt them push deep into his head. Something tickled, in his skull and all down his spine. |
| 1027 |
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. 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. |
| 1028 |
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. 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 aint missed nothing. I want to see a picture of him. I aint 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. 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. |
| 1029 |
They have been drinking margaritas, and she has salt on her lips and salt clinging to the back of her hand. Wednesday is not wearing a suit and tie, but the pin in the shape of a silver tree he wears over the pocket of his shirt glitters and glints when the mirror-ball light catches it. They make a fine-looking couple, considering the difference in their ages. There is a lupine grace to Wednesdays movements. A slow dance. He pulls her close to him, and his pawlike hand curves around the seat of her skirt possessively, moving her closer to him. His other hand takes her chin, pushes it upward into his face, and the two of them kiss, there on the floor, as the glitter-ball lights circle them into the center of the universe. Soon after, they leave. She sways against him, and he leads her from the dance hall. Shadow buried his head in his hands, and did not follow them, unable or unwilling to witness his own conception. The mirror lights were gone, and now the only illumination came from the tiny moon that burned high above his head. He walked on. At a bend in the path he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He felt a hand run gently up his back, and gentle fingers ruffle the hair on the back of his head. Hello, whispered a smoky feline voice, over his shoulder. Hello, he said, turning to face her. She had brown hair and brown skin and her eyes were the deep golden-amber of good honey. Her pupils were vertical slits. Do I know you? he asked, puzzled. Intimately, she said, and she smiled. I used to sleep on your bed. And my people have been keeping their eyes on you, for me. She turned to the path ahead of him, pointed to the three ways he could go. Okay, she said. One way will make you wise. One way will make you whole. And one way will kill you. I'm already dead, I think, said Shadow. I died on the tree. 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. |
| 1030 |
No, said Shadow. Its okay. So, she said. Which way do you want to go? I don't know, he admitted. She tipped her head on one side, a perfectly feline gesture. Suddenly, Shadow remembered the claw marks on his shoulder. He felt himself beginning to blush. If you trust me, said Bast, I can choose for you. I trust you, he said, without hesitation. Do you want to know what its going to cost you? I've already lost my name, he told her. Names come and names go. Was it worth it? Yes. Maybe. It wasnt easy. As revelations go, it was kind of personal. All revelations are personal, she said. that's why all revelations are suspect. I don't understand. No, she said, you don't. I'll take your heart. Well need it later, and she reached her hand deep inside his chest, and she pulled it out with something ruby and pulsing held between her sharp fingernails. It was the color of pigeons blood, and it was made of pure light. Rhythmically it expanded and contracted. She closed her hand, and it was gone. Take the middle way, she said. Shadow nodded, and walked on. The path was becoming slippery now. There was ice on the rock. The moon above him glittered through the ice crystals in the air: there was a ring about the moon, a moon-bow, diffusing the light. It was beautiful, but it made walking harder. The path was unreliable. He reached the place where the path divided. He looked at the first path with a feeling of recognition. It opened into a vast chamber, or a set of chambers, like a dark museum. He knew it already. He could hear the long echoes of tiny noises. He could hear the noise that the dust makes as it settles. It was the place that he had dreamed of, that first night that Laura had come to him, in the motel so long ago; the endless memorial hall to the gods that were forgotten, and the ones whose very existence had been lost. He took a step backward. He walked to the path on the far side, and looked ahead. There was a Disneyland quality to the corridor: black Plexiglas walls with lights set in them. |
| 1031 |
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. The pilot poled off away from the shore. Shadow stood there and watched, his pants legs dripping. I know you, he said to the creature at the prow. You do indeed, said the boatman. The oil lamp that hung at the front of the boat burned more fitfully, and the smoke from the lamp made Shadow cough. You worked for me. I'm afraid we had to inter Lila Goodchild without you. The voice was fussy and precise. The smoke stung Shadows eyes. He wiped the tears away with his hand, and, through the smoke, he thought he saw a tall man in a suit, with gold-rimmed spectacles. The smoke cleared and the boatman was once more a half-human creature with the head of a river bird. Mister Ibis? Good to see you, said the creature, with Mr. Ibiss voice. Do you know what a psychopomp is? Shadow thought he knew the word, but it had been a long time. |
| 1032 |
He shook his head. Its a fancy term for an escort, said Mr. Ibis. We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not ever have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead. I thought this was the world of the dead, said Shadow. No. Not per se. Its more of a preliminary. The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color. You cant, said Shadow. Can you? The echoes whispered his words back at him from across the pool. What you have to remember, said Mr. Ibis, testily, is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter. And if I had a double-headed quarter? You don't. Shadow had a frisson, then, as they crossed the dark water. He imagined he could see the faces of children staring up at him reproachfully from beneath the waters glassy surface: their faces were waterlogged and softened, their blind eyes clouded. There was no wind in that underground cavern to disturb the black surface of the lake. So I'm dead, said Shadow. He was getting used to the idea. Or I'm going to be dead. We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you. Why? You were a hard worker. Why not? Because Shadow marshaled his thoughts. Because I never believed in you. Because I don't know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn't expect this. What happened to Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates? The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us, said Mr. |
| 1033 |
Ibis. We believed in you. The boat touched bottom. Mr. Ibis stepped off the side, into the pool, and told Shadow to do the same. Mr. Ibis took a line from the prow of the boat, and passed Shadow the lantern to carry. It was in the shape of a crescent moon. They walked ashore, and Mr. Ibis tied the boat to a metal ring set in the rock floor. Then he took the lamp from Shadow and walked swiftly forward, holding the lamp high as he walked, throwing vast shadows across the rock floor and the high rock walls. Are you scared? asked Mr. Ibis. Not really. Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand. Shadow was not scared. He was interested, and apprehensive, but no more. He was not scared of the shifting darkness, nor of being dead, nor even of the dog-headed creature the size of a grain silo who stared at them as they approached. It growled, deep in its throat, and Shadow felt his neck hairs prickle. Shadow, it said. Now is the time of judgment. Shadow looked up at the creature. Mr. Jacquel? he said. The hands of Anubis came down, huge dark hands, and they picked Shadow up and brought him close. The jackal head examined him with bright and glittering eyes; examined him as dispassionately as Mr. Jacquel had examined the dead girl on the slab. Shadow knew that all his faults, all his failings, all his weaknesses were being taken out and weighed and measured; that he was, in some way, being dissected, and sliced, and tasted. We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor. |
| 1034 |
Please, said Shadow. Please stop. But the examination did not stop. Every lie he had ever told, every object he had stolen, every hurt he had inflicted on another person, all the little crimes and the tiny murders that make up the day, each of these things and more were extracted and held up to the light by the jackal-headed judge of the dead. Shadow began to weep, painfully, in the palm of the dark gods hand. He was a tiny child again, as helpless and as powerless as he had ever been. And then, without warning, it was over. Shadow panted, and sobbed, and snot streamed from his nose; he still felt helpless, but the hands placed him, carefully, almost tenderly, down on the rock floor. Who has his heart? growled Anubis. I do, purred a womans voice. Shadow looked up. Bast was standing there beside the thing that was no longer Mr. Ibis, and she held Shadows heart in her right hand. It lit her face with a ruby light. Give it to me, said Thoth, the Ibis-headed god, and he took the heart in his hands, which were not human hands, and he glided forward. Anubis placed a pair of golden scales in front of him. So is this where we find out what I get? whispered Shadow to Bast. Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? If the feather balances, she said, you get to choose your own destination. And if not? She shrugged, as if the subject made her uncomfortable. Then she said, Then we feed your heart and your soul to Ammet, the Eater of Souls Maybe, he said. Maybe I can get some kind of a happy ending. Not only are there no happy endings, she told him, there arent even any endings. On one of the pans of the scales, carefully, reverently, Anubis placed a feather. 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. |
| 1035 |
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. The Gede inhabited the bodies of three middle-aged brothers. They carried shotguns and told jokes of such astounding filthiness that only they were willing to laugh at them, which they did, raucously. Two ageless Chickamauga women, in oil-stained blue jeans and battered leather jackets, walked around, watching the people and the preparations for battle. Sometimes they pointed and shook their heads. They did not intend to take part in the coming conflict. The moon swelled and rose in the east, a day away from full. It seemed half as big as the sky, as it rose, a deep reddish-orange, immediately above the hills. As it crossed the sky it seemed to shrink and pale until it hung high in the sky like a lantern. There were so many of them waiting there, in the moonlight, at the foot of Lookout Mountain. * * * Laura was thirsty. Sometimes living people burned steadily in her mind like candles and sometimes they flamed like torches. It made them easy to avoid, and it made them easy, on occasion, to find. Shadow had burned so strangely, with his own light, up on that tree. She had chided him once, when they had walked and held hands, for not being alive. She had hoped, then, to see a spark of raw emotion. To have seen anything. She remembered walking beside him, wishing that he could understand what she was trying to say. But dying on the tree, Shadow had been utterly alive. She had watched him as the life had faded, and he had been focused and real. And he had asked her to stay with him, to stay the whole night. He had forgiven herperhaps he had forgiven her. It did not matter. He had changed; that was all she knew. Shadow had told her to go to the farmhouse, that they would give her water to drink there. There were no lights burning in the farm building, and she could feel nobody at home. But he had told her that they would care for her. She pushed against the door of the farmhouse and it opened, rusty hinges protesting the whole while. |
| 1036 |
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. 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. |
| 1037 |
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. She put it down, carefully, on the table, and retreated to the couch. She pulled herself up, with a wriggle and a shiver, and was seated beside her sisters once again. Thank you. Laura walked over to the table, looked around for a cup or a glass, but there was nothing like that to be seen. She picked up the jug. It was heavier than it looked. The water in it was perfectly clear. She raised the jug to her lips and began to drink. The water was colder than she had ever imagined liquid water could be. It froze her tongue and her teeth and her gullet. Still, she drank, unable to stop, feeling the water freezing its way into her stomach, her bowels, her heart, her veins. The water flowed into her. It was like liquid ice. She realized that the jug was empty and, surprised, she put it down on the table. The women were observing her, dispassionately. Since her death, Laura had not thought in metaphors: things were, or they were not. But now, as she looked at the women on the sofa, she found herself thinking of juries, of scientists observing a laboratory animal. She shook, suddenly and convulsively. She reached out a hand to the table to steady herself, but the table was slipping and lurching, and it almost avoided her grasp. As she put her hand on the table she began to vomit. She brought up bile and formalin, centipedes, and maggots. And then she felt herself starting to void, and to piss: stuff was being pushed violently, wetly, from her body. |
| 1038 |
She would have screamed if she could; but then the dusty floorboards came up to meet her so fast and so hard that, had she been breathing, they would have knocked the breath from her body. 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. Still, there were people there. There was even a tour bus that drew up that morning releasing a dozen men and women with perfect tans and gleaming, reassuring smiles. They looked like news anchors, and one could almost imagine there was a phosphor-dot quality to them: they seemed to blur gently as they moved. |
| 1039 |
He got back in the car and drove through. It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat. And by the time the frog notices that theres anything wrong, its already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely. When hed been transferred to the Agency it had all seemed so simple. Now it was all sonot complex, he decided; merely bizarre. He had been sitting in Mr. Worlds office at two that morning, and he had been told what he was to do. You got it? said Mr. World, handing him the knife in its dark leather sheath. Cut me a stick. It doesn't have to be longer than a couple of feet. Affirmative, he said. And then he said, Why do I have to do this, sir? Because I tell you to, said Mr. World, flatly. Find the tree. Do the job. Meet me down in Chattanooga. don't waste any time. And what about the asshole? Shadow? If you see him, just avoid him. don't touch him. don't even mess with him. I don't want you turning him into a martyr. Theres no room for martyrs in the current game plan. He smiled then, his scarred smile. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all. Look No martyrs, Town. And Town had nodded, and taken the knife in its sheath, and pushed the rage that welled up inside him down deep and away. Mr. Towns hatred of Shadow had become a part of him. As he was falling asleep he would see Shadows solemn face, see that smile that wasnt a smile, the way Shadow had of smiling without smiling that made Town want to sink his fist into the mans gut, and even as he fell asleep he could feel his jaws squeeze together, his temples tense, his gullet burn. He drove the Ford Explorer across the meadow, past an abandoned farmhouse. He crested a ridge and saw the tree. He parked the car a little way past it, and turned off the engine. The clock on the dashboard said it was 6:38 A. |
| 1040 |
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. 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. |
| 1041 |
He looked at the stick he was holding, and felt like a small boy, holding his stick as a sword or a spear. I could have cut a stick from any tree, he thought. It didn't have to be this tree. Who the fuck would have known? And he thought, Mr. World would have known. He carried the ladder back to the farmhouse. From the corner of his eye he thought he saw something move, and he looked in through the window, into the dark room filled with broken furniture, with the plaster peeling from the walls, and for a moment, in a half dream, he imagined that he saw three women sitting in the dark parlor. One of them was knitting. One of them was staring directly at him. One of them appeared to be asleep. The woman who was staring at him began to smile, a huge smile that seemed to split her face lengthwise, a smile that crossed from ear to ear. Then she raised a finger and touched it to her neck, and ran it gently from one side of her neck to the other. That was what he thought he saw, all in a moment, in that empty room, which contained, he saw at a second glance, nothing more than old rotting furniture and fly-spotted prints and dry rot. There was nobody there at all. He rubbed his eyes. Town walked back to the brown Ford Explorer and climbed in. He tossed the stick onto the white leather of the passenger seat. He turned the key in the ignition. The dashboard clock said 6:37 A. M. Town frowned, and checked his wristwatch, which blinked that it was 13:58. Great, he thought. I was either up on that tree for eight hours, or for minus a minute. That was what he thought, but what he believed was that both timepieces had, coincidentally, begun to misbehave. On the tree, Shadows body began to bleed. The wound was in his side. The blood that came from it was slow and thick and molasses-black. * * * Clouds covered the top of Lookout Mountain. Easter sat some distance away from the crowd at the bottom of the mountain, watching the dawn over the hills to the east. She had a chain of blue forget-me-nots tattooed around her left wrist, and she rubbed them absently, with her right thumb. |
| 1042 |
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. 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. 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. |
| 1043 |
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? 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. |
| 1044 |
The houses were set back from the roads; there were no welcoming lights. Now the fuel gauge was nudging Empty. He heard a rumble of distant thunder, and a single drop of rain splashed heavily onto his windshield. So when Town saw the woman, walking along the side of the road, he found himself smiling, involuntarily. Thank God, he said, aloud, and he drew up beside her. He thumbed down the window. Maam? I'm sorry. I'm kind of lost. Can you tell me how to get to Highway Eighty-one from here? She looked at him through the open passenger-side window and said, You know. I don't think I can explain it. But I can show you, if you like. She was pale, and her wet hair was long and dark. Climb in, said Town. He didn't even hesitate. First thing, we need to buy some gas. Thanks, she said. I needed a ride. She got in. Her eyes were astonishingly blue. Theres a stick here, on the seat, she said, puzzled. Just throw it in the back. Where are you heading? he asked. Lady, if you can get me to a gas station, and back to a freeway, I'll take you all the way to your own front door. She said, Thank you. But I think I'm going farther than you are. If you can get me to the freeway, that will be fine. Maybe a trucker will give me a ride. And she smiled, a crooked, determined smile. It was the smile that did it. Maam, he said, I can give you a finer ride than any trucker. He could smell her perfume. It was heady and heavy, a cloying scent, like magnolias or lilacs, but he did not mind. I'm going to Georgia, she said. Its a long way. I'm going to Chattanooga. I'll take you as far as I can. Mm, she said. Whats your name? They call me Mack, said Mr. Town. When he was talking to women in bars, he would sometimes follow that up with And the ones that know me really well call me Big Mack. That could wait. With a long drive ahead of them, they would have many hours in each others company to get to know each other. Whats yours? Laura, she told him. Well, Laura, he said, I'm sure were going to be great friends. |
| 1045 |
* * * 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. 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. |
| 1046 |
But. they'll die out anyway. They are passenger pigeons and thylacines. Yes? Who cares? This way, its going to be a bloodbath. Ah. Mr. World nodded. He was following. That was good. The fat kid said, Look, I'm not the only one who feels this way. I've checked with the crew at Radio Modern, andyou're all for settling this peacefully; and the intangibles are pretty much in favor of letting market forces take care of it. I'm being. You know. The voice of reason here. You are indeed. Unfortunately, there is information you do not have. The smile that followed was twisted and scarred. The boy blinked. He said, Mister World? What happened to your lips? World sighed. The truth of the matter, he said, is that somebody once sewed them together. A long time ago. Whoa, said the fat kid. Serious omerta shit. Yes. You want to know what were waiting for? Why we didn't strike last night? The fat kid nodded. He was sweating, but it was a cold sweat. We didn't strike yet, because I'm waiting for a stick. A stick? that's right. A stick. And do you know what I'm going to do with the stick? A head shake. Okay. I'll bite. What? I could tell you, said Mr. World, soberly. But then I'd have to kill you. He winked, and the tension in the room evaporated. The fat kid began to giggle, a low, snuffling laugh in the back of his throat and in his nose. Okay, he said. Hee. Hee. Okay. Hee. Got it. Message received on Planet Technical. Loud and clear. Ixnay on the Estionsquay. Mr. World shook his head. He rested a hand on the fat kids shoulder. Hey, he said. You really want to know? Sure. Well, said Mr. World, seeing that were friends, heres the answer: I'm going to take the stick, and I'm going to throw it over the armies as they come together. As I throw it, it will become a spear. And then, as the spear arcs over the battle, I'm going to shout I dedicate this battle to Odin. Huh? said the fat kid. Why? Power, said Mr. World. He scratched his chin. And food. A combination of the two. You see, the outcome of the battle is unimportant. |
| 1047 |
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? 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. |
| 1048 |
Better to die together, on the attack, like gods, than to die fleeing and singly, like rats in a cellar. Another murmur, this time one of deep agreement. She had said it for all of them. Now was the time. The first head is mine, said a very tall Chinese man, with a rope of tiny skulls around his neck. He began to walk, slowly and intently, up the mountain, shouldering a staff with a curved blade at the end of it, like a silver moon. * * * Even Nothing cannot last forever. He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference: time was an idea for which he no longer had any need. He could no longer remember his real name. He felt empty and cleansed, in that place that was not a place. He was without form, and void. He was nothing. And into that nothing a voice said, Ho-hoka, cousin. We got to talk. And something that might once have been Shadow said, Whiskey Jack? Yeah, said Whiskey Jack, in the darkness. You are a hard man to hunt down, whenyou're dead. You didn't go to any of the places I figured. I had to look all over before I thought of checking here. Say, you ever find your tribe? Shadow remembered the man and the girl in the disco beneath the spinning mirror-ball. I guess I found my family. But no, I never found my tribe. Sorry to have to disturb you. Let me be. I got what I wanted. I'm done. They are coming for you, said Whiskey Jack. They are going to revive you. But I'm done, said Shadow. It was all over and done. No such thing, said Whiskey Jack. Never any such thing. Well go to my place. You want a beer? He guessed he would like a beer, at that. 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. |
| 1049 |
They were at the top of a hill, near a waterfall, swollen with melting snow and runoff. It fell in stages, maybe seventy feet below them, maybe a hundred. The sun reflected from the ice that sheathed the trees that overhung the waterfall basin. Where are we? asked Shadow. Where you were last time, said Whiskey Jack. My place. You planning on holding on to my Bud till it warms up? Shadow stood up and passed him the can of beer. You didn't have a waterfall outside your place last time I was here, he said. Whiskey Jack said nothing. He popped the top of the Bud, and drank half the can in one long slow swallow. Then he said, You remember my nephew? Henry Bluejay? The poet? He traded his Buick for your Winnebago. Remember? Sure. I didn't know he was a poet. Whiskey Jack raised his chin and looked proud. Best damn poet in America, he said. He drained the rest of his can of beer, belched, and got another can, while Shadow popped open his own can of beer, and the two men sat outside on a rock, by the pale green ferns, in the morning sun, and they watched the falling water and they drank their beer. There was still snow on the ground, in the places where the shadows never lifted. The earth was muddy and wet. Henry was diabetic, continued Whiskey Jack. It happens. Too much. You people came to America, you take our sugar cane, potatoes, and corn, then you sell us potato chips and caramel popcorn, and were the ones who get sick. He sipped his beer, reflecting. Hed won a couple of prizes for his poetry. There were people in Minnesota who wanted to put his poems into a book. He was driving to Minnesota in a sports car to talk to them. He had traded your Bago for a yellow Miata. The doctors said they think he went into a coma while he was driving, went off the road, ran the car into one of your road signs. Too lazy to look at where you are, to read the mountains and the clouds, you people need road signs everywhere. And so Henry Bluejay went away forever, went to live with brother Wolf. |
| 1050 |
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? 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. |
| 1051 |
You follow that river for a way, you'll get to the lakes where the wild rice grows. In wild rice time, you go out in your canoe with a friend, and you knock the wild rice into your canoe, and cook it, and store it, and it will keep you for a long time. Different places grow different foods. Go far enough south there are orange trees, lemon trees, and those squashy green guys, look like pears Avocados. Avocados, agreed Whiskey Jack. that's them. They don't grow up this way. This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I'm trying to say is that America is like that. Its not good growing country for gods. They don't grow well here. you're like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country. They may not grow well, said Shadow, remembering, butyou're going to war. That was the only time he ever saw Whiskey Jack laugh. It was almost a bark, and it had little humor in it. Hey Shadow, said Whiskey Jack. If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off too? Maybe. Shadow felt good. He didn't think it was just the beer. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so alive, and so together. Its not going to be a war. Then what is it? Whiskey Jack crushed the beer can between his hands, pressing it until it was flat. Look, he said, and pointed to the waterfall. The sun was high enough that it caught the waterfall spray: a rainbow nimbus hung in the air. Shadow thought it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Its going to be a bloodbath, said Whiskey Jack, flatly. Shadow saw it then. He saw it all, stark in its simplicity. He shook his head, then he began to chuckle, and he shook his head some more, and the chuckle became a full-throated laugh. 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. |
| 1052 |
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. that's 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. that's 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. |
| 1053 |
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. 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. |
| 1054 |
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. He was glad he hadn't used the Big Mack line. This woman wasnt a barroom one-nighter, Mr. Town knew that in his soul. It might have taken him fifty years to find her, but this was finally it, this was the one, this wild, magical woman with the long dark hair. This was love. Look, he said, as they approached Chattanooga. The wipers slooshed the rain across the windshield, blurring the gray of the city. How about I find a motel for you tonight? I'll pay for it. And once I make my delivery, we can. Well, we can take a hot bath together, for a start. |
| 1055 |
Warm you up. That sounds wonderful, said Laura. What are you delivering? That stick, he told her, and chuckled. The one on the backseat. Okay, she said, humoring him. Then don't tell me, Mister Mysterious. He told her it would be best if she waited in the car in the Rock City parking lot while he made his delivery. He drove up the side of Lookout Mountain in the driving rain, never breaking thirty miles per hour, with his headlights burning. They parked at the back of the parking lot. He turned off the engine. Hey, Mack. Before you get out of the car, don't I get a hug? asked Laura with a smile. You surely do, said Mr. Town, and he put his arms around her, and she snuggled close to him while the rain pattered a tattoo on the roof of the Ford Explorer. He could smell her hair. There was a faintly unpleasant scent beneath the smell of the perfume. Travel would do it, every time. That bath, he decided, was a real must for both of them. He wondered if there was anyplace in Chattanooga where he could get those lavender bath-bombs his first wife had loved so much. Laura raised her head against his, and her hand stroked the line of his neck, absently. MackI keep thinking. You must really want to know what happened to those friends of yours? she asked. Woody and Stone. Do you? Yeah, he said, moving his lips down to hers, for their first kiss. Sure I do. So she showed him. * * * Shadow walked the meadow, making his own slow circles around the trunk of the tree, gradually widening his circle. Sometimes he would stop and pick something up: a flower, or a leaf, or a pebble, or a twig, or a blade of grass. He would examine it minutely, as if concentrating entirely on the twigness of the twig, the leafness of the leaf. 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. |
| 1056 |
Shadow picked it up, untied the knots at the top of the bag, loosened the drawstring. The clothes he pulled out were his own. They were old, but still serviceable. He turned the shoes over in his hands. He stroked the fabric of the shirt, the wool of the sweater, stared at them as if he were looking at them across a million years. One by one, he put them on. He put his hands into his pockets, and looked puzzled as he pulled one hand out, holding what looked to Easter like a white-and-gray marble. He said, No coins. It was the first thing he had said in several hours. No coins? echoed Easter. He shook his head. They gave me something to do with my hands. He bent down to pull on his shoes. Once he was dressed, he looked more normal. Grave, though. She wondered how far he had traveled, and what it had cost him to return. He was not the first whose return she had initiated; and she knew that, soon enough, the million-year stare would fade, and the memories and the dreams that he had brought back from the tree would be elided by the world of things you could touch. That was the way it always went. She led their way to the rear of the meadow. Her mount waited in the trees. It cant carry both of us, she told him. I'll make my own way home. Shadow nodded. He seemed to be trying to remember something. Then he opened his mouth, and he screeched a cry of welcome and of joy. The thunderbird opened its cruel beak, and it screeched a welcome back at him. Superficially, at least, it resembled a condor. Its feathers were black, with a purplish sheen, and its neck was banded with white. Its beak was black and cruel: a raptors beak, made for tearing. At rest, on the ground, with its wings folded away, it was the size of a black bear, and its head was on a level with Shadows own. Horus said, proudly, I brought him. They live in the mountains. Shadow nodded. I had a dream of thunderbirds once, he said. Damnest dream I ever had. The thunderbird opened its beak and made a surprisingly gentle noise, crawroo? |
| 1057 |
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. shouldn't 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. |
| 1058 |
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. 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. |
| 1059 |
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. 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. |
| 1060 |
His blood was soaking her back, spurting down the back of her legs. This must look so undignified, she said, in a dead whisper, not without a certain dark amusement. She felt Mr. World stumble behind her, and she stumbled too, and then she slipped in the bloodall of it histhat was puddling on the floor of the cave, and they both went down. * * * The thunderbird landed in the Rock City parking lot. Rain was falling in sheets. Shadow could barely see a dozen feet in front of his face. He let go of the thunderbirds feathers and half slipped, half tumbled to the wet asphalt. Lightning flashed, and the bird was gone. Shadow climbed to his feet. The parking lot was three-quarters empty. Shadow started toward the entrance. He passed a brown Ford Explorer, parked against a rock wall. There was something deeply familiar about the car, and he glanced up at it curiously, noticing the man inside the car, slumped over the steering wheel as if asleep. Shadow pulled open the drivers-side door. He had last seen Mr. Town standing outside the motel in the center of America. The expression on his face was one of surprise. His neck had been expertly broken. Shadow touched the mans face. Still warm. Shadow could smell a scent on the air in the car; it was faint, like the perfume of someone who left a room years before, but Shadow would have known it anywhere. He slammed the door of the Explorer and made his way across the parking lot. As he walked he felt a twinge in his side, a sharp, jabbing pain that lasted for only a second, or less, and then it was gone. There was nobody selling tickets. He walked through the building and out into the gardens of Rock City. Thunder rumbled, and it rattled the branches of the trees and shook deep inside the huge rocks, and the rain fell with cold violence. It was late afternoon, but it was dark as night. A trail of lightning speared across the clouds, and Shadow wondered if that was the thunderbird returning to its high crags, or just an atmospheric discharge, or whether the two ideas were, on some level, the same thing. |
| 1061 |
And of course they were. That was the point, after all. Somewhere a mans voice called out. Shadow heard it. The only words he recognized or thought he recognized were to Odin! Shadow hurried across Seven States Flag Court, the flagstones now running fast with rainwater. Once he slipped on the slick stone. There was a thick layer of cloud surrounding the mountain, and in the gloom and the storm beyond the courtyard he could see no states at all. There was no sound. The place seemed utterly abandoned. He called out, and imagined he heard something answering. He walked toward the place from which he thought the sound had come. Nobody. Nothing. Just a chain marking the entrance to a cave as off-limits to guests. Shadow stepped over the chain. He looked around, peering into the darkness. His skin prickled. A voice from behind him, in the shadows, said, very quietly, You have never disappointed me. Shadow did not turn. that's weird, he said. I disappointed myself all the way. Every time. Not at all, said the voice. You did everything you were intended to do, and more. You took everybodys attention, so they never looked at the hand with the coin in it. Its called misdirection. And theres power in the sacrifice of a sonpower enough, and more than enough, to get the whole ball rolling. To tell the truth, I'm proud of you. It was crooked, said Shadow. All of it. None of it was for real. It was just a setup for a massacre. Exactly, said Wednesdays voice from the shadows. It was crooked. But it was the only game in town. I want Laura, said Shadow. I want Loki. Where are they? There was only silence. A spray of rain gusted at him. Thunder rumbled somewhere close at hand. He walked farther in. Loki Lie-Smith sat on the ground with his back to a metal cage. Inside the cage, drunken pixies tended their still. He was covered with a blanket. Only his face showed, and his hands, white and long, came around the blanket. An electric lantern sat on a chair beside him. The lanterns batteries were close to failing, and the light it cast was faint and yellow. |
| 1062 |
He looked pale, and he looked rough. His eyes, though. His eyes were still fiery, and they glared at Shadow as he walked through the cavern. When Shadow was several paces from Loki, he stopped. You are too late, said Loki. His voice was raspy and wet. I have thrown the spear. I have dedicated the battle. It has begun. No shit, said Shadow. No shit, said Loki. So it does not matter what you do anymore. Shadow stopped and thought. Then he said, The spear you had to throw to kick off the battle. Like the whole Uppsala thing. This is the battle you'll be feeding on. Am I right? Silence. He could hear Loki breathing, a ghastly rattling inhalation. I figured it out, said Shadow. Kind of. I'm not sure when I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas. Loki just stared at him from the floor, saying nothing. Its just a two-man con, said Shadow. Like the bishop with the diamond necklace and the cop who arrests him. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game. Loki whispered, You are ridiculous. Why? I liked what you did at the motel. That was smart. You needed to be there, to make sure that everything went according to plan. I saw you. I even realized who you were. And I still never twigged that you were their Mister World. 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. |
| 1063 |
His voice was faintnot actually quiet, but there was a quality to it that made Shadow think of an old radio not quite tuned in to a distant station. If I hadn't died for real, we could never have got them here, said Wednesday. Kali and the Morrigan and the fucking Albanians andwell, youve seen them all. It was my death that drew them all together. I was the sacrificial lamb. No, said Shadow. You were the Judas Goat. The wraith-shape in the shadows swirled and shifted. Not at all. That implies that I was betraying the old gods for the new. Which was not what we were doing. Not at all, whispered Loki. I can see that, said Shadow. You two werent betraying either side. You were betraying both sides. I guess we were at that, said Wednesday. He sounded pleased with himself. You wanted a massacre. You needed a blood sacrifice. A sacrifice of gods. The wind grew stronger; the howl across the cave door became a screech, as if of something immeasurably huge in pain. And why the hell not? I've been trapped in this damned land for almost twelve hundred years. My blood is thin. I'm hungry. And you two feed on death, said Shadow. He thought he could see Wednesday, now. He was a shape made of darkness, who became more real only when Shadow looked away from him, taking shape in his peripheral vision. I feed on death that is dedicated to me, said Wednesday. Like my death on the tree, said Shadow. That, said Wednesday, was special. And do you also feed on death? asked Shadow, looking at Loki. Loki shook his head, wearily. No, of course not, said Shadow. You feed on chaos. Loki smiled at that, a brief pained smile, and orange flames danced in his eyes, and flickered like burning lace beneath his pale skin. We couldn't have done it without you, said Wednesday, from the corner of Shadows eye. I'd been with so many women You needed a son, said Shadow. Wednesdays ghost-voice echoed. I needed you, my boy. Yes. My own boy. I knew that you had been conceived, but your mother left the country. It took us so long to find you. |
| 1064 |
Reality was thin here. And Shadow knew where the battle must be taking place. With that, he began to walk. He remembered how he had felt on the carousel, tried to feel like that He remembered turning the Winnebago, shifting it at right angles to everything. He tried to capture that sensation And then, easily and perfectly, it happened: It was like pushing through a membrane, like plunging up from deep water into air. With one step he had moved from the tourist path on the mountain to To somewhere real. He was Backstage. He was still on the top of a mountain, that much remained the same. But it was so much more than that. This mountaintop was the quintessence of place, the heart of things as they were. Compared to it, the Lookout Mountain he had left was a painting on a backdrop, or a papier-mache model seen on a TV screenmerely a representation of the thing, not the thing itself. This was the true place. The rock walls formed a natural amphitheater. Paths of stone that wound around and across it, forming twisty natural bridges that Eschered through and across the rock walls. And the sky The sky was dark. It was lit, and the world beneath it was illuminated by a burning greenish-white streak, brighter than the sun, which forked crazily across the sky from, end to end, like a white rip in the darkened sky. 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. |
| 1065 |
People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen. The mountaintop was an arena; he saw that immediately. And on each side of the arena he could see them arrayed. They were too big. Everything was too big in that place. There were old gods in that place: gods with skins the brown of old mushrooms, the pink of chicken flesh, the yellow of autumn leaves. Some were crazy and some were sane. Shadow recognized the old gods. Hed met them already, or hed met others like them. There were ifrits and piskies, giants and dwarfs. He saw the woman he had met in the darkened bedroom in Rhode Island, saw the writhing green snake-coils of her hair. He saw Mama-ji, from the carousel, and there was blood on her hands and a smile on her face. He knew them all. He recognized the new ones, too. There was somebody who had to be a railroad baron, in an antique suit, his watch chain stretched across his vest. He had the air of one who had seen better days. His forehead twitched. There were the great gray gods of the airplanes, heirs to all the dreams of heavier-than-air travel. There were car gods, there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs. Even they looked uncomfortable. Worlds change. Others had faces of smudged phosphors; they glowed gently, as if they existed in their own light. Shadow felt sorry for them all. There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear. They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over. Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned. Shadow could see an initial skirmish had taken place. There was already blood on the rocks. They were readying themselves for the real battle; for the real war. |
| 1066 |
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 wasnt Friends, Romans, countrymen, but it would do. Youve probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either youve been forgotten, oryou're scaredyou're going to be rendered obsolete, or maybeyou're just getting tired of existing on the whim of people. The grumbles were fewer now. He had said something they agreed with. Now, while they were listening, he had to tell them the story. There was a god who came here from a far land, and whose power and influence waned as belief in him faded. He was a god who took his power from sacrifice, and from death, and especially from war. The deaths of those who fell in war were dedicated to himwhole battlefields that had given him in the Old Country power and sustenance. Now he was old. He made his living as a grifter, working with another god from his pantheon, a god of chaos and deceit. |
| 1067 |
Together they rooked the gullible. Together they took people for all theyd got. Somewhere in theremaybe fifty years ago, maybe a hundred, they put a plan into motion, a plan to create a reserve of power they could both tap into. Something that would make them stronger than they had ever been. After all, what could be more powerful than a battlefield covered with dead gods? The game they played was called Lets You and Him Fight. Do you see? The battle you came here for isn't something that any of you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand? The roaring, whoomping sound of something catching fire echoed across the arena. Shadow looked to the place the noise came from. An enormous man, his skin the deep brown of mahogany, his chest naked, wearing a top hat, cigar sticking rakishly from his mouth, spoke in a voice as deep as the grave. Baron Samedi said, Okay. But Odin. He died. At the peace talks. Motherfuckers killed him. He died. I know death. Nobody going to fool me about death. Shadow said, Obviously. He had to die for real. He sacrificed his physical body to make this war happen. After the battle he would have been more powerful than he had ever been. 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. |
| 1068 |
They glowed, many of those presences, in the darkness. Shadow wondered if they were going to argue with him, to attack him, to try to kill him. He waited for some kind of response. And then Shadow realized that the lights were going out. The gods were leaving that place, first in handfuls, and then by scores, and finally in the hundreds. A spider the size of a rottweiler scuttled heavily toward him, on seven legs; its cluster of eyes glowed faintly. Shadow held his ground, although he felt slightly sick. When the spider got close enough, it said, in Mr. Nancys voice, That was a good job. Proud of you. You done good, kid. Thank you, said Shadow. We should get you back. Too long in this place is goin to mess you up. It rested one brown-haired spider leg on Shadows shoulder * * * and, back on Seven States Flag Court, Mr. Nancy coughed. His right hand rested on Shadows shoulder. The rain had stopped. Mr. Nancy held his left hand across his side, as if it hurt. Shadow asked if he was okay. I'm tough as old nails, said Mr. Nancy. Tougher. He did not sound happy. He sounded like an old man in pain. There were dozens of them, standing or sitting on the ground or on the benches. Some of them looked badly injured. Shadow could hear a rattling noise in the sky, approaching from the south. He looked at Mr. Nancy. Helicopters? Mr. Nancy nodded. don't you worry about them. Not anymore. they'll just clean up the mess, and leave. Got it. Shadow knew that there was one part of the mess he wanted to see for himself, before it was cleaned up. He borrowed a flashlight from a gray-haired man who looked like a retired news anchor and began to hunt. He found Laura stretched out on the ground in a side cavern, beside a diorama of mining gnomes straight out of Snow White. The floor beneath her was sticky with blood. She was on her side, where Loki must have dropped her after he had pulled the spear out of them both. One of Lauras hands clutched her chest. She looked dreadfully vulnerable. She looked dead, but then, Shadow was almost used to that by now. |
| 1069 |
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. 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. |
| 1070 |
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. 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. |
| 1071 |
But I'm not certain of anything anymore. Its like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head. Yeah, said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, you're not so dumb. Maybe not, said Shadow. But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again. Maybe, said Mr. Nancy, you kept more than you think. No, said Shadow. They crossed the border into Florida, and Shadow saw his first palm tree. He wondered if theyd planted it there on purpose, at the border, just so that you knew you were in Florida now. Mr. Nancy began to snore, and Shadow glanced over at him. The old man still looked very gray, and his breath was rasping. Shadow wondered, not for the first time, if he had sustained some kind of chest or lung injury in the fight. Nancy had refused any medical attention. Florida went on for longer than Shadow had imagined, and it was late by the time he pulled up outside a small, one-story wooden house, its windows tightly shuttered, on the outskirts of Fort Pierce. Nancy, who had directed him through the last five miles, invited him to stay the night. I can get a room in a motel, said Shadow. Its not a problem, You could do that, and I'd be hurt. Obviously I wouldn't say anythin. But I'd be real hurt, real bad, said Mr. Nancy. So you better stay here, and I'll make you a bed up on the couch. Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies. Shadow agreed, reluctantly, to stay the night there, just as he agreed, even more reluctantly, to walk with Mr. Nancy to the bar at the end of the road, for just one late-night drink while the house aired out. Did you see Czernobog? asked Nancy, as they strolled through the muggy Floridian night. |
| 1072 |
I'm just a soul whose intentions are good, he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. Mr. Nancy showed him to the couch. It was much smaller than Shadow, who decided to sleep on the floor, but by the time he had finished deciding to sleep on the floor he was already fast asleep, half sitting, half lying on the tiny sofa. At first, he did not dream. There was just the comforting darkness. And then he saw a fire burning in the darkness and he walked toward it. You did well, whispered the buffalo man without moving his lips. I don't know what I did, said Shadow. You made peace, said the buffalo man. You took our words and made them your own. They never understood that they were here and the people who worshiped them were herebecause it suits us that they are here. But we can change our minds. And perhaps we will. Are you a god? asked Shadow. The buffalo-headed man shook his head. Shadow thought, for a moment, that the creature was amused. I am the land, he said. And if there was more to that dream then Shadow did not remember it. He heard something sizzling. 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. |
| 1073 |
Its an ancient African herbal remedy, he said. Its made of ground willow bark, things like that. Like aspirin? Yup, said Mr. Nancy. Just like that. From the bottom of the trunk he produced a giant economy-sized bottle of generic aspirin. He unscrewed the top, and shook out a couple of white pills. Here. Nice trunk, said Shadow. He took the bitter pills, swallowed them with a glass of water. My son sent it to me, said Mr. Nancy. he's a good boy. I don't see him as much as I'd like. I miss Wednesday, said Shadow. Despite everything he did. I keep expecting to see him. But I look up and he's not there. He kept staring at the pirate trunk, trying to figure out what it reminded him of. You will lose many things. Do not lose this. Who said that? You miss him? After what he put you through? Put us all through? Yes, said Shadow. I guess I do. Do you think hell be back? I think, said Mr. Nancy, that wherever two men are gathered together to sell a third man a twenty-dollar violin for ten thousand dollars, he will be there in spirit. Yes, but We should get back into the kitchen, said Mr. Nancy, his expression becoming stony. Those pans won't wash themselves. Mr. Nancy washed the pans and the dishes. Shadow dried them and put them away. Somewhere in there the headache began to ease. They went back into the sitting room. Shadow stared at the old trunk some more, willing himself to remember. If I don't go to see Czernobog, he said, what will happen? you'll see him, said Mr. Nancy flatly. Maybe hell find you. Or maybe hell bring you to him. But one way or another, you'll see him. Shadow nodded. Something started to fall into place. A dream, on the tree. Hey, he said. Is there a god with an elephants head? Ganesh? he's a Hindu god. He removes obstacles, and makes journeys easier. Good cook, too. Shadow looked up. Its in the trunk, he said. I knew it was important, but I didn't know why. I thought maybe it meant the trunk of the tree. But he wasnt talking about that at all, was he? Mr. |
| 1074 |
He skidded and slid, down to the lake and walked, carefully, out onto a short wooden jetty, and from there he stepped down onto the ice. The layer of water on the ice, made up of melted ice and melted snow, was deeper than it had looked from above, and the ice beneath the water was slicker and more slippery than any skating rink, so that Shadow was forced to fight to keep his footing. He splashed though the water as it covered his boots to the laces and seeped inside. Ice water. It numbed where it touched. He felt strangely distant as he trudged across the frozen lake, as if he were watching himself on a movie screena movie in which he was the hero: a detective, perhaps. He walked toward the klunker, painfully aware that the ice was too rotten for this, and that the water beneath the ice was as cold as water could be without freezing. He kept walking, and he slipped and slid. Several times he fell. He passed empty beer bottles and cans left to litter the ice, and he passed round holes cut into the ice, for fishing, holes that had not frozen again, each hole filled with black water. The klunker seemed farther away than it had looked from the road. He heard a loud crack from the south of the lake, like a stick breaking, followed by the sound of something huge thrumming, as if a bass string the size of a lake were vibrating. Massively, the ice creaked and groaned, like an old door protesting being opened. Shadow kept walking, as steadily as he could. This is suicide, whispered a sane voice in the back of his mind. Cant you just let it go? No, he said, aloud. I have to know. And he kept right on walking. He arrived at the klunker, and even before he reached it he knew that he had been right. There was a miasma that hung about the car, something that was at the same time a faint, foul smell and was also a bad taste in the back of his throat. He walked around the car, looking inside. The seats were stained, and ripped. The car was obviously empty. He tried the doors. They were locked. |
| 1075 |
He tried the trunk. Also locked. He wished that he had brought a crowbar. He made a fist of his hand, inside his glove. He counted to three, then smashed his hand, hard, against the drivers-side window glass. His hand hurt, but the side window was undamaged. He thought about running at ithe could kick the window in, he was certain, if he didn't skid and fall on the wet ice. But the last thing he wanted to do was to disturb the klunker enough that the ice beneath it would crack. He looked at the car. Then he reached for the radio antennait was the kind that was supposed to go up and down, but that had stuck in the up position a decade agoand, with a little waggling, he broke it off at the base. He took the thin end of the antennait had once had a metal button on the end, but that was lost in time, and, with strong fingers, he bent it back up into a makeshift hook. Then he rammed the extended metal antenna down between the rubber and the glass of the front window, deep into the mechanism of the door. He fished in the mechanism, twisting, moving, pushing the metal antenna about until it caught: and then he pulled up. He felt the improvised hook sliding from the lock, uselessly. He sighed. Fished again, slower, more carefully. He could imagine the ice grumbling beneath his feet as he shifted his weight. And slow and He had it. He pulled up on the aerial and the front-door locking mechanism popped up. Shadow reached down one gloved hand and took the door handle, pressed the button, and pulled. The door did not open. Its stuck, he thought, iced up. that's all. He tugged, sliding on the ice, and suddenly the door of the klunker flew open, ice scattering everywhere. The miasma was worse inside the car, a stench of rot and illness. Shadow felt sick. He reached under the dashboard, found the black plastic handle that opened the trunk, and tugged on it, hard. There was a thunk from behind him as the trunk door released. Shadow walked out onto the ice, slipped and splashed around the car, holding on to the side of it as he went. |
| 1076 |
Its in the trunk, he thought. The trunk was open an inch. He reached down and opened it the rest of the way, pulling it up. The smell was bad, but it could have been much worse: the bottom of the trunk was filled with an inch or so of half-melted ice. There was a girl in the trunk. She wore a scarlet snowsuit, now stained, and her mousy hair was long and her mouth was closed, so Shadow could not see the blue rubber-band braces, but he knew that they were there. The cold had preserved her, kept her as fresh as if she had been in a freezer. Her eyes were wide open, and she looked as if she had been crying when she died, and the tears that had frozen on her cheeks had still not melted. You were here all the time, said Shadow to Alison Mc-Governs corpse. Every single person who drove over that bridge saw you. Everyone who drove through the town saw you. The ice fishermen walked past you every day. And nobody knew. And then he realized how foolish that was. Somebody knew. Somebody had put her here. He reached into the trunkto see if he could pull her out. He put his weight on the car, as he leaned in. Maybe that was what did it. The ice beneath the front wheels went at that moment, perhaps from his movements, perhaps not. The front of the car lurched downward several feet into the dark water of the lake. Water began to pour into the car through the open drivers door. Lake water splashed about Shadows ankles, although the ice he stood on was still solid. He looked around urgently, wondering how to get away and then it was too late, and the ice tipped precipitously, throwing him against the car and the dead girl in the trunk; and the back of the car went down, and Shadow went down with it, into the cold waters of the lake. It was ten past nine in the morning on March the twenty-third. He took a deep breath before he went under, closing his eyes, but the cold of the lake water hit him like a wall, knocking the breath from his body. He tumbled downward, into the murky ice water, pulled down by the car. |
| 1077 |
He breathed deep gasps of air, stretched flat out on the creaking ice, and even that would not hold for long, he knew, but it was no good. His thoughts were coming with difficulty, syrupy-slow. Just leave me, he tried to say. I'll be fine. His words were a slur, and everything was drawing to a halt. He just needed to rest for a moment, that was all, just rest, and then he would get up and move on. Obviously he could not just lie there forever. There was a jerk; water splashed his face. His head was lifted up. Shadow felt himself being hauled across the ice, sliding on his back across the slick surface, and he wanted to protest, to explain that he just needed a little restmaybe a little sleep, was that asking for so much? and he would be just fine. If they just left him alone. He did not believe that he had fallen asleep, but he was standing on a vast plain, and there was a man there with the head and shoulders of a buffalo, and a woman with the head of an enormous condor, and there was Whiskey Jack standing between them, looking at him sadly, shaking his head. Whiskey Jack turned and walked slowly away from Shadow. The buffalo man walked away beside him. The thunderbird woman also walked, and then she ducked and kicked and she was gliding out into the skies. Shadow felt a sense of loss. He wanted to call to them, to plead with them to come back, not to give up on him, but everything was becoming formless and without shape: they were gone, and the plains were fading, and everything became void. * * * The pain was intense: it was as if every cell in his body, every nerve, was melting and waking and advertising its presence by burning him and hurting him. There was a hand at the back of his head, gripping it by the hair, and another hand beneath his chin. He opened his eyes, expecting to find himself in some kind of hospital. His feet were bare. He was wearing jeans. He was naked from the waist up. There was steam in the air. He could see a shaving mirror on the wall facing him, and a small basin, and a blue toothbrush in a toothpaste-stained glass. |
| 1078 |
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. How are you feeling now, Houdini? It hurts, said Shadow. Everything hurts. You saved my life. I guess maybe I did, at that. Can you hold your head up on your own now? Maybe. I'm going to let you go. If you start sinking below the water I'll pull you back up again. The hands released their grip on his head. He felt himself sliding forward in the tub. He put out his hands, pressed them against the sides of the tub, and leaned back. The bathroom was small. The tub was metal, and the enamel was stained and scratched. An old man moved into his field of vision. He looked concerned. Feeling better? asked Hinzelmann. You just lay back and relax. I've got the den nice and warm. You tell me whenyou're ready, I got a robe you can wear, and I can throw your jeans into the dryer with the rest of your clothes. Sound good, Mike? that's not my name. If you say so. The old mans goblin face twisted into an expression of discomfort. |
| 1079 |
Shadow nodded. You did a good thing, he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face. Somewhere in the house, Shadow heard a door close. He sipped at his coffee. Now that he was able to think clearly, he was starting to ask himself questions. He wondered how an old man, a man half his height and perhaps a third his weight, had been able to drag him, unconscious, across the ice, or get him up the bank to a car. He wondered how Hinzelmann had gotten Shadow into the house and the bathtub. Hinzelmann walked over to the fire, picked up the tongs and placed a thin log, carefully, onto the blazing fire. Do you want to know what I was doing out on the ice? Hinzelmann shrugged. None of my business, You know what I don't understand said Shadow. He hesitated, putting his thoughts in order. I don't understand why you saved my life. Well, said Hinzelmann, the way I was brought up, if you see another fellow in trouble No, said Shadow. that's not what I mean. I mean, you killed all those kids. Every winter. I was the only one to have figured it out. You must have seen me open the trunk. Why didn't you just let me drown? Hinzelmann tipped his head on one side. He scratched his nose, thoughtfully, rocked back and forth as if he were thinking. Well, he said. that's a good question. I guess its because I owed a certain party a debt. And I'm good for my debts. Wednesday? that's the fellow. There was a reason he hid me in Lakeside, wasnt there? There was a reason nobody should have been able to find me here. Hinzelmann said nothing. He unhooked a heavy black poker from its place on the wall, and he prodded at the fire with it, sending up a cloud of orange sparks and smoke. This is my home, he said, petulantly. Its a good town. Shadow finished his coffee. He put the cup down on the floor. The effort was exhausting. How long have you been here? Long enough. And you made the lake? Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. Yes, he said. I made the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it werent nothing more than a spring and a mill pond and a creek. |
| 1080 |
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. 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? |
| 1081 |
My old prison warden, up here for a weekends ice fishing? Lauras mother? Shadow realized that he was angry. You wanted me out of your town. You just didn't want to have to tell Wednesday that was what you were doing. In the firelight, Hinzelmann seemed more like a gargoyle than an imp. This is a good town, he said. Without his smile he looked waxen and corpselike. You could have attracted too much attention. Not good for the town. You should have left me back there on the ice, said Shadow. You should have left me in the lake. I opened the trunk of the klunker. Right now Alison is still iced into the trunk. But the ice will melt, and her body'll float out and up to the surface. And then they'll go down and look and see what else they can find down there. Find your whole stash of kids. I guess some of those bodies are pretty well preserved. Hinzelmann reached down and picked up the poker. He made no pretense of stirring the fire with it any longer; he held it like a sword, or a baton, the glowing orange-white tip of it waving in the air. It smoked. Shadow was very aware that he was next-to-naked, and he was still tired, and clumsy, and far from able to defend himself. You want to kill me? said Shadow. Go ahead. Do it. I'm a dead man anyway. I know you own this townits your little world. But if you think no ones going to come looking for me, you're living in a dream-world. Its over, Hinzelmann. One way or another, its done. Hinzelmann pushed himself to his feet, using the poker as a walking stick. The carpet charred and smoked where he rested the red-hot tip, as he got up. He looked at Shallow and there were tears in his pale blue eyes. I love this town, he said. I really like being a cranky old man, and telling my stories and driving Tessie and ice-fishing. Remember what I told you? 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. |
| 1082 |
I've done it before. you're not the first to figure it out. Chad Mulligans father, he figured it out. 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. You saved my life. He shook his head. He felt like crap, in every way he could feel like crap. He didn't feel like a hero or a detective anymorejust another fucking sell-out, waving a stern finger at the darkness before turning his back on it. You want to know a secret? asked Hinzelmann. Sure, said Shadow, with a heavy heart. He was ready to be done with secrets. Watch this. Where Hinzelmann had been standing stood a male child, no more than five years old. |
| 1083 |
His hair was dark brown, and long. He was perfectly naked, save for a worn leather band around his neck. He was pierced with two swords, one of them going through his chest, the other entering at his shoulder, with the point coming out beneath the rib-cage. Blood flowed through the wounds without stopping and ran down the childs body to pool and puddle on the floor. The swords looked unimaginably old. The little boy stared up at Shadow with eyes that held only pain. And Shadow thought to himself, of course. that's as good a way as any other of making a tribal god. He did not have to be told. He knew. You take a baby and you bring it up in the darkness, letting it see no one, touch no one, and you feed it well as the years pass, feed it better than any of the villages other children, and then, five winters on, when the night is at its longest, you drag the terrified child out of its hut and into the circle of bonfires, and you pierce it with blades of iron and of bronze. Then you smoke the small body over charcoal fires until it is properly dried, and you wrap it in furs and carry it with you from encampment to encampment, deep in the Black Forest, sacrificing animals and children to it, making it the luck of the tribe. When, eventually, the thing falls apart from age, you place its fragile bones in a box, and you worship the box; until one day the bones are scattered and forgotten, and the tribes who worshipped the child-god of the box are long gone; and the child-god, the luck of the village, will be barely remembered, save as a ghost or a brownie: a kobold. Shadow wondered which of the people who had come to northern Wisconsin 150 years ago, a woodcutter, perhaps, or a mapmaker, had crossed the Atlantic with Hinzelmann living in his head. And then the bloody child was gone, and the blood, and there was only an old man with a fluff of white hair and a goblin smile, his sweater-sleeves still soaked from putting Shadow into the bath that had saved his life. Hinzelmann? |
| 1084 |
the voice came from the doorway of the den. Hinzelmann turned. Shadow turned too. I came over to tell you, said Chad Mulligan, and his voice was strained, that the klunker went through the ice. I saw it had gone down when I drove over that way, and thought I'd come over and let you know, in case youd missed it. He was holding his gun. It was pointed at the floor. Hey, Chad, said Shadow. Hey, pal, said Chad Mulligan. They sent me a note said youd died in custody. Heart attack. How about that? said Shadow. Seems like I'm dying all over the place. He came down here, Chad, said Hinzelmann. He threatened me. No, said Chad Mulligan. He didn't. I've been here for the last ten minutes, Hinzelmann. I heard everything you said. About my old man. About the lake. He walked farther into the den. He did not raise the gun. Jesus, Hinzelmann. You cant drive through this town without seeing that goddamned lake. Its at the center of everything. So what the hell am I supposed to do? You got to arrest him. He said he was going to kill me, said Hinzelmann, a scared old man in a dusty den. Chad, I'm pleasedyou're here. No, said Chad Mulligan. you're not. Hinzelmann sighed. He bent down, as if resigned, and he pulled the poker out from the fire. The tip of it was burning bright orange. Put that down, Hinzelmann. Just put it down slowly, keep your hands in the air where I can see them, and turn and face the wall. There was an expression of pure fear on the old mans face, and Shadow would have felt sorry for him, but he remembered the frozen tears on the cheeks of Alison McGovern. Hinzelmann did not move. He did not put down the poker. He did not turn to the wall. Shadow was about to reach for Hinzelmann, to try to take the poker away from him, when the old man threw the burning poker at Mulligan. Hinzelmann threw it awkwardlylobbing it across the room as if for forms sake and as he threw it he was already hurrying for the door. The poker glanced off Mulligans left arm. The noise of the shot, in the close quarters of the old mans room, was deafening. |
| 1085 |
One shot to the head, and that was all. Mulligan said, Better get your clothes on. His voice was dull and dead. Shadow nodded. He walked to the room next door, opened the door of the clothes drier and pulled out his clothes. The jeans were still damp, but he put them on anyway. By the time he got back to the den, fully dressedexcept for his coat, which was somewhere deep in the freezing mud of the lake, and his boots, which he could not findMulligan had already hauled several smoldering logs out from the fireplace. Mulligan said, Its a bad day for a cop when he has to commit arson, just to cover up a murder. Then he looked up at Shadow. You need boots, he said. I don't know where he put them, said Shadow. Hell, said Mulligan. Then he said, Sorry about this, Hinzelmann, and he picked the old man up by the collar and by the belt buckle, and he swung him forward, dropped the body with its head resting in the open fireplace. The white hair crackled and flared, and the room began to fill with the smell of charring flesh. It wasnt murder. It was self-defense, said Shadow. I know what it was, said Mulligan, flatly. He had already turned his attention to the smoking logs he had scattered about the room. He pushed one of them to the edge of the sofa, picked up an old copy of the Lakeside News and pulled it into its component pages, which he crumpled up and dropped onto the log. The newspaper pages browned and then burst into flame. Get outside, said Chad Mulligan. He opened the windows as they walked out of the house, and he sprang the lock on the front door to lock it before he closed it. Shadow followed him out to the police car in his bare feet. Mulligan opened the front passenger door for him, and Shadow got in and wiped his feet off on the mat. Then he put on his socks, which were pretty much dry by now. We can get you some boots at Hennings Farm and Home, said Chad Mulligan. How much did you hear in there? asked Shadow. Enough, said Mulligan. Then he said, Too much. They drove to Hennings Farm and Home in silence. |
| 1086 |
When they got there the police chief said, What size feet? Shadow told him. Mulligan walked into the store. He returned with a pair of thick woolen socks, and a pair of leather farm-boots. All they had left in your size, he said. Unless you wanted gumboots. I figured you didn't. Shadow pulled on the socks and the boots. They fitted fine. Thanks, he said. You got a car? asked Mulligan. Its parked by the road down to the lake. Near the bridge. Mulligan started the car and pulled out of the Hennings parking lot. What happened to Audrey? asked Shadow. Day after they took you away, she said she liked me as a friend, but it would never work out between us, us being family and all, and she went back to Eagle Point. Broke my gosh-darn heart. Makes sense, said Shadow. And it wasnt personal. Hinzelmann didn't need her here anymore. They drove back past Hinzelmanns house. A thick plume of white smoke was coming up from the chimney. She only came to town because he wanted her here. 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. 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. |
| 1087 |
The creases in Chads forehead smoothed, and he blinked, sleepily. Go see Margie, said Shadow. Its been good seeing you, Chad. Take care of yourself. Sure, yawned Chad Mulligan. A message crackled over the police radio, and Chad reached out for the handset. Shadow got out of the car. Shadow walked over to his rental car. He could see the gray flatness of the lake at the center of the town. He thought of the dead children who waited at the bottom of the water. Soon, Alison would float to the surface As Shadow drove past Hinzelmanns place he could see the plume of smoke had already turned into a blaze. He could hear a siren wail. He drove south, heading for Highway 51. He was on his way to keep his final appointment. But before that, he thought, he would stop off in Madison, for one last goodbye. * * * Best of everything, Samantha Black Crow liked closing up the Coffee House at night. It was a perfectly calming thing to do: it gave her a feeling that she was putting order back into the world. She would put on an Indigo Girls CD, and she would do her final chores of the night at her own pace and in her own way. First, she would clean the espresso machine. Then she would do the final rounds, ensuring that any missed cups or plates were deposited back in the kitchen, and that the newspapers that were always scattered around the Coffee House by the end of each day were collected together and piled neatly by the front door, all ready for recycling. She loved the Coffee House. It was a long, winding series of rooms filled with armchairs and sofas and low tables, on a street lined with secondhand bookstores. She covered the leftover slices of cheesecake and put them into the large refrigerator for the night, then she took a cloth and wiped the last of the crumbs away. She enjoyed being alone. A tapping on the window jerked her attention from her chores back to the real world. She went to the door and opened it to admit a woman of about Sams age, with pig-tailed magenta hair. Her name was Natalie. |
| 1088 |
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? 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. |
| 1089 |
They were roses, their stems wrapped in paper. Six of them, and white. I didn't give them to you, said Natalie, her lips firming. And neither of them said another word until they reached the movie theater. When she got home that night Sam put the roses in an improvised vase. Later, she cast them in bronze, and she kept to herself the tale of how she got them, although she told Caroline, who came after Natalie, the story of the ghost-roses one night when they were both very drunk, and Caroline agreed with Sam that it was a really, really strange and spooky story, and, deep down, did not actually believe a word of it, so that was all right. * * * Shadow had parked near a pay phone. He called information, and they gave him the number. No, he was told. She isn't here. she's probably still at the Coffee House. He stopped on the way to the Coffee House to buy flowers. He found the Coffee House, then he crossed the road and stood in the doorway of a used bookstore, and waited, and watched. The place closed at eight, and at ten past eight Shadow saw Sam Black Crow walk out of the Coffee House in the company of a smaller woman whose pigtailed hair was a peculiar shade of red. They were holding hands tightly, as if simply holding hands could keep the world at bay, and they were talkingor rather, Sam was doing most of the talking while her friend listened. Shadow wondered what Sam was saying. She smiled as she talked. The two women crossed the road, and they walked past the place where Shadow was standing. The pigtailed girl passed within a foot of him; he could have reached out and touched her, and they didn't see him at all. He watched them walking away from him down the street, and felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him. It had been a good kiss, Shadow reflected, but Sam had never looked at him the way she was looking at the pig-tailed girl, and she never would. What the hell. Well always have Peru, he said, under his breath, as Sam walked away from him. And El Paso. |
| 1090 |
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. When she saw him her mouth became an O and she called out, Shadow? You came back to us? and she hurried toward him with her arms outstretched. He bent down and embraced her, and she kissed his cheek. So good to see you! she said. Now you must go away. Shadow stepped into the apartment. All the doors in the apartment (except, unsurprisingly, Zorya Polunochnayas) were wide open, and all the windows he could see were open as well. A gentle breeze blew fitfully through the corridor. you're spring cleaning, he said to Zorya Utrennyaya. We have a guest coming, she told him. Now, you must go away. |
| 1091 |
First, you want coffee? I came to see Czernobog, said Shadow. Its time. Zorya Utrennyaya shook her head violently. No, no, she said. You don't want to see him. Not a good idea. I know, said Shadow. But you know, the only thing I've really learned about dealing with gods is that if you make a deal, you keep it. They get to break all the rules they want. We don't. Even if I tried to walk out of here, my feet would just bring me back. She pushed up her bottom lip, then said, Is true. But go today. Come back tomorrow. He will be gone then. Who is it? called a womans voice from farther down the corridor. Zorya Utrennyaya, to who are you talking? This mattress, I cannot turn on my own, you know. Shadow walked down the corridor and said, Good morning, Zorya Vechernyaya. Can I help? which made the woman in the room squeak with surprise and drop her corner of the mattress. The bedroom was thick with dust: it covered every surface, the wood and the glass, and motes of it floated and danced through the beams of sunshine coming through the open window, disturbed by occasional breezes and the lazy flapping of the yellowed lace curtains. He remembered this room. This was the room they had given to Wednesday, that night. Bielebogs room. Zorya Vechernyaya eyed him uncertainly. The mattress, she said. It needs to be turned. Not a problem, said Shadow. He reached out and took the mattress, lifted it with ease, and turned it over. It was an old wooden bed, and the feather mattress weighed almost as much as a man. Dust flew and swirled as the mattress went down. Why are you here? asked Zorya Vechernyaya. It was not a friendly question, the way she asked it. I'm here, said Shadow, because back in December a young man played a game of checkers with an old god, and he lost. The old womans gray hair was up on the top of her head in a tight bun. She pursed her lips. Come back tomorrow, said Zorya Vechernyaya. I cant, he said, simply. Is your funeral. Now, you go and sit down. Zorya Utrennyaya will bring you coffee. |
| 1092 |
Czernobog will be back soon. Shadow walked along the corridor to the sitting room. It was just as he remembered, although now the window was open. The gray cat slept on the arm of the sofa. It opened an eye as Shadow came in and then, unimpressed, it went back to sleep. This was where he had played checkers with Czernobog; this was where he had wagered his life to get the old man to join them on Wednesdays last doomed grift. The fresh air came in through the open window, blowing the stale air away. Zorya Utrennyaya came in with a red wooden tray. A small enameled cup of steaming black coffee sat on the tray, beside a saucer filled with small chocolate-chip cookies. She put it down on the table in front of him. I saw Zorya Polunochnaya again, he said. She came to me under the world, and she gave me the moon to light my way. And she took something from me. But I don't remember what. She likes you, said Zorya Utrennyaya. She dreams so much. And she guards us all. She is so brave. Wheres Czernobog? He says the spring cleaning makes him uncomfortable. He goes out to buy newspaper, sit in the park. Buy cigarettes. Perhaps he will not come back today. You do not have to wait. Why don't you go? Come back tomorrow. I'll wait, said Shadow. There was no magic forcing him to wait, he knew that. This was him. It was one last thing that needed to happen, and if it was the last thing that happened, well, he was going there of his own volition. After this there would be no more obligations, no more mysteries, no more ghosts. He sipped the hot coffee, as black and as sweet as he remembered. He heard a deep male voice in the corridor, and he sat up straighter. He was pleased to see that his hand was not trembling. The door opened. Shadow? Hi, said Shadow. He stayed sitting down. Czernobog walked into the room. He was carrying a folded copy of the Chicago Sun-Times, which he put down on the coffee table. He stared at Shadow, then he put his hand out, tentatively. The two men shook hands. |
| 1093 |
I came, said Shadow. Our deal. You came through with your part of it. This is my part. Czernobog nodded. His brow creased. The sunlight glinted on his gray hair and mustache, making them appear almost golden. Is he frowned. Is not He broke off. Maybe you should go. Is not a good time. Take as long as you need, said Shadow. I'm ready. Czernobog sighed. You are a very stupid boy. You know that? I guess. You are a stupid boy. And on the mountaintop, you did a very good thing. I did what I had to do. Perhaps. Czernobog walked to the old wooden sideboard and, bending down, pulled an attache case from underneath it. He flipped the catches on the case. Each one sprang back with a satisfying thump. He opened the case. He took a hammer out and hefted it experimentally. The hammer looked like a scaled-down sledgehammer; its wooden haft was stained. Then he stood up. He said, I owe you much. More than you know. Because of you, things are changing. This is springtime. The true spring. I know what I did, said Shadow. I didn't have a lot of choice. Czernobog nodded. There was a look in his eyes that Shadow did not remember seeing before. Did I ever tell you about my brother? Bielebog? Shadow walked to the center of the ash-stained carpet. He went down on his knees. You said you hadn't seen him in a long time. Yes, said the old man, raising the hammer. It has been a long winter, boy. A very long winter. But the winter is ending, now. And he shook his head, slowly, as if he were remembering something. And he said, Close your eyes. Shadow closed his eyes and raised his head, and he waited. The head of the sledgehammer was cold, icy cold, and it touched his forehead as gently as a kiss. Pock! There, said Czernobog. Is done. There was a smile on his face that Shadow had never seen before, an easy, comfortable smile, like sunshine on a summers day. The old man walked over to the case, and he put the hammer away, and closed the bag, and pushed it back under the sideboard. Czernobog? asked Shadow. |
| 1094 |
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. 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. |
| 1095 |
Green Town did exist, then? Yes, and again, yes. Was there a real boy named John Huff? There was. And that was truly his name. But he didn't go away from me, I went away from him. But, happy ending, he is still alive, forty-two years later, and remembers our love. Was there a Lonely One? There was, and that was his name. And he moved around at night in my home town when I was six years old and he frightened everyone and was never captured. Most importantly, did the big house itself, with Grandpa and Grandma and the boarders and uncles and aunts in it exist? I have already answered that. Is the ravine real and deep and dark at night? It was, it is. I took my daughters there a few years back, fearful that the ravine might have gone shallow with time. I am relieved and happy to report that the ravine is deeper, darker, and more mysterious than ever. I would not, even now, go home through there after seeing The Phantom of the Opera. So there you have it. Waukegan was Green Town was Byzantium, with all the happiness that that means, with all the sadness that these names imply. The people there were gods and midgets and knew themselves mortal and so the midgets walked tall so as not to embarrass the gods and the gods crouched so as to make the small ones feel at home. And, after all, isn't that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other peoples heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that's how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that. Here is my celebration, then, of death as well as life, dark as well as light, old as well as young, smart and dumb combined, sheer joy as well as complete terror written by a boy who once hung upside down in trees, dressed in his bat costume with candy fangs in his mouth, who finally fell out of the trees when he was twelve and went and found a toy-dial typewriter and wrote his first novel. A final memory. Fire balloons. You rarely see them these days, though in some countries, I hear, they are still made and filled with warm breath from a small straw fire hung beneath. |
| 1096 |
Now... Boy, whispered Douglas. A whole summer ahead to cross off the calendar, day by day. Like the goddess Siva in the travel books, he saw his hands jump everywhere, pluck sour apples, peaches, and midnight plums. He would be clothed in trees and bushes and rivers. He would freeze, gladly, in the hoarfrosted icehouse door. 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. Mr. Tridden, run to the carbarn! Soon, scattering hot blue sparks above it, the town trolley would sail the rivering brick streets. |
| 1097 |
Ready John Huff, Charlie Woodman? whispered Douglas to the Street of Children. Ready! to baseballs sponged deep in wet lawns, to rope swings hung empty in trees. Mom, Dad, Tom, wake up. Clock alarms tinkled faintly. The courthouse clock boomed. Birds leaped from trees like a net thrown by his hand, singing. Douglas, conducting an orchestra, pointed to the eastern sky. The sun began to rise. He folded his arms and smiled a magicians smile. Yes, sir, he thought, everyone jumps, everyone runs when I yell. Itll be a fine season. He gave the town a last snap of his fingers. Doors slammed open; people stepped out. Summer 1928 began. Crossing the lawn that morning, Douglas Spaulding broke a spider web with his face. A single invisible line on the air touched his brow and snapped without a sound. So, with the subtlest of incidents, he knew that this day was going to be different. It would be different also, because, as his father explained, driving Douglas and his ten-year-old brother Tom out of town toward the country, there were some days compounded completely of odor, nothing but the world blowing in one nostril and out the other. And some days, he went on, were days of hearing every trump and trill of the universe. Some days were good for tasting and some for touching. And some days were good for all the senses at once. This day now, he nodded, smelled as if a great and nameless orchard had grown up overnight beyond the hills to fill the entire visible land with its warm freshness. The air felt like rain, but there were no clouds. Momentarily, a stranger might laugh off in the woods, but there was silence... Douglas watched the traveling land. He smelled no orchards and sensed no rain, for without apple trees or clouds he knew neither could exist. And as for that stranger laughing deep in the woods...? Yet the fact remainedDouglas shiveredthis, without reason, was a special day. The car stopped at the very center of the quiet forest. All right, boys, behave. They had been jostling elbows. |
| 1098 |
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. Think of the autumns that got by to make this. Boy, I walk like an Indian, said Tom. Not a sound. Douglas felt but did not feel the deep loam, listening, watchful. Were surrounded! he thought. Itll happen! What? He stopped. Come out, wherever you are, whatever you are! he cried silently. Tom and Dad strolled on the hushed earth ahead. Finest lace there is, said Dad quietly. And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasnt sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom. Dad stood comfortably saying this and that, the words easy in his mouth. He made it easier by laughing at his own declarations just so often. He liked to listen to the silence, he said, if silence could be listened to, for, he went on, in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen sifting down the bee-fried air, by God, the bee-fried air! |
| 1099 |
Listen! the waterfall of birdsong beyond those trees! Now, thought Douglas, here it comes! Running! I don't see it! Running! Almost on me! Fox grapes! said Father. Were in luck, look here! don't! Douglas gasped. But Tom and Dad bent down to shove their hands deep in rattling bush. The spell was shattered. The terrible prowler, the magnificent runner, the leaper, the shaker of souls, vanished. Douglas, lost and empty, fell to his knees. He saw his fingers sink through green shadow and come forth stained with such color that it seemed he had somehow cut the forest and delved his hand in the open wound. Lunch time, boys! With buckets half burdened with fox grapes and wild strawberries, followed by bees which were, no more, no less, said Father, the world humming under its breath, they sat on a green-mossed log, chewing sandwiches and trying to listen to the forest the same way Father did. Douglas felt Dad watching him, quietly amused. Dad started to say something that had crossed his mind, but instead tried another bite of sandwich and mused over it. Sandwich outdoors isn't a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite. Douglass tongue hesitated on the texture of bread and deviled ham. No... no... it was just a sandwich. Tom chewed and nodded. Know just what you mean, Dad! It almost happened, thought Douglas. Whatever it was it was Big, my gosh, it was Big! Something scared it off. Where is it now? Back of that bush! No, behind me! No here... almost here... He kneeded his stomach secretly. If I wait, itll come back. It won't hurt; somehow I know its not here to hurt me. What then? What? What? You know how many baseball games we played this year, last year, year before? 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. |
| 1100 |
Slept: four thousand some-odd times, not counting naps. Ate six hundred peaches, eight hundred apples. Pears: two hundred. I'm not hot for pears. Name a thing, I got the statistics! Runs to the billion millions, things I done, add em up, in ten years. Now, thought Douglas, its coming close again. Why? Tom talking? But why Tom? Tom chatting along, mouth crammed with sandwich, Dad there, alert as a mountain cat on the log, and Tom letting the words rise like quick soda bubbles in his mouth: Books I read: four hundred. Matinees I seen: forty Buck Joneses, thirty Jack Hoxies, forty-five Tom Mixes, thirty-nine Hoot Gibsons, one hundred and ninety-two single and separate Felix-the-Cat cartoons, ten Douglas Fairbankses, eight repeats on Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, four Milton Sillses, and one Adolph Menjou thing about love where I spent ninety hours in the theater toilet waiting for the mush to be over so I could see The Cat and the Canary or The Bat, where everybody held onto everybody else and screamed for two hours without letting go. During that time I figure four hundred lollipops, three hundred Tootsie Rolls, seven hundred ice-cream cones... Tom rolled quietly along his way for another five minutes and then Dad said, How many berries you picked so far, Tom? Two hundred fifty-six on the nose! said Tom instantly. Dad laughed and lunch was over and they moved again into the shadows to find fox grapes and the tiny wild strawberries, bent down, all three of them, hands coming and going, the pails getting heavy, and Douglas holding his breath, thinking, Yes, yes, its near again! Breathing on my neck, almost! don't look! Work. Just pick, fill up the pail. If you look you'll scare it off. don't lose it this time! But how do you bring it around here where you can see it, stare it right in the eye? How? How? Got a snowflake in a matchbox, said Tom, smiling at the wine-glove on his hand. Shut up! Douglas wanted to yell. But no, the yell would scare the echoes, and run the Thing away! |
| 1101 |
And, wait... the more Tom talked, the closer the great Thing came, it wasnt scared of Tom, Tom drew it with his breath, Tom was part of it! Last February, said Tom, and chuckled. Held a matchbox up in a snowstorm, let one old snowflake fall in, shut it up, ran inside the house, stashed it in the icebox! Close, very close. Douglas stared at Toms flickering lips. He wanted to jump around, for he felt a vast tidal wave lift up behind the forest. In an instant it would smash down, crush them forever... Yes, sir, mused Tom, picking grapes, I'm the only guy in all Illinois whos got a snowflake in summer. Precious as diamonds, by gosh. Tomorrow I'll open it. Doug, you can look, too... Any other day Douglas might have snorted, struck out, denied it all. But now, with the great Thing rushing near, falling down in the clear air above him, he could only nod, eyes shut. Tom, puzzled, stopped picking berries and turned to stare over at his brother. Douglas, hunched over, was an ideal target. Tom leaped, yelling, landed. They fell, thrashed, and rolled. No! Douglas squeezed his mind shut. No! But suddenly... Yes, its all right! Yes! The tangle, the contact of bodies, the falling tumble had not scared off the tidal sea that crashed now, flooding and washing them along the shore of grass deep through the forest. Knuckles struck his mouth. He tasted rusty warm blood, grabbed Tom hard, held him tight, and so in silence they lay, hearts churning, nostrils hissing. And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye. And everything, absolutely everything, was there. The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him. And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now. I'm alive, he thought. His fingers trembled, bright with blood, like the bits of a strange flag now found and before unseen, and him wondering what country and what allegiance he owed to it. |
| 1102 |
Holding Tom, but not knowing him there, he touched his free hand to that blood as if it could be peeled away, held up, turned over. Then he let go of Tom and lay on his back with his hand up in the sky and he was a head from which his eyes peered like sentinels through the portcullis of a strange castle out along a bridge, his arm, to those fingers where the bright pennant of blood quivered in the light. You all right, Doug? asked Tom. His voice was at the bottom of a green moss well somewhere underwater, secret, removed. The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember! He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling. Doug, you okay? Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled. Doug, you're crazy! 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. |
| 1103 |
Tom! Then quieter. Tom... does everyone in the world... know he's alive? Sure. Heck, yes! The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow. I hope they do, whispered Douglas. Oh, I sure hope they know. Douglas opened his eyes. Dad was standing high above him there in the green-leaved sky, laughing, hands on hips. Their eyes met. Douglas quickened. Dad knows, he thought. It was all planned. He brought us here on purpose, so this could happen to me! he's in on it, he knows it all. And now he knows that I know. A hand came down and seized him through the air. Swayed on his feet with Tom and Dad, still bruised and rumpled, puzzled and awed, Douglas held his strange-boned elbows tenderly and licked the fine cut lip with satisfaction. Then he looked at Dad and Tom. I'll carry all the pails, he said. This once, let me haul everything. They handed over the pails with quizzical smiles. He stood swaying slightly, the forest collected, full-weighted and heavy with syrup, clenched hard in his down-slung hands. I want to feel all there is to feel, he thought. Let me feel tired, now, let me feel tired. I mustn't forget, I'm alive, I know I'm alive, T mustn't forget it tonight or tomorrow or the day after that. The bees followed and the smell of fox grapes and yellow summer followed as he walked heavy-laden and half drunk, his fingers wonderously callused, arms numb, feet stumbling so his father caught his shoulder. No, mumbled Douglas, I'm all right. I'm fine... It took half an hour for the sense of the grass, the roots, the stones, the bark of the messy log, to fade from where they had patterned his arms and legs and back. While he pondered this, let it slip, slide, dissolve away, his brother and his quiet father followed behind, allowing him to pathfind the forest alone out toward that incredible highway which would take them back to the town... The town, then, later in the day. And yet another harvest. Grandfather stood on the wide front porch like a captain surveying the vast unmotioned calms of a season dead ahead. |
| 1104 |
Yes, even Grandma, drawn to the cellar of winter for a June adventure, might stand alone and quietly, in secret conclave with her own soul and spirit, as did Grandfather and Father and Uncle Pert, or some of the boarders, communing with a last touch of a calendar long departed, with the picnics and the warm rains and the smell of fields of wheat and new popcorn and bending hay. Even Grandma, repeating and repeating the fine and golden words, even as they were said now in this moment when the flowers were dropped into the press, as they would be repeated every winter for all the white winters in time. Saying them over and over on the lips, like a smile, like a sudden patch of sunlight in the dark. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine. Dandelion wine. You did not hear them coming. You hardly heard them go. The grass bent down, sprang up again. They passed like cloud shadows downhill... the boys of summer, running. Douglas, left behind, was lost. Panting, he stopped by the rim of the ravine, at the edge of the softly blowing abyss. Here, ears pricked like a deer, he snuffed a danger that was old a billion years ago. Here the town, divided, fell away in halves. Here civilization ceased. Here was only growing earth and a million deaths and rebirths every hour. And here the paths, made or yet unmade, that told of the need of boys traveling, always traveling, to be men. Douglas turned. This path led in a great dusty snake to the ice house where winter lived on the yellow days. This path raced for the blast-furnace sands of the lake shore in July. This to trees where boys might grow like sour and still-green crab apples, hid among leaves. This to peach orchard, grape arbor, watermelons lying like tortoise-shell cats slumbered by sun. That path, abandoned, but wildly swiveling, to school! This, straight as an arrow, to Saturday cowboy matinees. And this, by the creek waters, to wilderness beyond town... Douglas squinted. Who could say where town or wideness began? Who could say which owned what and what owned which? |
| 1105 |
There was always and forever that indefinable place where the two struggled and one of them won for a season to possess a certain avenue, a deli, a glen, a tree, a bush. The thin lapping of the great continental sea of grass and flower, starting far out in lonely farm country, moved inward with the thrust of seasons. Each night the wilderness, the meadows, the far country flowed down-creek through ravine and welled up in town with a smell of grass and water, and the town was disinhabited and dead and gone back to earth. And each morning a little more of the ravine edged up into town, threatening to swamp garages like leaking rowboats, devour ancient cars which had been left to the flaking mercies of rain and therefore rust. Hey! Hey! John Huff and Charlie Woodman ran through the mystery of ravine and town and time. Hey! Douglas moved slowly down the path. The ravine was indeed the place where you came to look at the two things of life, the ways of man and the ways of the natural world. The town was, after all, only a large ship filled with constantly moving survivors, bailing out the grass, chipping away the rust. Now and again a lifeboat, a shanty, kin to the mother ship, lost out to the quiet storm of seasons, sank down in silent waves of termite and ant into swallowing ravine to feel the flicker of grasshoppers rattling like dry paper in hot weeds, become soundproofed with spider dust and finally, in avalanche of shingle and tar, collapse like kindling shrines into a bonfire, which thunderstorms ignited with blue lightning, while flash-photographing the triumph of the wilderness. It was this then, the mystery of man seizing from the land and the land seizing back, year after year, that drew Douglas, knowing the towns never really won, they merely existed in calm peril, fully accoutered with lawn mower, bug spray and hedge shears, swimming steadily as long as civilization said to swim, but each house ready to sink in green tides, buried forever, when the last man ceased and his trowels and mowers shattered to cereal flakes of rust. |
| 1106 |
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. 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. |
| 1107 |
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. 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. |
| 1108 |
They looked detached and alien down there next to the dark cuffs of his business suit. Mr. Sanderson stood up. How do they feel? asked the boy. How do they feel, he asks; they feel fine. He started to sit down. Please! Douglas held out his hand. Mr. Sanderson, now could you kind of rock back and forth a little, sponge around, bounce kind of, while I tell you the rest? Its this: I give you my money, you give me the shoes, I owe you a dollar. But, Mr. Sanderson, butsoon as I get those shoes on, you know what happens? What? Bang! I deliver your packages, pick up packages, bring you coffee, bum your trash, run to the post office, telegraph office, library! you'll see twelve of me in and out, in and out, every minute. Feel those shoes, Mr. Sanderson, feel how fast theyd take me? All those springs inside? Feel all the running inside? Feel how they kind of grab hold and cant let you alone and don't like you just standing there? Feel how quick I'd be doing the things youd rather not bother with? You stay in the nice cool store while I'm jumping all around town! But its not me really, its the shoes. you're going like mad down alleys, cutting corners, and back! There they go! Mr. Sanderson stood amazed with the rush of words. When the words got going the flow carried him; he began to sink deep in the shoes, to flex his toes, limber his arches, test his ankles. He rocked softly, secretly, back and forth in a small breeze from the open door. The tennis shoes silently hushed themselves deep in the carpet, sank as in a jungle grass, in loam and resilient clay. He gave one solemn bounce of his heels in the yeasty dough, in the yielding and welcoming earth. Emotions hurried over his face as if many colored lights had been switched on and off. His mouth hung slightly open. Slowly he gentled and rocked himself to a halt, and the boys voice faded and they stood there looking at each other in a tremendous and natural silence. A few people drifted by on the sidewalk outside, in the hot sun. |
| 1109 |
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. 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. |
| 1110 |
The women carried varieties of fans with them, folded newspapers, bamboo whisks, or perfumed kerchiefs, to start the air moving about their faces as they talked. What they talked of all evening long, no one remembered next day. It wasnt important to anyone what the adults talked about; it was only important that the sounds came and went over the delicate ferns that bordered the porch on three sides; it was only important that the darkness filled the town like black water being poured over the houses, and that the cigars glowed and that the conversations went on, and on. The female gossip moved out, disturbing the first mosquitoes so they danced in frenzies on the air. The male voices invaded the old house timbers; if you closed your eyes and put your head down against the floor boards you could hear the mens voices rumbling like a distant, political earthquake, constant, unceasing, rising or falling a pitch. Douglas sprawled back on the dry porch planks, completely contented and reassured by these voices, which would speak on through eternity, flow in a stream of murmurings over his body, over his closed eyelids, into his drowsy ears, for all time. The rocking chairs sounded like crickets, the crickets sounded like rocking chairs, and the moss-covered rain barrel by the dining-room window produced another generation of mosquitoes to provide a topic of conversation through endless summers ahead. Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chilled Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people. For at some time or other during the evening, everyone visited here; the neighbors down the way, the people across the street; Miss Fern and Miss Roberta humming by in their electric runabout, giving Tom or Douglas a ride around the block and then coming up to sit down and fan away the fever in their cheeks; or Mr. |
| 1111 |
Jonas, the junkman, having left his horse and wagon hidden in the alley, and ripe t, bursting with words, would come up the steps looking as fresh as if his talk had never been said before, and somehow it never had. And last of all, the children, who had been off squinting their way through a last hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, panting, glowing, would sickle quietly back like boomerangs along the soundless lawn, to sink beneath the talking talking talking of the porch voices which would weigh and gentle them down... Oh, the luxury of lying in the fern night and the grass night and the night of susurrant, slumbrous voices weaving the dark together. The grownups had forgotten he was there, so still, so quiet Douglas lay, noting the plans they were making for his and their own futures. And the voices chanted, drifted, in moonlit clouds of cigarette smoke while the moths, like late appleblossoms come alive, tapped faintly about the far street lights, and the voices moved on into the coming years... In front of the United Cigar Store this evening the men were gathered to burn dirigibles, sink battleships, blow up dynamite works and, all in all, savor the very bacteria in their porcelain mouths that would someday stop them cold. Clouds of annihilation loomed and blew away in their cigar smoke about a nervous figure who could be seen dimly listening to the sound of shovels and spades and the intonations of ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This figure was that of Leo Auffmann, the town jeweler, who, widening his large liquid-dark eyes, at last threw up his childlike hands and cried out in dismay. Stop! In Gods name, get out of that graveyard! Lee, how right you are, said Grandfather Spaulding, passing on his nightly stroll with his grandsons Douglas and Tom. But, Lee, only you can shut these doom-talkers up Invent something that will make the future brighter, well rounded, infinitely joyous. Youve invented bicycles, fixed the penny-arcade contraptions, been our town movie projectionist, haven't you? |
| 1112 |
I wonder where Doug is? Its almost nine-thirty. Hell be here, Tom said, knowing very well that Douglas would be. He followed Mom out to wash the dishes. Each sound, each rattle of spoon or dish was amplified in the baked evening. Silently they went to the living room, removed the couch cushions and, together, yanked it open and extended it down into the double bed it secretly was. Mother made the bed, punching pillows neatly to flump them up for their heads. Then, as he was unbuttoning his shirt, she said, Wait awhile, Tom. Why? Because I say so. You look funny, Mom. Mom sat down a moment, then stood up, went to the door and called. He listened to her calling and calling, Douglas, Douglas, oh Doug! Douglasssssss! over and over. Her calling floated out into the summer warm dark and never came back. The echoes paid no attention. Douglas. Douglas. Douglas. Douglas! And as he sat on the floor, a coldness that was not ice cream and not winter, and not part of summers heat, went through Tom. He noticed Moms eyes sliding, blinking; the way she stood undecided and was nervous. All of these things. She opened the screen door. Stepping out into the night, she walked down the steps and down the front sidewalk under the lilac bush. He listened to her moving feet. She called again. Silence. She called twice more. Tom sat in the room. Any moment now, Douglas would answer from down the long long narrow street, All right, Mom! All right, Mother! Hey! But he didn't answer. And for two minutes Tom sat looking at the made-up bed, the silent radio, the silent phonograph, at the chandelier with the crystal bobbins gleaming quietly, at the rug with the scarlet and purple curlicues on it. He stubbed his toe on the bed purposely to see if it hurt. It did. Whining, the screen door opened and Mother said, Come on, Tom. Well take a walk. Where to? Just down the block. Come on. He took her hand. Together they walked down St. James Street. Underfoot the concrete was still warm, and the crickets were sounding louder against the darkening dark. |
| 1113 |
They reached a corner, turned, and walked toward the West Ravine. Off somewhere a car floated by, flashing its lights in the distance. There was such a complete lack of life, light, and activity. Here and there, back off from where they were walking, faint squares of light glowed where people were still up. But most of the houses, darkened, were sleeping already, and there were a few lightless places where the occupants of a dwelling sat talking low night talk on their front porches. You heard a porch swing squeaking as you walked by. I wish your father was home, said Mother. Her large hand squeezed around his small one. Just waitll I get that boy. The Lonely Ones around again. Killing people. No ones safe anymore. You never know when the Lonely Onell turn up or where. So help me, when Doug gets homeI'll spank him within an inch of his life. Now they had walked another block and were standing by the holy black silhouette of the German Baptist Church at the corner of Chapel Street and Glen Rock. In back of the church, a hundred yards away, the ravine began. He could smell it. It had a dark-sewer, rotten-foliage, thick-green odor. It was a wide ravine that cut and twisted across towna jungle by day, a place to let alone at night, Mother often declared. He should have felt encouraged by the nearness of the German Baptist Church but he was not, because the building was not illumined, was cold and useless as a pile of ruins on the ravine edge. He was only ten years old. He knew little of death, fear, or dread. Death was the waxen effigy in the coffin when he was six and Great-grandfather passed away, looking like a great fallen vulture in his casket, silent, withdrawn, no more to tell him how to be a good boy, no more to comment succinctly on politics. Death was his little sister one morning when he awoke at the age of seven, looked into her crib, and saw her staring up at him with a blind, blue, fixed and frozen stare until the men came with a small wicker basket to take her away. |
| 1114 |
Death was when he stood by her high chair four weeks later and suddenly realized shed never be in it again, laughing and crying and making him jealous of her because she was born. That was death. And Death was the Lonely One, unseen, walking and standing behind trees, waiting in the country to come in, once or twice a year, to this town, to these streets, to these many places where there was little light, to kill one, two, three women in the past three years. That was Death... But this was more than Death. This summer night deep down under the stars was all things you would ever feel or see or hear in your life, drowning you all at once. Leaving the sidewalk, they walked along a trodden, pebbled, weed-fringed path while the crickets rose in a loud full drumming chorus. He followed obediently behind brave, fine, tall Motherdefender of the universe. Together, then, they approached, reached, and paused at the very end of civilization. The Ravine. Here and now, down in that pit of jungled blackness were suddenly all the things he would never know or understand; all the things without names lived in the huddled tree shadow, in the odor of decay. He realized he and his mother were alone. Her hand trembled. He felt the tremble... Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasnt she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him. Ice cream lived again in his throat, stomach, spine and limbs; he was instantly cold as a wind out of December gone. He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter? Blackness could come swiftly, swallowing; in one titanically freezing moment all would be concluded. |
| 1115 |
Long before dawn, long before police with flashlights might probe the dark, disturbed pathway, long before men with trembling brains could rustle down the pebbles to his help. Even if they were within five hundred yards of him now, and help certainly was, in three seconds a dark tide could rise to take all ten years from him and The essential impact of lifes loneliness crushed his beginning-to-tremble body. Mother was alone, too. She could not look to the sanctity of marriage, the protection of her familys love, she could not look to the United States Constitution or the City Police, she could not look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she would find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear. In this instant it was an individual problem seeking an individual solution. He must accept being alone and work on from there. He swallowed hard, clung to her. Oh, Lord, don't let her die, please, he thought. don't do anything to us. Father will be coming home from lodge meeting in an hour and if the house is empty Mother advanced down the path into the primeval jungle. His voice trembled. Mom, Dougs all right. Dougs all right. he's all right. Dougs all right! Mothers voice was strained, high. He always comes through here. I tell him not to, but those darned kids, they come through here anyway. Some night hell come through and never come out again Never come out again. That could mean anything. Tramps. Criminals. Darkness. Accident. Most of all death! Alone in the universe. There were a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins was the small towns music, with no lights, but many shadows. Oh, the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life was a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, were threatened by an ogre called Death. Mother raised her voice into the dark. |
| 1116 |
Doug! Douglas! Suddenly both of them realized something was wrong. The crickets had stopped chirping. Silence was complete. Never in his life a silence like this one. One so utterly complete. Why should the crickets cease? Why? What reason? Theyd never stopped ever before. Not ever. Unless. Unless Something was going to happen. It was as if the whole ravine was tensing, bunching together its black fibers, drawing in power from sleeping countrysides all about, for miles and miles. From dew-sodden forest and dells and rolling hills where dogs tilted heads to moons, from all around the great silence was sucked into one center, and they were the core of it. In ten seconds now, something would happen, something would happen. The crickets kept their truce, the stars were so low he could almost brush the tinsel. There were swarms of them, hot and sharp. Growing, growing, the silence. Growing, growing, the tenseness. Oh, it was so dark, so far away from everything. Oh, God! 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. |
| 1117 |
He was glad Douglas was alive. Very glad. For a moment there he had thought Far off in the dim moonlit country, over a viaduct and down a valley, a train rushed along whistling like a lost metal thing, nameless and running. Tom went to bed shivering, beside his brother, listening to that train whistle, and thinking of a cousin who lived way out in the country where that train ran now; a cousin who died of pneumonia late at night years and years ago He smelled the sweat of Doug beside him. It was magic. Tom stopped trembling. Only two things I know for sure, Doug, he whispered. What? Nighttimes awful darkis one. Whats the other? The ravine at night don't belong in Mr. Auffmanns Happiness Machine, if he ever builds it. Douglas considered this awhile. You can say that again. They stopped talking. Listening, suddenly they heard footsteps coming down the street, under the trees, outside the house now, on the sidewalk. From her bed Mother called quietly, that's your father. It was. Late at night on the bent parch Leo Auffmann wrote a list he could not see in the dark, exclaiming, Ah! or, that's another! when he hit upon a fine component. Then the front-door screen made a moth sound, tapping. Lena? he whispered. She sat down next to him on the swing, in her nightgown, not slim the way girls get when they are not loved at seventeen, not fat the way women get when they are not loved at fifty, but absolutely right, a roundness, a firmness, the way women are at any age, he thought, when there is no question. She was miraculous. Her body, like his, was always thinking for her, but in a different way, shaping the children, or moving ahead of him into any room to change the atmosphere there to fit any particular mood he was in. There seemed no long periods of thought for her; thinking and doing moved from her head to her hand and back in a natural and gentle circuiting he could not and cared not to blueprint. That machine, she said at last, we don't need it. No, he said, but sometimes you got to build for others. |
| 1118 |
Instead of confetti and serpentine, people should throw grass spray at each other on the one day each year that really represents Beginning! He snorted at his own lengthy discussion of the affair, went to the window and leaned out into the mellow sun shine, and sure enough, there was a boarder, a young newspaperman named Forrester, just finishing a row. Morning, Mr. Spaulding! Give em hell, Bill! cried Grandpa heartily, and soon downstairs eating Grandmas breakfast, with the window open so the rattling buzz of the lawn mower lolled about his eating. It gives you confidence, Grandpa said. That lawn mower. Listen to it! 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 wasnt 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. |
| 1119 |
If it survives our climate itll save us getting out here next year, once a week, to keep the darned stuff trimmed. that's the trouble with your generation, said Grandpa. Bill, I'm ashamed of you, you a newspaperman All the things in life that were put here to savor, you eliminate. Save time, save work, you say. He nudged the grass trays disrespectfully. Bill, whenyou're my age, you'll find out its the little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because its full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. Youve time to seek and find. I knowyoure after the broad effect now, and I suppose that's fit and proper. But for a young man working on a newspaper, you got to look for grapes as well as watermelons. You greatly admire skeletons and I like fingerprints; well and good. Right now such things are bothersome to you, and I wonder if it isn't because youve never learned to use them. If you had your way youd pass a law to abolish all the little jobs, the little things. But then youd leave yourselves nothing to do between the big jobs and youd have a devil of a time thinking up things to do so you wouldn't go crazy. Instead of that, why not let nature show you a few things? Cutting grass and pulling weeds can be a way of life, son. Bill Forrester was smiling quietly at him. I know, said Grandpa, I talk too much. Theres no one I'd rather hear. Lecture continued, then. Lilacs on a bush are better than orchids. And dandelions and devil grass are better! Why? Because they bend you over and turn you away from all the people and the town for a little while and sweat you and get you down where you remember you got a nose again. 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. |
| 1120 |
A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder. As Samuel Spaulding, Esquire, once said, dig in the earth, delve in the soul. Spin those mower blades, Bill, and walk in the spray of the Fountain of Youth. End of lecture. Besides, a mess of dandelion greens is good eating once in a while. How many years since you had dandelion greens for supper, sir? We won't go into that! Bill kicked one of the grass flats slightly and nodded. About this grass now. I didn't finish telling. It grows so close its guaranteed to kill off clover and dandelions Great God in heaven! That means no dandelion wine next year! That means no bees crossing our lot! you're out of your mind, son! Look here, how much did all this cost you? A dollar a flat. I bought ten flats as a surprise. Grandpa reached into his pocket, took out the old deep-mouthed purse, unclasped the silver clasp, and removed from it three five-dollar bills. Bill, youve just made a great profit of five dollars on this transaction. I want you to deliver this load of unromantic grass into the ravine, the garbage dumpanywherebut I ask you in a civil and humble voice not to plant it in my yard. Your motives are above reproach, but my motives, I feel, because I'm approaching my tenderest years, must be considered first. Yes, sir. Bill pocketed the bills reluctantly. Bill, you just plant this new grass some other year. The day after I die, Bill, you're free to tear up the whole damn lawn. Think you can wait another five years or so for an old orator to kick off? I know dam well I can wait, Bill said. Theres a thing about the lawn mower I cant even tell you, but to me its the most beautiful sound in the world, the freshest sound of the season, the sound of summer, and I'd miss it fearfully if it wasnt there, and I'd miss the smell Of cut grass. Bill bent to pick up a flat. Here I go to the ravine. you're a good, understanding young man, and will make a brilliant and sensitive reporter, said Grandfather, helping him. |
| 1121 |
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! 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? |
| 1122 |
The children, who had been screaming horribly at each other, fell silent, as if the Red Death had entered at the chiming of the clock. The Happiness Machine, husked Leo Auffmann, is ready. Lee Auffmann, said his wife, has lost fifteen pounds. He hasnt talked to his children in two weeks, they are nervous, they fight, listen! His wife is nervous, she's gained ten pounds, shell need new clothes, look! Surethe machine is ready. But happy? Who can say? Lee, leave off with the clockyou're building. you'll never find a cuckoo big enough to go in it! Man was not made to tamper with such things. Its not against God, no, but it sure looks like its against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and well bury him in his machine! But Leo Auffmann was too busy noticing that the room was falling swiftly up. How interesting, he thought, lying on the floor. Darkness closed in a great wink on him as someone screamed something about that Happiness Machine, three times. The first thing he noticed the next morning was dozens of birds fluttering around in the air stirring up ripples like colored stones thrown into an incredibly clear stream, gonging the tin roof of the garage softly. A pack of multibred dogs pawfooted one by one into the yard to peer and whine gently through the garage door; four boys, two girls, and some men hesitated in the driveway and then edged along under the cherry trees. Leo Auffmann, listening, knew what it was that had reached out and called them all into the yard. The sound of the Happiness Machine. It was the sort of sound that might be heard coming from a giants kitchen on a summer day. There were all kinds of hummings, low and high, steady and then changing. Incredible foods were being baked there by a host of whirring golden bees as big as teacups. The giantess herself, humming contentedly under her breath, might glide to the door, as vast as all summer, her face a huge peach-colored moon gazing calmly out upon smiling dogs, corn-haired boys and flour-haired old men. |
| 1123 |
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? 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. |
| 1124 |
Below, the garage doors stood open. He felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck. When Saul slept again, uneasily, whimpering, his father went downstairs and out to the garage where, not breathing, he put his hand out. In the cool night the Happiness Machines metal was too hot to touch. So, he thought, Saul was here tonight. Why? Was Saul unhappy, in need of the machine? No, happy, but wanting to hold onto happiness always. Could you blame a boy wise enough to know his position who tried to keep it that way? No! And yet... Above, quite suddenly, something white was exhaled from Sauls window. Leo Auffmanns heart thundered. Then he realized the window curtain had blown out into the open night. But it had seemed as intimate and shimmering a thing as a boys soul escaping his room. And Leo Auffmann had flung up his hands as if to thwart it, push it back into the sleeping house. Cold, shivering, he moved back into the house and up to Sauls room where he seized the blowing curtain in and locked the window tight so the pale thing could not escape again. Then he sat on the bed and put his hand on Sauls back. A Tale of Two Cities? Mine. The Old Curiosity Shop? Ha, that's Leo Auffmanns all right! Great Expectations? That used to be mine. But let Great Expectations be his, now! Whats this? asked Leo Auffmann, entering. This, said his wife, is sorting out the community property! When a father scares his son at night its time to chop everything in half! Out of the way, Mr. Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop. In all these books, no mad scientist lives like Leo Auffmann, none! you're leaving, and you haven't even tried the machine! he protested. Try it once, you'll unpack, you'll stay! Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilatorwhose is that? she asked. Must I guess? Snorting, she gave Tom Swift to Leo Auffmann. Very late in the day all the books, dishes, clothes, linens had been stacked one here, one there, four here, four there, ten here, ten there. Lena Auffmann, dizzy with counting, had to sit down. |
| 1125 |
All right, she gasped. Before I go, Lee, prove you don't give nightmares to innocent sons! Silently Leo Auffmann led his wife into the twilight. She stood before the eight-foot-tall, orange-colored box. that's happiness? she said. Which button do I press to be overjoyed, grateful, contented, and much-obliged? The children had gathered now. Mama, said Saul, don't! I got to know what I'm yelling about, Saul. She got in the machine, sat down, and looked out at her husband, shaking her head. Its not me needs this, its you, a nervous wreck, shouting. Please, he said, you'll see! He shut the door. Press the button! he shouted in at his unseen wife. There was a click. The machine shivered quietly, like a huge dog dreaming in its sleep. Papa! said Saul, worried. Listen! said Leo Auffmann. At first there was nothing but the tremor of the machines own secretly moving cogs and wheels. Is Mama all right? asked Naomi. All right, she's fine! There, now... there! And inside the machine Lena Auffmann could be heard saying, Oh! and then again, Ah! in a startled voice. Look at that! said his hidden wife. Paris! and later, London! There goes Rome! The Pyramids! The Sphinx! The Sphinx, you hear, children? Leo Auffmann whispered and laughed. Perfume! cried Lena Auffmann, surprised. Somewhere a phonograph played The Blue Danube faintly. Music! I'm dancing! Only thinks she's dancing the father confided to the world. Amazing! said the unseen woman. Leo Auffmann blushed. What an understanding wife. And then inside the Happiness Machine, Lena Auffmann began to weep. The inventors smile faded. she's crying said Naomi. She cant be! She is, said Saul. She simply cant be crying! Leo Auffmann, blinking, pressed his ear to the machine. But... yes... like a baby... He could only open the door. Wait. There his wife sat, tears rolling down her cheeks. Let me finish. She cried some more. Leo Auffmann turned off the machine, stunned. Oh, its the saddest thing in the world! she wailed. I feel awful, terrible. |
| 1126 |
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. Lee, the mistake you made is you forgot some hour, some day, we all got to climb out of that thing and go back to dirty dishes and the beds not made. Whileyou're in that thing, sure, a sunset lasts forever almost, the air smells good, the temperature is fine. All the things you want to last, last. But outside, the children wait on lunch, the clothes need buttons. And then lets be frank, Lee, how long can you look at a sunset? Who wants a sunset to last? Who wants perfect temperature? Who wants air smelling good always? So after awhile, who would notice? Better, for a minute or two, a sunset. After that, lets have something else. People are like that, Lee. How could you forget? Did I? Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away. But Lena, that's sad. No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness. So two things you did you should never have. You made quick things go slow and stay around. You brought things faraway to our backyard where they don't belong, where they just tell you, No, you'll never travel, Lena Auffmann, Paris you'll never see! Pome you'll never visit. But I always knew that, so why tell me? Better to forget and make do, Lee, make do, eh? Leo Auffmann leaned against the machine for support. |
| 1127 |
He snatched his burned hand away, surprised. So now what, Lena? he said. Its not for me to say. I know only so long as this thing is here I'll want to come out, or Saul will want to come out like he did last night, and against our judgment sit in it and look at all those places so far away and every time we will cry and be no fit family for you. I don't understand, he said, how I could be so wrong. Just let me check to see what you say is true. He sat down inside the machine. You won't go away? His wife nodded. Well wait, Lee. He shut the door. In the warm darkness he hesitated, pressed the button, and was just relaxing back in color and music, when he heard someone screaming. Fire, Papa! The machines on fire! Someone hammered the door. He leaped up, bumped his head, and fell as the door gave way and the boys dragged him out. Behind him he heard a muffled explosion. The entire family was running now. Leo Auffmann turned and gasped, Saul, call the fire department! Lena Auffmann caught Saul as he ran. Saul, she said. Wait. There was a gush of flame, another muffled explosion. When the machine was burning very well indeed, Lena Auffmann nodded. All right, Saul, she said. Run call the fire department. Everybody who was anybody came to the fire. There was Grandpa Spaulding and Douglas and Tom and most of the boarders and some of the old men from across the ravine and all the children from six blocks around. And Leo Auffmanns children stood out front, proud of how fine the flames looked jumping from the garage roof. Grandfather Spaulding studied the smoke ball in the sky and said, quietly, Lee, was that it? 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. 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. |
| 1128 |
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. 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. |
| 1129 |
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. 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. |
| 1130 |
Better yet, lock the men out of the house. Make them leave their shoes outside the door. Bang, bang! They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns. Tom, don't stand there. Strike, boy! Its fun, seeing things, said Tom. Douglas glanced up suspiciously. What do you see? The whole dam town, people, houses, heres our house! Bang! Our street! Bang! That black part theres the ravine! Bang! Theres school! Bang! This funny cartoon heres you, Doug! Bang! Heres Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom. Bang! How many years this rug been down? Fifteen. Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print, gasped Tom. Land, boy, you got a tongue, said Great-grandma. I see all the things happened in that house in all those years right here! Bang! All the past, sure, but I can see the future, too. Just squinch up my eyes and peek around at the patterns, there, to see where well be walking, running around, tomorrow. Douglas stopped swinging the beater. What else you see in the rug? Threads mostly, said Great-grandma. Not much left but the underskin. See how the manufacturer wove the thing. Right! said Tom mysteriously. Threads one way, threads another. I see it all. Dire fiends. Deadly sinners. Theres bad weather, theres good. Picnics. Banquets. Strawberry festivals. He tapped the beater from place to place portentously. that's some boardinghouse you got me running, said Grandma, glowing with exertion. Its all there, fuzzylike. Hold your head on one side, Doug, get one eye almost shut. Its better at night, of course, inside, the rug on the floor, lamplight and all. Then you get shadows all shapes, light and dark, and watch the threads running off, feel the nap, run your hand around on the fur. Smells just like a desert, I bet. All hot and sandy, like inside a mummy case, maybe. Look, that red spot, that's the Happiness Machine burning up! Catsup from somebodys sandwich, no doubt, said Mom. |
| 1131 |
No, Happiness Machine, said Douglas, and was sad to see it burning there. He had been counting on Leo Auffmann to keep things in order, keep everybody smiling, keep the small gyroscope he often felt inside himself tilting toward the sun every time the earth tilted toward outer space and darkness. But no, there was Auffmanns folly, ashes and cinders. Bang! Bang! Douglas struck. Look, theres the green electric runabout! Miss Fern! Miss Roberta! said Tom. Honk, Honk! Bang! They all laughed. Theres your life-strings, Doug, running along in knots. Too many sour apples. Pickles at bedtime! Which one, where? cried Douglas, peering. This one, one year from now, this one, two years from now, and this one, three, four, five years from now! Bang! The wire beater hissed like a snake in the blind sky. And one to grow on! said Tom. He hit the rug so hard all the dust of five thousand centuries jumped from the shocked texture, paused on the air a terrible moment, and even as Douglas stood, eyes squinted to see the warp, the woof, the shivering pattern, the Armenian avalanche of dust roared soundless upon, over, down and around, burying him forever before their eyes... How it began with the children, old Mrs. Bentley never knew. She often saw them, like moths and monkeys, at the grocers, among the cabbages and hung bananas, and she smiled at them and they smiled back. Mrs. Bentley watched them making footprints in winter snow, filling their lungs with autumn smoke, shaking down blizzards of spring apple-blossoms, but felt no fear of them. As for herself, her house was in extreme good order, everything set to its station, the floors briskly swept, the foods neatly tinned, the hatpins thrust through cushions, and the drawers of her bedroom bureaus crisply filled with the paraphernalia of years. Mrs. Bentley was a saver. She saved tickets, old theater programs, bits of lace, scarves, rail transfers; all the tags and tokens of existence. I've a stack of records, she often said. Heres Caruso. |
| 1132 |
That was in 1916, in New York; I was sixty and John was still alive. Heres Tune Moon, 1924, I think, right after John died. That was the huge regret of her life, in a way. The one thing she had most enjoyed touching and listening to and looking at she hadn't saved. John was far out in the meadow country, dated and boxed and hidden under grasses, and nothing remained of him but his high silk hat and his cane and his good suit in the closet. So much of the rest of him had been devoured by moths. But what she could keep she had kept. Her pink-flowered dresses crushed among moth balls in vast black trunks, and cut-glass dishes from her childhoodshe had brought them all when she moved to this town five years ago. Her husband had owned rental property in a number of towns, and, like a yellow ivory chess piece, she had moved and sold one after another, until now she was here in a strange town, left with only the trunks and furniture, dark and ugly, crouched about her like the creatures of a primordial zoo. The thing about the children happened in the middle of summer. Mrs. Bentley, coming out to water the ivy upon her front porch, saw two cool-colored sprawling girls and a small boy lying on her lawn, enjoying the immense prickling of the grass. At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wineglasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. Mrs. Bentley called, Would you like some? Here! The ice-cream wagon stopped and she exchanged money for pieces of the original Ice Age. The children thanked her with snow in their mouths, their eyes darting from her buttoned-up shoes to her white hair. don't you want a bite? said the boy. No, child. I'm old enough and cold enough; the hottest day won't thaw me, laughed Mrs. Bentley. They carried the miniature glaciers up and sat, three in a row, on the shady porch glider. |
| 1133 |
I'm Alice, she's Jane, and that's Tom Spaulding. How nice. And I'm Mrs. Bentley. They called me Helen. They stared at her. don't you believe they called me Helen? said the old lady. I didn't know old ladies had first names, said Tom, blinking. Mrs. Bentley laughed dryly. You never hear them used, he means, said Jane. My dear, when you are as old as I, they won't call you Jane, either. Old age is dreadfully formal. Its always Mrs. Young People don't like to call you Helen. It seems much too flip. How old are you? asked Alice. I remember the pterodactyl. Mrs. Bentley smiled. No, but how old? Seventy-two. They gave their cold sweets an extra long suck, deliberating. that's old, said Tom. I don't feel any different now than when I was your age, said the old lady. Our age? Yes. Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice. They did not speak. Whats the matter? Nothing. Jane got up. Oh, you don't have to go so soon, I hope. You haven't finished eating... Is something the matter? My mother says it isn't nice to fib, said Jane. Of course it isnt. Its very bad, agreed Mrs. Bentley. And not to listen to fibs. Who was fibbing to you, Jane? Jane looked at her and then glanced nervously away. You were. I? Mrs. Bentley laughed and put her withered claw to her small bosom. About what? About your age. About being a little girl. Mrs. Bentley stiffened. But I was, many years ago, a little girl just like you. Come on, Alice, Tom. Just a moment, said Mrs. Bentley. don't you believe me? I don't know, said Jane. No. But how ridiculous! Its perfectly obvious. Everyone was young once! Not you, whispered Jane, eyes down, almost to herself. 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. The two girls laughed. |
| 1134 |
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. 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. |
| 1135 |
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. 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! |
| 1136 |
Mrs. Bentley seized the girls wrist. You must take these things on faith. Someday you'll be as old as I. People will say the same. Oh no, they'll say, those vultures were never hummingbirds, those owls were never orioles, those parrots were never bluebirds! One day you'll be like me! No, we wont! said the girls. Will we? they asked one another. Wait and see! said Mrs. Bentley. And to herself she thought, Oh, God, children are children, old women are old women, and nothing in between They cant imagine a change they cant see. Your mother, she said to Jane. haven't you noticed, over the years, the change? No, said Jane. she's always the same. And that was true. You lived with people every day and they never altered a degree. It was only when people had been off on a long trip, for years, that they shocked you. And she felt like a woman who has been on a roaring black train for seventy-two years, landing at last upon the rail platform and everyone crying: Helen Bentley, is that you? I guess we better go home, said Jane. Thanks for the ring. It just fits me. Thanks for the comb. Its fine. Thanks for the picture of the little girl. Come backyou cant have those! Mrs. Bentley shouted as they raced down the steps. you're mine! don't! said Tom, following the girls. Give them back! No, she stole them! They belonged to some other little girl. She stole them. Thanks! cried Alice. So no matter how she called after them, the girls were gone, like moths through darkness. I'm sorry, said Tom, on the lawn, looking up at Mrs. Bentley. He went away. They took my ring and my comb and my picture, thought Mrs. Bentley, trembling there on the steps. Oh, I'm empty, empty; its part of my life. She lay awake for many hours into the night, among her trunks and trinkets. 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. |
| 1137 |
You were always in the present. She may have been a girl once, but was not now. Her childhood was gone and nothing could fetch it back. A night wind blew in the room. The white curtain fluttered against a dark cane, which had leaned against the wall near the other bric-a-brac for many years. The cane trembled and fell out into a patch of moonlight, with a soft thud. Its gold ferule glittered. It was her husbands opera cane. It seemed as if he were pointing it at her, as he often had, using his soft, sad, reasonable voice when they, upon rare occasions, disagreed. Those children are right, he would have said. They stole nothing from you, my dear. These things don't belong to you here, you now. They belonged to her, that other you, so long ago. Oh, thought Mrs. Bentley. And then, as though an ancient phonograph record had been set hissing under a steel needle, she remembered a conversation she had once had with Mr. BentleyMr. Bentley, so prim, a pink carnation in his whisk-broomed lapel, saying, My dear, you never will understand time, will you? you're always trying to be the things you were, instead of the person you are tonight. Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? they'll only hurt you later. Throw them away, my dear. But Mrs. Bentley had stubbornly kept them. It won't work, Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. Whenyou're nine, you think youve always been nine years old and will always be. Whenyou're thirty, it seems youve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. you're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. It had been one of the few, but gentle, disputes of their quiet marriage. He had never approved of her bric-a-brackery. Be what you are, bury what you are not, he had said. Ticket stubs are trickery. |
| 1138 |
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. 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. |
| 1139 |
At last they were good friends. How old are you, Mrs. Bentley? Seventy-two. How old were you fifty years ago? Seventy-two. You werent ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these? No. Have you got a first name? My name is Mrs. Bentley. And youve always lived in this one house? Always. And never were pretty? Never. Never in a million trillion years? The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four oclock on a summer afternoon. Never, said Mrs. Bentley, in a million trillion years. You got the nickel tablet ready, Doug? Sure. Doug licked his pencil good. What you got in there so far? All the ceremonies. July Fourth and all that, dandelion-wine making and junk like bringing out the porch swing, huh? Says here, I ate the first Eskimo Pie of the summer season Tune first, 1928. That wasnt summer, that was still spring. It was a first anyway, so I put it down. Bought those new tennis shoes June twenty-fifth. Went barefoot in the grass June twenty-sixth Busy, busy, busy, heck! Well, what you got to report this time, Tom? A new first, a fancy ceremony of some sort to do with vacation like creek-crab catching or water-strider-spider grabbing? Nobody ever grabbed a water-strider-spider in his life. You ever know anybody grabbed a water-strider-spider? Go ahead, think! I'm thinking. Well? you're right. Nobody ever did. Nobody ever will, I guess. you're just too fast. Its not thatyou're fast. They just don't exist, said Tom. He thought about it and nodded. that's right, they just never did exist at all. Well, what I got to report is this. He leaned over and whispered in his brothers ear. Douglas wrote it. They both looked at it. I'll be darned! 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. |
| 1140 |
Now, Charlie, what you handing me? A Time Machine! panted Charlie Woodman, pacing him. Mothers, scouts, Injuns honor! Travels in the past and future? John Huff asked, easily circling them. Only in the past, but you cant have everything. Here we are. Charlie Woodman pulled up at a hedge. Douglas peered in at the old house. Heck, that's Colonel Freeleighs place. Cant be no Time Machine in there. he's no inventor, and if he was, wed known about an important thing like a Time Machine years ago. Charlie and John tiptoed up the front-porch steps. Douglas snorted and shook his head, staying at the bottom of: the steps. Okay, Douglas, said Charlie. Be a knucklehead. Sure, Colonel Freeleigh didn't invent this Time Machine. But he's got a proprietary interest in it, and its been here all the time. We were too darned dumb to notice! So long, Douglas Spaulding, to you! Charlie took Johns elbow as though he was escorting a lady, opened the front-porch screen and went in. The screen door did not slam. Douglas had caught the screen and was following silently. Charlie walked across the enclosed porch, knocked, and opened the inside door. They all peered down a long dark hall toward a room that was lit like an undersea grotto, soft green, dim, and watery. Colonel Freeleigh? Silence. He don't hear so good, whispered Charlie. But he told me to just come on in and yell. Colonel! The only answer was the dust sifting down and around the spiral stairwell from above. Then there was a faint stir in that undersea chamber at the far end of the hall. They moved carefully along and peered into room which contained but two pieces of furniture-an old man and a chair. They resembled each other, both so thin you could see just how they had been put together, ball and socket, sinew and joint. The rest of the room was raw floor boards, naked walls and ceiling, and vast quantities of silent air. He looks dead, whispered Douglas. No, he's just thinking up new places to travel to, said Charlie, very proud and quiet. |
| 1141 |
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. 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... |
| 1142 |
I'll always remember... his face a mask of red, the curtain coming down fast and the women weeping...1910... Boston... Variety Theatre... poor man... Colonel Freeleigh slowly opened his eyes. Boy, Colonel, said Charlie, that was fine. Now how about Pawnee Bill? Pawnee Bill...? And the time you was on the prairie way back in 75. Pawnee Bill... The colonel moved into darkness. Eighteen seventy-five... yes, me and Pawnee Bill on a little rise in the middle of the prairie, waiting. Shh! says Pawnee Bill. Listen. The prairie like a big stage all set for the storm to come. Thunder. Soft. Thunder again. Not so soft. And across that prairie as far as the eye could see this big ominous yellow-dark cloud full of black lightning, somehow sunk to earth, fifty miles wide, fifty miles long, a mile high, and no more than an inch off the ground. Lord! I cried, Lord! from up on my hilllord! the earth pounded like a mad heart, boys, a heart gone to panic. My bones shook fit to break. The earth shook: rat-a-tat rat-a-tat, boom! Rumble. that's a rare word: rumble. Oh, how that mighty storm rumbled along down, up, and over the rises, and all you could see was the cloud and nothing inside. that's them! cried Pawnee Bill. And the cloud was dust! Not vapors or rain, no, but prairie dust flung up from the tinder-dry grass like fine corn meal, like pollen all blazed with sunlight now, for the sun had come out. I shouted again! Why? Because in all that hell-fire filtering dust now a veil moved aside and I saw them, I swear it! The grand army of the ancient prairie: the bison, the buffalo! The colonel let the silence build, then broke it again. Heads like giant Negroes fists, bodies like locomotives! Twenty, fifty, two hundred thousand iron missiles shot out of the west, gone off the track and flailing cinders, their eyes like blazing coals, rumbling toward oblivion! I saw that the dust rose up and for a little while showed me that sea of humps, of dolloping manes, black shaggy waves rising, falling... |
| 1143 |
Shoot! says Pawnee Bill. Shoot! And I cock and aim. Shoot he says. And I stand there feeling like Gods right hand, looking at the great vision of strength and violence going by, going by, midnight at noon, like a glinty funeral train all black and long and sad and forever and you don't fire at a funeral train, now do you, boys? do you? All I wanted then was for the dust to sink again and cover the black shapes of doom which pummeled and jostled on in great burdensome commotions. And, boys, the dust came down. The cloud hid the million feet that were drumming up the thunder and dusting out the storm. I heard Pawnee Bill curse and hit my arm. But I was glad I hadn't touched that cloud or the power within that cloud with so much as a pellet of lead. I just wanted to stand watching time bundle by in great trundlings all hid by the storm the bison made and carried with them toward eternity. An hour, three hours, six, it took for the storm to pass on away over the horizon toward less kind men than me. Pawnee Bill was gone, I stood alone, stone deaf. I walked all numb through a town a hundred miles south and heard not the voices of men and was satisfied not to hear. For a little while I wanted to remember the thunder. I hear it still, on summer afternoons like this when the rain shapes over the lake; a fearsome, wondrous sound... one I wish you might have heard... The dim light filtered through Colonel Freeleighs nose which was large and like white porcelain which cupped a very thin and tepid orange tea indeed. Is he asleep? asked Douglas at last. No, said Charlie. Just recharging his batteries. Colonel Freeleigh breathed swiftly, softly, as if hed run a long way. At last he opened his eyes. Yes, sir said Charlie, in admiration. Hello Charlie. The colonel smiled at the boys puzzledly. that's Doug and that's John, said Charlie. How-de-do, boys. The boys said hello. But said Douglas. Where is the? My gosh, you're dumb! Charlie jabbed Douglas in the arm. He turned to the colonel. |
| 1144 |
Remember, remember... AU quiet along the Potomac tonight; no sound save the rush of the river; while soft falls the dew on the face of the deadthe pickets off duty forever!... After the surrender, Mr. Lincoln, on the White House balcony asked the band to play, Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land... And then there was the Boston lady who one night wrote a song will last a thousand years: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. Late nights I feel my mouth move singing back in another time. Ye Cavaliers of Dixie! Who guard the Southern shores... When the boys come home in triumph, brother, with the laurels they shall gain... So many songs, sung on both sides, blowing north, blowing south on the night winds. We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more... Tenting tonight, tenting tonight, tenting on the old camp ground. Hurrah, hurrah, we bring the Jubilee, hurrah, hurrah, the flag that makes us free... The old mans voice faded. The boys sat for a long while without moving. Then Charlie turned and looked at Douglas and said, Well, is he or isn't he? Douglas breathed twice and said, He sure is. The colonel opened his eyes. I sure am what? he asked. A Time Machine, murmured Douglas. A Time Machine. The colonel looked at the boys for a full five seconds. Now it was his voice that was full of awe. Is that what you boys call me? Yes, sir, Colonel. Yes, sir. The colonel sat slowly back in his chair and looked at the boys and looked at his hands and then looked at the blank wall beyond them steadily. 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. |
| 1145 |
I thought about what you said, boys! Yes, sir? And-youre right! Why didn't I think of it before! A Time Machine, by God, a Time Machine! Yes, sir. So long, boys. Come aboard any time! At the end of the street they turned again and the colonel was still waving. They waved back, feeling warm and good, then went on. Chug-a-chug, said John. I can travel twelve years into the past. Wham-chug-ding! Yeah, said Charlie, looking back at that quiet house, but you cant go a hundred years. No, mused John, I cant go a hundred years. that's really traveling. that's really some machine. They walked for a full minute in silence, looking at their feet. They came to a fence. Last one over this fence, said Douglas, is a girl. All the way home they called Douglas Dora. Long after midnight Tom woke to find Douglas scribbling rapidly in the nickel tablet, by flashlight. Doug, whats up? Up? Everythings up! I'm counting my blessings, Tom! Look here; the Happiness Machine didn't work out, did it?. But, who cares! I got the whole year lined up, anyway. Need r to run anywhere on the main streets, I got the Green Town Trolley to look around and spy on the world from. Need to run anywhere off the main streets, I knock on Miss Fern and I Miss Robertas door and they charge up the batteries on their electric runabout and we go sailing down the sidewalks. Need to run down alleys and over fences, to see that part of Green Town you only see around back and behind and creep up on, and I got my brand-new sneakers. Sneakers, runabout, I trolley! I'm set! But even better, Tom, even better, listen! If I want to go where no one else can go becauseyou're not: smart enough to even think of it, if I want to charge back to 1890 and then transfer to 1875 and transfer again crosstown to 1860 I just hop on the old Colonel Freeleigh Express! I'm writing it down here this way: Maybe old people were never children, like we claim with Mrs. Bentley, but, big or little, some of them were standing around at Appomattox the summer of 1865. |
| 1146 |
They got Indian vision and can sight back further than you and me will ever sight ahead. That sounds swell, Doug; what does it mean? Douglas went on writing. It means you and me aint got half the chance to be far-travelers they have. If were lucky well hit forty, forty-five, fifty, that's just a jog around the block to them. Its when you hit ninety, ninety-five, a hundred, thatyou're far-traveling like heck. The flashlight went out. They lay there in the moonlight. Tom, whispered Douglas. I got to travel all those ways. See what I can see. But most of all I got to visit Colonel Freeleigh once, twice, three times a week. 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. 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... |
| 1147 |
Shh! Listen. Someone knocked on the front door downstairs. After a time the knocking stopped. They saw a woman cross the yard and enter the house next door. Only Lavinia Nebbs, come with an empty cup, to borrow sugar, I guess. Hold me, I'm afraid. They shut their eyes. The memory-play began again. An old straw hat on an iron trunk was suddenly flourished, it seemed, by the man from Gumport Falls. 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. No license needed. On hot daystake the breeze. Ah... He glided by the porch, head back, eyes closed deliciously, hair tousling in the wind thus cleanly sliced through. |
| 1148 |
It happened quickly. Rolling soft onto the sidewalk at noon, because the streets were blistering and fiery, and the only shade was under the lawn trees, they had glided to a blind comer, bulbing their throaty horn. Suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box, Mister Quartermain had tottered from nowhere! Look out! screamed Miss Fern. Look out! screamed Miss Roberta. Look out! cried Mister Quartermain. The two women grabbed each other instead of the steering stick. There was a terrible thud. The Green Machine sailed on in the hot daylight, under the shady chestnut trees, past the ripening apple trees. Looking back only once, the two old ladies eyes filled with faded horror. The old man lay on the sidewalk, silent. And here we are, mourned Miss Fern in the darkening attic. Oh, why didn't we stop! Why did we run away? Shh! They both listened. The rapping downstairs came again. When it stopped they saw a boy cross the lawn in the dim light. Just Douglas Spaulding come for a ride again. They both sighed. The hours passed; the sun was going down. Weve been up here all afternoon, said Roberta tiredly. We cant stay in the attic three weeks hiding till everybody forgets. Wed starve. Whatll we do, then? Do you think anyone saw and followed us? They looked at each other. No. Nobody saw. The town was silent, all the tiny houses putting on lights. There was a smell of watered grass and cooking suppers from below. Time to put on the meat, said Miss Fern. Frankll be coming home in ten minutes. Do we dare go down? 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. |
| 1149 |
We won't tell him. won't we? They helped each other down the creaking stairs to the second floor, stopping to listen... In the kitchen they peered at the pantry, peeked out windows with frightened eyes, and finally set to work frying hamburger on the stove. After five minutes of working silence Fern looked sadly over at Roberta and said, I've been thinking. Were old and feeble and don't like to admit it. Were dangerous. We owe a debt to society for running off And? A kind of silence fell on the frying in the kitchen as the two sisters faced each other, nothing in their hands. I think thatFern stared at the wall for a long time-we shouldn't drive the Green Machine ever again. Roberta picked up a plate and held it in her thin hand. Not-ever? she said. No. But, said Roberta, we don't have toto get rid of it, do we? We can keep it, cant we? Fern considered this. Yes, I guess we can keep it. At least thatll be something. I'll go out now and disconnect the batteries. Roberta was leaving just as Frank, their younger brother, only fifty-six years, entered. Hi, sisters! he cried. Roberta brushed past him without a word and walked out into the summer dusk. Frank was carrying a newspaper which Fern immediately snatched from him. Trembling, she looked it through and through, and sighing, gave it back to him. Saw Doug Spaulding outside just now. Said he had a message for you. Said for you not to worryhe saw everything and everythings all right. What did he mean by that? I'm sure I wouldn't know. Fem turned her back and searched for her handkerchief. Oh well, these kids. Frank looked at his sisters back for a long moment, then shrugged. Supper almost ready? he asked pleasantly. Yes. Fern set the kitchen table. There was a bulbing cry from outside. Once, twice, three timesfar away. Whats that? Frank peered through the kitchen window into the dusk. Whats Roberta up to? Look at her out there, sitting in the Green Machine, poking the rubber horn! Once, twice more, in the dusk, softly, like some kind of mournful animal, the bulbing sound was pinched out. |
| 1150 |
Whats got into her? demanded Frank. You just leave her alone! screamed Fern. Frank looked surprised. A moment later Roberta entered quietly, without looking at anyone, and they all sat down to supper. The first light on the roof outside; very early morning. The leaves on all the trees tremble with a soft awakening to any breeze the dawn may offer. And then, far off, around a curve of silver track, comes the trolley, balanced on four small steel-blue wheels, and it is painted the color of tangerines. Epaulets of shimmery brass cover it and pipings of gold; and its chrome bell bings if the ancient motorman taps it with a wrinkled shoe. The numerals on the trolleys front 1, and sides are bright as lemons. Within, its seats prickle with; cool green moss. Something like a buggy whip flings up from its roof to brush the spider thread high in the passing trees from which it takes its juice. From every window blows an incense, the all-pervasive blue and secret smell of summer storms and lightning. Down the long elm-shadowed streets the trolley moves along, the motormans gray-gloved hand touched gently, timelessly, to the levered controls. At noon the motorman stopped Is car in the middle of the block and leaned out. Hey! And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped: from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr. Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he moved the trolley on down the shady block, calling. 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. |
| 1151 |
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 aint 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. Now! The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked. Why, just the smell of a trolley, that's different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny. Trolleys are too slow, said Mr. Tridden. Going to put busses on. Fusses for people and busses for school. The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust. |
| 1152 |
They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Triddens voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into, flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind. A loon flew over the sky, crying. Somebody shivered. Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. Well, time to go. Parentsll think I stole you all for good. The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands. Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Triddens foot and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. |
| 1153 |
Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets. Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Triddens gloves on the brass controls. Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling. Well... so long again, Mr. Tridden. Good-by, boys. See you around, Mr. Tridden. See you around. There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. 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. 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... |
| 1154 |
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. It was a day as perfect as the flame of a candle. Douglas walked through it thinking it would go on this way forever. The perfection, the roundness, the grass smell traveled on out ahead as far and fast as the speed of light. The sound of a good friend whistling like an oriole, pegging the softball, as you horse-danced, key-jingled the dusty paths, all of it was complete, everything could be touched; things stayed near, things were at hand and would remain. It was such a fine day and then suddenly a cloud crossed the sky, covered the sun, and did not move again. John Huff had been speaking quietly for several minutes. Now Douglas stopped on the path and looked over at him. John, say that again. You heard me the first time, Doug. Did you say you weregoing away? |
| 1155 |
Got my train ticket here in my pocket. Whoo-whoo, clang! Shush-shush-shush-shush. Whooooooooo... His voice faded. John took the yellow and green train ticket solemnly from his pocket and they both looked at it. Tonight! said Douglas. My gosh! Tonight we were going to play Red Light, Green Light and Statues! How come, all of a sudden? You been here in Green Town all my life. You just don't pick up and leave! Its my father, said John. he's got a job in Milwaukee. We werent sure until today... My gosh, here it is with the Baptist picnic next week and the big carnival Labor Day and Halloweencant your dad wait till then? John shook his head. Good grief! said Douglas. Let me sit down! They sat under an old oak tree on the side of the hill looking back at town, and the sun made large trembling shadows around them; it was cool as a cave in under the tree. Out beyond, in sunlight, the town was painted with heat, the windows all gaping. Douglas wanted to run back in there where the town, by its very weight, its houses, their bulk, might enclose and prevent Johns ever getting up and running off. But were friends, Douglas said helplessly. We always will be, said John. you'll come back to visit every week or so, won't you? Dad says only once or twice a year. Its eighty miles. Eighty miles aint far! shouted Douglas. No, its not far at all, said John. My grandmas got a phone. I'll call you. Or maybe well all visit up your way, too. Thatd be great! John said nothing for a long while. Well, said Douglas, lets talk about something. What? My gosh, ifyou're going away, we got a million things to talk about! All the things we wouldve talked about next: month, the month after! Praying mantises, zeppelins, acrobats, sword swallowers! Go on like you was back there, grasshoppers spitting tobacco! Funny thing is It don't feel like talking about grasshoppers. You always did! Sure. John looked steadily at the town. But It guess this just aint the time. John, whats wrong? You look funny... John had closed his eyes and screwed up his face. |
| 1156 |
Doug, the Terle house, upstairs, you know? Sure. The colored windowpanes on the little round windows, have they always been there? Sure. You positive? Darned old windows been there since before we were born. Why? I never saw them before today, said John. On the way walking through town I looked up and there they were. Doug, what was I doing all these years I didn't see them? You had other things to do. Did I? John turned and looked in a kind of panic at Douglas. Gosh, Doug, why should those dam windows scare me? I mean, that's nothing to be scared of, is it? Its just... He floundered. Its just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss? And what about all the things I did see here in town? Will I be able to remember them when I go away? Anything you want to remember, you remember. T went to camp two summers ago. Up there I remembered. No, you didn't! You told me. you woke nights and couldn't remember your mothers face. No! Some nights it happens to me in my own house; scares heck out of me. I got to go in my folks room and look at their faces while they sleep, to be sure! And I go back to my room and lose it again. Gosh, Doug, oh gosh! He held onto his knees tight. Promise me just one thing, Doug. Promise you'll remember me, promise you'll remember my face and everything. Will you promise? Easy as pie. Cot a motion-picture machine in my head. Lying in bed nights I can just turn on a light in my head and out it comes on the wall, clear as heck, and there you'll be, yelling and waving at me. Shut your eyes, Doug. Now, tell me, what color eyes I got? don't peek. What color eyes I got? Douglas began to sweat. His eyelids twitched nervously. Aw heck, John, that's not fair. Tell me! Brown! John turned away. No, sir. What do you mean, no? you're not even close! John closed his eyes. Turn around here, said Douglas. Open up, let me see. Its no use, said John. You forgot already. Just the way I said. Turn around here! Douglas grabbed him by the hair and turned him slowly. |
| 1157 |
Okay, Doug. John opened his eyes. Green. Douglas, dismayed, let his hand drop. Your eyes are green... Well, that's close to brown. Almost hazel! Doug, don't lie to me. All right, said Doug quietly. I wont. They sat there listening to the other boys running up the hill, shrieking and yelling at them. They raced along the railroad tracks, opened their lunch in brown-paper sacks, and sniffed deeply of the wax-wrapped deviled-ham sandwiches and green-sea pickles and colored peppermints. They ran and ran again and Douglas bent to scorch his ear on the hot steel rails, hearing trains so far away they were unseen voyagings in other lands, sending Morse-code messages to him here under the killing sun. Douglas stood up, stunned. John! For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you werent looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching! John! There was no way to get him to help now, save by a trick. John, ditch, ditch the others! Yelling, Douglas and John sprinted off, kiting the wind downhill, letting gravity work for them, over meadows, around barns until at last the sound of the pursuers faded. John and Douglas climbed into a haystack which was like a great bonfire crisping under them. Lets not do anything, said John. Just what I was going to say, said Douglas. They sat quietly, getting their breath. There was a small sound like an insect in the hay. 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. |
| 1158 |
He set the hands back. Now they had all the time they would ever need to look long and close at the world, feel the sun move like a fiery wind over the sky. But at last John must have felt the bodiless weight of their shadows shift and lean, and he spoke. Doug, what time is it? Two-thirty. John looked at the sky. don't! thought Douglas. Looks more like three-thirty, four, said John. Boy Scout. You learn them things. Douglas sighed and slowly turned the watch ahead. John watched him do this, silently. Douglas looked up. John punched him, not hard at all, in the arm. With a swift stroke a plunge, a train came and went so quickly the boys all leaped aside, yelling, shaking their fists after it, Douglas and John with them. The train roared down the track, two hundred people in it, gone. The dust followed it a little way toward the south, then settled in the golden silence among the blue rails. The boys were walking home. I'm going to Cincinnati when I'm seventeen and be a railroad fireman, said Charlie Woodman. I got an uncle in New York, said Jim. I'll go there and be a printer. Doug did not ask the others. Already the trains were chanting and he saw their faces drifting off on back observation platforms, or pressed to windows. One by one they slid away. And then the empty track and the summer sky and himself on another train run in another direction. Douglas felt the earth move under his feet and saw their shadows move off the grass and color the air. He swallowed hard, then gave a screaming yell, pulled back his fist, shot the indoor ball whistling in the sky. Last one homes a rhinos behind! They pounded down the tracks, laughing, flailing the air. There went John Huff, not touching the ground at all. And here came Douglas, touching it all the time. It was seven oclock, supper over, and the boys gathering one by one from the sound of their house doors slammed and their parents crying to them not to slam the doors. Douglas and Tom and Charlie and John stood among half a dozen others and it was time for hide-and-seek and Statues. |
| 1159 |
Just one game, said John. Then I got to go home. The train leaves at nine. Whos going to be it? Me, said Douglas. That the first time I ever heard of anybody volunteering to be it, said Tom. Douglas looked at John for a long moment. Start running, he cried. The boys scattered, yelling. John backed away, then turned and began to lope. Douglas counted slowly. He let them run far, spread out, separate each to his own small world. When they had got their momentum up and were almost out of sight he took a deep breath. Statues! Everyone froze. Very quietly Douglas moved across the lawn to where John Huff stood like an iron deer in the twilight. Far away, the other boys stood hands up, faces grimaced, eyes bright as stuffed squirrels. But here was John, alone and motionless and no one rushing or making a great outcry to spoil this moment. Douglas walked around the statue one way, walked around the statue the other way. The statue did not move. It did not speak. It looked at the horizon, its mouth half smiling. It was like that time years ago in Chicago when they had visited a big place where the carved marble figures were, and his walking around them in the silence. So here was John Huff with grass stains on his knees and the seat of his. pants, and cuts on his fingers and scabs on his elbows. Here was John Huff with the quiet tennis shoes, his feet sheathed in silence. There was the mouth that had chewed many an: apricot pie come summer, and said many a quiet thing or: two about life and the lay of the land. And there were the eyes, not blind like statues eyes, but filled with molten green- gold. And there the dark hair blowing now north now south or any direction in the little breeze there was. And there the % hands with all the town on them, dirt from roads and bark-slivers from trees, the fingers that smelled of hemp and vine and green apple, old coins or pickle-green frogs. There were the ears with the sunlight shining through them like bright warm peach wax and here, invisible, his spearmint-breath upon the air. |
| 1160 |
John, now, said Douglas, don't you move so much as an eyelash. I absolutely command you to stay here and not move at all for the next three hours! Doug... Johns lips moved. Freeze! said Douglas. John went back to looking at the sky, but he was not smiling now. I got to go, he whispered. Not a muscle, its the game! I just got to get home now, said John. Now the statue moved, took its hands down out of the air and turned its head to look at Douglas. They stood looking at each other. The other kids were putting their arms down, too. Well play one more round, said John, except this time, I'm it. Run! The boys ran. Freeze! The boys froze, Douglas with them. Not a muscle! shouted John. Not a hair! He came and stood by Douglas. Boy, this is the only way to do it, he said. Douglas looked off at the twilight sky. Frozen statues, every single one of you, the next three minutes! said John. Douglas felt John walking around him even as he had walked around John a moment ago. He felt John sock him on the arm once, not too hard. So long, he said. Then there was a rushing sound and he knew without looking that there was nobody behind him now. Far away, a train whistle sounded. Douglas stood that way for a full minute, waiting for the sound of the running to fade, but it did not stop. he's still running away, but he doesn't sound any further off, thought Douglas. Why doesn't he stop running? And then he realized it was only the sound of his heart in his body. Stop! He jerked his hand to his chest. Stop running! I don't like that sound! And then he felt himself walking across the lawns among all the other statues now, and whether they, too, were coming to life he did not know. 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 . |
| 1161 |
other, a sunset volley, along the street. Statues are best, he thought. you're the only things you can keep on your lawn. don't ever let them move. Once you do, you cant do a thing with them. Suddenly his fist shot out like a piston from his side and it shook itself hard at the lawns and the street and the gathering dusk. His face was choked with blood, his eyes were blazing. John! he cried. You, John! John, you're my enemy, you hear? you're no friend of mine! don't come back now, ever! Get away, you! Enemy, you hear? that's what you are! Its all off between us, you're dirt, that's all, dirt! John, you hear me, John! As if a wick had been turned a little lower in a great clear lamp beyond the town, the sky darkened still more. He stood on the porch, his mouth gasping and working. His fist still thrust straight out at that house across the street and down the way. He looked at the fist and it dissolved, the world dissolved beyond it. Going upstairs, in the dark, where he could only feel his face but see nothing of himself, not even his fists, he told himself over and over, I'm mad, I'm angry, I hate him, I'm mad, I'm angry, I hate him! Ten minutes later, slowly he reached the top of the stairs, in the dark... Tom, said Douglas, just promise me one thing, okay? Its a promise. What? You may be my brother and maybe I hate you sometimes, but stick around, all right? You mean you'll let me follow you and the older guys when you go on hikes? Well... sure... even that. What I mean is, don't go away, huh? don't let any cars run over you or fall off a cliff. I should say not! Whatta you think I am, anyway? Cause if worst comes to worst, and both of us are real oldsay forty or forty-five some daywe can own a gold mine out West and sit there smoking corn silk and growing beards. Growing beards! Boy! Like I say, you stick around and don't let nothing happen. You can depend on me, said Tom. Its not you I worry about, said Douglas. Its the way God runs the world. Tom thought about this for a moment. |
| 1162 |
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. 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. |
| 1163 |
Brown flicked the bell button with her iodined finger. Far away in the cool dim empty rooms of the big old house, a silver bell tinkled and faded. Tom listened. Still farther away there was a stir of mouselike running. A shadow, perhaps a blowing curtain, moved in a distant parlor. Hello, said a quiet voice. And quite suddenly Mrs. Goodwater was there, fresh as a stick of peppermint, behind the screen. Why, hello there, Tom, Elmira. What don't rush me! We came over about your practicing to be a full-fledged witch! Mrs. Goodwater smiled. Your husbands not only a mailman, but a guardian of the law. Got a nose out to here! He didn't look at no mail. he's ten minutes between houses laughing at post cards. and tryin on mail-order shoes. It aint what he seen; its what you yourself told him about the books you got. Just a joke. Goin to be a witch! I said, and bang! Off gallops Sam, like I'd flung Lightning at him. I declare there cant be one wrinkle in that mans brain. You talked about your magic other places yesterday You must mean the Sandwich Club... To which I pointedly was not invited. Why, lady, we thought that was your regular day with your grandma. I can always have another Grandma day, if peopled only ask me places. All there was to it at the Sandwich Club was me sitting there with a ham and pickle sandwich, and I said right out loud, At last I'm going to get my witchs diploma. Been studying for years! that's what come back to me over the phone! Aint modern inventions wonderful! said Mrs. Goodwater. Considering you been president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge since the Civil War, it seems, I'll put it to you bang on the nose, have you used witchcraft all these years to spell the ladies and win the ayes-have-it? Do you doubt it for a moment, lady? said Mrs. Goodwater. Elections tomorrow again, and all I want to know is, you runnin for another termand aint you ashamed? Yes to the first question and no to the second. Lady, look here, I bought those books for my boy cousin, Raoul. |
| 1164 |
he's just ten and goes around looking in hats for rabbits. I told him theres about as much chance finding rabbits in hats as brains in heads of certain people I could name, but look he does and so I got these gifts for him. wouldn't believe you on a stack of Bibles. Gods truth, anyway. I love to fun about the witch thing. The ladies all yodeled when I explained about my dark powers. Wish youd been there. I'll be there tomorrow to fight you with a cross of gold and all the powers of good I can organize behind me, said Elmira. Right now, tell me how much other magic junk you got in your house. Mrs. Goodwater pointed to a side table inside the door. I been buyin all kinds of magic herbs. Smell funny and make Raoul happy. That little sack of stuff, that's called This is rue, and this is Sabisse root and that theres Ebon herbs; heres black sulphur, and this they claim is bone dust. Bone dust Elmira skipped back and kicked Toms ankle. Tom yelped. And heres wormwood and fern leaves so you can freeze shotguns and fly like a bat in your dreams, it says in Chapter X of the little book here. I think its fine for growing boys heads to think about things like this. Now, from the look on your face you don't believe Raoul exists. Well, I'll give you his Springfield address. Yes, said Elmira, and the day I write him you'll take the Springfield bus and go to General Delivery and get my letter and write back to me in a boys hand. I know you! Mrs. Brown, speak upyou want to be president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, right? You run every year now for ten years. You nominate yourself. And always wind up gettin one vote. Yours. Elmira, if the ladies wanted you theyd landslide you in. But from where I stand looking up the mountain, aint so much as one pebble come rattlin down save yours. Tell you what, I'll nominate and vote for you myself come noon tomorrow, hows that? Damned for sure, then, said Elmira. Last year I got a deathly cold right at election time; couldn't get out and campaign back-fence-to-back-fence. |
| 1165 |
Year before that, broke my leg. Mighty strange. She squinted darkly at the lady behind the screen. that's not all. Last month I cut my finger six times, bruised my knee ten times, fell off my back porch twice, you hear-twice! I broke a window, dropped four dishes, one vase worth a dollar forty-nine at Bixbys, and I'm billin you for every dropped dish from now on in my house and environs! I'll be poor by Christmas, said Mrs. Goodwater. She opened the screen door and came out suddenly and let the door slam. Elmira Brown, how old are you? You probably got it written in one of your black books. Thirty-five! Well, when I think of thirty-five years of your life... Mrs. Goodwater pursed her lips and blinked her eyes, counting. that's about twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy-five days, or counting three of them per day, twelve thousand-odd commotions, twelve thousand much-ados and twelve thousand calamaties. Its a full rich life you lead, Elmira Brown. Shake hands! Get away! Elmira fended her off. Why, lady, you're only the second most clumsy woman in Green Town, Illinois. You cant sit down without playing the chair like an accordion. You cant stand up but what you kick the cat. You cant trot across an open meadow without falling into a well. Your life has been one long decline, Elmira Alice Brown, so why not admit it? It wasnt clumsiness that caused my calamities, but you being within a mile of me at those times when I dropped a pot of beans or juiced my finger in the electric socket at home. Lady, in a town this size, everybodys within a mile of someone at one time or other in the day. You admit being around then? I admit being born here, yes, but I'd give anything right now to have been born in Kenosha or Zion. Elmira, go to your dentist and see what he can do about that serpents tongue in there. Oh! said Elmira. Oh, oh, oh! Youve pushed me too far. I wasnt interested in witchcraft, but I think I'll just look into this business. Listen here! you're invisible right now. |
| 1166 |
Tomorrow! she cried. Till then, lady! said Mrs. Goodwater. Tom followed Elmira, shrugging and kicking ants off the sidewalk as he went. Running across a driveway, Elmira screamed. Mrs. Brown! cried Tom. A car backing out of a garage ran right over Elmiras right big toe. Mrs. Elmira Browns foot hurt her in the middle of the night, so she got up and went down to the kitchen and ate some cold chicken and made a neat, painfully accurate list of things. First, illnesses in the past year. Three colds, four mild attacks of indigestion, one seizure of bloat, arthritis, lumbago, what she imagined to be gout, a severe bronchial cough, incipient asthma, and spots on her arms, plus an abscessed semicircular canal which made her reel like a drunken moth some days, backache, head pains, and nausea. 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. |
| 1167 |
Good Lord, whats that? asked her husband. Looks like a milk shake been left out in the sun for forty years. Got kind of a fungus on it. Fight magic with magic. You going to drink that? Just before I go up into the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge for the big doings. Samuel Brown sniffed the concoction. Take my advice. Get up those steps first, then drink it. Whats in it? Snow from angels wings, well, really menthol, to cool hells fires that burn you, it says in this book I got at the library. The juice of a fresh grape off the vine, for thinking clear sweet thoughts in the face of dark visions, it says. Also red rhubarb, cream of tartar, white sugar, white of eggs, spring water and clover buds with the strength of the good earth in them. Oh, I could go on all day. Its here in the list, good against bad, white against black. I cant lose! Oh, you'll win, all right, said her husband. But will you know it? Think good thoughts. I'm on my way to get Tom for my charm. Poor boy, said her husband. Innocent, like you say, and about to be tom limb from limb, bargain-basement day at the Honeysuckle Lodge. Tomll survive, said Elmira, and, taking the bubbling concoction with her, hid inside a Quaker Oats box with the lid on, went out the door without catching her dress or snagging her new ninety-eight-cent stockings. Realizing this, she was smug all the way to Toms house where he waited for her in his white summer suit as she had instructed. Phew! said Tom. What you got in that box? Destiny, said Elmira. I sure hope so, said Tom, walking about two paces ahead of her. The Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge was full of ladies looking in each others mirrors and tugging at their skirts and asking to be sure their slips werent showing. At one oclock Mrs. Elmira Brown came up the steps with a boy in white clothes. 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. |
| 1168 |
She moved inside the hall and with her moved a rustling as of taffeta, all the ladies whispering in a tide after her. She sat down in back with Tom, and Tom looked more, miserable than ever. The one eye he had open looked at the crowd of ladies and shut up for good. Sitting there, Elmira got the potion out and drank it slowly down. At one-thirty, the president, Mrs. Goodwater, banged the gavel and all but two dozen of the ladies quit talking. Ladies, she called out over the summer sea of silks and laces, capped here and there with white or gray, its election time. But before we start, I believe Mrs. Elmira Brown, wife of our eminent graphologist A titter ran through the room. Whats graphologist? Elmira elbowed Tom twice. I don't know, whispered Tom fiercely, eyes shut, feeling that elbow come out of darkness at him. wife, as I say, of our eminent handwriting expert, Samuel Brown...(more laughter)... of the U. S. Postal Service, continued Mrs. Goodwater. Mrs. Brown wants to give us some opinions. Mrs. Brown? Elmira stood up. Her chair fell over backward and snapped shut like a bear trap on itself. She jumped an inch off the floor and teetered on her heels, which gave off cracking sounds like they would fall to dust any moment. I got plenty to say, she said, holding the empty Quaker Oats box in one hand with a Bible. She grabbed Tom with the other and plowed forward, hitting several peoples elbows and muttering to them, Watch whatyou're doing! Careful, you! to reach the platform, turn, and knock a glass of water dripping over the table. She gave Mrs. Goodwater another bristly scowl when this happened and let her mop it up with a tiny handkerchief. Then with a secret look of triumph, Elmira drew forth the empty philter glass and held it up, displaying it for Mrs. Goodwater and whispering, You know what was in this? Its inside me, now, lady. The charmed circle surrounds me. No knife can cleave, no hatchet break through. The ladies, all talking, did not hear. Mrs. Goodwater nodded, held up her hands, and there was silence. |
| 1169 |
She let go of Toms hand. Tom opened one eye and looked at her. Bay leaves, nasturtium petals... she said. Maybe you better sit down, said Mrs. Goodwater. One lady at the side went and opened a window. Dry betel nuts, lavender and crab-apple seed, said Mrs. Brown and stopped. Quick now, lets have the election. Got to have the votes. I'll tabulate. No hurry, Elmira, said Mrs. Goodwater. Yes, there is. Elmira took a deep trembling breath. Remember, ladies, no more fear. Do like you always wanted to do. Vote for me, and... The room was moving again, up and down. Honesty in government. All those in favor of Mrs. Goodwater for president say Aye. Aye, said the whole room. All those in favor of Mrs. Elmira Brown? said Elmira in a faint voice. She swallowed. After a moment she spoke, alone. Aye, she said. She stood stunned on the rostrum. A silence filled the room from wall to wall. In that silence Mrs. Elmira Brown made a croaking sound. She put her hand on her throat. She turned and looked dimly at Mrs. Goodwater, who now very casually drew forth from her purse a small wax doll in which were a number of rusted thumbtacks. Tom, said Elmira, show me the way to the ladies room. Yes m. They began to walk and then hurry and then run. Elmira ran on ahead, through the crowd, down the aisle... She reached the door and started left. No, Elmira, right, right! cried Mrs. Goodwater. Elmira turned left and vanished. There was a noise like coal down a chute. Elmira! The ladies ran around like a girls basketball team, colliding with each other. Only Mrs. Goodwater made a straight line. She found Tom looking down the stairwell, his hands clenched to the banister. Forty steps! he moaned. Forty steps to the ground! Later on and for months and years after it was told how like an inebriate Elmira Brown negotiated those steps touching every one on her long way down. 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. |
| 1170 |
She landed at the bottom, blinking and feeling better, having left whatever it was that had made her uneasy all along the way. True, she was so badly bruised she looked like a tattooed lady. But, no, not a wrist was sprained or an ankle twisted. She held her head funny for three days, kind of peering out of the sides of her eyeballs instead of turning to look. But the important thing was Mrs. Goodwater at the bottom of the steps, pillowing Elmiras Head on her Lap and dropping tears on her as the ladies gathered Hysterically. Elmira, I promise, Elmira, I swear, if you just live, if you don't die, you hear me, Elmira, listen! I'll use my magic for nothing but good from now on. No more black, nothing but white magic. The rest of your life, if I have my way, no more falling over iron dogs, tripping on sills, cutting fingers, or dropping downstairs for you! Elysium, Elmira, Elysium, I promise! If you just live! Look, I'm pulling the tacks out of the doll! Elmira, speak to me! Speak now and sit up! And come upstairs for another vote. President, I promise, president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, by acclamation, won't we, ladies? At this all the ladies cried so hard they had to lean on each other. Tom, upstairs, thought this meant death down there. He was halfway down when he met the ladies coming back up, looking like they had just wandered out of a dynamite explosion. Get out of the way, boy! First came Mrs. Goodwater, laughing and crying. Next came Mrs. Elmira Brown, doing the same. And after the two of them came all the one hundred twenty-three members of the lodge, not knowing if theyd just returned from a funeral or were on their way to a ball. He watched them pass and shook his head. don't need me no more, he said. No more at all. So he tiptoed down the stairs before they missed him, holding tight to the rail all the way. For what its worth, said Tom, theres the whole thing in a nutshell. The ladies carrying on like crazy. Everybody standing around blowing their noses. |
| 1171 |
their names what were they? Charles, Charlie, Chuck, yes! And Douglas! And Tom! He remembered! Calling his name far down the hall, but the door being locked in their faces, the boys turned away. You cant be excited, the doctor said. No visitors, no visitors, no It visitors. And he heard the boys moving across the street, he saw them, he waved. And they waved back. Colonel... Colonel... And now he sat alone with the little gray toad of a heart flopping weakly here or there in his chest from time to time. Colonel Freeleigh, said the operator. Heres your call. Mexico City. Erickson 3899. And now the far away but infinitely clear voice: Bueno. Jorge! cried the old man Senor Freeleigh! Again? This costs money. Let it cost! You know what to do. Si. The window? The window, Jorge, if you please. A moment, said the voice. And, thousands of miles away, in a southern land, in an office in a building in that land, there was the sound of footsteps retreating from the phone. The old man leaned forward, gripping the receiver tight to his wrinkled ear that ached with waiting for the next sound. The raising of a window. Ah, sighed the old man. The sounds of Mexico City on a hot yellow noon through the open window into the waiting phone. He c see Jorge standing there holding the mouthpiece out, out the bright day. Senor... No, no, please. Let me listen. He listened to the hooting of many metal horns, squealing of brakes, the calls of vendors selling red-purple bananas and jungle oranges in their stalls. Colonel Freeleighs feet began to move, hanging from the edge of his wheel chair, making the motions of a man walking. His eyes squeezed tight. He gave a series of immense sniffs, as if to gain the odors of meats hung on iron hooks in sunshine, cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins; the smell of stone alleys wet with morning rain. 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. |
| 1172 |
A rap on the door. Quickly he hid the phone under his lap robe. The nurse entered. Hello, she said. Have you been good? Yes. The old mans voice was mechanical. He could hardly see. The shock of a simple rap on the door was such that part of him was still in another city, far removed. He waited for his mind to rush homeit must be here to answer questions, act sane, be polite. I've come to check your pulse. Not now! said the old man. you're not going anywhere, are you? She smiled. He looked at the nurse steadily. He hadn't been anywhere in ten years. Give me your wrist. Her fingers, hard and precise, searched for the sickness in his pulse like a pair of calipers. Whatve you been doing to excite yourself? she demanded. Nothing. Her gaze shifted and stopped on the empty phone table. At that instant a horn sounded faintly, two thousand miles away. She took the receiver from under the lap robe and held it before his face. Why do you do this to yourself? You promised you wouldnt. that's how you hurt yourself in the first place, isn't it? Getting excited, talking too much. Those boys up here jumping around They sat quietly and listened, said the colonel. And I told them things theyd never heard. The buffalo, I told them, the bison. It was worth it. I don't care. I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn't matter if being so alive kills a man; its better to have the quick fever every time. Now give me that phone. If you won't let the boys come up and sit politely I can at least talk to someone outside the room. I'm sorry, Colonel. Your grandson will have to know about this. I prevented his having the phone taken out last week. Now it looks like I'll let him go ahead. This is my house, my phone. I pay your salary! he said. To make you well, not get you excited. She wheeled his chair across the room. To bed with you now, young man! From bed he looked back at the phone and kept looking at it. I'm going to the store for a few minutes, the nurse said. Just to be sure you don't use the phone again, I'm hiding your wheel chair in the hall. |
| 1173 |
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. 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? |
| 1174 |
said Jorge. I promise! The phone was laid on a desk thousands of miles away. Once more, with that clear familiarity, the footsteps, the pause, and, at last, the raising of the window. Listen, whispered the old man to himself. And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight, and the faint, tinkling music of an organ grinder playing La Marimbaoh, a lovely, dancing tune. With eyes tight, the old man put up his hand as if to click pictures of an old cathedral, and his body was heavier with flesh, younger, and he felt the hot pavement underfoot. He wanted to say, you're still there, arent you? All of: you people in that city in the time of the early siesta, the shops closing, the little boys crying loteria nacional para hoy! to sell lottery tickets. You are all there, the people in the city. I cant believe I was ever among you. When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people moving and living... He sat with the receiver tightly pressed to his ear. And at last, the dearest, most improbable sound of allthe sound of a green trolley car going around a comera trolley burdened with brown and alien and beautiful people, and the sound of other people running and calling out with triumph as they leaped up and swung aboard and vanished around a corner on the shrieking rails and were borne away in the sun-blazed distance to leave only the sound of tortillas frying on the market stoves, or was it merely the ever rising and falling hum and burn of static quivering along two thousand miles of copper wire... The old man sat on the floor. Time passed. A downstairs door opened slowly. Light footsteps came in, hesitated, then ventured up the stairs. Voices murmured. |
| 1175 |
We shouldn't be here! He phoned me, I tell you. He needs visitors bad. We cant let him down. he's sick! Sure! But he said to come when the nurses out. Well only stay a second, say hello, and... The door to the bedroom moved wide. The three boys stood looking in at the old man seated there on the floor. Colonel Freeleigh? said Douglas softly. There was something in his silence that made them all shut up their mouths. They approached, almost on tiptoe. Douglas, bent down, disengaged the phone from the old mans now quite cold fingers. Douglas lifted the receiver to his own ear, listened. Above the static he heard a strange, a far, a final sound. Two thousand miles away, the closing of a window. Boom!! said Tom. Boom. Boom. Boom. He sat on the Civil War cannon in the courthouse square. Douglas, in front of the cannon, clutched his heart and fell down on the grass. But he did not get up; he just lay there, his face thoughtful. You look likeyou're going to get out the old pencil any second now, said Tom. Let me think! said Douglas, looking at the cannon. He rolled over and gazed at the sky and the trees above him. Tom, it just hit me. What? Yesterday Ching Ling Soo died. Yesterday the Civil War ended right here in this town forever. Yesterday Mr. Lincoln died right here and so did General Lee and General Grantl and a hundred thousand others facing north and south. And yesterday afternoon, at Colonel Freeleighs house, a herd of buffalo-bison as big as all Green Town, Illinois, went off the cliff into nothing at all. Yesterday a whole lot of dust settled for good. And I didn't even appreciate it at the time. Its awful, Tom, its awful! What we going to do without all those soldiers and Generals Lee and Grant and Honest Abe; what we going to do without Ching Ling Soo? It never dreamed so many people could die so fast, Tom. But they did. They sure did! Tom sat astride the cannon, looking down at his brother as his voice trailed away. You got your tablet with you? Douglas shook his head. |
| 1176 |
Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers. This he would have to believe. And yet... looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh... August up ahead, said Douglas. Sure. But the way things are going, therell be no machines, no friends, and dam few dandelions for the last harvest. Doom. Doom. You sound like a funeral bell tolling, said Grandfather. Talk like that is worse than swearing. I won't wash out your mouth with soap, however. A thimbleful of dandelion wine is indicated. Here, now, swig it down. Whats it taste like? I'm a fire-eater! Whoosh! Now upstairs, run three times around the block, do five somersets, six pushups, climb two trees, and you'll be concertmaster instead of chief mourner. Get! On his way, running, Douglas thought, Four pushups, one tree, and two somersets will do it! And out there in the middle of the first day of August just getting into his car, was Bill Forrester, who shouted he Ir was going downtown for some extraordinary ice cream or other and would anyone join him? So, not five minutes later, jiggled and steamed into a better mood, Douglas found himself stepping in off the fiery pavements and moving through the grotto of soda-scented air, of vanilla freshness at the drugstore, to sit at the snow-marble fountain with Bill Forrester. They then asked for a recital of the most unusual ices and when the fountain man said, Old fashioned lime-vanilla ice... that's it! said Bill Forrester. Yes, sir! said Douglas. 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. |
| 1177 |
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. 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. |
| 1178 |
Do you know, its lucky we met so late. I wouldn't have wanted you to meet me when I was twenty-one and full of foolishness. They have special laws for pretty girls twenty-one. So you think I was pretty? He nodded good-humoredly. But how can you tell? she asked. When you meet a dragon that has eaten a swan, do you guess by the few feathers left around the mouth? that's what it isa body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven't seen her for years. I cant even remember what she looks like. I feel her, though. she's safe inside, still alive; the essential swan hasnt changed a feather. Do you know, there are some mornings in spring or fall, when I wake and think, I'll run across the fields into the woods and pick wild strawberries! Or I'll swim in the lake, or I'll dance all night tonight until dawn! And then, in a rage, discover I'm in this old and ruined dragon. I'm the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out, waiting for her Prince Charming. You should have written books. My dear boy, I have written. What else was there for an old maid? I was a crazy creature with a headful of carnival spangles until I was thirty, and then the only man I ever really cared for stopped waiting and married someone else. So in spite, in anger at myself, I told myself I deserved my: fate for not having married when the best chance was at hand. I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend. They drank their tea. Oh, such a rush of self-pity, she said good-naturedly. About yourself, now. you're thirty-one and still not married? Let me put it this way, he said. |
| 1179 |
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. 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. |
| 1180 |
They ate ice creams and squabs and drank good wines. I don't care what anyone says, she said. And people are saying things, arent they? He shifted uneasily. I knew it. A womans never safe, even when ninety-five, from gossip. I could stop visiting. Oh, no, she cried, and recovered. In a quieter voice she said, You know you cant do that. You know you don't care what they think, do you? So long as we know its all right? I don't care, he said. Now-she settled backlets play our game. Where shall it be this time? Paris? I think Paris. Paris, he said, nodding quietly. Well, she began, its the year 1885 and were boarding the ship in New York harbor. Theres our luggage, here are our tickets, there goes the sky line. Now were at sea. Now were coming into Marseilles... Here she was on a bridge looking into the clear waters of the Seine, and here he was, suddenly, a moment later, beside her, looking down at the tides of summer flowing past. Here she was with an aperitif in her talcum-white fingers, and here he was, with amazing quickness, bending toward her to tap her wineglass with his. His face appeared in mirrored halls at Versailles, over steaming smorgasbords in Stockholm, and they counted the barber poles in the Venice canals. The things she had done alone, they were now doing together. I the middle of August they sat staring at one another one late afternoon. Do you realize, he said, I've seen you nearly every day for two and a half weeks? Impossible! I've enjoyed it immensely. Yes, but there are so many young girls... you're everything they are notkind, intelligent, witty. Nonsense. Kindness and intelligence are the preoccupations of age. Being cruel and thoughtless is far more fascinating whenyou're twenty. She paused and drew a breath. Now, I'm going to embarrass you. Do you recall that first afternoon we met in the soda fountain, you said that you had had some degree ofshall we say affection for me at one time? Youve purposely put me off on this by never mentioning it again. |
| 1181 |
Now I'm forced to ask you to explain the whole uncomfortable thing. He didn't seem to know what to say. that's embarrassing, he protested. Spit it out! I saw your picture once, years ago. I never let my picture be taken. This was an old one, taken when you were twenty. Oh, that. Its quite a joke. Each time I give to a charity or attend a ball they dust that picture off and print it. Everyone in town laughs; even I Its cruel of the paper. No. I told them, If you want a picture of me, use the one taken back in 1853. Let them remember me that way. Keep the lid down, in the name of the good Lord, during the service. I'll tell you all about it. He folded his hands and looked at them and paused a moment. He was remembering the picture now and it was very clear in his mind. There was time, here in the garden to think of every aspect of the photograph and of Helen Loomis, very young, posing for her picture the first time, alone and beautiful. He thought of her quiet, shyly smiling face. It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers. That was the photograph; that was the way he knew her. Now he was talking again, after the remembering and the thinking over and the holding of the picture in his mind. When I first saw that pictureit was a simple, straightforward picture with a simple hairdoI didn't know it had been taken that long ago. The item in the paper said something about Helen Loomis marshaling the Town Ball that night. |
| 1182 |
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. 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? |
| 1183 |
I don't know, he said. Neither do I. that's what makes life interesting. August was almost over. The first cool touch of autumn moved slowly through the town and there was a softening and the first gradual burning fever of color in every tree, a faint flush and coloring in the hills, and the color of lions in the wheat fields. Now the pattern of days was familiar and repeated like a penman beautifully inscribing again and again, in practice, a series of its and ws and ms, day after day the line repeated in delicate rills. William Forrester walked across the garden one early August afternoon to find Helen Loomis writing with great care at the tea table. She put aside her pen and ink. I've been writing you a letter, she said. Well, my being here saves you the trouble. No, this is a special letter. Look at it. She showed him the blue envelope, which she now sealed and pressed flat. Remember how it looks. When you receive this in the mail, you'll know I'm dead. that's no way to talk, is it? Sit down and listen to me. He sat. My dear William, she said, under the parasol shade. In a few days I will be dead. No. She put up her hand. I don't want you to say a thing. I'm not afraid. When you live as long as I've lived you lose that, too. I never liked lobster in my life, and mainly because I'd never tried it. On my eightieth birthday I tried it. I cant say I'm greatly excited over lobster still, but I have no doubt as to its taste now, and I don't fear it. I dare say death will be a lobster, too, and I can come to terms with it. She motioned with her hands. But enough of that. The important thing is that I shant be seeing you again. There will be no services. I believe that a woman who has passed through that particular door has as much right to privacy as a woman who has retired for the night. You cant predict death, he said at last. For fifty years I've watched the grandfather clock in the hall, William. After it is wound I can predict to the hour when it will stop. Old people are no different. |
| 1184 |
They can feel the machinery slow down and the last weights shift. Oh, please don't look that wayplease don't. I cant help it, he said. Weve had a nice time, haven't we? It has been very special here, talking every day. It was that much-overburdened and worn phrase referred to as a meeting of the minds. She turned the blue envelope in her hands. I've always known that the quality of love was the mind, even though the body sometimes refuses this knowledge. The body lives for itself. It lives only to feed and wait for the night. Its essentially nocturnal. But what of the mind which is born of the sun, William, and must spend thousands of hours of a lifetime awake and aware? Can you balance off the body, that pitiful, selfish thing of night against a whole lifetime of sun and intellect? I don't know. I only know there has been your mind here and my mind here, and the afternoons have been like none I can remember. There is still so much to talk about, but we must save it for another time. We don't seem to have much time now. No, but perhaps there will be another time. Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late. I lived too long, that much is certain. And you were born either too early or too late. It was a terrible bit of timing. But perhaps I am being punished for being a silly girl. Anyway, the next spin around, wheels might function right again. Meantime you must find a nice girl and be married and be happy. But you must promise me one thing. Anything. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. If it is at all convenient, die beforeyou're fifty. It may take a bit of doing. But I advise this simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very, very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main Street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again? I don't think we could go through any more afternoons like these weve had, no matter how pleasant, do you? |
| 1185 |
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. 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. |
| 1186 |
A dish of lime-vanilla ice, he said. A dish of lime-vanilla ice. Douglas and Tom and Charlie came panting along the unshaded street. Tom, answer me true, now. Answer what true? What ever happened to happy endings? They got them on shows at Saturday matinees. Sure, but what about life? All I know is I feel good going to bed nights, Doug. that's a happy ending once a day. Next morning I'm up and maybe things go bad. But all I got to do is remember that I'm going to bed that night and just lying there a while makes everything okay. I'm talking about Mr. Forrester and old Miss Loomis. Nothing we can do; she's dead. I know! But don't you figure someone slipped up there? You mean about him thinking she was the same age as her picture and her a trillion years old all the time? No, sir, I think its swell! Swell, for gosh sakes? The last few days when Mr. Forrester told me a little here or a little there and I finally put it all togetherboy, did I bawl my head off. I don't even know why. I wouldn't change one bit of it. If you changed it, what would we have to talk about? Nothing! And besides, I like to cry. After I cry hard its like its morning again and I'm starting the day over. I heard everything now. You just won't admit you like crying, too. You cry just so long and everythings fine. And theres your happy ending. Andyou're ready to go back out and walk around with folks again. And its the start of gosh-knows-what-all! Any time now, Mr. Forrester will think it over and see its just the only way and have a good cry and then look around and see its morning again, even though its five in the afternoon. That don't sound like no happy ending to me. A good nights sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine, Doug. You listen to Tom Spaulding, M. D. Shut up, you guys, said Charlie. Were almost there! They turned a corner. Deep in winter they had looked for bits and pieces of summer and found it in furnace cellars or in bonfires on the edge of frozen skating ponds at night. |
| 1187 |
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. 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. |
| 1188 |
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? 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. |
| 1189 |
Strange the hot rooms with the sweating people pressed tightly back into them behind the bronze knobs and knockers. Baseball bats and balls lay upon the unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn, white-chalk game of hopscotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk. It was as if someone had predicted freezing weather a moment ago. Were crazy being out on a night like this, said Helen. Lonely One won't kill three ladies, said Lavinia. Theres safety in numbers. And besides, its too soon. The killings always come a month separated. A shadow fell across their terrified faces. A figure loomed behind a tree. As if someone had struck an organ a terrible blow with his fist, the three women gave off a scream, in three different shrill notes. Got you! roared a voice. The man plunged at them. He came into the light, laughing. He leaned against a tree, pointing at the ladies weakly, laughing again. Hey! I'm the Lonely One! said Frank Dillon. Frank Dillon! Frank! Frank, said Lavinia, if you ever do a childish thing like that again, may someone riddle you with bullets! What a thing to do! Francine began to cry hysterically. Frank Dillon stopped smiling. Say, I'm sorry. Go away! said Lavinia. haven't you heard about Elizabeth Ramsellfound dead in the ravine? You running around scaring women! don't speak to us again! Aw, now They moved. He moved to follow. Stay right there, Mr. Lonely One, and scare yourself. Go take a look at Elizabeth Ramsells face and see if its funny. Good night! Lavinia took the other two on along the street of trees and stars, Francine holding a kerchief to her face. 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. |
| 1190 |
His face was set and pale, like all the faces they had seen on the half-empty streets. For eating in the show, said Lavinia as the druggist weighed out a nickels worth of the green candy with a silver shovel. You sure look pretty tonight, ladies. You looked cool this afternoon, Miss Lavinia, when you was in for a chocolate soda. So cool and nice that someone asked after you. Oh? Man sitting at the counterwatched you walk out. Said to me, say, whos that? Why, that's Lavinia Nebbs, prettiest maiden lady in town, I said. she's beautiful, he said. Where does she live? Here the druggist paused uncomfortably. You didn't! said Francine. You didn't give him her address, I hope? You didn't! I guess I didn't think. I said, Oh, over on Park Street, you know, near the ravine. A casual remark. But now, tonight, them finding the body, I heard a minute ago, I thought, My God, whatve I done! He handed over the package, much too full. You fool! cried Francine, and tears were in her eyes. I'm sorry. Course, maybe it was nothing. Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat. She held out her money automatically. Theres no charge on those peppermints, said the druggist, turning to shuffle some papers. Well, I know what I'm going to do right now! Helen stalked out of the drugshop. I'm calling a taxi to take us all home. I'll be no part of a hunting party for you, Lavinia. That man was up to no good. Asking about you. You want to be dead in the ravine next? It was just a man, said Lavinia, turning in a slow circle to look at the town. So is Frank Dillon a man, but maybe he's the Lonely One. Francine hadn't come out with them, they noticed, and turning, they found her arriving. I made him give me a description-the druggist. I made him tell what the man looked like. A stranger, she said, in a dark suit. Sort of pale and thin. Were all overwrought, said Lavinia. I simply won't take a taxi if you get one. |
| 1191 |
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. 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. |
| 1192 |
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. Wasnt the film wonderful? Closing up, ladies. The druggist switched off the lights in the cool white-tiled silence. Outside, the streets were swept clean and empty of cars it or trucks or people. Bright lights still burned in the small store windows where the warm wax dummies lifted pink wax hands fired with blue-white diamond rings, or flourished orange wax legs to reveal hosiery. The hot blue-glass eyes of the mannequins watched as the ladies drifted down the empty river bottom street, their images shimmering in the windows like blossoms seen under darkly moving waters. Do you suppose if we screamed theyd do anything? Who? The dummies, the window people. Oh, Francine. Well... There were a thousand people in the windows, stiff and silent, and three people on the street, the echoes following like gunshots from store fronts across the way when they tapped their heels on the baked pavement. A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzed like a dying insect, as they passed. Baked and white, the long avenues lay ahead. Blowing and tall in a wind that touched only their leafy summits, the trees stood on either side of the three small women. Seen from the courthouse peak, they appeared like three thistles far away. First, well walk you home, Francine. |
| 1193 |
No, I'll walk you home. don't be silly. You live way out at Electric Park. If you walked me home youd have to come back across the ravine alone, yourself. And if so much as a leaf fell on you, youd drop dead. Francine said, I can stay the night at your house. you're the pretty one! And so they walked, they drifted like three prim clothes forms over a moonlit sea of lawn and concrete, Lavinia watching the black trees Bit by each side of her, listening to the voices of her friends murmuring, trying to laugh; and the night seemed to quicken, they seemed to run while walking slowly, everything seemed fast and the color of hot snow. Lets sing, said Lavinia. They sang, Shine On, Shine On, Harvest Moon... They sang sweetly and quietly, arm in arm, not looking back. They felt the hot sidewalk cooling underfoot, moving, moving. Listen! said Lavinia. They listened to the summer night. The summer-night crickets and the far-off tone of the courthouse clock making I it eleven forty-five. Listen! Lavinia listened. A porch swing creaked in the dark and there was Mr. Terle, not saying anything to anybody, alone on his swing, having a last cigar. They saw the pink ash swinging gently to and fro. Now the lights were going, going, gone. The little house lights and big house lights and yellow lights and green hurricane lights, the candles and oil lamps and porch lights, and everything felt locked up in brass and iron and steel, everything, thought Lavinia, is boxed and locked and wrapped and shaded. She imagined the people in their moonlit beds. And their breathing in the summer-night rooms, safe and together. And here we are, thought Lavinia, our footsteps on along the baked summer evening sidewalk. And above us the 1 lonely street lights shining down, making a drunken shadow. Heres your house, Francine. Good night. Lavinia, Helen, stay here tonight. Its late, almost midnight now. You can sleep in the parlor. I'll make hot chocolateitll be such fun! Francine was holding them both now, close to her. |
| 1194 |
No, thanks, said Lavinia. And Francine began to cry. Oh, not again, Francine, said Lavinia. I don't want you dead, sobbed Francine, the tears running straight down her cheeks. you're so fine and nice, I want you alive. Please, oh, please! Francine, I didn't know how much this has done to you. I promise I'll phone when I get home. Oh, will you? And tell you I'm safe, yes. And tomorrow well have a picnic lunch at Electric Park. With ham sandwiches I'll make myself, hows that? you'll see, I'll live forever! you'll phone, then? I promised, didn't I? Good night, good night! Rushing upstairs, Francine whisked behind a door, which slammed to be snap-bolted tight on the instant. Now, said Lavinia to Helen, I'll walk you home. The courthouse clock struck the hour. The sounds blew across a town that was empty, emptier than it had ever been. Over empty streets and empty lots and empty lawns the sound faded. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve, counted Lavinia, with Helen on her arm. don't you feel funny? asked Helen. How do you mean? When you think of us being out here on the sidewalks, under the trees, and all those people safe behind locked doors, lying in their beds. Were practically the only walking people out in the open in a thousand miles, I bet. The sound of the deep warm dark ravine came near. In a minute they stood before Helens house, looking at each other for a long time. The wind blew the odor of cut grass between them. The moon was sinking in a sky that was beginning to cloud. I don't suppose its any use asking you to stay, Lavinia? I'll be going on. Sometimes Sometimes what? Sometimes I think people want to die. Youve acted odd all evening. I'm just not afraid, said Lavinia. And I'm curious, I suppose. And I'm using my head. Logically, the Lonely One cant be around. The police and all. The police are home with their covers up over their ears. Lets just say I'm enjoying myself, precariously, but safely. If there was any real chance of anything happening to me, I'd stay here with you, you can be sure of that. |
| 1195 |
Maybe part of you doesn't want to live anymore. You and Francine. Honestly! I feel so guilty. I'll be drinking some hot cocoa just as you reach the ravine bottom and walk on the bridge. Drink a cup for me. Good night. Lavinia Nebbs walked alone down the midnight street, down the late summer-night silence. She saw houses with the dark windows and far away she heard a dog barking. In five minutes, she thought, I'll be safe at home. In five minutes I'll be phoning silly little Francine. I'll She heard the mans voice. A mans voice singing far away among the trees. Oh, give me a June night, the moonlight and you... She walked a little faster. The voice sang, In my arms... with all your charms... Down the street in the dim moonlight a man walked slowly and casually along. I can run knock on one of these doors, thought Lavinia, if I must. Oh, give me a June night, sang the man, and he carried a long club in his hand. The moonlight and you. Well, look whos here! What a time of night for you to be out, Miss Nebbs! Officer Kennedy! And that's who it was, of course. I'd better see you home! Thanks, I'll make it. But you live across the ravine... Yes, she thought, but I won't walk through the ravine with any man, not even an officer. How do I know who the Lonely One is? No, she said, I'll hurry. I'll wait right here, he said. If you need any help, give a yell. Voices carry good here. I'll come running. Thank you. She went on, leaving him under a light, humming to himself, alone. Here I am, she thought. The ravine. She stood on the edge of the one hundred and thirteen steps that went down the steep hill and then across the bridge seventy yards and up the hills leading to Park Street. 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. |
| 1196 |
he's following, don't turn, don't look, if you see him, you'll not be able to move, you'll be so frightened. Just run, run! She ran across the bridge. Oh, God, God, please, please let me get up the hill! Now up the path, now between the hills, oh God, its dark, and everything so far away. ii I screamed now it wouldn't help; I cant scream anyway. Heres the top of the path, heres the street, oh, God, please let me be safe, if I get home safe I'll never go out alone; I was a fool, let me admit it, I was a fool, I didn't know what terror was, but if you let me get home from this I'll never go without Helen or Francine again! Heres the street. Across the street! She crossed the street and rushed up the sidewalk. Oh God, the porch! My house! Oh God, please give me time to get inside and lock the door and I'll be safe! And theresilly thing to noticewhy did she notice, instantly, no time, no timebut there it was anyway, flashing bythere on the porch rail, the half-filled glass of lemonade she had abandoned a long time, a year, half an evening ago! The lemonade glass sitting calmly, imperturbably there on the rail... and... She heard her clumsy feet on the porch and listened and felt her hands scrabbling and ripping at the lock with the key. She heard her heart. She heard her inner voice screaming. The key fit. Unlock the door, quick, quick! The door opened. Now, inside. Slam it! She slammed the door. Now lock it, bar it, lock it! she gasped wretchedly. Lock it, tight, tight! The door was locked and bolted tight. The music stopped. She listened to her heart again and the sound of it diminishing into silence. 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! |
| 1197 |
Nobody. There was nobody following me at all. Nobody running after me. She got her breath and almost laughed at herself. It stands to reason. If a man had been following me, hed have caught me! I'm not a fast runner... Theres no one on the porch or in the yard. How silly of me. I wasnt running from anything. That ravines as safe as anyplace. Just the same, its nice to be home. Homes the really good warm place, the only place to be. She put her hand out to the light switch and stopped. What? she asked. What, What? Behind her in the living room, someone cleared his throat. Good grief, they ruin everything! don't take it so hard, Charlie. Well, whatre we going to talk about now? Its no use talking the Lonely One if he aint even alive! Its not scary anymore! don't know about you, Charlie, said Tom. I'm going back to Summers Ice House and sit in the door and pretend he's alive and get cold all up and down my spine. that's cheating. You got to take your chills where you can find them, Charlie. Douglas did not listen to Tom and Charlie. He looked at Lavinia Nebbss house and spoke, almost to himself. I was there last night in the ravine. I saw it. I saw everything. On my way home I cut across here. I saw that lemonade glass right on the porch rail, half empty. Thought I'd like to drink it. Like to drink it, I thought. I was in the ravine and I was here, right in the middle of it all. Tom and Charlie, in turn, ignored Douglas. For that matter, said Tom. I don't really think the Lonely One is dead. You were here this morning when the ambulance came to bring that man out on the stretcher, werent you? Sure, said Tom. Well, that was the Lonely One, dumb! Read the papers! After ten long years escaping, old Lavinia Nebbs up and stabbed him with a handy pair of sewing scissors. I wish shed minded her own business. You want shed laid down and let him squeeze her windpipe? No, but the least she couldve done is gallop out of the house and down the street screaming Lonely One! Lonely One! |
| 1198 |
long enough to give him a chance to beat it. This town used to have some good stuff in it up until about twelve oclock last night. From here on, were vanilla junket. Let me say it for the last time, Charlie; I figure the Lonely One aint dead. I saw his face, you saw his face, Doug saw his face, didn't you, Doug? What? Yes. I think so. Yes. Everybody saw his face. Answer me this, then: Did it look like the Lonely One to you? I... said Douglas, and stopped. The sun buzzed in the sky for about five seconds. My gosh... whispered Charlie at last. Tom waited, smiling. It didn't look like the Lonely One at all, gasped Charlie. It looked like a man. Right, yes, sir, a plain everyday man, who wouldn't pull the wings off even so much as a fly, Charlie, a fly! The least the Lonely One would do if he was the Lonely One is look like the Lonely One, right? Well, he looked like the candy butcher down front the Elite Theater nights. What you think he was, a tramp coming through town, got in what he thought was an empty house, and got killed by Miss Nebbs? Sure! Hold on, though. None of us know what the Lonely One should look like. Theres no pictures. Only people ever saw him wound up dead. You know and Doug knows and I know what he looks like. he's got to be tall, don't he? Sure... And he's got to be pale, don't he? Pale, that's right. And skinny like a skeleton and have long dark hair, don't he? that's what I always said. And big eyes bulging out, green eyes like a cat? that's him to the t. Well, then. Tom snorted. You saw that poor guy they lugged out of the Nebbss place a couple hours ago. What was he? Little and red-faced and kind of fat and not much hair and what there was was sandy. Tom, you hit on it! Come on! Call the guys! You go tell them like you told me! The Lonely One aint dead. Hell still be out lurkin around tonight. Yeah, said Tom, and stopped, suddenly thoughtful. Tom, you're a pal, you got a real brain. None of us wouldve saved the day this way. The summer was sure going bad up to this very minute. |
| 1199 |
You got your thumb in the dike just in time. August won't be a total loss. Hey, kids! And Charlie was off, waving his arms, yelling. Tom stood on the sidewalk in front of Lavinia Nebbs house, his face pale. My gosh! he whispered. Whatve I gone and done now! He turned to Douglas. I say, Doug, whatve I gone and done now? Douglas was staring at the house. His lips moved. I was there, last night, in the ravine. I saw Elizabeth Ramsell. It came by here last night on the way home. I saw the lemonade glass there on the rail. Just last night it was. I could drink that, I thought... I could drink that... She was a woman with a broom or a dustpan or a washrag or a mixing spoon in her hand. You saw her cutting piecrust in the morning, humming to it, or you saw her setting out the baked pies at noon or taking them in, cool, at dusk. She rang porcelain cups like a Swiss bell ringer, to their place. She glided through the halls as steadily as a vacuum machine, seeking, finding, and setting to rights. She made mirrors of every window, to catch the sun. She strolled but twice through any garden, trowel in hand, and the flowers raised their quivering fires upon the warm air in her wake. She slept quietly and turned no more than three times in a night, as relaxed as a white glove to which, at dawn, a brisk hand will return. Waking, she touched people like pictures, to set their frames straight. But, now...? Grandma, said everyone. Great-grandma. Now it was as if a huge sum in arithmetic were finally drawing to an end. She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, andgrown old. |
| 1200 |
All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I'll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. that's my answer to anyone asks big questions! Quick now, send in the rest! At last the entire family stood, like people seeing someone off at the rail station, waiting in the room. Well, said Great-grandma, there I am. I'm not humble, so its nice seeing you standing around my bed. Now next week theres late gardening and closet-cleaning and clothes-buying for the children to do. And since that part of me which is called, for convenience, Great-grandma, won't be here to step it along, those other parts of me called Uncle Bert and Leo and Tom and Douglas, and all the other names, will have to take over, each to his own. Yes, Grandma. I don't want any Halloween parties here tomorrow. don't want anyone saying anything sweet about me; I said it all in my time and my pride. I've tasted every victual and danced every dance; now theres one last tart I haven't bit on, one tune I haven't whistled. But I'm not afraid. I'm truly curious. 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. |
| 1201 |
They left him empty as the Mason jar which now, without knowing that he did so, he took back into bed with him, when he tried to sleep... There she sat in her glass coffin, night after night, her body melted by the carnival blaze of summer, frozen in the ghost winds of winter, waiting with her sickle smile and carved, hooked, and wax-poured nose hovering above her pale pink and wrinkled wax hands poised forever above the ancient fanned-out deck of cards. The Tarot Witch. A delicious name. The Tarot Witch. You thrust a penny in the silver slot and far away below, behind, inside, machinery groaned and cogged, levers stroked, wheels spun. And in her case the witch raised up her glittery face to blind you with a single needle stare. Her implacable left hand moved down to stroke and fritter enigmatic tarot-card skulls, devils, hanging men, hermits, cardinals and clowns, while her head hung close to delve your misery or murder, hope or health, your rebirths each morning and deaths renewals by night. Then she spidered a calligraphers pen across the back of a single card and let it titter down the chute into your hands. Whereupon the witch, with a last veiled glimmer of her eyes, froze back in her eternal caul for weeks, months, years, awaiting the next copper penny to revive her from oblivion. 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... |
| 1202 |
They moved on down the street, the white unwritten card passing between them. They sat inside the library in the lidded green light and then they sat outside on the carved stone lion, dangling their feet over its back, frowning. Old man Black, all the time screaming at her, threatening to kill her. You cant kill whats never lived, Doug. He treats the witch like she's alive or was once alive, or something. Screaming at her, so maybe she's finally given up. Or maybe she hasnt given up at all, buts taken a secret way to warn us her lifes in danger. Invisible ink. Lemon juice, maybe! Theres a message here she didn't want Mr. Black to see, in case he looked while we were in his arcade. Hold on! I got some matches. Why would she write us, Doug? Hold the card. Here! Douglas struck a match and ran it under the card. Ouch! The words aint on my fingers, Doug, so keep the match away. There! cried Douglas. And there it was, a faint spidery scrawl which began to shape itself in a spiral of incredible corkscrew calligraphers letters, dark on light... a word, two words, three... The card, its on fire! Tom yelled and let it drop. Stomp on it! But by the time they had jumped up to smash their feet on the stony spine of the ancient lion, the card was a black ruin. Doug! Now well never know what it said! Douglas held the flaking warm ashes in the palm of his hand. No, I saw. I remember the words. The ashes blew about in his fingers, whispering. You remember in that Charlie Chase Comedy last spring where the Frenchman was drowning and kept yelling something in French which Charlie Chase couldn't figure. Secours, Secours! And someone told Charlie what it meant and he jumped in and saved the man. Well, on this card, with my own eyes, I saw it. Secours! Why would she write it in French? So Mr. Black wouldn't know, dumb! Doug, it was just an old watermark coming out when you scorched the card... Tom saw Douglass face and stopped. Okay, don't look mad. It was sucker or whatever. But there were other words... |
| 1203 |
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. Black. Theres only one magic philter will fix Mr. Black, said Tom. Soons he gets enough pennies any one evening, hewell, lets see. Tom drew some coins from his pocket. This just might do it. Doug, you go read the books. I'll run back and look at the Keystone Kops fifteen times; I never get tired. By the time you meet me at the arcade, it might be the old philter will be working for us. Tom, I hope you know whatyou're doing. Doug, you want to rescue this princess or not? Douglas whirled and plunged. Tom watched the library doors wham shut and settle. |
| 1204 |
Then he leaped over the lions back and down into the night. On the library steps, the ashes of the tarot card fluttered, blew away. The arcade was dark, inside, the pinball machines lay dim and enigmatic as dust scribblings in a giants cave. The peep shows stood with Teddy Roosevelt and the Wright Brothers faintly smirking or just cranking up a wooden propeller. The witch sat in her case, her waxen eyes cauled. Then, suddenly, one eye glittered. A flashlight bobbed outside through the dusty arcade windows. A heavy figure lurched against the locked door, a key scrabbled into the lock. The door slammed open, stayed open. There was a sound of thick breathing. Its only me, old girl, said Mr. Black, swaying. Outside on the street, coming along with his nose in a book, Douglas found Tom hiding in a door nearby. Shh! said Tom. It worked. The Keystone Kops, fifteen times; and when Mr. Black heard me drop all that money in, his eyes popped, he opened the machine, took out the pennies, threw me out and went across to the speak-easy for the magic philter. Douglas crept up and peered into the shadowy arcade and saw the two gorilla figures there, one not moving at all, the wax heroine in his arms, the other one standing stunned in the middle of the room, weaving slightly from side to side. Oh, Tom, whispered Douglas, you're a genius. he's just full of magic philter, aint he? You can say that again. What did you find out? Douglas tapped the book and talked in a low voice. Mme. Tarot, like I said, told all about death and destiny and stuff in rich folks parlors, but she made one mistake. She predicted Napoleons defeat and death to his face! So... Douglass voice faded as he looked again through the dusty window at that distant figure seated quietly in her crystal case. Secours, murmured Douglas. Old Napoleon just called in Mme. Tussauds waxworks and had them drop the Tarot Witch alive in boiling wax, and now... now... Watch out, Doug, Mr. Black, in there! he's got a club or something! |
| 1205 |
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. 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. |
| 1206 |
Doug, is he dead? No, just the shock of Mme. Tarots predictions. Boy, he's got a scalded look. Horrible, that's what the cards must have been. The man slept noisily on the floor. Douglas picked up the strewn tarot cards, put them, trembling, in his pocket. Come on, Tom, lets get her out of here before its too late. Kidnap her? you're crazy! You wanna be guilty of aiding and abetting an even worse crime? Murder, for instance? For gosh sakes, you cant kill a dam old dummy! But Doug was not listening. He had reached through the open case and now, as if she had waited for too many years, the wax Tarot Witch with a rustling sigh, leaned forward and fell slowly slowly down into his arms. The town clock struck nine forty-five. The moon was high and filled all the sky with a warm but wintry light. The sidewalk was solid silver on which black shadows moved. Douglas moved with the thing of velvet and fairy wax in his arms, stopping to hide in pools of shadow under trembling trees, alone. He listened, looking back. A sound of running mice. Tom burst around the corner and pulled up beside him. Doug, I stayed behind. I was afraid Mr. Black was, well... then he began to come alive... swearing... Oh, Doug, if he catches you with his dummy! What will our folks think? Stealing! Quiet! They listened to the moonlit river of street behind them. Now, Tom, you can come help me rescue her, but you cant if you say dummy or talk loud or drag along as so much dead weight. I'll help! Tom assumed half the weight. My gosh, she's light. She was real young when Napoleon... Douglas stopped. Old people are heavy. that's how you tell. But why? Tell me why all this running around for her, Doug. Why? Why? Douglas blinked and stopped. Things had gone so fast, he had run so far and his blood was so high, he had long since forgotten why. Only now, as they moved again along the sidewalk, shadows like black butterflies on their eyelids, the thick smell of dusty wax on their hands, did he have time to reason why, and, slowly, speak of it, his voice as strange as moonlight. |
| 1207 |
No! said Douglas, sitting there, looking down. NO! The big man toppled on the rim of the hill, gasping. You just thank God it wasnt you I did that to! He moved unsteadily away, falling once, getting up, talking to himself, laughing, swearing, then gone. Douglas sat on the edge of the ravine and wept. After a long while he blew his nose. He looked at Tom. Tom, its late. Dadll be out walking, looking for us. We shouldve been home an hour ago. Run back along Washington Street, get Dad and bring him here. you're not going down in that ravine? she's city property now, on the trash dump, and nobody cares what happens, not even Mr. Black. Tell Dad what he's coming here for and he don't have to be seen coming home with me and her. I'll take her the back way around and nobody'll ever know. She won't be no good to you now, her machinery all busted. We cant leave her out in the rain, don't you see, Tom? Sure. Tom moved slowly off. Douglas let himself down the hill, walking in piles of cinder and old paper and tin cans. Halfway down he stopped and listened. He peered at the multicolored dimness, the great landslide below. Mme. Tarot? he almost whispered. Mme. Tarot? At the bottom of the hill in the moonlight he thought he saw her white wax hand move. It was a piece of white paper blowing. But he went toward it anyway... The town dock struck midnight The house Lights around were mostly turned out. In the workshop garage the two boys and the man stood back from the witch, who now sat, rearranged and at peace, in an old wicker chair before an oilcloth-covered card table, upon which were spread, in fantastic fans of popes and clowns and cardinals and deaths and suns and comets, the tarot cards upon which one wax hand touched. Father was speaking. ... know how it is. When I was a boy, when the circus left town I ran around collecting a million posters. Later it was breeding rabbits, and magic. I built illusions in the attic and couldn't get them out. He nodded to the witch. Oh, I remember she told my fortune once, thirty years ago. |
| 1208 |
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! nobody knowing where she came from or where she wentthen you'll know I worked the spell and set her free. And then, as I said, a year, two years from now, on that night when that train pulls out, itll be the time when we can cut through the wax. With her gone, you're liable to find nothing but little cogs and wheels and stuff inside her. that's how it is. Douglas picked up the witchs hand and moved it over the dance of life, the frolic of bone-white death, the dates and dooms, the fates and follies, tapping, touching, whispering her worn-down fingernails. Her face tilted with some secret equilibrium and looked at the boys and the eyes flashed bright in the raw bulb light, unblinking. |
| 1209 |
Tell your fortune, Tom? asked Douglas quietly. Sure. A card fell from the witchs voluminous sleeve. Tom, you see that? A card, hidden away, and now she throws it out at us! Douglas held the card to the light. Its blank. I'll put it in a matchbox full of chemicals during the night. Tomorrow well open the box and there the messagell be! Whatll it say? Douglas closed his eyes the better to see the words. Itll say, Thanks from your humble servant and grateful friend, Mme. Floristan Mariani Tarot, the Chiromancer, Soul Healer, and Deep-Down Diviner of Fates and Furies. Tom laughed and shook his brothers arm. Go on, Doug, what else, what else? Let me see... And itll say, Hey nonny no!... ist not fine to dance and sing?... when the bells of death do ring... and turn upon the toe... and sing Hey nonny no! And itll say, Tom and Douglas Spaulding, everything you wish for, all your life through, you'll get... And itll say that well live forever, you and me, Tom, well live forever... All that on just this one card? All that, every single bit of it, Tom. In the light of the electric bulb they bent, the two boys heads down, the witchs head down, staring and staring at the beautiful blank but promising white card, their bright eyes sensing each and every incredibly hidden word that would soon rise up from pale oblivion. Hey, said Tom in the softest of voices. And Douglas repeated in a glorious whisper, Hey... Faintly, the voice chanted under the fiery green trees at noon. ... nine, ten, eleven, twelve... Douglas moved slowly across the lawn. Tom, what you counting? ... thirteen, fourteen, shut up, sixteen, seventeen, cicadas, eighteen, nineteen... ! Cicadas? Oh hell! Tom unsqueezed his eyes. Hell, hell, hell! Better not let people hear you swearing. Hell, hell, hell is a place! Tom cried. Now I got to start all over. I was counting the times the cicadas buzz every fifteen seconds. He held up his two dollar watch. You time it, then add thirty-nine and you get the temperature at that very moment. |
| 1210 |
He looked at the watch, one eye shut, tilted his head and whispered again, One, two, three... ! Douglas turned his head slowly, listening. Somewhere in the burning bone-colored sky a great copper wire was strummed and shaken. Again and again the piercing metallic vibrations, like charges of raw electricity, fell in paralyzing shocks from the stunned trees. Seven! counted Tom. Eight. Douglas walked slowly up the porch steps. Painfully he peered into the hall. He stayed there a moment, then slowly he stepped back out on the porch and called weakly to Tom. Its exactly eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. -twenty-seven, twenty-eight Hey, Tom you hear me? I hear youthirty, thirty-one! Get away! Two, three thirty-four! You can stop counting now, right inside on that old thermometer its eighty-seven and going up, without the help of no katydids. Cicadas! Thirty-nine, forty! Not katydids! Forty-two! Eighty-seven degrees, I thought youd like to know. Forty-five, that's inside, not outside! Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one! Fifty-two, fifty-three! Fifty-three plus thirty-nine isninety-two degrees! Who says? I say! Not eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit! But ninety-two degrees Spaulding! You and who else? Tom jumped up and stood red-faced, staring at the sun. Me and the cicadas, that's who! Me and the cicadas! you're out-numbered! Ninety-two, ninety-two, ninety-two degrees Spaulding, by gosh! They both stood looking at the merciless unclouded sky like a camera that has broken and stares, shutter wide, at a motionless and stricken town dying in a fiery sweat. Douglas shut his eyes and saw two idiot suns dancing on the reverse side of the pinkly translucent lids. One... two... three... Douglas felt his lips move. ... four... five... six... This time the cicadas sang even faster. From noontime to sundown, from midnight to sunrise, one man, one horse, and one wagon were known to all twenty-six thousand three hundred forty-nine inhabitants of Green Town, Illinois. In the middle of the day, for no reason quickly apparent, children would stop still and say: Here comes Mr. |
| 1211 |
Jonass eyes gently questioning them. And they pulled their hand away and looked further on. Until at last each of them put their hand on a single item and left it there. Their faces came up and this time their faces were so bright Mr. Jonas had to laugh. He put up his hand as if to fend off the brightness of their faces from his eyes. He covered his eyes for a moment. When he did this, the children yelled their thanks, grabbed their roller skates or clay tiles or bumbershoots and, dropping off, ran. And the children came back in a moment with something of their own in their hands, a doll or a game they had grown tired of, something the fun had gone out of, like the flavor from gum, and now it was time for it to pass on to some other part of town where, seen for the first time, it would be revivified and would revivify others. These tokens of exchange were shyly dropped over the rim of the wagon down into unseen riches and then the wagon was trundling on, flickering light on its great spindling sunflower wheels and Mr... Jonas singing again... Junk! Junk! No, sir, not Junk! No, maam, not Junk! until he was out of sight and only the dogs, in the shadow pools under trees, heard the rabbi in the wilderness, and twitched their tails... ... junk... Fading. ... junk... A whisper. ... junk... Gone. And the dogs asleep. The sidewalks were haunted by dust ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up, swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strollers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes everywhere, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spontaneous combustion at three in the morning. Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for element. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with no sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene vapors. |
| 1212 |
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. 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. |
| 1213 |
Mr. Auffmann, did you invent it? he cried. Did you finally build the Happiness Machine? But then he saw there was no bottom to the machine. Mr. Auffmann ran along on the ground, carrying the whole incredible frame from his shoulders. Happiness, Doug, here goes happiness! And he went the way of the trolley, John Huff, and the dove-fingered ladies. Above on the roof a tapping sound. Tap-rap-bang. Pause. Tap-rap-bang. Nail and hammer. Hammer and nail. A bird choir. And an old woman singing in a frail but hearty voice. Yes, well gather at the river... river... river... Yes, well gather at the river... That flows by the throne of God... Grandma! Great-grandma! Tap, softly, tap. Tap, softly, ... river... river... And now it was only the birds picking up their tiny feet and putting them down again on the roof. Rattle-rattle. Scratch. Peep. Peep. Soft. Soft. ... river... Douglas took one breath and let it all out at once, wailing. He did not hear his mother run into the room. A fly, like the burning ash of a cigarette, fell upon his senseless hand, sizzled, and flew away. Four oclock in the afternoon. Flies dead on the pavement. Dogs wet mops in their kennels. Shadows herded under trees. Downtown stores shut up and locked. The lake shore empty. The lake full of thousands of people up to their necks in the warm but soothing water. Four-fifteen. Along the brick streets of town the junk wagon moved, and Mr. Jonas singing on it. Tom, driven out of the house by the scorched look on Douglass face, walked slowly down to the curb as the wagon stopped. Hi, Mr. Jonas. Hello, Tom. Tom and Mr. Jonas were alone on the street with all that beautiful junk in the wagon to look at and neither of them looking at it. Mr. Jonas didn't say anything right away. He lit his pipe and puffed it, nodding his head as if he knew before he asked, that something was wrong. Tom? he said. Its my brother, said Tom. Its Doug. Mr. Jonas looked up at the house. he's sick, said Tom. he's dying! Oh, now, that cant be so, said Mr. |
| 1214 |
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. 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. |
| 1215 |
I remember years like that, said the junkman. He looked off at the sky and there were all the years. So there you are, Mr. Jonas. that's it. that's why he's dying... Tom stopped and looked away. Let me think, said Mr. Jonas. Can you help, Mr. Jonas? Can you? Mr. Jonas looked deep in the big old wagon and shook his head. Now, in the sunlight, his face looked tired and he was beginning to perspire. Then he peered into the mounds of vases and peeling lamp shades and marble nymphs and satyrs made of greening copper. He sighed. He turned and picked up the reins and gave them a gentle shake. Tom, he said, looking at the horses back, I'll see you later. I got to plan. I got to look around and come again after supper. Even then, who knows? Until then... He reached down and picked up a little set of Japanese wind-crystals. Hang these in his upstairs window. They make a nice cool music! Tom stood with the wind-crystals in his hands as the wagon rolled away. He held them up and there was no wind, they did not move. They could not make a sound. Seven oclock. The town resembled a vast hearth over which the shudderings of heat moved again and again from the west. Charcoal-colored shadows quivered outward from every house, every tree. A red-haired man moved along below. Tom, seeing him illumined by the dying but ferocious sun, saw a torch proudly carrying itself, saw a fiery fox, saw the devil marching in his own country. At seven-thirty Mrs. Spaulding came out of the back door of the house to empty some watermelon rinds into the garbage pail and saw Mr. Jonas standing there. 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. |
| 1216 |
Oh, we don't know whats wrong! Even if he's not awake, said Mr. Jonas, I'd like to talk to him. Sometimes the things you hear in your sleep are more important, you listen better, it gets through. I'm sorry, Mr. Jonas, I just cant take the chance. Mrs. Spaulding caught hold of the screen-door handle and held fast to it. Thanks. Thank you, anyway, for coming by. Yes, maam, said Mr. Jonas. He did not move. He stood looking up at the window above. Mrs. Spaulding went in the house and shut the screen door. Upstairs, on his bed, Douglas breathed. It was a sound like a sharp knife going in and out, in and out, of a sheath. At eight oclock the doctor came and went again shaking his head, his coat off, his tie untied, looking as if he had lost thirty pounds that day. At nine oclock Tom and Mother and Father carried a cot outside and brought Douglas down to sleep in the yard under the apple tree where, if there might be a wind, it would find him sooner than in the terrible rooms above. Then they went back and forth until eleven oclock, when they set the alarm clock to wake them at three and chip more ice to refill the packs. The house was dark and still at last, and they slept. At twelve thirty-five, Douglass eyes flinched. The moon had begun to rise. And far away a voice began to sing. It was a high sad voice rising and falling. It was a clear voice and it was in tune. You could not make out the words. The moon came over the edge of the lake and looked upon Green Town, Illinois, and saw it all and showed it all, every house, every tree, every prehistoric-remembering dog twitching in his simple dreams. And it seemed that the higher the moon the nearer and louder and clearer the voice that was singing. And Douglas turned in his fever and sighed. Perhaps it was an hour before the moon spilled all its light upon the world, perhaps less. But the voice was nearer now and a sound like the beating of a heart which was really the motion of a horses hoofs on the brick streets muffled by the hot thick foliage of the trees. |
| 1217 |
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. You don't even have to pretend to listen. But inside there, I know you hear me, and its old Jonas, your friend. Your friend, he repeated and nodded. He reached up and picked an apple off the tree, turned it round, took a bite, chewed, and continued. Some people turn sad awfully young, he said. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them. |
| 1218 |
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. 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. He saw bread waiting to be cut into slices of warm summer cloud, doughnuts strewn like clown hoops from some edible game. |
| 1219 |
Savory... that's a swell word. And Basil and Betel. Capsicum. Curry. All great. But Relish, now, Relish with a capital R. No argument, that's the best. Trailing veils of steam, Grandma came and went and came again with covered dishes from kitchen to table while the assembled company waited in silence. No one lifted lids to peer in at the hidden victuals. At last Grandma sat down, Grandpa said grace, and immediately thereafter the silverware flew up like a plague of locusts on the air. When everyones mouths were absolutely crammed full of miracles, Grandmother sat back and said, Well, how do you like it? And the relatives, including Aunt Rose, and the boarders, their teeth deliciously mortared together at this moment, faced a terrible dilemma. Speak and break the spell, or continue allowing this honey-syrup food of the gods to dissolve and melt away to glory in their mouths? They looked as if they might laugh or cry at the cruel dilemma. They looked as if they might sit there forever, untouched by fire or earthquake, or shooting in the street, a massacre of innocents in the yard, overwhelmed with effluviums and promises of immortality. 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. |
| 1220 |
The food was self-explanatory, wasnt it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasnt 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? 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. |
| 1221 |
Yes, yes, but what did you put in this Thursday Special? Why, said Grandma evasively, what does it taste like to you? Aunt Rose sniffed the morsel on the fork. Beef, or is it lamb? Ginger, or is it cinnamon? Ham sauce? Bilberries? Some biscuit thrown in? Chives? Almonds? that's it exactly, said Grandma. Second helpings, everyone? A great uproar ensued, a clashing of plates, a swarming of arms, a rush of voices which hoped to drown blasphemous inquiry forever, Douglas talking louder and making more motions than the rest. But in their faces you could see their world tottering, their happiness in danger. For they were the privileged members of a household which rushed from work or play when the first dinner bell was so much as clapped once in the hall. Their arrival in the dining room had been for countless years a sort of frantic musical chairs, as they shook out napkins in a white fluttering and seized up utensils as if recently starved in solitary confinement, waiting for the summons to fall downstairs in a mass of twitching elbows and overflow themselves at table. Now they clamored nervously, making obvious jokes, darting glances at Aunt Rose as if she concealed a bomb in that ample bosom that was ticking steadily on toward their doom. Aunt Rose, sensing that silence was indeed a blessing devoted herself to three helpings of whatever it was on the plate and went upstairs to unlace her corset. Grandma, said Aunt Rose down again. Oh what a kitchen you keep. Its really a mess, now, you must admit. Bottles and dishes and boxes all over, the labels off most everything, so how do you tell whatyou're using? I'd feel guilty if you didn't let me help you set things to rights while I'm visiting here. Let me roll up my sleeves. No, thank you very much, said Grandma. Douglas heard them through the library walls and his heart thumped. Its like a Turkish bath in here, said Aunt Rose. Lets have some windows open, roll up those shades so we can see what were doing. Light hurts my eyes, said Grandma. |
| 1222 |
I got the broom, I'll wash the dishes and stack them away neat. I got to help, now don't say a word. Go sit down, said Grandma. Why, Grandma, think how itd help your cooking. you're a wonderful cook, its true, but ifyou're this good in all this chaospure chaoswhy, think how fine youd be, once things were put where you could lay hands on them. I never thought of that... said Grandma. Think on it, then. Say, for instance, modern kitchen methods helped you improve your cooking just ten or fifteen per cent. Your menfolk are already pure animal at the table. This time next week they'll be dying like flies from overeating. Food so pretty and fine they won't be able to stop the knife and fork. You really think so? said Grandma, beginning to be interested. Grandma, don't give in! whispered Douglas to the Library wall. But to his horror he heard them sweeping and dusting, throwing out half-empty sacks, pasting new labels on cans, putting dishes and pots and pans in drawers that had stood empty for years. Even the knives, which had lain like a catch of silvery fish on the kitchen tables, were dumped into boxes. Grandfather had been listening behind Douglas for a full five minutes. Somewhat uneasily he scratched his chin. Now that I think of it, that kitchens been a mess right on down the line. Things need a little arrangement, no doubt. And if what Aunt Rose claims is true, Doug boy, itll be a rare experience at supper tomorrow night. Yes, sir, said Douglas. A rare experience. Whats that? asked Grandma. Aunt Rose took a wrapped gift from behind her back. Grandma opened it. A cookbook! she cried. She let it drop on the table. I don't need one of those! A handful of this, a pinch of that, a thimbleful of something else is all I ever use I'll help you market, said Aunt Rose. And while were at it, I been noticing your glasses, Grandma. You mean to say you been going around all these years peering through spectacles like those, with chipped lenses, all kind of bent? How do you see your way around without falling flat in the flour bin? |
| 1223 |
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. 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. |
| 1224 |
Aunt Rose, he said gravely, why don't we go for a walk right now? I'll show you the butterfly ravine just down that way. They walked together all around town. Douglas talked swiftly, nervously, not looking at her, listening only to the courthouse clock strike the afternoon hours. Strolling back under the warm summer elms toward the house, Aunt Rose suddenly gasped and put her hand to her throat. There, on the bottom of the porch step, was her luggage, neatly packed. On top of one suitcase, fluttering in the summer breeze, was a pink railroad ticket. The boarders, all ten of them, were seated on the porch stiffly. Grandfather, like a train conductor, a mayor, a good friend, came down the steps solemnly. Rose, he said to her, taking her hand and shaking it up and down, I have something to say to you. What is it? said Aunt Rose. Aunt Rose, he said. Good-bye. They heard the train chant away into the late afternoon hours. The porch was empty, the luggage gone, Aunt Roses room unoccupied. Grandfather in the library, groped behind E. A. Poe for a small medicine bottle, smiling. Grandma came home from a solitary shopping expedition to town. Wheres Aunt Rose? We said good-bye to her at the station, said Grandfather. We all wept. She hated to go, but she sent her best love to you and said she would return again in twelve years. Grandfather took out his solid gold watch. And now I suggest we all repair to the library for a glass of sherry while waiting for Grandma to fix one of her amazing banquets. Grandma walked off to the back of the house. Everyone talked and laughed and listenedthe boarders, Grandfather, and Douglas, and they heard the quiet sounds in the kitchen. When Grandma rang the bell they herded to the dining room, elbowing their way. Everyone took a huge bite. Grandma watched the faces of her boarders. Silently they stared at their plates, their hands in their laps, the food cooling, unchewed, in their cheeks. I've lost it! Grandma said. I've lost my touch... And she began to cry. |
| 1225 |
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. 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. |
| 1226 |
Inside, the boys bones felt like chalk and ivory instead of green mint sticks and licorice whips as earlier in the year. But the new cold touched Grandfathers skeleton first, like a raw hand chording the yellow bass piano keys in the dining room. As the compass turns, so turned Grandfather, north. I guess, he said, deliberating, we won't be coming out here anymore. And the three of them clanked the chains shaken down from the porch-ceiling eyelets and carried the swing like a weathered bier around to the garage, followed by a blowing of the first dried leaves. Inside, they heard Grandma poking up a fire in the library. The windows shook with a sudden gust of wind. Douglas, spending a last night in the cupola tower above Grandma and Grandpa, wrote in his tablet: Everything runs backward now. Like matinee films sometimes, where people jump out of water onto diving boards. Come September you push down the windows you pushed up, take off the sneakers you put on, pull on the hard shoes you threw away last June. People run in the house now like birds jumping back inside clocks. One minute, porches loaded, everyone gabbing thirty to a dozen. Next minute, doors slam, talk stops, and leaves fall off trees like crazy. He looked from the high window at the land where the crickets were strewn like dried figs in the creek beds, at a sky where birds would wheel south now through the cry of autumn loons and where trees would go up in a great fine burning of color on the steely clouds. Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle. Here in town the first few scarves of smoke unwound from chimneys and the faint faraway quaking of iron was the rush of black hard rivers of coal down chutes, building high dark mounds in cellar bins. But it was late and getting later. Douglas in the high cupola above the town, moved his hand. Everyone, clothes off! He waited. The wind blew, icing the windowpane. Brush teeth. |
| 1227 |
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. One dog became famous. Actually he and she was a group of dogs, but they became renowned collectively as Pavlov's Dog. The thing about Pavlov's Dog is that he or she or they responded mechanically to mechanically administered stimuli. Pavlov's Dog caused some of the domesticated primates, especially the scientists, to think that all dog behavior was equally mechanical. This made them wonder about other mammals, including themselves. Most primates ignored this philosophical challenge. |
| 1228 |
They went about their business assuming that they were not mechanical. The fact that plutonium was missing originally leaked to the press in the mid-1970s. At first there was a minor wave of panic among those given to worrying about such matters, and there was even some churlish grumbling about a government so incompetent that it couldn't keep track of its own weapons of megadeath. But then a year passed, and another, and soon five years had passed, and then nearly a decade; and the missing plutonium was still missing but nothing really drastic had happened. Terran primates, being a simpleminded, sleepful race, simply stopped worrying about the subject. The triggering mechanism of the most destructive weapon ever devised on that backward planet was in unknown hands, true; but that was really not much more unsettling to contemplate than the fact that many of the known hands which had enjoyed access to plutonium belonged to persons who were not in all respects reasonable men. (See Terran Archives: Reagan, Ronald Wilson, career of.) The primate philosophy of that epoch was summed up by one of their popular heroes, Mr. 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. |
| 1229 |
Schrodinger's Cat Fair Copy #3 appeared much later, in 2031, under mysterious circumstances. Some claimed, at the time, that it had been received by a trance medium to whom Wilson had "broadcast" it after his melodramatic departure from this world in 1993. Skeptics have always insisted that the alleged medium actually found it in an old tampon box in her attic. A legend about the manuscript being recovered from the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, after the earthquake of 2005, and passed around among adepts of certain occult groups, is probably mythical. Various alternative texts, generally considered forgeries, have circulated at intervals and many Wilson scholars debate heatedly whether this final ms. is, in fact, totally or even in major part Wilson's work. That two authors at least are here represented, often at cross-purposes with each other, is the emerging academic consensus at this time. The present edition incorporates all material that is undoubtedly Wilson's, together with matter of such a Wilsonian and weird character that the present editor regards it as probably-Wilson's-within-reasonable-doubt. It only remains to affirm that Schrodinger's Cat, contrary to appearances, is not a mere "routine" or "shaggy shoggoth story." Despite his sinister reputation and his well-known eccentricities, Wilson was one of the last of the scientific shamans of the primitive, terrestrial phase of the cruel, magnificent Unistat Empire. This may be hard to understand when many Establishment scholars still deny that anything like scientific shamanism existed in the twentieth century, but it is nevertheless well documented that Wilson, Leary, Lilly, Crowley, Castaneda, and many others pursued rigorous studies in scientific shamanic research even under the persecution of the "neurological police" so characteristic of that barbaric epoch.* Some have even proposed that Schrodinger's Cat is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated. |
| 1230 |
"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. By December 23 the London Economist printed a very scholarly article on world history from 1949, when Orwell's book was published, to the present, enumerating dozens of parallels between Orwell's fiction and the planet's nightmare. In Paris a prominent Existentialist, in an interview with Paris Soir, argued that living inside a book, even a book by an English masochist like Orwell, was better than living in reality. "Art has meaning but reality has none," he said cheerfully. The six-legged majority on Terra were never consulted when the domesticated primates set about building weapons that could destroy all life-forms on that planet. This was not unusual. The fish, the birds, the reptiles, the flowers, the trees, and even the other mammals weren't allowed to vote on this issue. Even the wild primates weren't involved in the decision to produce such weapons. In fact, the majority of domesticated primates themselves never had a say in the matter. A handful of alpha males among the leading predator bands among the domesticated primates had made the decision on their own. Everybody else on the planet-including the six-legged majority, who had never been involved in primate politics-just had to face the consequences. Most of the domesticated primates of Terra did not know they were primates. They thought they were something apart from and "superior" to the rest of the planet. Even Benny Benedict's "One Month to Go" column was based on that illusion. Benny had actually read Darwin once, in college a long time ago, and had heard of sciences like ethology and ecology, but the facts of evolution had never really registered on him. 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. |
| 1231 |
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. Benny Benedict's entire philosophy of life had been shaped by an obscene novel, a murder, and a Boston Cream Pie. The novel was called Odysseus and the most shocking thing about it, aside from the searing indecency of its language, was that it had been written by a famous theologian, Rev. Carl Gustav Jung of Zurich, Switzerland. Nobody had known what to make of the book when it was first published, except to fulminate against it. The story, in fourteen chapters, recounted fourteen hours in a very ordinary day as some staggeringly ordinary characters wandered about Zurich on extraordinarily ordinary business. When Jung revealed that the fourteen chapters corresponded to the fourteen Stations of the Cross, conservative critics added blasphemy to their charges against him. Later-much later-academic exegetes adopted Odysseus as the very model of a modern novel and wrote endless studies proving that it was an allegory on everything from the evolution of consciousness to the rise and fall of civilizations. Benny couldn't understand much of what these academic critics wrote, but he knew that Odysseus was, to him, the only book that really succeeded in making the daily seem profound. That was enough of an achievement to convince him that Jung was a genius. |
| 1232 |
It also encouraged him to look at everything that happened as being marvelous in one way or another. If Jung's characters, or some of them, happened to defecate, urinate, masturbate, and fornicate during the fourteen hours, that was not because the theologian was trying to write pornography, but because the miracle of daily life could not be shown without all of its daily details. 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. On the way she had her purse snatched and, according to witnesses, struggled with the thief. She was stabbed seventeen times with a Boy Scout knife. |
| 1233 |
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. 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. |
| 1234 |
*Galactic Archives: At the time of this story the Unistat government had 1,700 atomic bombs for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Since a person can die only once, historians have been at a loss to explain what the Unistaters expected to do with the surplus 1,699 bombs for each human being. Galactical primatologists inform us that similar irrational behavior has been observed among domesticated apes on several thousand planets. The six-legged majority on Terra had never developed Idealism or Cynicism, nor had they ever thought of sin or corruption. They had a simple, pragmatic outlook. People could be recognized because they all had six legs. Good people smelled right and were part of the same hive or colony. Bad people smelled wrong and were not part of the hive; they should be eaten at once, or driven off. Two-legged and four-legged critters weren't people at all and to hell with them. The four-legged residents of Terra were, for the most part, equally simpleminded. People had four legs. Six-legged critters were food, or else they were not worth noticing. Two-legged critters were dangerous, and should be avoided. Only the dogs, among all the four-legged Terrans, recognized the two-legged primates as being people. Some of the primates also recognized the dogs as being people. One-tenth of one percent of the domesticated primates recognized all the life-forms on their planet as people. The one-tenth of one percent of the primates who recognized non-primates as people were in violent disagreement with each other about everything else. About one-third of them were Mystics and suffered from Permanent Brain Damage brought on by fasting, yoga, or other masochistic practices. They had attained understanding of the Intelligence of all living beings through an ecstatic-agonizing experience of ego loss brought on by their masochistic excesses. They went around talking about this genetic Intelligence and calling it "God" and telling everybody it was too smart to make mistakes and incidentally talking a lot of nonsense, also brought on by their excesses. |
| 1235 |
Schrodinger didn't like quantum theory because it pictures an anarchist universe and he was a determinist, like his good friend Albert Einstein. Thus, even though he had helped to create quantum theory and used it every day, Schrodinger kept hoping to find something seriously wrong with it. The Cat problem presupposes a Cat, a device of lethal nature, such as a gun or a poison-gas pellet, and a quantum process which will, eventually, trigger the weapon and kill the Cat. Very simple. An experimenter, if he wanted to find out when the device had fired and killed the Cat, would look into the laboratory where all this was transpiring and note what actually happened. 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. |
| 1236 |
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. He would be in a burning jungle, running from helicopters that caused the burning. Or he would be in a temple with the eye-on-the-pyramid design practicing strange breathing exercises. Once he even had a name-Fed King-and he watched as one of his teachers burned himself to death in protest against the war. He was Fed Xing seeing through the eyes of Mountbatten Babbit. His monogamy, which he usually succeeded in maintaining fifty-one weeks of the year, was falling apart on him. |
| 1237 |
Remembering a lad of twelve having Ivanhoe rammed down his gullet by the Chicago public school system and walking out the door at 3:05 P. M. to mingle with the junkies, whores, pimps, thieves, and assorted varieties of revolutionaries (Black Panthers, Black P. Stone Rangers, acid-electrified Weatherpeople) who provided the real education in the Hyde Park neighborhood of the late 1960s. Remembering the assassinations of Malcolm and of Martin Luther King. Remembering the endless epic of Stackerlee and the famous couplet: I got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind. I'm a black motherfucker and I don't mind dyin'. Call this the first metaprogram. It led Hassan (then called F. D. R. Stuart) far outside the ghetto into an entirely new and different world. It was easy. By acting out the imperatives of the Stackerlee "black motherfucker" script, the boy earned a term in the Audy Home, an institution for the further training of apprentice outlaws who slash tires on police cars, heave bricks through school windows, peddle merchandise from stores without first purchasing them, and answer policemen's questions with "Fuck you, ya honky motherfuck'n cocksucker." F. D. R. Stuart received the standard Audy Home training, which consists of sophisticated expert coaching in: (a) sodomy; (b) sado-masochism; and (c) assorted crimes more lucrative than selling shoplifted merchandise. 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. |
| 1238 |
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. Then he realized that he was sobbing. "Oh, God," he said, a mind at the end of its tether. "Oh, God, God, God..." It was explained as a breakdown due to overwork. There was no psychiatrist; ambition forbade the risk, so a clinical psychologist of Behaviorist orientation was found, on the faculty of Northwestern University, and the visits were listed as consultation in social psychology for business management. Mounty and the psychologist defined Fed Xing as a hallucination caused by the negative conditioning of the pacifist pickets surrounding Weishaupt Chemicals. A method of deconditioning was worked out, using hypnosis and aversion therapy against all manifestations of the Fed Xing persona. The aversive stimulus was apomorphine, a non-addicting morphine derivative that provokes vomiting and sensations of death. At first Fed Xing would speak directly at these moments, begging and pleading, "Don't send me back to the flames..." Later he became defiant. "We'll be back, millions of us, from all over the Third World. Living in your fat white bodies. Running your corporations and bureaucracies. All through the seventies and eighties. |
| 1239 |
furbish lousewart V, Unsafe Wherever You Go While Dr. 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. In five minutes, totally silent, he was sure that there was nobody in any of the other rooms. He slowly raised himself again and found a perch in a redwood that commanded a view of the front yard and doorway. He waited. The music from the stereo drifted up to him. Peggy Lee was singing "My Funny Valentine." After waiting forty-five minutes, Starhawk descended again. Murphy was no longer in the living room. The shotgun was missing also. |
| 1240 |
It was all very mechanical-but that's the way planetside life is. *Terran Archives 2803: New York was a city-state or island in the midwestem part of the Unistat. It seems to have been a center of religious worship, and many came there to walk about, probably in deep meditation, within an enormous female statue, the goddess of these primitives. Various authorities identify this divinity as Columbia, Marilyn Monroe, Liberty, or Mother Fucker-all of these being names widely recorded in Unistat glyphs: Perhaps her true name will never be known. Benny felt a rush of nostalgia. The jingle had been popular in Brooklyn when he was a schoolboy in the antediluvian era of the 1930s. Back then, in the Dark Ages of Roosevelt II, many Brooklyn peddlers still had horse-drawn carts, and the horses, as is common with their species, left piles of horse shit in the streets as they went about their itineraries. Sparrows would peck in these steaming piles of dung for undigested oats, and a Brooklyn child would exclaim, on seeing this: Benny reflected that this little bit of kidlore had stuck in his memory for nearly half a century and that it must therefore contain some profound Meaning. He began pounding the Mac Plus, offering the birdie-turdie poemlet as a perfect example of an American haiku-the juxtaposition of two images, without comment by the author, in a way that suggested far more than it actually said. "Birds," Benny wrote, "are traditional symbols of beauty, from Bacon's nightingales to Keats's skylark, throughout our whole poetic tradition. Horse manure, on the other hand, is regarded with revulsion and loathing. Yet the sparrows, indifferent to human standards, blithely pick in the manure, seeking the food they know is there. The poem is telling us that human likes and dislikes are arbitrary, squinty-eyed, chauvinistic, and irrelevant to nature's own grand design strategy." Benny went on to assert that he had only been able to see this profundity in the jingle now, after he had spent six months meditating at the Manhattan Zen Center. |
| 1241 |
The man Blake Williams loved was Niels Bohr, the physicist who had chosen the Taoist yin-yang as his Coat of Arms when knighted by the Danish court-which was rather far out back in the 1930s (before Taoism became faddish with physicists). 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. But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time-the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health-claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. |
| 1242 |
Crazy she might be (but how could he judge? Maybe it was normal for rich people to act out any fantasy that struck them.), but unappetizing she definitely was not. Although she was the first live naked woman he had ever seen, she was no less strikingly golden and rounded than, say, a Pussycat Pussyette of the Month. A head of gloriously fiery red hair was spread on the pillow, and below it her supposedly sleeping face was lovely in its peaceful anticipation. His eyes swept over her rounded shoulders, the two snowy-white breasts rising and falling with her respiration, the cute nipples that stood in surprisingly large areolas upon those breasts, the soft pillow of her belly, and, best of all, the thick swatch of reddish fur that hid her sex. And she had legs like a chorus girl. She's waiting for me-for me! Markoff Chaney experienced true happiness. Boldly, he stepped forward and grabbed the orange-juice can. An opener lay beside it and he quickly punched two holes, his hands trembling a bit-when the lady's belly moved with her breathing, he felt his penis stir in the same rhythm. 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. |
| 1243 |
He picked Vlad Teppis-Vlad the Impaler-a fourteenth-century Hungarian religious fanatic who had executed 100,000 people for differing with his own extremely odd theological notions. Marvin's novel not only justified Vlad, but positively glorifed him; it was full of denunciations of liberalism, permissiveness, and the opponents of capital punishment. It also had the most violent rape scenes Marvin could conjure out of his misogynistic imagination. 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. Vlad thereupon had one of the monks impaled. |
| 1244 |
And Marvin Gardens, coked to the nines, is reading on and on with absolute absorption: Syngamy forms a zygote, which develops into a new diploid form, and the cycle begins anew Cycles that's it, he thinks excitedly, we're all permutations and combinations of that first amoeba every ejaculation another birthdeath or node in the everybranching whatchamacallit. Oh man this is heavy and I'm really grooving with it cycles in time great wheels turning like the Mayan calendar the genetic clock like music but oh shit maybe it's just the coke I still haven't figured out if the damn amoeba is immortal. But Malik is maintaining his cool, albeit with some effort. "So all right," he said aloud, facing the Eye unblinking, "are you just trying to scare me to death, or do you have a message for me?" Treat all of Them in a lofty way, lest They have cause to think thee weak, said Dr. Dee. "We better do the exorcism again," whispered Carol Christmas-nude, golden, and delicious-also maintaining her cool. Carol had a great deal of experience at maintaining her cool. Her career had been typical of self-directed Unistat females who matured in the early 1970s: one rape at age fifteen while hitchhiking (she never hitchhiked again); two abortions; husband #1, who turned out to be so free of Macho and the Male Stereotype that even God's Lightning couldn't accuse him of Chauvinism (he wept most pite-ously when Carol got tired of supporting him and threw him out); husband #2, who was brilliant, kind, generous, sensitive, and a junky; a succession of mediocre lovers, with one or two she still treasured in memory but wouldn't want to live with again for all the tea in Acapulco; producers who believed that an actress as gorgeous as she should only be cast in roles that justified getting all her clothes off sometime during the third act and several times in their private offices; husband #3, who had put the goddamned loa on her when they separated; and Ronnie "Ronnie is doing very well for a special child," the doctor had told her the last time she visited the home. |
| 1245 |
Everything in the novel was inevitable, as everything in the supercontinuum containing the novel was inevitable. And yet Simon had escaped from the novel. Although not a member of the Warren Belch Society, Simon Moon was, of course, aware of the theory that there was a universe somewhere in which Bacon's major works were still attributed to somebody else. Simon, naturally, was not imaginative enough to conceive that in that universe Bacon had died of pneumonia while conducting experiments in refrigeration. In Simon's usual universe, the author of Novum Organum, The New Atlantis, King Lear, etc., had lived on to discover the inverse-square law of gravitation, and Isaac Newton was remembered only as a somewhat eccentric astrologer. In another novel, midway between the old universe and the new, Simon himself had been shot dead by a Chicago cop during the Democratic Convention of 1968. Over there, Bacon had been bold enough to admit publicly his high rank in the Invisible College (Illuminati) and had been beheaded by James I for heresy. In that universe, not just civilization, but all life on Terra, came to a very hideous end in 1984, because the President was constipated one day and made the wrong decision. Their technology was so advanced that half the solar system went nova along with Earth. In the next universe Simon explored, we were saved because a red-haired Tantric Engineer named Babs Lashtal gave the Prez a first-class Grade-A blow job in the Oval Room at 10 A. M., relaxed his tense muscles, pacified his glands, soothed his frustrations, and inspired him to act relatively sane for the rest of the day. He did not push the button, thereby preserving millions of species of living forms on Earth and thousands of microscopic species on Venus. Babs Lashtal, of course, was regarded with contempt by all right-thinking people, who had no idea that they owed their lives to her skillful extraction of presidential spermatozoa by means of tender, gentle, gracefully rhythmic kissing, licking, and sucking of the presidential wand. |
| 1246 |
Even if they had known about it, the right-thinking people would still say Babs should be ashamed of herself. The whole novel was rather didactic, Simon decided. It was written only to prove a point: Never underestimate the importance of a blow job. It had been necessary to write such a novel because the people over there were so ignorant and superstitious they still called Tantric Engineers "whores" and other degrading names. Every universe is inevitable; but there are as many universes as there are probability matrices. The Metapro-grammer chooses which universe he will enter. There is a love that binds it all together, and that love is expressed in primate language as the love of a parent for a child, so Simon was not surprised to find Tim Moon pervading everything, or at least a kind of continuous Tim Moon potential that could be encoded again in another book or that could remain latent for long times, vaguely permeating every book. There were hundreds of thousands of other Wobs there, Frank Little and Joe Hill and Pat Murfin and Neal Rest and Big Bill Heywood and they were all singing like an outlaw Hallelujah Chorus: Though cowards cringe and traitors sneer We'll keep the Black Flag flying here and Dad himself spoke to me, I swear it, saying, "Just tell them this, son: Capitalism is still nothing but a shit sandwich. The more bread you have, the less shit you've got to eat, and the less bread you have, the more shit you've got to eat. Tell them all." And yet that seems to mark the experience as brain-generated: the style is Simon-pwer not Tim-pater even if the idea is most certainly something old Tim Moon would want to communicate. A collaboration perhaps between the part of Tim Moon that lives on in Simon's memory banks and the part that lives eternally in the Mind of the Author of Our Being. "Hey, wait, before you turn the page and get into the next section, I want to say one more thing. Those faucets on the sink mean something. Every time I stare at them in deep meditation I almost remember something important. |
| 1247 |
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. 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. |
| 1248 |
Case did not suspect any of this. He loved his J. F. K. file. He was convinced that someday the crucial piece would come to him, he would insert it into the file, and the whole jigsaw would make sense. He never realized that the one detail which gave everything away was that while Oswald was firing from the sixth-floor window he was also having a Coke on the second floor and mingling with the crowd in the street. Like most liberals, Justin Case lacked imagination and never took seriously all the evidence of extraterrestrial activity on earth during the past forty years. Case was currently having an affair with the Hollywood actress Carol Christmas. Carol was renowned among the heterosexual male population for having the biggest Brownmillers since Jayne Mansfield; so far only women and a few Gay men had noticed that she could also act. Carol had been married four times. She had had three abortions. Like other famous Beauties, she was always dieting, and hence, a little bit high-strung. She was also a disciple of General E. A. Crowley, the eccentric English explorer who had discovered the North Pole and claimed there was a hole there leading down to the center of the Earth. Carol devoutly believed Crowley's yarn that there was a whole civilization down there, inside the Earth, run by green-skinned women. Carol believed this because she had a great artistic faith in the principle of balance. In her probability continuum-in the series of quantum eigenstates that had crystalized into her universe-the whole outside of the planet seemed to be run by white-skinned males. It was only fair that the inside should be run by green-skinned females. Carol was having three other affairs at the same time as her amour with Justin Case. There was a hairdresser in Hollywood (bi, not Gay) who was very talented at Bryanting and Briggsing-two arts at which totally straight men, in Carol's opinion, were usually a bit clumsy. There was also Fran9ois Loup-Garou, the painter, in Paris, who adored her madly, as only a painter can adore a woman. |
| 1249 |
And there was a bitter but brilliant Black novelist in Chicago named Franklin Stuart. Justin Case knew all about these other amours; after all, he read Bonny Benedict's column every day. Bonny kept the world informed about which celebrities were Potter Stewarting each other. She did this in a way that was perfectly clear to every reader but totally without any clear meaning in a court of law, in case somebody got irritated and tried to sue her. What she did was to write something like "Hollywood sexpot Carol Christmas and Black novelist Frank Stuart are an item these days." Everybody knew what "an item" meant. When Bonny wrote that a couple were "a hot item" many of her readers were mildly puzzled, but assumed she was insinuating some fantastic sexual acrobatics. Actually, it only meant that Bonny was trying to avoid stylistic monotony; occasionally, she even switched it to "a torrid item," which led to even more lascivious fantasies for some of her readers. Justin Case didn't object to Carol Christmas's other affairs because he accepted it as a fact of life that actors are hypersexed, just as coal miners are prone to black lung disease and novelists to booze and weird drugs. Besides, jealousy was a sign of possessiveness, and possessiveness was illiberal. And, anyway-as he usually concluded his ruminations on this subject, during the infrequent moments when he thought of it at all-Carol's career kept them apart most of the time, and he was not so naive as to expect somebody of her youth and beauty to resist all temptations. And it was the 1980s, wasn't it? Actually, Case was a bit of an unconscious psychic-that is, he was aware of quantum probability waves, although not consciously. He sensed that there were approximately 1050 universes in which he had lusted after Carol and never got into her Frankel even once. That unconscious psychic knowledge kept him content with this universe, where he was her part-time lover. Carol Christmas had starred in the first hard-core porn movie to win the Academy Award, Deep Mongolian Steinem Job. |
| 1250 |
I know this is hopeless because even though I've written a novel about Vlad the Impaler and made lots of money, I'm still very shy with women. (Some of them are extraterrestrials, I have discovered.) Why did God make such an unjust universe? Can you help me? Dr. Dashwood frowned thoughtfully, then scrawled, 'Send this nut the see-a-psychiatrist letter." Dum de dum de dum de. Next! Dr. Orgasm R. Institute Frank Dashwood 666 Malaclypse San Francisco, Calif. Dear Dr. Institute: We are sending you this personalized letter because we know that a man like you, Dr. Institute, cares about his investments and wants to know the facts about Inflation. Next! (And remember: look up that Zelenka.) Dear Dr Dashwood, I am a paraplegic and therefore I am incapable of normal coitus. My sweetheart and I, fortunately, have found that oral sex satisfies us fully-I Marshall her Frankel and then she gives me a Steinem Job. But this creates a terrible legal conundrum, since she lives across the Mississippi River in Iowa and I am a citizen of Illinois. Iowa has a very strict law against oral sex, which they classify as sodomy (due to a mistranslation of the Old Testament, I believe). Thus, we can't have sex in Iowa. Now, Illinois has had no anti-sodomy statutes since the 1960s, so you might think our problem can be solved by having sex in Illinois. Unfortunately, she can't afford to quit her job in Iowa, and thus every time she travels across the river to have sex with me, she is crossing a state line, which makes me vulnerable under the Mann Act. Is there any possible solution to this legal double-bind? Dr. Dashwood was intrigued. He began thinking of topological transformations, non-Euclidean geometries, Wheeler's wormholes in superspace... 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. |
| 1251 |
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. 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. |
| 1252 |
Father Starhawk had served three terms himself, for passively resisting Unistat's wars against Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the People's Republic of Hawaii. Like all Stephenites, he wrote the familiar lapel button with a photo of Pope Stephen, the famous black patch over his blind eye, and the sainted Pope's famous remark, "What-me infallible?" Pope Stephen had totally revolutionized the Catholic Church during his brief five-year reign. Indeed, as the French feminist Jeanne Paulette Sartre said, "This one man has single-handedly turned the most reactionary church on this planet into the most progressive." It was due to Pope Stephen that the "social gospel," previously preached only by a minority of far-out Jesuits and worker-priests, became the official Vatican policy. By being the first to denounce Hitler and Mussolini, and excommunicating their supporters, Pope Stephen had knowingly risked the biggest rupture within the Church since the time of Luther; but, while nearly 30 percent of the Catholics in Germany and Italy continued to follow their national leaders, over 70 percent obeyed the Pope, and both dictators fell from power. Adolf Hitler became a portrait painter again; and Benito Mussolini, deprived of power, returned to his early belief in anarchism and spent his declining years writing fiery journalism against all those who did manage to achieve and hold on to political power. At the time of Pope Stephen's death in 1940, it was estimated that the wealth of the Vatican was less than 10 percent of what it had been when he took the Chair of Peter, but its prestige about 1,000 percent higher. The Pope had spent 90 percent of the Vatican's wealth in projects for the abolition of poverty, disease, and ignorance. Many regarded him as a saint, but Pope Stephen always tried to discourage that view. He ended every conversation with "I am a sinner, also," which became a habit with Stephenites: Father Starhawk, for instance, ended all his conversations that way, and also used it for the tag line of all his theological articles and his private correspondence. |
| 1253 |
Because of the liberality of his sexual views, the Irish Pope was still controversial among conservative Catholics, who claimed he was a pervert and were forever trying to have him posthumously excommunicated. They also spread rumors about his private life, which had gained so much currency that whenever his name was mentioned somebody would mutter "garters, garters, garters." Pope Stephen's whole philosophy was derived from a single sentence in Aquinas: Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas. Which may be rendered: Three things are required for beauty: wholeness, harmony, radiance. It was Stephen's thought that the universe, as the product of a Great Artist, must be comprehensible in terms of integritas, consonantia, claritas-wholeness, harmony, radiance. Why, then, he asked himself, does it not appear so to the ordinary human mind? The only answer he could find was that we are not paying attention. We have not learned to observe closely enough. We do not have the Artist's eye for detail. And so Pope Stephen paid very close attention to everything that entered his field of perception. At the time of the Irish Pope's death in 1940, obituary writers all over the world compared him to every saint and sage in history: Buddha, Whitman, Plotinus, Rumi, Dante, Eckhart, John of Arc, St. Terrence of Avilla, and so on, and on; but the one who came closest to categorizing how Stephen's mind worked was an obscure Canadian professor of literature who wrote, "The only mind in history comparable to Stephen's was that of a fictitious character-Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street." Like Tobias Knight, Pope Stephen had spent all his life "trying to find out what the hell was really going on," although he never expressed it that way. He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on. The Stephenites called themselves "Seekers of the Real" and were always watching very closely to see what was going on. |
| 1254 |
At first His Eminence refused to speak to the press at all, but finally, by the time some scandal sheets were claiming that Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god of Khem, had appeared on the altar bellowing Cthulhu fthagn!, the Archbishop issued a terse statement through his Press Secretary. "Nothing untoward happened. His Eminence merely tripped on the altar rug, and any further discussion would be futile." This merely fanned the flames of Rumor, of course. One legend circulated even more than the others, perhaps because it appealed to prurient interest, or maybe just because it was the version given by a few people who had actually been in the Cathedral during Mass. According to this yarn, a miraculous flying Rehnquist- just like the ones in the murals at Pompeii, except that it didn't have wings-had soared across the front of the church, barely missing His Eminence's high episcopal nose. The judicious, of course, did not credit this wild rumor. They were all coming around, as the judicious usually do, to the view of the cynics. The Archbishop, they said, had been stewed to the gills. His Eminence was no fool, however. After the first shock, he had begun his own investigation, aided by a few trusted deacons. They found the slingshot, abandoned, on the floor of the first pew, to the right. That was the direction the Rehnquist had come from, and they all breathed a sigh of relief. The Archbishop told them, then, the rumors he had heard about the incident of the Unistat Ambassador who had to be put on morphine after finding It, wrapped in pink ribbon, on a staircase. "We are dealing with a deranged mind," His Eminence said, "but not with anything 'supernatural,' thank God." They never found the Rehnquist, but as the Archbishop pointed out, "the perpetrator may have confederates." Everybody tried to remember who had been sitting in the extreme right of the first pew. They carefully made up a list, including everybody's separate memories, half-memories, or pseudo-memories. |
| 1255 |
The Discordians believed that God was a Crazy Woman. For the Woman part of it, they used the usual Taoist and Feminist arguments about the Creative Force being dark, female, subtle, fecund, and in every way opposite to Male Authoritarianism. For the Crazy part, they pointed to Pickering's Moon, which goes around backward, to rains of crabs and periwinkles and live snakes, to the paradoxes of quantum theory, and to the religious and political behavior of humanity itself, all of which, they claimed, demonstrated that the fabric of reality was a mosaic of chaos, confusion, deception, delusion, and Strange Loops. And, Drest knew, they were definitely linked with the Network. Although computer specialists only spoke of the Network in whispers, the Company had a detailed file on them. The Network was devoted to the long-suppressed, much persecuted, but persistent underground religion of cocaine founded by the eccentric physician Sigmund Freud. They devoutly believed in the literal truth of Freud's vision of the Superman. ("What is man? A bridge between the primate and the superman-a bridge over an abyss," Freud wrote in his Diary of a Hope Fiend.) To achieve the Superman, the Network was systematically frustrating every other group of conspirators on the planet by glitching the computers, and meanwhile diverting funds from legitimate activities to subsidize dissident scientists engaged in research on immortality and higher intelligence. "Cocaine is a memory of the future" was the sick slogan of this misguided group of deranged intellectuals. "Our minds will function as ecstatically as on cocaine, without the jitters, once we achieve immortality and learn to repro-gram our brains as efficiently as we reprogram our computers," they went on. "When we don't have to die and can constantly increase our awareness of detail," they also said, "we will have no more problems, only adventures." Naturally, every government in the world, even the near-anarchistic Free Market maniacs in Russia, had outlawed this bizarre cult. |
| 1256 |
Gebloomenkraft or had acquired it from some go-between. Lady Sybiline was an eccentric, even for the British nobility. She was so far to the right, politically, that she regarded the Magna Carta as dangerously radical. She was so High Church that she referred to Charles I as "Saint Charles the Martyr." She hunted lions, in Africa, and was a crack shot. She was also, secretly, president of the Sappho Society, the group of aristocratic Lesbians who had secretly governed England, behind the scenes, since their founder, Elizabeth I. Lady Sybiline and her good and intimate friend, Lady Rose Potting-Shedde, evidently found great amusement, between them, with the Rehnquist, for they even took it with them when Lady Sybiline embarked, that summer, for her annual lion hunt in Kenya. 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. |
| 1257 |
Every time a bank made a loan on money they didn't actually have, they were creating money. Most of the people who knew about this (aside from the bankers) went paranoid worrying about it. This was because they did not realize how much of their Reality was created in similarly occult ways. The Federal Reserve made it possible for other banks to loan what they didn't have. The Fed "guaranteed" the credit of the banks. The Fed was able to make this guarantee because it had lots of credit itself, in the form of government bonds. The government bonds were good because they were guaranteed by loans from the Fed. The loans from the Fed were guaranteed because the government gave them bonds. And this was safe, because the bonds (remember) were guaranteed by the Fed. That's why Clem Cotex laughed for half an hour when he finally figured out the Unistat economy. The Communists had instituted this monetary policy because it made virtually all commerce dependent on money that didn't exist. The Communists had abandoned pure Marxism in 1904 and were now following a system based partly on Marx and partly on traditional shamanism. The whole Communist movement had secretly been taken over, in 1904, by General E. A. Crowley, the famous explorer. Crowley had learned a lot from the tribal shamans in the "backward" parts of the world he frequented. Chiefly, he had learned that the universe is created by the participation of its participants. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hand-picked by General Crowley to manage the Communist takeover of Unistat. Crowley picked Roosevelt chiefly because of his radio voice. The agreement was simple: Crowley would keep Roosevelt supplied with women-"That crip Casanova never gets enough," he was soon complaining-and Roosevelt, in turn, introduced Nasrudin's magic wand to political economy. Even though many clear-sighted, patriotic citizens saw through Roosevelt and warned, repeatedly, that he was leading the country to communism, the majority paid no heed to these voices of reason. |
| 1258 |
Pickering's Moon circled the Earth, going backward. And still the Punks came: the Chocolate Mouse, the Tax Writeoff, the Welfare Bums, the Primal Scream, Baphomet's Witnesses, the Black Rabbit of Inle, the Vegetables, the Fruits, the Nuts, the First Church of Satan Scientist, the Tantric Presbyterians, the Huns, the Creatures from the Back Ward, the Special Children, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Looters, the Shooters, the Scooters, the Peanut Butter Conspiracy Revisited, the Thousand Kim, the Seeds of Discord, the Benton Harbor Rat-Weasel, the Bloodshot Pyramid, the Wascal Wabbits, Crescendo, the Diabolic Variations, Skinnerball, the Committee for the Elimination of Death, the Weird Made Flesh, the Poor Golems, the Wretched Refuse, the Alluminum Bavariati, the Double Helix, the Goons, the Thugs, the Teeming Shore, the Unnatural Act, the Solitary Vice, the Morose Delectation, the Wrist Slashers, the Window Jumpers, the Kryptonite Kids, the Stay-Free Mini-Pads, the Elect Cohens, the Corpse-Eaters of Leng, the Miniature Sled, the Hash Brownies, the Boston Blackies, Kadath in the Cold Waste, the Neanderthal Tails, the Giant Slugs, the Sloths, the Disadvantaged Youth, the Albert de Salvo Fan Club, the Dead Kennedys, the Molotov Cocktails, and, loudest and most eldritch of all, Great Cthulhu's Starry Wisdom Band. And overall there was a smell of fried onions. ???? Hierusalem, my happy home ???? When shall I come to thee? ???? When shall my sorrows have an end, ???? Thy joys when shall I see? ???? ???? Thy walls are made of precious stones ???? They bulwarks diamonds square ???? Thy gates are of bright orient pearl ???? Exceeding rich and rare ???? ???? There trees for evermore bear fruit ???? And evermore do spring; ???? There evermore the angels sit ???? And evermore do sing ???? ???? Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem ???? Would God I were in thee! ???? Would God my woes were at an end ???? Thy joys that I might see It was dark in the room. His mother sang that song. She wore a perfume that smelled like lily-of-the-valley. |
| 1259 |
And in that lucidity he knew that he had been lying to himself for months, pretending not to notice what was happening to his body as it gradually terminated its basic functions, fearful of looking straight at Death; but now, in that lucidity, looking at it and seeing that it was just another of the millions of things that Wing Lee Chee (who was so rich and powerful) could not do anything about; but now, in that lucidity and objectivity, looking far down at this particular galaxy, this insignificant solar system, this temporary city, this house that a strong wind could blow away, this absurd old man who was rich and powerful but could not command the tides or alter the paths of the stars, it was all suddenly a great joke and every little detail made sense. For, in this new lucidity and objectivity and selfless perspective, he did not giggle or weep or feel dazed, but only smiled, very slightly, knowing he would soon lose this body, which was like an old run-down car, and this central nervous system, which was like a tired and increasingly incompetent driver, and the meta-programmer in the higher nervous centers which gave him this perspective, because out here beyond space-time he simply did not give a damn about that life, that planet, or that universe anymore. So, as he very slowly came down, contracted, into Euclidean 3-D again, he was aware of every amusing, poignant, radiant little detail, the wholeness and the harmony and the luminosity of it all, knowing how richly he would enjoy every last minute of it, now that it didn't matter to him anymore. The next day he called the office and told his secretary he wouldn't be in. Then he took a long walk, enjoying every bird, every flower, every blade of grass, every radiant detail, and getting a bit winded-another sign that the car was running down-and finally taking a cab to Ying Kaw Foy's house. She wept when he told her, but he smiled and joked and chided her out of it. "I may be one of the last men to die," he said when she was calm. |
| 1260 |
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. For most of the people passing nearby, seeing the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor was a once-in-a-lifetime event, one of many over the last few days, that would be recounted back in their homelands for years to come. Guards of the First File stood not far away, also watching attentively, but they mostly watched the nearby crowds shuffling through the market. The soldiers wanted to make sure that those crowds didn't close in too tightly, even though there was no real reason to expect any sort of trouble. |
| 1261 |
Spring had arrived, but so far it had proven to be more promise than substance. The woman smoothed back stray strands of brown and gray hair at her temple, apparently wanting to look presentable for potential customers. By the milky film over her eyes, the way her head tilted up without facing anyone accurately, and her searching movements, Richard knew that the woman couldn't see him or Kahlan. Only her hearing would be of any help in taking in the grandeur all around her. Out beyond where the woman sat, one of the many bridges in the palace crossed the hall at a second-floor level. Clutches of people engaged in conversation strolled across the bridge while others stood at the marble balusters, gazing down on the vast passageway below, some watching Richard and Kahlan and their accompanying contingent of guards. Many in the thick crowds of people strolling the expansive corridors of the palace were visitors who had come for the festivities of the day before. Though the People's Palace was more or less under one roof, it was really a city tightly clustered atop a lone, immense plateau rising up out of the Azrith Plain. Since the palace was the ancestral home of the Lord Rahl, parts of it were off-limits to the public, but most of the expansive complex was home to thousands of others. There were living quarters for people of every sort, from officials to merchants, to craftsmen, to workers, with other areas set aside for visitors. The sprawling public corridors linked the city palace together and provided access to it all. Not far from the woman sitting against the wall, a shop window displayed bolts of cloth. Throughout the palace there were shops of every sort. Down inside the plateau hundreds more rooms provided everything from quarters for soldiers to yet more shops for residents and visitors alike. The narrow road rising along the side of the plateau that Richard and Kahlan had ridden up after visiting the market was the fastest way up to the People's Palace, but it was narrow and in places treacherous, so the public was not allowed to use it. |
| 1262 |
You know Zedd and how he gets." Kahlan smiled a bit. Richard knew all too well what Rikka meant. While Cara had for years been close to Richard and Kahlan, ever watchful and protective of them, Rikka had spent a great deal of time with Zedd at the Wizard's Keep. She had become familiar with how Zedd frequently thought the simplest things were urgent. Richard thought that Rikka, in her own way, had taken a liking to Zedd and felt protective of him. He was, after all, still First Wizard as well as the grandfather to the Lord Rahl. Even more important, she knew how much Richard cared about him. "All right, Rikka. Let's go see what Zedd is all wound up about." He started to take a step, but the old woman sitting on the floor tugged his pant leg to stop him. "Lord Rahl," she said, trying to pull him closer, "I would not ask for payment from you, especially since I am but a humble guest in your home. Please, take your silver back with my appreciation for the gesture." "It was a bargain struck," Richard said in a tone meant to reassure her. "You held up your part. I owe you payment for your words about the future." She let her hand slip from its grip of his pants. "Then heed the omen, Lord Rahl, for it is true." Following Rikka deep into the private, warmly paneled corridors of the palace, Kahlan spotted Zedd standing with Cara and Benjamin at a window overlooking a small courtyard at the bottom of a deep pocket formed by the stone walls of the palace that rose up out of sight. A simple, unadorned door not far beyond the window provided access to an atrium where a small plum tree grew beside a wooden bench sitting on a stone pad surrounded by lush green ivy. As small as the room was, it still brought a welcome bit of the outdoors and daylight into the deep interior of the palace. Kahlan was relieved to be away from the public corridors, away from the constant gazes that were always on them. She felt a profound sense of calm as Richard slipped his arm around her waist, pulling her close for a moment. |
| 1263 |
He laid his head atop hers as she leaned in toward him. It was a moment of closeness that they didn't generally feel comfortable allowing themselves when in public view. Cara, wearing her white leather outfit, stood gazing out the window into the courtyard. Her single blond braid was perfectly done. Her red Agiel, the weapon carried by Mord-Sith that always hung at the ready by a fine chain on their wrists, stood out against the white leather like a bloodstain on a snow white tablecloth. An Agiel, looking like nothing more than a short leather rod, was just as lethal as the women who carried them. Benjamin had on a crisp general's uniform and wore a gleaming silver sword at his hip. The sword was no ceremonial accessory. Countless times Kahlan had seen how commanding he was in combat, seen his heart. She had been the one who had appointed him a general. Kahlan had expected that Cara and Benjamin might be dressed casually. They were not. They both looked ready for the war that was over. She supposed that as far as both of them were concerned, there was never an excuse to relax their guard. Both their lives were devoted to the protection of Richard, the Lord Rahl. Of course, the man they guarded was far more lethal than either of them. Dressed in his black and gold war-wizard outfit, Richard looked every bit the part of the Lord Rahl. But he was more than that. At his hip he wore the Sword of Truth, a singular weapon meant for a singular individual. Yet despite the weapon's power, it was the individual behind it that was the true weapon. That was what really made him the Seeker, and what made the Seeker so formidable. "Were they watching all night?" Zedd was asking as Kahlan and Richard came to a halt beside Richard's grandfather. Cara's face turned nearly as red as her Agiel. "I don't know," she growled, still glaring out the window. "It was my wedding night and I was otherwise occupied." Zedd smiled politely. "Of course." He glanced over at Richard and Kahlan to greet them with a brief smile. |
| 1264 |
He supposed that he knew how Zedd felt. Even though there was peace, he couldn't help worrying, either. Richard was worried about what Cara had said, that someone had been watching them. 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. "That real prophecies repeat themselves. That they resurface to reinforce the validity of the prophecy. That they repeat themselves to remind people of the prophecy, so to speak." Zedd gazed out at the crowd for a time before answering. "I'm not a prophet. My gift does not manifest itself in that way. |
| 1265 |
Her calm manner and authoritative demeanor made them confident in the truth of what she said. A number of the officials reminded her that in the Midlands most of the lands were formally represented in Aydindril, sometimes with rulers of the lands spending extended periods of time there, sometimes with emissaries and representatives, but there were always officials of some sort at hand so the different lands could always be involved in the decisions of the council or in matters of setting laws. Kahlan assured them that the People's Palace was now the formal seat of power in the D'Haran Empire, so there would be similar arrangements made for them and their representatives to have permanent quarters from where they could participate in the shaping of their common future. Everyone seemed not merely relieved to hear this, but genuinely pleased. Kahlan was used to being in command and carried her power with an easy grace. She had grown up mostly alone because, as a Confessor, she had grown up being feared. When Richard had first met her he saw people tremble in her presence. In the past people saw only the terrifying power she wielded, not the nature of the woman behind that power, but in the time she and Richard had fought on behalf of these people, she had come to be admired and respected. People had come to look up to her. At the most inopportune moment, in the midst of Kahlan's answers to questions, Nathan marched up behind Richard, took hold of his arm, and pulled him back a little. "I need to speak with you." Kahlan paused in her answer about an ancient boundary dispute. She had been telling people that there was nothing to dispute; they were all now part of the D'Haran Empire and it didn't really matter where a meaningless line was drawn on a map. As she fell silent, every eye went to the tall prophet. They all knew who he was. Richard noticed that Nathan had the book End Notes in hand, with one finger acting as a placeholder in the book. "What is it?" Richard asked in a low voice as he took several steps back from the suddenly silent crowd watching him. |
| 1266 |
Everyone seemed to relax a bit, as if having just pulled back from the brink. Out of the corner of his eye to the right, Richard saw the blue robes of one of the serving women coming up on the far side of Kahlan. The woman gently laid her left hand on Kahlan's forearm as if wanting to speak to her confidentially. That, more than anything, was what got Richard's attention. People didn't just come up and casually lay a hand on the Mother Confessor. As she came around and turned in toward Kahlan, Richard saw the haunted look in the woman's eyes and the blood down the front of her robes. He was already moving when he saw the knife in her other hand sweeping around toward Kahlan's chest. Time itself seemed to stop. Richard recognized all too well the eternal emptiness between the heartbeats of time, that expectant void before the lightning ignition of power. He was a step too far away to stop the woman in time, yet he also knew that he was too close for what was about to happen. It was already out of his hands and there was nothing he could do about it. Life and death hung in that instant of time. Kahlan could not afford to hesitate. His instinct to turn away tensed his muscles even though he was well aware that nothing he could do would be fast enough. The sea of people stood wide-eyed, frozen in shock. Several Mord-Sith in red leather had already begun to leap a distance that Richard knew they could never make in time. He saw Cara's red Agiel beginning to spin up into her hand, soldiers' hands going for swords, and Zedd's hand lifting to cast magic. Richard knew that not one of them had a chance to make it in time. At the center of it all, Richard saw the woman holding Kahlan's forearm down out of the way as the bloody knife in her other hand arced around toward Kahlan's chest. In that instant everyone had only begun to move. Into that silent void in time, thunder without sound suddenly ignited. Time crashed back in a headlong rush as the force of the concussion exploded through the confined space of the banquet hall. |
| 1267 |
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. Richard doubted that any of them would ever forget it as long as they lived. "Bags, that hurts," Zedd muttered as he sat up rubbing his elbows and rolling his shoulders. As Richard's vision and mind cleared from the needle-sharp stab of pain that had instantly stitched its way through every joint in his body, he saw that the woman had left a bloody handprint on the sleeve of Kahlan's white dress. Kneeling there before the Mother Confessor, the woman didn't look at all like an assassin. |
| 1268 |
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. 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. |
| 1269 |
He was sure that it wouldn't be long before the Azrith Plain was in the grip of a spring blizzard. They were going to have guests at the palace for a while. "Down this way," Nathan said as he gestured through a double set of doors to the right. They led out of the private areas and into the service passageways used by workers and those who lived at the palace. People in the halls, workers of every sort, moved to the side as they encountered the procession. Everyone, it seemed, gave Richard and the two wizards with him worried looks. No doubt the word of the trouble had already been to every corner of the vast palace and back three times over. Everyone would know about it. By the looks on the somber faces he saw, people were no longer in a celebratory mood. Someone had tried to kill the Mother Confessor, Lord Rahl's wife. Everyone loved Kahlan. Well, he thought, not everyone. But most people sincerely cared about her. They would be horrified by what had happened. Now that peace had returned, people had come to feel an expectant joy about what the future might hold. There was a growing sense of optimism. It seemed like everything was possible and that better days were ahead. This new fixation on prophecy threatened to destroy all that. It had already ended the lives of two children. Richard recalled Zedd's words that there was nothing as dangerous as peacetime. He hoped his grandfather was wrong. Richard and Zedd followed Nathan into a narrow hallway lit by a window at the end. It led them through a section of quarters where many of the palace staff lived. With its whitewashed, plastered walls and a wood plank floor that had been worn down from a millennium of traffic, the passageway was simpler than even the service hallways. Most doors, though, were decorated with painted flowers, or country scenes, or colorful designs, giving each place an individual, homey feel. "Here," Nathan said as he touched a door with a stylized sun painted on it. When Richard nodded, Nathan knocked. |
| 1270 |
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. 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. |
| 1271 |
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. Carefully, quietly, she slipped her legs over the side of the bed. Without making a sound she stood. She waited, listening, her whole body tense and ready. Kahlan stared so hard into the dark corner at the far end of the room that it made her eyes hurt. It felt like someone was staring back. She tried to tell where it felt like they could be hiding, but she couldn't come up with a direction. If she could sense someone watching, but wasn't able to sense where they were, then it had to be her imagination. "Enough of this," she said under her breath. With deliberate strides she walked to the dressing table. The heel-strikes of the laced boots she hadn't felt like taking off echoed softly back from the dark end of the room. Standing at the dressing table, watching, she turned up the wick on the lamp. It threw mellow light into the darkness. There was no one there. In the mirror she saw only herself standing half naked with a knife gripped in her fist. Just to be sure, she walked resolutely to the end of the room. She found no one there. She looked to the far side of the drapes and glanced behind the big pieces of furniture. There was no one there, either. How could there be? Richard had checked the room before he had taken her in. She had watched as he had looked everywhere while trying not to look like he was looking. Cara and soldiers stood guard as Kahlan had rested. No one could have entered. She turned to the tall, elaborately carved wardrobe and pulled open the heavy doors. Without hesitation she lifted out a clean dress and pulled it on. |
| 1272 |
Cara was wearing red leather. General Meiffert led the man wearing the straight black coat into the comfortable meeting room. Benjamin noticed his wife's change of outfit, but made no comment. The abbot removed his black, rimless hat to reveal tousled blond hair that was cut short at the sides. He put on a warm smile. Richard thought it looked forced. "Lord Rahl," Benjamin said, holding out a hand in introduction, "this is Abbot Ludwig Dreier, from Fajin Province." Rather than extending a hand, Richard nodded his greeting. "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. |
| 1273 |
She wanted to scream against the unseen darkness that was descending on them, but that would do no good. Richard closed the cabinet door. "With all that's going on I don't know that Zedd is going to want to be returning to the Keep before we figure out what's happening and get it resolved. I'm glad we have him here to help us." Kahlan watched as Richard lifted the baldric over his head and then propped his sword against the bedside table. He set his pack on the bed and started rooting around inside. She couldn't imagine what he was looking for. With a smile he at last brought up a small tin. It made her smile, too, seeing it again. He gestured to the edge of the bed. "Come and sit." As she did, Richard dabbed his finger in the tin and then lifted her hand. He gently smoothed some of the herb salve along the scratches. It felt cool and immediately started to quell the ache. "Better?" "Better," she said with a smile. It had been years since she had seen that tin of healing cream that Richard had made from aum, among other things. Having grown up in the woods, he knew about plants and how to make cures from them. After he spread some of the ointment on his own red scratches, he replaced the tin in his pack. So much had happened since she had first met him in his woodland home. Both their lives had completely changed. The world had been turned upside down as it went through a nightmare war. She couldn't count the times she had thought that she would never see him again, or feared he was going to die, or worse, thought that he had been killed. The terror had seemed as if it would never end. It finally had. They had not just survived but after years of struggle they had won the war and brought peace to the world. But now the world felt like it was again slipping into darkness. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Kahlan took up his good hand and held it to the side of her face. She hid her silent tears against his hand. Richard gently ran his hand through her hair as he pulled her head against him. |
| 1274 |
Having once been one of those prisoners, Richard knew all about it. He gestured to the iron door. "I want to see the woman who killed her children." "And the man who tried to kill his family?" "Yes, him too," Richard said. The captain worked a big key in the door. The lock resisted for a moment, but after the latch clanged open, the man yanked the heavy iron door open enough to slip through. After hooking the keys on his belt, he took a lantern from a table and led the way into the inner dungeon. In a well-practiced sweep of her arm, Nyda took another lantern off an iron peg in the wall. Before Richard could go through the door, she stepped in front of him and went in first. He was quite familiar with Mord-Sith's insistence on going first so they could check for danger. He had long ago learned that his life was easier if he let them have their way and didn't argue with them over such minor issues. He saved commands for times when they really mattered. Because of that, the Mord-Sith heeded his commands. The captain led them down a series of narrow passageways that in most places had been carved out of solid rock. Even after thousands of years, the chisel marks looked as fresh as when they had first been cut through the stone. They passed cell doors behind which criminals were held. Up ahead, in the light of the captain's lantern, Richard saw fingers sticking out, gripping the edges of tiny openings in the iron doors. He saw eyes looking out through some of the black openings. When the prisoners saw Nyda coming behind the captain, the fingers withdrew and the eyes disappeared back into the blackness. No one called out. No one wanted to draw her attention. At the end of a particularly narrow, crooked passageway with doors spaced farther apart, the captain came to a halt at a cell on the left. There were no fingers in the opening, no eyes looking out. When the heavy door was pulled open, Richard saw the reason. The outer door opened not into a cell, but into a small inner room with another door. |
| 1275 |
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. 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. Cara, in her red leather, stood behind Kahlan to her left. Kahlan took a deep breath and began. "I know that many of you have concerns about the direction of the future. |
| 1276 |
He wore a grand military-style coat in a deep mahogany color that fit his powerful frame with tailored precision. At his hip, on a broad, tooled, tan leather belt, he wore a gleaming, engraved, ceremonial sword lavishly adorned with gold and silver. It was no less a formidable weapon in his hands for all its embellishments. Kahlan knew that he was a reasoned leader, but she also knew that he had a volatile temper. His wife, Catherine, his ever-present shadow, glided forward with him. She wore a beautiful dark green brocade dress embroidered with vibrant gold leaves. She looked stunning in the dress. Though she was a queen with as much authority as her husband, she had little interest in matters of rule. She was also quite pregnant. Kahlan knew that this would be their first child, and they were eagerly looking forward to it now that the war was over. King Philippe gestured around at the gathered dignitaries. "We are the leaders of the lands that make up the D'Haran Empire. Many of us here were loyal to you, Mother Confessor, before that, in the Midlands. All of our people have fought, bled, and died to help us stand here today, triumphant. They have a right, through us, to hear the shape of the future they have fought so hard to make possible. On their behalf, as their representatives, we should be informed of what prophecy has to say so we can make sure it is being heeded and not ignored." A roar of voices rose as everyone agreed with King Philippe. Queen Orneta, not keen to cede her informal leadership role in arguing their position, swept a skeletal arm back at the crowd, calling for silence. "Prophecy must be obeyed. What we want, Mother Confessor, is for you to reveal what prophecy says so that we may see for ourselves that you are heeding it." "But I have just spent a great deal of time with all of you, listening to your concerns and explaining why prophecy is not meant for the uninitiated." The queen smiled in that patronizing manner that for some queens seemed to be an inborn ability bordering on theatric gift. |
| 1277 |
There wasn't enough light to really make out any details in the room and not anywhere near enough to make out what ever it was that seemed to be in their room, watching them. Richard squinted, trying as hard as he could to see better in the dim light, trying to make out what he thought seemed just a little darker than the rest of the near-darkness. He thought that he could see a shadowy hint of something. As he stared, he could feel it looking back at him. He was sure that, unlike the last time, this time he not only felt it watching, he could sense its presence in the room. That presence was icy cold and evil. He couldn't begin to imagine what it could be. After all, men of the First File were stationed all up and down the corridors. These were not the kind of men who fell asleep on watch, or got bored and didn't pay attention. These were battle-hardened men who were always ready for any threat. These were the elite of the D'Haran forces. Not one of those men wanted to be the one who let any threat get so much as a glimpse of Richard and Kahlan. What ever it was, it had not skulked in past the guards to get into the bedroom. What ever it was that Richard saw crouched in the alcove was dark and indistinct and not very large. It waited, still and silent, perfectly centered between the two dark forms of the tall wardrobes. Richard wondered what it was waiting for. From outside he could hear the wind howl and moan and occasionally rattle the doors, only to die out and let the room fall silent again. The only sound inside the room that Richard could hear was Kahlan's breathing and the faint hiss of the burning wick of the lamp. Richard couldn't tell if what ever it was he was staring at was nothing more than a murky dark area, or if it only looked that way because it was so dark in the room that it blurred the edges of a shadowed form. What ever it was, it was as dark as pitch. What ever it was, its gaze was unwavering. What ever it was, it was heartless. Richard thought that maybe it looked something like a dog poised there watching them. |
| 1278 |
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. 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. |
| 1279 |
Richard dove for his sword. Out of the corner of her eye Kahlan saw the dark thing charge toward them as Richard dove off her and across the bed. As he slid toward the edge of the bed, his hand snatched the hilt of the sword. He rolled off the bed, yanking the sword free of the scabbard in one fluid movement as he landed on his feet. The ringing sound of the Sword of Truth's steel cut the silence like a scream of rage that sent a shiver rippling across her flesh. As the dark shape vaulted toward them Richard spun to face the threat. Kahlan ducked back out of the way. With lightning speed, the weapon swung around in an arc. The blade whistled as it swept through the air to meet the streak of a shadow. Razor-sharp steel cut through the center of the inky form. But even as the blade was cleaving it, the dark form evaporated like dust losing its shape, a shadow decomposing into eddies and swirls as it vanished. Richard stood beside the bed, sword in hand, panting with rage. As far as Kahlan could tell, the source of his awakened anger was no longer there. She heard the soft, distant rumble of thunder, and the faint hiss of the lantern on the table between the chairs and the couch. Kahlan scooted across the bed toward him. She peered around at the dark room, trying to see if the form had reappeared somewhere else. She wondered if she would be able to see it if it did. "I don't feel anything watching us," she said, still scanning the darkness for the silent threat. "I don't either. It's gone." Kahlan wondered for how long. 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. "I wish I knew," he said as he finally slid the sword back into its scabbard. |
| 1280 |
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. But the nearly inconceivable combination of snow made dangerously heavy by a cold rain, along with being struck by lightning, had been too much for the glass roof to withstand. Wind whipped in through the opening, swirling sleet and snow down through the room and into the gaping hole in the center of the floor. Keeping a wary eye skyward for any hanging pieces of glass that might come down on him, Richard pulled the shard of glass out of his leg and tossed it aside. He quickly retrieved a steel and flint from his pack and used them to light a torch in an iron stand not far away. Worried that people below the collapsed floor had been hurt or killed, he rushed toward the opening even as dirt and sand was still sliding down into the dark maw. Kahlan clutched at his sleeve. "Richard! Stay back. The rest of the floor could fall in and you could go with it." He held the torch out, trying to see into the hole. The flame flapped in the gusts of wind that lashed down into the room from the break in the ceiling. He leaned down, peering under the edge on the opposite side of the opening in the floor. |
| 1281 |
There was no railing, making the descent into the darkness treacherous, especially since a lot of the sand and dirt from the floor of the Garden of Life that had fallen into the room above them had in turn poured down the spiral stairs. Richard had to pause in places to use the side of his boot to move dirt and debris aside so that they would have a safe place to step. As they went ever lower into the blackness, the confining shaft for the spiral stairs opened up into a dark, dead still room. The light of the sphere Richard was holding cast only enough illumination into the distance to see that the simple, unadorned room was made of stone blocks. There were no doors or other openings that Richard could see. The room was empty except for what appeared to be a block of stone sitting in the middle. "What in the world could this place be?" Kahlan asked. Richard shook his head as he looked around. "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. |
| 1282 |
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. He thought it might be a narrow ledge in the stone, maybe a stone block sticking out a little more than the rest. He held the sphere out to see better as he leaned in. He brushed away a layer of dust and crumbled granite flakes from the surface and saw that it was individual, small strips of metal, piled in tight, neat, orderly stacks. He picked a strip of metal off one of the stacks and turned it in the light, trying to figure out what it was, or its purpose. |
| 1283 |
Each was only a little longer than his longest finger, and soft enough that he could easily bend it. All the strips looked to be identical. Stacked tightly and evenly as they were, and covered in dust and dirt, the mass of them looked like part of the wall, like a ledge in the stone. Kahlan bent close, trying to see it better. "What do you think they are?" Richard straightened the strip of metal and set it back in its resting place atop one of the stacks. "They don't have any markings on them. They seem to be nothing more than simple strips of metal." Kahlan's gaze swept along the wall. "They're stacked all around the edge of the room. There must be tens of thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. What could they be for, and why are they buried in here?" "It seems like they were left and forgotten. Or it could be they were hidden away." Kahlan's nose wrinkled. "Why hide plain strips of metal?" Richard could only shrug as he looked around, trying to see if the room held any other clues to its purpose. The place didn't seem to make any sense. He scuffed the side of his boot across the floor. It was stone, covered with what was probably thousands of years of dust and crumbled, decayed granite from the surface of the walls. Even though he knew from being above the room that it had a vaulted ceiling above, the ceiling down inside the room was flat, a false ceiling, probably plastered over but now the same dark, dingy color as the walls. All in all, other than the stacks of metal and the odd block of stone in the center, it was an unremarkable room. Except, perhaps, that it led to nowhere. Had the floor of the Garden of Life not collapsed, there would have been no way into the buried room. If not for the roof falling in, the room could easily have remained undiscovered for a few thousand more years. As Kahlan trailed her fingers along the wall, looking for any hint of writing carved into the stone, or possibly a hidden passageway, Richard turned his attention to the square block that sat in the center of the dingy room. |
| 1284 |
Oddly enough, the stone floor stopped short of the block, leaving a narrow gutter of dirt all the way around it. The block was slightly more than waist high. If he and Kahlan would have reached across from opposite sides, they wouldn't have been able to touch their fingers. He couldn't imagine what it could be, or what it was doing there. With snowflakes drifting past, he squatted down, holding out the glowing sphere to see better, and brushed the flat of his hand along the surface of the side. He was surprised to realize that the surface was not stone, as he had thought, but thick, heavy metal. He rubbed away at the dust and grime of ages, trying to see it better. The surface of the metal was corroded and dirty, making it look like the stone in the room, but there could be no doubt, it was metal. Beneath the filth where he wiped his hand across the surface, metal glinted in the light of the sphere. "Look at this," Richard said. Kahlan glanced back over her shoulder. "What is it?" Richard thumped his fist against it. Even though it seemed to be extraordinarily heavy, he could just barely tell from the sound that it was hollow. "This thing is made of metal. And look at this, here." He held the sphere out so she could see better as she came up next to him. There was a small slot, starting in the top and cut down into one side of the thing. Some of the curious strips of metal were stacked in the slot. Kahlan removed one of the metal strips, inspecting it. As far as Richard could tell it was devoid of any markings, the same as all the others stacked against the wall. He rubbed more of the dirt and debris off the side. "There's some kind of emblem or something on the side. Kind of hard to tell what it is." With a heavy thud that shook the ground and made both of them flinch, light shot up from the center of the top. Dirt in the space between the metal monolith and the stone floor, disturbed by the thump, lifted into the still air. As one, Richard and Kahlan took a step back. |
| 1285 |
Something about it caught her eye. She was surprised to see that there were markings on it. She held it closer. She was stunned by what she saw. "Richard, look." As he bent close she held it out in the light for him to see. "This one in here isn't blank." Richard took it from her when she held it out and carefully looked over the line of symbols seemingly burned into the metal. "They're all different," he said, half to himself. Kahlan looked in the slot where she had found it. "There are two more strips in here." She pulled them out, took a quick look, and then handed them to him. He looked them over, one at a time, studying each for a moment. "More symbols. But they're different. Each strip has distinctive emblems on it. Look, this one has a whole string of markings, but the one that was on the bottom only has a few." When the machine began to make more noise, as if a whole bank of additional gears had been engaged, Richard bent to look into the slit of a window. Kahlan could see the light from inside reflecting in lines that moved parts of symbolic elements over the contours of his face. "I can see a strip of metal being pulled out from the bottom of the stack on the other side. It's being pulled into the machine and going way down inside." Kahlan put her head close to his, trying to see what he was talking about. Then she saw it, way down among the gears, shafts, and levers, being pulled through by a small pincer mechanism holding the front of the metal strip. The pincer was attached to a large wheel that carried the strip of metal up and around with it to place it in a track where a series of levers moved it along different junctions of track until another geared pincer finally picked it up. Kahlan and Richard both turned aside a little as a flash of intense orangish white light ignited deep within. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a bright pinpoint of light dance across the metal strip. The focused beam of light from far below moved with lightning speed but in a tightly controlled manner. |
| 1286 |
The light was so intense that she could see a moving, glowing white-hot spot of light shining through the top of the metal where the beam hit it from underneath. As the strip came around with the wheel, another mechanism took it in turn and rotated it around so that the symbol that had been burned into the underside of the metal was now facing up. At exactly the correct point in the arc of the gear, the pincers opened and a lever on a geared mechanism swung in from the side to push the metal strip through a slot in the side of the machine. She heard it drop into the tray. Richard and Kahlan straightened from the little window and looked at each other. "Did you see that?" he asked. Kahlan nodded. "Pretty hard to miss." Richard pulled the strip of metal out of the tray. He immediately tossed it on top of the machine and shook his hand, then blew on his fingers. He pushed the hot metal strip around with a finger for a moment until it cooled, then gingerly picked it up and studied the single symbol etched into it. "What about that one? Do you recognize it?" Kahlan asked. Richard stared at it with a troubled expression. "I'm not entirely certain. It's not exactly the same, but it's pretty close." "Pretty close to what? What is it?" Richard looked up at her again. "It's the emblematic representation for fire." Outside of the Garden of Life hundreds of heavily armed guards filled the corridor in both directions. They all looked a great deal more than edgy. Kahlan realized that they would have had to have heard the lightning hit the Garden of Life. They probably heard the glass roof breaking and falling as well. They undoubtedly wondered what in the world had been going on beyond the doors. They might even have feared that it was an attack of magic of some sort, and so they were standing ready in case they were called upon to defend the palace. She knew, though, that despite their worry, none of them, not even a Mord-Sith, would dare to enter the Garden of Life while the Lord Rahl was inside unless he invited them in. |
| 1287 |
The grim look on Richard's face and the set of his jaw as he came marching out probably only confirmed to all the men watching him approach that they had made the right decision to remain outside. The only people who regularly went into the garden were the staff assigned to tend the grass, flowers, shrubs, and trees. Only the most highly trusted people on the palace staff were allowed to work in the garden. Even then, when they went in to do their work officers of the First File watched them at all times. During the war, when they were under constant threat and there were dangerous objects of magic containing tremendous power locked away in the Garden of Life for safekeeping, not even the people who tended the garden had been allowed to go in to take care of the plants and trees. As a result it became for a time a wild, overgrown place that had taken on an eerie look that in a way matched the gloomy mood of everyone in the palace. After the war had ended, it had taken a lot of work to return the garden to the state of splendor it was now in. Kahlan had a feeling, though, that even such occasional tending was at an end and the Garden of Life was about to again become strictly off-limits to everyone except on Lord Rahl's instructions. Throughout history the Garden of Life had been a place where the Lord Rahl, from time to time, had unleashed some of the most powerful magic in existence. It had been a place that on occasion had been a gateway to the underworld itself. Magic was a mystery to most people and therefore greatly feared. 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. Most people only knew magic as a dark, mysterious danger. For the D'Haran people, the Lord Rahl was their protection against those dark dangers of magic. For their part, these soldiers were meant to be the steel against steel. They would lay down their lives in that service. But it was Richard's responsibility as the Lord Rahl to deal with any matters involving magic. |
| 1288 |
Since the seven rarely used doors, the shutters on the windows down on the ground level several stories below stood open in a fearless show of invitation. Though they frequently chose to use windows, they didn't actually need the windows any more than they needed the doors. They could seep through any opening, any crack, like vapor rising in the early morning from the stretches of stagnant water that lay in dark swaths through the peat barrens. The open shutters were meant to be a declaration for all to see, including the seven, that Hannis Arc feared nothing. Many people in Saavedra, the ruling city of Fajin Province down in the broad valley below the citadel, shuttered themselves in at night. Everyone out in the Dark Lands did. Shutting in at night for fear of what might be outside was only wise, after all. While that was true for those down in the city, it was doubly true for those who lived out in the more remote areas. There were corporeal dangers in the night, creatures that hunted with fang and claw, worthy of fear. There were other things to fear as well, things one rarely saw coming, if at all, until it was too late. Hannis Arc, though, did not fear the things that came out at night. He bent those elements to his own ends, mastered them, making him the source of fear, not its victim. He banked the hot coals of those fears in the hearts of others so that they would always be ready to roar to life in order to serve him. Hannis Arc wanted people to fear him. If they feared him, they respected him, they obeyed him, they bowed down to him. He made sure that people were never without cause to fear him. No, unlike most people who inhabited the Dark Lands, Hannis Arc was not himself burdened by fears. 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. |
| 1289 |
Anger was not only his constant companion, it was his trusted friend, his only friend. The glow of the dozens of candles in the stand at the far end of the room wavered as the seven familiars swirled around them on their way by, as if lingering to ride the eddies of heat rising from the flames. Mohler, the old scribe hunched over a massive book laid open on a stand not far away, straightened as if he thought he might have heard something. One of the seven glowing forms glided around him, trailing a tendril hand along his jaw. The man glanced around, seeming to feel the touch, but he couldn't find its source. He couldn't see the familiars. The woman standing guard back near the doors could. With gnarled, arthritic fingers, Mohler touched his cheek, but when he could find no cause for the sensation his hand dropped to his side and he returned his attention to recording the latest prophecies from the abbey while the seven spiraled up toward the vaulted ceiling to glide along the hulking stone arches and skim just beneath the heavy beams, surveying the gloomy, candlelit room. "It's your move," Hannis Arc reminded the hunched scribe. Mohler glanced back momentarily to see his master watching him. "Ah yes, so it is," he said as he laid down his quill and turned from his work at the massive book to shuffle over to the stone pedestal that held the board laid out with carved alabaster and obsidian pieces. He'd had more than enough time to consider his next move. He'd had most of the night, in fact. Hannis Arc hadn't pressed. He had already worked out the array of moves available to the man. None seemed to be good choices, although some were not as swiftly fatal as others. Hesitantly, Mohler reached out and moved an alabaster piece to another square, taking an inky black piece that occupied it off the board and setting it aside. It was a move that he had probably pondered for hours, a move that captured a valuable piece and put him into a position to threaten to win. Hannis Arc rose and, hands clasped behind his back, strode to the board. |
| 1290 |
He paused, hand on the door handle, and turned back, as if reading his master's dark thoughts. "You will have your revenge, Bishop. You will be pleased to see from the latest prophecies that your patience will be rewarded. You will have your rightful place as ruler of D'Hara, I know you will. Prophecy seems to say as much." Hannis Arc glared at the man, assessing whether he was being obsequious or genuinely meant it. He saw the glint of hope in the man's eyes and knew then that it was the latter. Some men needed an iron fist to rule them. Mohler was one of those, one who found great comfort in the shadow of a great man. More than that, though, Mohler had been there. He knew the rage that burned in his master, and he knew the reason for it. At that thought, Hannis Arc was visited by a flash of memory he'd had times beyond counting, the jarring, jagged, fragmented impression of his father being dragged out into the courtyard in the night, fighting every inch of the way, proclaiming his loyalty to the House of Rahl even as the powerfully built soldiers began clubbing him; of clinging to his mother before she hurriedly pulled his slender arms off her and stuffed him into an entryway bench, closing the lid before the men charged back in to drag her out as well; of the terrible, singular sound made by a single violent blow of a heavy mace studded with spikes caving in his older sister's skull as she stood in the entryway, frozen in panicked fear; of the cries and grunts from his mother as she was being beaten to death; of all the blood in the entry, on the courtyard cobblestones; of the still form of his sister lying in the entry; of the corpses of his parents on the cobblestones; of the screams of servants who had witnessed the murders; of the fading cries as they ran off into the night in fear for their own lives. 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. |
| 1291 |
As Hannis Arc had heard it, Darken Rahl's obsession had ultimately been his undoing and he had ended up being killed by his son, Richard Rahl. A Rahl killing his father hardly surprised Hannis Arc. It made no difference to Hannis Arc that Richard Rahl had not interfered with the rule of the Dark Lands or made demands for tribute. Being the ruler of D'Hara, he could at any time choose to do so, as had his ancestors. Besides, he was a Rahl, and that alone sealed his fate. This new Lord Rahl had led the D'Haran Empire to a great victory, defeating a tyrannical threat to their very existence. In so doing, he had unwittingly saved Hannis Arc, the man who would now bring him down. The new Lord Rahl, like his father before him, had no idea of the abilities Hannis Arc possessed, or the powers he could command. Hannis Arc could have struck earlier, as Richard Rahl was forging the D'Haran Empire and fighting the war for their survival, but then he would have had a war on his hands. It would have been difficult to survive against the incredible might of the Imperial Order. Instead, he had lain back, saving himself for the right time, working on his abilities, and let Richard Rahl fight the long and difficult war. Hannis Arc had even sent troops to support the effort, as would anyone loyal to the D'Haran Empire. He had saved himself and worked on his plans. Now that war was ended, the time to extract his revenge on the House of Rahl had at long last arrived. The new Lord Rahl was said to be widely respected, admired, and even loved by many. He was a man at the height of power, a conquering hero. Hannis Arc was pleased that the man was as powerful as he was. That would make his fall all the farther, all the harder, and therefore, Hannis Arc's rise all the more momentous, all the more satisfying. Still, Hannis Arc knew that simply killing a man like that would accomplish nothing except to make him a martyr. Making Richard Rahl a martyr would not bring Hannis Arc the rule of the D'Haran Empire. |
| 1292 |
Little did the man know that the seven familiars huddled together in the peak of the ceiling, watching, listening. Hannis Arc knew that they would report every word back to the Hedge Maid. "Soon, Bishop, you will rule D'Hara. You will rule the empire." Mohler did not look up to meet the steady gaze of the blue-eyed woman watching him as he pulled open the door. Few people had the courage to meet her gaze. Hannis Arc returned to his desk as the old scribe pulled the heavy iron-bound oak door closed on his way out. As he scooped his dark robes under his legs to sit at the desk in his massive leather chair, he watched from the corner of his eye as the seven glided in closer. Their flowing robes radiated a supple, bluish blush with a soft, ethereal glimmer to it. They moved with fluid grace, their robes never still, giving him the impression that he was actually looking in at them in another place, seeing them in an ethereal world of continual gentle breezes. From a distance, each seemed as elegant a creature as ever existed. To all appearances they seemed to be made of air and light as much as flesh and bone. As they glided closer, he fancied that they looked like nothing so much as good spirits. He knew, though, that they were anything but good spirits. Six of them drifted idly together, like corks in a pond, watching from not far away as the seventh floated in close on the other side of the desk. As she leaned in he could finally see beyond the edge of the cowl covering her head, see the wrinkled flesh of her pitted and pockmarked face, the knotted blue veins, the warts and ulcers that ravaged her distorted features, the hanging tags of skin, the eyes the color of rancid egg yolks. She smiled a wicked smile that promised overwhelming pain and suffering should she wish it. Hannis Arc was not in the least bit intimidated. Rather, he was indignant to be shown such little respect. He did not try to keep the displeasure from his voice. "Has Jit completed the tasks I gave her?" The familiar laid a gnarled hand on the desk as she leaned over toward him. |
| 1293 |
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. "Surprised?" He arched an eyebrow. "Surprised that a knife wielded by a mere man could harm you?" She let out another squealing screech that was loud enough to raise the dead as she again tugged and twisted wildly at her hand pinned to the desktop by the knife. Her bluish black lips curled back in a snarl, showing her fangs as she leaned toward him. It did her no good. The heavy desk rattled and wobbled, the feet lifting clear of the floor every time she yanked on her arm, trying without success to free it. The other six snaked through the air around her in sympathetic outrage. When they grabbed at her to try to pull her free they received a lightning jolt from the knife that shot though them, forcing them to release their grip. "What have you done?" the one stuck fast demanded in a screech. "Why, I have pinned you to the desk. Isn't it obvious?" "But how!" "Right now that is really not what should concern you. |
| 1294 |
"We will tell our mistress your words." "See that you do." Hannis Arc watched as they swirled like smoke and slipped out through the cracks around the heavy door. On their way out, as Mohler before them, they were careful not to meet the gaze of the woman standing guard there. Hannis Arc's rage still burned out of control. He would set the wrongs right. The spirit of his father would watch from his hallowed place in the underworld as his son finally visited vengeance upon the House of Rahl. This was the awakening of a new day in D'Hara, in more ways than one. The ages of darkness under the House of Rahl were about to be over. Richard Rahl was about to lose his grip on power. He was about to lose everything. Hannis Arc would see to it. 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. |
| 1295 |
"My prophecies!" The soldiers with the buckets kicked open the door. Black smoke laced with crackling sparks and burning pieces of paper rolled out into the hall and along the ceiling. Flags of flame unfurled out along the ceiling of the hallway. The soldiers heaved water in through the open doorway. From the amount of smoke and the heat from the flames, Richard didn't think their buckets of water were going to be anywhere near enough. Lauretta screamed when she saw the soldiers throwing water into her room. She pushed past Zedd and Nathan. "No! You'll ruin my prophecies!" Richard knew that it was too late to worry about that. Besides, water was not the real threat to her prophecies. He caught Lauretta's arm and dragged her to a halt. He knew that if left to her own devices she would run into the burning room to try to save her precious prophecies. As thick as the smoke was, and as heavily as she was breathing, she would have been overcome in mere seconds. The heat, even at a distance, was withering. Richard was relieved that the palace was made mostly of stone. Still, parts of it, like the floors under them and beams above, were wood. They needed to put out the fire as quickly as possible. More soldiers raced up with yet more buckets of water. They ran in toward the door, turned their faces away from the heat, and heaved the water in. Angry, hot flames licked out through the open door in defiance of the water. As Richard had suspected, such an effort was hopelessly in effective. Zedd knew it, too. He rushed past Richard and down the hall, ducking under the lowering black smoke hugging the ceiling to make his way toward the doorway into the inferno. 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. |
| 1296 |
"Bags! My gift is too weak in this place." Nathan caught up with Zedd and lifted his palms out toward the smoke-filled doorway, adding his gift to the effort. He, too, caused the air to waver, but it also slowed the amount of smoke as the flames withdrew back into the room. At last the smoke coming out the doorway was choked off entirely, confining it to the room inside, leaving the hallway in a dark and pungent haze. Nathan was a Rahl. His gift wasn't hampered by the palace's spell. He stepped in closer, holding the flats of his hands out toward the doorway again. As Richard restrained Lauretta, he watched Nathan gradually circle his palms, sealing off the room, suffocating the fire at its source. After a few tense moments, the fire died out and the prophet spun a web that cooled the remains of Lauretta's home. As Nathan entered the room, checking that it was safe, Richard let go of Lauretta, allowing her to follow. Weeping in misery, she rushed into the room behind Nathan. She lifted her arms in distress. "My prophecies! Dear Creator! My prophecies are ruined!" Richard could see that she was right. There looked to be some stacks in the farthest reaches that might not have been totally destroyed, but the blackened, wet mess covering the floor was all that was left of most of them. Lauretta fell to her knees, scooping up handfuls of the useless, wet ash. "They're ruined," she wept. Richard laid a hand on her shoulder. "You can write more, Lauretta. You can use the library as a place to write more." She nodded absently. He wondered if she even heard him. Out in the hall, people had gathered to see what was happening. Many of them covered their noses against the stench left from the fire. Richard saw a number of representatives he recognized at the back of the crowd. They looked grim. The fire was obviously confirmation of the prophecy they had all heard that morning. Murmuring warnings to one another, the crowd parted. Cara marched through as if the people were not there, expecting everyone to get out of her way. |
| 1297 |
They still had the nettlesome issue of prophecy without the machine adding its own. Richard laid a hand on the flat, iron top. 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. The metal strip dropped into the slot. Richard grabbed Zedd's wrist. "Careful, it will be hot." Zedd licked his fingers and then plucked the metal strip from the slot and quickly tossed it on top of the machine. Richard could clearly see the fresh emblems that had been burned into the metal. Wisps of smoke still rose from them. |
| 1298 |
He eased her back onto the couch. She went willingly, surrendering to him, to his hands exploring her, his hands drawing her dress off her shoulders. Kahlan woke with a start when she heard the howls. With a gasp, she sat bolt upright in her bedroll, her heart hammering so hard she could hear the blood whooshing in her ears. She frantically looked around, expecting fangs to rip into her at any instant. She snatched for her knife. The knife wasn't there. She scanned the trees, trying to see the source of the bloodcurdling howls. She saw no beasts, no fangs. She realized that she wasn't out in the woods at all. She was inside. She had been catching a little sleep at the edge of the small indoor forest. There were no hounds, or wolves, or beasts of any kind about. She was safe. The commotion that had awakened her had been the guards opening the double doors into the Garden of Life to make way for someone. The howl had been the hinges on the heavy doors. She pushed her hair back out of her face as she let out a deep sigh. She had to have been dreaming. It had seemed so real, but it was just a dream and its heart-pounding grasp on her quickly loosened. She rubbed her arms as she looked around and sighed again, relieved that it had been only a dream and that it was swiftly evaporating. Overhead, driven by the cycle of the seasons, the barren tree branches were laden with buds. They would soon be in full foliage. After the ceiling had finally been repaired and fully glassed in, the spring sun had, over a period of a few days, gently warmed the Garden of Life, making it once again a cozy refuge and a place where she and Richard could sleep. It wasn't as comfortable as a real bed, but sleep came a lot more easily when they didn't feel unseen eyes watching them. As she wiped the sleep from her eyes, Kahlan had to squint as she looked up at the full moon shining down from overhead. By its position in a black sky she knew that she had been asleep for only a brief time. That meant it was still the dead of night. |
| 1299 |
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. Kahlan nodded. "Yes, he's with Nicci, watching the machine in case it awakens again. Why? What's wrong?" "We have trouble," he said as he headed for the ladder. Kahlan saw that he had something in his hand. She threw the blanket aside and sprang up to follow after him. The men of the First File, after having closed the door, took up defensive positions. There were a good two dozen of the elite of the elite standing guard inside the Garden of Life. It would have required only two or three of these of men to hold off an army. It was somewhat disconcerting to have them nearby, watching over her, but they didn't watch her the way the thing in the bedrooms had. They were watching out for her safety. She didn't know why the thing in the bedroom had been watching, but she knew that it wasn't to keep them safe. Ever since the machine had given the first of its last two prophecies, the one that said "Pawn takes queen," Richard wasn't taking any chances with her safety. Whenever she left the Garden of Life without him, she left with a small army, Nathan, Zedd, or Nicci, and at least two Mord-Sith. It wasn't that she didn't like having protection from whatever the dark danger was that seemed loose in the palace, it was just that it made it rather awkward when meeting with the representatives. It put people on edge, giving the impression that the palace was under siege. The representatives were aware, though, that something was going on and there had already been an attempt on her life, so there was justification for the protection. |
| 1300 |
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. 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. |
| 1301 |
The ram crashed into the doors with a resounding thud. It felt to Kahlan like the entire wall shook with the impact, but the doors held tight. They backed across the corridor and came again, driving the ram into the doors, sending small splinters flying. Where it hit, the ram left an impression embossed into the carving of vines and a ring of splintered wood, but the doors remained intact. A third time was no more fruitful. Kahlan thought that it would be best if someone with the gift breached the doors. "Nicci, Nathan — can't one of you do something?" Richard wasn't in the mood to wait for that. "Move aside!" he impatiently yelled out when the men with the ram stepped back to gain room to make another attempt. As the men backed away, without wasting another moment, Richard gripped his sword with both hands and lifted it over his head. With a mighty swing the blade whistled through the air, arcing toward the doors. The Sword of Truth had been made thousands of years before and invested with great power. There was nothing it couldn't cut through in the hands of the Seeker, except one thing: those he knew to be innocent. With an earsplitting crash the blade smashed through the heavy doors. Sharp wooden fragments sailed through the hallway, ricocheting off the walls. Everyone nearby ducked away, covering their faces with an arm. Only the briefest pause later, a second swing shattered another ragged swath down through the doors, sending huge splinters flying through the hall and skittering across the carpets. Kahlan could see that a heavy beam inside that had barred the doors had been shattered by the sword. Richard threw a powerful kick into the center of the two broken doors. They both ripped from their hinges and toppled into the room. As the heavy doors crashed to the ground and clouds of dust and debris billowed up, Richard dove through into the dark room. Kahlan tried to follow Richard into the room, but Cara, Agiel in hand and bent on protecting him, raced in ahead of her. |
| 1302 |
Before Kahlan could follow, Nicci slipped in front of Kahlan and dashed in with Cara, both women worried about Richard diving headlong into trouble. Kahlan, no less concerned, cut in front of Benjamin and ran into the darkness after them. A frantic King Philippe tried to follow, but soldiers restrained him. Benjamin urged the king to let Lord Rahl and the rest of them find out what was going on, first. Inside, they came to a halt. The room was dead quiet. Kahlan held her breath against the stench of blood. Glancing back over her shoulder, she could see Benjamin silhouetted in the doorway, waiting to see if they needed reinforcements. On the opposite side of the room, to either side of double doors, sheer curtains billowed in a light breeze, looking like ghosts in the moonlight. "I can't see a thing in here," Cara whispered. Nicci ignited a flame that floated in midair above her palm. She quickly found a stand with a few candles still affixed to it and righted it, then sent the flame into the candles. As the level of light rose, Kahlan could at last see more than the mere hints of shapes in the moonlight coming through the open doors on the opposite side of the room. "Dear spirits," she whispered into the terrible quiet. Nicci retrieved a few lamps from the rubble, lit them, and set them on a table that was still upright. In the lamplight they were finally able to see the full extent of the devastation. Splintered furniture lay overturned. Cushions were scattered. The leather chairs were slashed by what looked to be either claws or fangs, Kahlan didn't know which. A nearby couch had been turned red with blood. Blood splatters crisscrossed the walls in swaths, as if flung there in terrible rage. The amount of it everywhere was shocking. At their feet Queen Catherine lay on her back. Her scalp had been partly peeled away. Gouges looking to be left by fangs raked across her exposed skull and cut through the upper part of her face. Her jaw was torn partially away. Her eyes, as if still filled with paralyzing shock, stared unseeing at the ceiling. |
| 1303 |
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. This was what the woman had predicted was going to happen to Kahlan. Then, among the organs and intestines, she saw an umbilical cord snaking its way across the floor. At the end of it were the bloody, pink remains of Catherine's unborn child. Its little toes looked perfect. The top half of the body was gone. From what remained, Kahlan could see that it was a boy. A prince. With a scream of fury, King Philippe finally pulled away from soldiers reluctant to be too forceful with him. He bulled his way into the room. When he reached his wife he froze stiff. Then he screamed, a cold cry such as could only be brought forth by such a horrific sight, a cry that would have made the good spirits weep. Richard put an arm around the man's shoulders and tried to gently pull him back and away from the sight. King Philippe jerked away and turned in fury toward Richard. "This is your fault!" Nathan lifted a hand in warning. "It was no such thing." The king ignored him. He brought his sword up, pointing it at Richard's face. "You could have prevented this!" Richard, his own sword still in his fist, its rage still in his eyes, slowly brought his blade up and used it to turn the point of King Philippe's sword aside. "I can only imagine how you must feel," Richard said in as calm a voice as he could muster with the sword in his hand and its rage pounding through his veins. |
| 1304 |
And then he turned and stormed away. His sword still gripped tightly in his hand, Richard circled his free arm around Kahlan's shoulders. She gently rested a hand on his back, silently returning the understanding. No words were needed, or at that moment would have been adequate. Without saying anything to the others watching him, Richard led her out of the room. Kahlan had seen violent deaths beyond counting, and to an extent had gotten used to it, built a shell to protect herself from feeling it, but that protective shell had slowly softened since the war had ended. 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. |
| 1305 |
"I wonder if Catherine felt someone watching her." "What I want to know is who put this here, and how is it that they weren't seen." Richard stood alone, hands clasped behind his back, staring at the machine, trying to work out what could be going on. He had lain down with Kahlan for a long time up in the Garden of Life, holding her until her tears had ended, waiting until the tension had gone out of her body and her breathing had slowed. When she had finally fallen into a fitful sleep, he had come alone down to the room where the machine had been buried and forgotten for uncounted centuries. He still didn't know who had created the thing, or why. It would seem that it had been created to give prophecy. An omen machine, the king had called it. Somehow, as inconceivable as that was, it still sounded too simple. The book, after all, called the machine Regula, and that meant so much more. But the book Regula down in the library was merely a translation of the symbols, of the language of Creation, that the machine used to convey its predictions. The book only helped them to understand the omens that the Regula machine issued. It did not explain why it called the machine Regula. "Regula" meant to regulate with sovereign authority. What that had to do with omens Richard couldn't imagine. He supposed that in a way, through its prophecies, the machine actually was controlling what was happening. Or someone else was, and making them look like prophecies coming from the machine. It also seemed that the prophecies issued by the machine were not enough. Those same prophecies also came to light through various people in the palace, as if to insure that the messages could not be kept secret. It could be, he imagined, that the machine was very much regulating — controlling — what was going on through its recent prophecies, so in that way the name Regula fit, although that seemed a stretch. It seemed to Richard far more likely that the answers to the machine's true purpose were in the part of the book that was missing, the part hidden away in the Temple of the Winds. |
| 1306 |
As much as he wanted to be with Kahlan, he needed to think things through. More than that, though, he needed to be alone. Somehow, it seemed certain to him that the machine, a machine that could issue omens, had to be at the heart of the the darkness that had settled over the palace. Richard remembered what the sick boy down in the market, the boy who had scratched Richard and Kahlan, had said. He'd said there was darkness in the palace. Darkness seeking darkness. Richard no longer doubted that there was darkness in the palace. It had descended on them all. He reached out and placed a hand on the machine. "What are you?" he whispered, wondering out loud to himself. "Why are you doing this?" As if in response, a low rumble came from the machine as the gears began turning against one another. It wasn't like in the past, though. In the past it had always started with a jolt that shook the ground. This time it began softly, the shafts and gears slowly beginning to move, to gather momentum. In the past it had always been a sudden, thunderous initiation of movement. It had always started at full speed. This time, it was very different. It was a quiet beginning that was building toward that eventual mechanical mayhem. Richard leaned over, looking into the slit of a window. He saw the light inside gradually intensify as the slowly turning gears picked up speed with the machine's awakening. The same symbol projected up onto the ceiling as in the past, though this time instead of igniting at full intensity, it gradually grew in strength. Before long, though, the inner workings of the machine were in full motion. The ground around it rumbled. The light burning up from deep inside steadily grew brighter. The symbol on the ceiling rotating above his head glowed. A latch on a rotating wheel popped up beneath the stack of strips on the other side of the machine and pushed a strip partway out from under the stack. Pincers then plucked the blank metal strip from the bottom of the stack. |
| 1307 |
When it dropped into the tray, Richard stood looking at it for a long time before he finally pulled it out. The second strip was as cool to the touch as the first had been. He held it up in the light, looking at the unique organization of symbols that made up the two emblems burned into the metal. Hardly able to believe what he was seeing, he read it aloud. "Why have I had dreams?" The machine seemed to be asking him a question. If it was, he had no idea how to answer it. Richard remembered then having heard before what was now written in the language of Creation on both strips. It had been the boy down in the market, Henrik, who had said "I have had dreams." Richard and Kahlan hadn't been able to understand why he'd said it. They had thought he was sick and delirious. He had then asked "Why have I had dreams?" Now the machine had just asked the very same thing. The boy hadn't been delirious. It had been the machine speaking through him. The boy had also asked if the sky was still blue. And it had asked why they had all left it alone. Only it had said "me" — why had they left "me" all alone in the cold and dark. It had said it was alone, so alone. The machine was asking why it had been buried alive. It had also said He will find me, I know he will. Richard wondered if that was a prophecy ... an omen. Or was the machine expressing a fear? Henrik lifted his head from gulping water out of the brook to look back through the trees into the deep shadows. He could hear the hounds coming. They crashed through brush, snarling and barking as they came. With the back of his fist, Henrik wiped fresh tears of terror from his cheeks. The hounds were going to catch him, he knew they were. They wouldn't stop until they had him. Ever since that day at the People's Palace, when they had showed up outside the tent, sniffing and growling, they kept coming for him. His only chance was to keep running. He stuck his foot into the stirrup and hooked his wrist over the horn of the saddle to help pull himself back up onto the horse's back. |
| 1308 |
He spun the reins around his wrists, locked them to his fisted hands with his thumbs, and then thumped the mare's belly with his heels, urging it into an easy gallop. He had hoped to take an extra moment to eat something more than a biscuit and a single piece of dried meat. He was starving. He was thirsty as well, but he'd only had time to lie on his belly and gulp a few swallows of water from the brook before he had sprung up and run back to his horse. He had desperately wanted to eat more, to drink more. But there was no time. The hounds were too close. He had to keep running, keep ahead of them. If they got to him they would tear him apart. He hadn't known where he was going at first. His instinct had made him bolt from his mother's tent and had driven him onward. He knew his mother would want to protect him, but she couldn't. She would have been torn apart and then they would be on him. So he'd had no choice but to run for all he was worth until, exhausted, he had happened upon the horses. They had been in a small corral with some others. He hadn't seen anyone around. He needed to get away, so he snatched up a saddle and took two horses. He was lucky enough to have discovered some traveling food in the saddlebags or he would probably have starved to death by now. He never gave a thought to it being wrong to take the horses; his life was at stake. He simply ran. Who could blame him? Would people really expect him to be torn apart and eaten alive rather than take a couple of horses to get away? What choice did he have? When it grew too dark to see, he was forced to stop for the night. A few times he had come across an abandoned building where he had been able to hole up for the night, safe for a time from the hounds. Then, in the morning, he made a run for it before the hounds knew he was up. 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. |
| 1309 |
Other times, when there was no place of safety, he had been able to get a fire started. He huddled close to it, ready to grab a burning branch and brandish it at the dogs if they came close. They never did. They didn't like the fire. They always watched from a distance, their heads lowered, their eyes glowing in the dark, as they paced back and forth, waiting for morning. Sometimes when he woke they were gone and he dared hope they had finally tired of the chase. But it was never long before he would hear them baying in the distance, racing in toward him, and the chase would be on again. He pushed the horses so hard keeping ahead of the hounds that the one he rode at first had given out. He switched the saddle to the second and left the first behind, hoping the hounds would be satisfied with the horse and he could get away. The hounds hadn't taken the horse, though. They'd kept coming for him, instead. They had followed him through the mountains, through the forests, ever onward, ever deeper into a dark, trackless land of immense trees. Now he was beginning to recognize the gloomy wood he was passing through. He had grown up several days' travel to the north, in a small village hard against the hills beside a branch of the Caro-Kann River. He had been in this place, on this trail, before, with his mother. He remembered the towering pines clinging to the rocky slope, the way they closed in overhead, obscuring the heavily overcast sky, making it dark and dreary down among the brush and bramble. The horse skidded, trying to find footing on the steep descent down the side of the grade. The woods were too thick and it was too dark in among them to see what lay down ahead. For that matter, he couldn't see far off to the sides, either. But he didn't need to see. He knew what was ahead. After a long descent down the ill-defined, twisting trail, the ground flattened out into a darker place where the trees grew closer together, and the underbrush was thick. There were only rare glimpses of light through the trees. |
| 1310 |
The tangle of shrubs and small trees made it nearly impossible to take any course but the thinned area that served as a trail. When he came to a rocky rim, the horse snorted in protest and refused to go on. There was no place beyond that was safe for a horse. What trail there was made its way down between and over cascading lifts of rock and ledges. Henrik dismounted and peered over the edge down into the misty wilderness below. He remembered that the trail down was narrow, steep, and treacherous. The horse couldn't take him any farther. He looked back over his shoulder, expecting the hounds to come bounding out of the trees at any second. By their growls and yelps, he knew they were getting close again. He quickly unsaddled the horse so that it would at least have a chance to get away. 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. 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. |
| 1311 |
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. 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. |
| 1312 |
Henrik knew where he was. Before him, the tangle of growth and trailers of vine marked the outer fringe of Kharga Trace. He had heard from his mother that a person had to have a powerful need to go into this place, because not many ever came out again. He and his mother had been two of the lucky ones who had made it back out, making it seem all the more foolish to tempt fate twice. His heart pounding, his breath coming in rapid pulls, he stared ahead with wide eyes. He knew what was waiting for him. Jit, the Hedge Maid, was waiting for him. There was only one thing worse than facing the Hedge Maid again: the certainty of being torn apart and eaten alive by the pack of dogs chasing him. He could hear them getting closer. He had no choice. He plunged ahead. After a frightening race along the trail as it tunneled in places through the dense growth, the landscape opened somewhat as he reached some of the more open stretches of water. The trail, never more than inches above the muddy water, was gradually taken over by tangled roots, sticks, vines, and branches all woven together into a mat that made a walkway of sorts. Without it, the solid ground of the trail in places would simply have vanished beneath stretches of duckweed. As it was, the pathway of sticks and vines barely cleared the surface of the dark brown water. Henrik worried about what would happen should he slip off the trail of tangled shoots and branches. He worried about what waited in the water for the unwary, or the careless. He was so tired, so afraid, that only raw fear kept his feet moving. He wished he could be back, safe, with his mother. But he couldn't stop or the hounds would get him. While the stick and vine walkway was in places wide enough for several people to walk abreast, much of it was only wide enough for one person. In those narrow places where it became a bridge over stretches of open water, there were sometimes handholds or even rails made of crooked branches, lashed by thin vines to supports sticking up out of the tangle of wood underfoot. |
| 1313 |
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. 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. |
| 1314 |
These were not small yet troublesome thorns like those on a rosebush that would scratch arms and legs. These were long, iron-hard, sharp spikes that would mercilessly rip a person apart and soon impale them so completely that they would be held prisoner. With the floating form of the familiar right behind him, watching over him to make sure that he didn't try to turn and run, he passed through a series of rooms of various sizes, their way always lit by hundreds of candles. Some parts were only connecting tunnels where he had to duck to make it through. They were something like hallways in a building, with smaller side corridors going off in different directions. One of the relatively large chambers they had to pass through contained what had to be thousands of strips of cloth, string, and thin vines all hanging down from the ceiling, all holding objects tied to their ends, everything from coins to shells to rotting lizards. They hung perfectly still in the dead air. Henrik bent low to pass under some of the dense, hanging collection of strange objects, holding his breath against the stench most of the way. The entire structure moved and creaked as he made his way through the maze, his route lit by candles, as if to welcome visitors. It felt like he was walking into a giant, tubular spiderweb, something like those he'd seen at the base of logs that were meant to funnel prey inward to their death. 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. |
| 1315 |
More likely, they were making certain that he didn't turn back. Whenever he glanced up at them, they stared at him with the most sickly yellow eyes and he would immediately look away. Each of the seven, when seen up close, was as ugly as death itself. As they made their way down a broader corridor, there were even more candles placed all along the twig walls, from the curving edge of the floor up the rounded walls higher than he was tall. The hall they were in, lit by the golden glow of all the candles, led them abruptly into a murky room with hardly any candles. There didn't look to be room for many candles in the shadowy room. The place was filled instead with jars and containers. Some of the containers were made of tan clay. The jars were far more plentiful and in colors from tan to green to ruby red. In hundreds of places, the woven sticks and twigs had been pulled apart enough so that jars could be stuck into the knitted stick walls. What was in all the jars, Henrik feared to imagine. From what he could see through the colored glass, most were filled with liquid that was dark and filthy-looking, though a lot of it looked like muddy water. Things floated in the liquid among the dirt and debris. He tried not to look too closely at what those things floating in the jars might be. One jar looked to be filled with human teeth. But the jars and containers were not what frightened him the most. It was what was woven into the twig walls themselves, behind the jars, that had tears of terror running down his cheeks. Woven into the walls were people. He could also see them in the walls of the corridors going out of the room in various directions. At first, he saw dozens and dozens of people cocooned in the fabric of the stick walls. The more he looked, though, the more people he could see entrapped farther back within the walls. Some of the people were desiccated corpses, their mouths gaping open, their eye sockets sunken, the skin of their bare arms and legs leathery and shriveled. |
| 1316 |
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. But what riveted his gaze, what had his heart pounding, what had his knees weak, was her mouth. Her thin lips were sewn shut with strips of leather. The leather thong was stitched right through the flesh of her lips, leaving holes that didn't look like they had ever entirely healed. The stitches weren't even. They looked to have been done haphazardly, with little care. The stitched strips of leather crossed to form "X"s over her mouth. |
| 1317 |
Henrik could see the one without a hand trembling slightly. Jit let out a long, low squeal and a few clicks. Two of the familiars gathered in close about her, leaning in, whispering. They nodded to more clicks and soft, grating sounds from deep in the Hedge Maid's throat. When the form finally swept into the room, bringing darkness with it, Henrik saw at last that it was a man. The man paused before Jit, not far from Henrik. The candles' flames in the hall behind him and those nearby in the room slowly came back to life, showing at last the man before them. When he finally got a good look at the man, Henrik froze stiff, unable to draw a breath. The man glanced down at the warm, wet place growing on the front of Henrik's pants and smiled to himself. "This is the boy?" he asked in a deep, iron-hard voice that made Henrik have to remind himself to blink and caused the seven familiars to drift back up ever so slightly more behind Jit, as if they weren't aware that his voice alone had bulled them back. The Hedge Maid let out a short, grating, clicking sound. "Yes, this is him, Bishop Arc," the handless familiar said for her mistress after watching her speak in the strange voice. Bishop Arc glared at Jit for a moment. His gaze lowered deliberately to take in her mouth sewn closed; then he again turned his terrible eyes on Henrik. The whites of the man's eyes were not white. Not at all. They had been tattooed a bright blood red. The dark iris and pupil in the field of blood red made his eyes seem as if they were looking out from some other world, a world of fire and flame — or perhaps from the underworld itself. But even as frightening as the bishop's eyes were, that was not the most disturbing aspect of the man. The most ghastly thing about him, the thing that made Henrik unable to look away, unable to stop his heart from hammering, unable to draw more than short, shallow breaths, was the man's flesh. Every bit of Bishop Arc was covered with tattooed symbols. Not simply covered, but layered over countless times so that the skin looked something other than human. |
| 1318 |
While the bishop's entire bald head was tattooed over with the designs, one dominated them all. It was larger than all the others. The bottom edge of that large circle crossed over the center of his nose and swept to each side beneath his eyes, going around just above his ears to cover the rest of the crown of the skull. Inside the circle was another, and between them a ring of runes. A triangle sitting within the inner circle crossed horizontally just above the man's brow. Smaller, secondary circular symbols floating outside the points of the triangle that broke the circles covered each temple with the third at the point of the triangle on the back of his head. The way it was laid out made it appear as if the man was glaring out with those haunting red eyes from within the circular symbol, as if he were looking out from the underworld. In the center of the triangle, toward the front of the man's skull, was a backward figure nine. That large tattoo covering the top of his bald head was darker than all the others, not just because it looked to be the most recently added, but because the lines composing it were heavier. 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. |
| 1319 |
She leaned toward him and made the same sound again. He didn't know what she was saying. He only knew that she wanted something. One of the familiars bent toward him over the Hedge Maid's shoulder. "Open your fists," she hissed impatiently. His breaths coming in short, rapid pulls, he tried with all his might to do as he had been told. Despite his best efforts, his hands would not open. He'd held them tightly closed for so long they'd become frozen into tight knots. Despite how much he tried, how much he wanted to obey, he could not will his fingers to uncurl. He stared at them, trying frantically to make them open, fearing what she would do to him if he didn't do as he'd been told. Jit seemed unconcerned. Her strong fingers began peeling his fingers open one at a time. It hurt something fierce to have them move after all the time they been held fisted. Each one tingled with stabbing pains as it was pulled straight. Showing no sympathy for his cries of pain, she did not pause at her work. Before long, she had all his fingers pried open. She flattened his hands out, pressing them between hers, one hand at a time, stroking them for a while as if to soothe away the stiffness and make certain they would remain open before she turned them over, palms down. The Hedge Maid snapped a small twig from the woven mass beside her. He could see that there was a long, wickedly sharp thorn at the end. Not knowing what she intended, he again tried to pull away, but, with his left wrist caught in her iron grip, she easily pulled his hand closer. He felt like an animal in a trap about to be skinned. Holding his hand steady, the Hedge Maid dragged the point of the thorn along the underside of the fingernail of his first finger. She turned the thorn in the light, carefully inspecting it. He couldn't imagine what she was doing or what she was looking for. Henrik saw one of the familiars, back at the wall, working at pulling a jar out of its snug place in the weave of branches. With effort, the jar finally came free. |
| 1320 |
She brought it with her to Jit's side and waited patiently as she watched her mistress at work. The Hedge Maid dragged the point of the thorn under the nail of the second finger. She held it up. This time there was a small bit of something stuck on the point. A sound came from deep in her throat that told him she was pleased. She held it up to show her companions. They cooed their satisfaction. Bishop Arc only glared when she showed him. The familiar with the jar, after pulling off the lid, held it out for her mistress. Cockroaches poured out over the sides of the jar and down over the familiar's hands. They made a rattling sound as they fell by the hundreds onto the floor, scattering in every direction before vanishing down into the weave of sticks and branches. In a moment they had all disappeared. Jit, unconcerned, dunked the thorn in the filthy water and swished it around. She pulled it up and saw that what ever had been stuck on it had come off. Satisfied, she returned her attention to Henrik. She repeated the careful cleaning under the nails of the last two fingers and thumb on his left hand. She found more of the tiny treasure she was searching for under the nails of his fingers, but not his thumb. Out of the corner of his eye, Henrik saw a smile come to Bishop Arc's tattooed lips both times the Hedge Maid came up with a little scrap of something on the point of the thorn. Each time, she swished the thorn in the stinking liquid in the jar, leaving what ever it was to disappear down into the murky water. Jit dropped his left hand and moved on to his right. After dragging the thorn under his first finger she brought it up close to her face for a look. There was nothing there. She cast a brief, furtive look up at the bishop and then dragged the thorn under the nail again, but it didn't produce anything the second time, either. She moved to the next finger and did a more careful cleaning under Henrik's nail. The thorn found nothing. She repeated the search, then when it was fruitless, moved on to his third finger. |
| 1321 |
It, too, didn't have what she wanted. She focused on the little finger, as if it were her last hope. When the thorn came up without anything but dirt, her hands dropped into her lap. The symbols all over him seemed to churn as the man leaned down a little. "What's wrong?" The Hedge Maid made a few short sounds from deep in her throat. "Jit says that we have the flesh of the woman," the familiar at her side said. She hesitated before finishing the translation. "But we do not have the flesh of the man." The bishop straightened in a way that caused all seven of the familiars to back up. One of them was not quick enough. He snatched her by the throat and yanked her close. It looked to be a reflex driven purely by emotion. She cried out, thrashing like a snake in a snare, but she could not escape his grip. It was clear that the bishop was in a blind rage. She clawed at his tattooed hands around her throat, but it did her no good. "Tell your mistress that I am not pleased," he said to the others. Several of them urgently leaned in, speaking to the Hedge Maid in her strange language. When the bishop pulled the familiar in his fist close to his face and glared into her eyes, she cried out with a shriek of terrible agony. "Back to the grave with you," he said through gritted teeth. As Henrik watched in frozen shock, the familiar lost the bluish glow they all had. Wisps of smoke curled up from under the cowl over her head. The whole creature writhed and withered as if everything was being sucked out of her. The skin on her hands and arms darkened as it drew in around the bones and knuckles until they looked skeletal. The flesh of her face boiled and bubbled and burned to a dark, leathery mask. Blackened skin smoldered as it shrank tighter and tighter around the skull. The eyes sunk back into their sockets. The jaw slackened and lips shriveled back, exposing the familiar's fangs. Bishop Arc tossed the withered remains aside. Seething with anger, he paced back toward the tunnel where he had entered. |
| 1322 |
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. The brown water sloshed around as she walked. The lid kept most but not all of the water from spilling over. Henrik saw big brown bugs emerge up out of the weave of the twigs and branches to feed at the drops that did escape, run down the jar, and drip onto the floor. Bishop Arc glared with bloodred eyes as the familiars went about their work of finding the correct containers out of the hundreds hoarded throughout the room. The dark symbols covering his flesh made his obvious rage seem all the more dangerous. The six remaining familiars avoided meeting his gaze as they worked at finding what they needed and pulled them out of the wall or plucked them up from the floor. Each of the familiars collected an unwieldy stash of jars clutched in the crook of their arms. |
| 1323 |
The one without a hand couldn't hold as many but she did the best she could. As soon as they had what they needed, they hurried with their cargo to catch up with their departing mistress. For her part, Jit took a staff that was leaning against the wall as she carried the single jar in her other arm. She looked back over her shoulder at Henrik and let out a series of short commands in her strange, screeching, clicking language. The familiar without a hand circled back and shoved him into line behind the Hedge Maid and in front of the rest of the familiars. "Jit says for you to hurry up and come along." She glanced back briefly at the bishop and then leaned closer. "When this is through," she said with venomous delight, "I am going to suck you dry and feed what's left of you to the cockroaches." Henrik froze stiff in terror. With a soft cackle, she shoved him to get him moving again. As he stumbled forward, he thought of how much he missed being with his mother. He wanted to be back with her in their tent making bead goods. He wished that she had never brought him to the Hedge Maid in the first place. Ever since he had realized that he was being chased back into Kharga Trace and that the Hedge Maid was going to have him in her clutches again, he had feared that this time he might not be leaving. The bishop took up a place at the end of the line as they followed the Hedge Maid along the dark passageway lined with hundreds of strips of leather holding everything from small dead animals to empty turtle shells, to the skulls of little creatures with sharp little teeth, all hanging from the walls in layers. Henrik saw the eyes of the people in projecting areas of buttress walls watching them as they passed. When Bishop Arc met their gazes they quickly looked away. Not a peep came from the people in the walls. Henrik imagined that if he was trapped in the walls he would have trouble not crying out for help. But there was no one to help the poor souls trapped in this terrible place. |
| 1324 |
There was no one to help him. Making their way through the labyrinth that was the Hedge Maid's lair, Henrik began to hear insects buzzing, birds calling, and other creatures whistling and chirping. As they reached an opening and emerged out into the night, the swamp creatures abruptly went dead silent. The low clouds gliding swiftly by overhead were lit by the moon from somewhere above them so that they cast a faint glow. The ground all around was elevated enough in the midst of the dense, swampy forest to be bone-dry. The dark shapes of hulking trees surrounding them, trailing long curtains of moss, looked to Henrik like arms of the dead trailing burial shrouds as they gathered around the living. As they crossed the clearing, he saw that the flat rocks lying here and there were not placed randomly, but arranged in circular patterns. Each stone was also placed atop slightly mounded dirt. The mounds with stones appeared to lead to the center of the open area, where the Hedge Maid set about making marks on the ground with her decorated staff. The marks she was scratching in the ground with the point of her staff were not unlike the tattooed designs all over Bishop Arc. Iridescent blue feathers, orange and yellow beads, and a collection of coins with holes in the center hung on buckskin thongs from the middle of the Hedge Maid's staff. Henrik wondered why the Hedge Maid would be so interested in coins that she would use them to adorn such an obviously important object. After all, what good would money do her out in Kharga Trace? Then he realized that it actually wasn't of any value to her as money, the way it was to other people. The coins must have been taken from those poor souls encased in the walls. To the Hedge Maid, shiny coins were merely decorations, like the shiny feathers. Both were tokens of the lives she had taken. As the familiars went about arranging the jars on the ground around the Hedge Maid, Bishop Arc stood to the side, arms folded, his bloodred eyes glaring as he watched the preparations. |
| 1325 |
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. 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. |
| 1326 |
The sound, the light, the spinning, horrific creatures dancing like demons, were all making Henrik dizzy. His head throbbed with the beat of it all, with the pressure of it all. He squinted, fearing to close his eyes lest he never be able to open them again, yet hardly able to keep his eyes open against the overwhelming sights and sounds. As all this activity whirled around her, Jit reached into various jars, pulling out handfuls of teeth, or what looked to be small finger bones, or human vertebrae, and cast them into the circle. With each addition light flared and danced. The world seemed to be flickering. He saw little flashes of red, yellow, and orange. And then Jit picked up the jar holding the flesh she had taken from under Henrik's fingernails. The forms were rotating so fast that he could hardly make out individuals. It was all becoming a blur of dark, glistening flesh and thrashing limbs. The Hedge Maid abruptly threw the jar she had up into the air above glowing circles and the writhing mass of forms. Henrik saw the glass explode apart. The liquid in the jar seemed to ignite. The world turned so bright that it looked like he could see Jit's bones right through her body. Everything was turned to light and fire. The trees all around burned. Hot glowing embers were drawn off the trees to swirl around the incandescence coming from the contents of the jar above the center of the flaming circle. The Hedge Maid held her hands up, summoning forces he had never imagined. She stood alone against the light, defined by it, holding sway over a world turned to an inferno. In the center of it all, in the heart of the blinding light, standing out like bright stars, there was something brighter yet. Small bits — the bits of flesh Jit had recovered from under his fingernails — were so incandescent that they made the rest of the burning world seem dull in comparison. Her arms raised, Jit seemed to be commanding those bright sparks to pull everything else up with them as they rotated while climbing ever higher into the sky. |
| 1327 |
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. 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. |
| 1328 |
Henrik blinked. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. The raging whirlwind of fire and light was gone as well. He looked around and saw that the moss on the nearby trees hung limp in the still, humid air, just as it had before. Every tree was still there. The ground that had broken open as the bone men had erupted out of it looked undisturbed. It was as if none of what Henrik had just seen had actually happened. Except, the jar was gone and tiny bits of glass, like a thousand fallen stars, lay scattered across the bare ground. Henrik couldn't understand what had happened, what he had seen. He couldn't understand if the fire had been real, if the creatures he had seen come up out of the ground were real, if the terrible sound and all the rest of it had been real. Bishop Arc, still standing where he had been in the beginning, looked unharmed, and unmoved. He wore the same glare as he had in the beginning. If he was surprised by the deafening display of fire and light, he didn't show it. In the center of the clearing, the six familiars slowly circled in around Jit, tending to her, fussing over her, touching her protectively, as if to see if she had survived the ordeal. She ignored them as she used a foot to swipe away the marks she had made in the dirt with her staff when she had first come out. The Hedge Maid turned her dark eyes toward Bishop Arc. She let out the squealing clicks that were her way of talking. Henrik could see her straining to open her mouth more as she made the sounds, but the net of leather thongs prevented it. One of the familiars floated a little closer toward the bishop. "Jit says that it is done." His red eyes turned from the familiar to Jit. "See that you do the other things I have asked as well." His brow drew down tight. "Don't give me cause to return." With that he turned and stormed away. 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. |
| 1329 |
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. 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. The effort had not healed her. She thought that maybe she'd done something wrong. |
| 1330 |
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. Both were in their red leather. While he welcomed the guards outside the room, he didn't really put too much faith in them stopping what really mattered to him. What had been in their room before, watching them, had without any trouble slipped past guards. This time, Richard intended to have a little surprise if the mysterious watchers again came looking in. With an arm around Kahlan's waist, Richard led her into the room. He set the load of their packs and other gear down to the side. |
| 1331 |
At the back of the room there were double doors with glass panes. With the back of his hand, Richard pushed the drapes aside and looked out the glass into the darkness. There appeared to be a small terrace with a potted evergreen to the side up against the fat, waist-high stone railing. Out on the grounds far below, Richard saw a patrol of soldiers. Once Cara left, Richard tried to get Kahlan to at least take off her boots. She fussed and said that she was cold and just wanted the blanket over her. Richard knew how when he had a headache and was throwing up and terribly sick to his stomach he didn't want anyone messing with him, either. 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. |
| 1332 |
They were greatly troubled that the Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor wouldn't share prophecy with them. They felt that their views were being ignored. Orneta had never really known these people to be all that concerned with prophecy, but recently it had taken center stage in their lives. It was much the same with her. She supposed that since peace had come, so had broader concerns about the future. As they had learned from the intimate discussions with Orneta and Ludwig, there could be only one explanation as to why Lord Rahl and the Mother Confessor refused to share prophecy. Orneta gestured to Ludwig. "As Abbot Dreier has revealed, a number of places in prophecy have been discovered that name Lord Rahl 'the bringer of death.' I take no satisfaction in telling you this. Nor do you need to take my word for it. Though I doubt that it would be wise to ask Lord Rahl to show you the reference material, it is available. Bishop Arc, reluctantly, would show it to you if you insisted on seeing it with your own eyes." The notion that the Keeper of the world of the dead was influencing and using their leaders for his own ends was clearly alarming. 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. |
| 1333 |
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. There were also nods of approval. Ludwig bowed his head. "Of course, Queen Orneta. I know that Bishop Arc will be humbled by your words. I can assure you, on his behalf, that wherever the future may lead our people, Bishop Arc and I will continue to use prophecy to guide us so that we all may know the dangers along the path to our common good." "I wish that Lord Rahl would do as much," Ambassador Grandon said. He tugged on the end of his pointed beard as he shook his head in sincere regret. "We're not picking sides in a conflict — we're all on the same side, after all — so I sincerely hope that Lord Rahl won't see our desire to align ourselves with Bishop Arc as any kind of betrayal." Urgent murmurs of agreement passed among those gathered. They wanted to side with prophecy, but they trod lightly where treason was concerned. These people were loyal to the D'Haran Empire, but they also wanted prophecy to guide D'Hara. Orneta leaned both hands on the broad marble railing and gazed out over the vast corridors of the People's Palace below. Sunlight streamed in from glassed sections overhead. Below, the crowds, lit by streamers of sunlight, moved through the halls, or gathered in groups, as did the intimate group up in the small but comfortable sitting area of the balcony. |
| 1334 |
She was indignant, and she was angry at the woman for hurting Ludwig, but she thought better of showing her emotion for the moment. She would make her grievance clear enough at the proper time and to the proper people, and then this woman would pay the price for her insolence, to say nothing of her needless cruelty. At least Orneta could get the Mord-Sith away from Ludwig before he did something foolish and got himself hurt even worse. As she made her way down the elegant corridor, Orneta tried not to move too swiftly. Rather, she moved at a stately pace, just to remind the Mord-Sith of who she was dealing with. Orneta was also in no hurry to reach her room and be alone with the woman. A servant going in the opposite direction, carrying an armful of fresh bed linens, moved hard against the side of the hallway when she saw the Mord-Sith coming, and stayed well out of her way. The woman kept her eyes turned toward the ground as she passed, avoiding meeting the steady gaze of the tall woman in red leather. Orneta felt like a prisoner being led to an execution. She couldn't believe that she was being treated with such disrespect. Considering her decision, it occurred to her that it wasn't entirely undeserved. For years, she had been nothing but loyal to the cause of the D'Haran Empire. She reminded herself that what she was doing was out of loyalty to the D'Haran Empire — to the people, anyway, if not the leader. She didn't know what the Mord-Sith could possibly want, but Orneta was becoming more worried by the moment that it had something to do with her throwing her loyalty to Hannis Arc over Richard Rahl. She told herself that it was a silly worry. No one knew of her decision but her and Ludwig. And of course the group, but she had only just told them. It occurred to her then that there might have been a prophecy that foretold of her new-sworn allegiance. Lord Rahl wouldn't tell them what prophecy said, wouldn't help them against threats those omens revealed, but that didn't mean he wouldn't use them for his own dark ends. |
| 1335 |
Sharp shards of suffering drove inward through her ears. Orneta sat on the floor, limp and helpless, as the shrieking, crashing, roaring sound and the blaze of light swirled through her head. She heard Vika's boots on the white marble floor as the woman came around in front of her. The Mord-Sith stood over Orneta, towered over her, looking down without the slightest hint of compassion, much less remorse. Orneta had never seen such a cold and heartless look in all her life. "That was quite good," Vika said in a calm voice. "I'm sure everyone could hear it." Orneta couldn't hold her head up. She couldn't make her neck muscles respond. By the terrible pain, she thought that they must be torn. Her chin rested on her blood-soaked chest. She saw blood spreading across the white marble floor. Her blood. A lot of her blood. The Mord-Sith's boots were the same color as the pool of blood she was standing in. With supreme effort, through the burning pain in her throat, past the blood filling her mouth, she used all her might to lift her head to look up and speak. "What do you want of me?" Vika arched a brow over a cold blue eye. "Well, now that you have screamed very nicely for me, I want you to die." Orneta blinked up at the woman. She could offer no resistance, could not fight such a savage creature. She was not surprised, though. She had known the answer before Vika had spoken it. Orneta saw the Agiel coming again. She felt only the first instant of exquisite pain as her heart exploded in her chest. And then, even that breathless, crushing agony diminished into the last conscious, dimming spark of awareness. Ludwig was pouring himself a last glass of wine when he heard the door behind him open and then close. There had been no knock. He glanced back over his shoulder just enough to catch a glimpse of red leather. The familiar odor of blood reached his nostrils. It reminded him of being back at the abbey, of his work at extracting prophecy. He turned around and took a sip of the wine as he leaned a hip against the table. |
| 1336 |
"So what does this one say?" She took a breath to steel herself and then handed him the strip. "I would rather you translate it yourself. I don't wish to be the messenger in this." Frowning, Richard took the strip and looked at the one rather simple emblem on the strip, followed by a more complex element. He felt blood rush to his face in hot rage. The strip said The hounds will take her from you. He clenched his jaw. "That's it, I've had it with that machine. I want it destroyed!" As he headed for the door, Nicci and Cara raced to catch up with him. Kahlan woke to the feel of warm breath on her face. It made absolutely no sense. The alarm of her inner voice warned her to keep her eyes closed and to remain perfectly still. She frantically tried to understand what was going on, but she couldn't make sense of it. She knew that it wasn't Richard. He was worried about her and would never do something that would frighten her, especially when she was not feeling well. Her left arm hurt. She only dimly recalled Zedd putting something on it and wrapping it in bandages. But her arm was not the immediate problem. Her experience during the war, and even more, her training and experience as a Confessor, automatically took over. She ignored her still-throbbing headache, her nausea, the ache of her arm, and put her full focus on the problem at hand. Without opening her eyes, or moving, or changing her breathing, Kahlan began to take assessment. Something was keeping her tightly pinned under the blanket. She tried to imagine what could be holding her down. As she put her mind to understanding it, she thought that it felt rather like someone on their hands and knees directly over her, with a hand and a knee to either side, pinning the blanket down. She knew that the room was heavily guarded, so she was at a loss to imagine how anyone intending harm could have gotten in. She couldn't think of a single person who would do such a thing as a joke. She realized that the smell of the thing was decidedly unpleasant and not human. |
| 1337 |
The heavy breathing had an element of a low growl to it. Ever so carefully, she slitted her eyelids open just the tiniest bit. Near to her, to each side, she could see something slender. Something slender and hairy. She realized that it could only be the front legs of an animal like a wolf or dog, possibly a coyote. In the dim light of the single lamp on the bedside table, it was hard to tell the color. With that bit of information, the frantic, bewildered confusion began to clear. Her thoughts of what it could possibly be, thankfully, began to coalesce. It was not a person on all fours over her. It was some sort of animal. By the weight of it on the bed, what ever it was had to be rather big, too big, she realized, to be a coyote. And then she heard the distinctive low growl, and felt the hot breath again. By the smell of the thing, the legs she could see, and the panting growl she was pretty sure that it had to be a big dog, possibly a wolf. 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. |
| 1338 |
She knew that she had only one chance. She also knew that she could not delay. Dogs and wolves both had a predator instinct. They were excited by prey trying to get away, by it running. As she lay perfectly still, the prey drive was being kept in check. But only as long as she was perfectly still, and only for the moment. She knew that the dog could decide to act first. She could hear the low, menacing growl getting deeper, getting a little louder. She could feel the vibration of it in her chest. The dog was deciding to flush its prey. She had no time to waste. She knew that once it sank its teeth into her, there would be no escape. She had to take the initiative. Kahlan slowly pulled in a deep breath, preparing herself. The dog sensed something. The growl rose in power. Suddenly, with all her strength, as fast as she possibly could, she used her right arm to whip the blanket up, over, and around the dog. It began to lunge. In an instant, though, before it could fully react, before it could drive forward and before its teeth could reach her face, she had the beast rolled up in the blanket. The rotating momentum of throwing the blanket over and around it, of enveloping and trapping the animal, rolled them both over the side of the bed. They crashed to the floor, Kahlan on top of the powerful, struggling dog. Its legs, encased in the blanket, kicked frantically to escape. Kahlan knew there were guards right outside the door. She tried to cry out for help, but her throat was so sore that her voice was gone. She couldn't bring forth a scream. Fortunately, she had just missed knocking the bedside lamp off onto the floor with them, so she could see what she was doing. From years of experience, Kahlan instinctively reached to the knife at her belt so that she could dispatch the wildly thrashing beast. The knife wasn't there. She was confused at first as to why not, wondering if she had lost it when she rolled off the bed. Almost at the same time, she realized that she didn't usually wear it in the palace. |
| 1339 |
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. 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. |
| 1340 |
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. 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. |
| 1341 |
Kahlan nearly cried out with giddy joy when she reached the wagon, but she didn't have the voice or the breath. She timed her paces right and leaped up onto the iron rung step hanging down off the back. As the dogs leaped, snapping, trying to get ahold of her leg, she pulled herself up to the second step and, with a final mighty effort, dove up and over into the wagon. As she landed, she cracked her head hard on something dead solid. The pain was stunning. Her world went black. It was deep in the middle of the night by the time Richard finally stepped off the spiral stairs and into the room with Regula. It had been a long journey from the guest quarters up to the Garden of Life. The palace complex was a sprawling city and it sometimes seemed that he spent half his time crossing back and forth through it. He gritted his teeth in anger at the sight of the machine. He was fed up with the way its predictions had been at the core of every one of the recent deaths. And now the machine was predicting that the hounds would take Kahlan from him. He couldn't get the image out of his mind of the manner in which the hounds had taken Catherine from her husband. The thought of that happening to Kahlan had him seeing red. On the way from the murdered Queen Orneta, despite Nicci's assurance that Kahlan was sleeping peacefully, he had stopped in to check for himself. He had slipped quietly into the room and by the light of a single lamp burning on a table by the bed he had seen her, covered by the blanket he had tucked under her chin earlier, sound asleep. Her breathing had been even and she wasn't tossing and turning, so it seemed to Richard that she was resting comfortably. He had gently kissed her forehead and left her to her rest. He had also checked with Rikka, Berdine, and the soldiers to make sure that they understood that anything at all unusual was to be taken as dead serious. They all understood. The whole time, the words from the machine, The hounds will take her from you, kept running through his mind. |
| 1342 |
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. Wizard's fire unleashed in a confined space was extraordinarily intense and profoundly dangerous. Even though Richard, Nicci, and Cara turned their faces away from the inferno, they still had to put hands up to shield themselves against the brutal heat and light from the concentrated conflagration. The burning roar was thunderous. It felt as if the entire world were being consumed. When the violence of the wizard's fire at last subsided, Richard was finally able to open his eyes and take his hand away from his face. As the last glowing clots of conjured conflagration dripped onto the floor and extinguished with a steamy hiss, and the smoke cleared away, Richard expected to see Regula reduced to a puddle of molten metal. It was not. He saw that the machine was still sitting in the center of the room, looking exactly the same as the first time he had seen it. It looked untouched. He was certain that the outer walls of the machine would be scorching hot, but as he approached it he felt no residual heat radiating from the metal. Richard cautiously reached out, carefully testing, then tentatively touching the metal surface. It was cool to the touch. Richard had seen some of the terrible damage done by wizard's fire, yet it had done nothing to the machine. It hadn't even scoured the patina of corrosion off the surface. |
| 1343 |
The symbols on the sides, the same symbols that appeared in the book Regula, were still in perfect condition. If he hadn't seen the wizard's fire engulfing it with his own eyes, he might not have believed that anything had happened, much less that it had been the target of some of the most powerful conjured magic in existence. 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. Both dark and light twisted with savage effort to dominate the other, to occupy the same place at the same time. |
| 1344 |
He let it rage for a time, letting it seep into every fiber of his being. The others in the room, recognizing all too well what he intended to do, backed away. Filled with the fury of the sword's magic mixing with his own, Richard slowly lifted the gleaming blade and touched the steel to his forehead. He let his own anger at the danger Kahlan was in surge through him, interlacing with the sword's righteous wrath. Eyes closed, he gave himself over to the volatile fusing of magic. "Blade," he whispered, "be true this day." With both hands, Richard lifted the sword high over his head. Without pause and with all his might and fury, he drove the blade down toward the machine. The sword's tip whistled as it sliced through the air. Richard screamed with the power of the magic coursing through him, with the power of his rage. The blade arced around and down toward the machine with lightning speed. A hairsbreadth from touching the machine, the blade stopped cold in midair. 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. |
| 1345 |
He was tired of the game. He didn't want to play along anymore. He thought that maybe he should leave the strip sitting in the machine until morning. Before Richard could leave, Zedd pulled the metal strip out, glanced at the symbols, and then handed it to Richard. "It's cool. What does it say?" Richard reluctantly took the strip from Zedd and held it up in the light to read the circular symbols. "'Your only chance is to let the truth escape.'" "What in the world could that mean?" Cara asked. Richard clenched the strip in his fist. "It's some kind of riddle. I hate riddles." Kahlan woke, confused at feeling herself rocking. She winced as she pressed a hand over the stunning pain at the top of her head. Her hair felt wet. She pulled her hand away to look at it, but it was too dark to see much other than wetness glistening in the moonlight. She suspected that she knew all too well what it was. As she struggled up onto her knees she touched her tongue to her hand. She was right; it was blood. When she swallowed, her throat was so sore that it made her wince. She ached all over and was shivering with chills even though she was sweating profusely. Her mind raced, trying to put the fragments of memories together, trying to recall exactly what had happened. Images and impressions flashed in sickening snatches. At the same time the whole world felt like it was moving. When she was jolted and then bounced, she lost her balance and fell forward. She had to put a hand down to keep from falling over on her face. She felt rough wood. Looking around she realized that she was in a small open space in the back of a wagon. Both the pain throbbing inside her head and the sharp stinging pain at the top of her head made her woozy. She fought back the urge to be sick. Suddenly, a big dog bounded up out of the darkness, slamming into the side of the wagon, startling her. It dropped back, unable to make it all the way into the wagon, but it hooked its front legs over the side and held on. |
| 1346 |
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. 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. |
| 1347 |
She couldn't yell loud enough. She needed to get closer before they would hear her. Kahlan scrambled to her feet. As she put a foot up onto the side wall of the wagon to climb up around the load, a dog came out of the darkness, lunging wildly, trying to grab her ankle. As she jumped back out of the way, she saw the pack of dogs snarling and growling as they ran alongside the wagon. Before she could try again to climb around the load, another dog leaped up, getting its front legs over the side. It sank its teeth into the canvas to help pull itself up. Its back legs scrambled, trying to get purchase on something so that it could climb into the wagon. She kicked at the dog's head. It let go of the canvas and snapped at her, trying to catch her foot even as it tried to clamber up into the wagon, but it fell off. Another big hound jumped up on the other side, almost making it in. A third leaped up beside it. Kahlan kicked at the dogs, knocking one after another off the sideboards of the wagon. As soon as she kicked one off, another to the back or side bounded up and hooked its front legs over the edge. Their eyes glowed red with vicious intent. The wagon wasn't going fast enough to get away from the pack, but it was going fast enough to keep her off balance as it rocked and bucked. When the wagon bounced on a rock, her kick missed and she had to urgently kick again to keep a dog out. Kahlan looked back into the distance. It was dark, but there was enough moonlight that she would have been able to see the plateau with the People's Palace atop it if it had been anywhere near. Even if it was too far in the distance to see the plateau in the moonlight, she would have been able to see the lights of the city palace atop it, but it wasn't there. 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. |
| 1348 |
"Maybe." Richard left Berdine outside in the hall and the soldiers of the First File off down the corridor to either side making certain that no one could get to their room. Alone, Richard quietly closed the door behind himself as he stepped into the nearly dark bedroom where Kahlan was sleeping. He had turned down the wick on the lamp when he had checked on her earlier, so it was difficult to see much of anything. 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. He didn't see her anywhere. |
| 1349 |
When he glanced up, Richard saw that the door to the balcony was open. His first thought was that maybe her fever had driven her out on the balcony to get some relief in the cool night air. Before he could go to the balcony, his attention was caught by his pack on the floor. Kahlan's pack had been beside it before. He knew, because he had been the one who had put them both there. He supposed that Kahlan might have wanted to get something out of it and could have moved it somewhere, but he didn't really believe that. Something told him that it would be a waste of time searching the room for it. Richard instead ran to the balcony doors. He was worried that, at the least, she might have gotten worse. He expected to see her passed out on the balcony floor. She wasn't there. The bedroom, like the balcony, wasn't that big. There was no way he could have missed her back in the room. Baffled as to where she could be, he reluctantly looked over edge of the railing, fearing that she might have fallen. It was difficult to see in the darkness, but not impossible. He was relieved to see nothing on the ground far below. As he started to turn to go back inside, Richard saw that there was another balcony. It wasn't connected or even all that close, but he went to the railing closest to it anyway for a look. He saw that it had a stairway down on the far side. He saw, then, the scuff mark on the top of the railing where he was standing. It looked to have been made by a boot. Richard hopped up on the railing and leaped across the daunting drop to the other balcony. The doors on the second balcony were locked and it was dark inside. It was possible that Kahlan had gone inside and then locked the doors, but he didn't really believe that. It made no sense. If she feared something, there were guards and Mord-Sith just outside their bedroom door. Instead of breaking in the door, Richard took Kahlan's more likely route. He raced in the darkness down the flights of stairs, eventually reaching the grounds of the palace. |
| 1350 |
The moonlight coming through the thin haze of clouds wasn't bright, but it was bright enough for him to recognize Kahlan's bootprints. With a lifetime of tracking experience, he also recognized her unique gait. He could read the features of the way she walked and the tracks she made nearly as well as he could read the features of her face. There was no doubt about it. Kahlan had come down the stairs outside the palace to the grounds at the top of the plateau. The thing that worried him the most was that he could see by the prints that she had been running as fast as she could. He looked around for other prints, the prints of anyone who might have been chasing her, but there were no other footprints. It didn't make any sense. Richard stood and stared off across the top of the dark plateau. What could she have been running from? In the distance, paths meandered through elaborate gardens, but the grounds closer to the palace, where Richard had come out at the bottom of the stairs, were an open staging and loading area where supplies arrived at the palace. While most visitors to the palace entered up stairways through the interior of the plateau, an imposing portico between the staging area and the gardens welcomed important guests arriving by horse or carriage at the top of the plateau. The entrance there took guests into the grand corridors and the guest areas. Closer to Richard, in a less well lit area, were the stables and service docks. He could see the dark shapes of dozens of wagons and carriages that were either parked or being loaded. Horses were being brought out of the stables and either saddled or hitched to wagons. Even in the middle of the night representatives were packing up and leaving the palace. The place was alive with activity. No one was arriving. All the wagons were leaving. Richard was concerned about all the things that had happened recently and the representatives who had decided that they would rather side with prophecy and those who promised it to them. |
| 1351 |
He wanted to know what could be behind it all, but at the moment his only real focus was on finding Kahlan. Richard followed Kahlan's tracks as they traced her route through the darkness atop the plateau. She had been running as fast as she could. He could see by certain characteristics of the tracks, such as the way a print twisted here and there, that she was looking behind at something chasing her as she ran. If she had been running after someone or something, the prints would have looked different. It made no sense. There were no prints of anything chasing her, yet he could clearly read the indications of fear in her tracks. What ever was after her would have had to be flying not to leave prints. He knew, too, that it might very well be fevered delusions chasing her. But the prophecy from the machine saying that the hounds would take her from him was no delusion. At least there were no tracks of hounds. And then, in the midst of hoofprints and wagon tracks, Kahlan's footprints simply ended. Richard went to one knee and bent to study the tracks more closely. He saw, then, the marks where her last print pushed off on the ball of her foot. It had left a heavier impression with pronounced side ridges as she had jumped up onto something. Since her footprints ended there, he knew that it was most likely a wagon or coach that she had jumped up onto. With an icy sense of dread, Richard realized that Kahlan was gone. He couldn't understand what had happened, or why she would have run the way she did, but he could see plainly enough that she had left the bedroom, come down the steps to the ground, run across the plateau, and then jumped into a wagon. There were wagons leaving all the time. Wheel tracks and hoofprints were everywhere. There was no telling which wagon or coach was the one Kahlan had jumped up into. If she had stayed in one of those wagons, she could be headed off in just about any direction away from the palace. There were a number of representatives who had left overnight. |
| 1352 |
"At least take some supplies, Lord Rahl." Richard lifted his sword from its scabbard just a bit and let it drop back, making sure that it was clear. He nodded his thanks to the men and then urged the horse toward the road that led down the side of the plateau. As Richard gave the horse reins and leaned over its withers, it complied instantly and thundered off into the night. Kahlan woke with a start. She squinted out at the surrounding woods in the faint, first light of dawn. She didn't see the hounds down on the ground, at least, not yet. They always came back. She knew that it was only a matter of time. She'd gotten only a few hours of sleep, and it was neither good nor enough. At least she hadn't fallen out of the tree. The lap of several branches had made a somewhat safe, if uncomfortable, place to rest. The days of terror seemed endless and had blended one into another until she had completely lost track of time. She was exhausted from the relentless chase. Overwhelming fatigue was the only thing that brought on sleep. At night, when it got dark enough, the hounds would seem to disappear for the night. She thought that maybe they went off at night to search for food and to rest. At first, she had entertained the hope that they had tired of the chase and had given up. The first few nights after leaving the palace, when she had still been out on the Azrith Plain and the hounds had vanished at night, Kahlan had thought that it was her chance to escape, to put distance between her and her pursuers, but no matter how fast she ran, no matter how many hours, no matter if she rode all night without stopping, the hounds were always right there when day broke, and then they would come for her again. Because the sun rose ahead and to the right and set behind her, she knew that she was headed roughly northeast. That told her the direction that the palace would be in. She had tried several times after the hounds had disappeared at night to circle around and head back, but doing so took her back into an ambush by the dogs. |
| 1353 |
She had barely escaped with her life. As they came after her she had to turn back to the northeast, her only thought to outrun them, to put distance between her and her would-be assassins. There were times when she had wanted to give up, to simply quit running and let it end. But the memory of Catherine's gruesome end was too horrifying to allow Kahlan to surrender. She kept telling herself that if she could stay alive, if she could stay ahead of the pack of wild dogs, she had a chance. As long as she could outrun them she would stay alive. As long as she was alive, there was hope. The thought of Richard also kept her from giving up. The thought of him finding her torn apart by the hounds was so crushingly heartbreaking that it made her fight all the harder to stay alive. After she had left the Azrith Plain and had gotten into mountainous terrain, it had become, for the most part, impossible for her to run the horse at night. She was afraid of the animal breaking a leg in the dark. Without the horse, the dogs would easily catch her. The horse was her lifeline. She took good care of it. At least, she took as good care of it as was possible. She knew that if she lost the horse, she would be dead in short order. On the other hand, if she didn't push the horse hard enough, the hounds would pull her down. Kahlan looked down from her place in the branches. The horse was tied to a nearby limb of the tree, but on a long rope so that it could graze on anything it could find close enough. If she needed the horse in a hurry she had the end of the rope at hand so that she could pull the animal in close and climb down onto it. For some reason, the hounds ignored the horse. 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. |
| 1354 |
In its panic, the horse could be hurt. If it broke a leg, she would be done. If she let the hounds somehow trap her up in the tree, she would have trouble getting the horse close enough to the growling, barking, snapping animals. She didn't like the thought of being trapped and risking that the horse would break loose in the confusion and get away without her. Just as soon as there was enough light to see, she would leave. She hadn't eaten much other than some travel biscuits, a few nuts from time to time, and bit of dried meat she had in her pack. She still felt sick to her stomach and really didn't want to eat anything at all, but she knew that she needed to keep up her strength, so she forced herself. She had a fever, and her arm throbbed painfully. She was nauseous and constantly feared that she would have to throw up. She remembered waking back in the Garden of Life with the splitting headache and vomiting uncontrollably. While she knew that she had to eat or she would get sicker, she couldn't afford to throw up, so she ate only as much as she thought she had to. As she searched the surrounding area for any sign of the dogs, she thought she spotted something off among the trees. It looked human. Kahlan was about to call out to try to get some help, when she saw the way the thing moved. It didn't walk, exactly. It was more like it glided along through the shadows. She leaned out on the branch, trying to see better. Just then, the first rays of sunlight came through the treetops. Kahlan saw then that what she had thought was a person was actually a dog — a big black dog. It was the leader of the pack, stalking out of the trees. She couldn't grasp how she could have thought it was a person. With the terror of seeing the pack leader, panic welled up in her and all she could think about was getting away. Kahlan leaned down and pulled in the rope hand over hand as fast as she could, drawing the horse close to the tree before the hounds could come in close and spook it away. |
| 1355 |
When the horse was below her, she climbed down to a lower branch of the oak tree and then dropped onto the horse's back. Kahlan looked back and saw the pack of dogs coming through the trees. When they saw her they started in howling. Kahlan leaned forward over the horse's withers as it bolted. The chase was back on. As Kahlan guided her horse among immense pines, she frequently looked back over her shoulder to keep track of how close the dogs had gotten. The colossal trees towering above her cut off almost every bit of sky. The lower branches were far out of reach overhead. Iron gray clouds made it even darker, leaving a gloomy world in the undergrowth for the horse to try to navigate. Drizzle collected on the pine needles until the drops grew fat enough to fall. It was distracting when those fat, random drops splashed against her face. Kahlan was cold, wet, and miserable. She had to concentrate to find the indistinct trail among the nursery of small pines carpeting the lower reaches of the dense forest. In many places they overgrew a trail too seldom used to keep open. In other places, beds of thick ferns covered over any hint of the little-traveled route through the forest wilderness. Having grown up in a palace, Kahlan had never known much about following obscure trails. In her duties as a Confessor, she had always traveled the roads and well-used paths between population centers of the Midlands. She had also always been escorted by a wizard. That seemed so long ago that it felt like another lifetime. To an extent, the hounds helped guide her in the sense that they left her only one real direction she could go. She just had to find enough footing for the horse. Even though the dogs were never far behind, she dared not let the horse panic and run on its own. If they left the trail there was no telling what trouble they could get into. Holes among rocks and fallen timber off the trail could catch and break the horse's legs. They might suddenly come to a cliff, or an impassable gorge, or a place so dense as to be impenetrable. |
| 1356 |
If that happened, the pack of wild dogs would have her trapped and it would be all over. She didn't want to die out in the middle of a trackless forest, taken down by dogs, torn apart, devoured and left for scavengers to pick clean. She needed to stay on the relative safety of the trail in order to stay ahead of her pursuers. It was Richard who had taught her about following poorly marked trails that were rarely used and difficult to make out. Besides looking for small indications close by, she continually scanned the broader area ahead, looking for telltale signs of where the trail went. The thought of Richard gave her an agonizing stab of longing. She hadn't thought about him much in recent days. She was so desperate to get away that she was hardly able to think about anything other than running and staying away from the baying pack of dogs. Her arm hurt. Her head throbbed. She was so exhausted that she could hardly sit upright atop the horse anymore. Worse, she was so sick with fever that she feared she might pass out. She supposed that if she was unconscious it might be the best way to die. It might be a blessing to lose consciousness when the pack got to her. With the back of her hand, Kahlan wiped a tear from her cheek. She missed Richard so much. He must be frantic with worry about her being missing for so long. She felt shame for not somehow letting him know what had happened. Several of the dogs suddenly ran in out of the brush at the side, lunging at her legs. In a panic, Kahlan urged the horse into a run. Limbs flashed by. Pine boughs slapped her as she raced headlong through the woods. One branch hit her shoulder, almost knocking her off her horse. 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. |
| 1357 |
Without a saddle there was precious little to hold on to. Kahlan snatched for the mane as she started slipping off the horse's back. She missed. Before she knew it, she landed with a heavy thud. Stunned from hitting the ground so hard, she groaned in pain. She had landed on her infected arm. With her good arm she cradled her sore arm to her abdomen. Before Kahlan could grab the rope, the horse bolted away into the woods. In mere seconds she couldn't see it anymore. But she could see the dogs bounding toward her, the lead dog barking with savage hunger to get at her. Kahlan turned and practically dove down the steep drop. In places she leaped from ledges of rocks above to rocks below in a series of jarring, barely controlled falls from ledge to ledge. She was racing downward so fast that she didn't have time to think about it before each leap. She knew how dangerous it was to descend like that, but she was possessed by the panicked drive to escape the terror coming for her. Kahlan slipped on loose gravel and fell into a slide down a channel of debris and loose ground. Rock and small shrubs flashed by as she slid downward. Behind her the dogs leaped across the rocks as if they were made for it. They were closing on her. With a hard impact she hit the bottom and fell sprawling on her face. Without taking the time to feel sorry for herself she pushed herself up. The way ahead looked flatter, but it also looked wet. Mist drifted among the dense trees, so she couldn't see very far ahead in the gloom. What she could see was a thick tangle of growth. Vines trailed down from above. Heavy vegetation blocked the way off to the sides. But she saw that she hadn't lost the trail after all. It was right in front of her, tunneling ahead through the dense underbrush. A short-haired brown dog crashed down from the steep trail, rolling as it landed behind her. As he scrambled to get to his feet, his jaws snapped, trying to get Kahlan's leg in his teeth. Kahlan sprang up and started running headlong into the burrow through the brush. |
| 1358 |
The passage through the undergrowth seemed endless. Vegetation flashed by as she ran. She couldn't see the end up ahead. Dogs barked as they chased her through the tangled green warren. Abruptly, she burst out of the thick underbrush into a more open, swampy area. Trees with smooth gray bark and fat bottoms of tangled, spreading roots stood in stretches of stagnant water. Kahlan's boots sank into mud and she fell. As she struggled to get free, she admonished herself for paying too much attention to the dogs chasing her and inadvertently leaving the trail. The only good thing was that the mud slowed the dogs as well. They circled around behind her, jumping from dry spots to clumps of grasses, looking for a way to come in from the side. Kahlan clambered back onto the trail and raced ahead, trying to jump from root to root in order to stay out of the water and morass of mud. She didn't trust stepping in the water because she feared that she would sink in and get her foot caught in a tangle of roots hidden below. She could even break an ankle. Both thoughts terrified her. As the trail occasionally submerged into the ever-expanding swamp, Kahlan saw places in the path where branches and vines had been placed on the ground to span impassable areas. They provided a welcome way ahead across the patches of water. The farther she went, the more substantial and frequent the knitted-branch path became. It was much easier to run with the woven mat underfoot. As she raced ahead into the thick swamp, through vines and moss hanging in sheets along the way, the walkway became even more substantial, eventually rising up above the surface of the stagnant water. A quick look behind revealed that the dogs were having trouble. Their paws slipped down through gaps in the weaving of the walkway, sometimes becoming caught. The farther in they went, the more difficulty they had negotiating the entwined branches, twigs, and vines. Kahlan was soon so far ahead that she lost sight of them in the swirling fog. |
| 1359 |
The walkway grew strong and solid. In places there were railings made of thick branches. Not long after that, the railings themselves became more sturdy. Kahlan was giddy with relief. She was reaching an inhabited place of some kind. With a walkway this well built, this painstakingly constructed, she was sure it would lead her to salvation. Kahlan was confounded at the construction of the enclosed, candlelit tunnel. Soggy parts of the pathway that at first had been gapped with bits of branches and vines knitted together turned into a continuous mat of woven material, which then became a causeway that rose above the surface of the water into an elevated structure that eventually circled all the way around the walkway and closed in overhead. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all constructed the same way, made entirely of woven branches, twigs, vines, and grasses. Kahlan had never seen anything like the remarkably well built and solid structure. She didn't know who had placed all the candles to welcome visitors, but she was thankful for them. She would at last be safe from the dogs that had pursued her for so long. She would at last be able to get help and return to the palace and to Richard. Kahlan remembered the prophecy all too well. "Dark things. Dark things stalking you, running you down. You won't be able to escape them... your body being ripped open as you scream, all alone, no one to help you." Now that she had found a place where it seemed clear that there would be people, she at last dared to think that she had beaten the prophecy. 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. |
| 1360 |
Kahlan had the passing thought that maybe she was dead, and she was being welcomed into the spirit world. That thought quickly faded. Strange as the place was, it was was no spirit world. Kahlan wasn't sure what was going on, but after Henrik's frantic warning, she wanted to run, but she was at the end of her strength. "We've been expecting you," the stooped figure on the right said as her grip tightened on Kahlan's arm. The two glowing figures dragged Kahlan into a larger room crowded with bottles, jars, vessels, and small boxes of every kind. The jars of colored glass were stuck in the walls anywhere a place could be found. Yet others, as well as pottery jars and jugs, were crowded together all over the floor. Acrid smoke rose in wisps from a shallow bowl in the center of the room. As Kahlan was hauled toward the center of the room, she pulled her gaze away from staring at the strange collection of containers and found herself face-to-face with a small woman just coming to her feet. The woman wasn't very big. In the dim light it was difficult to see much more than her boyish figure and shoulder-length hair. And then the woman leaned in and gave Kahlan a broad grin with lips sewn nearly shut. Kahlan stiffened at the evil in that grin and in her dark eyes. The woman with the sewn-shut mouth made low, drawn-out, screeching, clicking sounds toward another one of the glowing figures that seemed to have appeared out of the walls. 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. |
| 1361 |
Some were near the surface of the wall while others were so far back in she couldn't see much of them. None had clothes. A number of them were clearly dead. The small woman with the leather thongs sewing her mouth closed turned and tossed a handful of dusty material in the shallow bowl where small sticks were smoldering. Sparkling light spiraled up. Other figures, grotesque figures only partially visible, crowded into the room. It felt like being among an assembly of ghosts, except they didn't look like ghosts of people. They were gangly, human-like, skeletal creatures. Their long arms and legs had big, knobby joints. Their flesh, tight on their slender limbs, as if they had no muscle whatsoever, glistened with mottled, slimy rot. Their demonic heads bore only a passing resemblance to humans'. They growled at the sight of her, their thin lips drawing back to reveal large mouths crowded with pointed, needle-sharp teeth. The woman with the sewn-shut lips reached out with a filthy, blackened hand and grasped Kahlan's wrist. Paralyzing pain instantly crackled through her. But it was more than simply pain. Besides the jolt of pain, the touch carried the sensation of utter, disheartened hopelessness. It was like being touched by death. As all the glowing creatures in cowled robes closed in around her, Kahlan finally got a good look at their frightening faces. It was like looking at rotting corpses. Their gnarled hands clawed at her clothes, and Kahlan knew that she had to do something, and fast. She couldn't allow them to do what ever it was they intended. The woman with the sewn-shut mouth was touching her. That was all Kahlan needed. More than she needed. The world seemed to slow almost to a stop. Time belonged to Kahlan. Exhaustion, fear, pain, sickness, misery, hopelessness were forgotten. Mercy did not exist. The moment was hers. In that timeless place within, that place of power, that core of her being, where her inborn Confessor power resided, Kahlan released the constraints on her ability. |
| 1362 |
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. 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. |
| 1363 |
Now, this is very important. I need you to go back the way you came and find my friends who are coming this way. I need you to bring them here. I'm going in there to get Kahlan out. But I'm going to need the help of my friends when I come out. I need you to tell my friends where I am and get them here right away. Can you do that?" "Yes, Lord Rahl. I'll do it. Will you forgive me then, for what I did to you and the Mother Confessor?" "Of course. It wasn't your fault. You were being used by an evil person. Now, hurry and get going. There isn't a moment to lose." Henrik nodded and raced away back down the woven walk-way. Richard stood and looked at the structure. And then he started climbing up onto the top of it. Crouched low, Richard made his way along the top of the complex that had been constructed entirely of woven branches and vines. Fortunately, it seemed to be strong enough to hold his weight without sagging and was solid enough that it didn't flex and creak when he moved across it. The drizzle was making it slippery, though. Worse, the drizzle made places where moss and mold grew as slick as ice. Fortunately, the rough, jagged nature of the branches provided some grip for his boots. The woven structure was surprisingly large, in places sprawling out through the swamp in several directions, with clusters of larger sections. His problem was to try to figure out where Kahlan was inside the maze of rooms and corridors. He had to get it right the first time. He doubted that once it started he would have a second chance to get her out. All around, smooth-barked trees stood in the murky water on fat, spreading tangles of roots. Their wide-spreading branches held veils of gray-green moss. The water around the trees was in places covered with a thick layer of floating duckweed, making it look like a carpet of lawn. Richard knew that beneath it creatures lurked in the murky depths waiting for the unwary. In places the structure made of the branches and vines was attached to the massive trees for stability and support. |
| 1364 |
So many of the thick, stiff vines hung down from the trees that in spots Richard had difficulty getting through them. In other places he had to duck under low branches. In yet other places he had to brush thick webs of moss out of his way. He wanted to go faster, but as he made his way across the slippery top of the structure he needed to be as quiet as possible so as not to alert anyone down inside. Out in the swamp, the sharp calls of animals echoed across the stretches of dark water. When he glanced over the sloping side of the structure and saw shadows moving beneath the muddy water, Richard reminded himself to be careful. If the fall didn't kill him, something else likely would. In other places, long-legged white egrets stood on roots waiting for unwary fish to pass by. From below the water, other things hunted the egrets. As he moved ahead, he had to carefully skirt a poisonous yellow-and-red-banded snake lying over a branch hanging down in his way. Richard stopped still, listening. In a pause between the hoots, chirps, and calls of animals out in the swamp, he thought he heard chanting. He squatted down, putting one hand to the roof for balance as he leaned forward and listened. Even though he couldn't make out any words he recognized, he was sure that it was some kind of shouting and chanting. It was hard to tell exactly where it was coming from. The strange sounds were unlike anything he had ever heard before. As he crouched down lower, looking under wispy curtains of moss, Richard spotted what looked like trailers of fog. He thought that it could possibly be smoke. He moved ahead past the moss to get a better look and saw that it was definitely smoke. It wasn't billowing smoke, like that from a fire, but rather thin wisps of whitish smoke, possibly the kind used in certain mystic rituals. As Richard got closer, he could smell the acrid smoke. It was laced with the stink of something dead. When he reached the broad area where he'd spotted it, there was no chimney. |
| 1365 |
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. And then, across the room, where glowing figures hovered in a cluster, he spotted Kahlan. It looked like she was trapped behind the very fabric of the thorny wall. All the branches and vines netting her against the wall held her up, but by the way she slumped, she looked to be unconscious. With the heel of his hand to the center of her chest, Richard rammed the small woman back out of his way as he raced toward Kahlan. |
| 1366 |
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. 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. |
| 1367 |
Ghostly forms curled out from the fire as she spoke key words in low, guttural, rasping, clicking sounds. Each wisp of smoke coalesced into a deformed figure looking like it had been freed from the darkest reaches of the underworld to float above them. As Jit worked, and the frolicking creatures taunted him, Richard surreptitiously pulled off small pieces of his shredded shirt and rolled them between his finger and thumb. When he had two of them that he judged to be about the right size, he leaned toward Kahlan to make a show of caressing her face again. Twisting around like that pulled at the thorns sticking in his legs. He had no choice but to endure it. He could hear the grotesque cackles behind him of those watching and waiting for Jit to finish her work. With his left hand, so that it would cover her face and hide what he was doing, Richard slipped one of the rolled-up pieces of cloth into one of Kahlan's ears. With a finger he pushed it firmly into place. Without pause, he did the same with her other ear. A claw seized his left wrist and pulled it back. Other hands wrapped a thorny vine around the arm and pinned it back against the wall. Yet other creatures pulled a strip of thorny vine across his middle. Richard's strength did no good against so many of these undead creatures. Working as fast as he could with his free hand, he stuffed a rolled-up piece of cloth from his shredded shirt into each of his own ears. He remembered what the machine had told him. Your only chance is to let the truth escape. He needed to do something the Hedge Maid wouldn't expect. When Jit turned back toward him, he grinned at her. All the creatures drew back, murmuring to themselves at his puzzling behavior. The unexpected was frightening to them. He again gave the Hedge Maid a very deliberate grin to let her know that he knew something she didn't. He, in fact, knew the truth. The Hedge Maid, her expression darkening dangerously, glared at him. He needed to get her closer. "You have me," he said as he smiled broadly. |
| 1368 |
"Let Kahlan go and I'll cooperate with what ever you want." One of the glowing forms, who was missing a hand, poked him with a finger. "We do not need your cooperation," she said. "Yes you do," Richard said with absolute conviction while he smiled at the Hedge Maid. "You need to know the truth." The cowled figure frowned. "The truth?" She turned and spoke to Jit in her strange language. The Hedge Maid frowned at her companion as she listened, and then stepped up to him. He towered over her, but she did not fear him. She should have. Jit smiled back with as evil a grin as he'd ever seen, her lips parting with the grin as much as the leather sewn through her lips would allow. Richard used his free hand to draw his knife from the sheath at his belt. It felt good to have a blade in his hand. A blade meant salvation. This one was as razor-sharp as truth itself. The Hedge Maid didn't fear his knife, and with good reason. After all, his sword had proven impotent against her. Richard knew that using a blade to try to cut Jit would be not merely futile, but a deadly mistake. Her aura of powers shielded her, protected her from being cut by him. She had proven that his sword could not harm her, so she certainly didn't fear a mere knife. She should have. In a blink, before the Hedge Maid could have second thoughts or guess what he intended, Richard whipped the knife past her face, carefully avoiding cutting her, or even the thought of it, so as not to trigger her occult protection. If he was sincerely not trying to cut her, her defenses would not react. With deadly precision, he instead made the tip of the razor-sharp blade sweep in just between her parted lips ... and sever the leather strips holding her mouth closed. The Hedge Maid's dark eyes went wide. Her mouth also went wide, something it had never done before. Her jaws opened wide. It looked decidedly involuntary. And then came a scream of such power, such malevolence, such evil, that it seemed to rip through the very fabric of the world of life. |
| 1369 |
It was a scream born in the world of the dead. Jars and bottles exploded. Their contents flew everywhere. Bony creatures covered their heads protectively with their gangly arms. Broken glass, pottery, sticks, and pieces of vine began to move around the room in fits and starts, as if driven by gusts of wind, but then, with ever-growing speed, all the debris lifted into the air and began to circle the room. Even the bony creatures found themselves dragged into the building vortex, their arms and legs flailing as they orbited helplessly around the room among clouds of broken glass and pottery and all the things they had contained. The deadly power of the scream went on unabated, catching all the creatures up in it, along with the mass of rubble. The forms in the cowled cloaks covered their ears as they screamed in terror and pain. It did them no good. As Jit's unleashed scream ripped through the room, they began to be drawn up in the growing tornado of sound and wreckage storming around the room. Blood ran from the ears of those encased in the walls as they shook violently. The bony creatures began to disintegrate, coming apart as if they had been cast of sand, dust, and dirt. Arms and legs fell apart, dissolving in the maelstrom, mixing in with the rest of the rubble circling the room. They shrieked and howled even as they were coming apart. Their terrified cries joined the cry of the endless scream coming from the Hedge Maid. The glowing forms in the cowled capes began to elongate and rip apart in streams of glowing vapor as they were carried helplessly along in the power of the Hedge Maid's scream. Lightning flashed and flickered as it, too, was carried around the outside of the room. The very air roared and thundered. In the center of it all, the Hedge Maid stood, head thrown back, jaws wide, as she screamed her life away. The poison of who she was, of what she was, her wickedness, her corruption, her evil, her dedication to death and her contempt for life in any form, was escaping in a ripping scream that was the dead end of what she worshiped. |
| 1370 |
The scream was death itself. Now that the truth of the dead soul within her was released, it was taking the life of its host. She was seeing the truth of her dead inner self. Life, her life, was incompatible with the death she carried inside. Death showed her no appreciation, and no mercy. Her face began to melt as her own evil, the death at her core, escaped its prison. Blood veins broke, muscle ripped apart, and her skin split open until her bones were exposed. It all added power and force to her death shriek. That scream, its power, its poison, lanced into Richard as well. The pain of it was more than he could stand. Every joint cried out in agony. Every nerve fiber vibrated with the torture of the sound escaping the Hedge Maid. He, too, was being touched by death that had been freed. As he began to lose consciousness, Richard realized that the plugs he had made for his ears, and for Kahlan's ears, were not sufficient to stand up against the malevolence he had unleashed. He had failed. He had failed Kahlan. He felt a tear of grief for Kahlan, of his love for her, run down his face as the screaming, roaring, flashing world went slowly dark and silent. If he lives," Cara said, "I'm going to kill him." Nicci smiled, but the thought of Richard dying sent a renewed spike of panic through her. It was too terrifying a thought to contemplate. She laid a hand to his chest as somber soldiers gently laid his unconscious form beside Kahlan in the back of the wagon. Blood seeped through the blankets Richard and Kahlan were both wrapped in. But Nicci could feel his heart beating, feel the breath of life in his lungs. Kahlan, thankfully, was alive as well. For now, the two of them were alive and that was what mattered most. "He will live," Nicci said. "Both of them will, if I have anything to say about it." By the looks of what had happened in the room where they had found them, it was perhaps surprising that they were both alive, much less in one piece. It had been frightening to have to pull them both out of the prison of thorn branches and vines they had been encased in. |
| 1371 |
Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905. A villa, a garden, a balcony. Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair's wheel-spokes. The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom. These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have woven themselves into a woman. Her name is Sybil Gerard. Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium. Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and irresistible grace — metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl against the red horizon. Like starlings, Sybil thinks. The airship's lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth. Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance. Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling meaning from emotion and memory. She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing on, the city of Memory winding itself about her — till, by the walls of Newgate, the shadow of her father's hanging falls ... And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway — one where it is always evening ... It is January 15, 1855. A room in Grand's Hotel, Piccadilly. One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door's cut-glass knob. |
| 1372 |
He knew something was up — he could smell it. Sybil waited for Mick to pay, hands folded before her on her skirt, demure, but watching sidelong from beneath the blue fringe of her bonnet. Under her skirt, wadded through the frame of her crinoline, was the shawl she'd nicked while Radley tried on top-hats. Sybil had learned how to nick things — she'd taught herself. It simply took nerve, that was the secret. 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. The liftman, gotten up in a Frenchified livery, drew the rattling brass gate aside for her. |
| 1373 |
Then he turned a hose-tap, sniffed a bit, nodded, turned a second tap, and set the candle to it. Sybil yelped as a vicious flash sheeted into her eyes. Mick chuckled at her over the hiss of blazing gas, dots of hot blue dazzle drifting before her. "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. She started. "Lovely thing, isn't it?" "Yes, it's ... lovely." Mick still held her arm. Slowly, he put his other gloved hand against her cheek, inside her bonnet. Then he lifted her chin with his thumb, staring into her face. "It makes you feel something, doesn't it?" His rapt voice frightened her, his eyes underlit with glare. |
| 1374 |
And she knew that the black bag no longer contained the kino cards for the lecture, because he'd wrapped those carefully in sheets of The Times and hidden them again behind the stage-mirror. Mick undid the wretched tin clasps, opened the bag, and lifted out a long narrow case of polished rosewood, its corners trimmed with bright brass. 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. Three of its corners were slightly rounded, while the fourth was trimmed off at an angle. |
| 1375 |
There was surprised applause in the sudden darkness. The penny-boys up in the Garrick's gallery whistled shrilly. Then limelight framed Houston again. He began to boast about his wounds; two bullets in the arm, a knife-stab in the leg, an arrow into his belly — Houston didn't say the vulgar word, but he did rub that area lingeringly, as if he were dyspeptic. He'd lain all night on the battlefield, he claimed, and then been hauled for days through wilderness, on a supply cart, bleeding, raving, sick with swamp-fever ... The clerky cove next to Sybil took another lemon-drop, and looked at his pocket-watch. 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. |
| 1376 |
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 ... He'd have killed some of those newspaper rascals, Houston insisted loudly, if he hadn't been Governor, and on his dignity. So instead he'd thrown in his cards, and gone back to live with his precious Cherokees ... He had a real head of steam up, now; he'd stoked himself so, it was almost frightening to watch. The audience was entertained, their reserve broken by his bulging eyes and veiny Texian neck, but none too far from disgust. Maybe it had been something really dreadful that he'd done, Sybil thought, rubbing her hands together inside her rabbit-skin muff. Maybe it was lady's-fever, that he'd given his own wife a case of the glue. Some types of glue were horrible, and could make you mad, or blind, or crippled. Maybe that was the secret. Mick might know. Very likely Mick knew all about it. Houston explained that he had left the United States in disgust, and gone to Texas, and at the word a map appeared, a sprawl of land in the middle of the continent. |
| 1377 |
Houston claimed he'd gone there seeking land for his poor suffering Cherokee Indians, but it was all a bit confusing. Sybil asked the clerky fellow next to her for the time. Only an hour had passed. The speech was a third gone. Her moment was coming. "You must envision a nation many times the size of your home islands," said Houston, "with no roads greater than the grassy tracks of Indians. Without, at that time, a single mile of British railroad, and lacking the telegraph, or, indeed, Engine resources of any kind. As commander-in-chief of the Texian national forces, my orders had no courier more swift or more reliable than the mounted scout, his way menaced by the Comanche and Karankawa, by Mexican raiding-parties, and by the thousand nameless hazards of the wilderness. Small wonder then that Colonel Travis should receive my orders too late; and place his confidence, tragically, in the reinforcing-party led by Colonel Fannin. Surrounded by an enemy force fifty times his own. Colonel Travis declared his objective to be Victory or Death — knowing full well that the latter was a surely fated outcome. The defenders of the Alamo perished to a man. The noble Travis, the fearless Colonel Bowie, and David Crockett, a very legend among frontiersmen" — Messrs. Travis, Bowie, and Crockett each had a third of the kino screen, their faces gone strangely square with the cramped scale of their depletion — "bought precious time for my Fabian strategy." More soldier talk. Now he stepped back from the podium and pointed up at the kino with his heavy polished cane. "The forces of Lopez de Santa Anna were arrayed as you see them here, with the woods upon his left flank and the San Jacinto river-marshes at his back. His siege engineers had dug in around the baggage-train, with emplacements of sharpened timber, represented thusly. By a forced march through Burnham's Ford, however, my army of six hundred had seized the wooded banks of Buffalo Bayou, unbeknown to enemy intelligence. The assault began with a brisk cannon-fire from the Texian center ... |
| 1378 |
Leaving the thoroughfare for the unimproved cobbles of Renton Passage, she made out the sign of the Hart and heard the jangle of a pianola. It was Mrs. Winterhalter who'd arranged for her to room above the Hart. The public house itself was a steady sort of place, admitting no women. It catered to junior clerks and shopmen, and offered as its raciest pleasure a pull at a coin-fed wagering-machine. The rooms above were reached by way of steep dark stairs, that climbed below a sooty skylight to an alcove presenting a pair of identical doors. Mr. Cairns, the landlord, had rooms behind the door on the left. Sybil climbed the stairs, fumbled a penny box of lucifers from her muff, and struck one. Cairns had chained a bicycle to the iron railing overlooking the stairwell; the bright brass padlock gleamed in the flare of the match. She shook the lucifer out, hoping that Hetty hadn't double-latched the door Hetty hadn't, and Sybil's key turned smoothly in the lock. Toby was there to greet her, padding silently across the bare boards to twine himself around and about her ankles, purring like sixty. Hetty had left an oil-lamp turned down low on the deal table that stood in the hallway; it was smoking now, the wick in need of trimming. A foolish thing to have left it burning, where Toby might've sent it crashing, but Sybil felt grateful not to have found the place in darkness. She took Toby up in her arms. He smelled of herring. "Has Hetty fed you, then, dear?" He yowled softly, and batted at the ribbons of her bonnet. The pattern of the wallpaper danced as she lifted the lamp. The hallway had seen no sunlight in all the years the Hart had stood, yet the printed flowers were gone a shade like dust. Sybil's room had two windows, though they opened on a blank wall of grimed yellow brick, so near she could've touched it, if someone hadn't driven nails into the casements. Still, on a bright day, with the sun directly overhead, a bit of light did filter in. And Hetty's room, though larger, had only one window. |
| 1379 |
If Hetty was here, now, she must be alone and asleep, as no light was visible from the crack at the bottom of her closed door. It was good to have one's own room, one's privacy, however modest. Sybil put Toby down, though he protested, and carried the lamp to her own door, which stood slightly ajar. Inside, all was as she'd left it, though she saw that Hetty had left the latest number of the Illustrated London News on her pillow, with an engraving from Crimea on the front, a scene of a city all aflame. She set the lamp down on the cracked marble lid of the commode, Toby prowling about her ankles as though he expected to discover more herring, and considered what she should do. The ticking of the fat tin alarm-clock, which she sometimes found unbearable, was reassuring now; at least it was running, and she imagined that the time it showed, quarter past eleven, was correct. She gave the winder a few turns, just for luck. Mick would come for her at midnight, and there were decisions to be made, as he'd advised her to travel very light. She took a wick-trimmer from the commode's drawer, raised the lamp's chimney, and scissored away the blackened bit. The light somewhat improved. She threw on her mantelet against the cold, opened the lid of a japanned tin chest, and began to make an inventory of her better things. But after setting aside two changes of undergarments, it came to her that the less she took, the more Dandy Mick would have to buy for her in Paris. And if that wasn't thinking like a 'prentice adventuress, she didn't know what was. Still, she did have: some things she was 'specially fond of, and these went, along with the undergarments, into her brocade portmanteau with the split seam she'd meant to mend. There was a lovely bottle of rose-scented Portland water, half-full, a green paste brooch from Mr. Kingsley, a set of hairbrushes with imitation ebony backs, a miniature flower-press with a souvenir view of Kensington Palace, and a patent German curling-iron she'd nicked from a hair-dresser's. |
| 1380 |
She drew hesitantly on the lit cigarette and was rewarded with an acrid portion of vile smoke that set her wracking like a consumptive. 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. 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. |
| 1381 |
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. He made out the name painted in black and gilt across the bulbous prow, beneath a curved expanse of delicately leaded glass: Zephyr. "Come, Ned, join us!" his brother sang out, beckoning. "Don't be shy!" The others chuckled at Tom's sauciness as Mallory strode forward, his hobnails scraping the floor. His little brother Tom, nineteen years old, had grown his first mustache; it looked as though a cat could lick it off. Mallory offered his hand to his friend, Tom's master. "Mr. Michael Godwin, sir!" he said. |
| 1382 |
He chose to place his bet with the thoroughly modern firm of Dwyer and Company, rather than the venerable and perhaps marginally more reputable Tattersall's. He had frequently passed Dwyer's brightly lit establishment in St. Martin's Lane, hearing the deep brassy whirring of the three Engines they employed. He did not care to lay such a wager with any of the dozens of individual book-makers elevated above the throng on their high stools, though they were nearly as reliable as the larger firms. 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. |
| 1383 |
The thought almost paralyzed him. He stopped dead, his hands diving into his pockets. No — the blue flimsies were still there, his tickets to disaster ... He was almost trampled by a jostling pair of horses. Shocked and angered, Mallory grabbed at the harness of the nearer horse, caught his balance, shouted a warning. A whip cracked near his head. The driver was trying to fight his way free of the entangling crowd, standing on the box of an open brougham. The fellow was a race-track dandy, gotten up in a suit of the most artificial blue, with a great paste ruby glinting in a cravat of lurid silk. Beneath the pallor of a swelling forehead, accentuated by dark disheveled locks, his bright gaunt eyes moved constantly, so that he seemed to be looking everywhere at once — except at the race-course, which still compelled the attention of everyone, save himself and Mallory. A queer fellow, and part of a queerer trio, for the passengers within the brougham were a pair of women. One, veiled, wore a dark, almost masculine dress; and as the brougham halted she rose unsteadily and groped for its door. She tried to step free, with a drunken wobble, her hands encumbered by a long wooden box, something like an instrument-case. But the second woman made a violent grab for her veiled companion, yanking the gentlewoman back into her seat. Mallory, still holding the leather harness, stared in astonishment. The second woman was a red-haired tart, in the flash garments appropriate to a gin-palace or worse. Her painted, pretty features were marked with a look of grim and utter determination. Mallory saw the red-haired tart strike the veiled gentlewoman. It was a blow both calculated and covert, jabbing her doubled knuckles into the woman's short ribs with a practiced viciousness. The veiled woman doubled over and collapsed back into her seat. 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. |
| 1384 |
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. Mallory watched with the numb calm of a ruined man. The Zephyr lurched into an impossible burst of speed. It slipped past the other gurneys with absurd, buttery ease, like a slimy pumpkin-seed squeezed between thumb and forefinger. At the half-mile turn, its velocity quite astonishing, it teetered visibly onto two wheels; at the final lap, it struck a slight rise, the entire vehicle becoming visibly airborne. The great driving-wheels rebounded from earth with a gout of dust and a metallic screech; it was only at that moment that Mallory realized that the great crowd in the stands had fallen into deathly silence. Not a peep rose from them as the Zephyr whizzed across the finish-line. It slithered to a halt then, bumping violently across the gouged tracks left by the competition. A full four seconds passed before the stunned track-man managed to wave his flag. The other gurneys were still rounding a distant bend a full hundred yards behind. The crowd suddenly burst into astonished outcry — not joy so much as utter disbelief, and even a queer sort of anger. Henry Chesterton stepped from the Zephyr. He tossed back a neck-scarf, leaned at his ease against the shining hull of his craft, and watched with cool insolence as the other gurneys labored painfully across the finish line. By the time they arrived, they seemed to have aged centuries. They were, Mallory realized, relics. Mallory reached into his pocket. The blue slips of betting-paper were utterly safe. |
| 1385 |
Their material nature had not changed in the slightest, but now these little blue slips infallibly signified the winning of four hundred pounds. No, five hundred pounds in all — fifty of that to be given to the utterly victorious Mr. Michael Godwin. Mallory heard a voice ring in his ears, amid the growing tumult of the crowd. "I'm rich," the voice remarked calmly. It was his own voice. He was rich. This image is a formal daguerreotype of the sort distributed by the British aristocracy among narrow circles of friendship and acquaintance. The photographer may have been Albert, the Prince Consort, a man whose much-publicized interest in scientific matters had made him an apparently genuine intimate of Britain's Radical elite. The dimensions of the room, and the rich drapery of its back-drop, strongly suggest the photographing salon that Prince Albert maintained at Windsor Palace. The women depicted are Lady Ada Byron and her companion and soi-disant chaperone. Lady Mary Somerville. Lady Somerville, the authoress of 'On the Connection of the Physical Sciences' and the translator of Laplace's 'Celestial Mechanics', has the resigned look of a woman accustomed to the vagaries of her younger companion. Both women wear gilded sandals, and white draperies, somewhat akin to a Greek toga, but strongly influenced by French neoclassicism. They are, in fact, the garments of female adepts of the Society of Light, the secret inner body and international propaganda arm of the Industrial Radical Party. The elderly Mrs. Somerville also wears a fillet of bronze marked with astronomical symbols, a covert symbol of the high post this femme savante occupies in the councils of European science. Lady Ada, her arms bare save for a signet-ring on her right forefinger, places a laurel wreath about the brow of a marble bust of Isaac Newton. Despite the careful placement of the camera, the strange garb does not flatter Lady Ada, and her face shows stress. Lady Ada was forty-one years old in late June 1855, when this daguerreotype was taken. |
| 1386 |
The book detailed a jolly but quite extensive Crimean holiday which Oliphant had undertaken. To Mallory's newly alerted eye, Oliphant's latest article bristled with sly insinuation. A street-arab whipped with a broom of twigs at the pavement before Mallory's feet. The boy glanced up, puzzled. "Pardon, guv?" Mallory realized with an unhappy start that he had been talking to himself, standing there in rapt abstraction, muttering aloud over Oliphant's deviousness. The boy, grasping at Mallory's attention, did a back-somersault. Mallory tossed him tuppence, turned at random, and walked away, shortly discovering himself in Leicester Square, its gravel walks and formal gardens an excellent place to be robbed or ambushed. Especially at night, for the streets about featured theatres, pantos, and magic-lantern houses. Crossing Whitcomb, then Oxenden, he found himself in Haymarket, strange in the broad summer daylight, its raucous whores absent now and sleeping. He walked the length of it, for curiosity's sake. It looked very different by day, shabby and tired of itself. At length, noting Mallory's pace, a pimp approached him, offering a packet of French-letters, sure armor against the lady's-fever. Mallory bought them, dropping the packet into his valise. Turning left, he marched into the chuffing racket of busy Pall Mall, the wide macadam lined by the black iron palings of exclusive clubs, their marbled fronts set well back from the street-jostle. Off Pall Mall, at the far end of Waterloo Place, stood the Duke of York's memorial. The Grand Old Duke of York, Who Had Ten Thousand Men, was a distant soot-blackened effigy now, his rotund column dwarfed by the steel-spired headquarters of the Royal Society. Mallory had his bearings now. He tramped the elevated pedestrian-bridge, over Pall Mall, while below him sweating kerchief-headed navvies ripped at the intersection with a banging steel-armed excavator. They were preparing the foundation of a new monument, he saw, doubtless to the glory of the Crimean victory. |
| 1387 |
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. 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. |
| 1388 |
I'll see that you're given a key." "Lord Gideon Mantell taught me everything I knew about the modeling of plaster," Mallory declared, with a show of nostalgia. "It's been too long since I last came to grips with that worthy craft. It will be a great pleasure to observe the latest advances in technique, in such exemplary surroundings." Huxley smiled, with a hint of dubiousness. "I do hope we can satisfy you, Ned." Mopping the back of his neck with a kerchief. Mallory unhappily contemplated the headquarters of the Central Statistics Bureau. Ancient Egypt had been dead for twenty-five centuries, but Mallory had come to know it well enough to dislike it. The French excavation of the Suez Canal had been an heroic business, so that all things Egyptian had become the Parisian mode. The rage had seized Britain as well, leaving the nation awash with scarab neck-pins, hawk-winged teapots, lurid stereographs of toppled obelisks, and faux-marble miniatures of the noseless Sphinx. Manufacturers had Engine-embroidered that whole beast-headed rabble of pagan godlets on curtains and carpets and carriage-robes, much to Mallory's distaste, and he had come to take an especial dislike to silly maunderings about the Pyramids, ruins which inspired exactly the sort of chuckle-headed wonderment that most revolted his sensibilities. He had, of course, read admiringly of the engineering feats of Suez. Lacking coal, the French had fueled their giant excavators with bitumen-soaked mummies, stacked like cordwood and sold by the ton. Still, he resented the space usurped by Egyptology in the geographical journals. The Central Statistics Bureau, vaguely pyramidal in form and excessively Egyptianate in its ornamental detail, squatted solidly in the governmental heart of Westminster, its uppermost stories slanting to a limestone apex. For the sake of increased space, the building's lower section was swollen out-of-true, like some great stone turnip. Its walls, pierced by towering smokestacks, supported a scattered forest of spinning ventilators, their vanes annoyingly hawk-winged. |
| 1389 |
"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. 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. |
| 1390 |
Political men, in short, who dealt entirely in the intangible. And though they presumably had their wives, their children, their brownstone homes, here they struck Mallory as vaguely ghost-like or ecclesiastical. Some yards on. Mallory was forced to abruptly dodge a second wheeled messenger. He caught himself against a decorative cast-iron column. The metal scorched his hands. Despite its lavish ornamentation — lotus blossoms — the column was a smokestack. He could hear it emitting the muffled roar and mutter of a badly adjusted flue. Consulting his map again, he entered a corridor lined left and right with offices. White-coated clerks ducked from door to door, dodging young messenger-boys rolling about with card-laden wheelbarrows. The gas-lights were brighter here, but they fluttered in a steady draft of wind. Mallory glanced over his shoulder. At the end of the hall stood a giant steel-framed ventilator-fan. It squealed faintly, on an oiled chain-drive, propelled by an unseen motor in the bowels of the pyramid. Mallory began to feel rather dazed. Likely this had all been a grave mistake. Surely there were better ways to pursue the mystery of Derby Day, than hunting pimps with some bureaucratic crony of Oliphant's. The very air of the place oppressed him, scorched and soapy and lifeless, the floors and walls polished and gleaming ... He'd never before seen a place so utterly free of common dirt ... These halls reminded him of something, another labyrinthine journey ... Lord Darwin. Mallory and the great savant had been walking the leaf-shadowed hedgy lanes of Kent, Darwin poking at the moist black soil with his walking-stick. Darwin talking, on and on, in his endless, methodical, crushingly detailed way, of earthworms. Earthworms, always invisibly busy underfoot, so that even great sarsen-stones slowly sank into the loam. Darwin had measured the process, at Stonehenge, in an attempt to date the ancient monument. Mallory tugged hard at his beard, his map forgotten in his hand. |
| 1391 |
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. The Central Statistics Bureau suspected her of having fled to France, Mallory assumed, because someone had appended translations of French police-reports of 1854 dealing with a crime passionel trial in the Paris assizes. One "Florence Murphy," abortionist, purportedly an American refugee, was arrested and tried for the crime of vitriolage, the flinging of sulphuric acid with intent to disfigure or maim. The victim, Marie Lemoine, wife of a prominent Lyons silk-merchant, was an apparent rival. But "Mrs. Murphy" had vanished from custody, and from all subsequent French police-records, during the first week of her trial as a vitrioleuse. Mallory sponged his face, neck, and armpits in tap-water, thinking bleakly of vitriol. He was perspiring freely again as he laced his shoes. Leaving his room, he discovered that the city's queer summer had overwhelmed the Palace. Sullen humidity simmered over the marble floors like an invisible swamp. The very palms at the foot of the stairs seemed Jurassic. He trudged to the Palace's dining-room, where four cold hard-boiled eggs, iced coffee, a kippered herring, some broiled tomato, a bit of ham, and a chilled melon somewhat restored him. The food here was rather good, though the kipper had smelled a bit off — small wonder, in heat like this. Mallory signed the chit, and left to fetch his mail. He had been unjust to the kipper. Outside the dining room, the Palace itself stank: bad fish, or something much like it. There was a soapy perfume in the front lobby, left from the morning's mopping, but the air was heavy with the humid distant reek of something dreadful, and apparently long-dead. Mallory knew he had smelled that reek before — it was sharp, like acid, mixed with the greasy stench of a slaughterhouse — but he could not place the memory. |
| 1392 |
She had taken his ring at eighteen, and was now all of twenty-two. A long engagement was a cruel thing to ask of a young and lively girl, and Mallory had seen, in his last visit, that the ordeal had sharpened Madeline's tongue and temper, and made her almost a trial to the household. 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. Mallory tried the Gloucester Road underground, by the corner of Ashburn Mews. As he prepared to descend the stairs a thin crowd came up at a half-run, fleeing a reek of such virulence that it stopped him in his tracks. |
| 1393 |
"The great iron arch, with its lavish skeleton of struts and bolting, supported a large population of winged cupids and draperied ladies with torches. A handsome monument, Mallory thought, and in the latest taste. Its elegant solidity seemed to deny that there had ever been a trace of discord between Great Britain and her staunchest ally, Imperial France. Perhaps, thought Mallory wryly, the "misunderstandings" of the Napoleonic Wars could be blamed on the tyrant Wellington. Though London possessed no monuments to the Duke of Wellington, it sometimes seemed to Mallory that unspoken memories of the man still haunted the city, an unlaid ghost. Once, the great victor of Waterloo had been exalted here, as the very saviour of the British nation; Wellington had been ennobled, and had held the highest office in the land. But in modern England he was vilified as a swaggering brute, a second King John, the butcher of his own restless people. The Rads had never forgotten their hatred for their early and formidable enemy. A full generation had passed since Wellington's death, but Prime Minister Byron still often spattered the Duke's memory with the acid of his formidable eloquence. Mallory, though a loyal Radical Party man, was unconvinced by mere rhetorical abuse. He privately entertained his own opinion of the long-dead tyrant. On his first trip to London at the age of six, Mallory had once seen the Duke of Wellington — passing in his gilded carriage in the street, with a clopping, jingling escort of armed cavalry. And the boy Mallory had been vastly impressed — not simply by that famous hook-nosed face, high-collared and whiskered, groomed and stem and silent — but by his own father's awe-struck mix of fear and pleasure at the Duke's passage. Some faint tang of that childhood visit to London — in 1831, the first year of the Time of Troubles, the last of England's old regime — still clung to Mallory whenever he saw the capital. Some few months later, in Lewes, his father had cheered wildly when news came of Wellington's death in a bomb atrocity. |
| 1394 |
But Mallory had secretly wept, stirred to bitter sorrow for a reason he could not now recall. His seasoned judgment saw the Duke of Wellington as the outmoded, ignorant victim of an upheaval beyond his comprehension; more Charles the First than King John. Wellington had foolishly championed the interests of declining and decadent Tory blue-bloods, a class destined to be swept from power by the rising middle-class and the savant meritocrats. But Wellington himself had been no blue-blood; he had once been plain Arthur Wellesley, of rather modest Irish origin. Further, it seemed to Mallory that as a soldier, Wellington had displayed a very praiseworthy mastery of his craft. 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. |
| 1395 |
Perhaps he would try Oliphant when his errand was done. 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. 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. |
| 1396 |
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. 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. |
| 1397 |
He turned away, and began to wander back toward the Burlington Arcade. He had not once looked straight at Mallory. Mallory himself took a sudden pretended interest in the clasps of his clock-case. He set his case down, bent, and looked at the bits of shiny brass with his mind racing and a chill in his spine. The rascal's handkerchief trick had given him away. Mallory recognized him now as the man he had seen by the underground station in Kensington; the coughing gent, who would not give up his cab. What's more, thought Mallory, his mind hot with insight, the coughing gent was also the rude man who'd argued with the cabbie about his fare, in Piccadilly. He had followed Mallory the whole distance from Kensington. He was trailing him. Mallory seized his clock-case in a fierce grip and began to walk quietly down Burlington Gardens. He turned right on Old Bond Street. His nerves were tingling now, with a stalker's instinct. He had been a fool to turn and stare at first. Perhaps he had given himself away to his pursuer. Mallory did not turn and look again, but ambled along with his best pretense at leisure. He paused before a jeweler's velvet racks of cameos and bracelets and evening tiaras for Her Ladyship, and watched the street behind him, in the iron-barred shining glass. He saw the Coughing Gent reappear almost at once. The man hung well back for the moment, careful to keep groups of London shoppers between himself and Mallory. The Coughing Gent was perhaps thirty-five, with a bit of grey in his side-whiskers, and a dark machine-stitched Albert coat that did not look like anything remarkable. His face was that of anyone in London, perhaps a little heavier, a little colder in the eyes, with a grimmer mouth beneath the button-nose. Mallory took another turn, left up Bruton Street, his clock-case growing more awkward by the step. The shops here lacked conveniently angled glass. He doffed his hat to a pretty woman, and pretended to glance back at her ankles. The Coughing Gent was still with him. |
| 1398 |
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. 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. |
| 1399 |
But Mallory saw little real hope in these expedients. This fellow had the firm advantage of the terrain and all the sneaking tricks of the London criminal. Mallory felt like a lumbering Wyoming bison. He trudged ahead with the heavy clock. His hand ached; he was becoming weary ... At the foot of Queens Way, a dragline and two excavators were wreaking progressive havoc in the ruins of Shepherd Market. A hoarding surrounded the site, the boards cracked and knotholed by eager spectators. Kerchief-headed women and chaw-spitting costermongers, displaced from their customary sites, had set up a last-ditch rag-shop just outside the fence. Mallory walked down the line of ill-smelling oysters and limp vegetables. At the end of the hoarding, some accident of planning had left a narrow alleyway; dusty planks to one side, crumbled brick to the other. Rank weeds sprouted between piss-damp ancient cobbles. Mallory peered in as a bonneted crone arose from a squat, adjusting her skirts. She walked past him without a word. Mallory touched his hat. Heaving the case above his head, he set it gently atop the wall of mossy brick. He shored it up securely with a chunk of decayed mortar, then placed his hat beside it. He flattened his back against the wall of planks. The Coughing Gent appeared. Mallory lunged for the man, and punched him in the pit of the belly with all his strength. "The man doubled over with a spit and a wheeze, and Mallory clouted him with a short left to the side of the jaw. The man's hat flew off, and he tumbled to his knees. Mallory grabbed the back of the villain's Albert coat and flung him hard against the bricks. The man rebounded, sprawled headlong, and lay gasping, his whiskered face smeared with filth. Mallory snatched him up two-handed, by the throat and lapel. "Who are you!" "Help," the man croaked feebly, "murder!" Mallory dragged the man three yards down the alley. "Don't play the fool with me, you blackguard! Why are you following me? Who paid you? What's your name?" The man clawed desperately at Mallory's wrist. |
| 1400 |
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. He looked Mallory up and down. "May I help you ...? Oh, my word." He turned, raised his voice to a shout. "Mr. Oliphant!" Mallory tottered into the entrance hall, all elegant tile and waxed wainscoting. Oliphant appeared almost at once. In spite of the hour, he was formally dressed, with the smallest of bow-ties and a chrysanthemum boutonniere. Oliphant seemed to grasp the situation with a single keen-eyed glance. "Bligh! Go at once to the kitchen; fetch brandy from cook. A basin of water. And some clean towels." Bligh, the man-servant, vanished. Oliphant stepped to the open door, glanced warily up and down the street, then shut and locked the door securely. Taking Mallory's arm, he guided him into the parlor, where Mallory lowered himself wearily on a piano-bench. "So you've been attacked," Oliphant said. "Set upon from behind. |
| 1401 |
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. 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. |
| 1402 |
As Mallory glanced up, he thought he caught them staring at him — but this was nonsense. Mallory sorted through his correspondence with desultory interest, his head aching slightly and his mind already drifting. There was a tedious burden of necessary professional correspondence, and the usual tiresome freight of admiring missives and begging-letters. Perhaps the engagement of a personal secretary might in fact be unavoidable. Struck by an odd inspiration, Mallory wondered if young Mr. Tobias of the Central Statistics Bureau might not be just the man for this post. Perhaps an offer of alternate employment would increase the fellow's daring in the office, for there was much at the Bureau that Mallory longed to peruse. The file on Lady Ada, for instance, should such a fabulous item exist. Or the slippery Mr. Oliphant, with his ready smiles and vague assurances. Or Lord Charles Lyell, the medal-heavy savant chief of the Uniformitarian faction. These three worthies were likely well above his reach, Mallory thought. But he might well ferret out a bit of data on Peter Foulke: a sinister rascal whose web of underhanded intrigue was ever more manifest. He would have it all out somehow; Mallory felt quite sure of that, as he shuffled through his mail-basket. The whole occulted business would slowly emerge, like bones chipped from their bed of shale. He had glimpsed the closeted skeletons of the Rad elite. Now, given time and a chance to work, he would wrench the mystery whole from its stony matrix. His attention was caught by a most unusual packet. It was of non-standard dimensions, rather blocky and square, and it bore a colorful set of French express-stamps. The ivory-yellow envelope, astonishingly slick and stiff, was of a most unusual water-proof substance, something like isinglass. Mallory took out his Sheffield knife, selected the smallest of several blades, and worried the thing open. The interior bore a single French Engine-card, of the Napoleon gauge. Mallory, with growing alarm, shook the card free, onto the table-top. |
| 1403 |
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. 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. |
| 1404 |
He was stiff and restless with lust, and felt out of his own command. He had not had a woman since Canada, and the French girl in Toronto had not seemed wholly clean. He needed a woman, badly. An Englishwoman, some country girl with solid white legs and fat fair freckled arms ... Mallory made his way back to Fleet Street. Out in the open air, his eyes began to smart almost at once. There was no sign of Fraser in the hustling crowds. The gloom of the day was truly extraordinary. It was scarcely noon, but the dome of St. Paul's was shrouded in filthy mist. Great rolling wads of oily fog hid the spires and the giant bannered adverts of Ludgate Hill. Fleet Street was a high-piled clattering chaos, all whip-cracking, steam-snorting, shouting. The women on the pavements crouched under soot-stained parasols and walked half-bent, and men and women alike clutched kerchiefs to their eyes and noses. Men and boys lugged family carpetbags and rubber-handled traveling-cases, their cheery straw boaters already speckled with detritus. A crowded excursion-train chugged past on the spidery elevated track of the London, Chatham & Dover, its cloud of cindered exhaust hanging in the sullen air like a banner of filth. Mallory studied the sky. The thready jellyfish mess of rising smoke was gone now, swallowed in a looming opaque fog. Here and there, gray flakes of something like snow were settling delicately over Fleet Street. Mallory examined one that lit on his jacket-sleeve, a strange slaggy flake of crystallized grit. At his touch it burst into the finest ash. Fraser was shouting at him from beneath a lamp-post across the street. "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. |
| 1405 |
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. 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. |
| 1406 |
The pair of them stopped and moved off among a group of friends: an older, modest-looking woman in a bonnet, two other young girls who looked like dollymops, and another older gentleman who looked bleak-faced and foreign, from Holland perhaps or one of the Germanies. The dancing girl was talking with the others and tossing her head as if laughing. She had fine brunette hair and a bonnet knotted round her throat and hanging down her back. A fine, solid, womanly back and slim waist. Mallory began walking slowly toward them. The girl talked with seeming earnestness to the foreign man, but his face showed reluctance and a seeming disdain. The girl sketched out something like a half-reluctant curtsey, then turned away from him. Mallory saw her face for the first time. She had a strange long jaw, thick eyebrows, and a broad mobile slash of a mouth, lips edged with rouge. It was not exactly an ugly face, but decidedly plain. Yet there was a sharp, reckless look in her grey eyes and a strangely voluptuous expression that caught him as he stood. And she had a splendid form. He could see it as she walked — rolled, slid almost — to the bar. Again those marvelous hips and the line of that back. She leaned across the bar to chaff with the barman and her skirt rose behind her almost to her red-stockinged calf. The sight of her muscular leg thrilled him with a jolt of lewd intensity. It was as if she had kicked him with it. Mallory moved to the bar. She was not chaffing with the barman but arguing with him, in a half-painful, nagging, womanly way. She was thirsty and had no cash and said that her friends were paying. The barman didn't believe her, but would not say so straight out. Mallory tapped a shilling on the bar. "Barman, give the lady what she wants." She looked at him with annoyed surprise. Then she recovered herself, and smiled, and looked at him through half-shut lashes. "You know what I like best, Nicholas," she told the barman. He brought her a flute of champagne and relieved Mallory of his money. |
| 1407 |
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. Scatterings of damp flour showed a stampede of men's brogues, the small bare feet of street-urchins, the dainty trace of women's shoes, and the sweep of their skirt-hems. Four mist-shrouded figures, three men and a woman, all dressed respectably, all carefully masked in thick cloth, came shuffling into view. Noticing him, they pointedly crossed the street. They moved slowly, unhurriedly, talking together in low tones. Mallory moved on, splintered glass crunching under his shoe-heels. Meyer's Gent's Furnishings, Peterson's Haberdashery, LaGrange's Parisian Pneumatique Launderette, all presented disintegrated store-fronts and doors torn off their hinges. Their fronts had been thoroughly pelted with stones, with bricks, with raw eggs. Now a more cohesive group appeared. Men and young boys, some rolling heaped barrows, though they were clearly not costers. In their masks, they seemed tired, bemused, somber, as though attending a funeral. In their aimless progress they slowed before a sacked cobbler's, picking over the scattered shoes with the limp enthusiasm of scavengers. Mallory realized that he had been a fool. While he had wallowed in mindless dissipation, London had become a locus of anarchy. |
| 1408 |
He should be home in peaceful Sussex now, with the family. He should be readying for little Madeline's wedding, in clean country air, with his brothers and sisters at hand, with decent home-cooked food and decent homely drink. A sudden agony of homesickness struck him, and he wondered what chaotic amalgam of lust and ambition and circumstance had marooned him in this dreadful, vicious place. He wondered what the family were doing at that very moment. What was the time, exactly? With a jolt, Mallory remembered Madeline's clock. His sister's wedding-gift was sitting in its brass-hasped carry-case in the safety-box of the Palace of Paleontology. The lovely fancy clock for dear Madeline, now grotesquely out of his reach. The Palace was seven miles from Whitechapel. Seven miles of roiling chaos. There must be some way back, some way to cross that distance, surely. Mallory wondered if any of the city's trains were running, or the omnibuses. Perhaps a hansom? Horses would choke in this foul mist. He was down to shank's mare. Likely any effort to cross London was foolish, and likely it would be wisest to cower in some quiet cellar like a rat, hoping for Catastrophe to pass him over. And yet Mallory found his shoulders squaring, his legs tramping forward of their own accord. Even the throbbing in his parched head began to pass as his wits focused on a goal. Back to the Palace. 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. "Sir, could you, please, have a look at our door there — just to the side, below the steps? |
| 1409 |
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. 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. |
| 1410 |
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. 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. |
| 1411 |
The Palace air was sharp with disinfectant, but blissfully breathable. Mallory stripped the filthy mask from his face and stuffed it in his pocket. Somewhere in this blessed shelter, he thought, there was food to be had. Perhaps a wash-basin, and soap, and sulphurated powder for the fleas that had been creeping about his waistband since morning. Eggs. Ham. Restorative wine. Postage-stamps, laundresses, shoe-blacking — the whole miraculous concatenated network of Civilization. A stranger came marching toward Mallory across the lobby floor: a British soldier, an Artillery subaltern, in elegant dress-gear. He wore a double-breasted blue coatee, bright with chevrons, brass buttons, and gold-braided epaulets. His sleek trousers had a red military stripe. He wore a round, gold-laced forage-cap, and a buttoned pistol-holster at his neat white waistbelt. With his shoulders square, spine straight, and head high, this handsome young man approached with a stern look of purpose. Mallory straightened quickly, taken aback, even vaguely shamed, to compare his rumpled, sweat-stained civilian garb to this crisp military paragon. Then, with a leap of surprise, happy recognition dawned. "Brian!" Mallory shouted. "Brian, boy!" The soldier quickened his pace. "Ned — why it is you, ain't it!" said Mallory's brother, a tender smile parting his new Crimean beard. He seized Mallory's hand in both his own, and shook it heartily, with a solid strength. Mallory noted with surprise and pleasure that military discipline and scientific diet had put inches and pounds on the lad. Brian Mallory, the family's sixth-born child, had often seemed a bit quiet and timid, but now Mallory's little brother stood a good six-four in his military boots, and had the look in his creased blue eyes of a man who had seen the world. "We've been a-waiting for you, Ned," Brian told him. His bold voice had slipped a bit, by some old habit, into the remembered tone of their childhood. For Mallory, it was a plaintive echo from deep memory: the demands of a crowd of little children upon their eldest brother. |
| 1412 |
Tom stopped the Zephyr for coaling, while Fraser, followed by Mallory, sought intelligence from the London coppers. They were told that the situation south of the river was quite out of control. Pitched battles with brickbats and pistols were raging in Lambeth. Many streets were barricaded by pillaging mobs. Reports had it that the Bedlam Hospital had been thrown open, its unchained lunatics capering the streets in frenzy. The police were sooty-faced, coughing, exhausted. Every able-bodied man in the force was on the streets, the Army had been called in by an emergency committee, and a general curfew declared. Volunteers of the respectable classes were being deputized in the West End, and equipped with batons and rifles. At least, Mallory thought, this litany of disaster crushed any further doubts about the propriety of their own venture. Fraser made no comment; but he returned to the Zephyr with a look of grim resolution. Tom piloted on. Beyond authority's battered boundary, things grew swiftly more grim. It was noonday now, with a ghastly amber glow at the filthy zenith, and crowds were clustering like flies in the crossroads of the city. Clumps of masked Londoners shuffled along, curious, restless, hungry, or desperate — unhurried, and conspiring. The Zephyr, with merry toots of its whistle, passed through the amorphous crowd; they parted for it reflexively. A pair of commandeered omnibuses patrolled Cheapside, crammed with hard-faced bruisers. Men waving pistols hung from the running-boards, and the roofs of both steamers were piled high and bristling with stolen furniture. Thomas easily skirted the wallowing 'buses, glass crunching beneath the Zephyr's wheels. In Whitechapel there were dirty, shoeless children clambering like monkeys, four stories in the air, on the red-painted arm of a great construction-crane. Spies of a sort, Brian opined, for some were waving colored rags and screeching down at people in the street. Mallory thought it more likely that the urchins had clambered up there in hope of fresher air. |
| 1413 |
They were labeled with the skull-and-crossbones, amid a truck of distillation-flasks, red rubber-tubing, wire cages, and laboratory gas-rings. Tom, at Mallory's right, tapped Mallory's arm and whispered in a voice of near-terror, "Ned! Ned! Is that Lady Ada?" "My God, boy," Mallory hissed, the hair prickling in fear all across his arms and neck, "what makes you think that? Of course it isn't she!" Tom looked relieved, puzzled, vaguely offended. "Who is it, then?" The lecturing female turned to the chalkboard, and wrote, in a ladylike cursive, the words "Neurasthenic Degeneracy." She turned, aimed a false and brilliant smile at the audience over her shoulder, and for the first time Mallory recognized her. She was Florence Russell Bartlett. Mallory stiffened in his chair with a half-stifled gasp of shock. 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. |
| 1414 |
"Run!" Brian screeched. He, Tom, and Fraser fled at once. Chairs splintered, toppling, on either side of Mallory. The audience was shooting at him, ragged popping shots. Mallory leveled both his pistols at Bartlett at her podium, and squeezed the triggers. 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. "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. |
| 1415 |
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. He followed Fraser into the crevice, grunting and heaving, for several yards along the wall. Bullets began whacking into the brick, before them and behind them, but well above their heads. Ill-aimed shots burst the tin-sheet roof with drum-like metal bangs. Mallory emerged to find Tom working like a demon in an open cul-de-sac, flinging up a barricade of spindle-legged ladies' vanity-tables. The things lay piled in a white-lacquered heap like dead tropical spiders. The cracking of rifles, sharper now, made the warehouse a cacophony. From behind them Mallory heard shouts of rage and fear over the dead. Tom drove a length of iron bedstead into a heap of crates, put his back into it, and toppled the mess with a crash. |
| 1416 |
Fraser's pepperbox had three caps left, and the Marquess's gun five rounds. And they had an empty Victoria carbine, and Fraser's little truncheon. There was no sign of Brian. There were angry, muffled shouts in the depths of the warehouse — orders. Mallory thought. The gunfire died away quite suddenly, replaced by an ominous silence, broken by rustling and what seemed to be hammering. He peered up over the edge of a forward bale. There was no visible enemy, but the doors of the warehouse had been shut. Gloom flew across the warehouse in a sudden wave. Beyond the glazed vaulting of the ceiling, it had grown swiftly and astonishingly dark, as if the Stink had thickened further. "Should we make a run for it?" whispered Tom. "Not without Brian," Mallory said. Fraser shook his head dourly — not speaking his doubt, but it was clear enough. They worked in the gloom for a while, clearing space, digging in deeper, heaving up some of the bales to serve as crenellations. At the sound of their activity, more shots came, muzzle-flashes savagely lighting the darkness, bullets screaming off iron braces overhead. Here and there in the heaps of merchandise, the kindled light of lanterns glowed. More shouted orders, and the firing ceased. There was a flurry of pattering on the metal roof, swiftly gone. "What was that?" Tom asked. "Sounded like rats scampering," Mallory said. "Rain!" Fraser suggested. Mallory said nothing. Another ash-fall seemed far more likely. The gloom lightened again, quite suddenly. Mallory peered over the edge. A crowd of the rascals were creeping forward, almost to the foot of the ramparts, barefoot and in hushed silence, some with knives in their teeth. Mallory bellowed in alarm and began firing. He was blinded at once by his own muzzle-flashes, but the Ballester-Molina, kicking and pumping, seemed to have a life of its own; in an instant the three remaining rounds were gone. Not wasted, though; at such short range he had not been able to miss. Two men were down, a third crawling, and the rest fleeing in terror. |
| 1417 |
"They've got our range now!" Brian shouted. "For God's sake, take cover!" He began to struggle desperately with the cotton-bales. Mallory watched in astonishment as shell after shell punched through the roof, the holes as neatly spaced as the stabs of a shoemaker's awl. Whirlwinds of blazing rubbish flew, like the impact of iron comets. The glass vaulting burst into a thousand knife-edged shards. Brian was screaming at Mallory, his voice utterly drowned by the cacophony. After a stunned moment, Mallory bent to help his brother, heaving up another cotton-bale and crouching within the trench. He sat there, the rifle across his knees. Blasts of light sheeted across the buckling roof. Iron beams began to twist under pressure, their rivets popping like gunshots. The noise was hellish, supernatural. The warehouse shook like a sheet of beaten tin. Brian, Tom, and Fraser crouched like praying Bedouins, their hands clamped to their ears. Bits of flaming wood and fabric fell gently onto the bales around them, jumping a bit with each repeated concussion, smoldering into the cotton where they lay. The warehouse billowed with air and heat. Mallory absently plucked two wads of cotton and stuffed them into his ears. A section of roofing collapsed, quite slowly, like the wing of a dying swan. Rain in torrents fought the fires below. Beauty entered Mallory's soul. He stood, the rifle like a wand in his hands. The shelling had stopped, but the noise was incessant, for the building was on fire. Tongues of dirty flame leapt up in a hundred places, twisted fantastically by gusts of wind. Mallory stepped to the edge of the cotton parapet. The shelling had knocked the covered walkway into fragments, like a muddy crawl-way of termites, crushed by a boot. Mallory stood, his head filled with the monotone roaring of absolute sublimity, and watched as his enemies fled screaming. A man stopped amid the flames, and turned. It was Swing. He gazed up at Mallory where he stood. His face twisted with a desperate awe. |
| 1418 |
Mallory has only recently dismissed a purportedly clandestine meeting of the Society of Light. As the final Hierarch of this dwindling confraternity, tonight he wears the formal robes of office. His woolen chasuble of royal indigo is fringed in scarlet. A floor-length indigo skirt of artificial silk, similarly fringed, is decorated with concentric bands of semiprecious stones. He has set aside a domed crown of beaded gold-plate, with a neck-guard of overlapping gilt scales; this rests now upon a small desk-printer. He dons his spectacles, loads a pipe, fires it. His secretary, Cleveland, is a most punctilious and orderly man, and has left him two sets of documents, neatly squared atop the desk in folders of brass-clasped manila. One folder lies to his right, the other to his left, and it cannot be known which he will choose. He chooses the folder to his left. It is an Engine-printed report from an elderly officer of the Meirokusha, a famous confraternity of Japanese scholars which serves, not incidentally, as the foremost Oriental chapter of the Society of Light. The precise text of the report cannot be found in England, but is preserved in Nagasaki along with an annotation indicating that it was wired to the Hierarch via standard channels on April 11. The text indicates that the Meirokusha, suffering a grave decline in membership and a growing lack of attendance, have voted to indefinitely postpone further meetings. It is accompanied by an itemized bill for refreshments, and rental fees for a small upstairs room in the Seiyoken, a restaurant in the Tsukiji quarter of Tokyo. Lord Mallory, though this news is not unexpected, is filled with a sense of loss and bitterness. His temper, fierce at the best of times, has sharpened with old-age; his indignation swells to helpless rage. An artery fails. That chain of events does not occur. He chooses the folder to his right. It is thicker than the one to his left, and this intrigues him. It contains a detailed field report from a Royal Society paleontological expedition to the Pacific coast of Western Canada. |
| 1419 |
Pleased by an awakened nostalgia for his own expedition days, he studies the report closely. The modern labor of science can scarcely be more different from that of his own day. The British scientists have flown to the mainland from the flourishing metropolis of Victoria, and have motored at their ease into the mountains from a luxurious base in the coastal village of Vancouver. Their leader, if he can be given this title, is a young Cambridge graduate named Morris, whom Mallory remembers as a queer, ringleted fellow, given to wearing velvet capes and elaborate Modernist hats. The strata under examination are Cambrian, dark shale of a near-lithographic quality. And, it seems, they teem with a variety of intricate forms, the paper-thin and thoroughly crushed remnants of an ancient invertebrate fauna. Mallory, a vertebrate specialist, begins to lose interest; he has seen, he thinks, more trilobites than anyone ever should have to, and in truth he has always found it difficult to conjure up enthusiasm for anything less than two inches in length. Worse yet, the report's prose strikes him as unscientific, marked by a most untoward air of radical enthusiasm. He turns to the plates. There is a thing in the first plate that possesses five eyes. It has a long clawed nozzle instead of a mouth. There is a legless, ray-like thing, all lobes and jelly, with a flat, fanged mouth that does not bite but irises shut. There is a thing whose legs are fourteen horny, pointed spikes — a thing which has no head, no eyes, no gut, but does have seven tiny pincered mouths, each at the tip of a flexible tentacle. These things bear no relation to any known creature, from any known period whatever. A rush of blood and wonder mounts within Mallory's skull. A vortex of implications begins to sort itself within him, mounting step-by-step to a strange and numinous glow, an ecstatic rush toward utter comprehension, ever brighter, ever clearer, ever closer — His head strikes the table as he slumps forward. |
| 1420 |
McNeile connected the copper cables to a massive voltaic cell. The room filled with the faint eerie odor of electricity. "Please try to relax, Mr. Oliphant, so as to facilitate the polar reversal!" Half-Moon Street was illuminated by a massive Webb lamp, a fluted Corinthian column fueled by sewer-gas. Like the rest of London's Webbs, it had remained unlit, during the summer's emergency, for fear of leaks and explosions. Indeed, there had been at least a dozen pavement-ripping blasts, most attributed to the same firedamp that powered the Webb. Lord Babbage was an outspoken supporter of the Webb method; as a result, every school-boy knew that the methane potential from a single cow was adequate for an average household's daily heating, lighting, and cooking requirements. He glanced up at the lamp as he neared his own Georgian facade. Its light was another apparent token of returning normalcy, but he took little comfort in tokens. The physical and more crudely social cataclysm was past now, certainly, but Byron's death had triggered successive waves of instability; Oliphant imagined them spreading out like ripples in a pond, overlapping with others that spread from more obscure points of impact, creating ominously unpredictable areas of turbulence. One such, certainly, was the business of Charles Egremont and the current Luddite witch-hunt. Oliphant knew with absolute professional certainty that the Luddites were defunct; despite the best efforts of a few manic anarchists, the London riots of the past summer had shown no coherent or organized political agenda. All reasonable aspirations of the working-class had been successfully subsumed by the Radicals. Byron, in his vigorous days, had tempered justice with a well-dramatized show of mercy. Those early Luddite leaders who had made their peace with the Rads were now the tidy, comfortably well-to-do leaders of respectable trades-unions and craft-guilds. Some were wealthy industrialists — though their peace of mind was severely perturbed by Egremont's systematic disinterment of old convictions. |
| 1421 |
The two men before No. 5 wore long drooping black cape-like articles of waxed Egyptian cotton. A recent innovation from New South Wales, Oliphant knew, much praised in the Crimea and precisely the thing for concealing weapons of the sort that these two most certainly concealed. "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. They emerged in a barren hallway, illuminated by a second carbide-lantern. Great spreading continents of niter marred the bare plaster walls. |
| 1422 |
The Pinkerton organization, while ostensibly a private firm, served as the central intelligence-gathering organ of the embattled United States. With networks in place throughout the Confederate States, as well as in the Republics of Texas and California, the Pinkertons were often privy to information of considerable strategic importance. With the arrival in London of Mackerel and his cohorts, certain voices in Special Branch had argued for the various classic modes of coercion. Oliphant had quickly moved to quash this suggestion, arguing that the Americans would be of inestimably greater value if they were allowed to operate freely — under, he made it clear, the constant surveillance of both the Special Branch and his own Special Bureau of the Foreign Office. In practice, of course, the Special Bureau utterly lacked the manpower for any such undertaking, which had resulted in Special Branch assigning Betteredge to the task, along with a steady rota of nondescript Londoners, all of them experienced watchers, personally vetted by Oliphant. Betteredge reported directly to Oliphant, who assessed the raw material before passing it on to Special Branch. Oliphant found the arrangement thoroughly agreeable; Special Branch had so far refrained from comment. The movements of the Pinkertons had gradually revealed minor but hitherto unsuspected sub-strata of clandestine activity. The resultant information constituted a rather mixed bag, but this was all the more to Oliphant's liking. The Pinkertons, he had happily declared to Betteredge, would provide the equivalent of geological core-samples. The Pinkertons would plumb the depths, and Britain would reap the benefits. Betteredge, almost immediately and to his considerable pride, had discovered that one Mr. Fuller, the Texian legation's sole and woefully overworked clerk, was in Pinkerton pay. In addition, Mackerel had demonstrated a profound curiosity about the affairs of General Sam Houston, going so far as to personally burglarize the country estate of the exiled Texian President. |
| 1423 |
Oliphant, suppressing a sigh, rather wished that he himself believed them. 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. Oliphant shifted slightly, grimacing at the obscene sensation of the clinging rubber. Bligh had arranged a sponge, pumice, and a fresh bar of French-milled soap in the little bamboo basket attached to the side of the tub. Bamboo, Oliphant supposed, must also lack magnetic properties. He groaned, then took up sponge and soap and began to wash himself. Released from the pressing business of the day, Oliphant, as he often did, undertook a detailed and systematic act of recollection. |
| 1424 |
He had a natural gift for memory, greatly aided in youth by the educational doctrines of his father, whose ardent interest in mesmerism and the tricks of stage-magic had introduced his son to the arcane disciplines of mnemonics. Such accomplishments had been of great use to Oliphant in later life, and he practiced them now with a regularity he had once devoted to prayer. Almost a year had passed since his search through the effects of Michael Radley, in Room 37, Grand's Hotel. Radley had owned a modern steamer-trunk of the sort that, upended and opened, served as a compact combination of wardrobe and bureau. This, along with a scuffed leather hat-case and a brass-framed Jacquard satchel, constituted the whole of the publicist's luggage. Oliphant had found the intricacy of the trunk's fittings depressing. All these hinges, runners, hooks, nickeled catches, and leather tabs — they spoke of a dead man's anticipation of journeys that were never to be. Equally pathetic were the three gross of fancily stippled cartes-de-viste, with Radley's Manchester telegraph-number arranged in the French manner, still wrapped in printer's-tissue. He began by unpacking each section in turn, laying Radley's clothing out on the hotel bed with a valet's precision. The publicist had entertained a fondness for silk nightshirts. As he worked, Oliphant examined maker's labels and laundry-marks, turning out pockets and running his fingers over seams and linings. Radley's toilet articles were secured in a removable envelope of water-proofed silk. Oliphant examined the contents, handling each object in turn: a badger shaving-brush, a self-stropping safety-razor, a toothbrush, a tin of tooth-powder, a sponge-bag ... He rapped the ivory handle of the brush against the foot of the bedstead. He opened the razor's leatherette case: nickel-plate gleamed against a bed of violet velour. He emptied the toothpowder out on a sheet of Grand's engraved stationery. He looked in the sponge-bag — and found a sponge. |
| 1425 |
He read a Foreign Office dossier on one Wilhelm Stieber, a Prussian agent posing as an emigre newspaper editor named Schmidt. With considerably more interest, he read and annotated a Bow Street file detailing several recent attempts to smuggle munitions, each incident involving cargo destined for Manhattan. 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. Oliphant opened the file, which detailed the circumstances of the death of Michael Radley. He had himself been in the smoking-room with the General and poor doomed Radley, the both of them awash with drink. |
| 1426 |
Of their respective styles of drunkenness, Radley's had been the more presentable, the least predictable, the more dangerous. Houston, in his cups, delighted in playing the barbarous American; red-eyed, perspiring, foul-mouthed, he lounged with one great coarse boot propped muddily atop an ottoman. As Houston spoke, and smoked, and spat, roundly cursing Oliphant and Britain, he sullenly shaved curls from a bit of pine, periodically pausing to strop the jack-knife on the edge of his boot-sole. Radley, in contrast, had positively quivered with the liquor's stimulant effect, cheeks flushed and eyes flashing. Oliphant's visit had been intended deliberately to disturb Houston on the eve of his departure to France, but the display of ill-concealed mutual hostility evident between the General and his publicist had been quite unexpected. He had hoped to sow seeds of doubt with regard to the French tour; to this end, and primarily for Radley's benefit, he had managed to imply an exaggerated degree of cooperation on the parts of the intelligence services of Britain and France. Oliphant had suggested that Houston already possessed at least one powerful enemy among the Police des Chateaux, the bodyguard and secret personal agency of the Emperor Napoleon. While the Police des Chateaux were few in number, Oliphant insinuated, they were utterly without legal or constitutional restraint; Radley, at least, in spite of his condition, had obviously taken note of the implied threat. 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. |
| 1427 |
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. Sundry personal objects lay in the pool of blood and other matter surrounding the corpse: a repeating match, a cigar-case, coins of various denominations. Lamp in hand, the detective surveyed the room, discovering an ivory-handled Leacock & Hutchings pocket-pistol. The weapon's trigger was missing. Three of its five barrels had been discharged — very recently, McQueen judged. Continuing his search, he had discovered the gaudy gilded head of General Houston's stick, awash in splintered glass. Nearby lay a bloodied packet, tightly wrapped in brown paper. It proved to contain a hundred kinotrope-cards, their intricate fretting of punch-holes ruined by the passage of a pair of bullets. The bullets themselves, of soft lead and much distorted, fell into McQueen's palm as he examined the cards. Subsequent examination of the room by specialists from Central Statistics — the attention of the Metropolitan Police, at Oliphant's request, having been swiftly deflected from the matter — added little to what the veteran McQueen had observed. |
| 1428 |
The trigger of the Leacock & Hutchings pepperbox was recovered from beneath an armchair. A more peculiar discovery consisted of a square-cut white diamond, of fifteen carats and very high quality, which was found firmly wedged between two floor-boards. Two men from Criminal Anthropometry, no more than usually cryptic about their purposes, employed large squares of tissue-thin adhesive grid-paper to capture various hairs and bits of fluff from the carpet; they guarded these specimens jealously, and took them away promptly, and nothing was ever heard of them again. "Are you done with that one, sir?" He looked up at Betteredge, then down at the file, seeing Radley's blood spread in a tacky pool. "We're in Horseferry Road, sir." The cab came to a halt. "Yes, thank you." He closed the file and handed it to Betteredge. He descended from the cab and mounted the broad stairs. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding a given visit, he invariably felt a peculiar quickening upon entering the Central Statistics Bureau. He felt it now, certainly: a sense of being observed, somehow — of being known and numbered. The Eye, yes ... As he spoke to the uniformed clerk at the visitor's-desk, a gang of journeymen mechanics emerged from a hallway to his left. They wore Engine-cut woolen jackets and polished brogues soled with creped rubber. Each man earned a spotless tool-satchel of thick white duck, cornered with bronze rivets and brown hide. As they moved toward him, conversing among themselves, some drew pipes and cheroots from their pockets in anticipation of a shift's-end smoke. Oliphant experienced a sharp pang of tobacco-hunger. He had often had call to regret the Bureau's necessary policy regarding tobacco. He looked after the mechanics as they passed, out between the columns and the bronze sphinxes. 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. |
| 1429 |
The Clown, ornate with frills, in elaborately spangled satin, boasted an egg-bald shaven pate and the sinister white-face of the Pierrot, touched with color only in the outlined lips. The performance had been preceded by a brief, ranting address from one "Helen America," her heaving, apparently unconstrained bosom, through layers of diaphanous scarves, serving to hold the attention of the predominantly masculine audience. Her speech had consisted of slogans Oliphant found rather more cryptic than rousing. What exactly did it mean, for instance, when she declared that "We have nothing to wear but our chains ..."? Consulting the program, he was informed that Helen America was in fact the authoress of 'Mazulem the Night Owl', as well as 'Harlequin Panattahah' and 'The Genii of the Algonquins'. Musical accompaniment was provided by a moon-faced organist — her eyes, it seemed to Oliphant, glinting either with lunacy or laudanum. The pantomime had opened in what Oliphant supposed was meant to be taken as a hotel dining-room, with the peripatetic Roast Turkey — apparently played by a dwarf — attacking the diners with a carving-knife. 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. |
| 1430 |
They were, he was pleased to note, a thoroughly unremarkable lot. He disliked swinging-saloons, finding the Engine-controlled movements of the cabin, intended to compensate for the vessel's pitch and roll, somehow more unsettling than the ordinary motion of a ship at sea. In addition, the cabin itself was effectively windowless. Swung on gimbals in a central well, the cabin was mounted so deeply in the hull that its windows, such as they were, were located high up along the walls, well above one's line of sight. All in all, as a remedy for mal-de-mer, Oliphant thought it excessive. The public, however, were apparently fascinated by the novel employment of a small Engine, somewhat on the order of a gunnery Engine, whose sole task consisted of maintaining as near a level footing in the cabin as was deemed possible. This was accomplished via something the press referred to, in clacker's argot, as "back-feed." Still, with twin paddles fore and aft, the Bessemer customarily performed the distance of twenty-one miles between Dover and Calais in an hour and thirty minutes. 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? |
| 1431 |
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. 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. |
| 1432 |
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. On 12 December Lord Byron introduced a new Reform Bill, more radical yet, proposing outright disfranchisement of the hereditary British aristocracy, including himself. This was more than the lories could bear, and Wellington involved himself in covert planning for a military coup. The crisis had polarized the nation. At this juncture, the middle-classes, terrified of the prospect of anarchy, made their own move and came down on the side of the Radicals. A tax-strike was declared, to force Wellington from office; there was a deliberate run on the banks, in which merchants demanded and hoarded gold specie, bringing the national economy to a grinding halt. In Bristol, after three days of major riots, Wellington ordered the Army to put down "Jacobinism" by any means necessary. In the resulting massacre three hundred people, including three prominent Radical M. P.'s, lost their lives. When the news of the massacre reached him, a furious Byron, now calling himself "Citizen Byron," and appearing without coat or necktie at a London rally, called for a general strike. This rally was also attacked by Tory cavalry, with bloody results, but Byron eluded capture. Two days later the nation was under martial-law. In future, the Duke of Wellington would turn his considerable military genius against his own countrymen. The first uprisings against the Tory Regime — as it must now be called — were swiftly and efficiently put down, while garrison troops ruled all major cities. |
| 1433 |
Lord Scowcroft, the shiftiest person I ever saw, in threadbare clothes like a sexton. The coffin came solemnly along, the bearers holding feebly onto it. The Prince Consort Albert foremost among them, with the oddest gnawing look — duty, dignity, and fear. He was kept waiting, I hear, just in the doorway, and muttered in German about the Stink. When the coffin entered, the widowed Iron Lady looked a thousand years old. ======== The Widowed Iron Lady So now the world falls into the hands of the little men, the hypocrites and clerks. Look at them. They have not the mettle for the great work. They will botch it. Oh, even now I could set it all to rights, if only the fools would listen to sense, but I could never speak as you did, and they do not listen to women. You were their Great Orator, a puffed and painted mountebank, without one real idea in your head — no gift for logic, nothing but your posturing wickedness, and yet they listened to you; oh, how they did listen. You wrote your silly books of verse, you praised Satan and Cain and adultery, and every kind of wicked foolishness, and the fools could not get enough of it. They knocked down the bookshop doors. And women threw themselves at your feet, armies of them. I never did. But then, you married me. I was innocent then. From the days of our courtship, some moral instinct in me revolted at your sly teasing, your hateful double-entendres and insinuations, but I did see qualities of promise in you, and ignored my doubts. How swiftly you revived them, as my husband. You cruelly used my innocence; you made me a party to sodomy before I even knew the nature of that sin; before I learned the hidden words for the unspeakable. Pederastia, manustupration, fellatio — you were so steeped in unnatural vice that you could spare not even the marriage-bed. You polluted me, even as you had polluted your own hare-brained fool of a sister. If society had learned the tenth of what I knew, you would have been driven from England like a leper. |
| 1434 |
Back to Greece, back to Turkey and your catamites. How easily, then, might I have ruined you, and very nearly did, to spite you, for it vexed me sorely that you did not know, or care to know, the depth of my conviction. I sought refuge in my mathematics, then, and kept to silence, wishing still to be a good wife in the eyes of society, for I had uses to which to put you, and great work to do, and no means with which to do it, save through my husband. For I had glimpsed the true path toward the greatest good for the greatest number, a good so great it made a trifle of my own humble wishes. Charles taught it me. Decent, brilliant, unworldly Charles, your opposite in every way; so full of great plans, and the pure light of mathematical science, but so utterly impolitic, so entirely unable to suffer fools gladly. He had the gifts of a Newton, but he could not persuade. I brought you together. At first you hated him, and mocked him behind his back, and me as well, for showing you a truth beyond your comprehension. I persisted; begged you to think of honor, of service, of your own glory, of the future of the child in my womb, Ada, that strange child. (Poor Ada, she does not look well, she has too much of you in her.) But you cursed me for a cold-hearted shrew and retired in a drunken temper. For the sake of that greater good, I painted a smile on my face and descended open-eyed into the very Pit. How it pained me, that vile greasy probing and animal nastiness; but I let you do as you liked, and forgave you for it, and petted and kissed you for it, as if I liked it. And you wept like a child, and were grateful, and talked of love undying and united souls, until you tired of that sort of talk. And then, to hurt me, you told me dreadful, shocking things, to disgust me and frighten me away, but I would no longer allow you to frighten me; I was steeled to anything, that night. So I forgave you, forgave and forgave, until at last you could find no further confession even in the foulest dregs of your soul, and at last you had no pretense left, nothing left to say. |
| 1435 |
I imagine that after that night you became frightened of me, perhaps, a little frightened, and that did you a great deal of good, I think. It never hurt me so again, after that night. I taught myself to play all your "pretty little games," and to win them. That was the price I paid, to put your beast in harness. If there is a Judge of Men in another world, though I no longer believe that, no, not in my heart, and yet at times, evil times, times like these — I fancy I sense a never-closing, all-embracing Eye, and feel the awful pressure of its dreadful comprehension. And if there be a Judge, milord husband, then do not think to gull him. No, do not boast of your magnificent sins and demand damnation — for how little you knew, over the years. You, the greatest Minister of the greatest Empire in history — you flinched, you were feeble, you dodged every consequence — Are these tears? We should not have killed so many ... 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. The truth, the dreadful slime-entangled roots of history, vanish now without trace. The truth is buried with your gilt sarcophagus. I must stop thinking in this manner. I am weeping. They think me old and foolish. Was not every civil evil we committed repaid, repaid ten-fold for the public good? |
| 1436 |
There is a lurch, and a hiss of steam as the Foreman shuts down the Torpedo. The Grand Master has not moved. He stands quietly, regarding the work of the teeth. He puts his lamp aside, and reaches into the heap of spoil. He dabbles in it with his shining hook, and has something up by one eyehole. A skull. "Ah, then," he says, his deep voice ringing in the sudden utter silence, "ye poor damn' bastard." ======== The Gaming Lady Is Bad Luck "The Gaming Lady is bad luck to those that know her. When a poor night at the wagering-machines has emptied her purse, her jewels are carried privately into Lombard Street, and Fortune is tempted yet again with a sum from my lady's pawnbroker! Then she sells off her wardrobe as well, to the grief of her maids; stretches her credit amongst those she deals with, pawns her honor to her intimates, in vain hope to recover her losses! "The passions suffer no less by this gaming-fever than the understanding and the imagination. What vivid, unnatural hope and fear, joy and anger, sorrow and discontent, burst out all at once upon a roll of the dice, a turn of the card, a run of the shining gurneys! Who can consider without indignation that all those womanly affections, which should have been consecrated to children and husband, are thus vilely prostituted and thrown away. I cannot but be grieved when I see the Gaming Lady fretting and bleeding inwardly from such evil and unworthy obsessions; when I behold the face of an angel agitated by the heart of a fury! "It is divinely ordered that almost everything which corrupts the soul, must also decay the body. Hollow eyes, haggard looks, and pale complexion are the natural indications of a female gamester. Her morning sleeps cannot repair her sordid midnight watchings. I have looked long and hard upon the face of the Gaming Lady. Yes, I have watched her well. I have seen her earned off half-dead from Crockford's gambling-hell, at two o'clock in the morning, looking like a specter amid a flare of wicked gas-lamps — "Pray resume your seat, sir. |
| 1437 |
You are in the House of God. Is that remark to be taken as a threat, sir? How dare you. These are dark times, grave times indeed! I tell you, sir, as I tell this congregation, as I will tell all the world, that I have seen her, I have witnessed your Queen of Engines at her vile dissipations — "Help me! Stop him! Stop him! Oh dear Jesus, I am shot! I am undone! Murder! Can none of you stop him?" ======== Gentlemen, The Choice Is Yours At the height of the Parliamentary crisis of 1855, Lord Brunel assembled and addressed the members of his Cabinet. His remarks were recorded by his private secretary, using the Babbage shorthand notation. "Gentlemen, I cannot call to mind a single instance in which any individual in the Party or the Ministry has spoken, even casually, in my defense within the walls of Parliament. I have waited patiently, and I hope uncomplainingly, doing what little I could to protect and extend the wise legacy of the late Lord Byron, and to heal the reckless wounds inflicted on our Party by over-zealous juniors. "But there has been no change in the contempt in which you honorable gentlemen seem to hold me. On the contrary, the last two nights have been taken up with a debate on a vote of want-of-confidence, directed, obviously and especially, against the head of the Government. The discussion has been marked with more than usual violence against my office, and there has been no defense from any of you — the members of my own Cabinet. "How, under these circumstances, are we to successfully resolve the matter of the murder of the Reverend Alistair Roseberry? This shameful, atavistic crime, brutally perpetrated within a Christian church, has blackened the reputation of Party and Government, and cast the gravest doubts on our intentions and integrity. And how are we to root out the murderous dark-lantern societies whose power, and provocative daring, grows daily? "God knows, gentlemen, that I never sought my present office. Indeed, I would have done anything, consistent with honor, to avoid assuming it. |
| 1438 |
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. "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. And surely it was God's will, that the computational powers of the Engine be brought to bear upon the great commonality, upon the flows of traffic, of commerce, the tidal actions of crowds — upon the infinitely divisible texture of His work. |
| 1439 |
When I lived in Mexico City at the end of the 1940's, it was a city of one million people, with clear sparkling air and the sky that special shade of blue that goes so well with circling vultures, blood and sand — the raw menacing pitiless Mexican blue. I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there. In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day. My New Orleans case for heroin and marijuana possession looked so unpromising that I decided not to show up for the court date, and I rented an apartment in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City. I knew that under the statute of limitations I could not return to the United States for five years, so I applied for Mexican citizenship and enrolled in some courses in Mayan and Mexican archaeology at Mexico City College. The G. I. Bill paid for my books and tuition, and a seventy-five-dollar-per-month living allowance. I thought I might go into farming, or perhaps open a bar on the American border. The City appealed to me. The slum areas compared favorably with anything in Asia for sheer filth and poverty. People would shit all over the street, then lie down and sleep in it with the flies crawling in and out of their mouths. Entrepreneurs, not infrequently lepers, built fires on street corners and cooked up hideous, stinking, nameless messes of food, which they dispensed to passersby. Drunks slept right on the sidewalks of the main drag, and no cops bothered them. It seemed to me that everyone in Mexico had mastered the art of minding his own business. If a man wanted to wear a monocle or carry a cane, he did not hesitate to do it, and no one gave him a second glance. Boys and young men walked down the street arm in arm and no one paid them any mind. It wasn't that people didn't care what others thought; it simply would not occur to a Mexican to expect criticism from a stranger, nor to criticize the behavior of others. |
| 1440 |
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. 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. |
| 1441 |
I pulled out the receta, and a gray-haired lady smiled at me. The pharmacist looked at the script, and said, "Two minutes, senor." We sat down to wait. There were geraniums in the window. A small boy brought me a glass of water, and a cat rubbed against my leg. After awhile the pharmacist returned with our morphine. "Gracias, senor" Outside, the neighborhood now seemed enchanted: Little farmacias in a market, crates and stalls outside, a pulqueria on the corner. Kiosks selling fried grasshoppers and peppermint candy black with flies. Boys in from the country in spotless white linen and rope sandals, with faces of burnished copper and fierce innocent black eyes, like exotic animals, of a dazzling sexless beauty. Here is a boy with sharp features and black skin, smelling of vanilla, a gardenia behind his ear. Yes, you found a Johnson, but you waded through Shitville to find him. You always do. Just when you think the earth is exclusively populated by Shits, you meet a Johnson. One day there was a knock on my door at eight in the morning. I went to the door in my pyjamas, and there was an inspector from Immigration. "Get your clothes on. You're under arrest." It seemed the woman next door had turned in a long report on my drunk and disorderly behavior, and also there was something wrong with my papers and where was the Mexican wife I was supposed to have? The Immigration officers were all set to throw me in jail to await deportation as an undesirable alien. Of course, everything could be straightened out with some money, but my interviewer was the head of the deporting department and he wouldn't go for peanuts. I finally had to get up off of two hundred dollars. As I walked home from the Immigration Office, I imagined what I might have had to pay if I had really had an investment in Mexico City. I thought of the constant problems the three American owners of the Ship Ahoy encountered. The cops came in all the time for a mordida, and then came the sanitary inspectors, then more cops trying to get something on the joint so they could take a real bite. |
| 1442 |
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. 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). |
| 1443 |
There is something curiously systematic and unsexual about his quest for a suitable sex object, crossing one prospect after another off a list which seems compiled with ultimate failure in mind. On some very deep level he does not want to succeed, but will go to any length to avoid the realization that he is not really looking for sex contact. But Allerton was definitely some sort of contact. And what was the contact that Lee was looking for? Seen from here, a very confused concept that had nothing to do with Allerton as a character. While the addict is indifferent to the impression he creates in others, during withdrawal he may feel the compulsive need for an audience, and this is clearly what Lee seeks in Allerton: an audience, the acknowledgement of his performance, which of course is a mask, to cover a shocking disintegration. So he invents a frantic attention-getting format which he calls the Routine: shocking, funny, riveting. "It is an Ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three... ." The performance takes the form of routines: fantasies about Chess Players, the Texas Oilman, Corn Hole Gus's Used-Slave Lot. In Queer, Lee addresses these routines to an actual audience. Later, as he develops as a writer, the audience becomes internalized. But the same mechanism that produced A. J. and Doctor Benway, the same creative impulse, is dedicated to Allerton, who is forced into the role of approving Muse, in which he feels understandably uncomfortable. What Lee is looking for is contact or recognition, like a photon emerging from the haze of insubstantiality to leave an indelible recording in Allerton's consciousness. Failing to find an adequate observer, he is threatened by painful dispersal, like an unobserved photon. Lee does not know that he is already committed to writing, since this is the only way he has of making an indelible record, whether Allerton is inclined to observe or not. Lee is being inexorably pressed into the world of fiction. He has already made the choice between his life and his work. |
| 1444 |
Lee's face was rigid, his voice toneless." Allerton has just refused a dinner invitation and left abruptly: "Lee stared at the table, his thoughts slow, as if he were very cold." (Reading this am cold and depressed.) Here is a precognitive dream from Cotter's shack in Ecuador: "He was standing in front of the Ship Ahoy. The place looked deserted. He could hear someone crying. He saw his little son, and knelt down and took the child in his arms. The sound of crying came closer, a wave of sadness. ... He held little Willy close against his chest. A group of people were standing there in Convict suits. Lee wondered what they were doing there and why he was crying." I have constrained myself to remember the day of Joan's death, the overwhelming feeling of doom and loss ... walking down the street I suddenly found tears streaming down my face. "What is wrong with me?" The small Scout knife with a metal handle, the plating peeling off, a smell of old coins, the knife-sharpener's whistle. Whatever happened to this knife I never reclaimed? I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out. I have constrained myself to escape death. Denton Welch is almost my face. Smell of old coins. Whatever happened to this knife called Allerton, back to the appalling Margaras Inc. The realization is basic formulated doing? The day of Joan's doom and loss. Found tears streaming down from Allerton peeling off the same person as a Western shootist. What are you rewriting? A lifelong preoccupation with Control and Virus. Having gained access the virus uses the host's energy, blood, flesh and bones to make copies of itself. |
| 1445 |
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. "Well, I have to be going," said Joe. He gathered up his bundles and nodded to Lee, bestowing on him one of his sweet politician smiles, and walked out, his fuzzy, half-bald head outlined for a moment in the sunlight before he disappeared from view. Lee yawned and picked up a comic section from the next table. It was two days old. He put it down and yawned again. He got up and paid for his drink and walked out into the late afternoon sun. He had no place to go, so he went over to Sears' magazine counter and read the new magazines for free. He cut back past the K. C. Steak House. Moor beckoned to him from inside the restaurant. Lee went in and sat down at his table. "You look terrible," he said. He knew that was what Moor wanted to hear. As a matter of fact, Moor did look worse than usual. He had always been pale; now he was yellowish. The boat project had fallen through. Moor and Williams and Williams' wife, Lil, were back from Ziuhuatenejo. Moor was not on speaking terms with the Williamses. Lee ordered a pot of tea. Moor started talking about Lil. "You know, Lil ate the cheese down there. She ate everything and she never got sick. She won't go to a doctor. One morning she woke up blind in one eye and she could barely see out the other. But she wouldn't have a doctor. In a few days she could see again, good as ever. I was hoping she'd go blind." Lee realized Moor was perfectly serious. "He's insane," Lee thought. Moor went on about Lil. She had made advances to him, of course. He had paid more than his share of the rent and food. She was a terrible cook. |
| 1446 |
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. 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. |
| 1447 |
He had our agents out looking for a whole fictitious network of Russian spies. So finally the report comes back from Frankfurt — it is all a lot of crap. But instead of clearing out of town before the information could be checked, he came back with more. "At this point we'd really had enough of his bullshit. So we locked him up in a cellar. The room was pretty cold and uncomfortable, but that was all we could do. We had to handle prisoners very careful. He kept typing out confessions, enormous things." This story clearly delighted Allerton, and he kept laughing while he was telling it. Lee was impressed by his combination of intelligence and childlike charm. Allerton was friendly now, without reserve or defense, like a child who has never been hurt. He was telling another story. Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips. Lee did not enjoy frustration. The limitations of his desires were like the bars of a cage, like a chain and collar, something he had learned as an animal learns, through days and years of experiencing the snub of the chain, the unyielding bars. He had never resigned himself, and his eyes looked out through the invisible bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget the door, for the frayed collar, the loosened bar ... suffering without despair and without consent. "I went to the door and there he was with a branch in his mouth," Allerton was saying. Lee had not been listening. "A branch in his mouth," said Lee, then added inanely, "A big branch?" "It was about two feet long. |
| 1448 |
Tom Weston brought him some hot coffee. He drank the coffee, got up and staggered out of the apartment. Exhausted, he slept till the following morning. Scenes from the chaotic, drunken month passed before his eyes. There was a face he did not recognize, a good-looking kid with amber eyes, yellow hair and beautiful straight black eyebrows. He saw himself asking someone he barely knew to buy him a beer in a bar on Insurgentes, and getting a nasty brush. He saw himself pull a gun on someone who followed him out of a clip joint on Coahuila and tried to roll him. He felt the friendly, steadying hands of people who had helped him home. "Take it easy, Bill." His childhood friend Rollins standing there, solid and virile, with his elkhound. Carl running for a streetcar. Moor with his malicious hitch smile. The faces blended together in a nightmare, speaking to him in strange moaning idiot voices that he could not understand at first, and finally could not hear. Lee got up and shaved and felt better. He found he could eat a roll and drink some coffee. He smoked and read the paper, trying not to think about Allerton. Presently he went downtown and looked through the gun stores. He found a bargain in a Colt Frontier, which he bought for two hundred pesos. A 32-20 in perfect condition, serial number in the three hundred thousands. Worth at least a hundred dollars Stateside. Lee went to the American bookstore and bought a book on chess. He took the book out to Chapultepec, sat down in a soda stand on the lagoon, and began to read. Directly in front of him was an island with a huge cypress tree growing on it. Hundreds of vultures roosted in the tree. Lee wondered what they ate. He threw a piece of bread, which landed on the island. The vultures paid no attention. Lee was interested in the theory of games and the strategy of random behavior. As he had supposed, the theory of games does not apply to chess, since chess rules out the element of chance and approaches elimination of the unpredictable human factor. |
| 1449 |
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. Lee smiled back and ordered a refresco for the boy. He dropped a hand on Lee's thigh and squeezed it in thanks for the drink. The boy had uneven teeth, crowded one over the other, but he was a young boy. Lee looked at him speculatively; he couldn't figure the score. Was the boy giving him a come-on, or wars he just friendly? He knew that people in the Latin American countries were not self-conscious about physical contact. Boys walked around with their arms around each other's necks. |
| 1450 |
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. 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 ... |
| 1451 |
centipedes besieging the houses ... a man tied to a couch and a centipede ten feet long rearing up over him. Is this literal? Did some hideous metamorphosis occur? What is the meaning of the centipede symbol? Lee got on a bus and rode to the end of the line. He took another bus. He rode out to the river and drank a soda, and watched some boys swimming in the dirty river. The river looked as if nameless monsters might rise from the green-brown water. Lee saw a lizard two feet long run up the opposite bank. He walked back towards town. He passed a group of boys on a corner. One of the boys was so beautiful that the image cut Lee's senses like a wire whip. A slight involuntary sound of pain escaped from Lee's lips. He turned around, as though looking at the street name. The boy was laughing at some joke, a high-pitched laugh, happy and gay. Lee walked on. Six or seven boys, aged twelve to fourteen, were playing in a heap of rubbish on the waterfront. One of the boys was urinating against a post and smiling at the other boys. The boys noticed Lee. Now their play was overtly sexual, with an undercurrent of mockery. They looked at Lee and whispered and laughed. Lee looked at them openly, a cold, hard stare of naked lust. He felt the tearing ache of limitless desire. He focused on one boy, the image sharp and clear, as if seen through a telescope with the other boys and the waterfront blacked out. 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. |
| 1452 |
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. Even Cotter's wife had lost her teeth "inna thervith." His were long gone. He had a five-foot viper guarding his house from prowlers after his precious curare notes. He also had two tiny monkeys, cute but ill-tempered and equipped with sharp little teeth, and a two-toed sloth. Sloths live on fruit in trees, swinging along upside down and making a sound like a crying baby. On the ground they are helpless. This one just lay there and thrashed about and hissed. Cotter warned them not to touch it, even on the back of the neck, since it could reach around with its strong, sharp claws and drive them through one's hand, then pull it to its mouth and start biting. Cotter was evasive when Lee asked about Ayahuasca. He said he was not sure Yage and Ayahuasca were the same plant. Ayahuasca was connected with Brujena — witchcraft. He himself was a white Brujo. He had access to Brujo secrets. Lee had no such access. "It would take you years to gain their confidence." Lee said he did not have years to spend on the deal. "Can't you get me some?" he asked. Cotter looked at him sourly. |
| 1453 |
"I have been out here three years," he said. Lee tried to come on like a scientist. "I want to investigate the properties of this drug," he said. "I am willing to take some as an experiment." Cotter said, "Well, I could take you down to Canela and talk to the Brujo. He will give you some if I say so." "That would be very kind," said Lee. Cotter did not say any more about going to Canela. He did say a lot about how short they were on supplies, and how he had no time to spare from his experiments with a curare substitute. After three days Lee saw he was wasting time, and told Cotter they were leaving. Cotter made no attempt to conceal his relief. Epilogue: Mexico City Return Every time I hit Panama, the place is exactly one month, two months, six months more nowhere, like the course of a degenerative illness. A shift from arithmetical to geometrical progression seems to have occurred. Something ugly and ignoble and subhuman is cooking in this mongrel town of pimps and whores and recessive genes, this degraded leech on the Canal. A smog of bum kicks hangs over Panama in the wet heat. Everyone here is telepathic on the paranoid level. I walked around with my camera and saw a wood and corrugated iron shack on a limestone cliff in Old Panama, like a penthouse. I wanted a picture of this excrescence, with the albatrosses and vultures wheeling over it against the hot gray sky. My hands holding the camera were slippery with sweat, and my shirt stuck to my body like a wet condom. An old hag in the shack saw me taking the picture. They always know when you are taking their picture, especially in Panama. She went into an angry consultation with some other ratty-looking people I could not see clearly. Then she walked to the edge of a perilous balcony and made an ambiguous gesture of hostility. Many so-called primitives are afraid of cameras. There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit. I walked on and shot some boys — young, alive, unconscious — playing baseball. |
| 1454 |
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. Now there was nothing but this awful Oklahoma honky-tonk music, like the bellowings of an anxious cow: "You're Drivin' Nails in my Coffin" — "It Wasn't God Made Honky Tonk Angels" — "Your Cheatin' Heart." The servicemen in the joint all had that light-concussion Canal Zone look: cow-like and blunted, as if they had undergone special G. I. processing and were immunized against contact on the intuition level, telepathic sender and receiver excised. |
| 1455 |
His mouth fell open, showing teeth hard and yellow as old ivory. Slowly his body slid down in the leather armchair until the back of the chair pushed his hat down over his eyes, which gleamed in the hat's shade, catching points of light like an opal. He began humming "Johnny's So Long at the Fair" over and over. The humming stopped abruptly, in the middle of a phrase. The Skip Tracer was talking in a voice languid and intermittent, like music down a windy street. "You meet all kinds on this job, Kid. 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. |
| 1456 |
He nodded abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away. Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn't much like. Things weren't going right. Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn't anything terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch. It isn't the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong — the sticking latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot. It wasn't just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt's life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn't come into the office, yet Barth always came in. Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite his wife's attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked — Anne and Farley Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding, too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman's complaints about not being able to get good phone service or his wife's comments on the disgusting variety of television commercials they had these days. Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised him — he was strangely aware of it happening — he turned over in his bed and, quickly and completely, fell asleep. On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming. It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. |
| 1457 |
That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass. He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor — they were faked. It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence. The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home-workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished. "But I built that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing. "That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?" Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity. He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible! He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him. 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. |
| 1458 |
They jogged along. It was more than a mile before they began to see an end. They were in luck — at least no one came through the tunnel to spot them. But Swanson had said that it was only at certain hours that the tunnel seemed to be in use. Always the fifteenth of June. Why? Burckhardt asked himself. Never mind the how. Why? And falling asleep, completely involuntarily — everyone at the same time, it seemed. And not remembering, never remembering anything — Swanson had said how eagerly he saw Burckhardt again, the morning after Burckhardt had incautiously waited five minutes too many before retreating into the darkroom. When Swanson had come to, Burckhardt was gone. Swanson had seen him in the street that afternoon, but Burckhardt had remembered nothing. And Swanson had lived his mouse's existence for weeks, hiding in the woodwork at night, stealing out by day to search for Burckhardt in pitiful hope, scurrying around the fringe of life, trying to keep from the deadly eyes of them. Them. One of "them" was the girl named April Horn. It was by seeing her walk carelessly into a telephone booth and never come out that Swanson had found the tunnel. Another was the man at the cigar stand in Burckhardt's office building. There were more, at least a dozen that Swanson knew of or suspected. They were easy enough to spot, once you knew where to look, for they alone in Tylerton changed their roles from day to day. Burckhardt was on that 8:51 bus, every morning of every day-that-was-June-15th, never different by a hair or a moment. But April Horn was sometimes gaudy in the cellophane skirt, giving away candy or cigarettes; sometimes plainly dressed; sometimes not seen by Swanson at all. Russians? Martians? Whatever they were, what could they be hoping to gain from this mad masquerade? Burckhardt didn't know the answer, but perhaps it lay beyond the door at the end of the tunnel. They listened carefully and heard distant sounds that could not quite be made out, but nothing that seemed dangerous. |
| 1459 |
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. 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. |
| 1460 |
Surely the corporations who paid Dorchin for test results had no notion of the ghoul's technique he used; Dorchin would have to keep it from them, for the breath of publicity would put a stop to it. Walking out meant death, perhaps, but at that moment in his pseudo-life, death was no terror for Burckhardt. There was no one in the corridor. He found a window and stared out of it. There was Tylerton — an ersatz city, but looking so real and familiar that Burckhardt almost imagined the whole episode a dream. 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. |
| 1461 |
Now will you be reasonable and let the maintenance crews take over?" Burckhardt stood paralyzed. One of the moving mountains in the blinding glare came toward him. It towered hundreds of feet over his head; he stared up at its top, squinting helplessly into the light. It looked like — . Impossible! The voice in the loudspeaker at the door said, "Burckhardt?" But he was unable to answer. A heavy rumbling sigh. "I see," said the voice. "You finally understand. There's no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, Burckhardt, why would I reconstruct a city just the way it was before? I'm a businessman; I count costs. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn't any need to in this case." From the mountain before him, Burckhardt helplessly saw a lesser cliff descend carefully toward him. It was long and dark, and at the end of it was whiteness, five-fingered whiteness... "Poor little Burckhardt," crooned the loudspeaker, while the echoes rumbled through the enormous chasm that was only a workshop. "It must have been quite a shock for you to find out you were living in a town built on a table top." It was the morning of June 15th, and Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream. It had been a monstrous and incomprehensible dream, of explosions and shadow figures that were not men and terror beyond words. He shuddered and opened his eyes. Outside his bedroom window, a hugely amplified voice was howling. Burckhardt stumbled over to the window and stared outside. There was an out-of-season chill to the air, more like October than June; but the scene was normal enough — except for a sound-truck that squatted at curbside halfway down the block. Its speaker horns blared: "Are you a coward? Are you a fool? Are you going to let crooked politicians steal the country from you? NO! Are you going to put up with four more years of graft and crime? NO! |
| 1462 |
Her eyes were closed and her breathing was shallow. I spoke to her, but she merely lifted her hand and said nothing. My poor Ila! Why must she face so much misery, while I experience such joy and satisfaction in my work? Jan. 1, 1998. It has been almost two months since I last touched this journal, but I must take strength in this New Year and continue. It has been hard for me to work at all; there has been too much bitterness in my mind and unhappiness in my heart since Ila's death. As I write these words, little Fitz is sleeping peacefully in his crib, watched over by his new nursemaid, Annette. But Mac, who needs no sleep, is sitting in the study chair beside my desk, watching me through the expressionless eyes I have placed in his silver skull. Yet, blank as they are, somehow I sense emotion in those eyes as he watches me. Somehow, I feel my robot creation knows the torment I suffer, and knows the void in our home since Ila's death. Does he miss her, too? It is so difficult to tell. Even with Fitz, my human child, it is hard to recognize the signs of sorrow he must be feeling. During these past weeks, I began to believe that my experiment was all a conceit. But now I realize it was only grief that brought such thoughts; I must continue. Already, I believe Mac thinks of Fitz as his brother, and I know that someday Fitz will reciprocate. There will be much to learn from both of them. I cannot fail my mission now. I will go on. July 25, 2002. Today, my family and I began life in new surroundings, and as difficult as the transplantation has been, I am glad now that we made the move. It had become too much of a burden to face the curiosity and gibes of the neighborhood; we have attracted too much attention. For this reason, I have purchased this small home in the exurbs of the city, just outside the town of Fremont. Both my children seem happy in their new country residence. They are playing together now on the green grass that grows untamed behind the house; I will have to trim and weed it, like a truly domesticated homeowner. |
| 1463 |
I think I shall enjoy the sensation. Despite our problems, my joy is great as I watch the human and mechanical beings outside my window, laughing and romping together as if the differences between them had no existence. 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. She kept referring to "that metal thing" and "that machine" and her lip curled in disgust. I wasn't too upset by her attitude; I rather expected it. "I understand," I told her. "To be honest, I did not expect approval, but I felt it my duty to make the application. However, since the board refuses, I shall not enter either child. |
| 1464 |
But if I have a real source of happiness now, it is my son Fitz. He has become a fine handsome boy, of such good humor and intelligence that he is extremely popular with all the residents of the town — and the power of his engaging personality has created an acceptance for Mac, his robot brother, that all my elaborate scientific titles couldn't have attained. He is still fiercely loyal to Mac, but I already detect signs of independence. These do not worry me; they would be natural even among human brothers. Fitz is discovering that he is an individual; it's a process of life. But I wonder — will Mac feel the same way? Jan. 4, 2012. There has been a quarrel, and it has taken me several days to learn the true details. I have never been disturbed about quarrels between Fitz and Mac; they have had surprisingly few for brothers. But for the first time, I sensed that the quarrel concerned the differences between them. It began last week, when a boy of their age, Philip, a hostile surly youth, involved Fitz in a fight. Philip is the son of a divorced woman in the town, named Mrs. Stanton. She is a strange, brooding woman, with a terrible resentment against her ex-husband. I am afraid some of the resentment has been passed on to her son, Philip, and that he is an unhappy youngster. For the last two months, Fitz has been a frequent visitor to their home, and Mrs. Stanton has displayed great fondness for him. Philip, of course, doesn't like this affection, this stolen love, and has developed a strong animosity towards Fitz. One day, it turned into violence. Philip is big for his fifteen years, a tall boy, well over six feet, and well muscled. When he stopped Fitz and Mac on the street that morning, it was immediately apparent that he was seeking trouble. Fitz is not afraid of him, I know that; but Fitz tries to laugh trouble away. But the boy was in no mood to be put off with a smile. He lashed out and knocked Fitz down. When he got to his feet, Philip knocked him down again, and then leaped atop him. |
| 1465 |
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. 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. |
| 1466 |
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. 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. |
| 1467 |
But I must bring Mac home, before he does any harm to my son's career. March 10, 2026. Now at last it's been explained, the real reason for Mac's endless nights and days in the workshop. It was the Face episode all over again, but much, much worse. In the last year, Mac seems gripped by a strange passion (can there be something organically wrong with his robot's brain?), and the passion is the idea of creating a truly humanoid body for himself. But hard as he has worked, the effect he has gotten is so grotesque that it must be called horrible. Now he truly appears to be a monster, and when I expressed my distaste of what he had done, he fled from the house as if I had struck him. This morning, I learned of his whereabouts, and learned the dreadful story of what had occurred after he left me. The local police discovered him in hiding in the deserted warehouse on Orangetree Road, and, luckily, they called headquarters before taking any drastic action. Captain Ormandy was able to prevent any harm from coming to Mac; the captain has become a friend of mine in the last two years. It was he who told me the story of Mac's escapades after he fled the house. 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. |
| 1468 |
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. 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. |
| 1469 |
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. 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. |
| 1470 |
But even if it failed again, they were determined to go on trying. Faster-than-light travel was not something anyone gave up on easily, even a robot with a life span of five hundred years. The dream, and the obstinacy to pursue it, was a strong inheritance from the parent race. Next to the black experimental probe, with its derricks and workshops, was the towering bulk of the central cooling plant, by far the largest object in the Complex. The cooling plant made even the Old Wheel look like a child's toy hoop. Jason's rickety vac-sled puffed beneath the majestic globe, shining in the sky like a great silvery planet. On this, the side facing the sun, the cooling globe's reflective surface was nearly perfect. On the other side, a giant array of fluid-filled radiators stared out on to intergalactic space, chilling liquid helium down to the basic temperature of the universe — a few degrees above absolute zero. The array had to stare at the blackness between the galaxies. Faint sunlight — even starlight — would heat the cooling fluid too much. That was the reason for the silvery reflective backing. The amount of infrared radiation leaving the finned coolers had to exceed the few photons coming in in order for the temperature of the helium to drop far enough. The new types of citizens might be faster and tougher, and in some ways smarter, than old style humans. They might need neither food nor sleep. But they did require a lot of liquid helium to keep their supercooled, superconducting brains humming. The shining, well-maintained cooling plant was a reminder of the priorities of the times. Some years back, an erratic bio-human had botched an attempt to sabotage the cooling plant. 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. |
| 1471 |
A voice cut in over his helmet speaker in a sharp monotone. "Attention approaching biological... you are entering a restricted zone. Identify yourself at once." Jason grimaced. The station director had ordered all mechano personnel — meaning just about everybody left — to reprogram their voice functions along "more logical tonal lines." That meant they no longer mimicked natural human intonations, but spoke in a new, shrill whine. Jason's few android and cyborg friends — colleagues on the support staff — had whispered their regrets. But those days it was dangerous to be in the minority. All soon adjusted to the new order. "Jason Forbs, identifying self." He spoke as crisply as possible, mimicking the toneless Utilitarian dialect. He spelled his name and gave his ident code. "Oral witness engineer for Project Lightprobe, reporting for duty." There was a pause, then the unseen security overseer spoke again. "Cleared and identified, Jason Forbs. Proceed directly to slip nine, scaffold B. Escorts await your arrival." Jason blinked. Had the voice softened perceptibly? A closet Ethicalist, perhaps, out here in this Utilitarian stronghold. "Success, and an operative return are approved outcomes," the voice added, hesitantly, with just a hint of tonality. Jason understood Utilitarian dialect well enough to interpret the simple good luck wish. He didn't dare thank the fellow, whoever he might be, whatever his body form. But he appreciated the gesture. "Acknowledged," he said, and switched off. Ahead, under stark shadows cast by spotlights girdling the starship, Jason saw at least a dozen scientists and technicians, waiting for him by a docking slip. One or two of the escorts actually appeared to be fidgeting as he made his final maneuvers into the slot. They came in all shapes and sizes. Several wore little globe-bot bodies. Spider forms were also prominent. Jason hurriedly tied the sled down, almost slipping as he secured his magnetic boots to the platform. He knew his humaniform shape looked gawky and unsuited to this environment. |
| 1472 |
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. 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. |
| 1473 |
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. 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... |
| 1474 |
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. "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. |
| 1475 |
"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. But they had been a lot tougher than he. Perhaps the mysterious lethal agency had taken nearly all the fifteen days of the minimum first leg of the round trip to do them in. If so, he wondered, how long will it take to get me? A few hours later, the failure of anything to happen was starting to make him nervous. He cut down the rate of his running commentary in order to save his voice. Besides, nothing much seemed to be changing. The ship was cruising, now. All the dials and indicators were green and steady. During sleep period he tossed in the sleeping hammock, sharing it with disturbed dreams. He awakened several times impelled by a sense of duty and imminent danger, clutching his recorder tightly. But when he stared about the control room he could find nothing amiss. By the third day he had had enough. "I'm going to poke around in the instruments," he spoke into the microphone. "I know I was told not to. And I'll certainly not touch anything having to do with the functioning of the ship. But I figure I deserve a chance to see what I'm traveling through. |
| 1476 |
Nobody's ever looked out on hyperspace. I'm going to take a look." Jason set about the task with a feeling of exultation. What he was doing wouldn't hurt anything, just alter a few of the sensors. Sure, it was against orders, but if he got back alive he would be famous, too important to bother with charges over such a minor infraction. Not that he believed, for even a moment, that he was coming home alive. It was a fairly intricate task, rearranging a few of the ship's programs so the external cameras — meant to be used at the destination star only — would work in hyperspace. 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. |
| 1477 |
If he'd had to pay carpenters and masons and plumbers, he would never have been able to afford the house. But by building it himself, he had paid for it as he went along. It had taken ten years, of course, but think of all the fun he'd had! He sat there and thought of all the fun he'd had, and of all the pride. No, sir, he told himself, no one in his circumstances had a better house. Although, come to think of it, what he'd done had not been too unusual. 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. |
| 1478 |
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. 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. |
| 1479 |
There were cleaning attachments for the house and snowplowing attachments and housepainting attachments and almost any other kind one could wish. Get a full quota of attachments, then layout a work program and turn the robot loose — you could forget about the place the year around, for the robot would take care of everything. There was only one hitch. The cost of a robot kit came close to ten thousand dollars and all the available attachments could run to another ten. Knight closed the magazine and put it into the briefcase. He saw there were only fifteen minutes left until quitting time and that was too short a time to do anything, so Knight just sat and thought about getting home and finding the kit there waiting for him. He had always wanted a dog, but Grace would never let him have one. They were dirty, she said, and tracked up the carpeting, they had fleas and shed hair allover everything — and, besides, they smelled. Well, she wouldn't object to this kind of dog, Knight told himself. It wouldn't smell and it was guaranteed not to shed hair and it would never harbor fleas, for a flea would starve on a half-mechanical, half-biologic dog. He hoped the dog wouldn't be a disappointment, but he'd carefully gone over the literature describing it and he was sure it wouldn't. It would go for a walk with its owner and would chase sticks and smaller animals, and what more could one expect of any dog? To insure realism, it saluted trees and fence-posts, but was guaranteed to leave no stains or spots. The kit was tilted up beside the hangar door when he got home, but at first he didn't see it. When he did, he craned his neck out so far to be sure it was the kit that he almost came a cropper in the hedge. But, with a bit of luck, he brought the flier down neatly on the gravel strip and was out of it before the blades had stopped whirling. It was the kit, all right. The invoice envelope was tacked on top of the crate. But the kit was bigger and heavier than he'd expected and he wondered if they might not have accidentally sent him a bigger dog than the one he'd ordered. |
| 1480 |
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. 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. |
| 1481 |
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. 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. |
| 1482 |
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. But no matter how much trouble he might encounter, he couldn't very well be despondent, not face to face with the fact that, within a year, he'd be a multimillionaire. So he applied himself enthusiastically to the bottle and got drunk for the first time in almost twenty years. When he came home from work the next day, he found the lawn razored to a neatness it had never known before. The flower beds were weeded and the garden had been cultivated. The picket fence was newly painted. Two robots, equipped with telescopic extension legs in lieu of ladders, were painting the house. Inside, the house was spotless and he could hear Grace singing happily in the studio. In the sewing room, a robot — with a sewing-machine attachment sprouting from its chest — was engaged in making drapes. "Who are you?" Knight asked. "You should recognize me," the robot said. "You talked to me yesterday. I'm Abe — Albert's eldest son." Knight retreated. In the kitchen, another robot was busy getting dinner. "I am Adelbert," it told him. Knight went out on the front lawn. The robots had finished painting the front of the house and had moved around to the side. Seated in a lawn chair, Knight again tried to figure it out. He would have to stay on the job for a while to allay suspicion, but he couldn't stay there long. Soon, he would have all he could do managing the sale of robots and handling other matters. Maybe, he thought, he could lay down on the job and get himself fired. |
| 1483 |
So he said, instead, "Thanks, Albert. It was a nice thing for you to do. I'm sorry it didn't work out." Then he went upstairs and watched the robots burn the bales of money, with the Lord only knew how many bogus millions going up in smoke. 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. He sat there, astonished that he could feel that way, a bumbling, stumbling clerk who had never amounted to much, but had rolled along as smoothly as possible in the social and economic groove that had been laid out for him. |
| 1484 |
"But, in doing so, I intend to prove that the robot Albert was not property and could not be either stolen or sold. I intend to show that my client, instead of stealing him, liberated him. If, in so doing, I must wander far afield to prove certain basic points, I am sorry that I weary the court." "The court has been wearied with this case from the start," the judge told him. "But this is a bar of justice and you are entitled to attempt to prove what you have stated. You will excuse me if I say that to me it seems a bit farfetched." "Your Honor, I shall do my utmost to disabuse you of that attitude." "All right, then," said the judge. "Let's get down to business." It lasted six full weeks and the country ate it up. The newspapers splashed huge headlines across page one. The radio and the television people made a production out of it. Neighbor quarreled with neighbor and argument became the order of the day — 0n street corners, in homes, at clubs, in business offices. Letters to the editor poured in a steady stream into newspaper offices. There were public indignation meetings, aimed against the heresy that a robot was the equal of a man, while other clubs were formed to liberate the robots. In mental institutions, Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins dropped off amazingly, to be replaced by goose-stepping patients who swore they were robots. The Treasury Department intervened. It prayed the court, on economic grounds, to declare once and for all that robots were property. 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. |
| 1485 |
Robots could reproduce. That one was a poser. All Albert did, said How-2 Kits, was the job for which he had been fabricated. He reproduced, argued Lee. He made robots in his image. He loved them and thought of them as his family. He had even named all of them after himself — every one of their names began with A. Robots had no spiritual sense, argued the plaintiff. Not relevant, Lee cried. There were agnostics and atheists in the human race and they still were human. Robots had no emotions. Not necessarily so, Lee objected. Albert loved his sons. Robots had a sense of loyalty and justice. If they were lacking in some emotions, perhaps it were better so. Hatred, for one. Greed, for another. Lee spent the better part of an hour telling the court about the dismal record of human hatred and greed. He took another hour to hold forth against the servitude in which rational beings found themselves. The papers ate it up. The plaintiff lawyers squirmed. The court fumed. The trial went on. "Mr. Lee," asked the court, "is all this necessary?" "Your Honor," Lee told him, "I am merely doing my best to prove the point I have set out to prove — that no illegal act exists such as my client is charged with. I am simply trying to prove that the robot is not property and that, if he is not property, he cannot be stolen. I am doing..." "All right," said the court. "All right. Continue, Mr. Lee." How-2 Kits trotted out citations to prove their points. Lee volleyed other citations to disperse and scatter them. Abstruse legal language sprouted in its fullest flowering, obscure rulings and decisions, long forgotten, were argued, haggled over, mangled. And, as the trial progressed, one thing was written clear. Anson Lee, obscure attorney-at-law, had met the battery of legal talent arrayed against him and had won the field. He had the law, the citations, the chapter and the verse, the exact precedents, all the facts and logic which might have bearing on the case, right at hand. Or, rather, his robots had. |
| 1486 |
"Beer," he said, wondering what would happen. A robot scampered out of the kitchen — a barrel-bellied robot with a spigot at the bottom of the barrel and a row of shiny copper mugs on his chest. He drew a beer for Knight. It was cold and it tasted good. Knight sat and drank the beer and, through the window, he saw that Albert's defense force had taken up strategic positions again. This was a pretty kettle of fish. If the decision went against him and How-2 Kits came to claim its property, he would be sitting smack dab in the middle of the most fantastic civil war in all of mankind's history. He tried to imagine what kind of charge might be brought against him if such a war erupted. Armed insurrection, resisting arrest, inciting to riot — they would get him on one charge or another — that is, of course, if he survived. He turned on the television set and leaned back to watch. A pimply-faced newscaster was working himself into a journalistic lather. "... all business virtually at a standstill. Many industrialists are wondering, in case Knight wins, if they may not have to fight long, costly legal actions in an attempt to prove that their automatic setups are not robots, but machines. There is no doubt that much of the automatic industrial system consists of machines, but in every instance there are intelligent robotic units installed in key positions. If these units are classified as robots, industrialists might face heavy damage suits, if not criminal action, for illegal restraint of person. "In Washington, there are continuing consultations. The Treasury is worried over the loss of taxes, but there are other governmental problems causing even more concern. Citizenship, for example. Would a ruling for Knight mean that all robots would automatically be declared citizens? "The politicians have their worries, too. Faced with a new category of voters, all of them are wondering how to go about the job of winning the robot vote." Knight turned it off and settled down to enjoy another bottle of beer. |
| 1487 |
"Good?" asked the beer robot. "Excellent," said Knight. The days went past. Tension built up. Lee and the lawyer robots were given police protection. In some regions, robots banded together and fled into the hills fearful of violence. Entire automatic systems went on strike in a number of industries, demanding recognition and bargaining rights. The governors in half a dozen states put the militia on alert. A new show, Citizen Robot, opened on Broadway and was screamed down by the critics, while the public bought up tickets for a year ahead. The day of decision came. Knight sat in front of his television set and waited for the judge to make his appearance. Behind him, he heard the bustle of the ever-present robots. In the studio, Grace was singing happily. He caught himself wondering how much longer her painting would continue. It had lasted longer than most of her other interests and he'd talked a day or two before with Albert about building a gallery to hang her canvases in, so the house would be less cluttered up. 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. |
| 1488 |
In that case, they must be people, which means that they may enjoy all the rights and privileges and be subjected to the same duties and responsibilities as the human race. "I cannot rule otherwise. However, the ruling outrages my social conscience. This is the first time in my entire professional life that I have ever hoped some higher court, with a wisdom greater than my own, may see fit to reverse my decision!" Knight got up and walked out of the house and into the hundred-acre garden, its beauty marred at the moment by the twelve-foot fence. The trial had ended perfectly. He was free of the charge brought against him, and he did not have to pay the taxes, and Albert and the other robots were free agents and could do anything they wanted. He found a stone bench and sat down upon it and stared out across the lake. It was beautiful, he thought, just the way he had dreamed it — maybe even better than that — the walks and bridges, the flower beds and rock gardens, the anchored model ships swinging in the wind on the dimpling lake. He sat and looked at it and, while it was beautiful, he found he was not proud of it, that he took little pleasure in it. He lifted his hands out of his lap and stared at them and curved his fingers as if he were grasping a tool. But they were empty. And he knew why he had no interest in the garden and no pleasure in it. Model trains, he thought. Archery. A mechanobiologic dog. Making pottery. Eight rooms tacked onto the house. Would he ever be able to console himself again with a model train or an amateurish triumph in ceramics? Even if he could, would he be allowed to? He rose slowly and headed back to the house. Arriving there, he hesitated, feeling useless and unnecessary. He finally took the ramp down into the basement. Albert met him at its foot and threw his arms around him. "We did it, Boss! I knew we would do it!" He pushed Knight out to arm's length and held him by the shoulders. "We'll never leave you, Boss. We'll stay and work for you. |
| 1489 |
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. 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... |
| 1490 |
Just like men, I was saying. Except we're tougher. Lots tougher. It takes a war to kill us, nothing less, so if men could just keep their noses in their own business we'd live forever. If you can call it living. After all, we're just fancy machines. I wish I could get through to HO. That knife is sharp. I'm stark naked now. And the savages are staring. They've never seen anything like me. No equipment. I'm not that manlike. I swear they look disappointed. Especially the chief. Maybe he was counting on a delicacy. But now for the skin, hey? That's right, stroke it right down the middle, breastbone to crotch. Lean on it a little. You have to clean the carcass before you can do anything else with it. What? Not a mark? I told you I was tough. That's right, try honing it. Here comes a kid with your stone. Do a good job, now. What's the war all about, you ask? How should I know? I'm just a grunt, after all. But I can guess. Probably real estate, or resources. Jungle stuff, too. Futile, as always. What's it all about? From where I sit, it's battles, battles, and more battles. Kill or be killed. A classic story. Last night's was just one in a long string of firefights. Maybe my last. Somebody caught me right across the neck with a beam. I don't even know which side did it. And there I was, lying on the ground in two pieces. And there I stayed while the fighting faded out in the distance. Eventually these little brown fellows showed up to pick up the pieces, including me. Took me back to their village, stuck my head up on top of a pole, and planted the pole in front of the head man's place. Then they spread my body out in the middle of the compound, right in front of me, so I have a good view. Close to the fire, too. Nice and warm. Nice and handy.. The knife seems to be honed as sharp as it can be now. He's ready to try again. No luck slicing. Can he stab? The blade has a good point. Ummph! If I was alive, that would have knocked the breath right out of me, if I breathed. Now somebody's bringing a hammer. |
| 1491 |
Though that might be stretching things a bit. They told us the fungus can't root in our hides, another advantage we have over men. And if they catch you malingering — we can do it, believe me! — they program you. Even that would be better than what's happening now. They're building up the fire. If steel can't hack it, maybe heat will. They're logical, anyway. It's a reasonable assumption. They can see the scorch marks on the stump of my neck. I wish I could understand what they're saying. My ears are working, just like my eyes, but all the noise is just gibberish. Gobbledygood. Is that what started folks calling them gooks? 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? |
| 1492 |
He inspects it carefully. Pokes it with a finger and grins. Then he grabs it and holds it up to his scrawny frame, for all the world like a woman getting ready to try on a dress. The fit is going to be lousy. My feet drag on the ground in front of him. The others hold it for him as he crawls in through the neck hole. They help work his feet down where my feet ought to be and get his left hand into place. He gestures, and they bring him the skin of my right arm. He puts that on, just like a long glove, and there he is, me, skin-deep. Though he's all wrinkles. But he's still grinning. All he needs to do now is test his new outfit. He speaks and gestures and one of his wives runs out of sight under my perch. She returns in a second with one of the chiefs spears. When she hands it to him, he tests the point with a thumb. He grimaces when he can't feel a thing and touches it to his tongue. Then he hold it out to one of his young followers. The young guy steps back a few feet and raises the spear. He cocks his arm back and lets fly. And, of course, the thing bounces off my skin. Though not painlessly. The chief roars at the blow and leaps at his spearman. A quick blow knocks him to his knees, and I can almost understand what the boss man is crying: "Not that hard, you idiot!" Hah! 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. |
| 1493 |
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. 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. |
| 1494 |
The best technicians on the moon were working on designs, making them more and more intricate, more flexible. They became uncanny; the Ivans were having a lot of trouble with them. Some of the little claws were learning to hide themselves, burrowing down to the ash, lying in wait. And then they started getting into the Russian bunkers, slipping down when the lids were raised for air and a look around. One claw inside a bunker, a churning sphere of blades and metal — that was enough. And when one got in others followed. With a weapon like that the war couldn't go on much longer. Maybe it was already over. Maybe he was going to hear the news. Maybe the Politburo had decided to throw in the sponge. Too bad it had taken so long. Six years. A long time for war like that, the way they had waged it. The automatic retaliation disc, spinning down all over Russia, hundreds of thousands of them. Bacteria crystals. The Soviet guided missiles, whistling through the air. The chain bombs. And now this, the robots, the claws — The claws weren't like other weapons. They were alive, from any practical standpoint, whether the Governments wanted to admit it or not. They were not machines. They were living things, spinning, creeping, shaking themselves up suddenly from the gray ash and darting toward a man, climbing up him, rushing for his throat. 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. They were left to themselves. And they seemed to be doing all right. The new designs were faster, more complex. More efficient. Apparently they had won the war. Major Hendricks lit a second cigarette. |
| 1495 |
He ate slowly, finding the food hard to digest. When he was done he got to his feet and stamped the fire out. David rose slowly, watching him with his young-old eyes. "We're going," Hendricks said. "All right." Hendricks walked along, his gun in his arms. They were close; he was tense, ready for anything. The Russians should be expecting a runner, an answer to their own runner, but they were tricky. There was always the possibility of a slip-up. He scanned the landscape around him. Nothing but slag and ash, a few hills, charred trees. Concrete walls. But someplace ahead was the first bunker of the Russian lines, the forward command. Underground, buried deep, with only a periscope showing, a few gun muzzles. Maybe an antenna. "Will we be there soon?" David asked. "Yes. Getting tired!" "No." "Why, then?" David did not answer. He plodded carefully along behind, picking his way over the ash. His legs and shoes were gray with dust. His pinched face was streaked, lines of gray ash in riverlets down the pale white of his skin. There was no color to his face. Typical of the new children, growing up in cellars and sewers and underground shelters. Hendricks slowed down. He lifted his fieldglasses and studied the ground ahead of him. Were they there, someplace, waiting for him? 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. |
| 1496 |
But he had no time to think about that. He knelt down, aiming at the bunker entrance, gun against his cheek. The Davids were coming out in groups, clutching their teddy bears, their thin knobby legs pumping as they ran up the steps to the surface. Hendricks fired into the main body of them. They burst apart, wheels and springs flying in all directions. He fired again, through the mist of particles. A giant lumbering figure rose up in the bunker entrance, tall and swaying. Hendricks paused, amazed, A man, a soldier. With one leg, supporting himself with a crutch. "Major!" Tasso's voice came. More firing. The huge figure moved forward, Davids swarming around it. Hendricks broke out of his freeze. The First Variety. The Wounded Soldiers. He aimed and fired. The soldier burst into bits, parts and relays flying. Now many Davids were out on the flat ground, away from the bunker. He fired again and again, moving slowly back, half-crouching and aiming. From the rise, Klaus fired down. The side of the rise was alive with claws making their way up. Hendricks retreated toward the rise, running and crouching. Tasso had left Klaus and was circling slowly to the right, moving away from the rise. A David slipped up toward him, its small white face expressionless, brown hair hanging down in its eyes. It bent over suddenly, opening its arms. Its teddy bear hurtled down and leaped across the ground, bounding toward him. Hendricks fired. The bear and the David both dissolved. He grinned, blinking. It was like a dream. "Up here!" Tasso's voice. Hendricks made his way toward her. She was over by some columns of concrete, walls of a ruined building. She was firing past him, with the hand pistol Klaus had given her. "Thanks." He joined her, gasping for breath. She pulled him back, behind the concrete, fumbling at her belt. "Close your eyes!" She unfastened a globe from her waist. Rapidly, she unscrewed the cap, locking it into place. "Close your eyes and get down." She threw the bomb. It sailed in an arc, an expert, rolling and bouncing to the entrance of the bunker. |
| 1497 |
He struggled to his feet. "Good-bye, Major." Tasso tossed the pistol past Hendricks. 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. 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. |
| 1498 |
Endless motors and rods. He bent down. The brain cage had been smashed by the fall. The artificial brain was visible. He gazed at it. A maze of circuits. Miniature tubes. Wires as fine as hair. He touched the brain cage. It swung aside. The type plate was visible. Hendricks studied the plate. And blanched. IV — V. For a long time he stared at the plate. Fourth Variety. Not the Second. They had been wrong. There were more types. Not just three. Many more, perhaps. At least four. And Klaus wasn't the Second Variety. But if Klaus wasn't the Second Variety — Suddenly he tensed. Something was coming, walking through the ash beyond the hill. What was it? He strained to see. Figures. Figures coming slowly along, making their way through the ash. Coming toward him. Hendricks crouched quickly, raising his gun. Sweat dripped down into his eyes. He fought down rising panic, as the figures neared. The first was a David. The David saw him and increased its pace. The others hurried behind it. A second David. A third. Three Davids, all alike, coming toward him silently, without expression, their thin legs rising and falling. Clutching their teddy bears. He aimed and fired. The first two Davids dissolved into particles. The third came on. And the figure behind it. Climbing silently toward him across the gray ash. A Wounded Soldier, towering over the David. And And behind the Wounded Soldier came two Tassos, walking side by side. Heavy belt, Russian army pants, shirt, long hair. The familiar figure, as he had seen her only a little while before. 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. |
| 1499 |
And here would come Lubro, smooth and docile on his track, until he reached a machine that was running hot turning out the disks. The machines would flip little lids up at Lubro's approach and Lubro in response would whang jointed sections of tubing out of himself and the ends of those tubes would find their way into the holes where the lids had flipped up. And while the machines worked on as though nothing were happening Lubro would stand there vibrating on his track and eject oil into the holes according to some clocklike mechanism in him. And as the tempo of production increased, Lubro ran faster and faster on his track and whanged metal tubing out of himself oftener and oftener and came up to the reload place time and again. But it seemed to me he was happy at his work, although that could have been merely my imagining because of the great contrast between a Lubro and a machine that squatted on the floor hour by hour and turned out the quota time and again with, to console her, nothing but the small diversion of flipping her lids up for Lubro. All in all, everything was going well here at automation it seemed to me, and Lubro was taking care of it, I thought, all right. But maybe he was running hot. At any rate, some Central Brain in the place made the decision and another upright thing with a clocklike mechanism in him and the power to eject flexible tubing out of himself came in to run on the tracks with Lubro. The Oiler, his name was. I guess the Central Brain thought The Oiler and Lubro could stay out of each other's way all right; one could be taking care of it in the south end, say, while the other was over north doing it; or one could be functioning on the west side while the other was shooting for lids in the east section of the work area maybe. But the truth is they didn't — they couldn't — stay out of each other's way for long. In the first place, I think Lubro was a little jealous, or maybe resentful is the better word, of The Oiler. For the very presence of The Oiler made it clear how the Central Brain felt. |
| 1500 |
He felt that Lubro couldn't handle the job. Then too, no getting around it, The Oiler, big dark and cocky, was in Lubro's territory. But as for production, there was an increase in it, no denying that. Especially was there more work done by certain of the newer machines in the central part of the work area. And it was one of these very machines that caused the flare-up. She was a new blonde machine without yet the grime of much servicing on her oil lids. And she squatted there, seemingly as innocent as a piece of the floor, and tooled her disks. But Lubro noticed it, and I noticed it too. Twice within the hour, when Lubro glided up, she kept her oil lids closed as though she were running cool as a bucket of grease. But when The Oiler came in at almost the same time from the opposite side of the work area her lids flew open as though she were filled with fire. And The Oiler ejected the tubes, according to the clocklike mechanism in him, and the tubes found the holes where the quivering lids hovered open, and he oiled the machines that indeed was not running cool; it was his job. Lubro caught him at the top of the reload area. It was unethical. The Oiler was taking on oil, siphoning it from Central Supply into the can of his lower body. And Lubro should not have come in to the reload at the same time; there was but the one straight track in to the reload and no spur track for passing. But Lubro did come in. And the cocky Oiler stood nonchalantly siphoning oil until his can was full. Then he turned in that way he had, brazen, precise, sure, and he headed back for the work area as though it were understood that Lubro, being wrong, would retrace and let him through. Lubro would not! Lubro braced. Lubro hit him, hit him hard and middle-high and bounced him ten feet up the track. Lubro hit him again when The Oiler came within range. The Oiler closed and struck back; The Oiler hit twice in quick succession. The two oil cans stood toe-to-toe at the bottom of the reload area and exchanged blows. |
| 1501 |
They rattled each other's skin sections and clobbered each other's joints. Rivets flew. Clocklike mechanisms were upset. They fought until it seemed in doubt that either one or the other would prove himself the better oil can. Then the tide turned, as tides will, and Lubro got his chance. Because his clocklike mechanism was considerably upset by the hard blows he had taken, and possibly partly because he had just taken the reload, here at this strangest and most illogical of times one of The Oiler's tubelike sections popped out. Oil sprayed the area, and Lubro rammed in to wham the embarrassed oil can on the tube and spin him about until The Oiler was quite spun off the track. And there he lay, vanquished and bleeding oil, and presently all his other tubes flopped out and lay there limp and empty in plain sight, and The Oiler was a very sorry sight indeed. And because he had taken many hard blows himself, and partly, no doubt, in sheer exuberance over his victory, something got into Lubro's thinking and caused him to pull a very silly and shabby stunt. He ejected all his tubing sections to the very farthest limits they would go and sprayed The Oiler until he, Lubro, was quite empty of oil. The Central Brain was jumping-mad in his clock, crazymad at Lubro and The Oiler. From these silly oil cans he had had quite enough, really he had. He immediately called a meeting of all the Junior Brains, and they all left their clocks and sat around a big polished disk of metal with a hole in the center of it and the Central Brain in the hole until they had all quite decided what to do. There was just one logical answer. Tear up the tracks, build a Lubro or an Oiler stationary for each squatty fixed machine and service these automatic tube ejectors from a Central Supply, using as many self-motion helicopters as would be required. The Brains, having won again, having figured it out, resumed their clocklike places along the walls. And while they all agreed that automation had its bugs, yes it did, really it was quite the coming thing, yes it was. |
| 1502 |
It was a good place to be. It was very good, having so much money — now. True, he had had to kill to get the money. But no guilt troubled him. There is no guilt if you aren't found out, and Danner had protection. Protection straight from the source, which was something new in the world. Danner knew the consequences of killing. If Hartz hadn't satisfied him that he was perfectly safe, Danner would never have pulled the trigger... The memory of an archaic word flickered through his mind briefly. Sin. It evoked nothing. Once it had something to do with guilt, in an incomprehensible way. Not any more. Mankind had been through too much. Sin was meaningless now. He dismissed the thought and tried the heart-of-palms salad. He found he didn't like it. Oh well, you had to expect things like that. Nothing was perfect. He sipped the wine again, liking the way the glass seemed to vibrate like something faintly alive in his hand. It was good wine. He thought of ordering more, but then he thought no, save it, next time. There was so much before him, waiting to be enjoyed. Any risk was worth it. And of course, in this there had been no risk. Danner was a man born at the wrong time. He was old enough to remember the last days of utopia, young enough to be trapped in the new scarcity economy the machines had clamped down on their makers. In his early youth he'd had access to free luxuries, like everybody else. He could remember the old days when he was an adolescent and the last of the Escape Machines were still operating, the glamorous, bright, impossible, vicarious visions that didn't really exist and never could have. But then the scarcity economy swallowed up pleasure. Now you got necessities but no more. Now you had to work. Danner hated every minute of it. When the swift change came, he'd been too young and unskilled to compete in the scramble. The rich men today were the men who had built fortunes on cornering the few luxuries the machines still produced. All Danner had left were bright memories and a dull, resentful feeling of having been cheated. |
| 1503 |
All he wanted were the bright days back, and he didn't care how he got them. Well, now he had them. He touched the rim of the wine glass with his finger, feeling it sing silently against the touch. Blown glass? he wondered. He was too ignorant of luxury items to understand. But he'd learn. He had the rest of his life to learn in, and be happy. He looked up across the restaurant and saw through the transparent dome of the roof the melting towers of the city. They made a stone forest as far as he could see. And this was only one city. When he was tired of it, there were more. Across the country, across the planet the network lay that linked city with city in a webwork like a vast, intricate, half-alive monster. Call it society. He felt it tremble a little beneath him. He reached for the wine glass and drank quickly. The faint uneasiness that seemed to shiver the foundations of the city was something new. It was because — yes, certainly it was because of a new fear. It was because he had not been found out. That made no sense. Of course the city was complex. Of course it operated on a basis of incorruptible machines. They, and only they, kept man from becoming very quickly another extinct animal. And of these the analogue computers, the electronic calculators, were the gyroscope of all living. They made and enforced the laws that were necessary now to keep mankind alive. Danner didn't understand much of the vast changes that had swept over society in his lifetime, but this much even he knew. So perhaps it made sense that he felt society shiver because he sat here luxurious on foam-rubber, sipping wine, hearing soft music, and no Fury standing behind his chair to prove that the calculators were still guardians for mankind... If not even the Furies are incorruptible, what can a man believe in? It was at that exact moment that the Fury arrived. Danner heard every sound suddenly die out around him. His fork was halfway to his lips, but he paused, frozen, and looked up across the table and the restaurant toward the door. |
| 1504 |
There was a waist-high counter on the far side of the room, with a slanting glass screen on it. 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. As if invisible walls surrounded them, pressing back the crowds they walked through, the two moved in an empty space that closed in behind them, opened up before them. Some of the passersby stared, some looked away in embarrassment or uneasiness. Some watched with a frank anticipation, wondering perhaps at just what moment the Friday would lift his steel arm and strike the Crusoe dead. |
| 1505 |
Himself, and the one the Fury had come for. He released his fork and heard it clink on the plate. He looked down at it and the food, and suddenly his mind rejected everything around him and went diving off on a fugitive tangent like an ostrich into sand. He thought about food. How did asparagus grow? What did raw food look like? He had never seen any. Food came ready-cooked out of restaurant kitchens or automat slots. Potatoes, now. What did they look like? A moist white mash? No, for sometimes they were oval slices, so the thing itself must be oval. But not round. Sometimes you got them in long strips, squared off at the ends. Something quite long and oval, then, chopped into even lengths. And white, of course. And they grew underground, he was almost sure. Long, thin roots twining white arms among the pipes and conduits he had seen laid bare when the streets were under repair. How strange that he should be eating something like thin, ineffectual human arms that embraced the sewers of the city and writhed pallidly where the worms had their being. And where he himself, when the Fury found him, might... He pushed the plate away. An indescribable rustling and murmuring in the room lifted his eyes for him as if he were an automaton. The Fury was halfway across the room now, and it was almost funny to see the relief of those whom it had passed by. Two or three of the women had buried their faces in their hands, and one man had slipped quietly from his chair in a dead faint as the Fury's passing released their private dreads back into their hidden wells. The thing was quite close now. It looked to be about seven feet tall, and its motion was very smooth, which was unexpected when you thought about it. Smoother than human motions. Its feet fell with a heavy, measured tread upon the carpet. Thud, thud, thud. Danner tried impersonally to calculate what it weighed. You always heard that they made no sound except for that terrible tread, but this one creaked very slightly somewhere. |
| 1506 |
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. He breathed deep and hard, trying to pull himself together. An irrelevant thought floated across the surface of his mind. I forgot to pay for my dinner. And then: A lot of good the money will do me now. Oh, damn Hartz, damn him, damn him! He got the number. A girl's face flashed into sharp, clear colors on the screen before him. Good, expensive screens in the public booths in this part of town, his mind noted impersonally. "This is Controller Hartz's office. May I help you?" Danner tried twice before he could give his name. He wondered if the girl could see him, and behind him, dimly through the glass, the tall waiting figure. He couldn't ten, because she dropped her eyes immediately to what must have been a list on the unseen table before her. "I'm sorry. Mr. Hartz is out. He won't be back today." The screen drained of light and color. Danner folded back the door and stood up. His knees were unsteady. The robot stood just far enough back to clear the hinge of the door. For a moment they faced each other. Danner heard himself suddenly in the midst of an uncontrollable giggling which even he realized verged on hysteria. The robot with the smear of food like a ribbon of honor looked so ridiculous. Danner to his dim surprise found that all this while he had been clutching the restaurant napkin in his left hand. "Stand back," he said to the robot. "Let me out. Oh, you fool, don't you know this is a mistake?" His voice quavered. |
| 1507 |
It was here that he first encountered the two haunting and frightening lines Milton wrote when the world was small and simple — mystifying lines that made no certain sense to anybody until man created a Fury out of steel, in his own image. But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more... Danner glanced up at his own two-handed engine, motionless at his shoulder, and thought of Milton and the long ago times when life was simple and easy. He tried to picture the past. The twentieth century, when all civilizations together crashed over the brink in one majestic downfall to chaos. And the time before that, when people were... different, somehow. But how? It was too far and too strange. He could not imagine the time before the machines. But he learned for the first time what had really happened, back there in his early years, when the bright world finally blinked out entirely and gray drudgery began. And the Furies were first forged in the likeness of man. Before the really big wars began, technology advanced to the point where machines bred upon machines like living things, and there might have been an Eden on earth, with everybody's wants fully supplied, except that the social sciences fell too far behind the physical sciences. When the decimating wars came on, machines and people fought side by side, steel against steel and man against man, but man was the more perishable. The wars ended when there were no longer two societies left to fight against each other. 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. |
| 1508 |
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. 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. |
| 1509 |
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. 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. What Danner did during this time he scarcely knew. He thought a great deal of the old days when the Escape Machines still worked, before the machines rationed luxuries. He thought of this sullenly and with resentment, for he could see no point at all in the experiment mankind was embarked on. |
| 1510 |
But the kind of people willing to associate with a man under this sort of death sentence was not a very appealing type. He found, for instance, that some women felt strongly attracted to him, not because of himself or his money, but for the sake of his companion. They seemed enthralled by the opportunity for a close, safe brush with the very instrument of destiny. Over his very shoulder, sometimes, he would realize they watched the Fury in an ecstasy of fascinated anticipation. In a strange reaction of jealousy, he dropped such people as soon as he recognized the first coldly flirtatious glance one of them cast at the robot behind him. He tried farther travel. He took the rocket to Africa, and came back by way of the rain-forests of South America, but neither the night clubs nor the exotic newness of strange places seemed to touch him in any way that mattered. The sunlight looked much the same, reflecting from the curved steel surfaces of his follower, whether it shone over lion-covered savannahs or filtered through the hanging gardens of the jungles. All novelty grew dull quickly because of the dreadfully familiar thing that stood forever at his shoulder. He could enjoy nothing at all. And the rhythmic beat of footfalls behind him began to grow unendurable. He used earplugs, but the heavy vibration throbbed through his skull in a constant measure like an eternal headache. Even when the Fury stood still, he could hear in his head the imaginary beating of its steps. He bought weapons and tried to destroy the robot. Of course he failed. And even if he succeeded he knew another would be assigned to him. 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... |
| 1511 |
He had gone through all available factual material about the Furies. He had gone through all the literary references collated under that heading, astonished to find how many there were and how apt some of them had become — like Milton's two-handed engine — after the lapse of all these centuries. "Those strong feet that followed, followed after," he read. "... with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy..." He turned the page and saw himself and his plight more literally than any allegory: I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears, I stand amid the dust of the mounded years — My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. He let several tears of self-pity fall upon the page that pictured him so clearly. But then he passed on from literary references to the library's store of filmed plays, because some of them were cross-indexed under the heading he sought. He watched Orestes hounded in modern dress from Argos to Athens with a single seven-foot robot Fury at his heels instead of the three snake-haired Erinyes of legend. There had been an outburst of plays on the theme when the Furies first came into usage. Sunk in a half-dream of his own boyhood memories when the Escape Machines still operated, Danner lost himself in the action of the films. He lost himself so completely that when the familiar scene first flashed by him in the viewing booth he hardly questioned it. The whole experience was part of a familiar boyhood pattern and he was not at first surprised to find one scene more vividly familiar than the rest. But then memory rang a bell in his mind and he sat up sharply and brought his fist down with a bang on the stop-action button. He spun the film back and ran the scene over again. It showed a man walking with his Fury through city traffic, the two of them moving in a little desert island of their own making, like a Crusoe with a Friday at his heels... It showed the man turn into an alley, glance up at the camera anxiously, take a deep breath and break into a sudden run. |
| 1512 |
It showed the Fury hesitate, make indecisive motions and then turn and walk quietly and calmly away in the other direction, its feet ringing on the pavement hollowly... Danner spun the film back again and ran the scene once more; just to make doubly sure. He was shaking so hard he could scarcely manipulate the viewer. "How do you like that?" he muttered to the Fury behind him in the dim booth. He had by now formed a habit of talking to the Fury a good deal, in a rapid, mumbling undertone, not really aware he did it. "What do you make of that, you? Seen it before, haven't you? Familiar, isn't it? Isn't it! Isn't it! Answer me, you damned dumb hulk!" And reaching backward, he struck the robot across the chest as he would have struck Hartz if he could. The blow made a hollow sound in the booth, but the robot made no other response, though when Danner looked back inquiringly at it, he saw the reflections of the over-familiar scene, running a third time on the screen, running in tiny reflection across the robot's chest and faceless head, as if it too remembered. So now he knew the answer. And Hartz had never possessed the power he claimed. Or if he did, had no intention of using it to help Danner. Why should he? His risk was over now. No wonder Hartz had been so nervous, running that film-strip off on a news-screen in his office. But the anxiety sprang not from the dangerous thing he was tampering with, but from sheer strain in matching his activities to the action in the play. How he must have rehearsed it, timing every move! And how he must have laughed, afterward. "How long have I got?" Danner demanded fiercely, striking a hollow reverberation from the robot's chest. "How long? Answer me! Long enough?" Release from hope was an ecstasy, now. He need not wait any longer. He need not try any more. All he had to do was get to Hartz and get there fast, before his own time ran out. He thought with revulsion of all the days he had wasted already, in travel and time-killing, when for all he knew his own last minutes might be draining away now. |
| 1513 |
Before Hartz's did. "Come along," he said needlessly to the Fury. "Hurry!" It came, matching its speed to his, the enigmatic timer inside it ticking the moments away toward that instant when the two-handed engine would smite once, and smite no more. Hartz sat in the Controller's office behind a brand-new desk, looking down from the very top of the pyramid now over the banks of computers that kept society running and cracked the whip over mankind. He sighed with deep content. The only thing was, he found himself thinking a good deal about Danner. Dreaming of him, even. Not with guilt, because guilt implies conscience, and the long schooling in anarchic individualism was still deep in the roots of every man's mind. But with uneasiness, perhaps. Thinking of Danner, he leaned back and unlocked a small drawer which he had transferred from his old desk to the new. He slid his hand in and let his fingers touch the controls lightly, idly. Quite idly. Two movements, and he could save Danner's life. For, of course, he had lied to Danner straight through. He could control the Furies very easily. He could save Danner, but he had never intended to. There was no need. And the thing was dangerous. You tamper once with a mechanism as complex as that which controlled society, and there would be no telling where the maladjustment might end. Chain-reaction, maybe, throwing the whole organization out of kilter. No: He might someday have to use the device in the drawer. 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. |
| 1514 |
The gun was in his hand without his knowledge. The trigger pressed his finger and the revolver kicked back against his palm, and the spurt of the explosion made the air hiss between him and Danner. He heard his bullet clang on metal. Time started again, running double-pace to catch up. The Fury had been no more than a single pace behind Danner after all, because its steel arm encircled him and its steel hand was deflecting Danner's gun. Danner had fired, yes, but not soon enough. Not before the Fury reached him. Hartz's bullet struck first. It struck Danner in the chest, exploding through him, and rang upon the steel chest of the Fury behind him. Danner's face smoothed out into a blankness as complete as the blankness of the mask above his head. He slumped backward, not falling because of the robot's embrace, but slowly slipping to the floor between the Fury's arm and its impervious metal body. His revolver thumped softly to the carpet. Blood welled from his chest and back. The robot stood there impassive, a streak of Danner's blood slanting across its metal chest like a robotic ribbon of honor. The Fury and the Controller of the Furies stood staring at each other. And the Fury could not, of course, speak, but in Hartz's mind it seemed to. "Self-defense is no excuse," the Fury seemed to be saying. "We never punish intent, but we always punish action. Any act of murder. Any act of murder..." Hartz barely had time to drop his revolver in his desk drawer before the first of the clamorous crowd from downstairs came bursting through the door. He barely had the presence of mind to do it, either. He had not really thought the thing through this far. It was, on the surface, a clear case of suicide. In a slightly unsteady voice he heard himself explaining. Everybody had seen the madman rushing through the office, his Fury at his heels. This wouldn't be the first time a killer and his Fury had tried to get at the Controller, begging him to call off the jailer and forestall the executioner. |
| 1515 |
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. 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! |
| 1516 |
Ahead, small but in striking contrast to the others, one point stood out, the size of a dime at ten feet. For a moment, he stood staring at it, then moved almost emotionlessly toward the windows, until Three plucked at his sleeve. "I've mapped the planets already, if you wish to see them, master. We're still far from them, and at this distance, by only reflected light, they are hard to locate, but I think I've found them all." Jorgen swung to the electron screen that began flashing as Three made rapid adjustments on the telescope, counting the globes that appeared on it and gave place to others. Some were sharp and clear, cold and unwavering; others betrayed the welcome haze of atmosphere. Five, the apparent size of Earth, were located beyond the parched and arid inner spheres, and beyond them, larger than Jupiter, a monster world led out to others that grew smaller again. There was no ringed planet to rival Saturn, but most had moons, except for the farthest inner planets, and one was almost a double world, with satellite and primary of nearly equal size. Planet after planet appeared on the screen, to be replaced by others, and he blinked at the result of his count. "Eighteen planets, not counting the double one twice! How many are habitable?" "Perhaps four. Certainly the seventh, eighth, and ninth are. Naturally, since the sun is stronger, the nearer ones are too hot. But those are about the size of Earth, and they're relatively closer to each other than Earth, Mars, and Venus were; they should be very much alike in temperature, about like Earth. All show spectroscopic evidence of oxygen and water vapor, while the plates of seven show what might be vegetation. We've selected that, subject to your approval." It came on the screen again, a ball that swelled and grew as the maximum magnification of the screen came into play, until it filled the panel and expanded so that only a part was visible. The bluish green color there might have been a sea, while the browner section at the side was probably land. |
| 1517 |
"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? Perhaps by Centauri, perhaps a thousand light-years beyond, there must be a home for the human race, and we shall find it. On the desert before us lies the certainty of death; beyond our known frontiers there is only uncertainty — but hopeful uncertainty. It is for us to decide. There could be no point in arousing the others to disappointment when someday we may waken them to an even greater triumph. Well?" And now Craig, who had carried them so far, was dead like Moses outside the Promised Land, leaving the heritage of real as well as normal leadership to him. Jorgen shook himself, though the eagerness he had felt was dulled now by a dark sense of personal loss. There was work still to be done. "Then, at least, let's begin with the others, Five." Five had turned from the window and was facing the others, apparently communicating with them by the radio beam that was a part of him, his eyes avoiding Jorgen's. |
| 1518 |
Immune!" Five shuffled hesitantly. "No, master." Jorgen stared without comprehension, then jerked up his hands as the robot pointed, studying the skin on the backs. Tiny, almost undetectable blotches showed a faint brown against the whiter skin, little irregular patches that gave off a faint characteristic odor of musk as he put them to his nose. No, he wasn't immune. "The same as Dr. Craig," Five said. "Slowed almost to complete immunity, so that you may live another thirty years, perhaps, but we believe now that complete cure is impossible. Dr. Craig lived twenty years, and his death was due to age and a stroke, not the Plague, but it worked on him during all that time." "Immunity or delay, what difference now? What happens to all our dreams when the last dreamer dies, Five? Or maybe it's the other way around." Five made no reply, but slid down onto the bench beside the man, who moved over unconsciously to make room for him. Jorgen turned it over, conscious that he had no emotional reaction, only an intellectual sense of the ghastly joke on the human race. He'd read stories of the last human and wondered long before what it would be like. Now that he was playing the part, he still knew no more than before. Perhaps on Earth, among the ruined cities and empty reminders of the past, a man might realize that it was the end of his race. Out here, he could accept the fact, but his emotions refused to credit it; unconsciously, his conditioning made him feel that disaster had struck only a few, leaving a world of others behind. And however much he knew that the world behind was as empty of others as this ship, the feeling was too much a part of his thinking to be fully overcome. Intellectually, the race of man was ended; emotionally, it could never end. Five stirred, touching him diffidently. "We have left Dr. Craig's laboratory, master; if you want to see his notes, they're still there. And he left some message with the brain before he died, I think. The key was open when we found him, at least. |
| 1519 |
We have made no effort to obtain it, waiting for you." "Thank you, Five." But he made no move until the robot touched him again, almost pleadingly. "Perhaps you're right; something to fill my mind seems called for. All right, you can return to your companions unless you want to come with me." "I prefer to come." The little metal man stood up, moving down the hall after Jorgen, back toward the tail of the rocket, the sound of the metal feet matching the dumb regularity of the leather heels on the floor. Once the robot stopped to move into a side chamber and come back with a small bottle of brandy, holding it out questioningly. There was a physical warmth to the liquor, but no relief otherwise, and they continued down the hall to the little room that Craig had chosen. The notes left by the man could raise a faint shadow of curiosity only, and no message from the dead could solve the tragedy of the living now. Still, it was better than doing nothing. Jorgen clumped in, Five shutting the door quietly behind them, and moved listlessly toward the little fabrikoid notebooks. Twice the robot went quietly out to return with food that Jorgen barely tasted. And the account of Craig's useless labors went on and on, until finally he turned the last page to the final entry. "I have done all that I can, and at best my success is only partial. 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. |
| 1520 |
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. 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. |
| 1521 |
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. Slowly it grew before the eyes of the watchers, stretching out before them and taking on a pattern as the distance shortened. Two, at the controls, was bringing the ship about in a slow turn that would let them land to the sunward side of the planet where they had selected their landing site, and the crescent opened outward, the darkened night side retreating until the whole globe lay before them in the sunlight. Stretched across the northern hemisphere was the sprawling, horizontal continent he had seen before, a rough caricature of a running greyhound, with a long, wide river twisting down its side and emerging behind an outstretched foreleg. Mountains began at the head and circled it, running around toward the tail, and then meeting a second range along the hip. Where the great river met the sea, he could make out the outlines of a huge natural harbor, protected from the ocean, yet probably deep enough for any surface vessel. |
| 1522 |
There should have been a city there, but of that there was no sign, though they were low enough now for one to be visible. "Vegetation," Five observed. "This central plain would have a long growing season — about twelve years of spring, mild summer and fall, to be followed by perhaps four years of warm winter. The seasons would be long, master, at this distance from the sun, but the tilt of the planet is so slight that many things would grow, even in winter. Those would seem to be trees, a green forest. Green, as on earth." Below them, a cloud drifted slowly over the landscape, and they passed through it, the energy tubes setting the air about them into swirling paths that were left behind almost instantly. Two was frantically busy now, but their swift fall slowed rapidly, until they seemed to hover half a mile over the shore by the great sea, and then slipped downward. The ship nestled slowly into the sands and was still, while Two cut off energy and artificial gravity, leaving the faintly weaker pull of the planet in its place. Five stirred again, a sighing sound coming from him. "No intelligence here, master. Here, by this great harbor, they would surely have built a city, even if of mud and wattle. There are no signs of one. And yet it is a beautiful world, surely designed for life." He sighed again, his eyes turned outward. Jorgen nodded silently, the same thoughts in his own mind. It was in many ways a world superior to that his race had always known, remarkably familiar, with even a rough resemblance between plant forms here and those he had known. They had come past five suns and through ninety years of travel at nearly the speed of light to a haven beyond their wildest imaginings, where all seemed to be waiting them, untenanted but prepared. Outside, the new world waited expectantly. And inside, to meet that invitation, there were only ghosts and emptied dreams, with one slowly dying man to see and to appreciate. The gods had prepared their grim jest with painful attention to every detail needed to make it complete. |
| 1523 |
A race that had dreamed, and pleasant worlds that awaited beyond the stars, slumbering on until they should come! Almost, they had reached it; and then the Plague had driven them out in dire necessity, instead of the high pioneering spirit they had planned, to conquer the distance but to die in winning. "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. 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. |
| 1524 |
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. 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. |
| 1525 |
"Perhaps. But it would be a lonely world, Master Jorgen, filled with memories of your people, and the dreams we had would be barren to us." Jorgen turned back to Five again. "The solution for that exists, doesn't it, Five? You know what it is. Now you might remember us, and find your work pointless without us, but there is another way." "No, master!" "I demand obedience, Five; answer me!" The robot stirred under the mandatory form, and his voice was reluctant, even while the compulsion built into him forced him to obey. "It is as you have thought. Our minds and even our memories are subject to your orders, just as our bodies are." "Then I demand obedience again, this time of all of you. You will go outside and lie down on the beach at a safe distance from the ship, in a semblance of sleep, so that you cannot see me go. Then, when I am gone, the race of man will be forgotten, as if it had never been, and you will be free of all memories connected with us, though your other knowledge shall remain. Earth, mankind, and your history and origin will be blanked from your thoughts, and you will be on your own, to start afresh and to build and plan as you choose. That is the final command I have for you. Obey!" Their eyes turned together in conference, and then Five answered for all, his words sighing out softly. "Yes, master. We obey!" It was later when Jorgen stood beside them outside the ship, watching them stretch out on the white sands of the beach, there beside the great ocean of this new world. Near them, a small collection of tools and a few other needs were piled. Five looked at him in a long stare, then turned toward the ship, to swing his eyes back again. Silently, he put one metal hand into the man's outstretched one, and turned to lie beside his companions, a temporary oblivion blotting out his thoughts. Jorgen studied them for long minutes, while the little wind brought the clean scents of the planet to his nose. It would have been pleasant to stay here now, but his presence would have been fatal to the plan. |
| 1526 |
— Scandinavian legend Throughout the night thick clouds had been piling in the north; in the morning it was misty and cold. By eight o'clock a wet, heavy, snow-smelling breeze had begun to set in, and because the crops were all down and the winter planting done, the colonists brewed hot coffee and remained inside. 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. Although he was bigger than Rossel he did not seem bigger. And, because of the cold, there were tears gathering in the ends of his eyes. |
| 1527 |
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. Therefore the army did nothing but spread the news, and man began to fall back. In a thickening, hastening stream he came back from the hard-won stars, blowing up his homes behind him, stunned and cursing. Most of the colonists got out in time. A few, the farthest and loneliest, died in fire before the army ships could reach them. And the men in those ships, drinkers and gamblers and veterans of nothing, the dregs of a society that had grown beyond them, were for a long while the only defense earth had. This was the message Captain Dylan had brought, come out from earth with a bottle on his hip. An obscenely cheerful expression upon his gaunt, not too well shaven face, Captain Dylan perched himself upon the edge of a table and listened, one long booted leg swinging idly. One by one the colonists were beginning to understand. War is huge and comes with great suddenness and always without reason, and there is inevitably a wait between acts, between the news and the motion, the fear and the rage. |
| 1528 |
"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. Dylan had been called up out of a bar — he and Bossio — and told what had happened, and in three weeks now they had cleared four colonies. This would be the last, and the tension here was beginning to get to him. After thirty years of hanging around and playing like the town drunk, a man could not be expected to rush out and plug the breach, just like that. It would take time. He rested, sweating, took a pull from the bottle on his hip. Before they sent him out on this trip they had made him a captain. |
| 1529 |
Well, that was nice. After thirty years he was a captain. For thirty years he had bummed all over the west end of space, had scraped his way along the outer edges of mankind, had waited and dozed and patrolled and got drunk, waiting always for something to happen. There were a lot of ways to pass the time while you waited for something to happen, and he had done them all. Once he had even studied military tactics. He could not help smiling at that, even now. Damn it, he'd been green. But he'd been only nineteen when his father died — of a hernia, of a crazy fool thing like a hernia that killed him just because he'd worked too long on a heavy planet — and in those days the anti-war conditioning out on the Rim was not very strong. They talked a lot about guardians of the frontier, and they got him and some other kids and a broken-down doctor. And... now he was a captain. He bent his back savagely, digging at the ground. You wait and you wait and the edge goes off. This thing he had waited for all those damn days was upon him now, and there was nothing he could do but say the hell with it and go home. Somewhere along the line, in some dark corner of the bars or the jails, in one of the million soul-murdering insults which are reserved especially for peacetime soldiers, he had lost the core of himself, and it didn't particularly matter. That was the point: It made no particular difference if he never got it back. He owed nobody. He was tugging at the wire and trying to think of something pleasant from the old days when the wire came loose in his hands. Although he had been, in his cynical way, expecting it, for a moment it threw him and he just stared. The end was clean and bright. The wire had just been cut. Dylan sat for a long while by the radio shack, holding the ends in his hands. He reached almost automatically for the bottle on his hip, and then, for the first time he could remember, let it go. This was real; there was no time for that. When Rossel came up, Dylan was still sitting. |
| 1530 |
The snow began falling near noon. There was nothing anybody could do but stand in the silence and watch it come down in a white rushing wall, and watch the trees and the hills drown in the whiteness, until there was nothing on the planet but the buildings and a few warm lights and the snow. By one o'clock the visibility was down to zero and Dylan decided to try to contact Bossio again and tell him to hurry. But Bossio still didn't answer. Dylan stared long and thoughtfully out the window through the snow at the gray shrouded shapes of bushes and trees which were beginning to become horrifying. It must be that Bossio was still drunk — maybe sleeping it off before making planetfall on Three. Dylan held no grudge. Bossio was a kid and alone. It took a special kind of guts to take a ship out into space alone, when Things could be waiting... A young girl, pink and lovely in a thick fur jacket, came into the shack and told him breathlessly that her father, Mr. Rush, would like to know if he wanted sentries posted. Dylan hadn't thought about it but he said yes right away, beginning to feel both pleased and irritated at the same time, because now they were coming to him. He pushed out into the cold and went to find Rossel. With the snow it was bad enough, but if they were still here when the sun went down they wouldn't have a chance. Most of the men were out stripping down their ship, and that would take a while. He wondered why Rossel hadn't yet put a call through to Three, asking about room on the ship there. The only answer he could find was that Rossel knew that there was no room and wanted to put off the answer as long as possible. And, in a way, you could not blame him. Rossel was in his cabin with the big, gloomy man — who turned out to be Rush, the one who had asked about sentries. Rush was methodically cleaning an old hunting rifle. Rossel was surprisingly full of hope. "Listen, there's a mail ship due in, been due since yesterday. We might get the rest of the folks out on that." Dylan shrugged. |
| 1531 |
I'll go help your people at the ship." The gloomy man nodded and fluffed up his collar. "Nice day for huntin'," he said, and then he was gone, with the snow quickly covering his footprints. 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. 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. |
| 1532 |
Several moments later the realization of what was happening struck him like a blow. Three had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered. There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan. Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three, and what he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said hopeful things to Rossel and then went out to the ship and joined the men in lightening her. About the ship, at least, he knew something and he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then that he thought of Bossio. Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago, and if Three was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow. More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken, unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead — the one thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had. In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run universe Bossio was all his friendship and his trust. He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore. Bossio — a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no grudges — Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried to help these people. |
| 1533 |
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. 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. |
| 1534 |
Because the bone was steel and the muscles were springs and the thing had been a robot. The Alien rose up from his cot, whistling with annoyance. When that ship had come in his attention had been distracted from one of the robots, and of course the miserable thing had gone blundering right out into the humans. 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. There was little purpose in destroying the humans without first learning from them. Life was really a remarkable thing — one never knew what critical secrets a starborne race possessed. |
| 1535 |
Hence the robots. And it was an extraordinary plan, an elegant plan. The Alien trembled again. The humans were moving outward toward the rim; their base was apparently somewhere beyond Centaurus. Therefore a ring of defense was thrown up on most of the habitable worlds toward which the humans were coming — oh, a delightful plan — and the humans came down one by one and never realized that there was any defense at all. With a cleverness which was almost excruciating, the Aliens had carefully selected a number of animals native to each world, and then constructed robot duplicates. So simple then to place the robots down on a world with a single Director, then wait... for the humans to inhabit. Naturally the humans screened all the animals and scouted a planet pretty thoroughly before they set up a colony. Naturally their snares and their hungers caught no robots and never found the deep-buried Alien Director. Then the humans relaxed and began to make homes, never realizing that in among the animals which gamboled playfully in the trees there was one which did not gambol, but watched. Never once noticing the monkeylike animals, or the small thing like a rabbit which was a camera eye, or the thing like a rat, which took chemical samples, or the thing like a lizard which cut wires. The Alien rumbled on through the snow, trembling so much now with ecstasy and anticipation that the suit which bore him almost lost its balance. He very nearly fell over before he stopped trembling, and then he contained himself. In a little while, a very little while, there would be time enough for trembling. "They could've been here till the sun went out," Rush said, "and we never would've known." "I wonder how much they've found out," Dylan said. Rush was holding the paw. "Pretty near everything, I guess. This stuff don't stop at monkeys. Could be any size, any kind... Look, let's get down into camp and tell 'em." Dylan rose slowly to a kneeling position, peering dazedly out into the far white trees. |
| 1536 |
He would go on from here as a man... or not at all. Rush had sat down beside him, beginning to understand, watching without words. He was an old man. Like all earthmen, he had never fought with his hands. He had not fought the land or the tides or the weather or any of the million bitter sicknesses which man had grown up fighting, and he was beginning to realize that somewhere along the line he had been betrayed. Now, with a dead paw of the enemy in his hand, he did not feel like a man. 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. |
| 1537 |
He slid past the first trunk to the next, moving forward on his elbows with his pistol in his right hand. His elbow struck a rock and it hurt and his face was freezing. Once he rubbed snow from his eyebrows. Then he came through the trees and lay down before a slight rise, thinking. Better to go around than over. But if anything is watching, it is most likely watching from above. Therefore go around and come back up from behind. Yes. His nose had begun to run. With great care he crawled among some large rocks, hoping against hope that he would not sneeze. Why had nothing seen him? Was something following him now? He turned to look behind him, but it was darker now and becoming difficult to see. But he would have to look behind him more often. He was moving down a gorge. There were large trees above him and he needed their shelter, but he could not risk slipping down the sides of the gorge. And far off, weakly, out of the gray cold ahead, he heard a noise. He lay down in the snow, listening. With a slow, thick shuffle, a thing was moving through the trees before him. In a moment he saw that it was not coming toward him. He lifted his head but saw nothing. Much more slowly, now, he crawled again. The thing was moving down the left side of the gorge ahead, coming away from the rise he had circled. It was moving without caution, and he worried that if he did not hurry he would lose it. But for the life of him he couldn't stand up. The soldier went forward on his hands and knees. When his clothes hung down, the freezing cold entered his throat and shocked his body, which was sweating. He shifted his gun to his gloved hand and blew on the bare fingers of his right, still crawling. When he reached the other end of the gorge he stood upright against a rock wall and looked in the direction of the shuffling thing. He saw it just as it turned. It was a great black lump on a platform. The platform had legs, and the thing was plodding methodically upon a path which would bring it past him. |
| 1538 |
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. After a while he looked out at the monkey. It had risen to a sitting position but was frozen in the motion of rising. It had ceased to function when he hit the lump. Out of the numbness and the pain he felt a great gladness rising. The guide. He had killed the guide. He would not be cautious any more. Maybe some of the other robots were self-directing and dangerous, but they could be handled. He went to the lump, stared at it without feeling. A black, doughy bulge was swelling out through one of the holes. It was too big to carry, but he would have to take something back. He went over and took the monkey by a stiff jutting arm and began dragging it back toward the village. Now he began to stumble. It was dark and he was very tired. But the steel he had been forging in his breast was complete, and the days which were coming would be days full of living. |
| 1539 |
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. The second thing was to find a spot where he would be safe from the eyes of the men who would close the floor for the night. There was only one possible place, the laboratory set up behind the ship. Boldly he showed his press credentials to the second guard, stationed at the partitioned passageway leading to it, stating that he had come to interview the scientists; and in a moment was at the laboratory door. He had been there a number of times and knew the room well. It was a large area roughly partitioned off for the work of the scientists engaged in breaking their way into the ship and full of a confusion of massive and heavy objects — electric and hot-air ovens, carboys of chemicals, asbestos sheeting, compressors, basins, ladles, a microscope, and a great deal of smaller equipment common to a metallurgical laboratory. |
| 1540 |
Three white-smocked men were deeply engrossed in an experiment at the far end. Cliff, waiting a good moment, slipped inside and hid himself under a table half buried with supplies. He felt reasonably safe from detection there. Very soon now the scientists would be going home for the night. From beyond the ship he could hear another section of the waiting queue filing in — the last, he hoped, of the day. He settled himself as comfortably as he could. In a moment the lecture would begin. He had to smile when he thought of one thing the recording would say. Then there it was again — the clear, trained voice of the chap Stillwell. The foot scrapings and whispers of the crowd died away, and Cliff could hear every word in spite of the great bulk of the ship lying interposed. "Ladies and gentlemen," began the familiar words, "the Smithsonian Institution welcomes you to its new Interplanetary Wing and to the marvelous exhibits at this moment before you." A slight pause. "All of you must know by now something of what happened here three months ago, if indeed you did not see it for yourself in the telescreen," the voice went on. "The few facts are briefly told. A little after 5:00 P. M. on September sixteenth, visitors to Washington thronged the grounds outside this building in their usual numbers and no doubt with their usual thoughts. 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. |
| 1541 |
"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. 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. "When this opinion was disseminated, public tension grew until it was almost intolerable. Where had the traveler come from? Who were its occupants? Why had they come to Earth? |
| 1542 |
Behind the ship now, as you can see from either end, a partitioned workroom has been set up where the attempt still goes on. So far its wonderful greenish metal has proved inviolable. Not only are they unable to get in, but they cannot even find the exact place from which Klaatu and Gnut emerged. The chalk marks you see are the best approximation. "Many people have feared that Gnut was only temporarily deranged, and that on return to function might be dangerous, so the scientist have completely destroyed all chance of that. The greenish metal of which he is made seemed to be. the same as that of the ship and could no more be attacked, they found, nor could they find any way to penetrate to his internals; but they had other means. They set electrical currents of tremendous voltages and amperages through him. They applied terrific heat to all parts of his metal shell. They immersed him for days in gases and acids and strongly corroding solutions, and they have bombarded him with every known kind of ray. You need have no fear of him now. He cannot possibly have retained the ability to function in any way. "But — a word of caution. The officials of the government know that visitors will not show any disrespect in this building. It may be that the unknown and unthinkably powerful civilization from which Klaatu and Gnut came may send other emissaries to see what happened to them. Whether or not they do, not one of us must be found amiss in our attitude. None of us could very well anticipate what happened, and we all are immeasurably sorry, but we are still in a sense responsible, and must do what we can to avoid possible retaliations. "You will be allowed to remain five minutes longer, and then, when the gong sounds, you will please leave promptly. The robot attendants along the wall will answer any questions you may have. "Look well, for before you stand stark symbols of the achievement, mystery, and frailty of the human race." The recorded voice ceased speaking. Cliff, carefully moving his cramped limbs, broke out in a wide smile. |
| 1543 |
If they knew what he knew! For his photographs told a slightly different story from that of the lecturer. In yesterday's a line of the figured floor showed clearly at the outer edge of the robot's near foot; in today's, that line was covered. Gnut had moved! Or been moved, though this was very unlikely. Where were the derrick and other evidence of such activity? It could hardly have been done in one night, and all signs so quickly concealed. And why should it be done at all? Still, to make sure, he had asked the guard. He could almost remember verbatim his answer: "No, Gnut has neither moved nor been moved since the death of his master. A special point was made of keeping him in the position he assumed at Klaatu's death. The floor was built in under him, and the scientists who completed his derangement erected their apparatus around him, just as he stands. You need have no fears." Cliff smiled again. He did not have any fears. Not yet. 2 A moment later the big gong above the entrance doors rang the closing hour, and immediately following it a voice from the speakers called out, "Five o'clock, ladies and gentlemen. Closing time, ladies and gentlemen." The three scientists, as if surprised it was so late, hurriedly washed their hands, changed to their street clothes and disappeared down the partitioned corridor, oblivious of the young picture man hidden under the table. The slide and scrape of the feet on the exhibition floor rapidly dwindled, until at last there were only the steps of the two guards walking from one point to another, making sure everything was all right for the night. 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. |
| 1544 |
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. 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? |
| 1545 |
The position of Gnut's head did not seem to have changed, at any rate. Probably everything was all right, but he wished, he did not have to cross that end of the room with the feeling that the robot's eyes were following him. He drew back and sat down and waited. It would have to be totally dark before he essayed the trip to the table. He waited a full hour, until the faint beams from the lamps on the grounds outside began to make the room seem to grow lighter; then he got up and peeped around the ship once more. The robot's eyes seemed to pierce right at him as before, only now, due no doubt to the darkness, the strange internal illumination seemed much brighter. This was a chilling thing. Did Gnut know he was there? What were the thoughts of the robot? What could be the thoughts of a manmade machine, even so wonderful a one as Gnut? It was time for the cross, so Cliff slung his camera around on his back, went down on his hands and knees, and carefully moved to the edge of the entrance hall. There he fitted himself as closely as he could into the angle made by it with the floor and started inching ahead. Never pausing, not risking a glance at Gnut's unnerving red eyes, moving an inch at a time, he snaked along. He took ten minutes to cross the space of a hundred feet, and he was wet with perspiration when his fingers at last touched the one-foot rise of the platform on which the table stood. Still slowly, silently as a shadow, he made his way over the edge and melted behind the protection of the table. At last he was there. He relaxed for a moment, then, anxious to know whether he had been seen, carefully turned and looked around the side of the table. Gnut's eyes were now full on him! Or so it seemed. Against the general darkness, the robot loomed a mysterious and still darker shadow that, for all his being a hundred and fifty feet away, seemed to dominate the room. Cliff could not tell whether the position of his body was changed or not. But if Gnut was looking at him, he at least did nothing else. |
| 1546 |
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. 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? |
| 1547 |
How could he move with such silence? In the heavy darkness Gnut's eyes moved nearer. Slowly but in perfect rhythm that almost imperceptible sound of his footsteps beat on Cliffs ears. Cliff, usually resourceful enough, was this time caught flatfooted. Frozen with fear, utterly incapable of fleeing, he lay where he was while the metal monster with the fiery eyes came on. For a moment Cliff all but fainted, and when he recovered, there was Gnut towering over him, legs almost within reach. He was bending slightly, burning his terrible eyes right into his own! Too late to try to think of running now. Trembling like any cornered mouse, Cliff waited for the blow that would crush him. For an eternity, it seemed, Gnut scrutinized him without moving. For each second of that eternity Cliff expected annihilation, sudden, quick, complete. And then suddenly and unexpectedly it was over. Gnut's body straightened and he stepped back. He turned. And then, with the almost jerkless rhythm which only he among robots possessed, he started back toward the place from which he came. Cliff could hardly believe he had been spared. Gnut could have crushed him like a worm — and he had only turned around and gone back. Why? It could not be supposed that a robot was capable of human considerations. 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. |
| 1548 |
A long time passed and Gnut did not come out. What could he be doing inside? Cliff wondered. Some of his courage returned to him and he toyed with the idea of creeping forward and peeping through the port, but he found he had not the courage for that. Gnut had spared him, at least for the time, but there was no telling how far his tolerance would go. An hour passed, then another, Gnut was doing something inside the ship, but what? Cliff could not imagine. If the robot had been a human being, he knew he would have sneaked a look, but as it was, he was too much of an unknown quantity. Even the simplest of Earth's robots under certain circumstances were inexplicable things; what, then, of this one, come from an unknown and even unthinkable civilization, by far the most wonderful construction ever seen — what superhuman powers might he not possess? All that the scientists of Earth could do had not served to derange him. Acid, heat, rays, terrific crushing blows — he had withstood them all; even his finish had been unmarred. He might be able to see perfectly in the dark. And right where he was, he might be able to hear or in some way sense the least change in Cliff's position. More time passed, and then, sometime after two o'clock in the morning, a simple homely thing happened, but a thing so unexpected that for a moment it quite destroyed Cliff's equilibrium. Suddenly, through the dark and silent building, there was a faint whir of wings, soon followed by the piercing, sweet voice of a bird. A mockingbird. Somewhere in this gloom above his head. Clear and full-throated were its notes; a dozen little songs it sang, one after the other without pause between — short insistent calls, twirrings, coaxings, cooings — the spring love song of perhaps the finest singer in the world. Then, as suddenly as it began, the voice was silent. If an invading army had poured out of the traveler, Cliff would have been less surprised. The month was December; even in Florida the mockingbirds had not yet begun their song. |
| 1549 |
How had one gotten into that tight, gloomy museum? How and why was it singing there? He waited, full of curiosity. Then suddenly he was aware of Gnut, standing just outside the port of the ship. He stood quite still, his glowing eyes turned squarely in Cliff's direction. For a moment the hush in the museum seemed to. deepen; then it was broken by a soft thud on the floor near where Cliff was lying. He wondered. The light in Gnut's eyes changed, and he started his almost jerkless walk in Cliff's direction. When only a little away, the robot stopped, bent over, and picked something from the floor. For some time he stood without motion and looked at a little object he held in his hand. Cliff knew, though he could not see, that it was the mockingbird. Its body, for he was sure that it had lost its song forever. Gnut then turned, and without a glance at Cliff, walked back to the ship and again went inside. Hours passed while Cliff waited for some sequel to this surprising happening. Perhaps it was because of his curiosity that his fear of the robot began to lessen. Surely if the mechanism was unfriendly, if he intended him any harm, he would have finished him before, when he had such a perfect opportunity. Cliff began to nerve himself for a quick look inside the port. And a picture; he must remember the picture. He kept forgetting the very reason he was there. It was in the deeper darkness of the false dawn when he got sufficient courage and made the start. He took off his shoes, and in his stockinged feet, his shoes tied together and slung over his shoulder, he moved stiffly but rapidly to a position behind the nearest of the six robot attendants stationed along the wall, then paused for some sign which might indicate that Gnut knew he had moved. Hearing none, he slipped along behind the next robot attendant and paused again. Bolder now, he made in one spurt all the distance to the farthest one, the sixth, fixed just opposite the port of the ship. There he met with a disappointment. |
| 1550 |
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! 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. |
| 1551 |
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. Then it lay still and did not move again. The first faint pale light of the dawn was seeping into the room. From the corner where he had taken refuge, Cliff watched closely the great robot. It seemed to him that he behaved very queerly. He stood over the dead gorilla, looking down at him with what in a human would be called sadness. Cliff saw this clearly; Gnut's heavy greenish features bore a thoughtful, grieving expression new to his experience. For some moments he stood so, then as might a father with his sick child, he leaned over, lifted the great animal in his metal arms and carried it tenderly within the ship. Cliff flew back to the table, suddenly fearful of yet other dangerous and inexplicable happenings. It struck him that he might be safer in the laboratory, and with trembling knees he made his way there and hid in one of the big ovens. He prayed for full daylight. His thoughts were chaos. Rapidly, one after another, his mind churned up the amazing events of the night, but all was mystery; it seemed there could be no rational explanation for them. That mockingbird. The gorilla. Gnut's sad expression and his tenderness. What could account for a fantastic milange like that! Gradually full daylight did come. A long time passed. At last he began to believe he might yet get out of that place of mystery and danger alive. At eight-thirty there were noises at the entrance, and the good sound of human voices came to his ears. He stepped out of the oven and tiptoed to the passageway. The noises stopped suddenly and there was a frightened exclamation and then the sound of running feet, and then silence. Stealthily Cliff sneaked down the narrow way and peeped fearfully around the ship. |
| 1552 |
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. What a rotten picture man he was to come back with two ridiculous shots like these! He had had a score of opportunities to get real ones — shots of Gnut in action — Gnut's fight with the gorilla — even Gnut holding the mockingbird — spine-chilling stuff! — and all he had brought back were two stills of a doorway. Oh, sure, they were valuable, but he was a grade-A ass. And to top this brilliant performance, he had fallen asleep! Well, he'd better get out on the street and find out what was doing. Quickly he showered, shaved, and changed his clothes, and soon was entering a nearby restaurant patronized by other picture and newsmen. Sitting alone at the lunch bar, he spotted a friend and competitor. |
| 1553 |
The rest were found on the robot attendants." Cliff tried to look astounded. Gus pointed to a test tube partly filled with a light amber fluid "And that's blood, diluted — gorilla blood. It was found on Gnut's arms." "Good Heaven!" Cliff managed to exclaim. "And there's no explanation?" "Not even a theory. It's your big chance, wonder boy." Cliff broke away from Gus, unable to maintain his act any longer. He couldn't decide what to do about his story. The press services would bid heavily for it — with all his pictures — but that would take further action out of his hands. In the back of his mind he wanted to stay in the wing again that night, but — well, he simply was afraid. He'd had a pretty stiff dose, and he wanted very much to remain alive. He walked over and looked a long time at Gnut. No one would ever have guessed that he had moved, or that there had rested on his greenish metal face a look of sadness. Those weird eyes! Cliff wondered if they were really looking at him, as they seemed, recognizing him as the bold intruder of last night. Of what unknown stuff were they made — those materials placed in his eye sockets by one branch of the race of man which all the science of his own could not even serve to disfunction? What was Gnut thinking? What could be the thoughts of a robot — a mechanism of metal poured out of man's clay crucibles? Was he angry at him? Cliff thought not. Gnut had had him, at his mercy — and had walked away. Dared he stay again? Cliff thought perhaps he did. He walked about the room, thinking it over. He felt sure Gnut would move again. A Mikton ray gun would protect him from another gorilla — or fifty of them. He did not yet have the real story. He had come back with two miserable architectural stills! He might have known from the first that he would stay. At dusk that night, armed with his camera and a small Mikton gun, he lay once more under the table of supplies in the laboratory and heard the metal doors of the wing clang to for the night. |
| 1554 |
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. 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. |
| 1555 |
What would happen this time? With amazing silence, Gnut drew nearer, until he towered an ominous shadow over the spot where Cliff lay. For a long time his red eyes burned down on the prone man. Cliff trembled all over; this was worse than the first time. Without having planned it, he found himself speaking to the creature. "You would not hurt me," he pleaded. "I was only curious to see what's going on. It's my job. Can you understand me? I would not harm or bother you. I... I couldn't if I wanted to! Please!" The robot never moved, and Cliff could not guess whether his words had been understood or even heard. When he felt he could not bear the suspense any longer, Gnut reached out and took something from a drawer of the table, or perhaps he put something back in; then he stepped back, turned, and retraced his steps. Cliff was safe! Again the robot had spared him ! Beginning then, Cliff lost much of his fear. He felt sure now that this Gnut would do him no harm. Twice he had had him in his power, and either time he had only looked and quietly moved away. Cliff could not imagine what Gnut had done in the drawer of the table. He watched with the greatest curiosity to see what would happen next. As on the night before, the robot went straight to the end of the ship and made the peculiar sequence of sounds that opened the port, and when the ramp slid out he went inside. After that Cliff was alone in the darkness for a very long time, probably two hours. Not a sound came from the ship. Cliff knew he should sneak up to the port and peep inside, but he could not quite bring himself to do it. With his gun he could handle another gorilla, but if Gnut caught him it might be the end. Momentarily he expected something fantastic to happen — he knew not what; maybe the mockingbird's sweet song again, maybe a gorilla, maybe — anything. What did at last happen once more caught him with complete surprise. He heard a sudden muffled sound, then words — human words — every one familiar. |
| 1556 |
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. 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. "Who are you? What is all this?" one of them asked him roughly. "I'm Cliff Sutherland, picture reporter," Cliff answered calmly. "And I was the one who was inside here and ran away, as the guard says." "What were you doing?" the officer asked, eyeing him. |
| 1557 |
"And where did these bodies come from?" "Gentlemen, I'd tell you gladly — only business first," Cliff answered. "There's been some fantastic goings-on in this room, and I saw them and have the story, but" — he smiled — "I must decline to answer without advice of counsel until I've sold my story to one of the news syndicates. You know how it is. If you'd allow me the use of the radio in your plane — just for a moment, gentlemen — you'll have the whole story right afterward — say in half an hour, when the television men broadcast it. Meanwhile, believe me, there's nothing for you to do, and there'll be no loss by the delay." The officer who had asked the questions, blinked, and one of the others, quicker to react and certainly not a gentleman, stepped toward Cliff with clenched fists. Cliff disarmed him by handing him his press credentials. He glanced at them rapidly and put them in his pocket. By now half a hundred people were there, and among them were two members of a syndicate crew whom he knew, arrived by copter. The police growled, but they let him whisper in their ears and then go out under escort to the crew's plane. There, by radio, in five minutes, Cliff made a deal which would bring him more money than he had ever before earned in a year. After that he turned over all his pictures and negatives to the crew and gave them the story, and they lost not one second in spinning back to their office with the flash. More and more people arrived, and the police cleared the building. Ten minutes later a big crew of radio and television men forced their way in, sent there by the syndicate with which he had dealt. And then a few minutes later, under the glaring lights set up by the operators and standing close by the ship and not far from Gnut — he refused to stand underneath him — Cliff gave his story to the cameras and microphones, which in a fraction of a second shot it to every corner of the solar system. Immediately afterward the police took him to jail. On general principles and because they were pretty blooming mad. |
| 1558 |
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. It was as if two tiny red flashlights were turned from side to side, their beams at each motion crossing Cliffs eyes. Thrilling, Cliff signaled the studios, cut in his pickups, and described the phenomenon. Millions resonated to the excitement in his voice. Could Gnut conceivably break out of that terrible prison ? Minutes passed, the eye flashes continued, but Cliff could discern no movement or attempted movement of the robot's body. In brief snatches he described what he saw. Gnut was clearly alive; there could be no doubt he was straining against the transparent prison in which he had at last been locked fast; but unless he could crack it, no motion should show. Cliff took his eyes from the magnifier — and started. |
| 1559 |
His unaided eye, looking at Gnut shrouded in darkness, saw an astonishing thing not yet visible through his instrument. A faint red glow was spreading over the robot's body. With trembling fingers he readjusted the lens of the television eye, but even as he did so the glow grew in intensity. It looked as if Gnut's body were being heated to incandescence! He described it in excited fragments, for it took most of his attention to keep correcting the lens. Gnut passed from a figure of dull red to one brighter and brighter, clearly glowing now even through the magnifier. And then he moved! Unmistakably he moved! He had within himself somehow the means to raise his own body temperature, and was exploiting the one limitation of the plastic in which he was locked. For glasstex, Cliff now remembered, was a thermoplastic material, one that set by cooling and conversely would soften again with heat. Gnut was melting his way out! In three-word snatches, Cliff described this. The robot became cherry red, the sharp edges of the icelike block rounded, and the whole structure began to sag. The process accelerated. The robot's body moved more widely. The plastic lowered to the crown of his head, then to his neck, then to his waist, which was as far as Cliff could see. His body was free! And then, still cherry-red, he moved forward out of sight! Cliff strained eyes and ears, but caught nothing but the distant roar of the watchers beyond the police lines and a few low, sharp commands from the batteries posted around him. They, too, had heard, and perhaps seen by telescreen, and were waiting. Several minutes passed. There was a sharp, ringing crack; the great metal doors of the wing flew open, and out stepped the metal giant, glowing no longer. He stood stock-still, and his red eyes pierced from side to side through the darkness. Voices out in the dark barked orders and in a twinkling Gnut was bathed in narrow, crisscrossing rays of sizzling, colored light. Behind him the metal doors began to melt, but his great green body showed no change at all. |
| 1560 |
Then the world seemed to come to an end; there was a deafening roar, everything before Cliff seemed to explode in smoke and chaos, his tree whipped to one side so that he was nearly thrown out. Pieces of debris rained down. The tank gun had spoken, and Gnut, he was sure, had been hit. Cliff held on tight and peered into the haze. As it cleared he made out a stirring among the debris at the door, and then dimly but unmistakably he saw the great form of Gnut rise to his feet. He got up slowly, turned toward the tank, and suddenly darted toward it in a wide arc. The big gun swung in an attempt to cover him, but the robot sidestepped and then was upon it. As the crew scattered, he destroyed its breech with one blow of his fist, and then he turned and looked right at Cliff. He moved toward him, and in a moment was under the tree. Cliff climbed higher. Gnut put his two arms around the tree and gave a lifting push, and the tree tore out at the roots and fell crashing to its side. Before Cliff could scramble away, the robot had lifted him in his metal hands. Cliff thought his time had come, but strange things were yet in store for him that night. Gnut did not hurt him. He looked at him from arm's length for a moment, then lifted him to a sitting position on his shoulders, legs straddling his neck. Then, holding one ankle, he turned and without hesitation started down the path which led westward away from the building. Cliff rode helpless. Out over the lawns he saw the muzzles of the scattered field pieces move as he moved, Gnut — and himself — their one focus. But they did not fire. Gnut, by placing him on his shoulders, had secured himself against that — Cliff hoped. The robot bore straight toward the Tidal Basin. Most of the field pieces throbbed slowly after. Far back, Cliff saw a dark tide of confusion roll into the cleared area — the police lines had broken. Ahead, the ring thinned rapidly off to the sides; then, from all directions but the front, the tide rolled in until individual shouts and cries could be made out. |
| 1561 |
It came to a stop about fifty yards off, and few people ventured nearer. Gnut paid them no attention, and he no more noticed his burden than he might a fly. His neck and shoulders made Cliff a seat hard as steel, but with the difference that their underlying muscles with each movement flexed, just as would those of a human being. To Cliff, this metal musculature became a vivid wonder. Straight as the flight of a bee, over paths, across lawns and through thin rows of trees Gnut bore the young man, the roar of thousands of people following close. Above droned copters and darting planes, among them police cars with their nerve-shattering sirens. Just ahead lay the still waters of the Tidal Basin, and in its midst the simple marble tomb of the slain ambassador, Klaatu, gleaming black and cold in the light of the dozen searchlights always trained on it at night. Was this a rendezvous with the dead? Without an instant's hesitation, Gnut strode down the bank and entered the water. It rose to his knees, then above his waist, until Cliff's feet were under. Straight through the dark waters for the tomb of Klaatu the robot made his inevitable way. The dark square mass of gleaming marble rose higher as they neared it. Gnut's body began emerging from the water as the bottom shelved upward, until his dripping feet took the first of the rising pyramid of steps. In a moment they were at the top, on the narrow platform in the middle of which rested the simple oblong tomb. Stark in the blinding searchlights, the giant robot walked once around it, then, bending, he braced himself and gave a mighty push against the top. 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. |
| 1562 |
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. 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. |
| 1563 |
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. 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. |
| 1564 |
It was eight kilometers across, after all. Every once in a while since she was ten — once a month when she could manage it — she had walked around it for the exercise, and sometimes had taken the low-gravity paths so she could skim a little. That was always fun. Skim or walk, Rotor went on and on, with its buildings, its parks, its farms, and mostly its people. It took her a whole day to do it, but her mother didn't mind. She said Rotor was perfectly safe. "Not like Earth," she would say, but she wouldn't say why Earth was not safe. "Never mind," she would say. It was the people Marlene liked least. The new census, they said, would show sixty thousand of them on Rotor. Too many. Far too many. Everyone of them showing a false face. Marlene hated seeing those false faces and knowing there was something different inside. Nor could she say anything about it. She had tried sometimes when she had been younger, but her mother had grown angry and told her she must never say things like that. As she got older, she could see the falseness more clearly, but it bothered her less. 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. |
| 1565 |
He thought she was out of her mind. And there it was. She had said too much and had gained nothing by it. Everything was wrong. Aurinel was staring after her. The laughter had ceased on his boyishly handsome face and a certain uneasiness was creasing the skin between his eyebrows. 2. Eugenia Insigna had grown middle-aged during the trip to Nemesis, and in the course of the long stay after arrival. Over the years she had periodically warned herself: This is for life; and for our children's lives into the unseen future. The thought always weighed her down. 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. |
| 1566 |
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. She said, "Let him come in." She cast a quick look at the mirror. She could see that her appearance was reasonable. To herself, she seemed to look younger than her forty-two years. She hoped she looked the same way to others. It seemed silly to worry about her appearance because a seventeen-year-old boy was about to enter, but Eugenia Insigna had seen poor Marlene looking at that boy and she knew what that look portended. |
| 1567 |
There are more space Settlements than can easily be found room for. Even the asteroid belt is only an amelioration. It will be uncomfortably crowded soon enough. What's more, each Settlement has its own ecological balance and we are drifting apart in that respect. Commerce is being throttled for fear of picking up someone else's strains of parasites or pathogens. "The only solution, fellow Councillors, is to leave the Solar System — without fanfare, without warning. Let us leave and find a new home, where we can build a new world, with our own brand of humanity, our own society, our own way of life. This can't be done without hyper-assistance — which we have. Other Settlements will eventually learn the technique and will leave, too. The Solar System will be a dandelion gone to seed, its various components drifting in space. "But if we go first, we will find a world, perhaps, before others follow. We can establish ourselves firmly, so that when others do follow and, perhaps, come across us in our new world, we will be strong enough to send them elsewhere. The Galaxy is large and there are bound to be elsewheres." There had been objections, of course, and fierce ones. There were those who argued out of fear — fear of leaving the familiar. There were those who argued out of sentiment — sentiment for the planet of birth. There were those who argued out of idealism — the desire to spread knowledge so that others might go, too. Pitt had scarcely thought he would win out. He had done so because Eugenia Insigna had supplied the winning argument. What an incredible stroke of luck it was that she had come to him first. She was quite young then, only twenty-six, married but not yet pregnant. She was excited, flushed, and laden down with computer sheets. Pitt had frowned, he recalled, at her intrusion. He was Secretary of the Department and she — well, she was nobody although, as it happened, this was the very last moment when she would be nobody. At the time, he didn't realize this, of course, and he was annoyed that she had forced her way in. |
| 1568 |
It was dinnertime, and Insigna was in one of those moods when she was just a little afraid of her own daughter. Those moods had become more pronounced lately, and she didn't know why. Perhaps it was Marlene's increasing tendency to silence, to being withdrawn, to be always seeming to commune with thoughts too deep for speech. And sometimes the uneasy fear in Insigna was mixed with guilt: guilt because of her lack of motherly patience with the girl; guilt because of her too-great awareness of the girl's physical shortcomings. Marlene certainly didn't have her mother's conventional prettiness or her father's wildly unconventional good looks. Marlene was short and — blunt. That was the only word that Insigna could find that exactly fit poor Marlene. And poor, of course. It was the adjective she almost always used in her own mind and could just barely keep out of her speech. Short. Blunt. Thick without being fat, that was Marlene. Nothing graceful about her. Her hair was dark brown, rather long, and quite straight. Her nose was a little bulbous, her mouth turned down just a bit at the ends, her chin small, her whole attitude passive and turned in upon itself. There were her eyes, of course, large and lustrously dark, with meticulous dark eyebrows that curved above them, long eyelashes that looked almost artificial. Still, eyes alone could not make up for everything else, however fascinating they might be at odd moments. Insigna had known since Marlene was five that she was unlikely ever to attract a man on the physical plane alone, and that had become more obvious with each year. Aurinel had kept a languid eye on her during her preteen years, obviously attracted to her precocious intelligence and her almost luminous understanding. And Marlene had been shy and pleased in his presence, as though dimly realizing that there was something about an object called a "boy" that was somehow endearing, but not knowing what it might be. In the last couple of years, it seemed to Insigna that Marlene had finally clarified in her mind what "boy" meant. |
| 1569 |
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. 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. |
| 1570 |
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. Crile seemed surprised at that, as though it hadn't occurred to him, and then pleased. Insigna had found it a little disappointing. It would be much more flattering to be married for the sake of love than for the sake of citizenship, but then she thought to herself: Well, if that's what it takes So, after a typical long Rotorian engagement, they were married. Life went on without much change. He was not a passionate lover, but he had not been that before the marriage either. He had offered her an absent affection, an occasional warmth that kept her constantly near happiness if not altogether immersed in it. He was never actively cruel and unkind, and he had given up his world for her and gone through considerable inconvenience to be with her. Surely that might be counted in his favor, and Insigna counted it so. Even as a full citizen, which he had been granted after their marriage, there remained a kernel of dissatisfaction within him. Insigna was aware of this and could not entirely blame him. He might be a full citizen, yet he was still not a native-born Rotorian and many of the most interesting activities on Rotor were closed to him. She did not know what his training had been, for he never mentioned how much of an education he had had. He didn't sound uneducated, and there was no disgrace in being self-educated, but Insigna knew that on Earth the population did not take higher education as a given, the way that Settlement populations did. The thought bothered her. |
| 1571 |
No ordinary space vehicle could have endured that, but Rotor had a layer of soil around it that had been thickened for the trip, and the particles were absorbed. There would come a time, she had been assured by one of the hyperspatialists when one would enter and leave hyperspace at ordinary speeds. "Given hyperspace in the first place," he had said, "no new conceptual breakthrough is required. It's just engineering." Maybe! The remaining hyperspatialists, however, considered the notion so much star exhaust. Insignia hurried in to see Pitt when the appalling truth descended upon her. He had had little time for her in the last year, and she had understood. There was a certain tension that became more and more evident as the excitement of the trip wound down, as people realized that in a matter of months they would be in the neighborhood of anther star. They would then have the constant problem of having to survive over a long period in the vicinity of a strange red dwarf star without any guarantee of reasonable planetary material to serve as a supply source, let alone a living place. Janus Pitt no longer looked like a young man, although his hair was still dark, his face unlined. Only four years had passed since she had come to him with the news of Nemesis' existence. There was, however, a harried look in his eyes, a sense of having had his joy rubbed away and his cares left naked to the world. He was Commissioner-elect now. Perhaps that might account for a great deal of what might be troubling him, but who could tell? Insignia had never known true power — or the responsibility that accompanied it — but something told her it might have the capacity for souring one who did. Pitt smiled at her absently. They had been forced to be close when they had shared a secret that at first no one — and then almost no one — had shared with them. They could then talk unguardedly with each other, when they could not do so with anyone else. After the Leaving, however, when the secret was revealed, they had grown apart again. |
| 1572 |
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. If there were ten star systems and ten colonizing groups, all ten would zero in on one of the star systems, and one only. And sooner or later, they would discover N emesis and the colonizers would appear. How would Rotor survive then? Only if Rotor gained as much time as possible, built up a strong civilization, and expanded reasonably. If they had enough time, they might expand their hold over a group of stars. If not, Nemesis alone would be enough — but it must be made impregnable. Pitt did not dream of universal conquest, of conquest of any kind. What he wanted was an island of tranquility and security against the days when the Galaxy would be aflame and in chaos as a result of conflicting ambitions. But he alone could see this. He alone bore the weight of it. He might live another quarter century and might remain in power through all that time, either as actual Commissioner or as an elder statesman whose word would be decisive. Yet, eventually, he would die — and to whom could he then bequeath his far-sightedness? Then Pitt felt a twinge of self-pity. He had labored for so many years, would labor for so many more, yet was appreciated — truly appreciated — by none. And it would all come to an end anyway, because the Idea would be drowned in the ocean of mediocrity that constantly lapped at the ankles of those few who could see beyond the years. It was fourteen years since the Leaving and when, at any time, had he been able to be quietly confident? He went to sleep each night with the fear that he would be awakened before morning with the news that another Settlement had arrived — that Nemesis had been found. 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. |
| 1573 |
But she would only grow more dangerous as she grew older, so she would have to be stopped now. And she would be stopped by that other monster, Erythro. Pitt gave himself credit. He had recognized Erythro as a monster from the start. It had its own expression to read — the reflection of the bloody light of its star, an expression that was ominous and menacing. When they had reached the asteroid belt, a hundred million miles outside the orbit in which Megas and Erythro circled Nemesis, Pitt had said, with full confidence, "This is the place." He had expected no difficulty. The rational view admitted nothing else. Among the asteroids, Nemesis cast little heat and light. The loss of natural heat and light was nothing, since Rotor had fully functional micro-fusion. In fact, it was actually a benefit. With its red light dimmed to almost nothing, it did not weigh down the heart, darken the mind, and shiver the soul. Then, too, a base in the asteroidal belt would place them in an area where the gravitational effects of Nemesis and Megas would be weak, and where maneuverability would, in consequence, be less energy-expensive. The asteroids would be more easily mined, and considering the feeble light of Nemesis, there should be plenty of volatiles on those little bodies. Ideal! And yet the people of Rotor made it clear that, by an overwhelming majority, they wanted to move the Settlement into orbit around Erythro. Pitt labored to point out that they would be bathed in angrily depressing red light, that they would be held firmly in the grip of Megas as well as Erythro, and that they might still have to go to the asteroids for raw materials. Pitt discussed it angrily with Tambor Brossen, the ex-Commissioner, to whose post he had succeeded. The rather weary Brossen openly enjoyed his new role as elder statesman far more than he had ever enjoyed being Commissioner. (He had been known to say that he lacked Pitt's pleasure in making decisions.) Brossen had laughed at Pitt's concern over the matter of Settlement location — not outright, to be sure, but gently, with his eyes. |
| 1574 |
And it was she who was truly excited, with this odd compulsion of hers to visit Erythro. Insigna could not understand that compulsion and viewed it as another part of her daughter's unique mental and emotional complexity. Still, whenever Insigna quailed at the thought of leaving safe, small, comfortable Rotor for the vast empty world of Erythro, so strange and menacing, and fully six hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away (nearly twice as far away as Rotor had been from Earth), it was Marlene's excitement that reinvigorated her. The ship that would take them to Erythro was neither graceful nor beautiful. It was serviceable. It was one of a small fleet of rockets that acted as ferries, blasting up from the stodgy gravitational pull of Erythro, or coming down without daring to give in to it by even a trifle, and, either way, working one's way through the cushiony, windy, unpredictability of an untamed atmosphere. Insigna didn't think the trip would be pleasurable. Through most of it they would be weightless and two solid days of weightlessness would, no doubt, be tedious. Marlene's voice broke into her reverie. "Come on, Mother, they're waiting for us. The baggage is all checked and everything." Insigna moved forward. Her last uneasy thought as she passed through the airlock was — predictably — But why was Janus Pitt so willing to let us go? 25. Siever Genarr ruled a world as large as Earth. Or, to be more accurate perhaps, he ruled, directly, a domed region that covered nearly three square kilometers and was slowly growing. The rest of the world, however, nearly five hundred million square kilometers of land and sea, was unoccupied by human beings. It was also occupied by no other living things above the microscopic scale. So if a world is considered as being ruled by the multicellular life-forms that occupied it, the hundreds who lived and worked in the domed region were the rulers, and Siever Genarr ruled over them. Genarr was not a large man, but his strong features gave him an impressive look. |
| 1575 |
Pitt had, indeed, discussed the matter in detail, in his usual clipped and arbitrary manner that invited no discussion, or even comment, and the conversation had been shielded, too. It came as an even greater surprise that one of the people coming to Erythro was Eugenia Insigna. Once, years before the Leaving, they had been friends, but then, after their happy college days (Genarr remembered them wistfully as rather romantic), Eugenia had gone to Earth for her graduate studies and had returned to Rotor with an Earthman. Genarr had scarcely seen her — except once or twice, at a distance — since she had married Crile Fisher. And when she and Fisher had separated, just before the Leaving, Genarr had had work of his own and so had she — and it never occurred to either to renew old ties. Genarr had, perhaps, thought of it occasionally, but Eugenia was quite apparently sunk in sorrow, with an infant daughter to raise, and he was reluctant to intrude. Then he was sent to Erythro and that ended even the possibility of renewal. He had periodic vacation time on Rotor, but he was never at ease there any longer. Some old Rotorian friendships remained, but only in lukewarm fashion. Now Eugenia was coming with her daughter. Genarr, at the moment, didn't remember the girl's name — if he had ever known it. Certainly, he had never seen her. The daughter should be fifteen by now, and he wondered, with a queer little interior tremble, if she was beginning to look anything like the young Eugenia had. Genarr looked out his office window with an almost surreptitious air. He had grown so used to Erythro Dome that he no longer saw it with a critical eye. It was the home of working people of both sexes — adults, no children. 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. |
| 1576 |
It was kept clean and orderly as a matter of necessity, but there was also an air of artificiality about it. It was too much a matter of lines and arcs, planes and circles. It lacked irregularity, lacked the chaos of permanent life, where a room, or even just a desk, had adjusted itself to the hollows and waverings of a particular personality. There was himself, of course. His desk and his room reflected his own angular and planar person. That, perhaps, might be another reason he was at home in the Erythro Dome. The shape of his inner spirit matched its spare geometry. But what would Eugenia Insigna think of it? (He was rather pleased she had resumed her maiden name.) If she were as he remembered her, she would revel in irregularity, in the unexpected touch of frippery, for all she was an astronomer. Or had she changed? Did people ever change, essentially? Had Crile Fisher's desertion embittered her, twisted her Genarr scratched the hair at his temple where it had gone distinctly gray and thought that these speculations were useless and time-wasting. He would see Eugenia soon enough, for he had left word that she was to be brought to him as soon as she had arrived. Or should he have gone to greet her in person? No! He had argued that with himself half a dozen times already. He couldn't look too anxious; it wouldn't suit the dignity of his position. But then Genarr thought that that wasn't the reason at all. He didn't want to make her uneasy; he didn't want her to think he was still the same uncomfortable and incompetent admirer who had retreated in so shambling a manner before the tall and brooding good looks of the Earthman. And Eugenia had never looked at him again after she had seen Crile — never seriously looked at him. Genarr's eyes scanned the message from Janus Pitt — dry, condensed, as his messages always were, and with that indefinable feel of authority behind it, as though the possibility of disagreement were not merely unheard of — but actually unthought of. |
| 1577 |
No matter how he matched its population superficially, he still had a distinctive accent of speech, he could not remain as graceful as they under changes of gravitational pull, he could not skim along as they did in low gravity. In a dozen ways, he betrayed himself on each Settlement he visited, and always they withdrew from him just slightly, even though, in each case, he had gone through quarantine and medical treatment before being allowed to even enter the Settlement proper. Of course, he remained on each Settlement only a few days to a few weeks. Never was he expected to remain on a Settlement on a semipermanent basis or to build himself a family there as he had done on Rotor. But then Rotor had had hyper-assistance, and since then Earth had been looking for items of narrower importance, or at least he had been sent on tasks of narrower importance. He had been back now for three months. There was no word of a new assignment and he was not anxious for one. He was tired of the uprooting, tired of not fitting in, tired of the pretense of being a tourist. And there was Garand Wyler, his old friend and colleague, fresh from a Settlement of his own and staring at him with tired eyes. The dark skin of his graceful hand glimmered in the light as he raised his sleeve to his nose for a moment, then let it drop. Fisher half-smiled. He knew the gesture, had gone through it himself. Each Settlement had its own characteristic odor, depending on the crops it grew, the spices it used, the perfumes it affected, the very nature of the machinery and lubricants it used. It quickly went unnoticed, but on the return to Earth, the Settlement odor clung to one quite detectably. And though the person might be bathed, and the clothing washed so that others did not notice, one still noticed the smell on himself. Fisher said, "Welcome back. How was your Settlement this time?" "As always — terrible. Old Man Tanayama is correct. What all the Settlements fear and hate most is variety. They don't want differences in appearance, tastes, ways, and life. |
| 1578 |
However much it might have been meant as humor (or as sarcasm), it forced him, almost against his will, to go slowly. Producing a fiasco would seem doubly bad in the eyes of someone who believed him, however insincerely, to have a way with women. It was two weeks after Fisher had settled himself into the Settlement before he managed to see her. It was always a source of wonder to him that on any Settlement one could always manage to arrange to get a view of anyone. Not all his experience had accustomed him to the smallness of a Settlement, to the fewness of its population, to the manner in which everyone knew everyone else in his or her social circle — everyone else — and almost everyone else outside that circle, too. When he did see her, however, Tessa Wendel turned out to be rather impressive. Tanayama's description of her as middle-aged and as twice-divorced — the quirk of his aged lips as he said so, as though he were knowingly setting Fisher an unpleasant task — had built a picture in Fisher's mind of a harsh woman, hard-faced, with a nervous twitch, perhaps, and an attitude toward men that was either cynical or hungry. Tessa did not seem at all like this from the moderate distance at which he first saw her. She was almost as tall as he was and brunette, with her hair sleeked down. She looked quite alert and she smiled easily — he could tell that. Her clothes were refreshingly simple, as though she went out of her way to eschew ornament. She had kept herself slim and her figure was still surprisingly youthful. Fisher found himself wondering why she was twice-divorced. He was ready to assume that she had tired of the men, rather than the other way around, even though common sense told him that incompatibility could strike against all odds. It was necessary to be at some social function at which she would also be present. His being an Earthman interposed a small difficulty, but there were people on every Settlement who were, to some extent or other, in Earth's pay. |
| 1579 |
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. Genarr looked down with a queer feeling in the pit of his stomach. He remembered a phrase from an archaic epic: "the wine-dark sea." Below them the ocean certainly did look like a vast rolling mass of red wine, with pink froth here and there. There were no markings to identify in that vast body of water, and there was no place to land. The very essence of "location" was gone. Yet he knew that when he wanted to return, he need do no more than direct the plane to take them back to land. The plane's computer kept track of position in accurate reckoning of speed and direction and would know where land was — even where the Dome was. They passed under a thick cloud deck and the ocean turned black. |
| 1580 |
Her voice sounded dry and abnormal in her own ear. "We're out here and it's wonderful. It couldn't be nicer." "Yes, dear ," Insigna repeated, feeling hollow and lost and wondering whether she would ever see her daughter in her right mind again. 57. Siever Genarr felt almost lighthearted as he stepped out upon the surface of Erythro. The sloping wall of the Dome, behind him, reached upward, but he kept his back to it, for a sight so un-Erythronian would have spoiled the savor of the world. Savor? It was a queer word to use for Erythro, for at the moment it had no meaning. He lived behind the protection of his helmet, breathing the air of the Dome, or at least the air that had been purified and conditioned within the Dome. He could not smell the planet, or taste it, within that shelter. And yet there was a feel to it that made him oddly happy. His boots crunched slightly upon the ground. Although Erythro's surface was not rocky, it was rather gravelly and, between the bits of gravel, there was what he could only describe as soil. There was, of course, ample water and air to break up the primordial surface rock and, perhaps, the ubiquitous prokaryotes had, in their countless trillions, added their own work patiently over the billions of years. 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. |
| 1581 |
Don't spoil it." Genarr was indeed convinced that Marlene was enjoying herself. Somehow he was, too. Marlene was running upstream along the brook's edge. Genarr felt no great urgency to follow her. 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. For a moment, he could not tell what she was doing. He just stared at her in the pink light of Nemesis. Then he made it out. She was unhitching her helmet and was taking it off. Now she was working at removing the rest of her E-suit. He had to stop this! |
| 1582 |
"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. 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. |
| 1583 |
He looked at the other three (two men and one woman) almost furtively. He knew them to talk to, and had talked to them frequently. They were all young. The oldest was Chao-Li Wu, who was thirty-eight and a hyperspacialist. Then there was Henry Jarlow, who was thirty-five, and Merry Blankowitz, the baby of the team, twenty-seven years old and with the ink still damp on her doctor's diploma. Wendel, at fifty-five, was ancient by comparison, but she was the inventor, the designer, the demigoddess of the flight. 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. |
| 1584 |
She had once tried to listen to a recording entitled "Noises of Earth," had winced at it, and had quickly had enough. But here on Erythro, there was a wonderful silence. Marlene came to the creek, and the water moved past her with a soft bubbly sound. She picked up a jagged pebble and tossed it into the water and there was a small splash. Sounds were not forbidden on Erythro; they were merely doled out as occasional adornments that served to make the surrounding silence more precious. She stamped her foot on the soft clay at the creek's edge. She heard a small dull thump, and there was the vague impression of a footprint. She bent down, cupped some water in her hand, and tossed it over the soil in front of her. It moistened and darkened in spots, crimson showing against pink. She added more water and finally placed her right shoe on the dark spot, pressing down. When she lifted her shoe, there was a deeper footprint there. There were occasional rocks in the creek bed and she used them as stepping-stones to cross the water. Marlene kept on, walking vigorously, swinging her arms, taking in deep breaths of air. She knew very well that the oxygen percentage was somewhat lower than it was on Rotor. If she ran, she would quickly grow tired, but she lacked the impulse to run. If she ran, she would use up her world more rapidly. She wanted to look at everything! She looked back and the mound of the Dome was visible, especially the bubble that housed the astronomical instruments. That irritated her. She wanted to be far enough away so that she could turn around and see the horizon as a perfect — if irregular — circle, with no intrusion of any sign of humanity (except herself) anywhere. (Should she call the Dome? Should she tell her mother she would be out of sight for a little while? No, they would just argue. They could receive her carrier wave. They would be able to tell that she was alive, well, and moving around. If they called her, she decided, she would ignore them. Really! |
| 1585 |
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. Was it some dim atavistic memory of Earth? Was there a feeling for a huge endless world in her genes; a longing that a small, artificial, turning city-in-space could not fulfill? How could that be? Earth was surely different from Erythro in every possible way but the similarity of size. And if Earth were in her genes, why wouldn't it be in the genes of every human being? But there must be some explanation. Marlene shook her head as though to clear it and whirled around and around as if she were in the midst of endless space. Strange that Erythro didn't seem barren. On Rotor, you could see acres of grain and orchards of fruit trees, and a haze of green and amber, and the straight-line irregularity of human structures. Here on Erythro, however, you saw only the rolling ground, interspersed with rocks of all sizes, as though strewn carelessly by some giant hand-strange, brooding silent shapes, with rivulets of water, here and there, flowing around and among them. |
| 1586 |
"Why was he reluctant?" "He said he once suggested the possibility to you, and you told him not to be a fool." "Did I? And what has convinced him that I'm never wrong? I'll listen to it now and if it's a good idea, I'll break his neck for not forcing it on me earlier." And she hurried out. 72. Fisher could only wait during the day and a half that followed. They all ate together as they always did, but silently. Fisher did not know if any of them slept. He slept only in snatches, and woke to renewed despair. How long can we go on like this? he thought on the second day, as he looked at the beauty of that unattainable bright dot in the sky that, so brief a time ago, had warmed him and lighted his way on Earth. Sooner or later, they would die. Modern space technology would prolong life. Recycling was quite efficient. Even food would last a long time if they were willing to accept the tasteless algae cake they would end up with. The micro-fusion motors would dribble out energy for a long time, too. But surely no one would want to prolong life through the full time that the ship would make possible. With a lingering, dragging, hopeless, lonely death finally certain, the rational way out would be to use the adjustable de-metabolizers. That was the preferred method for suicide on Earth; why should it not be on board ship as well? You could — if you wished — adjust the dose for a full day of reasonably normal life, live it out as joyously as you could — a known last day. At the end of the day, you would grow naturally sleepy. You would yawn and release your hold on wakefulness, passing into a peaceful sleep of restful dreams. The sleep would slowly deepen, the dreams would slowly fade, and you would not wake up. No kinder death had ever been invented. And then, Tessa, just before 5 P. M., ship-time, on the second day after the transition that had curved instead of being straight, burst into the room. Her eyes were wild and she was breathing hard. Her dark hair, which, in the last year had become liberally salted with gray, was mussed. |
| 1587 |
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. People liked to look at shapely bodies and turned up their noses at shapely minds. Why? But here in Erythro with no people, she could take her clothes off whenever it was mild and be free of them. There'd be no one to point fingers or laugh at her. In fact, she could do whatever she wanted because she had a whole comfortable world, an empty world, an all-alone world, to surround her and envelop her like a huge soft blanket enclosing her and — just silence. She could feel herself letting go. Just silence. Her mind whispered it, so that even that would interfere as little as possible. Silence. And she sat upright. Silence? But she had come out to hear the voice again. And not scream this time. Not be afraid. Where was the voice? As though she had called it, as though she had whistled it up "Marlene!" Her heart gave a little jump. She held herself firm. She mustn't make any sign of fright or disturbance. She simply looked around, and then said, very calmly, "Where are you, please?" "It is not — necery-necessary to vi-vibrate the air-talk." The voice was Aurinel's, but it didn't speak like Aurinel at all. |
| 1588 |
I'm the only one who hasn't spoken and if we're going to be democratic, I would like to take my turn on the floor. May I, Captain?" "Go ahead," said Wendel, her right hand clenching and unclenching as though it just longed to grab someone by the throat. Fisher said, "Just about seven and a half centuries ago, Christopher Columbus sailed westward from Spain and, eventually, discovered America, though he himself never knew that that was what he had done. En route, he made the discovery that the deviation of the magnetic compass from the true north, the so-called 'magnetic declination,' changed with longitude. This was an important finding and was, in fact, the first purely scientific discovery made in the course of a sea voyage. "Now, how many know that Columbus discovered the variation of magnetic declination? 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. |
| 1589 |
Pitt had then put the question: Would the Settlements come to Nemesis? The answer was no. By that time, hyper-assistance would be far more efficient, far cheaper. The Settlements would know more about the nearer stars — which of them had planets, and what kind. They would not bother with a red dwarf star, but would head out for the Sun-like stars. And that would leave Earth itself, which would be desperate. Afraid of space, clearly degenerate already, and sinking farther into slime and misery as a thousand years passed and the doom of Nemesis became apparent, what would they do? They could not undertake long trips. They were Earthpeople. Surfacebound. They would have to wait for Nemesis to get reasonably close. They could not hope to go anywhere else. Pitt had the vision of a ramshackle world trying to find security in the more tightly held system of Nemesis, trying to find refuge in a star with a system built tightly enough together to hold in place while it was destroying that of the Sun it passed. It was a terrible scenario, and yet inevitable. Why could not Nemesis have been receding from the Sun? How everything would be changed. The discovery of Nemesis would have become somewhat less likely with time and, if the discovery came to pass, Nemesis would become ever less desirable — and less possible — as a place of refuge. If it were receding, Earth would not even need a refuge. But that was not the way it was. The Earthmen would come; ragtag degenerating Earthmen of every variety of makeshift and abnormal culture, flooding in. What could the Rotorians do but destroy them while they were still in space? But would they have a Janus Pitt to show them that there was no choice but that? Would they have Janus Pitts, between now and then, to make sure that Rotor had the weapons and the resolution to prepare for this and to do it when the time came? But the computer's analysis was, after all, a deceitfully optimistic one. The discovery of N emesis by the Solar System must come about within a thousand years, said the computer. |
| 1590 |
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? Was there an alternative? He would have to think of it. Ridiculous! How much easier it would all have been if that girl Marlene had only done something as simple as getting the Plague. In a spasm of irritation at Marlene's refusal to do so, he picked up the report on the energy source again. Look at that! A little puff of energy and they bothered him with it. He wasn't going to stand for it. He punched a memo into the computer for instant transmission. He was not to be bothered by minutiae. |
| 1591 |
How odd, thought Marlene. This giant life-form must never, before the coming of Rotor, have known that anything live existed other than itself. Her questions and sensations did not have to exist entirely in her mind. Erythro would rise before her sometimes, like thin gray smoke, consolidating into a wraithlike human figure wavering at the edges. There was always, about it, a flowing feeling. She could not actually see that, but she sensed, beyond doubt, that millions of invisible cells were leaving each second and immediately being replaced by others. No one prokaryote cell could exist for long out of its water film, so that each was only evanescently part of the figure, but the figure itself was as permanent as it wished to be, and never lost its identity. Erythro did not take Aurinel's form again. It had gathered, without being told, that that was disturbing. Its appearance was neutral now, changing slightly with the vagaries of Marlene's own thought. Erythro could follow the delicate changes of her mind pattern far better, she decided, than she herself could, and the figure adjusted to that, looking more like some figure in her mind's eye at one moment, and then as she tried to focus on it and identify it, it would shift gently into something else. Occasionally, she could catch glimpses: the curve of her mother's cheek, Uncle Siever's strong nose, bits of the girls and boys she had met at school. It was an interactive symphony. It was not so much a conversation between them as a mental ballet she could not describe, something that was infinitely soothing, infinite in variety — partly changing appearance — partly changing voice — partly changing thought. It was a conversation in so many dimensions that the possibility of going back to communication that consisted only of speech left her feeling flat, lifeless. Her gift of sensing by body language flowered into something she had never imagined earlier. Thoughts could be exchanged far more swiftly — and deeply — than by the coarse crudeness of speech. |
| 1592 |
Erythro explained — filled her, rather — with the shock of encountering other minds. Minds. Plural. One more might have been grasped easily. Another world. Another mind. But to encounter many minds, crowding on each other, each different, overlapping in small space. Unthinkable. The thoughts that permeated Marlene's mind as Erythro expressed itself could be expressed only distantly and unsatisfactorily in words. Behind those words, overflowing and drowning them, were the emotions, the feelings, the neuronic vibrations that shattered Erythro into a rearrangement of concepts. It had experimented with the minds — felt them. Not felt as human beings would mean "felt," but something else entirely that could be approached very distantly by that human word and concept. And some of the minds crumpled, decayed, became unpleasant. Erythro ceased to feel minds at random, but sought out minds that would withstand the contact. "And you found me?" said Marlene. "I found you." "But why? Why did you look for me?" she asked eagerly. The figure wavered and turned smokier. "Just to find you." It was no answer. "Why do you want me to be with you?" The figure started to fade and the thought was a fugitive one. "Just to be with me." And it was gone. Only its image was gone. Marlene felt its protection still, its warm enclosure. But why had it disappeared? Had she displeased it with her questions? She heard a sound. On an empty world it is possible to catalogue the sounds briefly, for there aren't many. There is the noise of flowing water, and the more delicate moan of blowing air. There are the predictable noises you make yourself, whether the falling of a footstep, the rustle of clothing, or the whistle of breath. Marlene heard something that was none of these, and turned in the direction of it. Over the rocky outcropping on her left, there appeared the head of a man. Her first thought, of course, was that it was someone from the Dome who had come to get her, and she felt a surge of anger. |
| 1593 |
Why would they still be searching for her? She would refuse to wear a wave-emitter from now on, and they would then have no way of locating her except by blind search. But she did not recognize the face and surely she had met everyone in the Dome by now. She might not know the individual names or anything about them, but she would know, when she saw anyone from the Dome, that she had seen that face before. She had not seen this new face anywhere in the Dome. Those eyes were staring at her. The mouth was a little open, as if the person were panting. And then whoever it was was topping the rise and running to her. She faced him. The protection she felt around her was strong. She was not afraid. He stopped ten feet away, staring, leaning forward as though he had reached a barrier he could not penetrate, one that deprived him of the ability to advance farther. Finally, he said in a strangled voice, "Roseanne!" 89. Marlene stared at him, observing carefully. His micro-movements were eager and radiated a sense of ownership: possession, closeness,... mine, mine, mine. She took a step backward. How was that possible? Why should he — A dim memory of a holoimage she had once seen when she was a little girl And finally, she could deny it no more. However impossible it sounded, however unimaginable She huddled within the protective blanket and said, "Father?" He rushed at her as though he wanted to seize her in his arms and she stepped away again. He paused, swaying, then put one hand to his forehead as though fighting dizziness. He said, "Marlene. I meant to say Marlene." He pronounced it incorrectly, Marlene noticed. Two syllables. But that was right for him. How would he know? A second man came up and stood next to him. He had straight black hair, a wide face, narrow eyes, a sallow complexion. Marlene had never seen a man who quite looked like him. She gaped a little and had to make an effort to close her mouth. The second man said to the first in a soft incredulous voice. "Is this your daughter, Fisher?" Marlene's eyes widened. |
| 1594 |
The search will be on for Sun-like stars that happen to be circled by at least one Earth-like planet. Nemesis will be put to one side. "Rotor, which has, till now, apparently made a fetish of secrecy, to keep others away and to reserve this stellar system for itself, need do so no more. Not only will this system be unwanted by other settlements, but Rotor itself may no longer want it. It may choose, if it so desires, to search out Sun-like stars for itself. There are billions of such stars in the spiral arms of the Galaxy. "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. |
| 1595 |
Andrew Harlan stepped into the kettle. Its sides were perfectly round and it fit snugly inside a vertical shaft composed of widely spaced rods that shimmered into an unseeable haze six feet above Harlan's head. Harlan set the controls and moved the smoothly working starting lever. The kettle did not move. Harlan did not expect it to. He expected no movement; neither up nor down, left nor right, forth nor back. Yet the spaces between the rods had melted into a gray blankness which was solid to the touch, though nonetheless immaterial for all that. And there was the little stir in his stomach, the faint (psychosomatic?) touch of dizziness, that told him that all the kettle contained, including himself, was rushing upwhen through Eternity. He had boarded the kettle in the 575th Century, the base of operations assigned him two years earlier. At the time the 575th had been the farthest upwhen he had ever traveled. Now he was moving upwhen to the 2456th Century. Under ordinary circumstances he might have felt a little lost at the prospect. His native Century was in the far downwhen, the 95th Century, to be exact. The 95th was a Century stiffly restrictive of atomic power, faintly rustic, fond of natural wood as a structural material, exporters of certain types of distilled potables to nearly everywhen and importers of clover seed. Although Harlan had not been in the 95th since he entered special training and became a Cub at the age of fifteen, there was always that feeling of loss when one moved outwhen from "home." At the 2456th he would be nearly two hundred forty millennia from his birthwhen and that is a sizable distance even for a hardened Eternal. Under ordinary circumstances all this would be so. But right now Harlan was in poor mood to think of anything but the fact that his documents were heavy in his pocket and his plan heavy on his heart. He was a little frightened, a little tense, a little confused. It was his hands acting by themselves that brought the kettle to the proper halt at the proper Century. |
| 1596 |
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. To concern oneself with the mystique of Time-travel, rather than with the simple fact of it, was the mark of the Cub and newcomer to Eternity. He paused again at the infinitely thin curtain of non-Space and nonTime which separated him from Eternity in one way and from ordinary Time in another. This would be a completely new section of Eternity for him. He knew about it in a rough way, of course, having checked upon it in the Temporal Handbook. Still, there was no substitute for actual appearance and he steeled himself for the initial shock of adjustment. He adjusted the controls, a simple matter in passing into Eternity (and a very complicated one in passing into Time, a type of passage which was correspondingly less frequent). He stepped through the curtain and found himself squinting at the brilliance. Automatically he threw up his hand to shield his eyes. |
| 1597 |
Harlan felt his world settle. "If you'll come with me now," said Voy. Harlan followed through empty corridors that, Harlan knew, must moments ago have been a riot of made light and reflection, up a ramp, through an anteroom, into an office. In all the short journey no human being had been visible. Harlan was so used to that, took it so for granted, that he would have been surprised, almost shocked, if a glimpse of a human figure hurrying away had caught his eyes. No doubt the news had spread that a Technician was coming through. Even Voy kept his distance and when, accidentally, Harlan's hand had brushed Voy's sleeve, Voy shrank away with a visible start. Harlan was faintly surprised at the touch of bitterness he felt at all this. He had thought the shell he had grown about his soul was thicker, more efficiently insensitive than that. If he was wrong, if his shell had worn thinner, there could only be one reason for that. Noys! Sociologist Kantor Voy leaned forward toward the Technician in what seemed a friendly enough fashion, but Harlan noted automatically that they were seated on opposite sides of the long axis of a fairly large table. Voy said, "I am pleased to have a Technician of your reputation interest himself in our little problem here." "Yes," said Harlan with the cold impersonality people would expect of him. "It has its points of interest." (Was he impersonal enough? Surely his real motives must be apparent, his guilt be spelled out in beads of sweat on his forehead.) He removed from an inner pocket the foiled summary of the projected Reality Change. It was the very copy which had been sent to the Allwhen Council a month earlier. Through his relationship with Senior Computer Twissell (the Twissell, himself) Harlan had had little trouble in getting his hands on it. Before unrolling the foil, letting it peel off onto the table top where it would be held by a soft paramagnetic field, Harlan paused a split moment. The molecular film that covered the table was subdued but was not zero. |
| 1598 |
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. How did "Basic Principles" start? "The life of an Eternal may be divided into four parts ..." It all worked out neatly, yet it had all changed for him, and what was broken could not be made whole again. Yet he had gone faithfully through each of the four parts of an Eternal's life. First, there was the period of fifteen years in which he was not an Eternal at all, but only an inhabitant of Time. Only a human being out of Time, a Timer, could become an Eternal; no one could be born into the position. At the age of fifteen he was chosen by a careful process of elimination and winnowing, the nature of which he had no conception. of at the time. He was taken beyond the veil of Eternity after a last agonized farewell to his family. (Even then it was made clear to him that whatever else happened he would never return. The true reason for that he was not to learn till long afterward.) Once within Eternity, he spent ten years in school as a Cub, and then graduated to enter his third period as Observer. |
| 1599 |
It was only after that that he became a Specialist and a true Eternal. The fourth and last part of the Eternal's life: Timer, Cub, Observer and Specialist. He, Harlan, had gone through it all so neatly. He might say, successfully. He could remember, so clearly, the moment that Cubhood was done, the moment they became independent members of Eternity, the moment when, even though un-Specialized, they still rated the legal title of "Eternal." He could remember it. School done, Cubhood over, he was standing with the five who completed training with him, hands clasped in the small of his back, legs a trifle apart, eyes front, listening. Educator Yarrow was at a desk talking to them. Harlan could remember Yarrow well: a small, intense man, with ruddy hair in disarray, freckled forearms, and a look of loss in his eyes. (It wasn't uncommon, this look of loss in the eyes of an Eternal — the loss of home and roots, the unadmitted and unadmittable longing for the one Century he could never see.) Harlan could not remember Yarrow's exact words, of course, but the substance of it remained sharp. Yarrow said, in substance, "You will be Observers now. It isn't a highly regarded position. Specialists look upon it as a boy's job. Maybe you Eternals" (he deliberately paused after that word to give each man a chance to straighten his back and brighten at the glory of it) "think so too. If so, you are fools who don't deserve to be Observers. "The Computers would have no Computing to do, Life-Plotters no lives to Plot, Sociologists no societies to profile; none of the Specialists would have anything to do, if it weren't for the Observer. I know you've heard this said before, but I want you to be very firm and clear in your mind about it. "It will be you youngsters who will go out into Time, under the most strenuous conditions, to bring back facts. Cold, objective facts uncolored by your own opinions and likings, you understand. Facts accurate enough to be fed into Computing machines. Facts definite enough to make the social equations stand up. |
| 1600 |
Facts honest enough to form a basis for Reality Changes. "And remember this, too. Your period as Observer is not something to get through with as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. 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. 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. |
| 1601 |
Harlan had grown actually fond of those odd, perverted Centuries that lay, not only before the beginning of Eternity in the 27th, but even before the invention of the Temporal Field, itself, in the 24th. He had used old books and periodicals in his studies. He had even traveled far downwhen to the earliest Centuries of Eternity, when he could get permission, to consult better sources. For over fifteen years he had managed to collect a remarkable library of his own, almost all in print-on-paper. There was a volume by a man called H. G. Wells, another by a man named W. Shakespeare, some tattered histories. Best of all there was a complete set of bound volumes of a Primitive news weekly that took up inordinate space but that he could not, out of sentiment, bear to reduce to micro-film. Occasionally he would lose himself in a world where life was life and death, death; where a man made his decisions irrevocably; where evil could not be prevented, nor good promoted, and the Battle of Waterloo, having been lost, was really lost for good and all. There was even a scrap of poetry he treasured which stated that a moving finger having once written could never be lured back to unwrite. And then it was difficult, almost a shock, to return his thoughts to Eternity, and to a universe where Reality was something flexible and evanescent, something men such as himself could hold in the palms of their hands and shake into better shape.) The illusion of St. Nicholas shattered when Hobbe Finge spoke to him in a brisk, matter-of-fact way. "You can start in tomorrow with a routine screening of current. Reality. I want it good, thorough, and to the point. There will be xio slackness permitted. Your first spatio-temporal chart will be ready for you tomorrow morning. Got it?" "Yes, Computer," said Harlan. He decided as early as that that he and Assistant Computer Hobbe Finge would not get along, and he regretted it. The next morning Harlan got his chart in intricately punched patterns as they emerged from the Computaplex. |
| 1602 |
He used a pocket decoder to translate them into Standard Intertemporal in his anxiety to make not even the smallest mistake at the very beginning. Of course, he had reached the stage where he could read the perforations direct. The chart told him where and when in the world of the 482nd Century he might go and where he might not; what he could do and what be could not; what he must avoid at all costs. His presence must impinge only upon those places and times where it would not endanger Reality. The 482nd was not a comfortable Century for him. It was not like his own austere and conformist homewhen. It was an era without ethics or principles, as he was accustomed to think of such. It was hedonistic, materialistic, more than a little matriarchal. It was the only era (he checked this in the records in the most painstaking way) in which ectogenic birth flourished and, at its peak, 40 per cent of its women gave eventual birth by merely contributing a fertilized ovum to the ovaria. Marriage was made and unmade by mutual consent and was not recognized legally as anything more than a personal agreement without binding force. Union for the sake of childbearing was, of course, carefully differentiated from the social functions of marriage and was arranged on purely eugenic principles. In a hundred ways Harlan thought the society sick and therefore hungered for a Reality Change. More than once it occurred to him that his own presence in the Century, as a man not of that time, could fork its history. If his disturbing presence could only be made disturbing enough at some key point, a different branch of possibility would become real, a branch in which millions of pleasure-seeking women would find themselves transformed into true, pure-hearted mothers. They would be in another Reality with all the memories that belonged with it, unable to tell, dream, or fancy that they had ever been anything else. Unfortunately, to do that, he would have to step outside the bounds of the spatio-temporal chart and that was unthinkable. |
| 1603 |
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. 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. |
| 1604 |
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. 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. I give you that hint in case you ever become a smoker. It is all very sad. Last week, I was stuck in the 123rd for two days. No smoking. I mean, even in the Section of Eternity devoted to the 123rd. The Eternals there have picked up the mores. If I had lit a cigarette it would have been like the sky collapsing. |
| 1605 |
He lived in the 24th, but Eternity didn't start till late in the 27th. Inventing the Field isn't the same as constructing Eternity, you know, and the rest of the 24th didn't have the slightest inkling of what Mallansohn's invention signified." "He was ahead of his generation, then?" "Very much so. He not only invented the Temporal Field, but he described the basic relationships that made Eternity possible and predicted almost every aspect of it except for the Reality Change. Quite closely, too — but I think we're pulling to a halt, Cooper. After you." They stepped out. Harlan had never seen Senior Computer Laban Twissell angry before. People always said that he was incapable of any emotion, that he was an unsouled fixture of Eternity to the point where he had forgotten the exact number of his homewhen Century. People said that at an early age his heart had atrophied and that a hand computer similar to the model he carried always in his trouser pocket had taken its place. Twissell did nothing to deny these rumors. In fact most people guessed that he believed them himself. So even while Harlan bent before the force of the angry blast that struck him, he had room in his mind to be amazed at the fact that Twissell could display anger. He wondered if Twissell would be mortified in some calmer aftermath to realize that his hand-computer heart had betrayed him by exposing itself as only a poor thing of muscle and valves subject to the twists of emotion. Twissell said, in part, his old voice creaking, "Father Time, boy, are you on the Allwhen Council? Do you give the orders around here? Do you tell me what to do or do I tell you what to do? Are you making arrangements for all kettle trips this Section? Do we all come to you for permission now?" He interrupted himself with occasional exclamations of "Answer me," then continued pouring more questions into the boiling interrogative caldron. He said finally, "If you ever get above yourself this way again, I'll have you on plumbing repair and for good. |
| 1606 |
He held the fate of millions in his finger tips, and if one must walk lonely because of it, one could also walk proudly. So he could stare coldly at the Communications man behind the entry desk of the 482nd and announce himself in clipped syllables: "Andrew Harlan, Technician, reporting to Computer Finge for temporary assignment to the 482nd," disregarding the quick glance from the middle-aged man he faced. It was what some people called the "Technician glance," a quick, involuntary sidelong peek at the rose-red shoulder emblem of the Technician, then an elaborate attempt not to look at it again. Harlan stared at the other's shoulder emblem. It was not the yellow of the Computer, the green of the Life-Plotter, the blue of the Sociologist, or the white of the Observer. It was not the Specialist's solid color at all. It was simply a blue bar on white. The man was Communications, a subbranch of Maintenance, not a Specialist at all. And he gave the "Technician glance" too. Harlan said a little sadly, "Well?" Communications said quickly, "I'm ringing Computer Finge, sir." Harlan remembered the 482nd as solid and massive, but now it seemed almost squalid. Harlan had grown used to the glass and porcelain of the 575th, to its fetish of cleanliness. He had grown accustomed to a world of whiteness and clarity, broken by sparse patches of light pastel. The heavy plaster swirls of the 482nd, its splashy pigments, its areas of painted metal were almost repulsive. Even Finge seemed different, less than life-size, somewhat. Two years earlier, to Observer Harlan, Finge's every gesture had seemed sinister and powerful. Now, from the lofty and isolated heights of Technicianhood, the man seemed pathetic and lost. Harlan watched him as he leafed through a sheaf of foils and got ready to look up, with the air of someone who is beginning to think he has made his visitor wait the duly required amount of time. Finge was from an energy-centered Century in the 600's. Twissell had told him that and it explained a good deal. |
| 1607 |
In a way, it's a waste of talent to ask a Technician to do a job of Observation, but your previous Observations, for clarity and insight, were perfect. We need that again. Now I'll just sketch in a few details... ." What those details were Harlan was not to find out just then. Finge spoke, but the door opened, and Harlan did not hear him. He stared at the person who entered. It was not that Harlan had never seen a girl in Eternity before. Never was too strong a word. Rarely, yes, but not never. But a girl such as this! And in Eternity! Harlan had seen many women in his passages through Time, but in Time they were only objects to him, like walls and balls, barrows and harrows, kittens and mittens. They were facts to be Observed. In Eternity a girl was a different matter. And one like this! She was dressed in the style of the upper classes of the 482nd, which meant transparent sheathing and not very much else above the waist, and flimsy, knee-length trousers below. The latter, while opaque enough, hinted delicately at gluteal curves. Her hair was glossily dark and shoulder length, her lips redly penciled thin above and full below in an exaggerated pout. Her upper eyelids and her ear lobes were tinted a pale rose and the rest of her youthful (almost girlish) face was a startlingly milky white. Jeweled pendants descended forward from mid-shoulder to tinkle now this side, now that of the graceful breasts to which they drew attention. She took her seat at a desk in the corner of Finge's office, lifting her eyelashes only once to sweep her dark glance across Harlan's face. When Harlan heard Finge's voice again, the Computer was saying, "You'll get all this in an official report and meanwhile you can have your old office and sleeping quarters." Harlan found himself outside Finge's office without quite remembering the details of his leaving. Presumably he had walked out. The emotion within him that was easiest to recognize was anger. By Time, Finge ought not to be allowed to do this. |
| 1608 |
Of course his spatio-temporal charts had never demanded or even permitted him to observe the aristocracy from within. What the reasons for that might have been was beyond the purview of an Observer. He was impatient with himself at feeling curiosity concerning that now. During those three days he had caught glimpses of the girl, Noys Lambent, four times. At first he had been aware only of her clothes and her ornaments. Now he noticed that she was five feet six in height, half a head shorter than himself, yet slim enough and with a carriage erect and graceful enough to give an impression of height. She was older than she first seemed, approaching thirty perhaps, certainly over twenty-five. She was quiet and reserved, smiled at him once when he passed her in the corridor, then lowered her eyes. Harlan drew aside to avoid touching her, then walked on feeling angry. By the close of the third day Harlan was beginning to feel that his duty as an Eternal left him only one course of action. Doubtless her position was a comfortable one for herself. Doubtless Finge was within the letter of the law. Yet Finge's indiscretion in the matter, his carelessness certainly went against the spirit of the law, and something should be done about it. Harlan decided that, after all, there wasn't a man in Eternity he disliked quite as much as Finge. The excuses he had found for the man only a few days before vanished. On the morning of the fourth day Harlan asked for and received permission to see Finge privately. He walked in with a determined step and, to his own surprise, made his point instantly. "Computer Finge, I suggest that Miss Lambent be returned to Time." Finge's eyes narrowed. He nodded toward a chair, placed clasped hands under his soft, round chin, and showed some of his teeth. "Well, sit down. Sit down. You find Miss Lambert incompetent? Unsuitable?" "As to her incompetence and unsuitability, Computer, I cannot say. It depends on the uses to which she is put, and I have put her to none. |
| 1609 |
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. 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. In any case it molded itself to his body as he lay down, firm when he lay still, yielding when he moved or turned. |
| 1610 |
Reluctantly he confessed the attraction of such things, and he accepted the wisdom which caused each Section of Eternity to live on the median scale of its Century rather than at its most comfortable level. In that way it could maintain contact with the problems and "feel" of the Century, without succumbing to too close an identification with a sociological extreme. It is easy, thought Harlan, that first evening, to live with aristocrats. And just before he fell asleep, he thought of Noys. He dreamed he was on the Allwhen Council, fingers clasped austerely before him. He was looking down on a small, a very small, Finge, listening in terror to the sentence that was casting him out of Eternity to perpetual Observation of one of the unknown Centuries of the far, far upwhen. The somber words of exile were coming from Harlan's own mouth, and immediately to his right sat Noys Lambent. He hadn't noticed her at first, but his eyes kept sliding to his right, and his words faltered. Did no one else see her? The rest of the members of the Council looked steadily forward, except for Twissell. He turned to smile at Harlan, looking through the girl as though she weren't there. Harlan wanted to order her away, but words were no longer coming out of his mouth. He tried to beat at the girl, but his arm moved sluggishly and she did not move. Her flesh was cold. Finge was laughing — louder — louder — — and it was Noys Lambent laughing. Harlan opened his eyes to bright sunlight and stared at the girl in horror for a moment before he remembered where she was and where he was. She said, "You were moaning and beating the pillow. Were you having a bad dream?" Harlan did not answer. She said, "Your bath is ready. So are your clothes. I've arranged to have you join the gathering tonight. It felt queer to step back into my ordinary life after being in Eternity so long." Harlan felt acutely disturbed at her easy flow of words. He said, "You didn't tell them who I was, I hope." "Of course not." Of course not! |
| 1611 |
But she said, "I brought you another drink. You seemed to enjoy one at the gathering and one isn't enough. Especially if you're going to be working." He noticed the small Mekkano behind her, gliding in on a smooth force-field. He had eaten sparingly that evening, picking lightly at dishes concerning which he had reported in full in past Observations but which (except for fact-searching nibbles) he had thus far refrained from eating. Against his will, he had liked them. Against his will, he had enjoyed the foaming, light green, peppermint-flavored drink (not quite alcoholic, something else, rather) that was currently fashionable. It had not existed in the Century two physioyears earlier, prior to the latest Reality Change. He took the second drink from the Mekkano with an austere nod of thanks to Noys. Now why had a Reality Change which had had virtually no physical effect on the Century brought a new drink into existence? Well, he wasn't a Computer, so there was no use asking himself that question. 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. |
| 1612 |
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. 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. |
| 1613 |
He had only to move his hand to feel the warmth and softness of her flesh, and he dared not do that, lest he wake her out of whatever dreaming she might have. It was as though she were dreaming for the two of them, dreaming herself and himself and all that had happened, and as though her waking would drive it all from existence. It was a thought that seemed a piece of those other queer, unusual thoughts he had experienced just before ... Those had been strange thoughts, coming to him at a moment between sense and nonsense. He tried to recapture them and could not. Yet suddenly it was very important that he recapture them. For although he could not remember the details, he could remember that, for just an instant, he had understood something. He was not certain what that something was, but there had been the unearthly clarity of the half-asleep, when more than mortal eye and mind seems suddenly to come to life. His anxiety grew. Why couldn't he remember? So much had been in his grasp. For the moment even the sleeping girl beside him receded into the hinterland of his thoughts. He thought: If I follow the thread ... I was thinking of Reality and Eternity ... 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. |
| 1614 |
Having done that, he re-entered Eternity in a way that seemed as prosaic to himself as passage through any door might be. Had there been a Timer watching, it would have seemed to him that Harlan had simply disappeared. The small container stayed where he put it. It played no immediate role in world history. A man's hand, hours later, reached for it but did not find it. A search revealed it half an hour later still, but in the interim a force-field had blanked out and a man's temper had been lost. A decision which would have remained unmade in the previous Reality was now made in anger. A meeting did not take place; a man who would have died lived a year longer, under other circumstances; another who would have lived died somewhat sooner. The ripples spread wider, reaching their maxium in the 2481st, which was twenty-five Centuries upwhen from the Touch. The intensity of the Reality Change declined thereafter. Theorists pointed out that nowhere to the infinite upwhen could the Change ever become zero, but by fifty Centuries upwhen from the Touch the Change had become too small to detect by the finest Computing, and that was the practical limit. Of course no human being in Time could ever possibly be aware of any Reality Change having taken place. Mind changed as well as matter and only Eternals could stand outside it all and see the change. Sociologist Voy was staring at the bluish scene in the 2481st, where earlier there had been all the activity of a busy space-port. He barely looked up when Harlan entered. He barely mumbled something that might have been a greeting. A change had indeed blasted the space-port. Its shininess was gone; what buildings there stood were not the grand creations they had been. A space-ship rusted. There were no people. There was no motion. Harlan allowed himself a small smile that flickered for a moment, then vanished. It was M. D. R. all right. Maximum Desired Response. And it had happened at once. The Change did not necessarily take place at the precise moment of the Technician's Touch. |
| 1615 |
It tested its surroundings and was drawn back. In the fulfillment of his function an Observer had no individuality of his own; he was not really a man. Almost automatically Harlan began his narration of the events he had left out of his report. He did it with the trained memory of the Observer, reciting the conversations with word-for-word accuracy, re constructing the tone of voice and cast of countenance. He did it lovingly, for in the telling he lived it again, and almost forgot, in the process, that a combination of Finge's probing and his own healing sense of duty was driving him into an admission of guilt. It was only as he approached the end result of that first long conversation that he faltered and the shell of his Observer's objectivity showed cracks. He was saved from further details by the hand that Finge suddenly raised and by the Computer's sharp, edgy voice. "Thank you. It is enough. You were about to say that you made love to the woman." Harlan grew angry. What Finge said was the literal truth, but Finge's tone of voice made it sound lewd, coarse, and, worse than that, commonplace. Whatever else it was, or might be, it was not commonplace. Harlan had an explanation for Finge's attitude, for his anxious cross-examination, for his breaking off the verbal report at the moment he did. 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. |
| 1616 |
He paused to say, with a sort of grim gaiety, "Of course, if you had her now, Harlan, if you had her now, you could enjoy her. You could keep your liaison and make it formal. That is, if you had her now. But the Change will come soon, Harlan, and after that, you will not have her. What a pity, the now does not last, even in Eternity, eh, Harlan?" Harlan no longer looked at him. Finge had won after all and was leaving in clear and leering possession of the field. Harlan stared unseeingly at his own toes, and when he looked up Finge was gone — whether five seconds earlier or fifteen minutes Harlan could not have said. Hours had passed nightmarishly and Harlan felt trapped in the prison of his mind. All that Finge had said was so true, so transparently true. Harlan's Observer mind could look back upon the relationship of himself and Noys, that short, unusual relationship, and it took on a different texture. It wasn't a case of instant infatuation. How could he have believed it was? Infatuation for a man like himself? Of course not. Tears stung his eyes and he felt ashamed. How obvious it was that the affair was a case of cool calculation. The girl had certain undeniable physical assets and no ethical principles to keep her from using them. So she used them and that had nothing to do with Andrew Harlan as a person. He simply represented her distorted view of Eternity and what it meant. Automatically Harlan's long fingers caressed the volumes in his small bookshelf. He took one out and, unseeingly, opened it. The print blurred. The faded colors of the illustrations were ugly, meaningless blotches. Why had Finge troubled to tell him all this? In the strictest sense he ought not to have. An Observer, or anyone acting as Observer, ought never to know the ends attained by his Observation. It removed him by so much from the ideal position of the objective non-human tool. It was to crush him, of course; to take a mean and jealous revenge! Harlan fingered the open page of the magazine. |
| 1617 |
He found himself staring at a duplication, in startling red, of a ground vehicle, similar to vehicles characteristic of the 45th, 182nd, 590th, and 984th Centuries, as well as of late Primitive times. It was a very common sort of affair with an internal-combustion motor. In the Primitive era natural petroleum fractions were the source of power and natural rubber cushioned the wheels. That was true of none of the later centuries, of course. Harlan had pointed that out to Cooper. He had made quite a point of it, and now his mind, as though longing to turn away from the unhappy present, drifted back to that moment. Sharp, irrelevant images filled the ache within Harlan. "These advertisements," he had said, "tell us more of Primitive times than the so-called news articles in the same magazine. The news articles assume a basic knowledge of the world it deals with. It uses terms it feels no necessity of explaining. What is a 'golf ball,' for instance?" Cooper had professed his ignorance readily. Harlan went on in the didactic tone he could scarcely avoid on occasions such as this. "We could deduce that it was a small pellet of some sort from the nature of the casual mentions it receives. We know that it is used in a game, if only because it is mentioned in an item under the heading 'Sport.' We can even make further deductions that it is hit by a long rod of some sort and that the object of the game is to drive the ball into a hole in the ground. But why bother with deduction and reasoning? Observe this advertisement! The object of it is only to induce readers to buy the ball, but in so doing we are presented with an excellent close-range portrait of one, with a section cut into it to show its construction." Cooper, coming from an era in which advertisement was not as wildly proliferative as it was in the later Centuries of Primitive times, found all this difficult to appreciate. He said, "Isn't it rather disgusting the way these people blow their own horn? Who would be fool enough to believe a person's boastings about his own products? |
| 1618 |
Would he admit defects? Is he likely to stop at any exaggeration?" Harlan, whose homewhen was middling fruitful in advertisement, raised tolerant eyebrows and merely said, "You'll have to accept that. It's their way and we never quarrel with the ways of any culture as long as it does not seriously harm mankind as a whole." But now Harlan's mind snapped back to his present situation and he was back in the present, staring at the loudmouthed, brassy advertisements in the news magazine. He asked himself in sudden excitement: Were the thoughts he had just experienced really irrelevant? Or was he tortuously finding a way out of the blackness and back to Noys? Advertisement! A device for forcing the unwilling into line. Did it matter to a ground-vehicle manufacturer whether a given individual felt an original or spontaneous desire for his product? If the prospect (that was the word) could be artificially persuaded or cajoled into feeling that desire and acting upon it, would that not be just as well? Then what did it matter if Noys loved him out of passion or out of calculation? Let them but be together long enough and she would grow to love him. He would make her love him and, in the end, love and not its motivation was what counted. He wished now he had read some of the novels out of Time that Finge had mentioned scornfully. Harlan's fists clenched at a sudden thought. If Noys had come to him, to Harlan, for immortality, it could only mean that she had not yet fulfilled the requirement for that gift. She could have made love to no Eternal previously. That meant that her relationship to Finge had been nothing more than that of secretary and employer. Otherwise what need would she have had for Harlan? Yet Finge surely must have tried — must have attempted... (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. |
| 1619 |
Then she must have refused him. He had had to use Harlan and Harlan had succeeded. It was for that reason that Finge had been driven into the jealous revenge of torturing Harlan with the knowledge that Noys's motivation had been a practical one, and that he could never have her. Yet Noys had refused Finge even with eternal life at stake and had accepted Harlan. She had that much of a choice and she had made it in Harlan's favor. 'So it wasn't calculation entirely. Emotion played a part. Harlan's thoughts were wild and jumbled, and grew more heated with every moment. He must have her, and now. Before any Reality Change. What was it Finge had said to him, jeering: The now does not last, even in Eternity. Doesn't it, though? Doesn't it? Harlan had known exactly what he must do. Finge's angry taunting had goaded him into a frame of mind where he was ready for crime and Finge's final sneer had, at least, inspired him with the nature of the deed he must commit. He had not wasted a moment after that. It was with excitement and even joy that he left his quarters, at all but a run, to commit a major crime against Eternity. 8 Crime No one had questioned him. No one had stopped him. There was that advantage, anyway, in the social isolation of a Technician. He went via the kettle channels to a door to Time and set its controls. There was the chance, of course, that someone would happen along on a legitimate errand and wonder why the door was in use. He hesitated, and then decided to stamp his seal on the marker. A sealed door would draw little attention. An unsealed door in active use would be a nine-day wonder. Of course, it might be Finge who stumbled upon the door. He would have to chance that. Noys was still standing as he had left her. Wretched hours (physiohours) had passed since Harlan had left the 482nd for a lonely Eternity, but he returned now to the same Time, within a matter of seconds, that he had left. Not a hair on Noys's head had stirred. She looked startled. "Did you forget something, Andrew?" Harlan stared at her hungrily, but made no move to touch her. |
| 1620 |
He said, "I am not afraid of anyone. I have ways of protecting myself. They don't imagine how much I know." 9 Interlude It was, looking back at it, an idyllic period that followed. A hundred things took place in those physioweeks, and all confused itself inextricably in Harlan's memory, later, making the period seem to have lasted much longer than it did. The one idyllic thing about it was, of course, the hours he could spend with Noys, and that cast a glow over everything else. Item One: At the 482nd he slowly packed his personal effects; his clothing and films, most of all his beloved and tenderly handled newsmagazine volumes out of the Primitive. Anxiously he supervised their return to his permanent station in the 575th. Finge was at his elbow as the last of it was lifted into the freight kettle by Maintenance men. Finge said, choosing his words with unerring triteness, "Leaving us, I see." His smile was broad, but his lips were carefully held together so that only the barest trace of teeth showed. He kept his hands clasped behind his back and his pudgy body teetered forward on the balls of his feet. Harlan did not look at his superior. He muttered a monotoned "Yes, sir." Finge said, "I will report to Senior Computer Twissell concerning the entirely satisfactory manner in which you performed your Observational duties in the 482nd." Harlan could not bring himself to utter even a sullen word of thanks. He remained silent. Finge went on, in a suddenly much lower voice, "I will not report, for the present, your recent attempt at violence against me." And although his smile remained and his glance remained mild, there was a relish of cruel satisfaction about him. Harlan looked up sharply and said, "As you wish, Computer." Item Two: He re-established himself at the 575th. He met Twissell almost at once. He found himself happy to see that little body, topped by that lined and gnomelike face. He was even happy to see the white cylinder nestling smokily between two stained fingers and being lifted rapidly toward Twissell's lips. |
| 1621 |
(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. Many of these last, Harlan knew, had been eliminated in Time and remained intact, as a product of human ingenuity, only in Eternity. Man had to be protected from his own too flourishing technical mind. That more than anything else. Not a physioyear passed but that somewhere in Time nuclear technology veered too close to the dangerous and had to be steered away. He returned to the library proper and to the shelves on mathematics and mathematical histories. His fingers skimmed across individual titles, and after some thought he took half a dozen from the shelves and signed them out. Item Five: Noys. That was the really important part of the interlude, and all the idyllic part. In his off-hours, when Cooper was gone, when he might ordinarily have been eating in solitude, reading in solitude, sleeping in solitude, waiting in solitude for the next day — he took to the kettles. |
| 1622 |
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. He froze! The sound had come from somewhere behind him, and in the startled moment during which he had not moved the lesser danger that it was a housebreaker occurred to him first and the greater danger of its being an investigating Eternal occurred second. It couldn't be a housebreaker. The entire period of the spatio-temporal chart, grace period and all, had been painstakingly cleared and chosen out of other similar periods of Time because of the lack of complicating factors. On the other hand, he had introduced a micro-Change (perhaps not so micro at that) by abstracting Noys. Heart pounding, he forced himself to turn. It seemed to him that the door behind him had just closed, moving the last millimeter required to bring it flush with the wall. He repressed the impulse to open that door, to search the house. With Noys's delicacies in tow he returned to Eternity and waited two full days for repercussions before venturing into the far upwhen. There were none and eventually he forgot the incident. But now, as he adjusted the controls to enter Time this one last time, he thought of it again. Or perhaps it was the thought of the Change, nearly upon him now, that preyed on him. Looking back on the moment later on, he felt that it was one or the other that caused him to misadjust the controls. |
| 1623 |
He could think of no other excuse. The misadjustment was not immediately apparent. It pin-pointed the proper room and Harlan stepped directly into Noys's library. He had become enough of a decadent himself, now, to be not altogether repelled by the workmanship that went into the design of the film-cases. 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? 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. |
| 1624 |
He would face Finge. He would kill him, if necessary. Harlan stepped to the door from behind which the laugh had sounded, stepped to it with the soft, firm step of the premeditated murderer. He flicked loose the automatic door signal and opened it by hand. Two inches. Three. It moved without sound. The man in the next room had his back turned. The figure seemed too tall to be Finge and that fact penetrated Harlan's simmering mind and kept him from advancing further. Then, as though the paralysis that seemed to hold both men in rigor was slowly lifting, the other turned, inch by inch. Harlan never witnessed the completion of that turn. The other's profile had not yet come into view when Harlan, holding back a sudden gust of terror with a last fragment of moral strength, flung himself back out the door. Its mechanism, not Harlan, closed it soundlessly. Harlan fell back blindly. He could breathe only by struggling violently with the atmosphere, fighting air in and pushing it out, while his heart beat madly as though in an effort to escape his body. Finge, Twissell, all the Council together could not have disconcerted him so much. It was the fear of nothing physical that had unmanned him. Rather it was an almost instinctive loathing for the nature of the accident that had befallen him. He gathered the stack of book-films to himself in a formless lump and managed, after two futile tries, to re-establish the door to Eternity. He stepped through, his legs operating mechanically. Somehow he made his way to the 575th, and then to personal quarters. His Technicianhood, newly valued, newly appreciated, saved him once again. The few Eternals he met turned automatically to one side and looked steadfastly over his head as they did so. That was fortunate, for he lacked any ability to smooth his face out of the death's-head grimace he felt he was wearing, or any power to put the blood back into it. But they didn't look, and he thanked Time and Eternity and whatever blind thing wove Destiny for that. |
| 1625 |
He had not truly recognized the other man in Noys's house by his appearance, yet he knew his identity with a dreadful certainty. The first time Harlan had heard a noise in the house he, Harlan, had been laughing and the sound that interrupted his laugh was of something weighty dropping in the next room. The second time someone had laughed in the next room and he, Harlan, had dropped a knapsack of book-films. The first time he, Harlan, had turned and caught sight of a door closing. The second time he, Harlan, closed a door as a stranger turned. He had met himself! In the same Time and nearly in the same place he and his earlier self by several physiodays had nearly stood face to face. He had misadjusted the controls, set if for an instant in Time which he had already used and he, Harlan, had seen him, Harlan. He had gone about his work with the shadow of horror upon him for days thereafter. He cursed himself for a coward, but that did not help. Indeed from that moment matters took a downward trend. 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. |
| 1626 |
Harlan grew as feverishly active as previously he had been catatonic. He traveled to the 2456th and bludgeoned Sociologist Voy to his own exact will. He did it perfectly. He got the information he sought. And more than he sought. Much more. Confidence is rewarded, apparently. There was a homewhen proverb that went: "Grip the nettle firmly and it will become a stick with which to beat your enemy." In short, Noys had no analogue in the new Reality. No analogue at all. She could take her position in the new society in the most inconspicuous and convenient manner possible, or she could stay in Eternity. There could be no reason to deny him liaison except for the highly theoretical fact that he had broken the law — and he knew very well how to counter that argument. So he went racing upwhen to tell Noys the great news, to bathe in undreamed-of success after a few days horrible with apparent failure. And at this moment the kettle came to a halt. It did not slow; it simply halted. If the motion had been one along any of the three dimensions of space, a halt that sudden would have smashed the kettle, brought its metal to a dull red heat, turned Harlan into a thing of broken bone and wet, crushed flesh. As it was, it merely doubled him with nausea and cracked him with inner pain. When he could see, he fumbled to the temporometer and stared at it with fuzzy vision. It read 100,000. Somehow that frightened him. It was too round a number. He turned feverishly to the controls. What had gone wrong? That frightened him too, for he could see nothing wrong. Nothing had tripped the drive-lever. It remained firmly geared into the upwhen drive. There was no short circuit. All the indicator dials were in the black safety range. There was no power failure. The tiny needle that marked the steady consumption of meg-megcoulombs of power calmly insisted that power was being consumed at the usual rate. What, then, had stopped the kettle? Slowly, and with considerable reluctance, Harlan touched the drivelever, curled his hand about it. |
| 1627 |
He pushed it to neutral, and the needle on the power gauge declined to zero. He twisted the drive-lever back in the other direction. Up went the power gauge again, and this time the temporometer flicked downwhen along the line of Centuries. Downwhen — downwhen — 99,983 — 99,972 — 99,959 — Again Harlan shifted the lever. Upwhen again. Slowly. Very slowly. Then 99,985 — 99,993 — 99,997 — 99,998 — 99,999 — 100,000 — Smash! Nothing past 100,000. The power of Nova Sol was silently being consumed, at an incredible rate, to no purpose. He went downwhen again, farther. He roared upwhen. Smash! His teeth were clenched, his lips drawn back, his breath rasping. He felt like a prisoner hurling himself bloodily against the bars of a prison. When he stopped, a dozen smashes later, the kettle rested firmly at 100,000. Thus far, and no farther. He would change kettles! (But there was not much hope in that thought.) In the empty silence of the 100,000th Century, Andrew Harlan stepped out of one kettle and chose another kettle shaft at random. 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. |
| 1628 |
He looked at the large clock as he passed, measuring off Standard Physiotime, numbering the days and marking off the three coequal work shifts of the physioday. Finge would be at his private quarters now, and that was so much the better. Harlan felt as though he were running a temperature when he arrived at the 482nd. His mouth was dry and cottony. His chest hurt. But he felt the hard shape of the weapon under his shirt as he held it firmly against his side with one elbow and that was the only sensation that counted. Assistant Computer Hobbe Finge looked up at Harlan, and the surprise in his eyes slowly gave way to concern. Harlan watched him silently for a while, letting the concern grow and waiting for it to change to fear. He circled slowly, getting between Finge and the Communiplate. Finge was partly undressed, bare to the waist. His chest was sparsely haired, his breasts puffy and almost womanish. His tubby abdomen lapped over his waistband. He looks undignified, thought Harlan with satisfaction, undignified and unsavory. So much the better. He put his right hand inside his shirt and closed it firmly on the grip of his weapon. Harlan said, "No one saw me, Finge, so don't look toward the door. No one's coming here. You've got to realize, Finge, that you're dealing with a Technician. Do you know what that means?" His voice was hollow. He felt angry that fear wasn't entering Finge's eyes, only concern. Finge even reached for his shirt and, without a word, began to put it on. Harlan went on, "Do you know the privilege of being a Technician, Finge? You've never been one, so you can't appreciate it. It means no one watches where you go or what you do. They all look the other way and work so hard at not seeing you that they really succeed at it. I could, for instance, go to the Section library, Finge, and help myself to any curious thing while the librarian busily concerns himself with his records and sees nothing. I can walk down the residential corridors of the 482nd and anyone passing turns out of my way and will swear later on he saw no one. |
| 1629 |
With each passing day of the last unbelievable month he had grown more convinced of his own indispensability. The Council, even the Allwhen Council itself, would have no choice but to come to terms when it was a choice of bartering one girl for the existence of all of Eternity. 11 Full Circle It was with a dull surprise that Technician Andrew Harlan, on bursting into the 575th, found himself in the night shift. The passing of the physiohours had gone unnoticed during his wild streaks along the kettle shafts. He stared hollowly at the dimmed corridors, the occasional evidence of the thinned-out night force at work. But in the continued grip of his rage Harlan did not pause long to watch uselessly. He turned toward personal quarters. He would find Twissell's room on Computer Level as he had found Finge's and he had as little fear of being noticed or stopped. The neuronic whip was still hard against his elbow as he stopped before Twissell's door (the name plate upon it advertising the fact in clear, inlaid lettering). Harlan activated the door signal brashly on the buzzer level. He shorted the contact with a damp palm and let the sound become continuous. He could hear it dimly. A step sounded lightly behind him and he ignored it in the sure knowledge that the man, whoever he was, would ignore him. (Oh, rose-red Technician's patch!) But the sound of steps halted and a voice said, "Technician Harlan?" Harlan whirled. It was a Junior Computer, relatively new to the Section. Harlan raged inwardly. This was not quite the 482nd. Here he was not merely a Technician, he was Twissell's Technician, and the younger Computers, in their anxiety to ingratiate themselves with the great Twissell, would extend a minimum civility to his Technician. The Computer said, "Do you wish to see Senior Computer Twissell?" Harlan fidgeted and said, "Yes, sir." (The fool! What did he think anyone would be standing signaling at a man's door for? To catch a kettle?) "I'm afraid you can't," said the Computer. |
| 1630 |
It was at once more likely and more unthinkable than death, and he would have none of it. 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. His final thought of himself was as a heroic social revolutionary, with Noys at his side, when he sank finally into a dreamless sleep. . The door signal awoke him. It whispered at him with hoarse impatience. He collected his thoughts to the point of being able to look at the small clock beside his bed and groaned inwardly. Father Time! After all that he had overslept. |
| 1631 |
Six weeks earlier Harlan would have been overwhelmed by the honor of sitting at lunch with such a group, tongue-tied by the combination of responsibility and power they represented. They would have seemed twice life-size to him. But now they were antagonists of his, worse still, judges. He had no time to be impressed. He had to plan his strategy. They might not know that he was aware they had Noys. They could not know unless Finge told them of his last meeting with Harlan. In the clear light of day, however, he was more than ever convinced that Finge was not the man to broadcast publicly the fact that he had been browbeaten and insulted by a Technician. 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. |
| 1632 |
Call the man earlier in physiotime, A, and the one later, B. Subdivision one, A and B may not see one another, or do anything that will significantly affect one another. In that case, they have not really met and we may dismiss this case as trivial. "Or B, the later individual, may see A while A does not see B. Here, too, no serious consequences need be expected. B, seeing A, sees him in a position and engaged in activity of which he already has knowledge. Nothing new is involved. "The third and fourth possibilities are that A sees B, while B does not see A, and that A and B see one another. 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? |
| 1633 |
Do you want a quick summary of Mallansohn's life? Here it is. He was born in the 78th, spent some time in Eternity, and died in the 24th." Twissell's small hand placed itself lightly on Harlan's elbow and his gnomish face broke into a wrinkled extension of his usual smile. "But come, boy, physiotime passes even for us and we are not completely masters of ourselves this day. Won't you come with me to my office?" He led the way and Harlan followed, not entirely aware of the opening doors and the moving ramps. He was relating the new information to his own problem and plan of action. With the passing of the first moment of disorientation his resolution returned. After all, how did this change things except to make his own importance to Eternity still more crucial, his value higher, his demands more sure to be met, Noys more certain to be bartered back to him. Noys! Father Time, they must not harm her! She seemed the only real part of his life. All Eternity beside was only a filmy fantasy, and not a worth-while one, either. When he found himself in Computer Twissell's office, he could not clearly recall how it had come about that he had passed from the dining area here. Though he looked about and tried to make the office grow real by sheer force of the mass of its contents, it still seemed but another part of a dream that had outlived its usefulness. Twissell's office was a clean, long room of porcelain asepsis. One wall of the office was crowded from floor to ceiling and wall to distant wall with the computing micro-units which, together, made up the largest privately operated Computaplex in Eternity and, indeed, one of the largest altogether. The opposite wall was crammed with reference films. Between the two what was left of the room was scarcely more than a corridor, broken by a desk, two chairs, recording and projecting equipment, and an unusual object the like of which Harlan was not familiar with and which did not reveal its use until Twissell flicked the remnants of a cigarette into it. |
| 1634 |
"Having entered Eternity, Cooper was trained in mathematics by a Computer named Laban Twissell and in Primitive sociology by a Technician named Andrew Harlan. After a thorough grounding in both disciplines, and in such matters as temporal engineering as well, he was sent back to the 24th to teach certain necessary techniques to a Primitive scientist named Vikkor Mallansohn. "Once having reached the 24th, he embarked first on a slow process of adjusting himself to the society. In this he benefited a great deal from the training of Technician Harlan and the detailed advice of Computer Twissell, who seemed to have an uncanny insight into some of the problems he was to face. "After the passage of two years, Cooper located one Vikkor Mallansohn, an eccentric recluse in the California backwoods, relationless and friendless but gifted with a daring and unconventional mind. Cooper made friends slowly, acclimated the man to the thought of having met a traveler from the future still more slowly, and set about teaching the man the mathematics he must know. "With the passage of time, Cooper adopted the other's habits, learned to shift for himself with the help of a clumsy Diesel-oil electric generator and with wired electrical appliances which freed them of dependence on power beams. "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. |
| 1635 |
"And so the circle was closed. Cooper-Mallansohn's intentions in writing the memoir were, of course, disregarded. Cooper must go through his life exactly as he had gone through it. Primitive Reality allows of no changes. At this moment in physiotime, the Cooper you know is unaware of what lies ahead of him. He believes he is only to instruct Mallansohn and to return. He will continue to believe so until the years teach him differently and he sits down to write his memoir. "The intention of the circle in Time is to establish the knowledge of Time-travel and of the nature of Reality, to build Eternity, ahead of its natural Time. Left to itself, mankind would not have learned the truth about Time before their technological advances in other directions had made racial suicide inevitable." Harlan listened intently, caught up in the vision of a mighty circle in Time, closed upon itself, and traversing Eternity in part of its course. He came as close to forgetting Noys, for the moment, as he ever could. He asked, "Then you knew all along everything you were to do, everything I was to do, everything I have done." Twissell, who seemed lost in his own telling of the tale, his eyes peering through a haze of bluish tobacco smoke, came slowly to life. His old, wise eyes fixed themselves on Harlan and he said reproachfully, "No, of course not. 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. "It worked itself out. First, I was found and brought to Eternity. When, in the fullness of physiotime, I became a Senior Computer, I was given the memoir and placed in charge. I had been described as in charge, so I was placed in charge. Again in the fullness of physiotime, you appeared in the changing of a Reality (we had watched your earlier analogues carefully), and then Cooper. |
| 1636 |
Twissell was correct and what in Time was going on? Twissell said, "You will be relieved to know, boy, that your responsibility is over. You were worried about that responsibility; you asked searching questions about it; and I think I know what you meant. 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? That quick and easy surrender over Noys. She won't be hurt, Twissell had said. All will be well. How could he have believed that! If they were not going to harm her, or touch her, why the temporal barrier across the kettleways at the 100,000th? |
| 1637 |
That would be slow and also dangerous since the man might well be discovered by the native inhabitants with probably catastrophic effects on our project. "What we did then instead was this: We sent back a known mass of the radioactive isotope, niobium-94, which decays by beta-particle emission to the stable isotope, molybdenum-94. The process has a halflife of almost exactly 500 Centuries. The original radiation intensity of the mass was known. That intensity decreases with time according to the simple relationship involved in first-order kinetics, and, of course, the intensity can be measured with great precision. "When the kettle reaches its destination in Primitive times, the ampule containing the isotope is discharged into the mountainside and the kettle then returns to Eternity. At the moment in physiotime that the ampule is discharged, it simultaneously appears at all future Times growing progressively older. At the place of discharge in the 575th (in actual Time and not in Eternity) a Technician detects the ampule by its radiation and retrieves it. "The radiation intensity is measured, the time it has remained in the mountainside is then known, the Century to which the kettle traveled is also known to two decimal places. Dozens of ampules were thus sent back at various thrust levels and a calibration curve set up. The curve was a check against ampules sent not all the way into the Primitive but into the early Centuries of Eternity where direct observations could also be made. "Naturally, there were failures. The first few ampules were lost until we learned to allow for the not too major geological changes between the late Primitive and the 575th. Then, three of the ampules later on never showed up in the 575th. Presumably, something went wrong with the discharge mechanism and they were buried too deeply in the mountain for detection. We stopped our experiments when the level of radiation grew so high that we feared that some of the Primitive inhabitants might detect and wonder what radioactive artifacts might be doing in the region. |
| 1638 |
He did not look at it. Was this nonexistence? Not yet. Nonexistence not yet. Harlan stared out the window. He did not move. Time passed and he was unaware of its passage. The room was empty. Where the giant, enclosed kettle had been was nothing. Metal blocks that had served as its base sat emptily, lifting their huge strength against air. Twissell, strangely small and dwarfed in the room that had become a waiting cavern, was the only thing that moved as he tramped edgily this way and that. Harlan's eyes followed him for a moment and then left him. Then, without any sound or stir, the kettle was back in the spot it had left. Its passage across the hairline from time past to time present did not as much as disturb a molecule of air. Twissell was hidden from Harlan's eyes by the bulk of the kettle, but then he rounded it, came into view. He was running. A flick of his hand was enough to activate the mechanism that opened the door of the control room. He hurtled inside, shouting with an almost lyrical excitement. "It's done. It's done. We've closed the circle." He had breath to say no more. Harlan made no answer. Twissell stared out the window, his hands flat against the glass. Harlan noted the blotches of age upon them and the way in which they trembled. It was as though his mind no longer had the ability or the strength to filter the important from the inconsequential, but were selecting observational material in a purely random manner. Wearily he thought: What does it matter? What does anything matter now? Twissell said (Harlan heard him dimly), "I'll tell you now that I've been more anxious than I cared to admit. Sennor used to say once that this whole thing was impossible. He insisted something must happen to stop it — What's the matter?" He had turned at Harlan's odd grunt. Harlan shook his head, managed a choked "Nothing." Twissell left it at that and turned away. It was doubtful whether he spoke to Harlan or to the air. It was as though he were allowing years of pent-up anxieties to escape in words. |
| 1639 |
Councilmen are human too. They could not witness the final kettle drive because the Mallansohn memoir did not place them at the scene. They could not interview Cooper since the memoir made no mention of that either. Yet they wanted something. Father Time, boy, don't you see they would want something? You were as close as they could get, so they brought you close and stared at you." "I don't believe you." "It's the truth." Harlan said, "Is it? And while we ate, Councilman Sennor talked of a man meeting himself. He obviously knew about my illegal trips into the 482nd and my nearly meeting myself. It was his way of poking at me, enjoying himself cutely at my expense." Twissell said, "Sennor? You worried about Sennor? Do you know the pathetic figure he is? His homewhen is the 803rd, one of the few cultures in which the human body is deliberately disfigured to meet the aesthetic requirements of the time. It is rendered hairless at adolescence. "Do you know what that means in the continuity of man? Surely you do. A disfigurement sets men apart from their ancestors and descendants. Men of the 803rd are poor risks as Eternals; they are too different from the rest of us. Few are chosen. Sennor is the only one of his Century ever to sit on the Council. "Don't you see how that affects him? Surely you understand what insecurity means. Did it ever occur to you that a Councilman could be insecure? Sennor has to listen to discussions involving the eradication of his Reality for the very characteristic that makes him so conspicuous among us. And eradicating it would leave him one of a very few in all the generation to be disfigured as he is. Someday it will happen. "He finds refuge in philosophy. He overcompensates by taking the lead in conversation, by deliberately airing unpopular or unaccepted viewpoints. His man-meeting-himself paradox is a case in point. I told you that he used it to predict disaster for the project and it was we, the Councilmen, that he was attempting to annoy, not you. |
| 1640 |
I can't remember anything else about that physiotime. My old colleagues are only names in the record books; the Changes I supervised — all but one — are only items in the Computaplex memory pools. I remember her, though, very well. Perhaps you can understand that. I had had a long-standing request for liaison in the books; and after I achieved status as a Junior Computer, she was assigned to me. She was a girl of this very Century, the 575th. I didn't see her until after the assignment, of course. She was intelligent and kind. Not beautiful or even pretty, but then, even when young (yes, I was young, never mind the myths) I was not noted for my own looks. We were well suited to one another by temperament, she and I, and if I were a Timed man, I would have been proud to have her as my wife. I told her that many times. I believe it pleased her. I know it was the truth. Not all Eternals, who must take their women as and how Computing permits, are that fortunate. In that particular Reality, she was to die young, of course, and none of her analogues was available for liaison. At first, I took that philosophically. After all, it was her short lifetime which made it possible for her to live with me without deleteriously affecting Reality. I am ashamed of that now, of the fact that I was glad she had a short time to live. Just at first, that is. Just at first. I visited her as often as spatio-temporal charting allowed. I squeezed every minute out of it, giving up meals and sleep when necessary, shifting my labor load shamelessly whenever I could. Her amiability passed the heights of my expectations, and I was in love. I put it bluntly. My experience of love is very small, and understanding it through Observation in Time is a shaky matter. 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. |
| 1641 |
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. 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. |
| 1642 |
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. 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. |
| 1643 |
I was a hardened criminal, a habitat of crime. I worked out a new Life-Plot for my son under the new Reality, certain of what I would find. But then for twenty-four hours, without eating or sleeping, I sat in my office, striving with the completed Life-Plot, tearing at it in a despairing effort to find an error. There was no error. The next day, holding back my solution to the Change, I worked out a spatio-temporal chart, using rough methods of approximation (after all, the Reality was not to last long) and entered Time at a point more than thirty years upwhen from the birth of my child. He was thirty-four years old, as old as I myself. I introduced myself as a distant relation, making use of my knowledge of his mother's family, to do so. He had no knowledge of his father, no memory of my visits to him in his infancy. He was an aeronautical engineer. The 575th was expert in half a dozen varieties of air travel (as it still is in the current Reality), and my son was a happy and successful member of his society. He was married to an ardently enamored girl, but would have no children. Nor would the girl have married at all in the Reality in which my son had not existed. I had known that from the beginning. I had known there would be no deleterious affect on Reality. Otherwise, I might not have found it in my heart to let the boy live. I am not completely abandoned. I spent the day with my son. I spoke to him formally, smiled politely, took my leave coolly when the spatio-temporal chart dictated. But un derneath all that, I watched and absorbed every action, filling myself with him, and trying to live one day at least out of a Reality that the next day (by physiotime) would no longer have existed. How I longed to visit my wife one last time, too, during that portion of Time in which she lived, but I had used every second that had been available to me. I dared not even enter Time to see her, unseen. I returned to Eternity and spent one last horrible night wrestling futilely against what must be. |
| 1644 |
The next morning I handed in my computations together with my recommendations for Change. Twissell's voice had lowered to a whisper and now it stopped. He sat there with his shoulders bent, his eyes fixed on the floor between his knees, and his fingers twisting slowly into and out of a knotted clasp. Harlan, waiting vainly for another sentence out of the old man, cleared his throat. He found himself pitying the man, pitying him despite the many crimes he had committed. He said, "And that's all?" Twissell whispered, "No, the worst — the worst — An analogue of my son did exist. In the new Reality, he existed — as a paraplegic from the age of four. Forty-two years in bed, under circumstances that barred me from arranging to have the nerve-regenerating techniques of the 900's applied to his case, or even for arranging to have his life ended painlessly. "That new Reality still exists. My son is still out there in the appropriate portion of the Century. I did that to him. It was my mind and my Computaplex that discovered this new life for him, and my word that ordered the Change. I had committed a number of crimes for his sake and for his mother's, but that one last deed, though strictly in accordance with my oath as an Eternal, has always seemed to me to be my great crime, the crime." There was nothing to say, and Harlan said nothing. Twissell said, "But you see now why I understand your case, why I will be willing to let you have your girl. It would not harm Eternity and, in a way, it would be expiation for my crime." And Harlan believed. All in one change of mind, he believed! Harlan sank to his knees and lifted his clenched fists to his temples. He bent his head and rocked slowly as savage despair beat through him. He had thrown Eternity away, and lost Noys — when, except for his Samson-smash, he might have saved one and kept the other. 15 Search through the Primitive Twissell was shaking Harlan's shoulders. The old man's voice urgently called his name. "Harlan! Harlan! |
| 1645 |
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. 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. |
| 1646 |
He had the blaster in his hand. It was aimed at Noys. But why did she say nothing? Why did she persist in this impassive attitude? How could he kill her? How could he not kill her? He said hoarsely, "Well?" She moved, but it was only to clasp her hands loosely in her lap, to look more relaxed, more aloof. When she spoke her voice seemed scarcely that of a human being. Facing the muzzle of a blaster, it yet gained assurance and took on an almost mystic quality of impersonal strength. She said, "You cannot wish to kill me only in order to protect Eternity. If that were your desire, you could stun me, tie me firmly, pin me within this cave and then take to your travels in the dawn. Or you might have asked Computer Twissell to keep me in solitary confinement during your absence in the Primitive. Or you might take me with you at dawn, lose me in the wastes. If it is only killing that will satisfy you, it is only because you think that I have betrayed you, that I have tricked you into love first in order that I might trick you into treason later. This is murder out of wounded pride and not at all the just retribution you tell yourself it is." Harlan squirmed. "Are you from the Hidden Centuries? Tell me." Noys said, "I am. Will you now blast?" Harlan's finger trembled on the blaster's contact point. 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. |
| 1647 |
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. Noys might have read his mind. She said, "Do you want to know about the Hidden Centuries? If that will be a defense, it is easily done. Would you like to know, for instance, why Earth is empty of mankind after the 150,000th? Would you be interested?" Harlan wasn't going to plead for knowledge, nor was he going to buy knowledge. He had the blaster. He was very intent on no show of weakness. He said, "Talk!" and flushed at the little smile which was her first response to his exclamation. She said, "At a moment in physiotime before Eternity had reached very far upwhen, before it had reached even the 10,000th, we of our Century — and you're right, it was the 111,394th — learned of Eternity's existence. We, toe, had Time-travel, you see, but it was based on a completely different set of postulates than yours, and we preferred to view Time, rather than shifting mass. Furthermore, we dealt with our past only, our downwhen. "We discovered Eternity indirectly. First, we developed the calculus of Realities and tested our own Reality through it. We were amazed to find we lived in a Reality of rather low probability. It was a serious question. Why such an improbable Reality? ... You seem abstracted, Andrew! Are you interested at all?" Harlan heard her say his name with all the intimate tenderness she had used in weeks past. |
| 1648 |
It should grate on him now, anger him with its cynical faithlessness. And yet it didn't. He said desperately, "Go on and get it over with, woman." He tried to balance the warmth of her "Andrew" with the chill anger of his "woman" and yet she only smiled again, pallidly. She said, "We searched back through time and came across the growing Eternity. It seemed obvious to us almost at once that there had been at one point in physiotime (a conception we have also, but under another name) another Reality. The other Reality, the one of maximum probability we call the Basic State. The Basic State had encompassed us once, or had encompassed our analogues, at least. At the time we could not say what the nature of the Basic State was. We could not possibly know. "We did know, however, that some Change initiated by Eternity in the far downwhen had managed, through the workings of statistical chance, to alter the Basic State all the way up to our Century and beyond. We set about determining the nature of the Basic State, intending to undo the evil, if evil it was. First we set up the quarantined area you call the Hidden Centuries, isolating the Eternals on the downwhen side of the 70,000th. This armor of isolation would affect us from all but a vanishingly small percentage of the Changes being made. It wasn't absolute security but it gave us time. "We next did something our culture and ethics did not ordinarily allow us to do. 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. 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. |
| 1649 |
Squinting, shading his eyes against the chilly light of Tano and Sitha, he stood looking toward the north, the direction from which the sandstorm was coming. The expression on his face was one of anguish. Balik was their chief stratigrapher, but he was also the expedition's meteorological expert, more or less. 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. 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. |
| 1650 |
Pretend that you don't notice the signs of an approaching sandstorm and maybe the sandstorm will go somewhere else. And then that little gray cloud appearing out of nowhere in the far north, that dull stain on the fierce shield of the desert sky, which ordinarily was always as clear as glass- Cloud? Do you see a cloud? I don 't see any clouds. Denial again. Now the cloud was an immense black monster filling half the sky. The wind still blew from the south, but it was no longer moist-a searing furnace-blast was what it was, now-and there was another wind, an even stronger one, bearing down from the opposite direction. One wind fed the other. And when they met- "Siferra!" Balik yelled. "Here it comes! Take cover!" "I will! I will!" She didn't want to. What she wanted to do was run from one zone of the dig to another, looking after everything at once, holding the flaps of the tents down, wrapping her arms around the bundles of precious photographic plates, throwing herself against the face of the newly excavated Octagon House to protect the stunning mosaics that they had discovered the month before. But Balik was right. Siferra had done all she could, this frantic morning, to batten down the site. Now the thing to do was to huddle in, down there below the cliff that loomed at the upper edge of the site, and hope that it would be a bulwark for them against the fullest force of the storm. She ran for it. Her sturdy, powerful legs carried her easily over the parched, crackling sand. Siferra was not quite forty years old, a tall, strong woman in the prime of her physical strength, and until this moment she had never felt anything but optimism about any aspect of her existence. But suddenly everything was imperiled now: her academic career, her robust good health, maybe even her life itself. The others were crowded together at the base of the cliff, behind a hastily improvised screen of bare wooden poles with tarpaulins lashed to them. "Move over," Siferra said, pushing her way in among them. |
| 1651 |
Lately he had spent more and more time at the Observatory, and it was getting so that they were almost never awake at the same time. Beenay knew how trying that was for her. It was trying for him. All the same, the work he was doing on Kalgash's orbit was demanding stuff, and it was leading him into ever more difficult regions that he found both challenging and frightening. 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. "Look," he said, going to the couch and taking her hand in his. |
| 1652 |
Indeed he felt sudden buoyant excitement, such as he had not known in a long while, as he traveled through its wellmanicured grounds. He hoped that he'd have some time later in the week to explore it on his own. But his mood changed abruptly as the car swung around the perimeter of the Exposition and brought them to an entrance in back that led to the amusement area. Here, just as Kelaritan had said, great sections were roped off; and sullen crowds peered across the ropes in obvious annoyance as Cubello, Kelaritan, and Varitta 312 led him toward the Tunnel of Mystery. Sheerin could hear them muttering angrily, a low harsh growling that he found unsettling and even a little intimidating. He realized that the lawyer had told the truth: these people were angry because the Tunnel was closed. They're jealous, Sheerin thought in wonder. They know we're going to the Tunnel, and they want to go too. Despite everything that's happened there. "We can go in this way," Varitta said. The facade of the Tunnel was an enormous pyramidal structure, tapering away at the sides in an eerie, dizzying perspective. In the center of it was a huge six-sided entrance gate, dramatically outlined in scarlet and gold. Bars had been drawn across it. Varitta produced a key and unlocked a small door to the left of the facade, and they stepped through. Inside, everything seemed much more ordinary. Sheerin saw a series of metal railings no doubt designed to contain the lines of people waiting to board the ride. Beyond that was a platform much like that in any railway station, with a string of small open cars waiting there. And beyond that- Darkness. Cubello said, "If you don't mind signing this first, please, Doctor-" Sheerin stared at the paper the lawyer had handed him. It was full of words, blurred, dancing about. "What is this?" "A release. The standard form." "Yes. Of course." Airily Sheerin scrawled his name without even trying to read the paper. You are not afraid, he told himself. You fear nothing at all. |
| 1653 |
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. 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. 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. |
| 1654 |
You mustn't use the abort switch, or they'll know-they'll all know- Fatty is a coward, Fatty is a coward- Suddenly, astonishingly, he hurled the abort switch into the darkness. There was a tiny sound as it fell-somewhere. Then silence again. His hand felt terribly empty. The Darkness- The Darkness- There was no end to it. He was tumbling through an infinite abyss. Falling and falling and falling into the night, the endless night, the all-devouring black- Breathe deeply. Stay calm. What if there 'c permanent mental damage? Stay calm, he told himself. You'll be all right. You've got maybe eleven minutes more of this at the worst, maybe only six or seven. The suns are shining out there. Six or seven minutes and you'll never be in Darkness again, not if you live to be a thousand. The Darkness- Oh, God, the Darkness- Calm. Calm. You're a very stable man, Sheerin. You're extremely sane. You were sane when you went into this thing and you'll be sane when you come out. Tick. Tick. Tick. Every second gets you closer to the exit. Or does it? This ride may never end. I could be in here forever. Tick. Tick. Tick. Am I moving? Do I have five minutes left, or five seconds, or is this still the first minute? Tick. Tick. Why don t they let me out? Can 't they tell bow I'm suffering in here? They don't want to let you out. They'll never let you out. They're going to Suddenly, a stabbing pain between his eyes. An explosion of agony in his skull. What's that? Light! Could it be? Yes. Yes. Thank God. Light, yes! Thank any god that might ever have existed! He was at the end of the Tunnel! He was coming back to the station! It must be. Yes. Yes. His heartbeat, which had become a panicky thunder, was starting to return to normal. His eyes, adjusting now to the return of normal conditions, began to focus on familiar things, blessed things, the stanchions, the platform, the little window in the control booth- Cubello, Kelaritan, watching him. He felt ashamed now of his cowardice. Pull yourself together, Sheerin. |
| 1655 |
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. 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. Faro 24 was short and roly-poly, with a languid, almost indolent way of moving. His general style was easygoing and casual. His friend Yimot 70 was incredibly tall and thin, something like a hinged ladder with arms, legs, and a face, and you practically needed a telescope to see his head, looming up there in the stratosphere above you. |
| 1656 |
He had been pondering, all year long, certain implications of the Theory of Universal Gravitation, which his mentor Athor had brought to such a summit of perfection. It had been Athor's great triumph, the making of his lofty reputation, to work out the orbital motions of Kalgash and all six of its suns according to rational principles of attractive forces. Beenay, using modern computational equipment, had been calculating some aspects of Kalgash's orbit around Onos, its primary sun, when to his horror he observed that his figures didn't check out properly in terms of the Theory of Universal Gravitation. The theory said that at the beginning of the present year Kalgash should have been here in relation to Onos, when in undeniable fact Kalgash was there. The deviation was trivial-a matter of a few decimal places- but that wasn't trivial at all, in the larger sense of things. The Theory of Universal Gravitation was so precise that most people preferred to refer to it as the Law of Universal Gravitation. Its mathematical underpinning was considered impeccable. But a theory that purports to explain the movements of the world through space has no room for even small discrepancies. Either it is complete or it is not complete: no middle way was permissible. And a difference of a few decimal places in a shortrange calculation would widen into a vast abyss, Beenay knew, if more ambitious computations were attempted. What good was the whole Theory of Universal Gravitation if the position that it said Kalgash was going to hold in the sky a century from now turned out to be halfway around Onos from the planet's actual location then? Beenay had gone over his figures until he was sick of reworking them. The result was always the same. But what was he supposed to believe? 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! |
| 1657 |
The astronomer had sounded awful-as though he was keeping hysteria at bay only by some tremendous effort. Theremon couldn't imagine what terrible thing could have happened to him, there in the seclusion and stillness of the Observatory, to make such a wreck out of him in so short a time. 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. So long as some sun was going to be up there the next day, Theremon didn't especially care which one it was. And there always was one-two or three, actually, or sometimes four. |
| 1658 |
Let's pray it's the latter. And now we need to do some very hard thinking, young man." Athor 77 closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, which was beginning to ache. It had been a long time since he'd done any real science, he realized. He'd occupied himself almost entirely with administrative matters at the Observatory for the past eight or ten years. But the mind that had produced the Theory of Universal Gravitation might yet have a thought or two left in it, he told himself. -"First, I want to take a closer look at these calculations of yours," he said. "And then, I suppose, a closer look at my own theory." The headquarters of the Apostles of Flame was a slender but magnificent tower of gleaming golden stone, rising like a shining javelin above the Seppitan River, in the exclusive Birigam quarter of Saro City. That soaring tower, Theremon thought, must be one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the entire capital. He had never stopped to consider it before, but the Apostles had to be an exceedingly wealthy group. They owned their own radio and television stations, they published magazines and newspapers, they had this tremendous tower. And probably they controlled all sorts of other assets too that were less visibly theirs. He wondered how that was possible. A bunch of fanatic puritan monks? Where would they have managed to get their hands on so many hundreds of millions of credits? But, he realized, such well-known industrialists as Bottiker 888 and Vivin 99 were outspoken adherents of the teachings of Mondior and his Apostles. It wouldn't surprise him to know that men like Bottiker and Vivin, and others like them, were heavy contributors to the Apostles' treasury. And if the organization was even a tenth as old as it claimed to be-ten thousand years, was what they said!-and if it had invested its money wisely over the centuries, there was no telling what the Apostles could have achieved through the miracle of compound interest, Theremon thought. They might be worth billions. |
| 1659 |
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. A polished marble floor, with inlays in half a dozen brilliant colors, stretched as far as he could see. The walls were covered with glittering golden mosaics in abstract patterns, rising to arched vaults high overhead. Chandeliers of woven gold and silver threw a shimmering shower of brightness over everything. At the opposite end from the entrance Theremon saw what seemed to be a model of the whole universe, fashioned, apparently, entirely of precious metals and gems: immense suspended globes, which seemed to represent the six suns, hung from the ceiling by invisible wires. Each of them cast an eerie light: a golden beam from the largest of them, which must be Onos, and a dim red glow from the Dovim globe, and cold hard blue-white from the Tano-Sitha pair, and a gentler white light from Patru and Trey. A seventh globe that must be Kalgash moved slowly among them like a drifting balloon, its own colors changing as the shifting pattern of the suns' light played over its surface. As Theremon stood gaping in astonishment, a voice coming from nowhere in particular said, "May we have your name?" "I'm Theremon 762. I have an appointment with Mondior." "Yes. Please enter the chamber on your immediate left, Theremon 762." He saw no chamber on his immediate left. But then a segment of the mosaic-covered wall slid noiselessly open, revealing a small oval room, more an antechamber than a chamber. Green velvet hangings covered the walls and a single bar of amber light provided illumination. He shrugged and stepped in. At once the door closed behind him and he felt a distinct sensation of motion. This wasn't a room, it was a lift! |
| 1660 |
Yes, he was rising, he was certain of it. Up and up and up he went, in a very unhurried way. It took half an eternity before the lift chamber came to a halt and the door slid open once again. A black-robed figure was waiting for him. "Would you come this way, please?" A narrow hallway led a short distance into a kind of waiting room, where a large portrait of Mondior 71 occupied most of one entire wall. As Theremon entered, the portrait seemed to light up, coming strangely to life and glowing, so that Mondior's dark, intense eyes looked straight at him and the High Apostle's stern face took on a luminous inner radiance that made him seem almost beautiful, in a fierce sort of way. Theremon met the portrait's gaze coolly enough. But even the tough-minded newspaperman found himself ever so slightly unnerved to think that very shortly he would be interviewing this very person. Mondior on radio or television was one thing, just some crazed preacher with an absurd message to peddle. But Mondior in the flesh-awesome, hypnotic, mysterious, if this portrait was any indication-might be something else again. Theremon warned himself to be on his guard. The black-robed monk said, "If you'll step inside, please-" The wall just to the left of the portrait opened. An office became visible within, as sparsely decorated as a cell, nothing in it but a bare desk made of a single slab of polished stone and a low backless chair, cut from a chunk of some unusual red-streaked gray wood, placed in front of it. 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. |
| 1661 |
A strange half hour, the newspaperman thought. And not very fruitful, really. In some ways he knew even less about the Apostles than he had before he had come here. That they were cranks and superstition-mongers was still obvious to Theremon. Plainly they didn't have a shred of anything like real evidence that some gigantic cataclysm was in store for the world soon. Whether they were mere self-deluding fools, though, or outright frauds looking to line their own pockets, was something that he could not yet clearly decide. It was all pretty confusing. There was an element of fanaticism, of puritanism, about their movement that was not at all to his liking. And yet, and yet ... this Folimun, this spokesman of theirs, had seemed an unexpectedly attractive person. He was intelligent, articulate-even, in his way, rational. The fact that he appeared to have a sense of humor of sorts was a surprise, and a point in his favor. Theremon had never heard of a maniac who was capable of even the slightest self-mockery- or a fanatic, either. -Unless it was all part of Folimun's publicrelations act: unless Folimun had been deliberately projecting the kind of persona that someone like Theremon would be likely to find appealing. Be careful, he told himself. Folimun wants to use you. But that was all right. His position with the newspaper was an influential one. Everyone wanted to use him. Well, Theremon thought, we'll see who uses whom. His footsteps echoed sharply as he walked at a brisk pace through the immense entrance hall of the Apostles' headquarters and out into the brilliance of a three-sun afternoon. Back to the Chronicle office now. A couple of pious hours devoted to a close study of the Book of Revelations; and then it was time to begin thinking about tomorrow's column. The summer rainy season was in full spate the afternoon Sheenin 501 returned to Saro City. The plump psychologist stepped out of the plane into a stupendous downpour that had turned the airfield into something close to a lake. |
| 1662 |
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? Well, you know, northern food-not really to my taste-" He hadn't expected that it would be so apparent. A man of his girth ought to be able to drop ten or fifteen pounds without its being noticeable at all. But Liliath had always had sharp eyes. And perhaps he had dropped more than ten or fifteen pounds. Ever since the Tunnel, he had simply pecked at his food. Him! It was hard for him to believe how little he had eaten. "You look good," she said. |
| 1663 |
Not on a miserable gray day like this-so dark-so dark- But Liliath was very sensitive about her cooking. Especially when she cooked for him. He'd eat everything she put before him, he resolved, even if he had to force himself. A funny notion, he thought: he, Sheerin, the great gourmand, thinking about forcing himself to eat! Liliath glanced toward him at the sound of his laughter. "What's so funny?" "I-ah-that Athor should be back doing research again," he said hastily. "After having been content so long with being the Lord High Emperor of Astronomy and doing purely administrative stuff. I'll have to call Beenay right away. What in the world can be going on over at the Observatory?" This was Siferra 89's third day back at Saro University, and it hadn't stopped raining yet. Qite a refreshing contrast to the bone-dry desert environment of the Sagikan Peninsula. She hadn't seen rain in so long that she found herself wonderstruck at the whole idea that water could fall from the skies. In Sagikan, every drop of water was enormously precious. You calculated its use with the greatest precision and recycled whatever was recyclable. 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. |
| 1664 |
These figures that he had asked Yimot to work out for him were almost certainly the last confirmation he needed. 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. 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. |
| 1665 |
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. 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. |
| 1666 |
He found her challenging, highly intelligent, and abrasive in a refreshing sort of way. What she saw in him he had no idea: perhaps just an intellectually stimulating young man who wasn't involved in the poisonous rivalries and feuds of her own field and had no apparent designs on her body. Siferra unfolded the charts, huge sheets of thin parchmentlike paper on which complex, elegant diagrams had been ruled with pencil, and she and Beenay bent forward to examine them at close range. He had been telling the truth when he said he was fascinated by archaeology. Ever since he'd been a boy, he had enjoyed reading the narratives of the great explorers of afitiquity, such men as Marpin, Shelbik, and of course Galdo 221. He found the remote past nearly as exciting to think about as the remote reaches of interstellar space. His contract-mate Raissta wasn't greatly pleased by his friendship with Siferra. She had rather testily implied, a couple of times, that it was Siferra herself who fascinated him, not her field of research. But Beenay thought Raissta's jealousy was absurd. Certainly Siferra was an attractive woman-it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise-but she was relentlessly non-romantic and every man on campus knew it. Besides, she was something like ten years older than Beenay. Handsome as she was, Beenay had never thought of her with any sort of intimate intentions. "What we have here, first, is a cross section of the entire hill," Siferra told him. "I've plotted each separate level of occupation in a schematic way. The newest settlement's at the top, naturally-huge stone walls, what we call the cyclopean style of architecture, typical of the Beklimot culture in its mature period of development. This line here in the level of the cyclopean walls represents a layer of charcoal remains-enough charcoal to indicate a widespread conflagration that must have utterly wiped the city out. And here, below the cyclopean level and the burn line, is the next oldest settlement." "Which is constructed in a different style." "Exactly. |
| 1667 |
You see how I've drawn the stones of the walls? It's what we call the crosshatch style, characteristic of the early Beklimot culture, or perhaps the culture that developed into Beklimot. Both these styles can be seen in the Beklimot-era ruins that surround the Hill of Thombo. The main ruins are cyclopean, and here and there we've found a little crosshatch stuff, just a mere outcropping or two, which we call protoBeklimot. Now, look here, at the border between the crosshatch settlement and the cyclopean ruins above it." "Another fire line?" Beenay said. "Another fire line, yes. What we have in this hill is like a sandwich-a layer of human occupation, a layer of charcoal, another layer of human occupation, another layer of charcoal. 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. |
| 1668 |
Everything he knew about the movements of the suns in the heavens rebelled against the idea of the six of them somehow bunching up on one side of Kalgash at the same time. It just couldn't happen, short of a miracle. Beenay didn't believe in miracles. The way the suns were arranged in the sky, there always had to be at least one or two of them shining over every part of Kalgash at any given moment. Forget the six-suns-here, Darkness-there hypothesis. What was left? Dovim alone, he thought. The little red sun all alone in the sky? Well, yes, it did happen, though not often. On those occasional five-sun days when Tano, Sitha, Trey, Patru, and Onos all were in conjunction in the same hemisphere: that left only Dovim for the other side of the world. Beenay wondered whether that might be the moment when the Darkness came. Could it be? Dovim by itself might cast so little light, just its cool and feeble reddish-purple gleam, that people might mistake it for Darkness. But that didn't really make sense. Even little Dovim should be able to provide enough light to keep people from plunging into terror. Besides, Dovim-only days occurred somewhere in the world every few years. They were uncommon, but not all that extraordinary. Surely, if the effects of seeing nothing but a single small dim sun in the sky could cause vast psychological upheavals, then everybody would be worrying about the next Dovim-only event, which was due, as Beenay recalled, in just another year or so. And in fact nobody was thinking about it at all. 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. |
| 1669 |
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. Every time Kalgash Two came round on its orbit, it reached Kalgash's vicinity closer and closer to a Dovim-only day. The numbers continued to appear, as the computer processed all the astronomical possibilities. Beenay watched in mounting awe and disbelief. There it was, finally. All three bodies lined up in just the right way. Kalgash-Kalgash Two-Dovim! Yes! It was possible for Kalgash Two to cause a total eclipse of Dovim when Dovim was the only sun visible in the sky. |
| 1670 |
"The voice of science is now one with the voice of heaven," Mondior cried. "I urge you now: put no further hope in miracles and dreams. What must come must come. Nothing can save the world from the wrath of the gods, nothing except a willingness to abandon sin, to give up evil, to devote oneself to the path of virtue and righteousness." Mondior's booming pronouncement had pushed Theremon out of his neutrality. In loyalty to Beenay's friendship he had allowed himself to take the eclipse hypothesis more or less seriously, for a while. But now he began to see it' as pure sillyseason stuff-a bunch of earnest, self-deluding scientists, swept away by their own enthusiasm for a lot of circumstantial evidence and reasoning from mere coincidence, willing to kid themselves into a belief in the century's most nonsensical bit of insanity. The next day Theremon's column asked, "Are you wondering how the Apostles of Flame ever managed to gain Athor 77 as a convert? Of all people, the grand old man of astronomy seems about the least likely to line up in support of those robed and hooded purveyors of claptrap and abracadabra. Did some silver-tongued Apostle charm the great scientist out of his wits? Or is it simply the case, as we've heard whispered behind the ivy-covered walls of Saro University, that the mandatory faculty retirement age has been pegged a few years too high?" And that was only the beginning. Theremon saw what role he had to play now. If people started taking this eclipse thing seriously, there would be mental breakdowns on all sides, even without the coming of general Darkness to start the trouble off. Let everyone actually begin believing that doom would arrive on the evening of Theptar nineteenth, and there would be panic in the streets long before that, universal hysteria, a collapse of law and order, a prolonged period of general instability and troublesome apprehension-followed by the gods only knew what sort of emotional upheavals when the dreaded day came and went harmlessly. |
| 1671 |
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. 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. |
| 1672 |
He exchanged glances with Siferra. "The sky," she murmured. "I see it, yes." It had changed tone again. Now it was darker still, a horrible deep purple-red, a monstrous color, as though some enormous wound in the fabric of the heavens were gushing fountains of blood. The air had grown, somehow, denser. Dusk, like a palpable entity, entered the room, and the dancing circle of yellow light about the torches etched itself into ever sharper distinction against the gathering grayness beyond. The odor of smoke here was just as cloying as it had been upstairs. Theremon found himself bothered even by the little chuckling sounds that the torches made as they burned, and by the soft pad of Sheerin's footsteps as the heavyset psychologist circled round and round the table in the middle of the room. It was getting harder to see, torches or no. So now it begins, Theremon thought. The time of total Darkness-and the coming of the Stars. For an instant he thought it might be wisest to look for some cozy closet to lock himself into until it was all over. Stay out of the way, avoid the sight of the Stars, hunker down and wait for things to become normal again. But a moment's contemplation told him what a bad idea that was. A closet-any sort of enclosed place-would be dark too. Instead of being a safe snug harbor, it might become a chamber of terrors far more frightening than the rooms of the Observatory. And then too, if something big was going to happen, something that would reshape the history of the world, Theremon didn't want to be tucked away with his head under his arm while it was going on. That would be cowardly and foolish; and it might be something he would regret all the rest of his life. 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. |
| 1673 |
The little telescopes and other gadgets within them went tumbling over as he jockeyed the heavy cases into position. There was the sound of breaking glass. Beenay will kill me, Theremon thought. He worships all that stuff. But this was no moment for being delicate. He slammed one case after another up against the door, and in a few minutes had built a barricade that might, he hoped, serve to hold back the mob if it succeeded in breaking through the gate. Somewhere, dimly, far off, he could hear the battering of bare fists against the door. Screams-yells- It was all like a ghastly dream. The mob had set out from Saro City driven by the hunger for salvation, the salvation held forth by the Apostles of Flame, which could be attained now, they had been told, only by the destruction of the Observatory. But as the moment of Darkness drew near a maddening fear had all but stripped their minds of the ability to function. There was no time to think of ground cars, or of weapons, or of leadership, or even of organization. They had rushed to the Observatory on foot, and they were assaulting it with bare hands. And now that they were there, the last flash of Dovim, the last ruby-red drop of sunlight, flickered feebly over a humanity that had nothing left but stark, universal fear. Theremon groaned. "Let's get back upstairs!" There was no sign of anyone now in the room where they had been gathered. They had all gone to the topmost floor, into the Observatory dome itself. As he came rushing in, Theremon was struck by an eerie calmness that seemed to prevail in there. It was like a tableau. Yimot was seated in the little lean-back seat at the control panel of the gigantic solarscope as if this were just an ordinary evening of astronomical research. The rest were clustered about the smaller telescopes, and Beenay was giving instructions in a strained, ragged voice. "Get it straight, all of you. It's vital to snap Dovim just before totality and change the plate. Here, you-you-one of you to each camera. |
| 1674 |
Theremon reached out. He caught hold of Folimun's robe, yanked, twisted. Suddenly there were clutching fingers at his throat. He staggered crazily. There was nothing before him but shadows; the very floor beneath his feet lacked substance. A knee drove hard into his gut, and he grunted in a blinding haze of pain and nearly fell. But after the first gasping moment of agony his strength returned. He seized Folimun by the shoulders, somehow swung him around, hooked his arm around the Apostle's throat. At the same moment he heard Beenay croak, "I've got it! At your cameras, everyone!" Theremon seemed conscious of everything at once. The entire world was streaming through his pounding mind-and everything was in chaos, everything was screaming with terror. There came the strange awareness that the last thread of sunlight had thinned out and snapped. Simultaneously he heard one last choking gasp from Folimun, and a heavy bellow of amazement from Beenay, and a queer little cry from Sheerin, a hysterical giggle that cut off in a rasp- And a sudden silence, a strange, deadly silence, from outside. 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. |
| 1675 |
They hammered at the roots of his being. They beat like flails against his brain. Their icy monstrous light was like a million great gongs going off at once. My God, he thought. My God, my God, my God! But he could not tear his eyes away from the hellish sight of them. He looked up through the opening in the dome, every muscle rigid, frozen, and stared in helpless wonder and horror at that shield of fury that filled the sky. He felt his mind shrinking down to a tiny cold point under that unceasing onslaught. His brain was no bigger than a marble, rattling around in the hollow gourd that was his skull. His lungs would not work. His blood ran backward in his veins. At last he was able to close his eyes. He knelt for a time, panting, murmuring to himself, fighting to regain control. Then Theremon staggered to his feet, his throat constricting him to breathlessness, all of the muscles of his body writhing in a tensity of terror and sheer fear beyond bearing. Dimly he was aware of Siferra somewhere near him, but he had to struggle to remember who she was. He had to work at remembering who he was. From below came the sound of a terrible steady pounding, a frightful hammering against the door-some strange wild beast with a thousand heads, struggling to get in- It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. He was going mad, and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad-to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence that was you would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark-the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate, him. Someone came crawling toward him on hands and knees and jostled up against him. Theremon moved aside. He put his hands to his tortured throat and limped toward the flames of the torches that filled all his mad vision. |
| 1676 |
For a long moment he hunkered down where he was, hardly daring to think. Then, cautiously, he opened his eyes just a slit. The gigantic blazing thing was still there in the sky. It hadn't moved an inch. It wasn't going to fall on him. He began to shiver despite the heat. The dry, choking smell of smoke came to him. Something was burning, not very far away. It was the sky, he thought. The sky was burning. The golden thing is setting fire to the world. No. No. There was another reason for the smoke. He would remember it in a moment, if only he could clear the haze out of his mind. The golden thing hadn't caused the fires. It hadn't even been here when the fires started. It was those other things, those cold glittering white things that filled the sky from end to end-they had done it, they had sent the Flames- What were they called? The Stars. Yes, he thought. The Stars. And he began to remember, just a little, and he shivered again, a deep convulsive quiver. He remembered how it had been when the Stars came out, and his brain had turned to a marble and his lungs refused to pump air and his soul had screamed in the deepest of horror. 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. |
| 1677 |
He saw a few people lying scattered on the steps of the building, sprawled like discarded dolls. There were others lying in the bushes, and still others along the path leading down the hill. Some of them were faintly moving. Most were not. He looked the other way. On the horizon he saw the towers of a great city. A heavy pall of smoke hung over them, and when he squinted he imagined that he could see tongues of flame coming from the windows of the tallest buildings, although something rational within his mind told him that it was impossible to make out any such detail at so great a distance. That city had to be miles away. Saro City, he thought suddenly. Where the Chronicle is published. Where I work. Where I live. And I'm Theremon. Yes. Theremon 762. Of the Saro City Chronicle. He shook his head slowly from side to side, as some wounded animal might have done, trying to clear it of the haze and torpor that infested it. It was maddening, not being able to think properly, not being able to move around freely in the storehouse of his own memories. The brilliant light of the Stars lay like a wall across his mind, cutting him off from his own memories. But things were beginning to get through. Colored fragments of the past, sharp-edged, shimmering with manic energy, were dancing around and around in his brain. He struggled to make them hold still long enough for him to comprehend them. The image of a room came to him, then. His room, heaped with papers, magazines, a couple of computer terminals, a box of unanswered mail. Another room: a bed. The small kitchen that he almost never used. This, he thought, is the apartment of Theremon 762, the well-known columnist for the Saro City Chronicle. Theremon himself is not at home at this time, ladies and gentlemen. At the present moment Theremon is standing outside the ruins of the Saro University Observatory, trying to understand- The ruins- Saro University Observatory- "Siferra?" he called. "Siferra, where are you?" No answer. |
| 1678 |
He wondered who Siferra was. Someone he must have known before the ruins were ruined, probably. The name had come bubbling up out of the depths of his troubled mind. He took another few uncertain steps. There was a man lying under a bush a short distance downhill. Theremon went to him. His eyes were closed. He held a burned-out torch in his hand. His robe was torn. Sleeping? Or was he dead? Theremon prodded him carefully with his foot. Yes, dead. That was strange, all these dead people lying around. You didn't ordinarily see dead people everywhere like this, did you? And an overturned car over there-it looked dead, too, with its undercarriage turned pathetically toward the sky, and curls of smoke rising sluggishly from its interior. "Siferra?" he called again. Something terrible had happened. That seemed very clear to him, though hardly anything else did. Once again he crouched, and pressed his hands against the sides of his head. The random fragments of memory that had been jigging around in there were moving more slowly now, no longer engaged in a frantic dance: they had begun to float about in a stately fashion, like icebergs drifting in the Great Southern Ocean. If he could only get some of those drifting fragments to come together-force them into a pattern that made a little sense- He reviewed what he had already managed to reconstruct. 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. |
| 1679 |
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. Breathed in again. Hold, release. Breathe, hold, release. Breathe, hold, release. In his mind's eye he saw the interior of the Observatory. Remembering, now. It was evening. Only the little red sun was in the sky-Dovim, that was its name. That tall woman: she was Siferra. And the fat man was Sheerin, and the young slender earnest one, he was Beenay, and the fierce old man with the patriarchal mane of white hair was the great famous astronomer, the head of the Observatory-Ithor? Uthor? Athor, yes. Athor. And the eclipse was coming. The Darkness. The Stars. Oh, yes. Yes. It was all flowing together now. The memories returning. The mob outside the Observatory, led by fanatics in black robes: the Apostles of Flame, that's what they were called. And one of the fanatics had been inside the Observatory. Folimun, his name was. Folimun 66. He remembered. The moment of totality. The sudden and complete descent of night. The world entering the Cave of Darkness. The Stars- The madness-the screaming-the mob- Theremon winced at the recollection. The hordes of crazed, frightened people from Saro City breaking down the heavy doors, bursting into the Observatory, trampling each other in their rush to destroy the blasphemous scientific instruments and the blasphemous scientists who denied the reality of the gods- Now that the memories came flooding back, he almost wished he had not recaptured them. |
| 1680 |
The shock he had felt at the first moment of seeing the brilliant light of the Stars-the pain that had erupted within his skull-the strange horrific bursts of cold energy racing across his field of vision. 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. 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. |
| 1681 |
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? My God, he thought again. All you gods! What have you done to us? Sometimes cowardice has its advantages, Sheerin told himself, as he unbolted the door of the storeroom in the Observatory basement where he had spent the time of Darkness. He still felt shaky, but he had no doubt that he was still sane. As sane as he had ever been, at any rate. It seemed quiet out there. And although the storeroom had no windows, enough light had managed to make its way through a grating high up along one of its walls so that he was fairly confident that morning had come, that the suns were in the sky again. Perhaps the madness had passed by this time. Perhaps it was safe for him to come out. He poked his nose out into the hallway. Cautiously he looked around. The smell of smoke was the first thing he perceived. But it was a stale, musty, nasty, damp, acrid kind of smoke-smell, the smell of a fire that has been extinguished. |
| 1682 |
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. Yes. And what archaeologists did was dig for ancient things. She had been digging in a place far away. Sagimot? Beklikan? Something like that. And had found tablets, prehistoric texts. Ancient things, archaeological things. Very important things. In a place called Thombo. How am I doing? she asked herself. And the answer came: You're doing fine. She smiled. She was feeling better moment by moment. It was the pink light of dawn on the horizon that was healing her, she thought. The morning was coming: the sun, Onos, entering the sky. As Onos rose, the Stars became less bright, less terrifying. |
| 1683 |
They were fading fast. Already those in the east were dimmed by Onos's gathering strength. Even at the opposite end of the sky, where Darkness still reigned and the Stars thronged like minnows in a pool, some of the intensity was starting to go from their formidable gleam. She could look at the sky for several moments at a stretch now without feeling her head begin to throb painfully. And she was feeling less confused. She remembered clearly now where she lived, and where she worked, and what she had been doing the evening before. At the Observatory-with her friends, the astronomers, who had predicted the eclipse- The eclipse- That was what she had been doing, she realized. Waiting for the eclipse. For the Darkness. For the Stars. Yes. For the Flames, Siferra thought. And there they were. Everything had happened right on schedule. The world was burning, as it had burned so many times before-set ablaze not by the hand of the gods, nor by the power of the Stars, but by ordinary men and women, Star-crazed, cast into a desperate panic that urged them to restore the normal light of day by any means they could find. Despite the chaos all around her, though, she remained calm. 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. |
| 1684 |
There was a small botanical garden behind it, and an experimental arboretum on the hillside beyond that, at the edge of the forest that encircled the campus. Looking back, Siferra thought she saw the men still pursuing her, though she couldn't be sure. She sprinted past the Botany building and easily leaped the low fence around the botanical garden. A man riding a mowing machine waved at her. He wore the olive-drab uniform of the university gardeners; and he was methodically mowing the bushes, cutting a wide swath of destruction back and forth across the center of the garden. He was chuckling to himself as he worked. Siferra went around him. From there it was a short run into the arboretum. Were they still following her? She didn't want to take the time to glance behind her. Just run, run, run, that was the best idea. Her long, powerful legs carried her easily between the rows of neatly planted trees. She moved in steady strides. It felt good, running like this. Running. Running. Then she came to a rougher zone of the arboretum, all brambles and thorns, everything tightly interwoven. Unhesitatingly Siferra plunged into it, knowing no one would go after her there. The branches clawed at her face, ripped at her clothing. As she pushed her way through one dense patch she lost her grip on the roll of charts, and emerged on the far side without them. Let them go, she thought. They don't mean anything any more anyway. But now she had to rest. Panting, gasping with exhaustion, she vaulted across a little stream at the border of the arboretum and dropped down on a patch of cool green moss. No one had followed her. She was alone. She looked up, through the tops of the trees. The golden light of Onos flooded the sky. The Stars could no longer be seen. The night was over at last, and the nightmare too. No, she thought. The nightmare is just beginning. Waves of shock and nausea rolled through her: The strange numbness that had afflicted her mind all through the night was beginning to lift. |
| 1685 |
After hours of mental dissociation, she was starting to comprehend the patterns of things again, to put one event and another and another together and understand their meaning. She thought of the campus in ruins, and the flames rising above the distant city. The wandering madmen everywhere, the chaos, the devastation. Balik. The ugly grin on his face as he tried to paw her. And the look of amazement on it when she had hit him. I've killed a man today, Siferra thought in astonishment and dismay. Me. How could I ever have done a thing like that? She began to tremble. The horrifying memory seared her mind: the sound the club had made when she hit him, the way Balik had staggered backward, the other blows, the blood, the twisted angle of his head. The man with whom she had worked for a year and a half, patiently digging out the ruins at Beklimot, falling like a slaughtered beast under her deadly bludgeoning. And her utter calmness as she stood over him afterward-her satisfaction at having prevented him from annoying her any more. That was perhaps the ghastliest part of it all. Then Siferra told herself that what she had killed hadn't been Balik, but only a madman inside Balik's body, wild-eyed and drooling as he clawed and fondled her. 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. |
| 1686 |
One might just as well have ordered the tides of the ocean to turn back. Beenay remembered imploring Athor to come away with him, to flee while there still might be a chance. "Let go of me, young man!" Athor had roared, hardly seeming even to recognize him. "Get your hands off me, sir!" And then Beenay had realized what he should have seen before: that Athor had gone insane, and that the small part of Athor's mind that was still capable of functioning rationally was eager for death. What was left of Athor had lost all will to survive-to go forth into the dreadful new world of the post-eclipse barbarism. That was the most tragic single thing of all, Beenay thought: the destruction of Athor's will to live, the great astronomer's hopeless surrender in the face of this holocaust of civilization. And then-the escape from the Observatory. That was the last thing that Beenay remembered with any degree of confidence: looking back at the main Observatory room as Athor disappeared beneath a swarm of rioters, then turning, darting through a side door, scrambling down the fire escape, out the back way into the parking lot- Where the Stars were waiting for him in all their terrible majesty. With what he realized later had been sublime innocence, or else self-confidence verging on arrogance, Beenay had totally underestimated their power. In the Observatory at the moment of their emergence he had been too preoccupied with his work to be vulnerable to their force: he had merely noted them as a remarkable occurrence, to be examined in detail when he had a free moment, and then had gone on with what he was doing. But out here, under the merciless vault of the open sky, the Stars had struck him in their fullest might. He was stunned by the sight of them. The implacable cold light of those thousands of suns descended upon him and knocked him groveling to his knees. He crawled along the ground, choking with fear, sucking in sharp gasps of breath. His hands were shaking feverishly, his heart was palpitating, streams of sweat were running down his burning face. |
| 1687 |
When some shred of the scientist he once had been motivated him to turn his face toward that colossal brilliance overhead, so that he could examine and analyze and record, he was compelled to hide his eyes after only a second or two. He could remember that much: the struggle to look at the Stars, his failure, his defeat. After that, everything was murky. A day or two, he guessed, of wandering in the forest. Voices in the distance, cackling laughter, harsh discordant singing. Fires crackling on the horizon; the bitter smell of smoke everywhere. Kneeling to plunge his face in a brook, cool swift water sweeping along his cheek. A pack of small animals surrounding him-not wild ones, Beenay decided afterward, but household pets that had escaped -and baying at him as though they meant to rip him apart. Pulling berries off a vine. Climbing a tree to strip it of tender golden fruit, and falling off, landing with a disastrous thud. The long hours of pain before he could pick himself up and move onward. A sudden furious fight in the deepest, darkest part of the woods-fists flailing, elbows jabbing into ribs, wild kicks, then stone-throwing, bestial screeching, a man's face pushed close up against his own, eyes red as flame, fierce wrestling, the two of them rolling over and over-reaching for a massive rock, bringing it down in a single decisive motion- Hours. Days. A feverish daze. Then, on the morning of the third day, remembering finally who he was, what had happened. Thinking of Raissta, his contract-mate. Remembering that he had promised to go to her at the Sanctuary when his work at the Observatory was done. The Sanctuary-now where was that? Beenay's mind had healed enough for him to recall that the place of refuge that the university people had established for themselves was midway between the campus and Saro City, in an open, rural area of rolling plains and grassy meadows. The Physics Department's old particle accelerator was there, a vast underground chamber, abandoned a few years back when they had built the new research center at Saro Heights. |
| 1688 |
It hadn't been difficult to equip the echoing concrete rooms for short-term occupation by several hundred people, and, since the accelerator site had always been sealed off from easy access for security reasons, it was no problem to make the site safe against any sort of invasion by townsfolk who might be driven insane during the eclipse. But in order to find the Sanctuary, Beenay first had to find out where be was. And he had been wandering randomly in a dismal stupor for at least two days, perhaps more. He could be anywhere. In the early morning hours he found his way out of the forest, almost by accident, stepping forth unexpectedly into what had once been a neatly laid out residential district. It was deserted now, and in frightening disarray, with cars piled up every which way in the streets where their owners had left them when they no longer were capable of driving, and the occasional body lying in the street under a black cluster of flies. There was no sign that anyone was alive here. He spent a long morning trudging along a suburban highway lined by blackened, abandoned homes, without recognizing a single familiar landmark. At midday, as Trey and Patru rose into the sky, he entered a house through its open door and helped himself to whatever food he could find that had not spoiled. No water came out of the kitchen tap; but he found a cache of bottled water in the basement and drank as much of that as he could hold. He bathed himself in the rest. Afterward he proceeded up a winding road to a hilltop cul-de-sac of spacious, imposing dwellings, every one of them burned to a shell. Nothing at all was left of the uppermost house except a hillside patio decorated with pink and blue tiles, no doubt very handsome once, but marred now by thick black lumps of clotted debris scattered along its gleaming surface. With difficulty he made his way out onto it and looked out into the valley beyond. The air was very still. No planes were aloft, there was no sound of ground traffic, a weird silence resounded from every direction. |
| 1689 |
Suddenly Beenay knew where he was, and everything fell into place. The university was visible off to his left, a handsome cluster of brick buildings, many of them now streaked with black smoke-stains and some seeming to be altogether destroyed. Beyond, on its high promontory, was the Observatory. Beenay glanced at it quickly and looked away, glad that at this distance he was unable to make out its condition very clearly. Far away to his right was Saro City, gleaming in the bright sunlight. To his eyes it seemed almost untouched. But he knew that if he had a pair of field glasses he would surely see shattered windows, fallen buildings, still-glowing embers, rising wisps of smoke, all the scars of the conflagration that had broken out at Nightfall. Straight below him, between the city and the campus, was the forest in which he had been wandering during the time of his delirium. The Sanctuary would be just on the far side of that; he might well have passed within a few hundred yards of its entrance a day or so ago, all unknowing. The thought of crossing that forest again did not appeal to him. Surely it was still full of madmen, cutthroats, irate escaped pets, all manner of troublesome things. But from his vantage point on the hilltop he could see the road that cut across the forest, and the pattern of streets that led to the road. Stick to paved routes, he told himself, and you'll be all right. And so he was. Onos was still in the sky when he completed the traversal of the forest highway and turned onto the small rural road that he knew led to the Sanctuary. Afternoon shadows had barely begun to lengthen when he came to the outer gate. Once past that, Beenay knew, he had to go down a long unpaved road that would take him to the second gate, and thence around a couple of outbuildings to the sunken entrance to the Sanctuary itself. The outer gate, a high metal-mesh screen, was standing open when he reached it. That was an unexpected and ominous sight. Had the mob come roaring in here too? |
| 1690 |
Now, suddenly, he was a forest-dweller. The strange thing was that he almost liked it. What the citizens of Saro City called "the forest" was actually a fair-sized woodsy tract that began just southeast of the city itself and stretched for a dozen miles or so along the south bank of the Seppitan River. There once had been a great deal more of it, a vast wilderness sweeping on a great diagonal across the midsection of the province almost to the sea, but most of it had gone to agriculture, much of the remainder had been cut up into suburban residential districts, and the university had taken a goodly nip some fifty years back for what was then its new campus. Unwilling to have itself engulfed by urban development, the university had then agitated to have what was left set aside as a park preserve. And since the rule in Saro City for many years had been that whatever the university wanted the university usually got, the last strip of the old wilderness was left alone. That was where Theremon found himself living now. The first two days had been very bad. His mind was still half fogged by the effects of seeing the Stars, and he was unable to form any clear plan. The main thing was just to stay alive. The city was on fire-smoke was everywhere, the air was scorching hot, from certain vantage points you could even see the leaping flames dancing along the rooftops-so obviously it wasn't a good idea to try to go back there. In the aftermath of the eclipse, once the chaos within his mind had begun to clear a little, he had simply continued downhill from the campus until he found himself entering the forest. Many others plainly had done the same thing. Some of them looked like university people, others were probably remnants of the mob that had come out to storm the Observatory on the night of the eclipse, and the rest, Theremon guessed, were suburbanites driven from their homes when the fires began to break out. Everyone he saw appeared to be at least as unsettled mentally as he was. |
| 1691 |
Most seemed very much worse off-some of them completely unhinged, totally unable to cope. They had not formed any sort of coherent bands. Mainly they were solitaries, moving on mysterious private tracks through the woods, or else groups of two or three; the biggest aggregation Theremon saw was eight people, who from their appearance and dress seemed all to be members of one family. It was horrifying to encounter the truly crazy ones: the vacant eyes, the drooling lips, the slack jaws, the smeared clothing. They plodded through the forest glades like the walking dead, talking to themselves, singing, occasionally dropping to their hands and knees to dig up clumps of sod and munch on them. 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. 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. |
| 1692 |
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. 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. |
| 1693 |
There was no way of telling at a quick glance whether the person approaching you was merely one of the distraught or bewildered crazies, and therefore basically harmless, or one of the kind who were full of lethal fury and attacked anyone they encountered, with neither rhyme nor reason behind their deeds. So you quickly learned to be on your guard against anyone who came prancing and swaggering through the woods. Any stranger at all could be a menace. You might be talking quite amiably with someone, comparing notes on your experiences since the evening of Nightfall, when abruptly he would take offense at some casual remark of yours, or decide that he admired some article of your clothing, or perhaps merely take a blind unreasoning dislike of your face-and, with an animal-like howl, he would come rushing at you in mindless ferocity. Some of this sort, no doubt, had been criminals to begin with. The sight of society collapsing all around them had freed them of all restraint. But others, Theremon suspected, had been placid enough folk until their minds were shattered by the Stars. Then, suddenly, they found all the inhibitions of civilized life fall away from them. They forgot the rules that made civilized life possible. They were like small children again, asocial, concerned only with their own needs-but they had the strength of adults and the will power of the deeply disturbed. The thing to do, if you hoped to survive, was to avoid those whom you knew to be lethally crazy, or suspected of it. The thing to pray for was that they would all kill each other off within the first few days, leaving the world safe for the less predatory. Theremon had three encounters with madmen of this terrifying breed in the first two days. The first one, a tall, rangy man with a weird diabolical grin who was cavorting by the side of a brook that Theremon wanted to cross, demanded that the newspaperman pay him a toll to go past. "Your shoes, let's say. Or how about that wristwatch?" "How about getting out of my way?" Theremon suggested, and the man went berserk. |
| 1694 |
Snatching up a cudgel that Theremon hadn't noticed until that moment, he roared some sort of war-cry and charged. There was no time to take evasive action: the best Theremon could do was duck as the other man swung the cudgel with horrific force at his head. He heard the club go whirring by, missing him by inches. It hit the tree beside him instead, cracking into it with tremendous force-a force so great that the impact of it traveled up the attacker's arm, and he gasped in pain as the cudgel fell from his nerveless fingers. Theremon was on top of him in an instant, seizing the man's injured arm, bringing it sharply upward with merciless force, making him grunt in agony and double up and fall moaning to his knees. Theremon prodded and pushed him down until his face was in the stream, and held him there. And held him there. And held him there. How simple it would be, Theremon thought in wonder, just to go on holding his head under water until he drowned. A part of his mind was actually arguing in favor of it. He would have killed you without even thinking about it. Get rid of him. Otherwise what will you do once you let go of him? Fight him all over again? What f he follows you through the forest to get even with you? Drown him now, Theremon. Drown him. It was a powerful temptation. But only one segment of Theremon's mind was willing to adapt so readily to the world's new jungle morality. The rest of him recoiled at the idea; and finally he released the man's arm and stepped back. He picked up the fallen cudgel and waited. All the fight was gone from the other man now, though. Choking and gasping, he rose from the stream with water flowing from his mouth and nostrils, and sat trembling by the bank, shivering, coughing, struggling for breath. He stared sullenly and fearfully at Theremon, but he made no attempt to get up, let alone to renew the fighting. Theremon stepped around him, crossed the stream in a bound, and trotted off quickly, deeper into the forest. The implications of what he had almost done did not fully strike him for another ten minutes. |
| 1695 |
Then he halted suddenly, in a burst of sweat and nausea, and was swept by a fierce attack of vomiting that racked him so savagely that it was a long while before he could rise. Later that afternoon he realized that his roamings had brought him right to the border of the forest. When he looked out between the trees he saw a highway-utterly deserted- and, on the far side of the road, the ruins of a tall brick building standing in a broad plaza. He recognized the building. It was the Pantheon, the Cathedral of All the Gods. There wasn't much left of it. He walked across the road and stared in disbelief. It looked as if a fire had started in the heart of the building-what had they been doing, using the pews for kindling?-and had swept right up the narrow tower over the altar, igniting the wooden beams. The whole tower had toppled, bringing down the walls. Bricks were strewn everywhere about the plaza. He saw bodies jutting out of the wreckage. Theremon had never been a particularly religious man. He didn't know anyone who was. Like everyone else, he said things like "My God!" or "Gods!" or "Great gods!" for emphasis, but the idea that there might actually be a god, or gods, or whatever the current prevailing belief-system asserted, had always been irrelevant to the way he lived his life. Religion seemed like something medieval to him, quaint and archaic. Now and then he would find himself in a church to attend the wedding of a friend-who was as much of a disbeliever as he was, of course-or else he went to cover some official rite as a news item-but he hadn't been inside any kind of holy building for religious purposes since his own confirmation, when he was ten years old. 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. |
| 1696 |
Even he, who had no belief in the sacred, could not help feeling that if there was any place on Kalgash where the gods truly were present, it must be here. And the gods had let the building be destroyed like this! The gods had sent the Stars, knowing that the madness to follow would wreck even their own Pantheon! What did that mean? What did that say about the unknowability and unfathomability of the gods-assuming they even existed? No one would ever rebuild this cathedral, Theremon knew. Nothing would ever be as it was. "Help me," a voice called. That feeble sound cut into Theremon's meditations. He looked around. "Over here. Here." To his left. Yes. Theremon saw the glint of golden vestments in the sunlight. A man half buried in the rubble, far along down the side of the building-one of the priests, apparently, judging by his rich garb. He was pinned below the waist by a heavy beam and was gesturing with what must be the last of his strength. Theremon started to go toward him. But before he could take more than a dozen steps a second figure appeared at the far end of the fallen building and came running forward: a lean, agile little man who went scrambling over the bricks with animal swiftness, heading for the trapped priest. Good, Theremon thought. Together we ought to be able to pull that beam off him. But when he was still some twenty feet away he halted, horror-stricken. The agile little man had already reached the priest. Bending over him, he had slit the priest's throat with one quick stroke of a small knife, as casually as one might open an envelope; and now he was busily engaged in slicing the cords that fastened the priest's rich vestments. He looked up, glaring, at Theremon. His eyes were fiery and appalling. "Mine," he growled, like a jungle beast. "Mine!" And he flourished the knife. Theremon shivered. For a long moment he stood frozen in his tracks, fascinated in a ghastly way by the efficient manner with which the looter was stripping the dead priest's body. |
| 1697 |
Then, sadly, he turned and hurried away, back across the road, into the forest. There was no point in doing anything else. That evening, when Tano and Sitha and Dovim held the sky with their melancholy light, Theremon allowed himself a few hours of fragmentary sleep in a deep thicket; but he awoke again and again, imagining that some madman with a knife was creeping up on him to steal his shoes. Sleep left him long before Onos-rise. It seemed almost surprising to find himself still alive when morning finally came. Half a day later he had his third encounter with one of the new breed of killers. This time he was crossing a grassy meadow close by one of the arms of the river when he caught sight of two men sitting in a shady patch just across the way, playing some sort of game with dice. They looked calm and peaceful enough. But as Theremon came nearer, he realized that an argument had broken out; and then, unthinkably swiftly, one of the men snatched up a bread-knife sitting on a blanket beside him and plunged it with lethal force into the other man's chest. The one who had wielded the knife smiled across at Theremon. "He cheated me. You know how it is. It makes you damned angry. I can't stand it when a guy tries to cheat me." It seemed all very clear-cut to him. He grinned and rattled the dice. "Hey, you want to play?" Theremon stared into the eyes of madness. "Sorry," he said, as casually as he could. "I'm looking for my girlfriend." He kept on walking. "Hey, you can find her later! Come on and play!" "I think I see her," Theremon called, moving faster, and got out of there without looking back. After that he was less cavalier about wandering through the forest. He found a sheltered nook in what seemed like a relatively unoccupied glade and built a tidy little nest for himself under a jutting overhang. There was a berry-bush nearby that was heavily laden with edible red fruits, and when he shook the tree just opposite his shelter it showered him with round yellow nuts that contained a tasty dark kernel. |
| 1698 |
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. 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. |
| 1699 |
Whatever kind of civilization is going to evolve, we'd find a good place for ourselves in it. And if there had been a little psychological barrier between them before, he was certain it would seem unimportant to her now. It was a brand-new world, and new attitudes were necessary if you were going to survive. But how could he find Siferra No communications circuits were open, so far as he knew. She was just one of millions of people at large in the area. The forest alone probably had a population of many thousands now; and he had no real reason for assuming that she was in the forest. 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. "You know, from the Chronicle. Help me and I'll make it worth your while. |
| 1700 |
It appeared to her as if new fires were being started every day. Which meant that the craziness had not yet begun to abate. She could feel her own mind returning gradually to normal, clearing day by day, blessedly emerging into clarity as though she were awakening from some terrible fever. She was uncomfortably aware that she wasn't fully herself yet-managing any sequence of thoughts was a laborious thing for her, and she lost herself quickly in muddle. But she was on her way back, of that she was sure. 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. |
| 1701 |
Her cheeks flamed as she realized that there had been no need for her to have been living this cave-woman life all week. Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Just a few miles from here at this very moment, hundreds of university people were tucked away safe and sound in the old particle accelerator lab, drinking bottled water and dining pleasantly on the canned foods that they had spent the last few months stashing away. How ridiculous to be skulking around in this forest full of madmen, scratching in the dirt for her meager meals and looking hungrily at the little forest creatures that cavorted beyond her reach on the branches of the trees! She would go to the Sanctuary. Somehow there would be a way to get them to take her in. It was a measure of the extent to which the Stars had disrupted her mind, she told herself, that it had taken her as long as this to remember that the Sanctuary was there. Too bad, she thought, that the idea hadn't occurred to her earlier. She realized now that she had spent the last few days traveling in precisely the wrong direction. Directly ahead of her now lay the steep chain of hills that marked the southern boundary of the forest. Looking up, she could see the blackened remains of the posh Onos Heights real estate development along the summit of the hill that rose like a dark wall before her. The Sanctuary, if she remembered correctly, was the opposite way entirely, midway between the campus and Saro City on the highway running along the north side of the forest. It took her another day and a half to make her way back through the forest to the north side. 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. |
| 1702 |
And it was the correct gate. She saw the University Security symbol on it. But why was it open? There was no indication that it had been forced. Troubled now, she went through. The road inward was nothing more than a dirt track, deeply rutted and cratered. She followed along its edge, and in a little while she saw an inner barrier, no mere barbed-wire fence here but a solid concrete wall, blank, impregnable-looking. It was broken only by a gateway of dark metal, with a scanner mounted above it. And this gate was open too. Stranger and stranger! What about all the vaunted protection that was supposed to have sealed the Sanctuary away from the general madness that had overtaken the world? 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. |
| 1703 |
Just about everybody else seems to be clear out of his mind. Except, that is, for you and us, Professor." "How flattering of you to include me." "I never flatter anybody. You give an appearance of having withstood the Darkness and the Stars and the Breakdown better than most. What I want to know is whether you're interested in staying here and becoming part of our group. We need people like you, Professor." "What does that mean? Scrub floors for you? Cook soup?" Altinol seemed impervious to her sarcasms. "I mean helping in the struggle to keep civilization alive, Professor. Not to sound too high-pitched about it, but we see ourselves as having a holy mission. Day after day we are making our way through that madhouse out there, disarming the crazies, taking the firemaking apparatus away from them, reserving to ourselves exclusively the right to light fires. We can't put out the fires that are already burning, at least not yet, but we can do our best to keep new ones from being lit. That's our mission, Professor. We are taking control of the concept of fire. It's the first step toward making the world fit to live in again. You seem sane enough to join us and therefore I invite you in. What do you say, Professor? Do you want to be part of the Fire Patrol? Or would you rather try your luck back there in the forest?" The morning was misty and cool. Thick swirls of fog blew through the ruined streets, fog so heavy that Sheerin was unable to tell which suns were in the sky. Onos, certainly-somewhere. But its golden light was diffused and almost completely concealed by the fog. And that patch of slightly brighter sky off to the southwest very likely indicated the presence of one of the pairs of twin suns, but whether they were Sitha and Tano or Patru and Trey he had no way of discerning. 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. |
| 1704 |
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. 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. |
| 1705 |
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. 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. |
| 1706 |
Before long it would seem simpler just to curl up behind some bush and rest ... and rest ... and rest... He had to find food. Soon. The neighborhood he was moving through now, though deserted like all the rest, seemed a little less devastated than the areas behind him. There had been fires here too, but not everywhere, and the flames appeared to have jumped randomly past this house and that without harming them. Patiently Sheerin went from one to the next, trying the door of each house that didn't seem to have been seriously damaged. Locked. Every one of them. How fastidious of these people! he thought. How tidy! The world has fallen in around their ears, and they are abandoning their homes in blind terror, running off to the forest, the campus, the city, the gods only knew where-and they take the trouble to lock their houses before they go! As if they mean simply to have a brief holiday during the time of chaos, and then go home to their books and their bric-a-brac, their closets full of nice clothing, their gardens, their patios. Or hadn't they realized that everything was over, that the chaos was going to go on and on and on? Perhaps, Sheerin thought dismally, they aren't gone at all. They're in there hiding behind those locked doors of theirs, huddling in the basement the way I did, waiting for things to get normal again. Or else staring at me from the upstairs windows, hoping I'll go away. He tried another door. Another. Another. All locked. No response. "Hey! Anybody home? Let me in!" Silence. He stared bleakly at the thick wooden door in front of him. He envisioned the treasures behind it, the food not yet spoiled and waiting to be eaten, the bathtub, the soft bed. And here he was outside, with no way of getting in. He felt a little like the small boy in the fable who has been given the magic key to the garden of the gods, where fountains of honey flow and gumdrops grow on every bush, but who is too small to reach up and put it in the keyhole. He felt like crying. |
| 1707 |
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. 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. |
| 1708 |
Is that what's frightening you?" "You are university," the man called Tasibar said. "You knew the secrets. University brought the Darkness, yes. University brought the Stars. University brought doom." It was too much. 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. 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. |
| 1709 |
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. For a dumb scavenger it was remarkably agile, scooting swiftly this way and that in its desperation to elude its attackers. But finally a lucky shot caromed off its head and killed it instantly. He had assumed that they would devour it on the spot. But at that moment a shaggy, shambling figure came into view above them, standing for a moment at the rim of the little canyon, then beginning to climb down toward the lake. "Run! It's Garpik the Slasher!" one of the boys yelled. "Garpik! Garpik!" In an instant the boys scattered, leaving the dead graben behind. Theremon, still watching, had slipped back into the shadows on his side of the lake. He also knew this Garpik, though not by name: one of the most dreaded of the forest-dwellers, a squat, almost ape-like man who wore nothing but a belt through which an assortment of knives was thrust. He was a killer without motive, a cheerful psychopath, a pure predator. Garpik stood by the mouth of the canyon for a while, humming to himself, fondling one of his knives. He didn't seem to notice the dead animal, or didn't care. Perhaps he was waiting for the boys to come back. But plainly they weren't planning to do that, and after a time Garpik, with a shrug, went slouching off into the forest, most likely in search of something amusing to do with his weapons. Theremon waited an endless moment, making certain Garpik didn't intend to double back and pounce on him. |
| 1710 |
Then-when he could no longer bear the sight of the dead graben lying there on the ground, where some other human or animal predator might suddenly come along to seize it before he did-he rushed forward, circled the lake, snatched the animal up, carried it back to his hiding place. 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. 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. |
| 1711 |
Not without some difficulty, he skewered the graben on a spit he had made of a sharp, reasonably straight stick, and positioned it a short distance above the woodpile. So far, so good. Just one little thing missing, now. Fire! He had kept his mind away from that problem while assembling his fuel, hoping that it would solve itself somehow without his having to dwell on it. But now it had to be faced. He needed a spark. The old boys'-book trick of rubbing two sticks together was, Theremon was certain, nothing but a myth. He had read that certain primitive tribes had once started their fires by twirling a stick against a board with a little hole in it, but he suspected that the process wasn't all that simple, that it probably took an hour of patient twirling to get anything going. And in any case very likely you had to be initiated into the art by the old man of the tribe when you were a boy, or some such thing, or it wouldn't work. Two rocks, though-was it possible to strike a spark by banging one against the other? He doubted that too. But he might as well try it, he thought. He had no other ideas. There was a wide flat stone lying nearby, and after a little searching he found a smaller triangular one that could fit conveniently in the palm of his hand. He knelt beside his little fireplace and began methodically to hit the flat one with the pointed one. Nothing in particular happened. A hopeless feeling began to grow in him. Here I am, he thought, a grown man who can read and write, who can drive a car, who can even operate a computer, more or less. I can turn out a newspaper column in two hours that everybody in Saro City will want to read, and I can do it day in, day out, for twenty years. But I can't start a fire in the wilderness. On the other hand, he thought, I will not eat this graben raw unless I absolutely have to. Will not. Will not. Not. Not. Not! In fury he struck the stones together, again, again, again. Spark, damn you! Light! Burn! Cook this ridiculous pathetic animal for me! |
| 1712 |
A voice somewhere deep within him said, They 're completely nuts. They 're perfectly likely to keep this up until they beat you to death. Nothing he could do about that now, though. Except try to hold them off. He kept his head down and punched as hard as he could, while steadily pushing onward toward the wall. They crowded around him, battering him from all sides. But he stayed on his feet. Their numerical advantage wasn't as overwhelming as he had expected. In these close quarters, the five of them were unable all to get at him at once, and Theremon was able to play the confusion to his own benefit, striking out in any direction and moving as quickly as he could while they lumbered around trying to avoid hitting each other. Even so, he knew he couldn't take much more. His lip was cut and one eye was starting to swell, and he was getting short of breath. One more good punch could send him down. He held one arm in front of his face and struck with the other, while continuing to back toward the shelter of the rock wall. He kicked someone. There was a howl and a curse. Someone else kicked back. Theremon took it on his thigh and swung around, hissing in pain. He swayed. He struggled desperately for air. It was hard to see, hard to tell what was going on. They were all around him now, fists flailing at him from all sides. He wasn't going to reach the wall. He wasn't going to stay on his feet much longer. He was going to fall, and they were going to trample him, and he was going to die- Going-to — die- Then he became aware of confusion within the confusion: the shouts of different voices, new people mingling in the melee, a host of figures everywhere. Fine, he thought. Another bunch of crazies joining the fun. But maybe I can slip away somehow while all this is going on- "In the name of the Fire Patrol, stop!" a woman's voice called, clear, loud, commanding. "That's an order! Stop, all of you! Get away from him! Now!" Theremon blinked and rubbed his forehead. He looked around, bleary-eyed. |
| 1713 |
A meal was waiting for him there-one of the packaged dinners that had been stockpiled here in the months that the Sanctuary was being set up. Lukewarm vegetables, tepid meat of some unknown kind, a pale green non-alcoholic drink of nondescript flavor. It all tasted wondrously delicious to Theremon. He forced himself to eat slowly, carefully, knowing that his body was unaccustomed to real food after his time in the forest; every mouthful had to be thoroughly chewed or he'd get sick, he knew, though his instinct was to bolt it as fast as he could and ask for a second helping. After he had eaten Theremon sat back, staring dully at the ugly tin wall. He wasn't hungry any more. And his frame of mind was beginning to change for the worse. Despite the bath, despite the meal, despite the comfort of knowing he was safe in this well-defended Sanctuary, he found himself slipping into a mood of the deepest desolation. He felt very weary. And dispirited, and full of gloom. It had been a pretty good world, he thought. Not perfect, far from it, but good enough. Most people had been reasonably happy, most were prosperous, there was progress being made on all fronts-toward deeper scientific understanding, toward greater economic expansion, toward stronger global cooperation. The concept of war had come to seem quaintly medieval and the age-old religious bigotries were mostly obsolete, or so it had seemed to him. And now it was all gone, in one short span of hours, in a single burst of horrifying Darkness. A new world would be born from the ashes of the old, of course. It was always that way: Siferra's excavations at Thombo testified to that. But what sort of world would it be? Theremon wondered. The answer to that was already at hand. It would be a world in which people killed other people for a scrap of meat, or because they had violated a superstition about fire, or simply because killing seemed like a diverting thing to do. A world in which the Altinols came forward to take advantage of the chaos and gain power for themselves. |
| 1714 |
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. 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! But at least she had that. Everything else might be lost; but at least she had that. "Look there," she said, pointing. |
| 1715 |
Do you want to get to Amgando, or would you rather spend the rest of your life hiding out here in this alleyway?" "But you can't just kill people, even though you-even though they-" Her voice trailed off. She didn't know what she was trying to say. "Even though they're trying to kill you, Siferra? Even though they think it's fun to send a couple of shots whistling past your ears?" She made no reply. She had thought she was beginning to understand the way things worked in the monstrous new world that had come into being on the evening of the eclipse; but she realized that she understood nothing, nothing at all. 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. |
| 1716 |
"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. Siferra said, "Probably some drivers stopped right away, when the Stars came out. But others speeded up, trying to get off the highway and head for home, and went piling into the cars that had stopped. And still other people were so dazed they forgot how to drive altogether-look, they went right off the edge of the road over there, and this one here must have turned around and tried to drive back through the oncoming traffic-" Theremon shuddered. "A horrendous colossal pileup. Cars crashing in from all sides at once. Spinning around, turning over, flung right across the road to the opposite lanes. People getting out, running for cover, getting hit by other cars just arriving. Everything gone crazy in fifty different ways." He laughed bitterly. Siferra said in surprise, "What can you possibly find to laugh about, Theremon?" "Only my own foolishness. Do you know, Siferra, a wild idea crossed my mind half an hour ago, as we were getting close to the highway, that we could just sit down in somebody's abandoned car and find it fueled up and ready to go, and drive ourselves off to Amgando? |
| 1717 |
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. A small group of ragged-looking people were scrambling over its tumbled walls, prying at the remaining blocks of gray stone with crowbars, pulling them loose and hurling them into the courtyard. "It looks as though they're demolishing it," she said. "Why would they do that?" Theremon said, "Because they hate the gods. They blame them for everything that happened. -Do you know the Pantheon, the big Cathedral of All the Gods just at the edge of the forest, with the famous Thamilandi murals? I saw it a couple of days after Nightfall. It had been burned down-just rubble, everything destroyed, and one half-conscious priest sticking out of a pile of bricks. Now I realize that it was no accident that it burned. That fire was deliberately set. And the priest-I saw a crazy kill him right before my eyes, and I thought it was to steal his vestments. Maybe not. Maybe it was out of mere hatred." "But the priests didn't cause-" "Have you forgotten the Apostles so soon? |
| 1718 |
In hardly any time at all they came to the next road-sign, the one that gave quarter-mile warning of the exit. But then their rapid progress was sharply checked. They found the roadbed blocked at that point by so immense a pileup of crashed cars that Theremon feared for a moment that they would not be able to get through at all. There must have been some truly monstrous series of crashes here, something dreadful even by the standards of what he and Siferra had already passed through. Two huge transport trucks seemed to be in the middle of it, interlocked face to face like two warring beasts of the jungle; and it appeared that dozens of passenger cars had come barreling into them, flipping up on end, falling back on those who followed them, building a gigantic barrier that reached from one side of the road to the other and outward over the railings at the road's margins. Crumpled doors and fenders, sharp as blades, stuck out everywhere, and acres of broken glass set up a sinister tinkling as the wind played over it. "Here," Theremon called. "I think I see a way-up through this opening, and then over the left-hand truck-no, no, that won't work, we'll have to go under-" Siferra came up alongside him. He showed her the problem -a cluster of up-ended cars waiting for them on the far side, like a field of upturned knives-and she nodded. They went underneath instead, a slow, dirty, painful crawl through shards of glass and clotted pools of fuel. Midway through they paused to rest before continuing through to the far side of the pileup. Theremon was the first to emerge. "Gods!" he muttered, staring in bewilderment at the scene that lay before him. "What now?" The road was open for perhaps fifty feet on the far side of the great mass of wreckage. Beyond the clear space a second roadblock lay across the highway from one side to the other. This one, though, had been deliberately constructed-a heap of car doors and wheels neatly piled on the roadbed to a height of eight or nine feet. |
| 1719 |
-Apostles! Amgando!" "Thank you very much," said Theremon, with a graciousness bordering so closely on sarcasm that Siferra took him by the arm and steered him quickly through the checkpoint before he could get them into real trouble. 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. What lay beyond the eastern and western borders of the new provinces was anybody's guess. No radio or television communications seemed to be in existence. "Wasn't there any kind of emergency planning at all?" Theremon asked, speaking more to the air than to Siferra. |
| 1720 |
Unless-unless- He had never imagined himself as a hero. Heroes were people he wrote about in his column-people who functioned at the top of their form under extreme circumstances, performing strange and miraculous deeds that the ordinary individual would never dream of even attempting, let alone of carrying off. 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. No. He was strong and fast, but they were stronger, faster. He saw them coming up alongside him. "Siferra!" he yelled. "Keep going! Keep-going!" Perhaps she had actually made it to safety. |
| 1721 |
She could lose herself easily enough in those low shrubby trees, and hide there until she had figured out her next move. And what could that be? she wondered. She had to admit that Theremon's idea, wild as it was, still was their only hope: steal a truck somehow, drive down to Amgando and sound the alarm before the Apostles could get their army on the move again. But Siferra knew there wasn't the remotest chance that she could simply tiptoe up to an empty truck, jump in, and drive it away. The Apostles weren't that stupid. She'd have to order one of them at gunpoint to switch the truck on for her and surrender its controls to her. And that involved carrying out the whole bizarre maneuver of trying to overpower a stray Apostle, getting his robe, slipping into the camp, locating someone who could open up one of the trucks for her- Her heart sank. It was all too implausible. She might just as well consider trying to rescue Theremon while she was at it- go marching in with her needle-gun blazing, take hostages, demand his immediate release-oh, it was absolute foolishness, a silly melodramatic dream, a gaudy maneuver out of some cheap children's adventure book- But what will I do? What will I do? She huddled down in a copse of tightly woven little trees with long feathery leaves and waited for time to pass. The Apostles gave no sign of breaking camp: she could still see the smoke of their bonfire against the twilight sky, and their trucks were still parked where they had been along the road. Evening was coming on. Onos was gone from the sky. Dovim hovered on the horizon. The only suns overhead were her two least favorite ones, bleak and cheerless Tano and Sitha, casting their cold light from their distant location at the edge of the universe. Or what people had thought was the edge of the universe, rather, in those far-off innocent days before the Stars appeared and revealed to them just how immense the universe really was. The hours ticked interminably by. No solution to the situation made sense to her. |
| 1722 |
Amgando seemed lost, unless someone else had managed to get a warning to them-certainly there was no way she was going to get down there ahead of the Apostles. Rescuing Theremon was an absurd idea. Her chances of stealing a truck and getting to Amgando by herself was only slightly less preposterous. What then? Simply sit back and watch while the Apostles took command of everything? There seemed to be no alternative. At one point during the evening she thought that the only path open to her was to walk into the Apostles' camp, surrender, and ask to be imprisoned with Theremon. At least they would be together then. It astonished her how much she missed him. They had not been out of each other's company in weeks, she who had never lived with a man in her life. And all during the long journey from Saro City, though they had bickered now and then, even quarreled a little, she had never tired of being with him. Not once. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to be together. And now she was alone again. Go on, she told herself. Give yourself up. Everything's lost anyway, isn't it? It grew darker. Clouds veiled Sitha and Tano's frosty light, and the sky turned so dusky that she half expected the Stars to reappear. Go ahead, she thought bitterly. Come out and shine. Drive everyone crazy all over again. What harm can it do? The world can only be smashed once, and that's been done already. But the Stars, of course, did not appear. Veiled as they were, Tano and Sitha nevertheless afforded enough light to mask the glow of those distant points of mysterious brilliance. And as the hours went by, Siferra found herself swinging completely around from her mood of total defeatism to a new sense of almost reckless hope. When all is lost, she told herself, there's nothing left to lose. Under cover of this evening gloom she would slip into the Apostles' camp and-somehow, somehow-take one of their trucks. And rescue Theremon, too, if she could manage it. And then off to Amgando! |
| 1723 |
The sentries would probably investigate; and if they fanned out separately, she could slip up behind one of them, jab the needler into his back, warn him to keep quiet, make him strip off his robe- No, she thought. Don't warn him of anything. Just shoot him, quickly, and take his robe, before he can call out an alarm. These are Apostles, after all. Fanatics. Her own newfound cold-bloodedness amazed her. Onward. Onward. She was almost at the nearest truck now. Into the darkness on the side opposite the campfire. Where's a rock? Here. Here, this is a good one. Shift the needler to the left hand for a moment. Now, toss the rock at that big tree over there- She raised her arm to make the throw. And in that moment she felt a hand seize her left wrist from behind and a powerful arm clamp across her throat. Caught! Shock and outrage and a jolt of maddening frustration went coursing through her. Furiously Siferra lashed out with her foot, kicking backward with all her strength, and connecting. She heard a grunt of pain. Not enough to break the man's strong grip, though. Twisting halfway around, she kicked again, and attempted at the same time to pass the needle-gun from her left hand to her right. But her assailant pulled her left arm upward in a short, sharp, agonizing gesture that numbed her and sent the needler spilling out of her hand. The other arm, the one that was pressing against her throat, tightened to choking intensity. 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. Then, numb with confusion, she swung around to stare at him. |
| 1724 |
"I've thought about very little else since this request first came to my attention." "I sincerely regret any discomfort that it may have caused you." "Thank you. I am grateful for your concern." All very formal, very courteous, very useless. They were simply fencing with each other, neither one willing to get down to essentials. And now the surgeon fell silent. Andrew waited for him to proceed. The silence went on and on. This is getting us nowhere, Andrew told himself. To the surgeon he said, "The thing that I need to know, Doctor, is how soon the operation can be carried out." The surgeon hesitated a perceptible moment. Then he said softly, with that certain inalienable note of respect that a robot always used when speaking to a human being, "I am not convinced, sir, that I fully understand how such an operation could be performed, let alone why it should be considered desirable. And of course I still don't know who the subject of the proposed operation is going to be." There might have been a look of respectful intransigence on the surgeon's face, if the elegantly contoured stainless steel of the surgeon's face had been in any way capable of displaying such an expression — or any expression at all. 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. |
| 1725 |
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. But this one, brained or not, was so limited in his capacity that he didn't recognize Andrew Martin — had probably never heard of Andrew Martin at all, in fact. That was something of a novelty for Andrew. He was more than a little famous. He had never asked for his fame, of course — that was not his style — but fame, or at any rate notoriety, had come to him all the same. Because of what he had achieved: because of what he was. Not who, but what. Instead of replying to what the surgeon had asked him Andrew said, with sudden striking irrelevance, "Tell me something, Doctor. Have you ever thought you would like to be a man?" The question, startling and strange, obviously took the surgeon aback. He hesitated a moment as though the concept of being a man was so alien to him that it would fit nowhere in his allotted positronic pathways. Then he recovered his aplomb and replied serenely, "But I am a robot, sir." "Wouldn't it be better to be a man, don't you think?" "If I were allowed the privilege of improving myself, sir, I would choose to be a better surgeon. The practice of my craft is the prime purpose of my existence. There is no way I could be a better surgeon if I were a man, but only if I were a more advanced robot. It would please me very much indeed to be a more advanced robot." "But you would still be a robot, even so." "Yes. |
| 1726 |
"Ugh. It's got things growing on it." "They're just another kind of seaweed," Little Miss said. "Right, Andrew?" She picked up the discarded piece of driftwood and handed it to him for inspection. "Algae, yes," he said. "Algy?" "Algae. The technical term for seaweed." "Oh. Algy." Little Miss laughed and put the bit of driftwood down near the beginning of the trail, so she would remember to take it with her when they went up to the house again. Then she rampaged off down the beach again, following her older sister through the foamy fringes of the surf. Andrew kept pace with them without difficulty. He did not intend to let them get very far from him at any time. He had needed no special orders from Sir to protect the girls while they were actually on the beach: the First Law took care of that. The ocean here was not only wild-looking but exceedingly dangerous: the currents were strong and unpredictable, the water was intolerably cold at almost any time of the year, and the great rocky fangs of a deadly reef rose from the swirling breakers less than fifty meters offshore. If Miss or Little Miss should make the slightest move to enter the sea, Andrew would be beside them in an instant. But they had more sense than to want to go swimming in this impossible ocean. The shore along this part of the Pacific coast was a beautiful thing to behold in its harsh, bleak way, but the sea itself, forever angry and turbulent, was the enemy of those who were not bred for it, and even a small child could see that at a glance. Miss and Little Miss were wading in the tide pools now, peering at the dark periwinkles and gray-green limpets and pink-and-purple anemones and the myriad little scuttling hermit crabs, and searching — as they always did, rarely with much luck — for a starfish. Andrew stood nearby, poised and ready in the event that a sudden wave should rise without warning nearby and sweep toward shore. The sea was quiet today, as quiet as that savage body of water ever got, but perilous waves were apt to come out of nowhere at any time. |
| 1727 |
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. A steady stream of magnificent work flowed from his little attic shop — one-of-a-kind masterpieces of carved jewelry fashioned from rare woods, sumptuous office furniture, elegant bedroom suites, wondrous lamps, and ornate bookcases. There was no need for a showroom or catalogs, because word of mouth took care of everything and all of Andrew's output was commissioned months and then years in advance. The checks were made payable to Pacific Coast Artifactories, Incorporated, and Andrew Martin was the only officer of Pacific Coast Artifactories who was entitled to draw money from the corporate account. Whenever it was necessary for Andrew to go back to the U. S. Robots factory for maintenance or upgrading, it was a Pacific Coast Artifactories check, signed by Andrew himself, that paid for the work. The one area of Andrew that remained untouched by upgrading of any sort was his positronic pathways. |
| 1728 |
(Or perhaps had simply admitted that the public would now prefer a younger man for the job.) Sir had changed with the passage of time in many ways, not just the loss of the fire and conviction that had marked him out for success when he was still a raw new legislator. His hair had thinned and grayed and his face had grown pouchy, and his fierce penetrating eyes no longer saw as clearly. Even his famous mustache was less bristling now, less flamboyant. Whereas Andrew looked rather better than he had when he first joined the family — quite handsome, in fact, in his robotic way. Time had brought certain other changes to the Martin household, too. Ma'am had decided, after some thirty years of being Mrs. Gerald Martin, that there might be some more fulfilling role in life than simply being the wife of a distinguished member of the Regional Legislature. She had played the part of Mrs. Gerald Martin loyally and uncomplainingly and very well, all that time. But she had played it long enough. And so she had regretfully announced her decision to Sir, and they had amicably separated, and Ma'am had gone off to join an art colony somewhere in Europe — perhaps in southern France, perhaps in Italy. Andrew was never quite sure which it was (or what difference, if any, there might be between France and Italy, which were mere names to him) and the postage stamps on her infrequent letters to Sir were of various kinds. Since both France and Italy were provinces of the European Region, and had been for a long time, Andrew had difficulty understanding why they needed their own postage stamps, either. But apparently they insisted on maintaining certain ancient folkways even though the world had passed beyond the epoch of independent and rival nations. The two girls had finished growing up, too. Miss, who by all reports had become strikingly beautiful, had married and moved to Southern California, and then she had married again and moved to South America, and then had come word of still another marriage and a new home in Australia. |
| 1729 |
But now Miss was living in New York City and had become a poet, and nothing was said about any further new husbands. Andrew suspected that Miss's life had not turned out to be as happy or rewarding as it should have been, and he regretted that. Still, he reminded himself, he had no very clear understanding of what humans meant by "happiness." Perhaps Miss had lived exactly the kind of life that she had wanted to live. He hoped so, anyway. As for Little Miss, she was now a slender, fine-boned woman with high cheekbones and a look of great delicacy backed by extraordinary resilience. Andrew had never heard anyone speak of her unusual beauty in his presence — Miss was always said to be the beautiful sister, and Little Miss was praised more for her forceful character than for her looks. To Andrew's taste golden-haired Little Miss had always seemed far more beautiful than the soft and overly curvy older sister; but his taste was only a robot's taste, after all, and he never ventured to discuss matters of human appearance with anyone. It was hardly an appropriate thing for a robot to do. In fact he had no right even to an opinion in such areas, as he very well knew. Little Miss had married a year or so after finishing college, and was living not far away, just up the coast from the family estate. Her husband, Lloyd Charney, was an architect who had grown up in the East but who was delighted to make his home along the wild Northern California coast that his wife loved so deeply. Little Miss had also made it clear to her husband that she wanted to remain close to her father's robot, Andrew, who had been her guardian and mentor since the early years of her childhood. Perhaps Lloyd Charney was a little taken aback by that, but he raised no objection, and Little Miss remained a frequent visitor at the imposing Martin mansion, which now was occupied only by the aging Sir and the faithful Andrew. In the fourth year of her marriage Little Miss gave birth to a boy who was named George. |
| 1730 |
He still was uneasy about the possibility of Sir's becoming involved. But Little Miss had given him enough assurance to proceed. A man from the Feingold office came to the house with papers for him to sign, and Andrew signed them — proudly, with a flourish, the bold Andrew Martin signature in firm up-and-down strokes that he had been using on his checks ever since the founding of his corporation so many years before. The petition was filed with the Regional Court. Months went by, and nothing in particular happened. Occasionally some dreary legal document would arrive, elaborately bound in the traditional stiff covers, and Andrew would scan it quickly and sign it and return it, and then nothing more would be heard for another few months. Sir was very frail now. Andrew found himself thinking, sometimes, that it might be for the best if Sir died peacefully before the case ever came to court, so that he would be spared the possibility of any kind of emotional turmoil. The thought was horrifying to him. Andrew banished it from his mind. "We're on the docket," Little Miss told him finally. "It won't be long now." And, exactly as Sir had predicted, the proceedings were far from simple. Little Miss had assured him that it would merely be a matter of appearing before a judge, presenting a petition for a declaration of his status as a free robot, and sitting back to wait out the time it took for the judge to do some research, study the legal precedents, and issue his ruling. The California district of the Regional Court was notoriously farseeing in its interpretation of legal matters and there was every reason, so Little Miss asserted, to believe that the judge would, in the course of time, rule in Andrew's favor and issue some sort of certificate that gave him the free status he sought. The first indication that things were going to be more complicated than that came when the offices of Feingold and Feingold received notice from the Regional Court — Judge Harold Kramer, presiding over the Fourth Circuit — that counter-petitions had been filed in the matter of Martin vs. |
| 1731 |
But some curious longing within Andrew seemed to have arisen lately that led him to want to cover his body in the way humans did, and — without pausing to examine the motivation that was leading him toward it — he set out to do so. The day Andrew acquired the trousers, George had been with him in his workshop, helping him stain some porch furniture for his own house. Not that Andrew needed the help — indeed, it would have been very much simpler all around if George had let him do it by himself — but George had insisted on participating in the job. It was furniture for his own porch, after all. 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. |
| 1732 |
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. Andrew suspected that if he ever should question Little Miss on that point she would deny it, probably quite indignantly. But he had no intention of doing that. He simply tended to avoid putting on clothes — or too many of them — whenever Little Miss came to visit him. Which was none too often, these days, for Little Miss was past seventy now — well past seventy — and had grown very thin and sensitive to cold, and even the mild climate of Northern California was too cool for her most of the year. Her husband had died several years before, and since then Little Miss had begun spending much of her time traveling in the tropical parts of the world — Hawaii, Australia, Egypt, the warmer zones of South America, places like that. She would return to California only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year, to see George and his family — and, of course, Andrew. After one of her visits George came down to the cabin to speak with Andrew and said ruefully, "Well, she's finally got me, Andrew. I'm going to be running for the Legislature next year. She won't give me any peace unless I do. |
| 1733 |
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. 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? |
| 1734 |
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? Andrew had never been very good at judging the age of humans. He said, when they were still some distance away, "Pardon me, sirs. Would you kindly describe to me the route to the town library?" They halted and stared. One of them, the taller and thinner of the two, who was wearing a tall narrow black hat that looked like a length of pipe and extended his height still further, almost grotesquely, said — not to Andrew, but to the other — "I think it's a robot." "I think you're right," said the other, who was short and plump, and had a bulbous nose and heavy eyelids. "It's got a robot kind of face, doesn't it?" "It certainly does. |
| 1735 |
And I would reply to him that he is mistaken, that he is so bemused by affection for the robot that his own family has kept for many decades that he has lost sight of what robots really are. "They are machines, my friends. They are tools. 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. And to take any other position is a wrongheaded, sentimental, dangerous way of thinking." George Charney was a persuasive orator, but so was James Van Buren. And in the end the battle — fought mainly in the court of public opinion, rather than in the Legislature or the Regional Court — ended in something of a stalemate. |
| 1736 |
There were a great many people now who had been able to transcend the fear or dislike of robots that had been so widespread a couple of generations earlier, and George's arguments struck home with them. They too had begun to look upon their robots with a certain degree of affection, and wanted them afforded some kind of legal security. But then there were the others, who may not have feared robots themselves so much as they did the financial risks that they might somehow experience as a result of extending civil rights to robots. They urged caution in this new legal arena. So when the battle at last was over and pro-robot legislation came forth, setting up conditions under which it was illegal to issue an order that might harm a robot, the law that was passed by the Regional Legislature, sent back for revisions by the Regional Court, passed again in a modified way, this time upheld in the Regional Court, and eventually ratified by the World Legislature and upheld after a final appeal to the World Court, was a very tepid one indeed. It was endlessly qualified and the punishments for violating its provisions were totally inadequate. But at least the principle of robot rights — established originally by the decree awarding Andrew his "freedom" — had been extended a little further. The final approval by the World Court came through on the day of Little Miss's death. That was no coincidence. Little Miss, very old and very weak now, had nevertheless held on to life with desperate force during the closing weeks of the debate. Only when word of victory arrived did she at last relax the tenacity of her grip. Andrew was at her bedside when she went. He stood beside her, looking down at the small, faded woman propped up among the pillows and thinking back to those days of nearly a hundred years before when he was newly arrived at the grand coastside mansion of Gerald Martin and two small girls had stood looking up at him, and the smaller one had frowned and said, "En-dee-arr. That isn't any good. |
| 1737 |
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. 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. |
| 1738 |
s. Robots and Mechanical Men. You're uniquely equipped to tea the world what it needs to know about the human-robot relationship, because in some ways you partake of the nature of each. Was it so? Is that what Paul really thought, Andrew wondered, or had it just been the heat of the moment that had led him to say those things? Andrew asked himself that over and over again, and gradually he began to form an answer. And then he decided that the time had come to pay another visit to the offices of Feingold and Charney and have another talk with Paul. He arrived unannounced, but the receptionist greeted him without any inflection of surprise in its voice. Andrew was far from an unfamiliar figure by this time at the Feingold and Charney headquarters. He waited patiently while the receptionist disappeared into the inner office to notify Paul that Andrew was here. It would surely have been more efficient if the receptionist had used the holographic chatterbox, but unquestionably it was unmanned (or perhaps the word was "unroboted") by having to deal with another robot rather than with a human being. Eventually the receptionist returned. "Mr. Charney will be with you soon," the receptionist announced, and went back to its tasks without another word. Andrew passed the time revolving in his mind the matter of his word choice of a few minutes before. Could "unroboted" be used as an analog of "unmanned"? he wondered. Or had "unmanned" become a purely metaphoric term sufficiently divorced from its original literal meaning to be applied to robots — or to women, for that matter? Many similar semantic problems had cropped up frequently while Andrew was working on his book. Human language, having been invented by humans for the use of humans, was full of little tricky complexities of that sort. 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. |
| 1739 |
Which is why I have been willing to put myself in your hands for periodic upgrading. And why I have come to you today to request the most extensive upgrading you have ever done on any robot. What I want is a total replacement for myself, Mr. Smythe-Robertson." Smythe-Robertson looked both astounded and bewildered. He stared at Andrew in total silence, and the silence went on for a seemingly interminable time. Andrew waited. He looked past Smythe-Robertson toward the wall, where a holographic portrait looked back at him. It showed a dour, austere female face: the face of Susan Calvin, the patron saint of all roboticists. She had been dead nearly two centuries now, but after having delved into her working papers as deeply as he had during the course of writing his book, Andrew felt he knew her so well that he could half persuade himself that he had met her in life. Smythe-Robertson said finally, "A total replacement, you say? But what does that mean?" "Exactly what I said. When you call in an obsolete robot, you provide its owner with a replacement. Well, I want you to provide me with a replacement for me." Still looking confused, Smythe-Robertson said, "But how can we do that? If we replace you, how can we turn the new robot over to you as owner, since in the very act of being replaced you would have to cease to exist?" And he smiled grimly. "Perhaps Andrew hasn't made himself sufficiently clear," interposed Paul. "May I try? — the seat of Andrew's personality is his positronic brain, which is the one part that cannot be replaced without creating a new robot. The positronic brain, therefore, is the locus of Andrew Martin, who is the owner of the robot in which Andrew Martin's positronic brain is currently housed. Every other part of the robotic body can be replaced without affecting the Andrew Martin personality — most of those parts, as you may know, have already been replaced, sometimes more than once, in the hundred-odd years since Andrew was first manufactured. Those subsidiary parts are the brain's possessions. |
| 1740 |
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. 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. |
| 1741 |
They lacked the careless free flow of the human being. He could hope that that would come after a while — he was already far beyond the first dismal days after the operation, when he had staggered awkwardly about his room like some sort of crude pre-positronic automaton — but something told him that even with this extraordinary new body he was never going to be able to move in the natural way that virtually every human being took for granted. Still, things were not all that bad. The U. S. Robots people had kept their part of the bargain honorably and had carried out the transfer with all the formidable technical skill at their disposal. And Andrew had what he wanted. He might not fool the truly observant onlooker into thinking he was human, but he was far more human-looking than any robot ever had been, and at least he could wear clothes now without the ridiculous anomaly of an expressionless metal face rising up above them. Eventually Andrew declared, "I will be getting back to work now." Paul Charney laughed and said, "Then you must be well. What will you be doing? Another book?" "No," said Andrew seriously. "I live too long for anyone career to seize me by the throat and never let me go. There was a time when I was primarily an artist, and I still dabble in that now and then. And there was a time when I was a historian and I can always write another book or two, if I feel the need for it. But I have to keep moving on. What I want to be now, Paul, is a robobiologist." "A robopsychologist, you mean?" "No. That would imply the study of positronic brains and at the moment I have no interest in doing that. A robobiologist, it seems to me, would be concerned with the workings of the body that is attached to that brain." "Wouldn't that be a roboticist?" "In the old days, yes. But roboticists work with metallic bodies. I would be studying an organic humanoid body — of which I have the only one, as far as I know. Examining the way it functions, the way it simulates a true human body. |
| 1742 |
I want to know more about artificial human bodies than the android-makers know themselves." "You narrow your field of endeavor," said Paul thoughtfully. "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. 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. |
| 1743 |
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. He delved deep into the mechanisms of the human body — for Andrew saw that that was every bit as much a mechanism as were the products of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men. It was an organic mechanism, yes — but a mechanism nevertheless, a beautifully designed one, with its own firm laws of metabolic rhythm, of balance and decay, of breakdown and repair. Years went by, quiet ones not only within Andrew's secluded retreat on the grounds of the old Martin estate, but in the world outside. The Earth's population was stable, held level not only by a low birth rate but by steady emigration to the growing settlements in space. Giant computers controlled most economic fluctuations, keeping supply and demand in balance between one Region and another so that the ancient business cycles of boom and bust were flattened into gentle curves. It was not a challenging, dynamic era; but it was not a turbulent or perilous one, either. |
| 1744 |
They have all let me do what I felt I needed to do, Andrew thought, even when they privately disagreed with it. They have granted me my wishes — out of love for me. Yes, love. For a robot. Andrew dwelled on that thought for a while, and sensations of warmth and pleasure went through him. But it was a little troubling, too, to realize that sometimes the Charneys had supported him not out of personal convictions of their own but simply because they so wholeheartedly and unconditionally believed in allowing him to follow his own path, whether or not they thought it was the correct one. 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. |
| 1745 |
In his earlier days Andrew would never have admitted such a thing, even to himself; but he was different now. These thoughts led Andrew inevitably, around the time of Paul Charney's death, to a consideration of the entire concept of family ties — the love of parent for child, of child for parent — and how that was related to the inexorable passing of the generations. If you are human, Andrew told himself, you are part of a great chain, a chain that hangs suspended across vast spans of time and links you to all those who have come before you and those who follow after. And you understand that individual links of the chain may perish — indeed, must perish — but the chain itself is ever-renewing and will survive. People died, whole families might become extinct — but the human race, the species, went on and on through the centuries and the millennia and the eons, everyone connected through the heritage of blood to those who had gone before. It was a difficult thing for Andrew to understand, that sense of connection, of infinite linkage with intimately related predecessors. He had no predecessors, not really, and he would have no successors, either. He was unique — individual — something that had been brought forth at a certain moment in time out of nothing at all. Andrew found himself wondering what it might be like to have had a parent himself — but all he could come up with was a vague image of assembly-robots weaving his body together in a factory. Or what it was like to have a child — but the best he could manage was to envision a table or desk, something that he had made with his own hands. But human parents were not assembly-mechs, and human children were nothing like tables and desks. He had it all wrong. It was a mystery to him. And very likely always would be. He was not human; why then should he expect human family linkages to be comprehensible to him? Then Andrew thought of Little Miss, of George, of Paul, even of fierce old Sir, and what they had meant to him. |
| 1746 |
A robot greeted Andrew when his aeroflitter landed at the U. S. Robots airstrip. Its face was bland and blank and its red photoelectric eyes were utterly expressionless. Scarcely thirty percent of the robots of Earth, Andrew knew, were still independently brained: this one was an empty creature, nothing more than the mindless metal puppet of some immobile positronic thinking-device housed deep within the U. S. Robots complex. "I am Andrew Martin," Andrew said. "I have an appointment with Director of Research Magdescu." "Yes. You will follow me." Lifeless. Brainless. A mere machine. A thing. The robot greeter led Andrew briskly along a paved path that gleamed with some inner crystalline brightness and up a shining spiral ramp into a domed many-leveled building covered with a glistening and iridescent translucent skin. To Andrew, who had had little experience of modern architecture, it had the look of something out of a storybook — light, airy, shimmering, not entirely real. He was allowed to wait in a broad oval room carpeted with some lustrous synthetic material that emitted a soft glow and a faint, pleasant sort of music whenever Andrew moved about on its surface. He found that if he walked in a straight line the glow was pale pink and the music was mildly percussive in texture, but that when he sauntered in a curve that followed the border of the room the light shifted more toward the blue end of the spectrum and the music seemed more like the murmuring of the wind. He wondered if any of this had any significance and decided that it did not: that it was mere ornamentation, a decorative frill. In this placid and unchallenging era such lovely but meaningless decorative touches were ubiquitous, Andrew knew "Ah — Andrew Martin at last," a deep voice said. A short, stocky man had appeared in the room as though some magic had conjured him out of the carpet. The newcomer was dark of complexion and hair, with a little pointed beard that looked as though it had been lacquered, and he wore nothing above the waist except the breastband that fashion now dictated. |
| 1747 |
I'd hate to lose you." "I'd hate to lose me too, Alvin. But I don't think it's going to happen." Magdescu looked bleak. "You insist on going through with it, then." "I insist. I have every faith in the skill of the staff at U. S. Robots." And that was where the matter rested. Magdescu was unable to budge him; and once more Andrew made the journey eastward to the U. S. Robots research center, where an entire building had been reconfigured to serve as the operating theater. Before he went, he took a long solitary stroll one afternoon along the beach, under the steep rugged cliffs, past the swarming tide pools where Miss and Little Miss had liked to play in their childhood of a century and more ago, and stood for a long while looking out at the dark turbulent sea, the vast arch of the sky, the white flecks of cloud in the west. 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. |
| 1748 |
He would be permanently out of order. He would be dead, and after that it would make no difference to him at all that he could no longer perceive the beauties of the world. That was what death meant: a total cessation of function, an end to all processing of data. There were risks, yes. But they were risks he had to take, because otherwise — Otherwise — He simply had to. There was no otherwise. He could not go on as he was, outwardly human in form, more or less, but incapable of the most basic human biological functions — breathing, eating, digesting, excreting — An hour later Andrew was on his way east. Alvin Magdescu met him in person at the U. S. Robots airstrip. "Are you ready?" Magdescu asked him. "Totally." "Well, then, Andrew, so am I." Obviously they intended to take no chances. They had constructed a wondrous operating theater for him, far more advanced in capability than the earlier room in which they had carried out his transformation from the metallic to the androidal form. It was a magnificent tetrahedral enclosure illuminated by a cross-shaped cluster of chromed fixtures at its summit that flooded the room with brilliant but not glaring light. A platform midway between floor and ceiling jutted from one wall, dividing the great room almost in half, and atop this platform rested a dazzling transparent aseptic bubble within which the surgery would be performed. Beneath the platform that supported the bubble was the surgical stage's environmental-support apparatus: an immense cube of dull green metal, housing an intricate tangle of pumps, filters, heating ducts, reservoirs of sterilizing chemicals, humidifiers, and other equipment. On the other side of the room was a great array of supplementary machinery covering an entire wall: an autoclave, a laser bank, a host of metering devices, a camera boom and associated playback screens that would allow consulting surgeons outside the operating area to monitor the events. "What do you think?" Magdescu asked proudly. |
| 1749 |
Why can't you settle for what you have now? Why take all these crazy chances, and run the risk of losing everything? Why do you insist on playing further games with your body?" Andrew did not answer. 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. Surgeons, both human and robot, underwent courses of instruction at the U. S. Robots prosthetics facility so that they would be able to carry out the complicated installation procedures. Demand for Andrew's prosthetic devices was immense. The flow of royalties was heavy right from the start and within a few years became overwhelming. |
| 1750 |
Andrew now owned the entire Martin-Charney estate, and much of the surrounding land — a wondrous stretch of clifftop terrain overlooking the Pacific Ocean for eight or ten kilometers. He lived in Sir's big house, but maintained his own old cottage nearby as a sentimental reminder of his early days of independent life after gaining free-robot status. Farther down the property he built the imposing research facilities of Andrew Martin Laboratories. There was a little trouble with the zoning authorities about that, because this was supposed to be a quiet residential area and the research center that Andrew wanted to set up would be the size of a small university campus. There was also, perhaps, some lingering anti-robot feeling at work among the opposition. But when his application came up for approval, Andrew's lawyer simply said, "Andrew Martin has given the world the prosthetic kidney, the prosthetic lung, the prosthetic heart, the prosthetic pancreas. In return all he asks is the right to continue his research in peace on the property where he has lived and worked for well over a hundred years. Who among us would refuse such a small request when it comes from so great a benefactor of mankind?" And after a certain amount of debate the zoning variance was granted and the buildings of the Andrew Martin Laboratories Research Center began to rise amid the somber cypresses and pines of what had, long ago, been the wooded estate of Gerald Martin. Every year or two, Andrew would return to the gleaming operating theater at u. S. Robots for additional prosthetic upgrading of his own. Some of the changes were utterly trivial ones: the new fingernails and toenails, for example, virtually indistinguishable now from those of humans. Some of the changes were major: the new visual system, which although synthetically grown was able to duplicate the human eyeball in virtually every respect. "Don't blame us if you come out of this permanently blind," Magdescu told him sourly, when Andrew went to him for the eye transplant. |
| 1751 |
But in fact most of these functions had come to irritate and bore him. The first honorary degree from a major university had given him a thrill of vindication. No robot had ever received such an honor before. But the fiftieth honorary degree? The hundredth? They had no meaning for him. They said more about the giver than about the recipient. Andrew had proved whatever point it was that he had set out to make about his intelligence and creativity long ago, and now he simply wanted to proceed with his work in peace, without having to make long trips and listen to speeches in his honor. He was surfeited with honor. Boredom and irritation, Andrew knew, were exceedingly human traits, and it seemed to him that he had only begun to experience them in the past twenty or thirty years. Previously — so far as he could recall — he had been notably free from such afflictions, though from the beginning there had always been a certain unrobotic component of impatience in his makeup that he had chosen not to acknowledge for a long time. This new irritability, though: it was some side effect of the upgrades, he suspected. But not a troublesome one, at least not so far. When his hundred and fiftieth anniversary came around and the U. S. Robots people let it be known that they wanted to hold a great testimonial dinner to mark the occasion, Andrew instructed his secretary, with some annoyance in his voice, to turn the invitation down. "Tell them I'm deeply touched, et cetera, et cetera, the usual stuff. But that I'm busy right now with an extremely complex project, et cetera, et cetera, and that in any case I'd just as soon not have a lot of fuss made over the anniversary, but I thank them very much, I understand the great significance of the gesture, and so forth — et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." Usually a letter like that was enough to get him off the hook. But not this time. Alvin Magdescu called him and said, "Look, Andrew, you can't do this." "Can't do what?" "Toss the U. S. R. M. |
| 1752 |
"My friends, I won't waste your time repeating the things that everyone else has said here tonight. 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. But in fact he felt little joy. Though the sinews of his face had long since been redesigned to display a range of emotions, he had sat through the entire evening looking solemnly passive, and even at this climactic moment he could manage nothing better than a perfunctory half-smile. Even that took effort. Magdescu had meant well, but his words had given Andrew pain. |
| 1753 |
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. Over the past fifty years nuclear-powered subterrenes had drilled a network of wide tunnels through the deep-lying rocks of the continent, and now high-speed trains moving on silent inertialess tracks offered swift and simple long-distance travel, while much of the surface zone was allowed to revert to its natural state. To Andrew it seemed that he was reaching the spaceport in Nevada almost before the train had set out from the San Francisco terminal. And now into space at last — the lunar journey — He was handled at every stage of the embarkation procedure like some fine and highly breakable piece of rare porcelain. Important officials of U. S. Robots clustered around him, eagerly assisting him with the minutiae of checking in and being cleared for flight. They were surprised at how little baggage he had brought with him — just one small bag, containing a couple of changes of clothing and a few holocubes for reading during the trip — considering that he was likely to be staying on the Moon anywhere from three months to a year. But Andrew simply shrugged and said that he had never felt the need to haul a lot of possessions around with him when he traveled. That was true enough; but of course Andrew had never taken a journey of more than a few days' duration before, either. |
| 1754 |
The one aspect of the voyage that Andrew did find stirring was the view from the ship's observation window. It gave him shivers down his ceramic spine; it sent the blood pulsing faster through his dacron arteries; it set up a tingling of excitement in the synthetic epidermal cells of his fingertips. The Earth seen from space looked extraordinarily lovely to him: a perfect disk of blue, stippled with white masses of clouds. The outlines of the continents were surprisingly indistinct. Andrew had expected to see them sharply traced as they were on a geographic globe; but in fact they were no more than vaguely apparent, and it was the wondrous swirling of the atmospheric clouds against the vastness of the seas that gave the Earth its beauty from this vantage-point. It was strange and wondrous, also, to be able to look upon the entire face of the world at once this way — for the ship had moved very swiftly out into space and the planet behind them was now small enough to be seen in its entirety, a turning blue ball constantly dwindling against the black star-flecked background of space. 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. |
| 1755 |
And also the right — such as it was — to pay taxes. "Let's all be equals," he had said, as if by merely saying so he could make it be. What folly! What gall! But the mood soon passed and rarely returned. Except in the dark moments when he berated himself this way, though, Andrew found himself enjoying his stay on the Moon, and it was a particularly fruitful time for him creatively. The Moon was an exciting, intellectually stimulating place. The civilization of Earth was mature and sedate, but the Moon was the frontier, with all the wild energy that frontier challenges inevitably called forth. Life was a little on the frantic side in the underground lunar cities — constant expansion was going on, and you could not help being aware of the eternal throbbing of the jackhammer subterrenes as new caverns were melted into being daily so that in six months the next group of suburbs could be undergoing construction. The pace was fast and the people were far more competitive and vigorous than those Andrew had known on Earth. Startling new technical developments came thick and fast there. Radical new ideas were proposed at the beginning of one week and enacted into law by the end of the next. One of the prosthetologists explained it to him: "It's a genetic thing, Andrew. Everyone on Earth with any get-up-and-go got up and went a long time ago, and here we all are out on the edge of civilization, inventing our way as we go along, while those who remained behind have raised a race that's been bred to remain behind and do things the most familiar comfortable way possible. From here on in, I think, the future belongs to those of us who live in space. Earth will become a mere backwater world." "You really believe that?" Andrew asked. "Yes. I do." He wondered what would become of him, living on and on through the decades and centuries ahead, if any such decadence and decline truly was going to overcome the world. His immediate answer was that it made no difference to him if Earth became some sort of sleepy backwater where "progress" was an obscene word. |
| 1756 |
He no longer had need of progress now that he had attained the upgrade he had most deeply desired. His body was virtually human in form; he had his estate; he had his work, in which he had achieved enormous success; he would live as he always had, no matter what might be going on around him. But then he sometimes thought wistfully of the possibility of remaining on the Moon, or even going deeper out into space. On Earth he was Andrew the robot, forced to go into court and do battle every time he wanted one of the rights or privileges that he felt his intelligence and contributions to society entitled him to have. 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. |
| 1757 |
He stayed on into a fourth year, and a fifth. Then one day he paid a visit to a bubbledome on the lunar surface, and saw the Earth in all its wondrous beauty hanging in the sky — tiny, at this distance, but vivid, glowing, a blue jewel that glistened brilliantly in the night. It is my home, he thought suddenly. The mother world — the fountain of humanity — Andrew felt it pulling him — calling him home. At first it was a pull he could scarcely understand. It seemed wholly irrational to him. And then understanding came. His work on the Moon was done, basically. But he still had unfinished business down there on Earth. The following week, Andrew booked his passage home on a liner that was leaving at the end of the month. And then he called back and arranged to take an even earlier flight. He returned to an Earth that seemed cozy and ordinary and quiet in comparison to the dynamic life of the lunar settlement. Nothing of any significance appeared to have changed in the five years of his absence. As his Moon-ship descended toward it, the Earth seemed to Andrew like a vast placid park, sprinkled here and there with the small settlements and minor cities of the decentralized Third Millennium civilization. One of the first things Andrew did was to visit the offices of Feingold and Charney to announce his return. The current senior partner, Simon DeLong, hurried out to greet him. In Paul Charney's time, DeLong had been a very junior clerk, callow and self-effacing, but that had been a long time ago and he had matured into a powerful, commanding figure whose unchallenged ascent to the top rung of the firm had been inevitable. He was a broad-shouldered man with heavy features, who wore his thick dark hair shaven down the middle in the tonsured style that had lately become popular. There was a surprised look on DeLong's face. "We had been told you were returning, Andrew," he said — with just a bit of uncertainty in his voice at the end, as though he too had briefly considered calling him "Mr. |
| 1758 |
She was dressed in somewhat more chaste tubular coverings, now. Her once lustrous black hair was streaked with gray, and she wore it cut much shorter. Andrew, though, had of course not changed at all. His face was as unlined as ever; his soft, fine hair was still brown. And he clung, as closely as he could within the limits of reasonable taste, to the loose style of clothing that had prevailed when he first adopted clothing over a century before. It was late in the year. The harsh chill winds of winter were blowing through the ancient canyons of New York and faint wisps of snow were swirling through the air above the giant gleaming tower that housed the World Legislature. The Legislature's wordy struggles were over for the season. But for Andrew the struggle never seemed to reach its end. The debate had gone on and on — the angry, baffled Legislators had tried to take all possible sides of the issue — the voting public, unable to come to any clear philosophical position, had fallen back on emotion, on primordial fear, on the deepest-rooted of uncertainties and prejudices Congresswoman Chee had withdrawn her bill, had modified it substantially to take into account the stubborn opposition that it had run into. But she had not yet offered it again to the Legislature. "What do you think?" Andrew asked. "Will you introduce the revised bill in the new session or not?" "What do you want me to do?" "You know what I want you to do." Li-hsing nodded, a little wearily. "I told you once, Andrew, that your cause was not really my cause, and that I might have to abandon it if I felt my career was at stake. Well, my career is at stake. And I still haven't abandoned you." "And do you still feel that my cause isn't your cause?" "No. It has become my cause. I have no doubt that you are human, Andrew — perhaps made so by your own hand, but human all the same. And I understand that to deny the humanity of a single member of our kind is to raise the renewed possibility of denying humanity to whole multitudes, as was done all too often in our ugly past. |
| 1759 |
"Enough of this chatter. I won't pretend to be human, and you'd discover soon enough when you operated that I'm not, anyway, so we can leave First Law considerations entirely out of this. But Second Law will apply. I am a free robot and you will do as I say. You will not oppose my wishes. Is that clear?" And he declared, with all the firmness that he had learned how to use even with human beings over these past decades, "I order you to carry out this operation on me." The robot surgeon's red eyes turned brighter than ever with inner confusion and conflict and for a long moment he was unable to reply. Andrew knew what the surgeon must be going through. Before him was a man who insisted that he was not a man, or else a robot who claimed to have as much authority over him as a human being, and either way the surgeon's pathways must be abuzz with incomprehension. If this were indeed a man, then First Law would override Second and the surgeon could not accept the commission. But if this were a robot, did Second Law govern the situation or not? What was there in Second Law that gave one robot the right to order another one around — even a free robot? This was a robot, though, who denied being a man but looked entirely like one. That was an almost incomprehensible situation. The ambiguity of it was probably overwhelming the surgeon's positronic pathways. All his visual responses were crying out that his visitor was human; his mind was trying to process the datum that his visitor was not. The visual evidence would tend to activate the First and Second Laws, the other evidence would not. Faced with chaotic contradictions of that sort, it was conceivable that the surgeon's mind would short out altogether. Or perhaps, Andrew hoped, the safest way out of the crisis for the surgeon would be to take a Second Law position: that this visitor, while by his own admission not human enough to invoke First Law prohibitions, had sufficiently human characteristics to be able to demand obedience from the surgeon. |
| 1760 |
Andrew had chosen to remain completely conscious throughout the entire process. He had no wish to shut down awareness even for an instant. Pain was not an issue for him, and he needed to be certain that his instructions were being followed precisely. But of course they were. The surgeon's nature, being robotic, was not one that would permit any capricious deviation from the agreed-upon course of action. What Andrew was not prepared for was the unexpectedly intense weakness and fatigue that came after the job had been done. He had never known such sensations as those that came over him in the early hours of his recovery period. Even when they had transferred his brain from the robot body to the android one, Andrew had experienced nothing like this. Instead of walking normally, he lurched and staggered. Often he felt as though the floor before him was rising up to strike him in the face. There were times when his fingers trembled so violently that he had difficulty holding things. His vision, which had always been flawless, suddenly would grow blurry for long minutes at a stretch. Or he would try to remember someone's name, and nothing would come to mind except a tantalizing blankness that glimmered at him from around the corners of his memory. He spent an entire afternoon, the first week after the operation, searching his mind for the full name of the man he had known as Sir. Then, suddenly, the name was there: Gerald Martin. But now Andrew had forgotten the name of Little Miss's dark-haired older sister, and it took him hours more of diligent searching before "Melissa Martin" popped abruptly into his brain. Two hours! It should not have taken him two milliseconds! It was all more or less what Andrew should have expected, and in an abstract way he had expected it. And yet the reality of the feelings themselves was far beyond anything that Andrew had anticipated. Physical weakness was something new to him. So were poor coordination, uncertain reflexes, imperfect eyesight, and episodes of impaired memory. |
| 1761 |
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. 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. |
| 1762 |
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. Andrew wondered whether in his long unceasing quest to attain full humanity he had somehow managed to contract a case of hypochondria, and smiled at the thought. Quite likely he had, he decided. His own testing equipment showed no measurable degrading of his performance capabilities. All parameters were well within permissible deviation. And yet — yet — he felt so tired It had to be imaginary. Andrew ordered himself to give his feelings of weariness no further thought. And, tired or not, he made one more journey across the continent to the great green-glass tower of the World Legislature in New York to pay a call on Chee Li-hsing. He entered her grand and lofty office and she beckoned him automatically to a seat before her desk, the way she would have done with any other visitor. But Andrew had always preferred to stand in her presence, out of some obscure impulse of courtesy that he had never tried to explain to himself, and he did not want to sit now — especially not now. It would be entirely too revealing to do that Nevertheless, he found after a moment or two that standing seemed a bit troublesome to him, and he leaned, as unobtrusively as he could manage, against the wall. Li-hsing said, "The final vote will come this week, Andrew. I've tried to delay it, but I've run out of parliamentary maneuvers, and there's nothing more I can do. |
| 1763 |
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. And so is the status of robot with which you came into the world, and for which you were cited on that day. We take that status from you now. You are a robot no longer. The document that I have just signed changes all that. Today, Mr. Martin, we declare you — a Bicentennial Man." And Andrew, smiling in return, held out his hand as though to shake that of the World Coordinator — despite the distance of a continent's width that actually lay between them. The gesture had been carefully rehearsed, everything measured down to the millimeter. And to the billions of onlookers it seemed that the two hands did in fact meet — a warm human gesture linking, for a moment, one man with the other. |
| 1764 |
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. 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. |
| 1765 |
'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. Over the green grass, cropped like a bowling-green by the grazing sheep, cotton-grass grew in great profusion. From a distance, this looked like fields of snow, but when you got close and walked through it and it was blown by the wind it was like a million rabbit scuts, flicking and glinting. Overhead, the chocolate-dark skuas wheeled on huge wings, keeping a careful eye on us, for they had young concealed in the heather. We discovered one youngster, the size of a small chicken. Clad in pale tawny down, with his black face and beak and huge, dark, soulful eyes, he was an enchanting baby. Lee and I pursued him as he waddled off through the heather and his parents started to dive-bomb us a really impressive performance. |
| 1766 |
Huge wings taut, they swooped at us, the wind whooshing through their feathers, looking like strange, coffee-coloured Concordes. At the very last minute, within a few feet of your head, they would veer away, fly round and come in again. Lee had by now caught the baby, so the parents concentrated their attacks on her. As I knew that skuas were capable of knocking a man down with a clout from one of their wings, I relieved her of the baby and the parents turned their attention to me, getting closer and closer with each swoop, the wind purring through their wings as they dived. At first, I instinctively ducked each time, but then I discovered that if you let them get to within a dozen feet or so, and then waved your arms at them, they would sheer off. 'Let us,' said Jonathan, 'do a piece to camera about skuas, with that enchanting baby sitting in your lap.' So the camera was set up and a microphone concealed around my neck. All this activity made the parent skuas twice as distraught as they had been and they redoubled their attacks, dive-bombing now me and then the camera, getting dangerously close. When the camera was ready, I squatted down in the heather and placed the fat baby in my lap. I had just opened my mouth to start on a fascinating lecture about skuas, when the baby stood up suddenly, pecked my thumb unexpectedly, making me lose the thread of my discourse, and then proceeded to defecate loudly and copiously all over my knees. 'Nature white in tooth and claw,' said Jonathan, as I mopped the glutinous, fishy mess off my trousers with my handkerchief. 'I don't think we can use that shot in the film.' 'When you have finished laughing,' I said to Lee, 'you might like to take this damn baby and release it. I think I've been intimate enough with skuas for one day.' She took my fat, fluffy friend and placed him in the heather some twenty feet away. He took off at a spread-legged, crouching, flat-footed run looking remarkably like an elderly fat lady in a fur coat, pursuing a bus. |
| 1767 |
'He is cute,' said Lee wistfully. 'I wish we could have kept him.' 'I don't,' I said. 'We wouldn't have been able to afford the dry-cleaning bills.' Skuas, of course, are one of the most graceful predators of the sky. Like sun-bronzed pirates, they pursue other birds, harrying them ceaselessly until they are forced to disgorge the fish they have caught. Then the skua swoops and snatches the treasure in mid-air. They are such bold buccaneers that they have even been known to grab a gannet's wing-tip in order to get it to relinquish a fish. Skuas will eat anything and are not at all averse to stealing fish from a parent bird, be it gannet or guillemot, and then feasting on their eggs and young as well. We moved on, the flocks of sheep like clotted cream on the green baize of the turf, the sun brilliant above us. We had come muffled up against the reputedly inclement weather of the Shetland Islands and now found ourselves sweating and discarding coats and pullovers. Presently, the land started to drop away to precipitous cliffs and beyond was the Atlantic, blue as gentian flowers. Wheatears were everywhere, their rumps flashing like little white lights as they danced ahead of us. Two ravens, black as mourning-bands, flew slowly along the edge of the cliffs, cranking at one another dolefully. 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? |
| 1768 |
At the cliff-edge, where the earth was soft enough for digging, was the puffins' special area. Here they excavated their burrows with powerful beaks and feet. They sat around in their hundreds, almost letting you tread on them before launching themselves over the cliffs edge and flying away with rapid wing-beats, their feet trailing behind them like little orange ping-pong bats. To see the green cliff-tops lined with hundreds of these comical waddling birds, each very upright in its neat black and white dinner-jacket, each wearing (as it were) one of those carnival noses, a huge beak striped orange and red. It was like watching a convention of clowns. Many of them, to add to their ridiculous aspect, had just flown in from fishing far out at sea (for they travel as far as three hundred kilometres away to fish) bearing in their brightly painted beaks handfuls of sand-eels. These were carefully arranged across the beak, hanging down each side like a fishy moustache. The extraordinary thing was that the sand-eels were arranged head to tail like sardines in a tin. How the birds manage to catch the eels and arrange them in this meticulous way is an extraordinary feat. Further along the cliff, we came upon two men engaged in an extremely curious pursuit puffin fishing. I know that in remote corners of the world the inhabitants sometimes become very eccentric, but I have never seen anything to equal this. Seated on their behinds, they shuffled slowly down the turf towards the cliffs edge where the solemn-faced puffins congregated, eyeing the men's approach warily. The first man carried a long pole, on the end of which was a noose. Having chosen his puffin, he then cautiously slid towards it, manoeuvred the noose carefully until it got round one of the bird's orange feet, then pulled the flapping, squawking bird towards him; and, when it was within range, the other man seized it. I thought this a curious way to treat birds in what was, after all, a sanctuary. However, as we got closer, I could see that they were fastening a ring to the puffin's leg. |
| 1769 |
As far as the eye could see along the cliff-face the rocky shoreline was alive with birds, and the air was full of them whirling like giant snowflakes above us. The cacophony of cries was tremendous. Everywhere, there were groups of guillemots sitting shoulder to shoulder on their ledges. Many of them had their single, beautifully coloured, speckled egg between their feet. Eggs green, brown, yellow, buff, spotted and blotched like fingerprints, no two alike. Their strange, growling cries echoed among the cliffs as they jostled each other and their young. We were too late to see their courtship, but I had watched these strange rituals being enacted by guillemots elsewhere. Probably the most curious part of the courtship is when groups of birds conduct a sort of dance on the surface of the sea. They would weave and wheel, dancing over the waves, and then, suddenly, at some mysterious signal, they would all dive beneath the surface simultaneously and the dance would continue underwater. Groups of them would also indulge in extraordinary flights when a flock of perhaps a hundred birds would wheel, twist, soar and dive as if they were a single entity. What minute signals they give each other in order to achieve this extraordinary co-ordinated flight is impossible to see, but signals there must be to accomplish it in such perfect unison. On other ledges along the cliff-face were the mud-and-root nests of the kittiwakes neat, demure-looking gulls. While other species of gull have deserted the sea and now forage inland, following the plough and scavenging on city dumps, the conservative kittiwake has remained staunchly a seabird. It is such a delicate, self-effacing little thing that it comes as something of a shock when it opens its beak and utters the harsh cry from which it gets its pretty name. The kittiwakes of Hermaness, I noticed, were great gardeners; and hundreds of them, as they sat on their nests, were forever busy rearranging the roots and pebbles and mud that made up the cradles for their eggs. |
| 1770 |
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. 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. |
| 1771 |
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. 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. |
| 1772 |
As the light started to fade and the sky turned from blue to lavender, we packed up and reluctantly left the seabird metropolis. I will draw a veil over my ascent of the cliff; suffice it to say that it was even more gruelling than the descent had been and on reaching the top I crawled across the turf as far away from the cliffs edge as possible and lay on my back, staring up into the pale evening sky while Jonathan, showing a rare Christian instinct, unearthed a bottle of Glenmorangie from his bag and plied me with it. Then we walked back over the velvety turf through the heather now purple-brown in the twilight, the cotton-grass glimmering all around us and the steady whoosh, whoosh of the huge dark skuas dive-bombing us in the gloaming. It seemed incredible that in one day we had managed to obtain all the seabird footage we needed for the programme. There were only a few landscape shots we needed, which we got on the following day. Our filming on the magnificent cliffs of Hermaness was over, and so we returned to Jersey. Here we planned to film the life on the rocky coasts. Although only nine miles by five in size, the island has such an indented coastline that you have, in effect, an enormous stretch of rocky shore for such a small area. Coupled with this is the fact that the seas around the island are comparatively unpolluted and it has a huge 34-foot tide which, when it is out, exposes acres and acres of magnificent rock-pools teeming with marine life of every conceivable sort. The sea is a wonderful world. It is as though we had another planet joined on to this, so diverse and bizarre are its life forms, so vastly rich and colourful. From a naturalist's point of view the lip of the sea is a fascinating ecosystem where many creatures live under the most topsy-turvy conditions, several feet deep in pounding waves for some periods, dry as a bone for others. The adaptations to this strenuous sort of life are, of course, many and various. Take humble limpets, for example, so common that they are generally ignored. |
| 1773 |
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. 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. |
| 1774 |
Like many sea-creatures, they can change their sex with comparative ease, and there is evidence that young limpets are for the most part males while the older ones are mainly females. Many limpets start life and get to be teenagers as males and then turn into females for the rest of their existence. As well as this curious state of affairs, limpets, unlike the bulk of shore snails, simply scatter their future progeny in the sea; these develop into minute, free-swimming plankton before taking life seriously and settling down on the rocks. Limpets share this half-and-half wet-and-dry world with a host of other creatures: topshells, the woodlouse-like Triton, sand-fleas or sand-hoppers, various seaweeds and some sponges, and many of the rock-and wood-borers such as the toredo worms. But it is really in the limpid rock-pools left by the retreating tide that you find the most colourful and extraordinary creatures. Here, as well as strange methods of reproduction, you will find ingenious methods of defence and startling methods of obtaining food. Take the common starfish as an example. This beast not only, by sheer strength, pulls apart the two halves of a mussel (no mean feat, as you will realize if you have ever tried to open an oyster), but also, when the two halves of the shell are far enough apart, proceeds to extrude its stomach, push it into the shell and start the process of digestion. Then there is one of the tunicates with the lovely, slightly oriental-sounding name of Oikopleura, a tiny tadpole-like creature which has a remarkable way of obtaining nourishment. It builds out of mucus a strange plankton-trap, shaped like a minute, fat, transparent airship, in which the Oikopleura sits, wiggling its tail. This creates a current of water through the airship, which has two inhalant orifices, each one of which has a protective screen which only allows the very smallest of particles to enter. Within the airship are further mucous filters which entrap the minute organisms that make up the plankton. |
| 1775 |
Also built into this mucous trap is an emergency exit through which the Oikopleura can escape when threatened by an enemy. 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. 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. |
| 1776 |
In this programme, we wanted to show how important this sort of wetland is, not just to creatures such as the wild boar that live there all the year round, but also to the creatures that pass through or that visit in order to breed. For some strange reason, all over the world man seems to think that wetlands are inimical to him. As soon as he comes across a wonderful swamp or marsh teeming with wildlife he becomes unhappy until he has covered it with pesticides, shot out all the edible animals, drained it, ploughed it, planted a series of useless crops on it and, finally, through his unbiological activities, created a sterile piece of eroded earth which was once a rich, balanced tapestry of life. 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. |
| 1777 |
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. Later, they form an arrowhead of horses, surrounding a flock of the little devil-black bulls, which they drive at a gallop through the streets to the arena while the crowd does its best to break the arrowhead to make the bulls scatter, which would be a black mark against the abilities of the gardiens if it should be done. Then we have jostled our way into the Roman arena, tiny and beautiful, in honey-coloured stone and, when full of people, looking like a strange bowl full of moving flowers. Then the sound of Carmen fills the air, and the doors fling wide. From where perhaps lions or elephants and their Christian victims had at one time emerged, would appear a solitary bull, black and glossy as jet, tiny, muscular, horns showing white as ivory, strong, short legs as nimble as a ballerina's. The doors would shut behind it and he would stand there, a tiny black mark like an inkstain on the pale sand floor. He would look round, snort, trot forward a few paces, then lower his sharp horns, paw the sand, defying all comers. The fight had begun. Before my indignant reader throws down this book and takes up a vitriol-dipped pen to write to me about the cruelty of bullfighting, may I hastily point out that there are two forms of bullfighting, and in this one the bull is never killed. Indeed, he stands an excellent chance of inflicting crippling, sometimes mortal, damage on his foes, the razateurs, and, as I witnessed myself, actually enjoys the fight, once he is habituated to it. The black bulls of the Camargue realise that this is a curious sort of game, yet their ferocity is such that they can kill without necessarily meaning to. The fight is organised like this. The bull, before entering the arena, has certain little coloured tassels attached to his horns with rubber bands. These are called cockades. |
| 1778 |
The object of the fight (not so much a fight as a contest of speed and skill) is for the razateurs, or bullfighters if you will, to remove these cockades from the bull's horns within a given length of time. No bull is in the arena for more than twenty minutes. During that time the razateurs, a group of men incongruously clad in white shirts and flannels as if for tennis, enter the ring. They are armed only with fleetness of foot and a curious thing that looks like a curry-comb fixed by a band round their right hand, snuggling into the palm. With this instrument they try to cut loose the cockades from the bull's horns. Each cockade is worth a certain sum of money. The longer it remains, as it were, the bull's property, the higher the price rises. Some razateurs, with new and idiotic bulls, leave the moment of removing the cockade until the very end of the twenty minutes so that the price is high. However, if they are fighting an experienced bull, they might find that at the end of the twenty minutes the animal still retains its cockades. The fight then ends and the Grand March from Carmen is played in the bull's honour as he is ushered out of the ring and back to his lorry to be taken back and released once more in the green, glinting pastures and reed-beds of the Camargue. That experienced bulls actually enjoy this I have witnessed with my own eyes, as some years ago we made a film of the Course Libre, as it is called, and so had to attend many bullfights to get the necessary shots. An experienced bull enters the ring and gazes around at the crowd like an actor summing up the audience at a matinEe. Then he goes through the 'Look how fierce I am' routine the snorting, the tossing of the head, the pawing of the sand. He is apparently unaware that the white-flannelled razateurs have entered the ring and are now approaching him. Then suddenly, with astonishing speed and agility, he whirls round and is among them, galloping head down, and the razateurs are running before him like snowflakes driven before the wind. |
| 1779 |
The dirt roads ran straight as rulers, white with the salt crust on them, between fields of mauve sea-lavender which, from a distance, looked like pale smoke drifting in a carpet two feet high over the ground. Here and there were thick patches of false olive, a silvery-green tree growing some six feet in height and very bushy. The young trees looked from a distance tight and curly as though someone had practised a curious form of topiary on them. After several miles, the false olives grew thicker and we eventually arrived at a glittering white crossroads among huge thickets. The blue sky had a faintly gold wash to it and a few pale clouds like tiny feathers hung immobile in the western horizon, turning from white to gold and then to pink. We parked the cars and waited for Pig Woman. Presently, she arrived, bumping over the dirt roads in a tiny, battered Deux Chevaux van with a long antenna sticking out of the roof, which wriggled and whipped like a fishing-rod with an infuriated marlin on the end. She chugged to a halt, and stopped the van and got out and walked towards us. I don't know why, but the sobriquet 'Pig Woman' had conjured up in my mind something out of a horror story, some snouted, grunting half-pig, half-woman, with huge tusks and slavering jaws and doubtless unpleasant habits like eating its young. So in consequence I was somewhat relieved to find myself being introduced to a slim and handsome young woman who had none of the less attractive attributes of a member of the Suidae. Marise was her name, and she viewed us with a bright humorous eye while Jonathan explained what he wanted. She obviously thought us quite mad but was happy to oblige the eccentric anglais. First, as the sun was setting, Jonathan wanted her to drive her truck with its whipping antenna to and fro through the false olive groves, just as she would do if tracking the pigs after dark. These shots had to be done before the sun set, so that when printed in the laboratory they would look like night. |
| 1780 |
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. But you can't tell the true sufferer that without risking a lynching. While the team, cursing and swatting, set up the fights for the next scene, Marise, Lee and I shared the back of her little van with approximately two million mosquitoes as she talked about her studies. In the old days, if you wanted to work out where animals went and what they did you had to rely on your own eyesight and tracking abilities. Now, with radio tracking, the whole thing is more efficient and accurate. The small radio collars attached to an animal send out a radio bleep. |
| 1781 |
This is picked up on what, to all intents and purposes, is a little radar screen. Reading the bleeps off the screen on to a map of a given area, you can follow the movements of the animals you are studying without having to disturb them or go near them. Marise was obviously very involved with the wild boars she was studying and she talked on enthusiastically, oblivious of mosquitoes. Did we know they had a tremendously wide range of food? Even though the bulk of their food is vegetarian acorns, beech mast, grasses, various herbs they will eat an astonishing amount of other things from carrion, ground-nesting birds and their eggs and young, lizards and snakes, various insects, crabs, and they have even been seen to be adept at catching mice. During the rutting season, she went on, the big boars have the most terrible mating battles, slashing at each other with their razor-sharp tusks. Generally, they tend to attack each other's shoulders, and to protect himself against his sharp-toothed foes each boar develops at this season a sort of thick plate of flesh which guards his shoulders much in the way that knights of old used to wear steel breastplates for battle. 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. |
| 1782 |
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. 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. Fortunately, the bulls seemed too panic-stricken to notice either Jonathan or Chris and passed by them on either side, taking most of the tamarisk grove with them. |
| 1783 |
Panama had another advantage as far as we were concerned: ever since the construction of the canal and the necessary flooding that went with it, an island was created, called Barro Colorado, and it has been used for many years by the Smithsonian Institution as a tropical research station. The Smithsonian also has the reef research station on the San Bias Islands, lying off the Caribbean coast, about an hour's flight from Panama City. Wherever groups of scientists gather together in one spot over a period of time, you may be sure that they get to know every leaf of every tree, and this sort of knowledge, when your time is limited, is of inestimable value to the film-maker. Lee and I arrived in Panama City suffering terribly from jetlag, since we had flown the Atlantic and then down to Panama from New York. However, no exhaustion could quench our happiness at being in the tropics again, to see the boat-tailed grackles, black and solemn as undertakers, parading on the half-finished blocks of flats outside our hotel bedroom window, to see glittering humming-birds and butterflies the size of your hand in the hotel garden and, above all, to feel the moist, scented hot air, like the smell of plum cake from a newly opened oven, that told you that you were once more in that richest area of the earth's surface, the tropics. The following day, when we had recovered, we met for a briefing with Paula and Alastair. Alastair has a very curious method of communication with members of his own species. So strange is it, indeed, that I, in spite of priding myself on being able to communicate with most people anywhere in the world, found I had to use Paula as a translator. What Alastair would do was to throw you a half-sentence or, even worse, two half-sentences which appeared to have no connection with each other, and you then had to fill in the missing words to find the sense of what he was saying. It was rather like trying to do a Times crossword puzzle without the clues. Now, beaming at us affectionately, he said: 'Jetlag over? |
| 1784 |
The men wore shirts and trousers and floppy hats, but the women wore brightly coloured skirts, headscarves and blouses that had been made vivid in reverse appliquE, most beautifully constructed. One elderly lady had a large, flamboyant toucan on her chest, with a roguish look in its eye; another had two huge red fish beaming at each other, face to face in an ultramarine sea; and a third lady's bosom was covered in a spirited scene of several small black fishermen in a canoe trying, with a most fragile and ineffectual fishing-rod, to catch a school of fish the size of sperm whales. All the ladies, gay and gaudy as parakeets in this charming finery, had an additional ornament, gold rings, like wedding rings, implanted through the centre of their noses, and their cheeks were gorgeously made up with cyclamen-pink rouge. These were some of the San Bias islanders and they looked simply splendid. We had a mildly bumpy flight over the centre of Panama and soon we reached the Caribbean coastline and were flying over blue, translucent seas with reefs showing like strange sea-serpents embedded in blue amber. Scattered all around were the hundreds and hundreds of San Bias Islands, each so small and perfect with its wedding-ring of reef around white beaches and shaggy wigs of palm that they looked like manufactured South Sea islands in a toyshop window. Presently, somewhat to my consternation, the pilot flew over the blue waters, dropping lower and lower, and headed for an island of such microscopic dimensions that it seemed impossible that he intended to land on it, except in the direst emergency. By now we were almost skimming the surface of the water, and poor Alastair, who did not like small planes any more than I like heights, was looking distinctly apprehensive. Just as we all thought a crash landing in the sea was unavoidable, we flew over a snow-white beach and immediately beyond it the tarmac started. We touched down in a series of juddering bounces and were then tearing along the tarmac, brakes screaming. |
| 1785 |
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. A riot of hibiscus and other tropical bushes was in full flower. The whole thing in the most brilliant sunshine had an air of unreality. It looked exactly like a Hollywood film-set for a great South Sea epic. One expected (and looked for in vain) a sour-faced Somerset Maugham in immaculate white ducks descending the rickety bamboo stairs. But the closest you got to it were the two turtles whose expressions of disdain were remarkably similar. Our bedroom was, to say the least, a novelty. There was no need for windows since the light streamed through the bedroom walls, and some of the cracks afforded us excellent views over the sea and the islands around us. The beds were enormous and sagged in the middle, having at one time, it was clear, suffered a severe prolapse. The sand on the floor scrunched pleasantly under our feet and gave a special outdoor feeling to the apartment. A small cubicle the size of a coffin led off this honeymoon suite, constructed of beaten-out kerosene-tins covered with peeling oilcloth in a striking tartan pattern. From this Scottish ensemble protruded a small pipe from which, experiment proved, when a tap was turned, a jet of sea-water hit you straight in the eye. It was not the Ritz, but you didn't expect it in these idyllic surroundings. We had scarcely unpacked and hung our clothes neatly on the only chair, when looking over the veranda rail we saw a canoe arriving, piloted by a splendidly golden-brown young man accompanied by a young blonde. This proved to be Mark, doing special research on fish at the Smithsonian Institution's research station, a clutter of buildings perched uncomfortably on a reef a quarter of a mile away. |
| 1786 |
Mark had been seconded to us to be our guide and adviser while we were there. He was very attractive, with a slightly oriental cast to his features, and I found out later that his mother was Japanese. Extremely knowledgeable and competent, he immediately became our mentor and friend, as did the student Kathy who was working with him. That afternoon, Mark took us out to the reef a mile or so away, where he was doing his researches, and so knew practically every fish by its Christian name. We anchored the boat in six feet of water over the sandy bottom on the edge of the reef, donned our masks and dropped into the warm water. I can never get over the wonder of that moment when you enter the water and find your face beneath the diamond-bright surface of a tropical sea. The mask is like a magic door, whose opening smooths out the ruffles and pleats of the water, and you slide effortlessly through a fairyland of unimaginable beauty. At first we drifted over the golden sand, patterned with its bright, ever-moving chain mail created by the brilliant sun, and saw the stingrays like strange mottled frying-pans glide out of our way. Here and there were small islands of coral, smouldering like great jewels, clad in multicoloured weeds, decorated with sponges and sea-squirts in vivid colours, each island with its retinue of fish orange, scarlet, blue as a midnight summer sky, yellow as a dandelion, striped, speckled, pleated and ruffed, shapes to defy the imagination. We swam on and presently the reef loomed ahead, an extraordinary area of grottoes, channels, hidden gardens of sponges and intricate corals, great castles of coral with banners of weeds flying from their battlements. There were brain coral like enormous craniums of giants felled in battle who had fallen into the sea and whose bone structure had become part of the reef. All around you there was the click, purr, rasp or squeak of fishy conversation, abuse and feeding. Take one of the winding channels and follow its eel-like wrigglings. |
| 1787 |
One minute the weed would be brushing your shoulders on each side, sea-urchins like marine horse-chestnut husks clinging to the multicoloured walls, the fish darting ahead of you as if enticing you on. The next minute, the narrow channel would suddenly open out into a small area of dazzling filigreed sand covered with the obese black sea-slugs as though some marine delicatessen's delivery-van had dropped a load of saucisson by mistake. Then the narrow channel would become a great fish-filled valley and you could feel the pulse of the sea, the lift and fall, as you drifted like a bird out over the edge of the reef and suddenly below you was nothing but mysterious, menacing blackness as the reef-edge slipped down into the sea's bottom and disappeared into velvety darkness. Mark, over this and other reefs, had the intimate knowledge a man has of his back garden. He would tell you to swim down a certain channel, take the first left, second right, turn left at the big brain coral and twenty feet down the channel you would find the sponge or the coral or the fish that you were looking for. He directed you around the reef as a man would direct you round his home town, and certainly, without his guidance and expertise, there is a lot we would have missed or failed to understand unless it was explained. 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. |
| 1788 |
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. 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. |
| 1789 |
Among the many fascinating aspects of reef life Mark showed to us, none was more intriguing and bewildering than the sex fife of the blue-headed wrasse. If Freud thought that the sex life of the average human was complex, he would have had a nervous breakdown if he had been forced to psycho-analyse the blue-headed wrasse. To begin with, he would have been in some doubt as to whether he was addressing Mr or Mrs Wrasse, and this alone may have given him pause for thought. When the blue-headed wrasse are young, they are not blue-headed. It is no good beating about the bush, I might as well make a clean breast of it, they are yellow and don't even really look like blue-headed wrasse. However, don't despair. When they grow up, they undergo a startling colour-change and become deep, velvety blue with a fight blue head. The male then stakes out a territory in the mountain ranges of coral and defends it against all comers and waits for the ladies. He is large, glamorous, and he can mate with as many as a hundred females a day a fact that makes the prowess of all legendary human lovers pale into insignificance. The females, dazzled by his brio, find him irresistible and visit his coral apartment by the dozen. However, this is where the difficulties arise. Young males, too young to be able to obtain and defend a bachelor pad, hang around the adult fish's territory, waiting for the ladies. Groups of them then force the female to rocket skywards in the water and release her eggs, while the young males release their sperm and fertilize them. However, this is really unsatisfactory and obviously it is a fairly hit-and-miss affair. Ideally, the young males should stake out and defend territory and in this way be able to have the females to themselves, and thus fertilize even more. So his strategy is to grow big enough, change colour and get himself a penthouse. Meanwhile, what of the female wrasse? It is obvious that the number of eggs she can lay and the number of offspring she can produce is very small compared to the legion a big male can fertilize. |
| 1790 |
So what does she do? It sounds magical to us, but it is commonplace to a wrasse. She simply changes sex from a yellow female into a large blue male, strong enough to seize and defend a territory. This she does and is soon busy mating with dozens of females a day. This is, I suppose, the ultimate, a sub-aqua piscatorial women's liberation movement. Love in the wrasse's world is enchanting but apt to be confusing to the amateur naturalist at first. We arranged to film the damsel fish defending his garden and the extraordinary sexual activities of the blue-headed wrasse and many other things besides. Once Alastair got so carried away that he attempted to give directions under water, forgetting that the snorkel was not a megaphone, and nearly drowned in consequence. All in all, it was a most enjoyable and successful shoot. Our next stop was to be Barro Colorado, but as we knew it would take the crew some time to get organized Lee and I decided to stay on for a few days in the San Bias Islands, since it is not often that you find such an ideal, unspoilt spot. However, I felt it incumbent upon me to go to Israel, our hotel owner, and remonstrate with him. It is not often that I do battle with a hotel manager, but in this instance I felt justified. After all, we didn't mind the sand on the bedroom floor, the fact that we had to make our own beds, if we could find the sheets, or the fact that the sea-water in the shower would suddenly cease owing to a surfeit of shrimps in the pipes, or that the lavatory (because two screws were missing) bucked like a rodeo horse and nearly precipitated you through the bamboo walls into the sea. No, we put up with these minor irritations because of the charm of the place. What we were really complaining about was the food. Breakfast consisted of coffee, toast, marmalade and cereals perfectly satisfactory but it was the other meals that filled us with despair. So, determined to be firm but fair, I talked to Israel. 'Israel,' I said, smiling warmly, 'I want to talk to you about the food.' 'Huh?' said Israel. |
| 1791 |
Quite simply, Israel now wanted to know if we would go and help him to look for it. Most women would have fainted if asked to do this not my wife. 'How exciting,' she said. 'Do let's. We've got time, haven't we?' 'Yes,' I said, 'it would be nice to have a final swim with a corpse.' As we were preparing to leave, the latest guest at the hotel appeared and approached us. She was a voluptuous, well-rounded lady with glossy black hair, glossy brown body and large quantities of glossy white teeth. Her suntan lotion could be smelt a mile up-wind, and she jangled musically as she moved from the glittering goldmine of ornaments she wore. What she was doing in the primitive San Bias Islands I shall never know. She looked as though she would have been much more at home on the Cote d'Azur or Copacabana Beach. The white bikini she was wearing was so minuscule she might just as well have not worn one at all. 'Excuse, please,' she said, giving us the benefit of all her teeth. 'You are going out swimming?' 'Er ... yes, in a way,' I said. 'Would you mind if I come, too?' she asked beguilingly. '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. |
| 1792 |
The sky was a deep, rich blue, although it was only early morning, and the sun was hot enough to send trickles of sweat down your back under your shirt. That lovely, rich fragrant smell of the forest enveloped us, the delicate scent of a million flowers, a thousand thousand mushrooms and fruit, the perfume from a quadrillion gently rotting leaves in the simmering, ever-changing, ever-dying, ever-growing cauldron of the forest. Presently, the island came into view. Hills like isosceles triangles forested to their very tips, their reflections blurred and smudged in the brown waters like a pastel drawing. As the launch drew in at the jetty, a Morpho butterfly, the size of a swallow, came and pirouetted around us briefly, like a piece of animated sky, before flying off to illuminate some dark-green part of the forest. We unloaded our gear, and then faced the fact that what lay before us was an almost one-in-one climb to the summit up a flight of cement steps, which reminded me unpleasantly of some of the steeper, more backbreaking Aztec monuments that Lee and I had crawled up a few years previously in Mexico. Alongside it ran a monorail with a flat-topped train-like engine on it. On this we piled our luggage and gazed up at the distant houses almost hidden in the trees. 'Well,' I said grimly, 'I'll walk up this once, just to say I've done it, but after that it's the Orient Express for me.' I have rarely regretted a decision more. By the time I was halfway up I was exhausted and drenched with sweat. By the time I reached the top I had just enough strength left to stagger to a chair and grasp the tankard of beer which Paula so thoughtfully had waiting. Needless to say, to my intense annoyance, Lee had attained the summit looking immaculate and not in the least out of breath. Since they had arrived, the crew had been busy checking suitable film-sites and finding out the best areas for animal photography. Most of the animals on the island were used to clutches of earnest scientists bumbling about in the forest so one more entourage would not make much difference. |
| 1793 |
Everywhere you look there is a new species and, although die riot of undergrowth is stationary, you get the impression of great movement. The giant trees, a hundred feet high straddling on buttress roots (like the flying buttresses of a medieval cathedral), are lashed together with a web of creepers and lianas, so that they resemble the giant masts of so many wrecked and abandoned tall-masted schooners, their green sails in tatters and only the shrouds of the lianas keeping them upright. In places, the forest floor appeared to be alive, a moving carpet of green. This hallucination was brought about by the streams of leaf-cutting ants hurrying back to their nests with their booty, a triangular piece of thumbnail-sized green leaf, slung over their shoulders. From the tree of their choice (which they were busily dissecting) to their nest may be several hundred yards, and so these columns of green wend their way over the dark forest floor, over logs and under bushes in a steady stream that on close inspection looks like a Lilliputian regatta, all the boats having green sails. As we made our way deeper into the forest, we could hear ahead of us the deep, vibrant roar that signalled a troupe of black howler monkeys. It's an impressive sound, somewhere between a howl, a roar and a harsh gurgle, and it shakes and vibrates the forest in a prodigious fashion. Presently we found them, a small family group, black as jet, some slouching nonchalantly through the branches, others lolling back in patches of sunlight, stuffing leaves and buds into their mouths, others simply hanging by their superbly prehensile tails and contemplating their aerial garden. When they caught sight of us, they became very alert, glaring at us suspiciously, and when we moved off the path into the forest so that we were directly underneath them they grew agitated and belligerent and broke off twigs and leaves to throw down at us, and less desirable ammunition as well. '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. |
| 1794 |
'Now, cool your jets, Alastair,' said Paula. 'They're only doing what everyone wants to do to a director.' The monkeys above us, having found that the barrage of twigs and excreta had no effect, now burst into a gigantic chorus to persuade us that this was their territory. It was like standing in the deep end of an empty swimming-pool listening to the Red Army choir, each member singing a different song in Outer Mongolian. 'We've certainly made them lose their cool,' said Paula, raising her voice above the racket. 'We must certainly, you know ... howling, yes ... somewhere high ... trees,' said Alastair. 'There's a tower,' said Paula, doing an instant translation. 'They were telling me that there's a tall tower in the forest that they used to use for studying the forest canopy.' 'Just the thing,' said Alastair. 'About a hundred and fifty feet high,' said Paula enthusiastically. 'How delicious,' I said. 'I shall enjoy watching Alastair go up it.' 'Oh, honey, I forgot you don't like heights,' said Paula. 'Never mind, we'll send the crew up, and you and Lee can stay on the ground.' 'What a lovely producer you are,' I said. We moved on into the forest, stepping carefully over the columns of leaf-cutters. So numerous were they that you wondered why the whole forest was not defoliated. This leaf-gathering is really a form of gardening, for the ants carry the leaves to their vast underground homes (sometimes a quarter of an acre in extent) and here they rot the leaves down into a mulch on which they grow the fungi which is their food. In some way realizing that, if they defoliate all the trees in the immediate vicinity of the nest, they would soon starve, they cull the trees carefully and only gather a certain amount of leaves from each tree. On our second day we came to a clearing in the forest that had been created by the death of one of the giant trees. Growing on a slope, torrential rains had undermined its roots' tenuous hold on the topsoil and a gust of wind had then torn it free, as easily as a dentist wrenches a tooth from a jaw. |
| 1795 |
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. The next film star that was brought from the forest to appear in front of the cameras was a fascinating little creature that I have not seen since I obtained some in Guyana many years ago. It was a pygmy anteater, the smallest of the anteaters, a beast that, fully grown, would fit comfortably into your cupped hand with room to spare. Like the sloth, this diminutive creature is perfectly adapted to its arboreal life. Its fur is short, dense and silky, an amber brown in colour. Its prehensile tail is naked at the end, which enables the creature to get a firmer grip with it, when it is wound round a branch. It has a short, tube-like snout, slightly curved, and tiny eyes and ears hidden in its thick fur. It is the feet of this little beast which are so extraordinary. Its hands are fat, pink pads armed with three long, slender, sharp claws, the middle one being the biggest. |
| 1796 |
These claws can fold back into the palm of the hand like the blade of a pocket-knife. On the hind feet (the heel of the foot, so to speak) is a muscular pad shaped like a cup, which enables it to fit snugly round a branch. The toes on these feet end in sharp claws and have pads at their base so these, together with the suction-cup effect, help to form a prodigious clasping mechanism, without actually involving the claws. When in danger, the pygmy anteater lashes its tail round a branch, attaches its hind feet firmly (thus forming a triangle with the two feet and the tail), raises its arms above its head and, when its adversary is within range, falls forward, slashing downwards with its razor-sharp front claws. Unlike the sloth, who has blunt, peg-like teeth with no enamel that go on growing throughout its life, this anteater has no teeth, merely a long, sticky tongue and a very muscular gizzard in its stomach, which pulverizes the tree ants on which it lives. Our specimen behaved with great fortitude during the filming and soon became so inured to us that, between takes, he sat quietly clinging on to Lee's forefinger, his tail carefully wound round her thumb or wrist. When the time came to release him, he was reluctant to leave Lee's hand and sat for a long time in the bushes, peering at us pensively, before moving away into the forest. Although we had miles of film of the leaf-cutting ants going about their business of defoliating the forest, carrying their leaves back to their nest, cleaning out the nest and creating huge garbage-heaps, we had to part company with them when they vanished underground. This irked Alastair. 'I want... you know ... I think ... well, gardens,' he said, with his head on one side, revolving slowly, looking like a beaming, benevolent corpse on a gibbet. 'Mushroom-beds, you know ... underground?' 'The only way you'll get them, honey, is by digging the guys out,' said Paula practically. 'Yes,' said Alastair musingly, moving top-like on the nest he was standing on, which covered an area approximately the size of a small ballroom. |
| 1797 |
'Is possible?' asked Roger. 'Is not too deep?' 'Well, sometimes the mushroom-beds he quite close to the surface,' I said, 'but the ants won't take too kindly to it.' 'Paula, you get some spades and we dig, eh?' said Roger enthusiastically. '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. 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. |
| 1798 |
This was accompanied by wild, tremulous screams of agony, interspersed in equal parts with blasphemy and procreative oaths. 'Christ,' shrieked Alastair, waltzing around, now of necessity. 'Ouch, ouch; they're biting. Oh, the bloody things!' 'Ouch, ouch, merde alors!' screamed Roger, waltzing, too, and slapping his trousers. 'Zey is biting.' The chief problem was that Alastair was wearing shorts and an ancient pair of baseball boots, and this did not give his legs any protection, so the ants swarmed up him as though he were a tree, attempting to tear him to pieces. Roger, if anything, was in worse case, for he was wearing elegant, fairly tight-fitting trousers, up which the ants flowed with speed and precision. Those on the outside bit right through the thin cloth and into his flesh. Those on the inside concentrated on getting as high as possible before beginning their assault, so that Roger was being bitten in the most intimate and tender parts of his anatomy. The ants' jaws, powerful enough to chop up tough leaves, made short work of the thin trouser material and Roger's legs were patched with bloodstains as were Alastair's legs. We got them both away from the immediate scene of battle and de-anted them. Paula then practised first aid with antibiotics, but it was a considerable time before we got all of the ants off them. 'Did you see that?' panted Alastair, his spectacles misted over with emotion. 'The buggers were trying to defoliate me.' 'What about me?' said Roger. 'Me they go for the private parts. Me they try to make eunuch.' Later on, wrapped in so many layers of clothing that they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee clad for battle, they succeeded in unearthing a small section of the mushroom-garden and filming it, to the ants' fury. One of the most fantastic pieces of natural history in the forest, one that was in its own way just as difficult to obtain on film as the ants' fungus-garden, was the extraordinary story of the giant fig tree and the minute fig wasp. |
| 1799 |
This strange relationship only recently became unravelled, and it shows part of the enormous complexity of the tropical forest and how any plant or creature is only part of the whole intricate ecosystem, for without the great fig trees the fig wasp would perish and without the fig wasp the fig tree would never reproduce its kind, and its numbers would dwindle and it would eventually become extinct. All figs have a very curious flower structure, resembling, in fact, that of a fruit more than that of a flower. A host of tiny flowers He inside the fig, which is attached to the tree by a stalk at one end; at the other there is a minute opening almost obscured by scales. Figs have male and female flowers and the way the pollen is ferried from one to the other is as enchanting as it is awe-inspiring. This is what happens: In the fig the first to mature are the female flowers, and their scent attracts female fig wasps, who are carrying pollen from other fig trees in the forest. 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. |
| 1800 |
If I leant forwards, I fell flat on my face; if I leant backwards I fell flat on my back; if I maintained a regal upright stance, I fell either forwards or backwards, depending on which way the wind was blowing. Snowshoeing, however, was quite another kettle of fish and most satisfactory. It was a fascinating feeling, to be able to walk over the deep snow without sinking in. It made you feel like one of those lovely birds, the lilytrotters (albeit a fairly massive one), who progress over the waterlilies as though they were a highway. With shoes like tennis rackets you could progress at a steady pace over a depth of snow that, without the shoes, would have had you floundering and immobilized within a few feet. Turning round on shoes was the only tricky part, and if you did not do it right your shoes got tangled up and you fell into the snow, from whence it required much struggling and effort to get yourself upright again. Once you had mastered it you felt like a guardsman with outsize feet, doing a smart right-about-turn on the parade-ground. Having acquired some expertise on the snowshoes, Lee and I went off to explore the immediate environs. The sky was slate grey, so solid it looked as if it would clang like iron if you threw a snowball at it. Out of it drifted handfuls of snowflakes, each the size of a penny stamp, as thick and as soft as blotting-paper. The snow squeaked and purred under your shoes, but apart from this the silence was complete, the world gagged with snow. The pines looked as though some giant pastrycook had flung icing sugar at them, their dark-green branches bending under the weight. In places you could see where quite large trees had been bent over by their white load and it was obvious that with the next snowfall the trees would be wrenched from the ground. We came to a small lake, round and smooth as a saucer of milk under its ice and snow covering. At the edges we could see snow-covered hummocks with black branches sticking out of them, like sticks of charcoal breaking the icy crust. |
| 1801 |
These were beaver lodges and deep inside the animals slumbered, waiting for the spring to melt the five-foot piecrust of ice and snow and thus release the water for them to swim in. In the summer, when we returned to Canada, we revisited this lake at dawn. Then the change was spectacular. The water was greeny-gold and the whole lake was rimmed with thick beds of reeds, like a fringe on a Victorian tablecloth, and here and there the surface was embroidered with patches of white waterlilies. The sun had just lifted above the green, shimmering trees, pulling wisps of mist up from the lake's surface, delicate skeins drifting among the reeds and the waterlilies, like fragile wedding veils. We took a canoe, and travelled slowly out across the water towards the brown hump, like a giant, badly made Christmas pudding, that was the beavers' lodge. Halfway to it, a large brown head suddenly broke the surface of the greeny-gold water, and in a circular picture-frame of ripples a beaver contemplated us with a certain suspicion. We paused in our paddling to watch him as he swam slowly and sedately to and fro in front of the lodge, like a guardsman patrolling in front of a palace. When we attempted to manoeuvre the canoe closer to him, however, he panicked and lifted his paddle-shaped tail out of the water and brought it down on the surface with a blow that echoed across the lake like a gunshot and then dived. A few minutes later, he appeared in a different place and, seeing that we had not retreated, he smote the waters again before diving once more. The whole time we were out in the canoe, he kept reappearing, each time in a different place, and smiting the water to frighten us off. He was the only beaver we saw during our time in Canada and I cannot say that he behaved in anything like a welcoming manner. Back at the house, we found Alastair in high spirits, for he had come upon and filmed a large herd of white-tailed deer and a somewhat recalcitrant moose which proved, as far as he was concerned, that there were animals in this frozen wilderness. |
| 1802 |
In order to show the wonderful insulating properties of the snow, Alastair wanted to build what the North American Indians call a quinzhee, or what the Eskimos would call an igloo. So, while we and half our entourage went in search of animals, the other half, led by Alastair, found a suitable spot and started to build a quinzhee. We had not driven far down the road when we spotted a moose with monstrous chocolate-coloured horns, standing among the trees at the side of the road. Moose are such curious-looking creatures with their ungainly bodies and legs and their bulbous wine-bibbers' noses. They always look to me as though they have been made up of discarded bits from several different creatures. This animal gazed at us lugubriously for a few minutes, twisting his ears; and then, blowing out two great clouds of steam from his balloon-like nose, he moved off heavily through the trees. The adult male moose is of course a magnificent animal, as large as a shire horse and with enormous palmated antlers, like giant holly leaves, on his head. We watched them later on in the spring, grazing along the lakes and rivers on the waterlily roots. Their heads and huge antlers would be plunged beneath the surface of the water as they grazed and then when they came up for air their antlers would be entangled and decorated with waterlilies and their stems. We drove on and then ten minutes later two huge male elk came into view standing majestically by the side of the road, their branched antlers like some magnificent bony candelabra on their heads. They gazed at us with regal disdain for a moment or so and then trotted off slowly and gracefully, threading their way through the trees adroitly so that their massive antlers did not get entangled in the branches. Just as they disappeared, a whole herd of white-tailed deer, gingerbread-brown, came trotting into view, ears pricked, nostrils wide, big liquid eyes peering fearfully across the snow. They came to a halt when they saw us, clustering together nervously, their noses testing the air. |
| 1803 |
For a moment or so it seemed as though they might actually cross the road in front of us, but then one more nervous than the rest panicked and in a moment the whole herd had turned in a flurry of snow and were off, their pale backsides like strange heart-shaped targets bobbing among the charcoal-black trees. We drove on through the glittering frozen landscape under the bright-blue sky and half an hour later we saw, ploughing its way across a white valley between two black belts of leafless trees, what appeared to be a chestnut-brown avalanche. As we drove nearer, it proved to be, to our excitement, a small herd of six buffalo, hunchbacked, shaggy, wading shoulder high through the snow, packed tightly together, trailing shawls of white steamy breath behind them. As they ploughed through the crisp, white, undisturbed valley, leaving a broken path of chumed-up snow and blue shadows behind them, they did look very like an avalanche of curly fur, muscular shoulders and glimmering horns. We watched them for perhaps ten minutes until they were out of sight. We were just going to start up the car when suddenly, from the interior of the dark mesh of trees, out strolled an enormous old bull buffalo. On to the snowfield, white as a banqueting-cloth, he sauntered out, his beard swinging to his rolling walk, his horns sharp-curved as bows, his great forehead and massive shoulders a mass of dark ringlets, the breath from his nostrils making two cumulus clouds of steam ahead of him as he moved. Slowly, like a portly, well-made man of substance taking his constitutional, he moved across the white expanse. Here the snow was not so deep, so it only came up to his knees. He moved ponderously across until he was perhaps two hundred yards from the tree line. Then he paused and mused, his breath forming a cloud around his face, entangling itself in the fur of his forehead and shoulders. Then, in slow motion, as it were, he doubled his feet under him, and lay down in the snow. He lay there for a moment, and then with a vigorous kicking of his legs he rolled over. |
| 1804 |
More kicks rolled him back again and so for the next ten minutes we were privileged to watch him take his snow bath rolling to and fro, grunting with the exertion, his breath spouting silver clouds into the air, the snow flying in white cakes in all directions. Presently, exhausted by his ablutions, he lay on his side for a time, panting, his flanks heaving. Then he hauled his bulk upright, gave a gigantic shuddering shake that made the snow burst from his thick fur in a cloud and then, massively sure of himself, he sauntered after the herd, of which we had no doubt he was king. Slowly, meditatively, like a huge, dark cloud, he moved across the snow and disappeared. We got back to find Alastair, pink with exertion, proudly walking round a five-foot conical mound of snow. 'Quinzhee,' he explained proudly, with his head on one side and contemplating the pile of snow with affection. 'Got to ... you know ... snowshoes and dig it.' So with our snowshoes we patted the snow flat all over the pile and then proceeded to dig a large opening like a small church door on one side. 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. |
| 1805 |
I seized the rod with confidence, pointed the tip skywards and made what I considered to be a perfect cast. Unfortunately, for some reason, the wretched line, instead of unfurling and gently lowering the mouse on to the ice, behaved like a whip, with the result that the mouse snapped in two and half of its body went soaring away across the pond, leaving me with only the head and forelegs still attached to the line. 'Honey,' said Paula, when she had stopped laughing, 'you know the budget can't afford endless mice.' 'Lucky we've got a spare,' said Alastair. '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. For the Northern Lights alone, I felt it was worth braving the Canadian winter. Our next visit to Canada was in the summer, when the countryside presented a very different mien, with trees in full leaf and flowers growing everywhere. Our destination was Banff, one of Canada's major national parks, situated in the middle of the Rocky Mountains and so containing some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. |
| 1806 |
These hirsute coverings can be found on a lot of alpine plants and, believe it or not, actually help to protect the plant from at least nine months of icy weather in the same way that the thick coat of the grizzly bear protects its body. Here the trees ended and the valley stretched out before us, lush and so green it would have put a mine of emeralds to shame. On the flanks of the mountainside surrounding it you could see the scars of old avalanches, but the bright meadow itself seemed unscathed. Here the rich green grass was spangled with tiny alpine plants, the bright-yellow cinquefoil, the yellow heather, the delicate purple milk vetch, the white sandwort and cushions of bright-pink moss campions. Through the centre of the valley ran a stream chattering and glistening around piles of grey rocks, each so beautifully arranged that it seemed as if the whole valley had just been completed by some alpine Capability Brown. Suddenly our attention was attracted by a shrill whistle that echoed back from the surrounding hills, and on top of a pile of rocks, lolling in the sun, was a fat, brown marmot, looking somewhat like a gigantic guinea-pig, with a long furry tail. I think he gave his alarm cry from force of habit, for he did not seem at all upset by our presence. In fact, after being near to him for a few minutes, he actually allowed me to approach him and scratch his fat neck and tickle his whiskers. It was a marvellous, magical feeling to be in a place where the animals look upon you as being benign and allow you to share, however briefly, a part of their lives. Ahead of us, we could see the valley was divided into two a higher and a lower area, separated by a steep slope of tumbled boulders. Beyond lay a barren hillside of jagged rocks, arranged in piles by past avalanches. These huge boulders were embossed with fossil seashells and coral an indication that in times past these rocks had formed the bed of an ancient sea that had, by a cataclysmic movement of the earth, been lifted up to this high and remote valley. |
| 1807 |
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. 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. |
| 1808 |
You could eat the fly agaric if you swallowed it without chewing, and so this is what they did to get the desired effect. They also found out one shudders to think how that if you imbibe the urine of someone who has been on an agaric bender you can obtain the same effect through this now 'distilled' potion. The Lapps of course, when they are blundering about with colossal hangovers, blame the reindeer for the whole thing. Although to us the forest was ravishing, to Jonathan it represented an implacable enemy who, with its ever-changing moods, was trying to frustrate him. 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. |
| 1809 |
With them we solemnly transported a ladder and, under Jonathan's direction, propped it against the trunk of a huge oak tree. Brian, who was not doing any sound-recording in this sequence, was detailed to go up the ladder carrying a plastic bag full of leaves, crawl out along the branches and start scattering leaves as though he were Mother Nature. This he dutifully did. 'Throw them more naturally,' Jonathan kept calling. 'How can you throw them naturally out of a plastic bag?' asked Brian aggrievedly from his precarious perch. 'Throw them delicately,' said Jonathan, 'not in great wodges like that.' 'I must say, you chaps go to an awful lot of trouble,' said Simon. 'No expense spared,' I said. 'Erich von Stroheim, when he was filming, once had 35,000 almond blossoms fixed to the trees because he was shooting in winter and the trees were bare.' 'Good God, wasn't that expensive?' asked Simon. 'Yes,' I said, 'very. Harris is related to him, of course, hence this leaves business.' 'Really?' said Simon, interested. 'Yes, his real name is Harris von Stroheim, but he changed it.' 'So that is why he is so keen on the leaves?' asked Simon. 'Yes, well, with our budget you can't run to almond blossom,' I said. As I have said, Jonathan felt that the New Forest was not really co-operating. It deliberately grew its fungi in shady comers with not enough light for photography. It refused to shed its leaves, it got rained on, it got covered in fog, it was recalcitrant to a degree. Then came the final straw, the business of the galls. Each tree in a forest has, of course, an ecosystem of its own. The tree itself, while controlling heat and moisture and so climate, provides an important world for a host of creatures who live on, in or around it or merely visit it for reasons of business, like nesting. It has been estimated that a single oak tree can support well over three hundred species (and goodness knows how many individuals of each species), ranging from birds to moths, from caterpillars to spiders. |
| 1810 |
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. '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. |
| 1811 |
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. I've found one,' she yelled. We all converged on her at a run. 'Where, where, where is it?' barked Jonathan hoarsely. Lee pointed. Attached to the branch of an oak-tree she was holding was an oak-apple. It was undeniably an oak-apple but so minuscule, so shrivelled, so pathetic, that it looked like a very old dropping of a Lilliputian elephant. 'Is that an oak-apple?' asked Jonathan suspiciously. 'Yes,' I said, 'but I must admit I've seen healthier specie mens.' 'Well, it's the only one we have,' he said, as he removed it carefully from the tree. 'We'd better take it.' As it turned out, it was the only one we did see. It was transported back to London as reverently as if it had been the Crown Jewels (or, rather, Crown Jewel), and people sat around it for weeks, cameras at the ready, like scientists waiting for something to emerge from a flying saucer. Nothing happened. When it became patently obvious that nothing was going to hatch, Jonathan cut it in half with a penknife. |
| 1812 |
Inside was one very small, extremely dead larva of a gall wasp. Filming nature is not easy, especially when you only have a limited time to do it in. The next thing that we had a slight contretemps with were badgers, those magnificent creatures of ancient lineage who have waddled through the English woodland since the days when humans were dressed in woad. It is a swaggering, beguiling, beautifully designed creature of great intelligence and charm which does an enormous amount of good as one of the countryside's major predators, striking terror into the heart of everything from a woodlouse to a baby rabbit, a pheasant chick to a frog, taking in worms, snails, beetles, snakes and hedgehogs on the way. The word 'omnivorous' means 'eating everything', and the badger lives up to this title admirably. Everything is grist to his mill. In spite of this indiscriminately carnivorous approach to life, much of the badger's food consists of roots, mushrooms, berries and seeds. Altogether, it is a handsome and useful addition to the countryside and if it does occasionally wreak havoc in a cornfield or a hop field, or set a henhouse on end, one must overlook these lapses from good manners for the amount of good these creatures contribute. Badger homes, or setts, are enormous complex structures of endless tunnels and chambers. As the sett (like the English country home) is handed down from generation to generation and as each generation enlarges and improves it, the ramifications of an old sett are considerable. It consists of bedrooms, recesses and, where young are being reared, they even excavate special lavatory areas. Badgers mate for life and, being eminently civilized beasts, remain on good terms with all the neighbouring badger couples. Just recently, the badger, who has been shambling through the green twilight of the English woodland for a millennium, has been beset by two separate groups of so-called civilized man. They were accused of carrying bovine TB (which they probably do) by that group of veterinary surgeons employed by the Ministry of Agriculture. |
| 1813 |
Their answer to the problem was 'Kill the Badgers' and so there was a great flurry of badger-gassing under the most unpleasant conditions. It has always seemed to me that veterinary surgeons employed by the Ministry have only one answer to any problem, which is 'destroy it' rather than 'solve it'. Fortunately, this simplistic approach was stopped by public outcry, and the vandalizing of the ancestral homes of the badgers and the destruction of this creature was halted. You would have thought that an official campaign of gassing (macabrely Teutonic in its conception) would have been quite sufficient for the poor badger, but no. Once officialdom had been worsted, the animal was threatened on another front. Badger-baiting with terriers became the lead sport among those members of the human race whose frontal lobes are still Neanderthal. 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. 'You will be sitting outside a sett on the other side of the valley,' Jonathan explained, 'and then, just as it becomes dusk, the badgers will come out.' 'Have you told the badgers this?' I asked. 'They will come out,' Jonathan said confidently. 'They will come out for the sandwich.' 'Sandwich? |
| 1814 |
What sandwich?' asked Lee. 'A peanut-butter sandwich,' said Jonathan. 'What are you talking about?' asked Lee. 'Badgers,' said Jonathan, with an air of authority, 'badgers find peanut-butter sandwiches irresistible. They will travel miles to obtain one. Drag a peanut-butter sandwich through the forest and you will have every badger for miles around following you.' 'Where did you obtain this esoteric piece of information?' I enquired. 'I read it in a book on badgers,' said Jonathan. 'They said it never fails.' 'It sounds distinctly peculiar to me,' I said. 'I have never heard of attracting badgers with peanut butter.' 'Chipmunks like peanut butter,' said Lee. 'I used to feed it to them in the garden in Memphis, so I don't see why a badger shouldn't like it.' 'They find it irresistible,' repeated Jonathan. 'They'll do anything for a peanut-butter sandwich.' So, armed with a vast quantity of peanut-butter sandwiches, we made our way into the forest where there was an extensive badger sett. However, it was a fairly well-populated area and all the signs were that a number of human beings had been trampling round in the vicinity. 'I hate to sound pessimistic,' I said to Jonathan, 'but what happens if the badgers won't come out on cue?' 'I've thought of that,' he said, glancing at his watch. 'Any minute now my badger reinforcements will arrive.' 'What reinforcements?' asked Lee. 'A chap called David Chaffe,' said Jonathan. 'He has two tame badgers. He will be arriving with them any minute now, so if the wild ones don't show up we at least have some tame ones.' So the cameras were set up, and Lee and I took up our badger-watching positions. Needless to say, no badgers appeared. It was not altogether surprising as, however careful a film crew are, they cannot be completely silent and badgers have very sensitive hearing. By now, however, David Chaffe, burly and bearded, had arrived and in his van were two handsome young badgers. These, wriggling and snorting with excitement, were removed from their cages and released outside the badger sett. |
| 1815 |
The lovely stitchwort, white as a snowflake, was supposed to cure sharp pains in your side; the cool, fleshy dock leaves were soothing for stings, especially nettle stings; if you were wounded or cut, the self-heal would be the plant to search for; or, if you suffered from ulcers in the mouth or in more intimate and painful places, the handsome silver weed would cure you. Medieval man treated the hedgerows with respect because they were the haunt of elves, fairies and other sprites. As well as bad magic lurking in the hedges (if you plucked lady's smock an adder would bite you, or pluck innocent blue speedwell and create a thunderstorm or, worse, bring a bird down to peck out your eyes), there was good magic as well. You could rub your cow's udder with buttercups and thus increase your milk yield or you could hang nettles in your dairy to prevent witches from curdling your milk. Once the hedgerows were considered vitally important and they were carefully maintained so that man and wild creatures benefited from them. Now, however, farmers consider the hedgerow to be a nuisance and so these ancient and useful sanctuaries are being bulldozed out of existence to make way for ever larger and larger tracts of land, exposed to the eroding effects of wind and rain. We wanted to try to show on film one of these ancient hedgerows that still exist and capture some of its beauty and importance. In time, the hedgerow will be a thing of the past and a lovely and important part of Britain's heritage will have vanished. So we wanted to show a bit of the English countryside as it had been for thousands of years and to explore it. We decided to use three archaic or semi-archaic forms of transport. Jonathan had found a magnificent area of hedgerow in Sussex which ran along the side of a sunken green lane, that is to say a natural lane, uncorrupted by gravel or macadam, the sort of lane a-glitter with flowers, sheltered by tall hawthorns covered with white blossom like snow. It was the sort of green lane that Shakespeare knew, the sort of lane that the pilgrims to Canterbury used. |
| 1816 |
The first stage of our journey to this entrancing bit of English countryside was accomplished, to my delight, by steam train. Railway enthusiasts have, in different parts of the British Isles, rescued ancient steam engines, lovingly restored them, and are allowed to run them on special sections of rail. You discover that the driver, the guard, the conductor and other personnel are in real life schoolmasters, professors, shopkeepers, chemists or merely retired train buffs who give their services free so that this generation can experience the feeling of real train travel, can smell that magic, acrid perfume of coal, soot and steam, can thrill to the owl-like hoot of the engine itself, can be sent into a trance by the rattle, clank and hiss of the train and then settle to that rhythmic clackety-clack like the heartbeat of the train itself. Eagerly, we wended our way down to the charmingly named Bluebell Railway. Lee, at the age of thirty-three, had never travelled on a steam train a revelation which shocked me to the core of my soul, railway enthusiast that I am. So we arrived at the station and there was the train, gleaming and glittering, wearing a rakish scarf of steam over one shoulder, and behind it the elegant carriages, quite rightly designated as First, Second and Third Class. The heavy doors slammed with a satisfying clunk and had great leather straps with which to lower the windows, the more easily to get sparks in your eyes or soot on your nose all experiences that enhance any railway journey that is a railway journey. Jonathan, regardless of the budget, had thrown caution to the wind and reserved a whole First Class carriage for us, with wide, beautifully upholstered seats with fat buttons like mushrooms embedded in them. There were gaily coloured travel posters depicting seaside resorts circa 1920, with a sea of such blueness you wondered why anybody ever went to the Mediterranean. There were huge luggage-racks, wide and sturdy enough to take any number of Gladstone bags, hatboxes, picnic hampers and other necessities. |
| 1817 |
The three old ladies screamed, the Brigadier-General said something that sounded suspiciously like 'By Gad!' and Lee and I, rolling about on the gravel, finally managed to disentangle ourselves and stand up. The Brigadier-General screwed a monocle into one eye and surveyed us from top to toe. We were both wearing our naturalist outfits, which, after a day's filming in the rain, looked extremely scruffy. 'Trippers!' said the Brigadier-General, after surveying us in silence for a moment, packing into that one word all the well-bred scorn that the middle-class Englishman still feels for the proletariat. 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. |
| 1818 |
It was so compact and well filled, that it would roll across the table without being discomposed, though it contained eight little mice that were naked and blind. As this nest was perfectly full, how could the dam come at her litter respectively so as to administer a teat to each? Perhaps she opens different places for that purpose, adjusting them again when the business is over; but she could not possibly be contained herself in the ball with her young, which moreover would be daily increasing in bulk. 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. |
| 1819 |
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. They ran round and round in circles, squeaking plaintively to each other; then one, nose to the ground like a dog, found my scent and set off at a brisk trot, leading the others. That it was undoubtedly my scent they were following became apparent, for I had meandered to and fro to reach my present position and they followed the route I had taken slavishly. There was much excited noise when they discovered me and they clambered squeaking and snorting into my lap. |
| 1820 |
I remember once, when we lived in Hampshire, we had a huge and ancient cooking-apple tree in the garden. One year it had a bumper crop of fruit, more than my mother could utilize in spite of making tons of chutney and jams, so a lot of fruit fell to the ground and we let it rot and manure the earth beneath the tree. One bright moonlight night, I was woken by screams and squeals and grunts and, thinking it was a pair of courting cats, I leant out of the window to give them a piece of my mind and saw to my astonishment that it was a pair of hedgehogs. Wondering what on earth they were doing, I donned my slippers and went down into the moonlit garden. I discovered that they had been feasting on the semi-rotten apples and the fermenting fruit had acted like cider, so now both hedgehogs were appallingly inebriated. They staggered round and round the tree bumping into things, hiccuping, hurling abuse at each other and generally behaving in the most reprehensible manner. For their own good, I had to lock them up in our garage overnight and the next morning it was a very dejected and sorry-looking pair of insectivores I released into the woods at the back of our house. Another creature that we were lucky enough to film was the weasel, the smallest and most delightful of the British predators. Some twenty-eight centimetres in length, including their tails, they are beautiful, swift and slender little creatures how swift we soon discovered when we started to film. In order to get the close-up shots of our weasel hunting, we built a very lifelike set to represent a section of the hedgerow. A film is made at twenty-four frames a second, that is to say that the camera takes twenty-four photographs each second. We found our weasel was moving so fast that he could actually cross the set in between the photographs an absolutely extraordinary feat of agility. I remember when I worked as a student keeper at Whipsnade I used to cycle on my day off across to Tring Museum to take lessons in taxidermy. |
| 1821 |
We had to walk to the centre of this field of the cloth of gold to have our picnic and it seemed sacrilege to wade calf-deep through the buttercups, leaving a crushed path behind us across that impeccably unsullied sheet of gold and green. In the final scenes of the programme, in order to show the complex web of hedgerows spreading across the countryside, Jonathan had decided to send us up in a hot-air balloon. Although I had often wanted to try this splendid, archaic form of transport, I was a trifle nervous because of my vertigo. However, this was an opportunity too good to be missed, so I agreed to try to curb my absurd complaint and take to the air. The whole thing had to be planned like a military operation. We were to take two flights; the first day we would be accompanied by Chris and the camera so that he could get all the close-ups of us in the basket, while the others followed us by car and filmed us on the ground. On the second day, Chris and the camera were to follow our flight in a helicopter and a helicopter to be piloted by Captain John Crewdson, no less, who had done all the complex and risky filming for the James Bond films. The pilot of our balloon was Jeff Westley, a skilled balloonist who could virtually land his craft on a sixpence. Ideally, Jonathan would have liked to have had the balloon ascending majestically out of the centre of the buttercup field, but this would have created too much havoc on the flowers and the grass, so we had to choose a much more plebeian and well-grazed pasture for our first ascent. We arrived at the meadow early in the morning to find our balloon awaiting us. It was a gorgeous monster far bigger than I had expected gaily striped in red, yellow and blue. Resting on the grass beneath it was the basket, rather like a giant-sized old-fashioned laundry-basket, which contained the essential canisters of butane gas which made flight possible. We were introduced to Jeff, a stocky, fair-haired man with twinkling blue eyes and a massive air of confidence. |
| 1822 |
Finally, however, we spotted a meadow with no crop growing in it and devoid of domestic animals. To get to it, we had to drift over a large field of ripening barley and then over a belt of trees and then do a fairly smart three-point landing, for the meadow we were aiming for was narrow. It was at this point that the wind played us false. We had to come down low over the barley, skip skilfully over the belt of trees and then plummet down into the meadow. As we drifted across the barley, the wind suddenly faded and the balloon dropped earthwards with considerable speed. Jeff gave us a burst of flame to try to gain altitude, but it was no use; the basket crashed into the barley and then progressed across the field in a series of gigantic leaps, like a kangaroo. Three times we bounced, bone-breaking bumps, and then the wind caught the balloon and we were rushed across the barley, six inches from the ground, at breakneck speed, towards the menacing belt of trees, leaving a swathe of damaged crops behind us. 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. |
| 1823 |
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. 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. |
| 1824 |
The cactus is mature when it is only seven or eight feet high, but at this point it is already fifty years old. From a distance, they look pleated, as though they were constructed from thick green corduroy. Along each of the pleats are bunches of stiff black spines some two inches long and as sharp as hypodermic needles. The whole growth process of this prickly giant is a slow one. It starts as a tiny seed and the first few years are precarious, for it has to contend with extremes of temperature from blazing heat to frost, from drought to floods. At this stage, it may be trodden on and killed by deer or partially eaten and stunted by rabbits or pack rats. If it can survive these hazards, then it grows slowly but surely. By the time it is seventy-five to a hundred years old, it is between twelve and twenty feet in height and then starts to develop its arms and its curious candelabra shape. The number and position of these arms vary so that no two Saguaro are alike. Some may have two arms, some twenty or as many as fifty. It is, like all cacti, a succulent, and like a huge prickly barrel it can store a vast quantity of water in its stem and arms. Its skin is thick and waxy, which of course makes it the perfect container for water. Its spines are not only a protection against the attack of animals such as deer or big-horn sheep, but also grow so thickly that they cast quite an appreciable amount of shadow on its trunk and arms, thus helping to keep the cactus cool in the intense heat. When a Saguaro dies, the flesh rots away and leaves a skeleton behind, a woody, basket-like structure that in life helped to support the barrel-like trunk and massive limbs. Inside these skeletons you can find odd wooden structures some ten to twelve inches or more in length that look like misshapen elongated Dutch clogs. These are in fact the remains of birds' nests. Because of its giant size, the interior of the cactus maintains a temperature several degrees cooler than the outside air and this makes it ideal for birds to nest in. |
| 1825 |
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. 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. |
| 1826 |
Although the Sonora was hot, it was so dry that you did not really feel it. In fact, you had to be careful working out in the cactus forest, for you could get badly sunburnt without realizing it. An additional hazard of course was the cacti themselves, for they surrounded you on all sides with, as it were, their swords at the ready. Brush against a Teddy Bear Cholla, for example, and you soon found out how deceptive its furry, cuddly look was and you had to spend a tedious hour or so plucking spines out of your shirt or trousers. Alastair, who always insisted on running everywhere and who was constantly tripping over his own feet, was in mortal peril most of the time we were in the Sonora. On one occasion, running backwards to get the right angle for a shot he wanted, he ran straight into an extremely prickly and unyielding Saguaro that had been growing in that spot for a hundred years or so and could see no reason why it should move for a film director. Alastair's hoot of agony could, with a following wind, have surely been heard in London. We were very lucky to have the enthusiastic co-operation of the Sonora Desert Museum, a unique and wonderful institution that has living creatures for exhibition rather than stuffed ones. This of course enabled us to borrow most of our stars, and the majority of them were tame. But tameness can have its disadvantages, as we found out. We wanted to show the time-honoured method of catching lizards (which I have used with success all over the world) by the simple means of having a noose in a piece of fishing-line attached to a stick. You approach your lizard circumspectly, slide the noose gently over its head a quick jerk and he is then yours. In order to demonstrate this technique, we borrowed one of the Desert Museum's oldest inhabitants, a large and venerable chuckwalla. These lizards, which are about two feet long, have fat, gingery-brown bodies, broad heads with a very Churchillian expression (only lacking the cigar) and extremely solid tails. |
| 1827 |
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. He had huge, liquid dark eyes and a most benign expression, for his mouth curved slightly, making him look as though he was smiling shyly at you. Placidly he allowed himself to be caught in Lee's noose, caught with a forked snake stick, to be discovered on rocks and under them, to slither endlessly through the cacti and other plant cover, to be handled endlessly, coiling lovingly round Lee's fingers, round her arms and round her neck. It was only finally, when Alastair said to Lee, 'Now put that lizard down on the rocks there,' that the snake, affronted, turned round and bit her. Fortunately king snakes are not poisonous. One of the high spots of our desert filming, as far as I was concerned, was to see my all-time favourite bird in the wild the road runner. With their wild eyes, their ridiculous unkempt crests and the loping run so reminiscent of all the lanky athletes you have ever seen, the road runner is the most comical and endearing of birds. We captured a curious incident on film which shows how, in the desert, nothing must be wasted in this harsh environment. There was a nest with three baby road runners in it, and one of the chicks had died. To our astonishment, when the mother discovered this, she picked up the dead baby out of the nest and proceeded to feed it to one of the other chicks. When we last saw it, the chick had succeeded in engulfing the head and neck of its dead brother, while the body dangled outside. |
| 1828 |
It was at this point that we discovered why this area was free of dune-buggies. At a section of the road most distant from the highway and civilization, our car sank in over its axles and got stuck. Paula, Lee and I had to walk two miles to the highway and then another two miles before we found the garage that had the necessary truck to drag us out of the dune we were embedded in. We got back to our hotel very late that night, feeling exceedingly frustrated and irritated by the fact that, in addition to not having been able to shoot any film, we owed the Police Department twenty-five dollars in fines. But this was our only bad day; the rest of the shoot in the desert was perfect. The weather was flawless, the temperature superb, from dawn with its wonderful green, pink and lavender clouds fading to crisp sunlight that enveloped the cacti in a blurred golden web of fight, to the evening when the huge sky (the sky looks twice as big, somehow, in the desert) was drenched in scarlet and purples of such brilliance that they would have made a Turner sunset look anaemic in comparison. The fascinating thing about shooting this series was the contrast. One minute you would be filming in snow and the next minute sweating in the heat of a tropical forest. One minute paddling a canoe down an English river, the next minute paddling a canoe over a tropical reef. So in this case we had a contrast, for we left the giant cactus forests of Arizona and flew down to the rolling grasslands of southern Africa, to that great game reserve with the marvellous name straight out of Rider Haggard of Umfolozi. Approaching the wonderful reserve is one of the most salutary and frightening biological eye-openers I have ever experienced anywhere in the world. You drive through mile after mile of rolling green grassland that reminds you vaguely of parts of England. You are also vaguely aware that forests must have been felled to create this grassland and you are aware that, while it looks superficially lush and green, it is in fact desiccated and eroded, overgrazed and overpopulated. |
| 1829 |
However, this does not really impinge upon you until you reach Umfolozi. You are driving through these rolling green hills, eroded and sparse, and then suddenly you see ahead of you a fence and beyond that fence is what Africa was like before the advent of the white man and before the Africans had overpopulated. Wonderful rolling acacia scrubland, rich meadows, giant pot-bellied baobab a rich lushness that had to be seen to be believed. Those of my readers who, like me, are tottering on the borders of decrepitude may remember Judy Garland in the film called The Wizard of Oz. They will recall how her house is whirled up over the rainbow by a tornado. Up to that point, the film had been in black and white, but when the house crashes to a standstill and July Garland timidly opens the door everything is in Technicolor of the most flamboyant sort. Arriving at Umfolozi had very much the same effect on me. We had been travelling through a man-made and man-desecrated landscape, but you were not fully aware of what your species had destroyed because there was no contrast in Technicolor, as it were. But arrive at the fence that guards this chunk of original Africa and even someone like myself (who is fairly aware of the world's problems of conservation) is jolted. You suddenly realize that you have been driving through a man-made equivalent of a desert and have arrived at an oasis behind bars. As you enter the park, not only do you have the extreme contrast of vegetation but suddenly the landscape is alive with animals. Zebras, striped like Victorian humbugs, cantered alongside the truck, throwing up their heels skittishly. With them cavorted the brindled wildebeests, or gnus, their curiously twisted horns making them look as though they were peering at you over a pair of spectacles. For such ungainly animals they are astonishingly agile. A herd of gnu taking off is more like a ballet than anything, for they twist and buck and prance, one minute practically standing on their heads and the next minute leaping into the air and executing a complex pirouette. |
| 1830 |
As the zebra and gnu galloped through the undergrowth, they disturbed flocks of plum-purple starlings and groups of ground hornbills with huge curved Fagin-like beaks and scarlet wattles. They paced along as sedately as soldiers on sentry duty and gazed at us out of huge, soulful eyes, framed by thick, extremely sexy eyelashes. We had travelled about a mile through the park when we saw its most important inhabitants a white, or square-lipped, rhinoceros. These huge and magnificent beasts (the largest land mammal next to the elephant) were at one time driven to the edge of extinction. Fortunately, at the eleventh hour, action was taken to preserve this antediluvian giant and so now in Umfolozi and other parts of South Africa they are on the increase. This was a huge male and he moved majestically through the trees, his enormous head with a four-foot horn curved like a scimitar on his square-lipped nose. Several tick birds perched along his back, like ornaments on a mantelpiece. Occasionally, as the rhino's massive legs brushed through the grass, they would disturb small animals or grasshoppers and the tick birds would fly off their, moving perch, catch an insect and then return to the rhino's back to eat it. We stopped the car within thirty feet of him, and he came to a halt and surveyed us calmly. Then, uttering a deep sigh, he crossed the road in front of us and disappeared among the acacias. Not more than half a mile further on, we came upon a group of what I consider to be one of the most beautiful of all mammals, the giraffe. There were five of them; three were quietly browsing on the acacia-tops while the other two, who were obviously on honeymoon, were behaving in the most ludicrously besotted manner. Facing each other, they were managing to entwine their necks in the most astonishing manner, more as though they were swans than giraffes. 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. |
| 1831 |
They, like all lovers, were completely oblivious of everything except each other and they took no notice, even when we got out of the car and walked quite close to them. Eventually, we arrived at the singularly unattractive series of cement-block buildings constructed by the South African government to make the tourist feel loved and wanted. It was rather like living in a badly designed public lavatory but was more than compensated for by our surroundings. Our cameraman here was another Rodney Rodney Borland, and his wife Moira. Together they had made some superb wildlife films and so knew the African bush intimately. It was at this time that Alastair was having a prolonged and intense love affair with a mole. Perhaps such a statement needs some elaboration. I had proclaimed that I had no intention of going to South Africa unless I was allowed to meet a creature that had long fascinated me the golden mole. There are several species of this strange beast and, although bearing a strong resemblance to the European mole, they differ from it chiefly in having fur that is extremely silky and that glows like spun gold. Bearing my wishes in mind, Alastair had gone to considerable trouble to get someone in Durban to extract a golden mole from his garden and hand it over to us for the filming. It was an enchanting creature, with eyes so minuscule that it looked like somebody who had mislaid his spectacles. It was about five inches long and looked like a furry ingot, scuttling about in its box of earth. Like most insectivores, of course, it had a voracious and insatiable appetite and required about three hundred yards of worms per day to keep it cheerful. For some reason, Alastair worked up a great affinity with this curious little creature, digging up vast quantities of worms for its breakfast, lunch and dinner and keeping it in his room at night. He did admit that, as McTavish spent the entire night trying to dig his way out of his box, he had known more restful sleeping companions. |
| 1832 |
Although the golden mole bears a superficial resemblance to the European mole, they are not related and the likeness has come about simply because they have both adapted similarly to a fossorial way of life and thus have developed similarities, such as the powerful forefeet for digging, vestigial eyes and strong, bulldozing snouts. McTavish, as I say, looked golden in most lights, but if the sunlight struck his glossy fur at a certain angle he could turn green, violet or purple a really striking display for a mammal. One night, McTavish's nocturnal activities were successful. He found a weak spot in his box and with his powerful forefeet enlarged this to a hole. Alastair, heartbroken, reported at breakfast that he had awoken to find himself moleless. It was fortunate that we had shot all of McTavish's vital scenes before he made his bid for freedom. One of the things that we wanted to show was how the various ungulates in savannah lands have each developed their particular grazing habits so that, for example, a giraffe will graze off the tops of the acacias, whereas the kudu will browse lower down the tree. In this way, by splitting up the various levels of grazing, there is less competition and the food supply is more evenly shared. We thought that the best way to demonstrate this would be to show two extremes a creature that browsed at the very tops of the trees and one that fed at ground level. So we decided on a giraffe and a tortoise as our examples. First, with considerable difficulty, we succeeded in finding a large, somnolent tortoise sitting under a baobab tree. Alastair, who had been getting increasingly jittery as no tortoise seemed to be forthcoming, sighted this reptile, who appeared to be in a trance, and he leapt from the car with cries of joy and swept the tortoise into his arms and clasped it to his bosom. Now, this is not the wisest thing to do to a tortoise when it is fully alert. To do it to one that appears to be quietly sitting under a baobab reciting one of the longer and more boring of Tennyson's poems to himself is courting disaster. |
| 1833 |
All tortoises have large and retentive bladders, and this one was no exception. To say that Alastair was drenched would be an understatement. He was most upset. 'Nobody told me that tortoises peed,' he kept saying plaintively. 'Nobody told me that they were so copious.' So we put the now empty tortoise into a box, dried Alastair as best we could and then set off in search of a giraffe. As always happens, of course, there was not a giraffe to be seen. Normally, the landscape was littered with them, but now we could not track down a single one. After driving around for several hours, however, we finally found one a gigantic and beautifully marked male, lurking among the acacias. Alastair's great idea was that I should approach the giraffe, taking the tortoise with me. When I got as close to the giraffe as he would let me, I was to put the tortoise on the ground, face the camera and start talking about the browsing habits of giraffe at the tops of the trees and then point out that lower down other antelopes grazed and then right at the bottom you got a grazing creature such as a tortoise. At this point, I was to bend down and pick up the tortoise. Like most of Alastair's ideas, this was easier said than done. I got out of the car and, bearing the indignantly hissing tortoise in my arms, I approached the giraffe. He watched my approach with an expression of complete incredulity on his face. During his long and happy life, fate had never engineered it that his lunch would be interrupted by a human being carrying a vociferous tortoise, and he was not at all sure that this was an experience he wanted. He gave a tremulous snort of alarm and walked round to the other side of the acacia so that only his head was visible. 'That's no good,' hissed Alastair. '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. |
| 1834 |
'It's no good,' I said to Alastair, 'you'll have to move the damn camera.' So the camera was moved and after a lot more waltzing round the acacias I finally got the giraffe into the position that my director required. 'Excellent,' said Alastair excitedly. 'Now put that snake thing on the ground and talk about zebra.' So I put the tortoise on the ground, straightened up and spoke long and eloquently about the giraffe and their feeding habits and about the feeding habits of other ungulates. 'And so,' I concluded, 'by grazing in this selective manner the food is evenly distributed from the very tops of the trees to the ground level, where you get grazing animals like this.' I bent down to pick up the tortoise and, to my astonishment, there was no tortoise there. In a burst of speed unprecedented in such a reptile, he had fled and was fifty feet away, making for the peace and tranquillity of the acacia groves. Needless to say, this whole sequence was not a success. Another of Alastair's brilliant ideas was to have me start the programme and set the scene while standing, as it were, hand in hand with a white rhino. So besotted had he become with this idea that we spent three days doing nothing else but driving round looking for white rhinos. We had no difficulty in finding them, since the park was overflowing with them. The difficulty lay in trying to get them to co-operate with Alastair. We found a portly mother and her plump child sitting about in a waterhole that they were companionably sharing with a buffalo. The buffalo had mud all over his back and shoulders which had dried and cracked, so that he looked as if he were wearing a grey jigsaw puzzle. The female rhino and her baby were not aware of our presence and it was possible that I could have got close enough to complete the scene to Alastair's satisfaction if it had not been for the buffalo. He had been standing belly deep in the waterhole, sunk into that bemused state that overcomes all buffalo when they get anywhere near water, and so he woke up with a start when he suddenly saw me getting out of the car. |
| 1835 |
By this time, his massive weight had made him sink so deeply into the mud that, when he tried to vacate the waterhole, his legs stuck and he fell sideways, thrashing about wildly. The rhinos, not unnaturally, took this to be a sign that something was amiss and so, as the buffalo finally righted himself, they all left the waterhole at a brisk run and disappeared into the trees. This sort of thing happened time and again. Rhinos, being shortsighted, make up for this defect by having extremely keen hearing and a good sense of smell. Also they are exceedingly suspicious, probably because of their bad eyesight, although what enemies a creature of such massive proportions could have was a mystery to me. However, all our attempts at getting me and a rhino standing side by side were meeting with failure and it looked as though we were going to have to leave South Africa without this vital opening shot that our director insisted upon. It was our last morning and, amid groans of despair from all of us, Alastair insisted on driving out to have one final attempt to get me and a rhino together. It was very early in the morning and for this reason, I think, we were successful, for the massive old male we finally found looked very bemused, as if he had just that minute got out of bed. Cautiously, we drove the car over the savannah towards him, keeping downwind. When we were within some forty feet of him, we switched off the engine and discussed the situation in hushed whispers, whilst the gigantic creature stood there, flicking his ears to and fro suspiciously. He was dimly aware that something untoward was going on, but was not sure exactly what. Another point in our favour was that he had no tick birds on him, for these invariably gave the alarm that sent their steed lumbering off. '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. |
| 1836 |
Lee, thoroughly excited, was decked out in a scarlet wetsuit and a becoming bright-yellow crash-helmet. Then she was wedged into a slender and fragile-looking canoe and launched into a placid area of the river for her first and only lesson. Such is the perversity of women that within half an hour she was handling the canoe in a manner equally (or more) professional than her instructor. The purpose of all this was to show how a canoeist had to use the strength of the river to his or her advantage, using the force of the water as propulsion, using the current to steer and the curving eddies as placid areas of calm, like water parking-lots. We were then to illustrate it with the creatures that live in these turbulent waters, using exactly the same methods for their survival. So the camera was stationed on the rocks by the white water and Lee, wedged in her canoe, waited a quarter of a mile upstream for the signal to shoot her first rapids. Attached to the bows of the canoe was a tiny camera, and a cord ran along the edge of the craft to a button near where Lee was sitting. The idea was that as she reached white water she was to press the button and then take a close-up film of herself and the canoe zooming through the waves, water splashing over her. Meanwhile, the other camera on the bank would be getting all the wide shots. So her canoe set off, skimming between jagged black rocks, bucking and bouncing on the shining streams of water, the nose of the fragile craft digging into the bursts of foam like a pig searching for truffles in a bouquet of white roses. I must say Lee handled the craft as though she had been doing it all her life, but I watched in some trepidation and heaved a sigh of relief when she could turn into a placid area of water and bring her canoe to a halt. 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. |
| 1837 |
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. 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. |
| 1838 |
Curiously, they resemble so many of the punks that you see about, but they are infinitely more appealing. 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. 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. |
| 1839 |
However, when they grow up and the breeding season arrives they hop off in their thousands to the pond or lake where they were born. Of course, in many cases they have to cross roads or even motorways to attain their objective and so thousands are killed annually by cars. In the Netherlands, where they seem to deal more sympathetically with their wildlife, they have created underpasses for migrating toads. There is as yet no such refinement in Britain, but there is a move afoot to remedy this with the slogan 'Help a Toad Cross the Road'. People empathetic to toads (and who could be otherwise since, if kissed, each one is a potential prince?) take buckets, dustbins or other containers to those points where the toads habitually cross and as the vast concourse of amphibians arrives they bundle them into the buckets and other containers and take them safely across the road. It is to be hoped that the Boy Scouts give up their time-consuming traditional task of helping old ladies across the road and concentrate instead on the toads. Of course, we had already filmed quite a number of the pond sequences under controlled conditions and had got some remarkable material. There was, for example, the curious little fish called the bitterling that uses the freshwater mussel as a sort of babysitter. In the breeding season, the female bitterling develops an extraordinary long, white, slightly curved ovipositor, which looks as though it has been made out of white plastic; then, accompanied by her husband, she goes in search of her babysitter. The fresh-water mussels, about four or five inches long, lie on their sides in the mud and look very like oval, slightly flattened stones. At one end of the shell there are two siphons one exhalant and one inhalant. The mussel sucks in water through the latter, extracts what food it contains and then expels the water now filtered of its nutrients out of the other siphon. Both these siphons look like little round mouths and are capable of being shut tight by the shell should it become alarmed. |
| 1840 |
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. It was when he was coming in to land that he ran into trouble. For some reason, as he reached the shallows, he lost his balance, fell over sideways and lay there in two feet of water, his legs trapped in the watershoes, frantically struggling to keep his head above water. It was fortunate that the water was shallow so he could keep one hand on the bottom and so keep his head above the surface. If the water had been deeper and we had not been handy as rescuers, he would assuredly have drowned. The next sequence we had to do was Lee and I rowing the boat about while I explained how an amateur naturalist does not have to spend large sums of money on vast quantities of sophisticated equipment but can, with a little bit of ingenuity, convert everyday appliances to his or her needs, such as making a perfectly good grapnel out of a wire coathanger, which will enable you to pull patches of weed from the centre of a pond to the bank. As every amateur naturalist knows, all the most exciting bits of weed are invariably situated in the exact centre of any body of water and so require some sort of appliance to bring them within reach. To get these idyllic shots of Lee and myself, clad in straw hats, rowing gently across the placid pond was slightly more complex than one imagined. To begin with, the boat was not very large and so once Lee and I were in it there was very little space left in the stern for anyone else. |
| 1841 |
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. 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. |
| 1842 |
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. 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. |
| 1843 |
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. The two things were designed along the same lines, but for different purposes. It was then that a lady researcher of great intelligence and perception called Janice Egerley made an extraordinary discovery. She observed that a caterpillar among the multitude she was studying followed a pencil line she had made in her notebook. Was there, then, something in the lead of the pencil that resembled the elusive caterpillar scent? There was, and subsequent investigations of various lead pencils proved that there was some component in the sterated beef fat or the hydrogenated fish oil that some manufacturers use to produce the lead in pencils that so excited the caterpillars with thoughts of succulent green leaves. It was further discovered that, whatever this mysterious substance was, the tent caterpillars were sensitive enough to be able to distinguish between 3B and 4B pencils of a certain brand. The investigations continue, and doubtless other fascinating facts will come to light. |
| 1844 |
However, armed with this knowledge, we felt we could not depict wildlife in a city without showing some of the private life of the tent caterpillars, who are such a part of city life, being such major defoliating pests. But, as I have said, our lovely empty lot, although it contained a young cherry tree, one of the caterpillars' favourite foods, had no caterpillars. A high-level conference divulged the fact that the budget could actually run to the extraordinary extent of getting Helen to import for us some caterpillars from her part of the city (where they were flourishing and hated) to our vacant lot, where we planned to put them on the baby cherry tree so we could film them. 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. |
| 1845 |
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. '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. 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. |
| 1846 |
What youse is doing is faking, and faking on our lot.' 'We have permission from the Mayor's office,' said Paula. 'Have you got permission to fake from the 87th Street Block Association?' asked the lady, swelling as a turkey to a gobble. 'Surely the Mayor's office takes precedence?' asked Paula. 'Nothing takes precedence over the 87th Street Block Association,' said the lady. 'You know ... for some ... skyscrapers ... lots of life ... caterpillars ...' said Alastair, turning in a distraught circle. 'I'll go and see the 87th Street Block Association,' said the lady, 'and find out why you are allowed to fake.' She strode away, as if to relieve Leningrad singlehanded, and we all heaved a sigh of relief. However, our sense of relief was short-lived. Alastair was shouting instructions at a tent caterpillar who was incapable of understanding English when the lady returned bearing with her a woman who looked like one of those viragos who have been hatched from a shrike's egg, with militant eyes like laser beams, the sort of person who always looks for the worst in anything. Accompanying her, presumably as a back-up, was a man who appeared to have been constructed out of cardboard at a very early age, and rained on incessantly during his life. 'What is going on here?' asked Shrike Lady. Patiently, Paula explained to her about the film we were attempting to make, while Alastair continued to turn in irritated circles. 'But what are you doing to our lot?' said the lady accusingly, rather as if the place was Kew Gardens instead of a vacant lot knee deep in dog droppings. 'They're faking nature,' said Neanderthal Lady. 'They've brung a lot of bugs.' 'Bugs?' said Shrike Lady, her eyes flashing. 'What bugs?' 'These,' said Alastair, pointing. 'They're only tent caterpillars.' 'Tent caterpillars?' screamed Shrike Lady. '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. |
| 1847 |
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. All this creates a mystical landscape, bathed in sharp brittle sunlight, orchestrated by the knife-grinder song of the cicadas, framed in the blue, still sea. Of all the wonderful and fascinating parts of the planet I have been privileged to visit, Corfu is the nearest approach to home for me, since it was here, nurtured in sunlight, that my fascination for the living world around me came to fruition. Owing to the vagaries of connecting flights, we managed to stay for a few hours in Athens enough time for us to catch a brief glimpse of the Acropolis, a quick peep at the Evzones changing the guard at the royal palace and then some time eating a splendid meal on the waterfront in Pyraeus: seafood as only the Greeks can cook it. Then we flew on to Corfu. When we reached the island, it was dark and a giant yellow moon lit the road so brightly you could see the olive-enshrouded landscape clearly and the moon's reflection on the faint, wind-stirred sea was like a million buttercup petals on the surface. After an excellent bottle of pale amber retsina, tasting of all the pinewoods you had ever visited, and some delicious local fish, we retired to bed and not even the moon perched, it seemed, on our balcony rail could keep us from sleep. |
| 1848 |
'Why not in your bath?' suggested Jean-Pierre seriously. It was as though the manager of Claridges or the Waldorf Astoria had suggested you kept a group of warthogs in your suite. 'That's a good idea,' said Lee, 'and we can take them out when we have a shower.' 'Yes,' said Jean-Pierre, 'they don't like soap and hot water.' It was, I decided, the sort of conversation you could only have in Corfu. So we went up to our room, carrying our reptile stars, and filled the bath with water and put the terrapins in. The snakes we knew were all right in their bags. Then we set off for the very north of the island to a place called Kouloura where Jonathan wanted to film our 'arrival' in Corfu on board a caique, one of those tubby, highly coloured Greek fishing boats that are such a feature of the Greek landscape. It was a brilliant blue day, as clear as crystal, with a sun that was just comfortably hot. The sea was blue and calm, and only the faintest whisper of wind came from the brown eroded hills of Albania and the Greek mainland that we could see so clearly across the waters. It was cool driving through the olive groves in the shade created by the great canopy of silvery-green leaves and the huge twisted olive trunks, pitted like pumice-stone, each unique as a fingerprint, looking like misshapen columns holding up the roof of a cathedral of leaves. Soon we left the coolness of the olive groves and started along a road that twisted and turned along the flanks of the biggest mountain of Corfu, Pantokrator. Here in places the edge of the road dropped almost sheer to the glittering sea, and above, the rocky slopes of the mountain rose; among its russet, gold and white cliffs the red-rumped swallows glided like dark arrows, busy about the construction of their strange nests that look like half Chianti bottles made out of mild cobbles. Presently, we took a steep, winding side-road towards the sea, a road thickly lined with immensely tall dark-green cypresses that had been elderly giants when I used to come here in 1935. |
| 1849 |
Soon we could see below us Kouloura harbour, like a small curved bow, and at one end of it what is probably the most beautiful villa in Corfu, belonging to old friends of mine, Pam and Disney Vaughan-Hughes. Anchored in the harbour was our caique, a splendidly large craft, spotlessly clean, its blue and white paint gleaming. Pam and Disney greeted us warmly, for we had not seen each other for several years. They had kindly agreed to have our gear stacked in front of their beautiful home, to let us film in their lovely garden, to ply us with cool drinks and even to lend us the talents of their land tortoise, who rejoiced in the name of Carruthers. Friendship could go no further. So we cluttered up the front of their house as only a film crew can and while the team was setting up we went to have a look at the kayiki to make sure all was ready for our sea trip. Here, to Jonathan's horror, disaster struck. In the opening sequence on the boat, I was to say: 'All of us are born with an interest in the world around us. You watch any young human being or any other young animal, if it comes to that and you'll see that they're investigating and learning the whole time with all their senses. Because from the moment we're born we are explorers in a very complex and fascinating world. Now, as people grow older, they sometimes lose interest in the world around them, but others keep it stimulated the whole time. These are the lucky ones. These are called the amateur naturalists.' In order to make the point more forcefully, Jonathan had decided we needed a child on board with us, so that we could all be examining a big bowl full of sea-creatures. To this end, he had engaged the services of the daughter of the owner of the minute cafE that graces Kouloura harbour, a very pretty little six-year-old. However, just before our arrival she had done something so monstrously naughty (we never found out what) that her mother had taken the unprecedented step (in Greece, that is) of giving her a good slapping. |
| 1850 |
Needless to say, the Greek Customs thought that, although Corfu is renowned for its eccentrics, it was carrying things too far when they insisted on opening this highly suspicious parcel to find it full of fritillary, cabbage white and swallowtail larvae all nestling in beds of their favourite food plants. Arguments by Ann that all these species were found in Corfu anyway met with cold unfriendly stares from the Customs officers. Why, they asked, if they were found in Corfu already, did one have to import them at colossal expense from England? (The complications of animal filming are difficult, if not impossible, to explain to a Greek Customs officer.) In any case, they pointed out national pride now coming into it if the same caterpillars were found in Corfu, why not use them? Were Greek caterpillars inferior in some way to British caterpillars? For years, Greece had been known for the enormous size, quantities and qualities of its caterpillars. Greek caterpillars, as everyone admitted, were the best in the world. Therefore, what was the sense in importing a lot of English caterpillars (inferior in every way) and probably causing some fatal disease to the Corfiot caterpillars? The morning dragged by, while Paula, Ann and Jonathan, hot and irritated, had to sign affidavits to the effect that the caterpillars had been individually inspected by the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Zoological Society of London. Further guarantees were signed to indemnify the Greek government, and a promise to pay vast compensation should the English caterpillars be responsible for one single (superior) Corfiot caterpillar's death. Further guarantees had to be given that our caterpillars were not in any way to corrupt the Corfiot caterpillars by coming into contact with them and that our caterpillars, at the end of the filming, would be ignominiously banished from Corfu and sent back to England there, presumably, to hatch out into inferior butterflies. |
| 1851 |
'Don't let's undermine Jonathan's pathetic faith in Mother Nature. Who knows, we might have a miracle.' So began the great pond terrapin day. The terrapins were removed from our bath (doubtless to the relief of the maids who serviced our room) and placed in a suitable container, and our convoy of three vehicles set off, for Jean-Pierre flushed with his cinematic success as a glass-snake wrangler had come along to wrangle the grass snake for us. It was an excessively hot day and we were glad when at last the road plunged into the shady shimmering depths of the vast olive groves. These groves to me, when I was young, were magical places. 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. |
| 1852 |
For me, they housed an endless, fascinating pageant of creatures and in spring they were awash with flowers, as if someone had emptied a paintbox among the great, dark, gnarled trunks. They were anything but dull and lifeless. Finally, we bumped our way down a stony track through the olives and there lay Scottini, an almost circular lake about seven or eight acres in extent, surrounded by trees and with a large reedy island in the middle and its shallow water full of jade-green weeds. As olive groves looked to some people, it too looked lifeless, yet I knew it was a universe of its own, for in its depths were weird darting, rolling, jerking, flitting forms of microscopic life, fearsome dragonfly larvae, small fish, newts, frogs, snakes and pond terrapins. I remember in my youth I had gone here once and spent a day collecting, and so rich was this little lake and so numerous my captures that I had soon used up all my collecting gear and was forced to use my clothes in which to carry my precious specimens, so that I arrived back at our villa stark naked, to the alarm and consternation of my mother. So, after Jonathan had prowled around and found suitable locations, cameras were set up and we took the first sequence which starred the grass snake. Our snake wrangler, the cares of catering and hotel management forgotten, bare-footed, trousers rolled up, stripped to the waist, danced about in mud and water, getting the handsome reptile to do Jonathan's bidding. The snake behaved beautifully, slithering across mud, wriggling through grass and finally swimming out into the lake, its large handsome head raised high above the water, leaving a wide V of ripples behind it. 'Now for the piEce de rEsistance,' said Jonathan, overexcited by our success with the grass snake. 'The pond terrapins. Now, I want you to put three of them just there on that grass bank, and you and Lee come along and see them basking in the sun and you creep up and catch one as the others go into the water.' 'They will be down that bank before you can say "Jonathan Harris",' I said. |
| 1853 |
'Well, anyway, let's try it,' said Jonathan stubbornly. So three of the pond terrapins were taken out, held in position by Jean-Pierre, while Lee and I took up our positions. 'Now, action,' said Jonathan. Jean-Pierre released his hold on the terrapins and leapt back so that he was out of shot. Lee and I took one step forward. The three terrapins, like racing cars taking off at Le Mans, sped down the bank, plopped into the water and disappeared. 'Damn,' said Jonathan. 'We'll have to hold them further back.' 'Remember you have only got five left,' said Lee. 'Well, we will just try another three,' said Jonathan. 'I'm sure we will get it this time.' So the three terrapins were placed well back from the lake's edge, Jean-Pierre holding them firmly until Jonathan shouted 'Action'. This time, the terrapins behaved differently. Apparently, they could not see the water and so they did not know which way to run. They revolved round and round for a second and then ran straight for the camera and through the tripod legs. Time and again, we tried to get them to run towards the lake, and time and again they ran inland with an obstinacy that can only be displayed by a terrapin or a donkey. Desperately, we moved them to a vantage-point where they could just see a glint of water, whereupon they sped into it and disappeared with the same alacrity as the first three had shown. Jonathan was now wearing his most Heathcliffian scowl. We tried again with one of the two remaining terrapins and he put up a new variation of the act. He pulled himself up into his shell and remained there immobile as a stone. Nothing we could do would make him move. Then, while we were all having a conference about his stubbornness, he quite unexpectedly came to life and rushed down the bank to freedom before any of us could stop him. Now we had only one terrapin left and things were getting desperate. Jonathan was taking no chances, so we filmed the capture scene in reverse, that is to say the first shot was Lee with the net with the terrapin in it, pulling it out of the weed as if she had just caught it. |
| 1854 |
The real fact of the matter was that many of them had no place else to go. And they liked the fact that there was drink and that I didn't work too hard trying to bed down with them. Of course, after I met Sarah, this part of my lifestyle changed quite a bit. That neighborhood around Carlton Way near Western Avenue was changing too. It had been almost all lower-class white, but political troubles in Central America and other parts of the world had brought a new type of individual to the neighborhood. The male usually was small, a dark or light brown, usually young. There were wives, children, brothers, cousins, friends. They began filling up the apartments and courts. They lived many to an apartment and I was one of the few whites left in the court complex. The children ran up and down, up and down the court walkway. They all seemed to be between two and seven years old. They had no bikes or toys. The wives were seldom seen. They remained inside, hidden. Many of the men also remained inside. It was not wise to let the landlord know how many people were living in a single unit. The few men seen outside were the legal renters. At least they paid the rent. How they survived was unknown. The men were small, thin, silent, unsmiling. Most sat on the porch steps in their undershirts, slumped forward a bit, occasionally smoking a cigarette. They sat on the porch steps for hours, motionless. Sometimes they purchased very old junk automobiles and the men drove them slowly about the neighborhood. They had no auto insurance or driver's licenses and they drove with expired license plates. Most of the cars had defective brakes. The men almost never stopped at the corner stop sign and often failed to heed red lights, but there were few accidents. 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. |
| 1855 |
They would take off the hood and the engine would rust in the rain. Then they would put the car on blocks and remove the wheels. They took the wheels inside and kept them there so they wouldn't be stolen at night. While I was living there, there were two rows of cars lined up in the court, just sitting there on blocks. The men sat motionless on their porches in their undershirts. Sometimes I would nod or wave to them. They never responded. Apparently they couldn't understand or read the eviction notices and they tore them up, but I did see them studying the daily L. A. papers. They were stoic and durable because compared to where they had come from, things were now easy. Well, no matter. My tax consultant had suggested I purchase a house, and so for me it wasn't really a matter of "white flight." Although, who knows? I had noticed that each time I had moved in Los Angeles over the years, each move had always been to the North and to the West. Finally, after a few weeks of house hunting, we found the one. After the down payment the monthly payments came to $789.81. There was a huge hedge in front on the street and the yard was also in front so the house sat way back on the lot. It looked like a damned good place to hide. There was even a stairway, an upstairs with a bedroom, bathroom and what was to become my typing room. And there was an old desk left in there, a huge ugly old thing. Now, after decades, I was a writer with a desk. Yes, I felt the fear, the fear of becoming like them. Worse, I had an assignment to write a screenplay. Was I doomed and damned, was I about to be sucked dry? I didn't feel it would be that way. But does anybody, ever? Sarah and I moved our few possessions in. The big moment came. I sat the typewriter down on the desk and I put a piece of paper in there and I hit the keys. The typewriter still worked. And there was plenty of room for an ashtray, the radio and the bottle. Don't let anybody tell you different. Life begins at 65. 13 Down at the Marina del Rey times were getting hard. |
| 1856 |
And Christ is my high, greater than any drink the devil has put upon this earth!" Tears were in the fellow's eyes. I took another hit. Then he recited a poem: I am found again. I am made over by ten. I have lost the yen. I am brother to my kin. I am found again. He bowed his head and the others applauded. Then a woman began to speak. She had, she said, begun drinking at parties. And it had gone on from there. She began to drink alone at home. The plants died because she didn't water them. During an argument she slashed her daughter with a paring knife. Her husband began drinking also. Lost his job. Stayed at home. They drank together. Then she slashed him with a paring knife. One day she just got in her car and drove off with her suitcase and her credit cards. Drank in motels. Smoked and drank and watched TV. Vodka. She loved vodka. One night she set her bed on fire. A fire engine came to the motel. She was drunk in her nightie. 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. |
| 1857 |
Sarah was in the bedroom beyond the wall to my right. Jon was downstairs watching TV. I was just sitting there. A half a bottle of wine was gone. I had never had trouble before. In decades, I had never had a writer's block. Writing had always been easy for me. The words just rolled out as I drank and listened to the radio. I knew that Jon was just listening for the sound of the typer. I had to type something. I began a letter to a fellow who taught English at Cal State Long Beach. We had been exchanging letters for a couple of decades. I began: Hello Harry: How's it hanging? They've been running good. Badly hungover other day, got to track for 2nd race, gotta win on a 10-to-one-shot. I no longer use the Racing Form. I see everybody reading it and almost everybody loses. I've got a new system, of course, which I can't tell you about. You know, if the writing goes to hell, I think I can make it at the track. Shit. I'll tell you my system, why shouldn't I? O. K. I buy a newspaper, any newspaper. I try to buy a different newspaper every day, just to shake up the gods. Then out of that newspaper I'll choose any handicapper. Then I'll line up his selections in order. Say there's an 8 horse race. On my program I will mark next to each horse the order of his selection. Example: horse 1. 7 horse 2. 3 horse 3. 5 horse 4. 1 horse 5. 2 horse 6. 4 horse 7. 8 horse 8. 6The system? Well, you take the horse's odds that go off below the number of the handicapper's selection. If more than one set of odds goes off below, then take the greatest drop. For example, horse 1, selection 7 going off at 4-to-one is better than horse 6, selection 4 going off at 3-to-one. There is one exception to this system. If horse 4 goes off at below 1, that is 45 or below, then pass the race if there is nothing working against it. That is because plays on nothing but odds-on-favorites always show a loss. The way I came up with this system was that when I was in highschool I was in the R. O. T. C. and we had to read the Manual of Arms and in this fat book there was a little bit about the Artillery. |
| 1858 |
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. Really a top-notch fuck-up. Sarah was worried about the future of the barflies. I didn't like it either. On the other hand I couldn't see them sitting around our front room, drinking and telling their stories. Sometimes charm lessens when it gets too close to reality. And how many brothers can you keep? I drove on in. We got there. The cats were waiting. Sarah got down and cleaned their bowls and I opened the cans. Simplicity, that's what was needed. We went upstairs, washed, changed, made ready for bed. "What are those poor people going to do?" asked Sarah. "I know. I know..." Then it was time for sleep. I went downstairs for a last look, came back up. Sarah was asleep. I turned out the light. We slept. Having seen the movie made that afternoon we were now somehow different, we would never think or talk quite the same. We now knew something more but what it was seemed very vague and even perhaps a bit disagreeable. 29 Jon Pinchot had escaped from the ghetto. In his contract it stated that he would be supplied with an apartment to be paid for by Firepower. Jon found an apartment near the Firepower building. Each night, from his bed, Jon could see the lit sign at the top of the building, Firepower, and it shone through his window and upon his face as he slept. Francois Racine remained in the ghetto. He began a garden, growing vegetables. He spun his roulette wheel, tended his garden and fed the chickens. He was one of the strangest men I had ever met. "I cannot leave my chickens," he told me. "I will die in this strange land here with my chickens, here among the blacks." I went to the track on the days that the horses were running and the movie continued shooting. The phone rang every day. People wanted to interview the writer. |
| 1859 |
And we used to think, 'Look at them, talking about their half-assed movie deals or their contracts or their last films.' What moles, what misfits... better to look away when the swordfish and the sand dabs arrive." "We thought they were shit," said Sarah, "and now we are." "What goes around comes around..." "Right! I think I'll have the sand dabs..." The waiter stood above us, shuffling his feet, scowling, the hairs of his eyebrows falling down into his eyes. Musso's had been there since 1919 and everything was a pain in the ass to him: us, and everybody else in the place. I agreed. Decided on the swordfish. With french fries. 33 The film was being shot in 3 locations. Different rooms, different streets and alleys, different bars had to be juggled about. There was a night scene which was to entail some stealing of corn from a vacant lot and a chase by the police. The corn had been planted and was ready to steal. To use the location cost the budget 5 thousand dollars. The vacant lot was now owned by a Rehabilitation Center for Alcoholics. Pinchot had searched everywhere for a cheaper location but finally had to settle for that one, which actually was the same vacant lot which my lady had stolen the corn from over 3 decades ago. 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. |
| 1860 |
On the other hand, my biggest bet was $20 win. Excessive greed can create errors because very heavy outlays affect your thinking processes. Two more things. Never bet the horse with the highest speed rating off his last race and never bet a big closer. My day out there was pleasant enough but as always I resented that 30 minute wait between races. 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. "Yeah. Sure. A little." "No phone calls," she said. "Too bad, all this..." I said. "You know, after Jon threatened to cut off his finger and all that. |
| 1861 |
It was cold out there. Almost everything was ready. There was to be a double in the fight scene for both the bartender and Jack Bledsoe. The closeups were to show the faces of Bledsoe and the bartender but the real fight scenes were to be with the doubles. Bledsoe saw me. "Hey, Hank, come here!" I walked over. "Let them see your fighting style." I circled about, shooting out weak left jabs, then now and then I rushed forward throwing lefts and rights. Then I stopped. I explained those fights of long ago. "It really didn't look very good. At first, there was much circling. Around and around. And then the crowd would get on us and somebody would rush in. 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. |
| 1862 |
I don't want to discuss horses with them. I don't view the other players with any kind of camaraderie at all. Actually we are playing against each other. The track never has a losing day. The track takes its cut, the state takes its cut, and the cut keeps getting bigger, which means for a player to win consistently he or she must have a decided betting edge, a superior method, a logical insight. The average player plays daily doubles, exactas, triples, pick sixes, or pick nines. They end up with handfuls of useless cardboard. They bet win, they bet place, they bet show. But there is only one bet, and that bet is to win. It takes the pressure off. Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity. I think that the racetrack keeps me aware of this. But, in another sense, the racetrack is a sickness, a fill-in, a cop-out, a substitute for something else that should be faced. 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. |
| 1863 |
You realize how he regarded these men who were rallying to the banners of liberty - the banners woven by the virgins of Taunton, the girls from the seminaries of Miss Blake and Mrs. Musgrove, who - as the ballad runs - had ripped open their silk petticoats to make colours for King Monmouth's army. That Latin line, contemptuously flung after them as they clattered down the cobbled street, reveals his mind. To him they were fools rushing in wicked frenzy upon their ruin. You see, he knew too much about this fellow Monmouth and the pretty brown slut who had borne him, to be deceived by the legend of legitimacy, on the strength of which this standard of rebellion had been raised. He had read the absurd proclamation posted at the Cross at Bridgewater - as it had been posted also at Taunton and elsewhere - setting forth that "upon the decease of our Sovereign Lord Charles the Second, the right of succession to the Crown of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, with the dominions and territories thereunto belonging, did legally descend and devolve upon the most illustrious and high-born Prince James, Duke of Monmouth, son and heir apparent to the said King Charles the Second." It had moved him to laughter, as had the further announcement that "James Duke of York did first cause the said late King to be poysoned, and immediately thereupon did usurp and invade the Crown." He knew not which was the greater lie. For Mr. Blood had spent a third of his life in the Netherlands, where this same James Scott - who now proclaimed himself James the Second, by the grace of God, King, et cetera - first saw the light some six-and-thirty years ago, and he was acquainted with the story current there of the fellow's real paternity. Far from being legitimate - by virtue of a pretended secret marriage between Charles Stuart and Lucy Walter - it was possible that this Monmouth who now proclaimed himself King of England was not even the illegitimate child of the late sovereign. What but ruin and disaster could be the end of this grotesque pretension? |
| 1864 |
How could it be hoped that England would ever swallow such a Perkin? And it was on his behalf, to uphold his fantastic claim, that these West Country clods, led by a few armigerous Whigs, had been seduced into rebellion! "Quo, quo, scelesti, ruitis?" He laughed and sighed in one; but the laugh dominated the sigh, for Mr. Blood was unsympathetic, as are most self-sufficient men; and he was very self-sufficient; adversity had taught him so to be. A more tender-hearted man, possessing his vision and his knowledge, might have found cause for tears in the contemplation of these ardent, simple, Nonconformist sheep going forth to the shambles - escorted to the rallying ground on Castle Field by wives and daughters, sweethearts and mothers, sustained by the delusion that they were to take the field in defence of Right, of Liberty, and of Religion. For he knew, as all Bridgewater knew and had known now for some hours, that it was Monmouth's intention to deliver battle that same night. The Duke was to lead a surprise attack upon the Royalist army under Feversham that was now encamped on Sedgemoor. Mr. Blood assumed that Lord Feversham would be equally well-informed, and if in this assumption he was wrong, at least he was justified of it. He was not to suppose the Royalist commander so indifferently skilled in the trade he followed. Mr. Blood knocked the ashes from his pipe, and drew back to close his window. As he did so, his glance travelling straight across the street met at last the glance of those hostile eyes that watched him. There were two pairs, and they belonged to the Misses Pitt, two amiable, sentimental maiden ladies who yielded to none in Bridgewater in their worship of the handsome Monmouth. Mr. Blood smiled and inclined his head, for he was on friendly terms with these ladies, one of whom, indeed, had been for a little while his patient. But there was no response to his greeting. Instead, the eyes gave him back a stare of cold disdain. The smile on his thin lips grew a little broader, a little less pleasant. |
| 1865 |
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. 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. "It is Lord Gildoy," he panted. |
| 1866 |
He twisted out of the grip of the dragoons, for he was strong and agile, but they closed with him again immediately, and bore him down. Pinning him to the ground, they tied his wrists behind his back, then roughly pulled him to his feet again. "Take him away," said Hobart shortly, and turned to issue his orders to the other waiting troopers. "Go search the house, from attic to cellar; then report to me here." The soldiers trailed out by the door leading to the interior. Mr. Blood was thrust by his guards into the courtyard, where Pitt and Baynes already waited. From the threshold of the hall, he looked back at Captain Hobart, and his sapphire eyes were blazing. On his lips trembled a threat of what he would do to Hobart if he should happen to survive this business. Betimes he remembered that to utter it were probably to extinguish his chance of living to execute it. For to-day the King's men were masters in the West, and the West was regarded as enemy country, to be subjected to the worst horror of war by the victorious side. Here a captain of horse was for the moment lord of life and death. Under the apple-trees in the orchard Mr. Blood and his companions in misfortune were made fast each to a trooper's stirrup leather. Then at the sharp order of the cornet, the little troop started for Bridgewater. As they set out there was the fullest confirmation of Mr. Blood's hideous assumption that to the dragoons this was a conquered enemy country. There were sounds of rending timbers, of furniture smashed and overthrown, the shouts and laughter of brutal men, to announce that this hunt for rebels was no more than a pretext for pillage and destruction. Finally above all other sounds came the piercing screams of a woman in acutest agony. Baynes checked in his stride, and swung round writhing, his face ashen. As a consequence he was jerked from his feet by the rope that attached him to the stirrup leather, and he was dragged helplessly a yard or two before the trooper reined in, cursing him foully, and striking him with the flat of his sword. |
| 1867 |
It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man - as he had long suspected - was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated. It was not until two months later - on the 19th of September, if you must have the actual date - that Peter Blood was brought to trial, upon a charge of high treason. We know that he was not guilty of this; but we need not doubt that he was quite capable of it by the time he was indicted. Those two months of inhuman, unspeakable imprisonment had moved his mind to a cold and deadly hatred of King James and his representatives. It says something for his fortitude that in all the circumstances he should still have had a mind at all. Yet, terrible as was the position of this entirely innocent man, he had cause for thankfulness on two counts. The first of these was that he should have been brought to trial at all; the second, that his trial took place on the date named, and not a day earlier. In the very delay which exacerbated him lay although he did not realize it - his only chance of avoiding the gallows. Easily, but for the favour of Fortune, he might have been one of those haled, on the morrow of the battle, more or less haphazard from the overflowing gaol at Bridgewater to be summarily hanged in the market-place by the bloodthirsty Colonel Kirke. There was about the Colonel of the Tangiers Regiment a deadly despatch which might have disposed in like fashion of all those prisoners, numerous as they were, but for the vigorous intervention of Bishop Mews, which put an end to the drumhead courts-martial. Even so, in that first week after Sedgemoor, Kirke and Feversham contrived between them to put to death over a hundred men after a trial so summary as to be no trial at all. They required human freights for the gibbets with which they were planting the countryside, and they little cared how they procured them or what innocent lives they took. |
| 1868 |
His Majesty had consented to see Monmouth. To have done so unless he intended to pardon him was a thing execrable and damnable beyond belief; for the only other object in granting that interview could be the evilly mean satisfaction of spurning the abject penitence of his unfortunate nephew. Later they heard that Lord Grey, who after the Duke - indeed, perhaps, before him - was the main leader of the rebellion, had purchased his own pardon for forty thousand pounds. Peter Blood found this of a piece with the rest. His contempt for King James blazed out at last. "Why, here's a filthy mean creature to sit on a throne. If I had known as much of him before as I know to-day, I don't doubt I should have given cause to be where I am now." And then on a sudden thought: "And where will Lord Gildoy be, do you suppose?" he asked. Young Pitt, whom he addressed, turned towards him a face from which the ruddy tan of the sea had faded almost completely during those months of captivity. His grey eyes were round and questioning. Blood answered him. "Sure, now, we've never seen his lordship since that day at Oglethorpe's. And where are the other gentry that were taken? the real leaders of this plaguey rebellion. Grey's case explains their absence, I think. They are wealthy men that can ransom themselves. Here awaiting the gallows are none but the unfortunates who followed; those who had the honour to lead them go free. It's a curious and instructive reversal of the usual way of these things. Faith, it's an uncertain world entirely!" He laughed, and settled down into that spirit of scorn, wrapped in which he stepped later into the great hall of Taunton Castle to take his trial. With him went Pitt and the yeoman Baynes. The three of them were to be tried together, and their case was to open the proceedings of that ghastly day. The hall, even to the galleries - thronged with spectators, most of whom were ladies - was hung in scarlet; a pleasant conceit, this, of the Lord Chief Justice's, who naturally enough preferred the colour that should reflect his own bloody mind. |
| 1869 |
"Jesus God! That ever we should have such a generation of vipers among us," he burst out in rhetorical frenzy. And then he sank back as if exhausted by the violence he had used. A moment he was still, dabbing his lips again; then he moved uneasily; once more his features were twisted by pain, and in a few snarling, almost incoherent words he dismissed the jury to consider the verdict. Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and almost obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that afterwards, in retrospect, surprised him. He was so amazed by the man, by the reactions taking place in him between mind and body, and by his methods of bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed, that he almost forgot that his own life was at stake. The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one. The verdict found the three prisoners guilty. Peter Blood looked round the scarlet-hung court. For an instant that foam of white faces seemed to heave before him. Then he was himself again, and a voice was asking him what he had to say for himself, why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, being convicted of high treason. He laughed, and his laugh jarred uncannily upon the deathly stillness of the court. It was all so grotesque, such a mockery of justice administered by that wistful-eyed jack-pudding in scarlet, who was himself a mockery - the venal instrument of a brutally spiteful and vindictive king. His laughter shocked the austerity of that same jack-pudding. "Do you laugh, sirrah, with the rope about your neck, upon the very threshold of that eternity you are so suddenly to enter into?" And then Blood took his revenge. "Faith, it's in better case I am for mirth than your lordship. For I have this to say before you deliver judgment. Your lordship sees me - an innocent man whose only offence is that I practised charity - with a halter round my neck. Your lordship, being the justiciar, speaks with knowledge of what is to come to me. I, being a physician, may speak with knowledge of what is to come to your lordship. |
| 1870 |
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. But none came. Slowly, faintly, the colour crept back into that ashen face. The scarlet figure lost its rigidity, and bent forward. His lordship began to speak. In a muted voice and briefly - much more briefly than his won't on such occasions and in a manner entirely mechanical, the manner of a man whose thoughts are elsewhere while his lips are speaking - he delivered sentence of death in the prescribed form, and without the least allusion to what Peter Blood had said. Having delivered it, he sank back exhausted, his eyes half-closed, his brow agleam with sweat. The prisoners filed out. Mr. Pollexfen - a Whig at heart despite the position of Judge-Advocate which he occupied - was overheard by one of the jurors to mutter in the ear of a brother counsel: "On my soul, that swarthy rascal has given his lordship a scare. It's a pity he must hang. For a man who can frighten Jeffreys should go far." Mr. Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and wrong - a condition much more common than is generally supposed. He was right in his indifferently expressed thought that a man whose mien and words could daunt such a lord of terror as Jeffreys, should by the dominance of his nature be able to fashion himself a considerable destiny. He was wrong - though justifiably so - in his assumption that Peter Blood must hang. |
| 1871 |
We know from Lord Jeffreys's secretary how the Chief Justice inveighed that night in drunken frenzy against this misplaced clemency to which His Majesty had been persuaded. We know how he attempted by letter to induce the King to reconsider his decision. But James adhered to it. It was - apart from the indirect profit he derived from it - a clemency full worthy of him. He knew that to spare lives in this fashion was to convert them into living deaths. Many must succumb in torment to the horrors of West Indian slavery, and so be the envy of their surviving companions. Thus it happened that Peter Blood, and with him Jeremy Pitt and Andrew Baynes, instead of being hanged, drawn, and quartered as their sentences directed, were conveyed to Bristol and there shipped with some fifty others aboard the Jamaica Merchant. From close confinement under hatches, ill-nourishment and foul water, a sickness broke out amongst them, of which eleven died. Amongst these was the unfortunate yeoman from Oglethorpe's Farm, brutally torn from his quiet homestead amid the fragrant cider orchards for no other sin but that he had practised mercy. The mortality might have been higher than it was but for Peter Blood. At first the master of the Jamaica Merchant had answered with oaths and threats the doctor's expostulations against permitting men to perish in this fashion, and his insistence that he should be made free of the medicine chest and given leave to minister to the sick. But presently Captain Gardner came to see that he might be brought to task for these too heavy losses of human merchandise and because of this he was belatedly glad to avail himself of the skill of Peter Blood. The doctor went to work zealously and zestfully, and wrought so ably that, by his ministrations and by improving the condition of his fellow-captives, he checked the spread of the disease. Towards the middle of December the Jamaica Merchant dropped anchor in Carlisle Bay, and put ashore the forty-two surviving rebels-convict. |
| 1872 |
If these unfortunates had imagined - as many of them appear to have done - that they were coming into some wild, savage country, the prospect, of which they had a glimpse before they were hustled over the ship's side into the waiting boats, was enough to correct the impression. They beheld a town of sufficiently imposing proportions composed of houses built upon European notions of architecture, but without any of the huddle usual in European cities. The spire of a church rose dominantly above the red roofs, a fort guarded the entrance of the wide harbour, with guns thrusting their muzzles between the crenels, and the wide facade of Government House revealed itself dominantly placed on a gentle hill above the town. This hill was vividly green as is an English hill in April, and the day was such a day as April gives to England, the season of heavy rains being newly ended. On a wide cobbled space on the sea front they found a guard of red-coated militia drawn up to receive them, and a crowd - attracted by their arrival - which in dress and manner differed little from a crowd in a seaport at home save that it contained fewer women and a great number of negroes. To inspect them, drawn up there on the mole, came Governor Steed, a short, stout, red-faced gentleman, in blue taffetas burdened by a prodigious amount of gold lace, who limped a little and leaned heavily upon a stout ebony cane. After him, in the uniform of a colonel of the Barbados Militia, rolled a tall, corpulent man who towered head and shoulders above the Governor, with malevolence plainly written on his enormous yellowish countenance. At his side, and contrasting oddly with his grossness, moving with an easy stripling grace, came a slight young lady in a modish riding-gown. The broad brim of a grey hat with scarlet sweep of ostrich plume shaded an oval face upon which the climate of the Tropic of Cancer had made no impression, so delicately fair was its complexion. Ringlets of red-brown hair hung to her shoulders. |
| 1873 |
Frankness looked out from her hazel eyes which were set wide; commiseration repressed now the mischievousness that normally inhabited her fresh young mouth. Peter Blood caught himself staring in a sort of amazement at that piquant face, which seemed here so out of place, and finding his stare returned, he shifted uncomfortably. He grew conscious of the sorry figure that he cut. Unwashed, with rank and matted hair and a disfiguring black beard upon his face, and the erstwhile splendid suit of black camlet in which he had been taken prisoner now reduced to rags that would have disgraced a scarecrow, he was in no case for inspection by such dainty eyes as these. Nevertheless, they continued to inspect him with round-eyed, almost childlike wonder and pity. Their owner put forth a hand to touch the scarlet sleeve of her companion, whereupon with an ill-tempered grunt the man swung his great bulk round so that he directly confronted her. Looking up into his face, she was speaking to him earnestly, but the Colonel plainly gave her no more than the half of his attention. His little beady eyes, closely flanking a fleshly, pendulous nose, had passed from her and were fixed upon fair-haired, sturdy young Pitt, who was standing beside Blood. The Governor had also come to a halt, and for a moment now that little group of three stood in conversation. What the lady said, Peter could not hear at all, for she lowered her voice; the Colonel's reached him in a confused rumble, but the Governor was neither considerate nor indistinct; he had a high-pitched voice which carried far, and believing himself witty, he desired to be heard by all. "But, my dear Colonel Bishop, it is for you to take first choice from this dainty nosegay, and at your own price. After that we'll send the rest to auction." Colonel Bishop nodded his acknowledgment. He raised his voice in answering. "Your excellency is very good. But, faith, they're a weedy lot, not likely to be of much value in the plantation." His beady eyes scanned them again, and his contempt of them deepened the malevolence of his face. |
| 1874 |
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. Bishop shaded his eyes with his hand to look in the direction in which she was pointing. Then slowly, with his ponderous, rolling gait, he approached again accompanied by Gardner, and followed by the lady and the Governor. On they came until the Colonel was abreast of Blood. He would have passed on, but that the lady tapped his arm with her whip. "But this is the man I meant," she said. "This one?" Contempt rang in the voice. Peter Blood found himself staring into a pair of beady brown eyes sunk into a yellow, fleshly face like currants into a dumpling. |
| 1875 |
Reaching the summit of a gentle, grassy slope, she met a tall, lean man dressed in a sober, gentlemanly fashion, who was walking in the opposite direction. He was a stranger to her, and strangers were rare enough in the island. And yet in some vague way he did not seem quite a stranger. Miss Arabella drew rein, affecting to pause that she might admire the prospect, which was fair enough to warrant it. Yet out of the corner of those hazel eyes she scanned this fellow very attentively as he came nearer. She corrected her first impression of his dress. It was sober enough, but hardly gentlemanly. Coat and breeches were of plain homespun; and if the former sat so well upon him it was more by virtue of his natural grace than by that of tailoring. His stockings were of cotton, harsh and plain, and the broad castor, which he respectfully doffed as he came up with her, was an old one unadorned by band or feather. What had seemed to be a periwig at a little distance was now revealed for the man's own lustrous coiling black hair. Out of a brown, shaven, saturnine face two eyes that were startlingly blue considered her gravely. The man would have passed on but that she detained him. "I think I know you, sir," said she. Her voice was crisp and boyish, and there was something of boyishness in her manner - if one can apply the term to so dainty a lady. It arose perhaps from an ease, a directness, which disdained the artifices of her sex, and set her on good terms with all the world. To this it may be due that Miss Arabella had reached the age of five and twenty not merely unmarried but unwooed. She used with all men a sisterly frankness which in itself contains a quality of aloofness, rendering it difficult for any man to become her lover. Her negroes had halted at some distance in the rear, and they squatted now upon the short grass until it should be her pleasure to proceed upon her way. The stranger came to a standstill upon being addressed. "A lady should know her own property," said he. |
| 1876 |
He turned, and resuming his way, went off in long, swinging strides towards the little huddle of huts built of mud and wattles - a miniature village enclosed in a stockade which the plantation slaves inhabited, and where he, himself, was lodged with them. Through his mind sang the line of Lovelace: "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage." But he gave it a fresh meaning, the very converse of that which its author had intended. A prison, he reflected, was a prison, though it had neither walls nor bars, however spacious it might be. And as he realized it that morning so he was to realize it increasingly as time sped on. Daily he came to think more of his clipped wings, of his exclusion from the world, and less of the fortuitous liberty he enjoyed. Nor did the contrasting of his comparatively easy lot with that of his unfortunate fellow-convicts bring him the satisfaction a differently constituted mind might have derived from it. Rather did the contemplation of their misery increase the bitterness that was gathering in his soul. Of the forty-two who had been landed with him from the Jamaica Merchant, Colonel Bishop had purchased no less than twenty-five. The remainder had gone to lesser planters, some of them to Speightstown, and others still farther north. What may have been the lot of the latter he could not tell, but amongst Bishop's slaves Peter Blood came and went freely, sleeping in their quarters, and their lot he knew to be a brutalizing misery. They toiled in the sugar plantations from sunrise to sunset, and if their labours flagged, there were the whips of the overseer and his men to quicken them. They went in rags, some almost naked; they dwelt in squalor, and they were ill-nourished on salted meat and maize dumplings food which to many of them was for a season at least so nauseating that two of them sickened and died before Bishop remembered that their lives had a certain value in labour to him and yielded to Blood's intercessions for a better care of such as fell ill. |
| 1877 |
She was his niece, of his own blood, and some of the vices of it, some of the remorseless cruelty of the wealthy planter must, he argued, inhabit that pleasant body of hers. He argued this very often to himself, as if answering and convincing some instinct that pleaded otherwise, and arguing it he avoided her when it was possible, and was frigidly civil when it was not. Justifiable as his reasoning was, plausible as it may seem, yet he would have done better to have trusted the instinct that was in conflict with it. Though the same blood ran in her veins as in those of Colonel Bishop, yet hers was free of the vices that tainted her uncle's, for these vices were not natural to that blood; they were, in his case, acquired. Her father, Tom Bishop - that same Colonel Bishop's brother - had been a kindly, chivalrous, gentle soul, who, broken-hearted by the early death of a young wife, had abandoned the Old World and sought an anodyne for his grief in the New. He had come out to the Antilles, bringing with him his little daughter, then five years of age, and had given himself up to the life of a planter. He had prospered from the first, as men sometimes will who care nothing for prosperity. Prospering, he had bethought him of his younger brother, a soldier at home reputed somewhat wild. He had advised him to come out to Barbados; and the advice, which at another season William Bishop might have scorned, reached him at a moment when his wildness was beginning to bear such fruit that a change of climate was desirable. William came, and was admitted by his generous brother to a partnership in the prosperous plantation. Some six years later, when Arabella was fifteen, her father died, leaving her in her uncle's guardianship. It was perhaps his one mistake. But the goodness of his own nature coloured his views of other men; moreover, himself, he had conducted the education of his daughter, giving her an independence of character upon which perhaps he counted unduly. As things were, there was little love between uncle and niece. |
| 1878 |
But she was dutiful to him, and he was circumspect in his behaviour before her. All his life, and for all his wildness, he had gone in a certain awe of his brother, whose worth he had the wit to recognize; and now it was almost as if some of that awe was transferred to his brother's child, who was also, in a sense, his partner, although she took no active part in the business of the plantations. Peter Blood judged her - as we are all too prone to judge - upon insufficient knowledge. He was very soon to have cause to correct that judgment. One day towards the end of May, when the heat was beginning to grow oppressive, there crawled into Carlisle Bay a wounded, battered English ship, the Pride of Devon, her freeboard scarred and broken, her coach a gaping wreck, her mizzen so shot away that only a jagged stump remained to tell the place where it had stood. She had been in action off Martinique with two Spanish treasure ships, and although her captain swore that the Spaniards had beset him without provocation, it is difficult to avoid a suspicion that the encounter had been brought about quite otherwise. One of the Spaniards had fled from the combat, and if the Pride of Devon had not given chase it was probably because she was by then in no case to do so. The other had been sunk, but not before the English ship had transferred to her own hold a good deal of the treasure aboard the Spaniard. It was, in fact, one of those piratical affrays which were a perpetual source of trouble between the courts of St. James's and the Escurial, complaints emanating now from one and now from the other side. Steed, however, after the fashion of most Colonial governors, was willing enough to dull his wits to the extent of accepting the English seaman's story, disregarding any evidence that might belie it. He shared the hatred so richly deserved by arrogant, overbearing Spain that was common to men of every other nation from the Bahamas to the Main. Therefore he gave the Pride of Devon the shelter she sought in his harbour and every facility to careen and carry out repairs. |
| 1879 |
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. Indeed, had the wishes of some of these inhabitants been regarded, the Spaniards would have been left to die like vermin, and of this Peter Blood had an example almost at the very outset. With the assistance of one of the negroes sent to the shed for the purpose, he was in the act of setting a broken leg, when a deep, gruff voice, that he had come to know and dislike as he had never disliked the voice of living man, abruptly challenged him. "What are you doing there?" Blood did not look up from his task. There was not the need. He knew the voice, as I have said. |
| 1880 |
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. 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. She was elegantly dressed in lavender silk and was followed by a half-naked negro carrying a basket. |
| 1881 |
"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. 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. |
| 1882 |
It shall be a loan, which you shall repay us - repay me, when you can." That betraying "us" so hastily retrieved completed Blood's understanding. The other doctor was also in the business. They were approaching the peopled part of the mole. Quickly, but eloquently, Blood expressed his thanks, where he knew that no thanks were due. "We will talk of this again, sir - to-morrow," he concluded. "You have opened for me the gates of hope." In that at least he tittered no more than the bare truth, and expressed it very baldly. 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. |
| 1883 |
He had survived the ill-nourishment, the excessive work on the sugar plantation under a pitiless sun, the lashes of the overseer's whip when his labours flagged, and the deadly, unrelieved animal life to which he was condemned. But the price he was paying for survival was the usual price. He was in danger of becoming no better than an animal, of sinking to the level of the negroes who sometimes toiled beside him. The man, however, was still there, not yet dormant, but merely torpid from a surfeit of despair; and the man in him promptly shook off that torpidity and awoke at the first words Blood spoke to him that night - awoke and wept. "Escape?" he panted. "O God!" He took his head in his hands, and fell to sobbing like a child. "Sh! Steady now! Steady!" Blood admonished him in a whisper, alarmed by the lad's blubbering. He crossed to Pitt's side, and set a restraining hand upon his shoulder. "For God's sake, command yourself. If we're overheard we shall both be flogged for this." Among the privileges enjoyed by Blood was that of a hut to himself, and they were alone in this. But, after all, it was built of wattles thinly plastered with mud, and its door was composed of bamboos, through which sound passed very easily. Though the stockade was locked for the night, and all within it asleep by now - it was after midnight - yet a prowling overseer was not impossible, and a sound of voices must lead to discovery. Pitt realized this, and controlled his outburst of emotion. Sitting close thereafter they talked in whispers for an hour or more, and all the while those dulled wits of Pitt's were sharpening themselves anew upon this precious whetstone of hope. 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. |
| 1884 |
Whacker had predicted. When he left the shipwright, it was agreed that Nuttall should seek the boat required, for which Blood would at once produce the money. The quest took longer than was expected by Blood, who waited impatiently with the doctor's gold concealed about his person. But at the end of some three weeks, Nuttall - whom he was now meeting daily - informed him that he had found a serviceable wherry, and that its owner was disposed to sell it for twenty-two pounds. That evening, on the beach, remote from all eyes, Peter Blood handed that sum to his new associate, and Nuttall went off with instructions to complete the purchase late on the following day. He was to bring the boat to the wharf, where under cover of night Blood and his fellow-convicts would join him and make off. Everything was ready. In the shed, from which all the wounded men had now been removed and which had since remained untenanted, Nuttall had concealed the necessary stores: a hundredweight of bread, a quantity of cheese, a cask of water and some few bottles of Canary, a compass, quadrant, chart, half-hour glass, log and line, a tarpaulin, some carpenter's tools, and a lantern and candles. And in the stockade, all was likewise in readiness. Hagthorpe, Dyke, and Ogle had agreed to join the venture, and eight others had been carefully recruited. 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? The chief risk lay in discovery by those of their companions who were to be left behind. It was because of these that they must go cautiously and in silence. |
| 1885 |
The thing was unfortunate; but after all not beyond remedy. The escape was set for midnight, and he should easily be back by then. He mounted the horse that Kent procured him, intending to make all haste. "How shall I reenter the stockade, sir?" he enquired at parting. "You'll not reenter it," said Bishop. "When they've done with you at Government House, they may find a kennel for you there until morning." Peter Blood's heart sank like a stone through water. "But..." he began. "Be off, I say. Will you stand there talking until dark? His excellency is waiting for you." And with his cane Colonel Bishop slashed the horse's quarters so brutally that the beast bounded forward all but unseating her rider. Peter Blood went off in a state of mind bordering on despair. And there was occasion for it. A postponement of the escape at least until to-morrow night was necessary now, and postponement must mean the discovery of Nuttall's transaction and the asking of questions it would be difficult to answer. 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. |
| 1886 |
He was thankful that the fellow had not asked the question he most dreaded, which was how he, a debtor, should come by the money to buy a wherry. But this he knew was only a respite. The question would presently be asked of a certainty, and then hell would open for him. He cursed the hour in which he had been such a fool as to listen to Peter Blood's chatter of escape. He thought it very likely that the whole plot would be discovered, and that he would probably be hanged, or at least branded and sold into slavery like those other damned rebels-convict, with whom he had been so mad as to associate himself. If only he had the ten pounds for this infernal surety, which until this moment had never entered into their calculations, it was possible that the thing might be done quickly and questions postponed until later. As the Secretary's messenger had overlooked the fact that he was a debtor, so might the others at the Secretary's office, at least for a day or two; and in that time he would, he hoped, be beyond the reach of their questions. But in the meantime what was to be done about this money? And it was to be found before noon! Nuttall snatched up his hat, and went out in quest of Peter Blood. But where look for him? Wandering aimlessly up the irregular, unpaved street, he ventured to enquire of one or two if they had seen Dr. Blood that morning. He affected to be feeling none so well, and indeed his appearance bore out the deception. None could give him information; and since Blood had never told him of Whacker's share in this business, he walked in his unhappy ignorance past the door of the one man in Barbados who would eagerly have saved him in this extremity. 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. |
| 1887 |
Avenues intersected the great blocks of ripening amber cane. In the distance down one of these he espied some slaves at work. Nuttall entered the avenue and advanced upon them. They eyed him dully, as he passed them. Pitt was not of their number, and he dared not ask for him. He continued his search for best part of an hour, up one of those lanes and then down another. Once an overseer challenged him, demanding to know his business. He was looking, he said, for Dr. Blood. His cousin was taken ill. The overseer bade him go to the devil, and get out of the plantation. Blood was not there. If he was anywhere he would be in his hut in the stockade. Nuttall passed on, upon the understanding that he would go. But he went in the wrong direction; he went on towards the side of the plantation farthest from the stockade, towards the dense woods that fringed it there. The overseer was too contemptuous and perhaps too languid in the stifling heat of approaching noontide to correct his course. Nuttall blundered to the end of the avenue, and round the corner of it, and there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten pounds from Blood that very morning or they were all undone. And all he got for his pains and his sweat was the condemnation of Jeremy Pitt. "Damn you for a fool!" said the slave. "If it's Blood you're seeking, why are you wasting your time here?" "I can't find him," bleated Nuttall. He was indignant at his reception. He forgot the jangled state of the other's nerves after a night of anxious wakefulness ending in a dawn of despair. "I thought that you..." "You thought that I could drop my spade and go and seek him for you? |
| 1888 |
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. Out over that sea his glance ranged miserably. In the roads, standing in for the shore before a gentle breeze that scarcely ruffled the sapphire surface of the Caribbean, came a stately red-hulled frigate, flying the English ensign. Colonel Bishop halted to consider her, shading his eyes with his fleshly hand. Light as was the breeze, the vessel spread no canvas to it beyond that of her foresail. Furled was her every other sail, leaving a clear view of the majestic lines of her hull, from towering stern castle to gilded beakhead that was aflash in the dazzling sunshine. So leisurely an advance argued a master indifferently acquainted with these waters, who preferred to creep forward cautiously, sounding his way. At her present rate of progress it would be an hour, perhaps, before she came to anchorage within the harbour. And whilst the Colonel viewed her, admiring, perhaps, the gracious beauty of her, Pitt was hurried forward into the stockade, and clapped into the stocks that stood there ready for slaves who required correction. |
| 1889 |
Colonel Bishop followed him presently, with leisurely, rolling gait. "A mutinous cur that shows his fangs to his master must learn good manners at the cost of a striped hide," was all he said before setting about his executioner's job. That with his own hands he should do that which most men of his station would, out of self-respect, have relegated to one of the negroes, gives you the measure of the man's beastliness. It was almost as if with relish, as if gratifying some feral instinct of cruelty, that he now lashed his victim about head and shoulders. 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. |
| 1890 |
Soon, however, from the partial stupor which pain had mercifully induced, a new variety of pain aroused him. 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. Cooled and revived by the draught, he attempted to sit up. "My back!" he screamed. There was an unusual glint in Mr. Blood's eyes; his lips were compressed. But when he parted them to speak, his voice came cool and steady. "Be easy, now. One thing at a time. Your back's taking no harm at all for the present, since I've covered it up. I'm wanting to know what's happened to you. |
| 1891 |
"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. 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. |
| 1892 |
The landing was contested by the militia and by every islander capable of bearing arms with the fierce resoluteness of men who knew that no quarter was to be expected in defeat. The ruthlessness of Spanish soldiery was a byword, and not at his worst had Morgan or L'Ollonais ever perpetrated such horrors as those of which these Castilian gentlemen were capable. But this Spanish commander knew his business, which was more than could truthfully be said for the Barbados Militia. Having gained the advantage of a surprise blow, which had put the fort out of action, he soon showed them that he was master of the situation. His guns turned now upon the open space behind the mole, where the incompetent Bishop had marshalled his men, tore the militia into bloody rags, and covered the landing parties which were making the shore in their own boats and in several of those which had rashly gone out to the great ship before her identity was revealed. All through the scorching afternoon the battle went on, the rattle and crack of musketry penetrating ever deeper into the town to show that the defenders were being driven steadily back. By sunset two hundred and fifty Spaniards were masters of Bridgetown, the islanders were disarmed, and at Government House, Governor Steed - his gout forgotten in his panic - supported by Colonel Bishop and some lesser officers, was being informed by Don Diego, with an urbanity that was itself a mockery, of the sum that would be required in ransom. For a hundred thousand pieces of eight and fifty head of cattle, Don Diego would forbear from reducing the place to ashes. And what time that suave and courtly commander was settling these details with the apoplectic British Governor, the Spaniards were smashing and looting, feasting, drinking, and ravaging after the hideous manner of their kind. Mr. Blood, greatly daring, ventured down at dusk into the town. What he saw there is recorded by Jeremy Pitt to whom he subsequently related it - in that voluminous log from which the greater part of my narrative is derived. |
| 1893 |
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. "Will ye wait to see my credentials?" he snapped. Steps were clattering towards them from beyond the corner round which she had fled from that Spanish ruffian. "Come," he urged again. And this time, reassured perhaps by his clear English speech, she went without further questions. They sped down an alley and then up another, by great good fortune meeting no one, for already they were on the outskirts of the town. They won out of it, and white-faced, physically sick, Mr. Blood dragged her almost at a run up the hill towards Colonel Bishop's house. He told her briefly who and what he was, and thereafter there was no conversation between them until they reached the big white house. It was all in darkness, which at least was reassuring. |
| 1894 |
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. Above, two sentinels only kept vigil, at stem and stern. Nor were they as vigilant as they should have been, or else they must have observed the two wherries that under cover of the darkness came gliding from the wharf, with well-greased rowlocks, to bring up in silence under the great ship's quarter. From the gallery aft still hung the ladder by which Don Diego had descended to the boat that had taken him ashore. The sentry on guard in the stern, coming presently round this gallery, was suddenly confronted by the black shadow of a man standing before him at the head of the ladder. "Who's there?" he asked, but without alarm, supposing it one of his fellows. |
| 1895 |
Mr. Blood's absence was brief. When he rejoined his comrades there was no watch above the Spaniards' decks. Meanwhile the revellers below continued to make merry at their ease in the conviction of complete security. The garrison of Barbados was overpowered and disarmed, and their companions were ashore in complete possession of the town, glutting themselves hideously upon the fruits of victory. What, then, was there to fear? Even when their quarters were invaded and they found themselves surrounded by a score of wild, hairy, half-naked men, who - save that they appeared once to have been white - looked like a horde of savages, the Spaniards could not believe their eyes. Who could have dreamed that a handful of forgotten plantation-slaves would have dared to take so much upon themselves? The half-drunken Spaniards, their laughter suddenly quenched, the song perishing on their lips, stared, stricken and bewildered at the levelled muskets by which they were checkmated. And then, from out of this uncouth pack of savages that beset them, stepped a slim, tall fellow with light-blue eyes in a tawny face, eyes in which glinted the light of a wicked humour. He addressed them in the purest Castilian. "You will save yourselves pain and trouble by regarding yourselves my prisoners, and suffering yourselves to be quietly bestowed out of harm's way." "Name of God!" swore the gunner, which did no justice at all to an amazement beyond expression. "If you please," said Mr. Blood, and thereupon those gentlemen of Spain were induced without further trouble beyond a musket prod or two to drop through a scuttle to the deck below. After that the rebels-convict refreshed themselves with the good things in the consumption of which they had interrupted the Spaniards. To taste palatable Christian food after months of salt fish and maize dumplings was in itself a feast to these unfortunates. But there were no excesses. Mr. Blood saw to that, although it required all the firmness of which he was capable. |
| 1896 |
Dispositions were to be made without delay against that which must follow before they could abandon themselves fully to the enjoyment of their victory. This, after all, was no more than a preliminary skirmish, although it was one that afforded them the key to the situation. It remained to dispose so that the utmost profit might be drawn from it. Those dispositions occupied some very considerable portion of the night. But, at least, they were complete before the sun peeped over the shoulder of Mount Hilibay to shed his light upon a day of some surprises. It was soon after sunrise that the rebel-convict who paced the quarter-deck in Spanish corselet and headpiece, a Spanish musket on his shoulder, announced the approach of a boat. It was Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez coming aboard with four great treasure-chests, containing each twenty-five thousand pieces of eight, the ransom delivered to him at dawn by Governor Steed. He was accompanied by his son, Don Esteban, and by six men who took the oars. Aboard the frigate all was quiet and orderly as it should be. She rode at anchor, her larboard to the shore, and the main ladder on her starboard side. Round to this came the boat with Don Diego and his treasure. Mr. Blood had disposed effectively. It was not for nothing that he had served under de Ruyter. The swings were waiting, and the windlass manned. Below, a gun-crew held itself in readiness under the command of Ogle, who - as I have said - had been a gunner in the Royal Navy before he went in for politics and followed the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth. 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. |
| 1897 |
Plump into their middle came a third shot, smashing a second boat with fearful execution. Followed again a moment of awful silence, then among those Spanish pirates all was gibbering and jabbering and splashing of oars, as they attempted to pull in every direction at once. Some were for going ashore, others for heading straight to the vessel and there discovering what might be amiss. That something was very gravely amiss there could be no further doubt, particularly as whilst they discussed and fumed and cursed two more shots came over the water to account for yet a third of their boats. The resolute Ogle was making excellent practice, and fully justifying his claims to know something of gunnery. In their consternation the Spaniards had simplified his task by huddling their boats together. After the fourth shot, opinion was no longer divided amongst them. As with one accord they went about, or attempted to do so, for before they had accomplished it two more of their boats had been sunk. The three boats that remained, without concerning themselves with their more unfortunate fellows, who were struggling in the water, headed back for the wharf at speed. If the Spaniards understood nothing of all this, the forlorn islanders ashore understood still less, until to help their wits they saw the flag of Spain come down from the mainmast of the Cinco Llagas, and the flag of England soar to its empty place. Even then some bewilderment persisted, and it was with fearful eyes that they observed the return of their enemies, who might vent upon them the ferocity aroused by these extraordinary events. Ogle, however, continued to give proof that his knowledge of gunnery was not of yesterday. After the fleeing Spaniards went his shots. The last of their boats flew into splinters as it touched the wharf, and its remains were buried under a shower of loosened masonry. That was the end of this pirate crew, which not ten minutes ago had been laughingly counting up the pieces of eight that would fall to the portion of each for his share in that act of villainy. |
| 1898 |
A merciless despot, who had never known the need for restraint in all these years, he was doomed by ironic fate to practise restraint in the very moment when his feelings had reached their most violent intensity. Peter Blood gave an order. A plank was run out over the gunwale, and lashed down. "If you please, Colonel," said he, with a graceful flourish of invitation. The Colonel looked at him, and there was hell in his glance. Then, taking his resolve, and putting the best face upon it, since no other could help him here, he kicked off his shoes, peeled off his fine coat of biscuit-coloured taffetas, and climbed upon the plank. A moment he paused, steadied by a hand that clutched the ratlines, looking down in terror at the green water rushing past some five-and-twenty feet below. "Just take a little walk, Colonel, darling," said a smooth, mocking voice behind him. Still clinging, Colonel Bishop looked round in hesitation, and saw the bulwarks lined with swarthy faces - the faces of men that as lately as yesterday would have turned pale under his frown, faces that were now all wickedly agrin. For a moment rage stamped out his fear. He cursed them aloud venomously and incoherently, then loosed his hold and stepped out upon the plank. Three steps he took before he lost his balance and went tumbling into the green depths below. When he came to the surface again, gasping for air, the Cinco Llagas was already some furlongs to leeward. But the roaring cheer of mocking valediction from the rebels-convict reached him across the water, to drive the iron of impotent rage deeper into his soul. Don Diego de Espinosa y Valdez awoke, and with languid eyes in aching head, he looked round the cabin, which was flooded with sunlight from the square windows astern. Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head. Lying thus, he attempted to think, to locate himself in time and space. But between the pain in his head and the confusion in his mind, he found coherent thought impossible. |
| 1899 |
An indefinite sense of alarm drove him to open his eyes again, and once more to consider his surroundings. There could be no doubt that he lay in the great cabin of his own ship, the Cinco Llagas, so that his vague disquiet must be, surely, ill-founded. And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be. The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was headed westward. Then the alternative occurred to him. They might be sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon. That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under him. But how did they come to be sailing, and he, the master, not to know whether their course lay east or west, not to be able to recollect whither they were bound? His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it was. He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck again. There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased. He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his best suit of clothes step into the cabin. It was a singularly elegant and characteristically Spanish suit of black taffetas with silver lace that had been made for him a year ago in Cadiz, and he knew each detail of it so well that it was impossible he could now be mistaken. The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch on which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall, slender gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape. Seeing the wide, startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman lengthened his stride. |
| 1900 |
And so it comes to this: We desire to make for the Dutch settlement of Curacao as straightly as possible. Will you pledge me your honour, if I release you upon parole, that you will navigate us thither? If so, we will release you and your surviving men upon arrival there." Don Diego bowed his head upon his breast, and strode away in thought to the stern windows. There he stood looking out upon the sunlit sea and the dead water in the great ship's wake - his ship, which these English dogs had wrested from him; his ship, which he was asked to bring safely into a port where she would be completely lost to him and refitted perhaps to make war upon his kin. That was in one scale; in the other were the lives of sixteen men. Fourteen of them mattered little to him, but the remaining two were his own and his son's. He turned at length, and his back being to the light, the Captain could not see how pale his face had grown. "I accept," he said. By virtue of the pledge he had given, Don Diego de Espinosa enjoyed the freedom of the ship that had been his, and the navigation which he had undertaken was left entirely in his hands. And because those who manned her were new to the seas of the Spanish Main, and because even the things that had happened in Bridgetown were not enough to teach them to regard every Spaniard as a treacherous, cruel dog to be slain at sight, they used him with the civility which his own suave urbanity invited. He took his meals in the great cabin with Blood and the three officers elected to support him: Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, and Dyke. They found Don Diego an agreeable, even an amusing companion, and their friendly feeling towards him was fostered by his fortitude and brave equanimity in this adversity. That Don Diego was not playing fair it was impossible to suspect. Moreover, there was no conceivable reason why he should not. And he had been of the utmost frankness with them. He had denounced their mistake in sailing before the wind upon leaving Barbados. |
| 1901 |
They should have left the island to leeward, heading into the Caribbean and away from the archipelago. As it was, they would now be forced to pass through this archipelago again so as to make Curacao, and this passage was not to be accomplished without some measure of risk to themselves. 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. So far, indeed, was he recovered that he complained of his confinement, of the heat in his cabin. To indulge him Captain Blood consented that he should take the air on deck, and so, as the last of the daylight was fading from the sky, Jeremy Pitt came forth upon the Captain's arm. |
| 1902 |
New to the seas of the Spanish Main and to the ways of the adventurers who sailed it, Captain Blood still entertained illusions. 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. "Of course." The Spaniard rubbed his hands, and Mr. Blood observed that they were unsteady. "The satisfaction of a mariner." "Or of a traitor - which?" Blood asked him quietly. And as the Spaniard fell back before him with suddenly altered countenance that confirmed his every suspicion, he flung an arm out in the direction of the distant shore. "What land is that?" he demanded. |
| 1903 |
Considering him, Captain Blood thought with satisfaction that he displayed the proper degree of filial piety. He afterwards confessed that for a moment he was in danger of weakening, that for a moment his mind rebelled against the pitiless thing it had planned. But to correct the sentiment he evoked a memory of what these Spaniards had performed in Bridgetown. Again he saw the white face of that child Mary Traill as she fled in horror before the jeering ruffian whom he had slain, and other things even more unspeakable seen on that dreadful evening rose now before the eyes of his memory to stiffen his faltering purpose. The Spaniards had shown themselves without mercy or sentiment or decency of any kind; stuffed with religion, they were without a spark of that Christianity, the Symbol of which was mounted on the mainmast of the approaching ship. A moment ago this cruel, vicious Don Diego had insulted the Almighty by his assumption that He kept a specially benevolent watch over the destinies of Catholic Spain. Don Diego should be taught his error. Recovering the cynicism in which he had approached his task, the cynicism essential to its proper performance, he commanded Ogle to kindle a match and remove the leaden apron from the touch-hole of the gun that bore Don Diego. Then, as the younger Espinosa broke into fresh intercessions mingled with imprecations, he wheeled upon him sharply. "Peace!" he snapped. "Peace, and listen! It is no part of my intention to blow your father to hell as he deserves, or indeed to take his life at all." Having surprised the lad into silence by that promise - a promise surprising enough in all the circumstances - he proceeded to explain his aims in that faultless and elegant Castilian of which he was fortunately master - as fortunately for Don Diego as for himself. "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. |
| 1904 |
She also bore two treasure-chests containing fifty thousand pieces of eight. Gold has at all times been considered the best of testimonies of good faith, and Blood was determined that in all respects appearances should be entirely on his side. His followers had accounted this a supererogation of pretence. But Blood's will in the matter had prevailed. He carried further a bulky package addressed to a grande of Spain, heavily sealed with the arms of Espinosa - another piece of evidence hastily manufactured in the cabin of the Cinco Llagas - and he was spending these last moments in completing his instructions to his young companion. Don Esteban expressed his last lingering uneasiness: "But if you should betray yourself?" he cried. "It will be unfortunate for everybody. I advised your father to say a prayer for our success. I depend upon you to help me more materially." "I will do my best. God knows I will do my best," the boy protested. Blood nodded thoughtfully, and no more was said until they bumped alongside the towering mass of the Encarnadon. Up the ladder went Don Esteban closely followed by Captain Blood. In the waist stood the Admiral himself to receive them, a handsome, self-sufficient man, very tall and stiff, a little older and greyer than Don Diego, whom he closely resembled. He was supported by four officers and a friar in the black and white habit of St. Dominic. Don Miguel opened his arms to his nephew, whose lingering panic he mistook for pleasurable excitement, and having enfolded him to his bosom turned to greet Don Esteban's companion. Peter Blood bowed gracefully, entirely at his ease, so far as might be judged from appearances. "I am," he announced, making a literal translation of his name, "Don Pedro Sangre, an unfortunate gentleman of Leon, lately delivered from captivity by Don Esteban's most gallant father." And in a few words he sketched the imagined conditions of his capture by, and deliverance from, those accursed heretics who held the island of Barbados. |
| 1905 |
"It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy. We'll be exceptional. Oh, faugh! I've no stomach for cold-blooded killing. At daybreak pack the Spaniards into a boat with a keg of water and a sack of dumplings, and let them go to the devil." That was his last word on the subject, and it prevailed by virtue of the authority they had vested in him, and of which he had taken so firm a grip. 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. But that is by the way. |
| 1906 |
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. "Fata viam invenerunt," is his own expression of it. If he resisted so long, it was, I think, the thought of Arabella Bishop that restrained him. That they should be destined never to meet again did not weigh at first, or, indeed, ever. He conceived the scorn with which she would come to hear of his having turned pirate, and the scorn, though as yet no more than imagined, hurt him as if it were already a reality. And even when he conquered this, still the thought of her was ever present. He compromised with the conscience that her memory kept so disconcertingly active. He vowed that the thought of her should continue ever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might in this desperate trade upon which he was embarking. And so, although he might entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, of ever even seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in his soul as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence. The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal. The resolve being taken, he went actively to work. Ogeron, most accommodating of governors, advanced him money for the proper equipment of his ship the Cinco Llagas, which he renamed the Arabella. This after some little hesitation, fearful of thus setting his heart upon his sleeve. But his Barbados friends accounted it merely an expression of the ever-ready irony in which their leader dealt. To the score of followers he already possessed, he added threescore more, picking his men with caution and discrimination - and he was an exceptional judge of men - from amongst the adventurers of Tortuga. |
| 1907 |
"My name," he informed the three men, two of whom at least were eyeing him askance, "it is Levasseur. You may have heard of me." They had, indeed. He commanded a privateer of twenty guns that had dropped anchor in the bay a week ago, manned by a crew mainly composed of French boucanhunters from Northern Hispaniola, men who had good cause to hate the Spaniard with an intensity exceeding that of the English. Levasseur had brought them back to Tortuga from an indifferently successful cruise. It would need more, however, than lack of success to abate the fellow's monstrous vanity. A roaring, quarrelsome, hard-drinking, hard-gaming scoundrel, his reputation as a buccaneer stood high among the wild Brethren of the Coast. He enjoyed also a reputation of another sort. There was about his gaudy, swaggering raffishness something that the women found singularly alluring. That he should boast openly of his bonnes fortunes did not seem strange to Captain Blood; what he might have found strange was that there appeared to be some measure of justification for these boasts. It was current gossip that even Mademoiselle d'Ogeron, the Governor's daughter, had been caught in the snare of his wild attractiveness, and that Levasseur had gone the length of audacity of asking her hand in marriage of her father. M. d'Ogeron had made him the only possible answer. He had shown him the door. Levasseur had departed in a rage, swearing that he would make mademoiselle his wife in the teeth of all the fathers in Christendom, and that M. d'Ogeron should bitterly rue the affront he had put upon him. This was the man who now thrust himself upon Captain Blood with a proposal of association, offering him not only his sword, but his ship and the men who sailed in her. A dozen years ago, as a lad of barely twenty, Levasseur had sailed with that monster of cruelty L'Ollonais, and his own subsequent exploits bore witness and did credit to the school in which he had been reared. I doubt if in his day there was a greater scoundrel among the Brethren of the Coast than this Levasseur. |
| 1908 |
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. For the rest, the articles contained all the clauses that were usual, among which was the clause that any man found guilty of abstracting or concealing any part of a prize, be it of the value of no more than a peso, should be summarily hanged from the yardarm. All being now settled they made ready for sea, and on the very eve of sailing, Levasseur narrowly escaped being shot in a romantic attempt to scale the wall of the Governor's garden, with the object of taking passionate leave of the infatuated Mademoiselle d'Ogeron. |
| 1909 |
He desisted after having been twice fired upon from a fragrant ambush of pimento trees where the Governor's guards were posted, and he departed vowing to take different and very definite measures on his return. That night he slept on board his ship, which with characteristic flamboyance he had named La Foudre, and there on the following day he received a visit from Captain Blood, whom he greeted half-mockingly as his admiral. The Irishman came to settle certain final details of which all that need concern us is an understanding that, in the event of the two vessels becoming separated by accident or design, they should rejoin each other as soon as might be at Tortuga. Thereafter Levasseur entertained his admiral to dinner, and jointly they drank success to the expedition, so copiously on the part of Levasseur that when the time came to separate he was as nearly drunk as it seemed possible for him to be and yet retain his understanding. Finally, towards evening, Captain Blood went over the side and was rowed back to his great ship with her red bulwarks and gilded ports, touched into a lovely thing of flame by the setting sun. He was a little heavy-hearted. I have said that he was a judge of men, and his judgment of Levasseur filled him with misgivings which were growing heavier in a measure as the hour of departure approached. He expressed it to Wolverstone, who met him as he stepped aboard the Arabella: "You over persuaded me into those articles, you blackguard; and it'll surprise me if any good comes of this association." The giant rolled his single bloodthirsty eye, and sneered, thrusting out his heavy jaw. "We'll wring the dog's neck if there's any treachery." "So we will - if we are there to wring it by then." And on that, dismissing the matter: "We sail in the morning, on the first of the ebb," he announced, and went off to his cabin. It would be somewhere about ten o'clock on the following morning, a full hour before the time appointed for sailing, when a canoe brought up alongside La Foudre, and a half-caste Indian stepped out of her and went up the ladder. |
| 1910 |
"A ship's a ship, be she Dutch or Spanish, and ships are our present need. That will suffice for the men." His lieutenant said no more. But from his glimpse of the letter, knowing that a girl and not a ship was his captain's real objective, he gloomily shook his head as he rolled away on his bowed legs to give the necessary orders. Dawn found La Foudre close on the Dutchman's heels, not a mile astern, and the sight of her very evidently flustered the Jongvrow. No doubt mademoiselle's brother recognizing Levasseur's ship would be responsible for the Dutch uneasiness. They saw the Jongvrow crowding canvas in a futile endeavour to outsail them, whereupon they stood off to starboard and raced on until they were in a position whence they could send a warning shot across her bow. The Jongvrow veered, showed them her rudder, and opened fire with her stern chasers. The small shot went whistling through La Foudre's shrouds with some slight damage to her canvas. Followed a brief running fight in the course of which the Dutchman let fly a broadside. Five minutes after that they were board and board, the Jongvrow held tight in the clutches of La Foudre's grapnels, and the buccaneers pouring noisily into her waist. The Dutchman's master, purple in the face, stood forward to beard the pirate, followed closely by an elegant, pale-faced young gentleman in whom Levasseur recognized his brother-in-law elect. "Captain Levasseur, this is an outrage for which you shall be made to answer. What do you seek aboard my ship?" "At first I sought only that which belongs to me, something of which I am being robbed. But since you chose war and opened fire on me with some damage to my ship and loss of life to five of my men, why, war it is, and your ship a prize of war." From the quarter rail Mademoiselle d'Ogeron looked down with glowing eyes in breathless wonder upon her well-beloved hero. Gloriously heroic he seemed as he stood towering there, masterful, audacious, beautiful. He saw her, and with a glad shout sprang towards her. |
| 1911 |
The Dutch master got in his way with hands upheld to arrest his progress. Levasseur did not stay to argue with him: he was too impatient to reach his mistress. He swung the poleaxe that he carried, and the Dutchman went down in blood with a cloven skull. The eager lover stepped across the body and came on, his countenance joyously alight. But mademoiselle was shrinking now, in horror. She was a girl upon the threshold of glorious womanhood, of a fine height and nobly moulded, with heavy coils of glossy black hair above and about a face that was of the colour of old ivory. Her countenance was cast in lines of arrogance, stressed by the low lids of her full dark eyes. In a bound her well-beloved was beside her, flinging away his bloody poleaxe, he opened wide his arms to enfold her. But she still shrank even within his embrace, which would not be denied; a look of dread had come to temper the normal arrogance of her almost perfect face. "Mine, mine at last, and in spite of all!" he cried exultantly, theatrically, truly heroic. But she, endeavouring to thrust him back, her hands against his breast, could only falter: "Why, why did you kill him?" He laughed, as a hero should; and answered her heroically, with the tolerance of a god for the mortal to whom he condescends: "He stood between us. Let his death be a symbol, a warning. Let all who would stand between us mark it and beware." It was so splendidly terrific, the gesture of it was so broad and fine and his magnetism so compelling, that she cast her silly tremors and yielded herself freely, intoxicated, to his fond embrace. Thereafter he swung her to his shoulder, and stepping with ease beneath that burden, bore her in a sort of triumph, lustily cheered by his men, to the deck of his own ship. Her inconsiderate brother might have ruined that romantic scene but for the watchful Cahusac, who quietly tripped him up, and then trussed him like a fowl. Thereafter, what time the Captain languished in his lady's smile within the cabin, Cahusac was dealing with the spoils of war. |
| 1912 |
In the glory of the following morning, sparkling and clear after the storm, with an invigorating, briny tang in the air from the salt-ponds on the south of the island, a curious scene was played on the beach of the Virgen Magra, at the foot of a ridge of bleached dunes, beside the spread of sail from which Levasseur had improvised a tent. Enthroned upon an empty cask sat the French filibuster to transact important business: the business of making himself safe with the Governor of Tortuga. A guard of honour of a half-dozen officers hung about him; five of them were rude boucan-hunters, in stained jerkins and leather breeches; the sixth was Cahusac. Before him, guarded by two half-naked negroes, stood young d'Ogeron, in frilled shirt and satin small-clothes and fine shoes of Cordovan leather. He was stripped of doublet, and his hands were tied behind him. The young gentleman's comely face was haggard. Near at hand, and also under guard, but unpinioned, mademoiselle his sister sat hunched upon a hillock of sand. She was very pale, and it was in vain that she sought to veil in a mask of arrogance the fears by which she was assailed. Levasseur addressed himself to M. d'Ogeron. He spoke at long length. In the end "I trust, monsieur," said he, with mock suavity, "that I have made myself quite clear. So that there may be no misunderstandings, I will recapitulate. Your ransom is fixed at twenty thousand pieces of eight, and you shall have liberty on parole to go to Tortuga to collect it. 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? |
| 1913 |
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. "It was last night's hurricane compelled our return. We had no choice but to ride before it with stripped poles, and it drove us back the way we had gone. Moreover - as the devil would have it! - the Santiago sprang her mainmast; and so I was glad to put into a cove on the west of the island a couple of miles away, and we've walked across to stretch our legs, and to give you good-day. But who are these?" And he designated the man and the woman. Cahusac shrugged his shoulders, and tossed his long arms to heaven. "Voila!" said he, pregnantly, to the firmament. |
| 1914 |
"If you will sail with me again," the Captain answered him, "you may do so on the condition that you make your peace with the Dutch, and restore the brig and her cargo." The condition was accepted, and Captain Blood went off to find his guests, the children of the Governor of Tortuga. Mademoiselle d'Ogeron and her brother - the latter now relieved of his bonds - sat in the great cabin of the Arabella, whither they had been conducted. Wine and food had been placed upon the table by Benjamin, Captain Blood's negro steward and cook, who had intimated to them that it was for their entertainment. But it had remained untouched. Brother and sister sat there in agonized bewilderment, conceiving that their escape was but from frying-pan to fire. At length, overwrought by the suspense, mademoiselle flung herself upon her knees before her brother to implore his pardon for all the evil brought upon them by her wicked folly. M. d'Ogeron was not in a forgiving mood. "I am glad that at least you realize what you have done. And now this other filibuster has bought you, and you belong to him. You realize that, too, I hope." He might have said more, but he checked upon perceiving that the door was opening. Captain Blood, coming from settling matters with the followers of Levasseur, stood on the threshold. 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. |
| 1915 |
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. He recruited five hundred adventurers in all, and he might have had as many thousands if he could have offered them accommodation. Similarly without difficulty he might have increased his fleet to twice its strength of ships but that he preferred to keep it what it was. The three vessels to which he confined it were the Arabella, the La Foudre, which Cahusac now commanded with a contingent of some sixscore Frenchmen, and the Santiago, which had been refitted and rechristened the Elizabeth, after that Queen of England whose seamen had humbled Spain as Captain Blood now hoped to humble it again. |
| 1916 |
"Is it that I have not warned you from the beginning that all was too easy?" he demanded between plaintiveness and fury. "I am no fool, my friends. I have eyes, me. And I see. I see an abandoned fort at the entrance of the lake, and nobody there to fire a gun at us when we came in. Then I suspect the trap. Who would not that had eyes and brain? Bah! we come on. What do we find? A city, abandoned like the fort; a city out of which the people have taken all things of value. Again I warn Captain Blood. It is a trap, I say. We are to come on; always to come on, without opposition, until we find that it is too late to go to sea again, that we cannot go back at all. But no one will listen to me. You all know so much more. Name of God! Captain Blood, he will go on, and we go on. We go to Gibraltar. True that at last, after long time, we catch the Deputy-Governor; true, we make him pay big ransom for Gibraltar; true between that ransom and the loot we return here with some two thousand pieces of eight. But what is it, in reality, will you tell me? Or shall I tell you? It is a piece of cheese - a piece of cheese in a mousetrap, and we are the little mice. Goddam! And the cats - oh, the cats they wait for us! The cats are those four Spanish ships of war that have come meantime. And they wait for us outside the bottle-neck of this lagoon. Mort de Dieu! That is what comes of the damned obstinacy of your fine Captain Blood." Wolverstone laughed. Cahusac exploded in fury. "Ah, sangdieu! Tu ris, animal? You laugh! Tell me this: How do we get out again unless we accept the terms of Monsieur the Admiral of Spain?" From the buccaneers at the foot of the steps came an angry rumble of approval. The single eye of the gigantic Wolverstone rolled terribly, and he clenched his great fists as if to strike the Frenchman, who was exposing them to mutiny. But Cahusac was not daunted. The mood of the men enheartened him. "You think, perhaps, this your Captain Blood is the good God. That he can make miracles, eh? |
| 1917 |
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! Nom de Dieu! Was it my fault that..." "Was it any one else's fault that you ran your ship La Foudre aground on the shoal in the middle of the lake? You would not be piloted. You knew your way. You took no soundings even. The result was that we lost three precious days in getting canoes to bring off your men and your gear. Those three days gave the folk at Gibraltar not only time to hear of our coming, but time in which to get away. After that, and because of it, we had to follow the Governor to his infernal island fortress, and a fortnight and best part of a hundred lives were lost in reducing it. |
| 1918 |
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. "And what is more, they've succeeded. Audaces fortuna juvat. Bedad, they knew their world, the old Romans." He breathed into his companions and even into Cahusac some of his own spirit of confidence, and in confidence all went busily to work. For three days from sunrise to sunset, the buccaneers laboured and sweated to complete the preparations for the action that was to procure them their deliverance. Time pressed. They must strike before Don Miguel de Espinosa received the reenforcement of that fifth galleon, the Santo Nino, which was coming to join him from La Guayra. Their principal operations were on the larger of the two sloops captured at Gibraltar; to which vessel was assigned the leading part in Captain Blood's scheme. They began by tearing down all bulkheads, until they had reduced her to the merest shell, and in her sides they broke open so many ports that her gunwale was converted into the semblance of a grating. Next they increased by a half-dozen the scuttles in her deck, whilst into her hull they packed all the tar and pitch and brimstone that they could find in the town, to which they added six barrels of gunpowder, placed on end like guns at the open ports on her larboard side. On the evening of the fourth day, everything being now in readiness, all were got aboard, and the empty, pleasant city of Maracaybo was at last abandoned. But they did not weigh anchor until some two hours after midnight. Then, at last, on the first of the ebb, they drifted silently down towards the bar with all canvas furled save only their spiltsails, which, so as to give them steering way, were spread to the faint breeze that stirred through the purple darkness of the tropical night. |
| 1919 |
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. Straight for the Admiral's great ship, the Encarnacion, did Wolverstone head the sloop; then, lashing down the helm, he kindled from a match that hung ready lighted beside him a great torch of thickly plaited straw that had been steeped in bitumen. First it glowed, then as he swung it round his head, it burst into flame, just as the slight vessel went crashing and bumping and scraping against the side of the flagship, whilst rigging became tangled with rigging, to the straining of yards and snapping of spars overhead. |
| 1920 |
His six men stood at their posts on the larboard side, stark naked, each armed with a grapnel, four of them on the gunwale, two of them aloft. At the moment of impact these grapnels were slung to bind the Spaniard to them, those aloft being intended to complete and preserve the entanglement of the rigging. Aboard the rudely awakened galleon all was confused hurrying, scurrying, trumpeting, and shouting. At first there had been a desperately hurried attempt to get up the anchor; but this was abandoned as being already too late; and conceiving themselves on the point of being boarded, the Spaniards stood to arms to ward off the onslaught. Its slowness in coming intrigued them, being so different from the usual tactics of the buccaneers. Further intrigued were they by the sight of the gigantic Wolverstone speeding naked along his deck with a great flaming torch held high. Not until he had completed his work did they begin to suspect the truth - that he was lighting slow-matches - and then one of their officers rendered reckless by panic ordered a boarding-party on to the shop. The order came too late. Wolverstone had seen his six fellows drop overboard after the grapnels were fixed, and then had sped, himself, to the starboard gunwale. 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. |
| 1921 |
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. 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. |
| 1922 |
Thence, some in boats and some by swimming, the Admiral got his crew ashore on Palomas as best he could. And then, just as Captain Blood accounted the victory won, and that his way out of that trap to the open sea beyond lay clear, the fort suddenly revealed its formidable and utterly unsuspected strength. With a roar the cannons-royal proclaimed themselves, and the Arabella staggered under a blow that smashed her bulwarks at the waist and scattered death and confusion among the seamen gathered there. Had not Pitt, her master, himself seized the whipstaff and put the helm hard over to swing her sharply off to starboard, she must have suffered still worse from the second volley that followed fast upon the first. Meanwhile it had fared even worse with the frailer Infanta. Although hit by one shot only, this had crushed her larboard timbers on the waterline, starting a leak that must presently have filled her, but for the prompt action of the experienced Yberville in ordering her larboard guns to be flung overboard. Thus lightened, and listing now to starboard, he fetched her about, and went staggering after the retreating Arabella, followed by the fire of the fort, which did them, however, little further damage. Out of range, at last, they lay to, joined by the Elizabeth and the San Felipe, to consider their position. It was a crestfallen Captain Blood who presided over that hastily summoned council held on the poop-deck of the Arabella in the brilliant morning sunshine. It was, he declared afterwards, one of the bitterest moments in his career. He was compelled to digest the fact that having conducted the engagement with a skill of which he might justly be proud, having destroyed a force so superior in ships and guns and men that Don Miguel de Espinosa had justifiably deemed it overwhelming, his victory was rendered barren by three lucky shots from an unsuspected battery by which they had been surprised. And barren must their victory remain until they could reduce the fort that still remained to defend the passage. |
| 1923 |
Disclosing its contents to him, he despatched him with it to Don Miguel. His choice of a messenger was shrewd. The Deputy-Governor was of all men the most anxious for the deliverance of his city, the one man who on his own account would plead most fervently for its preservation at all costs from the fate with which Captain Blood was threatening it. And as he reckoned so it befell. The Deputy-Governor added his own passionate pleading to the proposals of the letter. But Don Miguel was of stouter heart. True, his fleet had been partly destroyed and partly captured. But then, he argued, he had been taken utterly by surprise. That should not happen again. There should be no surprising the fort. Let Captain Blood do his worst at Maracaybo, there should be a bitter reckoning for him when eventually he decided - as, sooner or later, decide he must - to come forth. The Deputy-Governor was flung into panic. He lost his temper, and said some hard things to the Admiral. But they were not as hard as the thing the Admiral said to him in answer. "Had you been as loyal to your King in hindering the entrance of these cursed pirates as I shall be in hindering their going forth again, we should not now find ourselves in our present straits. So weary me no more with your coward counsels. I make no terms with Captain Blood. I know my duty to my King, and I intend to perform it. I also know my duty to myself. I have a private score with this rascal, and I intend to settle it. Take you that message back." So back to Maracaybo, back to his own handsome house in which Captain Blood had established his quarters, came the Deputy-Governor with the Admiral's answer. And because he had been shamed into a show of spirit by the Admiral's own stout courage in adversity, he delivered it as truculently as the Admiral could have desired. "And is it like that?" said Captain Blood with a quiet smile, though the heart of him sank at this failure of his bluster. "Well, well, it's a pity now that the Admiral's so headstrong. |
| 1924 |
Such was Captain Blood's assurance of success that he immediately freed the prisoners held as hostages, and even the negro slaves, who were regarded by the others as legitimate plunder. His only precaution against those released prisoners was to order them into the church and there lock them up, to await deliverance at the hands of those who should presently be coming into the city. Then, all being aboard the three ships, with the treasure safely stowed in their holds and the slaves under hatches, the buccaneers weighed anchor and stood out for the bar, each vessel towing three piraguas astern. The Admiral, beholding their stately advance in the full light of noon, their sails gleaming white in the glare of the sunlight, rubbed his long, lean hands in satisfaction, and laughed through his teeth. "At last!" he cried. "God delivers him into my hands!" He turned to the group of staring officers behind him. "Sooner or later it had to be," he said. "Say now, gentlemen, whether I am justified of my patience. Here end to-day the troubles caused to the subjects of the Catholic King by this infamous Don Pedro Sangre, as he once called himself to me." He turned to issue orders, and the fort became lively as a hive. The guns were manned, the gunners already kindling fuses, when the buccaneer fleet, whilst still heading for Palomas, was observed to bear away to the west. The Spaniards watched them, intrigued. Within a mile and a half to westward of the fort, and within a half-mile of the shore - that is to say, on the very edge of the shoal water that makes Palomas unapproachable on either side by any but vessels of the shallowest draught - the four ships cast anchor well within the Spaniards' view, but just out of range of their heaviest cannon. Sneeringly the Admiral laughed. "Aha! They hesitate, these English dogs! Por Dios, and well they may." "They will be waiting for night," suggested his nephew, who stood at his elbow quivering with excitement. Don Miguel looked at him, smiling. |
| 1925 |
And all this in spite of Don Miguel's four galleons and his heavily armed fort that at one time had held the pirates so securely trapped. Heavy, indeed, grew the account of Peter Blood, which Don Miguel swore passionately to Heaven should at all costs to himself be paid in full. Nor were the losses already detailed the full total of those suffered on this occasion by the King of Spain. For on the following evening, off the coast of Oruba, at the mouth of the Gulf of Venezuela, Captain Blood's fleet came upon the belated Santo Nino, speeding under full sail to reenforce Don Miguel at Maracaybo. At first the Spaniard had conceived that she was meeting the victorious fleet of Don Miguel, returning from the destruction of the pirates. When at comparatively close quarters the pennon of St. George soared to the Arabella's masthead to disillusion her, the Santo Nino chose the better part of valour, and struck her flag. Captain Blood ordered her crew to take to the boats, and land themselves at Oruba or wherever else they pleased. So considerate was he that to assist them he presented them with several of the piraguas which he still had in tow. "You will find," said he to her captain, "that Don Miguel is in an extremely bad temper. Commend me to him, and say that I venture to remind him that he must blame himself for all the ills that have befallen him. The evil has recoiled upon him which he loosed when he sent his brother unofficially to make a raid upon the island of Barbados. Bid him think twice before he lets his devils loose upon an English settlement again." With that he dismissed the Captain, who went over the side of the Santo Nino, and Captain Blood proceeded to investigate the value of this further prize. 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. |
| 1926 |
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. 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. |
| 1927 |
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. 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. |
| 1928 |
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. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations. Observe it now at work in the affairs of Captain Blood and of some others. On the 15th September of the year 1688 - a memorable year in the annals of England - three ships were afloat upon the Caribbean, which in their coming conjunctions were to work out the fortunes of several persons. The first of these was Captain Blood's flagship the Arabella, which had been separated from the buccaneer fleet in a hurricane off the Lesser Antilles. In somewhere about 17 deg. N. Lat., and 74 deg. Long., she was beating up for the Windward Passage, before the intermittent southeasterly breezes of that stifling season, homing for Tortuga, the natural rendezvous of the dispersed vessels. The second ship was the great Spanish galleon, the Milagrosa, which, accompanied by the smaller frigate Hidalga, lurked off the Caymites, to the north of the long peninsula that thrusts out from the southwest corner of Hispaniola. Aboard the Milagrosa sailed the vindictive Don Miguel. The third and last of these ships with which we are at present concerned was an English man-of-war, which on the date I have given was at anchor in the French port of St. Nicholas on the northwest coast of Hispaniola. She was on her way from Plymouth to Jamaica, and carried on board a very distinguished passenger in the person of Lord Julian Wade, who came charged by his kinsman, my Lord Sunderland, with a mission of some consequence and delicacy, directly arising out of that vexatious correspondence between England and Spain. The French Government, like the English, excessively annoyed by the depredations of the buccaneers, and the constant straining of relations with Spain that ensued, had sought in vain to put them down by enjoining the utmost severity against them upon her various overseas governors. |
| 1929 |
The time for her return being now at hand, a passage was sought for her aboard the Royal Mary, and in view of her uncle's rank and position promptly accorded. Lord Julian hailed her advent with satisfaction. It gave a voyage that had been full of interest for him just the spice that it required to achieve perfection as an experience. His lordship was one of your gallants to whom existence that is not graced by womankind is more or less of a stagnation. Miss Arabella Bishop - this straight up and down slip of a girl with her rather boyish voice and her almost boyish ease of movement - was not perhaps a lady who in England would have commanded much notice in my lord's discerning eyes. His very sophisticated, carefully educated tastes in such matters inclined him towards the plump, the languishing, and the quite helplessly feminine. Miss Bishop's charms were undeniable. But they were such that it would take a delicate-minded man to appreciate them; and my Lord Julian, whilst of a mind that was very far from gross, did not possess the necessary degree of delicacy. I must not by this be understood to imply anything against him. It remained, however, that Miss Bishop was a young woman and a lady; and in the latitude into which Lord Julian had strayed this was a phenomenon sufficiently rare to command attention. On his side, with his title and position, his personal grace and the charm of a practised courtier, he bore about him the atmosphere of the great world in which normally he had his being - a world that was little more than a name to her, who had spent most of her life in the Antilles. It is not therefore wonderful that they should have been attracted to each other before the Royal Mary was warped out of St. Nicholas. Each could tell the other much upon which the other desired information. He could regale her imagination with stories of St. James's - in many of which he assigned himself a heroic, or at least a distinguished part - and she could enrich his mind with information concerning this new world to which he had come. |
| 1930 |
How the powder came there will never now be known, and the gallant Captain himself did not survive to enquire into it. Before the men of the Royal Mary had recovered from their consternation, their captain killed and a third of their number destroyed with him, the ship yawing and rocking helplessly in a crippled state, the Spaniards boarded her. In the Captain's cabin under the poop, to which Miss Bishop had been conducted for safety, Lord Julian was seeking to comfort and encourage her, with assurances that all would yet be well, at the very moment when Don Miguel was stepping aboard. Lord Julian himself was none so steady, and his face was undoubtedly pale. Not that he was by any means a coward. But this cooped-up fighting on an unknown element in a thing of wood that might at any moment founder under his feet into the depths of ocean was disturbing to one who could be brave enough ashore. Fortunately Miss Bishop did not appear to be in desperate need of the poor comfort he was in case to offer. Certainly she, too, was pale, and her hazel eyes may have looked a little larger than usual. But she had herself well in hand. Half sitting, half leaning on the Captain's table, she preserved her courage sufficiently to seek to calm the octoroon waiting-woman who was grovelling at her feet in a state of terror. And then the cabin-door flew open, and Don Miguel himself, tall, sunburned, and aquiline of face, strode in. Lord Julian span round, to face him, and clapped a hand to his sword. The Spaniard was brisk and to the point. "Don't be a fool," he said in his own tongue, "or you'll come by a fool's end. Your ship is sinking." There were three or four men in morions behind Don Miguel, and Lord Julian realized the position. He released his hilt, and a couple of feet or so of steel slid softly back into the scabbard. But Don Miguel smiled, with a flash of white teeth behind his grizzled beard, and held out his hand. "If you please," he said. Lord Julian hesitated. His eyes strayed to Miss Bishop's. |
| 1931 |
That happened early on the following morning. After having systematically hunted his enemy in vain for a year, Don Miguel chanced upon him in this unexpected and entirely fortuitous fashion. But that is the ironic way of Fortune. It was also the way of Fortune that Don Miguel should thus come upon the Arabella at a time when, separated from the rest of the fleet, she was alone and at a disadvantage. 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. Did she realize, he wondered, what was afoot? Her next sentence resolved his doubt. |
| 1932 |
"She is English, and she comes resolutely on. She means to fight." "God help her, then," said his lordship gloomily. "Her captain must be mad. What can he hope to do against two such heavy hulks as these? If they could so easily blow the Royal Mary out of the water, what will they do to this vessel? Look at that devil Don Miguel. He's utterly disgusting in his glee." From the quarter-deck, where he moved amid the frenzy of preparation, the Admiral had turned to flash a backward glance at his prisoners. His eyes were alight, his face transfigured. He flung out an arm to point to the advancing ship, and bawled something in Spanish that was lost to them in the noise of the labouring crew. They advanced to the poop-rail, and watched the bustle. Telescope in hand on the quarter-deck, Don Miguel was issuing his orders. Already the gunners were kindling their matches; sailors were aloft, taking in sail; others were spreading a stout rope net above the waist, as a protection against falling spars. And meanwhile Don Miguel had been signalling to his consort, in response to which the Hidalga had drawn steadily forward until she was now abeam of the Milagrosa, half cable's length to starboard, and from the height of the tall poop my lord and Miss Bishop could see her own bustle of preparation. And they could discern signs of it now aboard the advancing English ship as well. She was furling tops and mainsail, stripping in fact to mizzen and sprit for the coming action. Thus, almost silently without challenge or exchange of signals, had action been mutually determined. Of necessity now, under diminished sail, the advance of the Arabella was slower; but it was none the less steady. She was already within saker shot, and they could make out the figures stirring on her forecastle and the brass guns gleaming on her prow. The gunners of the Milagrosa raised their linstocks and blew upon their smouldering matches, looking up impatiently at the Admiral. But the Admiral solemnly shook his head. |
| 1933 |
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. 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. |
| 1934 |
A group of men squatting about the main hatch were drowsily chanting, their hardened natures softened, perhaps, by the calm and beauty of the night. They were the men of the larboard watch, waiting for eight bells which was imminent. Captain Blood did not hear them; he did not hear anything save the echo of those cruel words which had dubbed him thief and pirate. Thief and pirate! It is an odd fact of human nature that a man may for years possess the knowledge that a certain thing must be of a certain fashion, and yet be shocked to discover through his own senses that the fact is in perfect harmony with his beliefs. 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. |
| 1935 |
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. 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. |
| 1936 |
He's chivalrous to the point of idiocy." "And yet he has been what he has been and done what he has done in these last three years," said she, but she said it sorrowfully now, without any of her earlier scorn. Lord Julian was sententious, as I gather that he often was. "Life can be infernally complex," he sighed. Miss Arabella Bishop was aroused very early on the following morning by the brazen voice of a bugle and the insistent clanging of a bell in the ship's belfry. As she lay awake, idly watching the rippled green water that appeared to be streaming past the heavily glazed porthole, she became gradually aware of the sounds of swift, laboured bustle - the clatter of many feet, the shouts of hoarse voices, and the persistent trundlings of heavy bodies in the ward-room immediately below the deck of the cabin. Conceiving these sounds to portend a more than normal activity, she sat up, pervaded by a vague alarm, and roused her still slumbering woman. In his cabin on the starboard side Lord Julian, disturbed by the same sounds, was already astir and hurriedly dressing. When presently he emerged under the break of the poop, he found himself staring up into a mountain of canvas. 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. |
| 1937 |
"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. 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. |
| 1938 |
"Lord Sunderland designated him?" he asked, amazed. "Expressly." His lordship waited a moment for a reply. None coming from the speechless Deputy-Governor, he asked a question: "Would you still venture to describe the matter as a mistake, sir? And dare you take the risk of correcting it?" "I... I had not dreamed..." "I understand, sir. Let me present Captain Blood." Perforce Bishop must put on the best face he could command. But that it was no more than a mask for his fury and his venom was plain to all. From that unpromising beginning matters had not improved; rather had they grown worse. Blood's thoughts were upon this and other things as he lounged there on the day-bed. He had been a fortnight in Port Royal, his ship virtually a unit now in the Jamaica squadron. And when the news of it reached Tortuga and the buccaneers who awaited his return, the name of Captain Blood, which had stood so high among the Brethren of the Coast, would become a byword, a thing of execration, and before all was done his life might pay forfeit for what would be accounted a treacherous defection. And for what had he placed himself in this position? For the sake of a girl who avoided him so persistently and intentionally that he must assume that she still regarded him with aversion. He had scarcely been vouchsafed a glimpse of her in all this fortnight, although with that in view for his main object he had daily haunted her uncle's residence, and daily braved the unmasked hostility and baffled rancour in which Colonel Bishop held him. Nor was that the worst of it. He was allowed plainly to perceive that it was the graceful, elegant young trifler from St. James's, Lord Julian Wade, to whom her every moment was devoted. And what chance had he, a desperate adventurer with a record of outlawry, against such a rival as that, a man of parts, moreover, as he was bound to admit? You conceive the bitterness of his soul. He beheld himself to be as the dog in the fable that had dropped the substance to snatch at a delusive shadow. |
| 1939 |
Blood was of those few, as he had proved in the case of Mary Traill. It needed no further assurances of his to convince her that she had done him a monstrous injustice. She remembered words he had used - words overheard aboard his ship (which he had named the Arabella) on the night of her deliverance from the Spanish admiral; words he had uttered when she had approved his acceptance of the King's commission; the words he had spoken to her that very morning, which had but served to move her indignation. All these assumed a fresh meaning in her mind, delivered now from its unwarranted preconceptions. Therefore she lingered there in the garden, awaiting his return that she might make amends; that she might set a term to all misunderstanding. In impatience she awaited him. Yet her patience, it seemed, was to be tested further. For when at last he came, it was in company - unusually close and intimate company - with her uncle. In vexation she realized that explanations must be postponed. Could she have guessed the extent of that postponement, vexation would have been changed into despair. He passed, with his companion, from that fragrant garden into the courtyard of the fort. Here the Commandant, who had been instructed to hold himself in readiness with the necessary men against the need to effect the arrest of Captain Blood, was amazed by the curious spectacle of the Deputy-Governor of Jamaica strolling forth arm in arm and apparently on the friendliest terms with the intended prisoner. For as they went, Blood was chatting and laughing briskly. They passed out of the gates unchallenged, and so came to the mole where the cock-boat from the Arabella was waiting. They took their places side by side in the stern sheets, and were pulled away together, always very close and friendly, to the great red ship where Jeremy Pitt so anxiously awaited news. You conceive the master's amazement to see the Deputy-Governor come toiling up the entrance ladder, with Blood following very close behind him. |
| 1940 |
He noted the sheen of her red-brown hair, and how gracefully one of its heavy ringlets coiled upon her slender, milk-white neck. She wore a gown of shimmering grey silk, and a scarlet rose, fresh-gathered, was pinned at her breast like a splash of blood. Always thereafter when he thought of her it was as he saw her at that moment, as never, I think, until that moment had he seen her. In silence they paced on a little way into the green shade. Then she paused and faced him. "You said something of a message, sir," she reminded him, thus betraying some of her impatience. He fingered the ringlets of his periwig, a little embarrassed how to deliver himself, considering how he should begin. "He desired me," he said at last, "to give you a message that should prove to you that there is still something left in him of the unfortunate gentleman that... that.., for which once you knew him." "That is not now necessary," said she very gravely. He misunderstood her, of course, knowing nothing of the enlightenment that yesterday had come to her. "I think..., nay, I know that you do him an injustice," said he. Her hazel eyes continued to regard him. "If you will deliver the message, it may enable me to judge." To him, this was confusing. He did not immediately answer. He found that he had not sufficiently considered the terms he should employ, and the matter, after all, was of an exceeding delicacy, demanding delicate handling. It was not so much that he was concerned to deliver a message as to render it a vehicle by which to plead his own cause. Lord Julian, well versed in the lore of womankind and usually at his ease with ladies of the beau-monde, found himself oddly constrained before this frank and unsophisticated niece of a colonial planter. They moved on in silence and as if by common consent towards the brilliant sunshine where the pergola was intersected by the avenue leading upwards to the house. Across this patch of light fluttered a gorgeous butterfly, that was like black and scarlet velvet and large as a man's hand. |
| 1941 |
"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. 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. You must not blame yourself for anything." She swung to him with some impatience, her eyes aswim in tears. "You can say that, and in spite of his message, which in itself tells how much I was to blame! It was my treatment of him, the epithets I cast at him that drove him. |
| 1942 |
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. In that snug anchorage he found his fleet awaiting him - the four ships which had been separated in that gale off the Lesser Antilles, and some seven hundred men composing their crews. Because they had been beginning to grow anxious on his behalf, they gave him the greater welcome. Guns were fired in his honour and the ships made themselves gay with bunting. The town, aroused by all this noise in the harbour, emptied itself upon the jetty, and a vast crowd of men and women of all creeds and nationalities collected there to be present at the coming ashore of the great buccaneer. Ashore he went, probably for no other reason than to obey the general expectation. His mood was taciturn; his face grim and sneering. Let Wolverstone arrive, as presently he would, and all this hero-worship would turn to execration. His captains, Hagthorpe, Christian, and Yberville, were on the jetty to receive him, and with them were some hundreds of his buccaneers. He cut short their greetings, and when they plagued him with questions of where he had tarried, he bade them await the coming of Wolverstone, who would satisfy their curiosity to a surfeit. |
| 1943 |
On that he shook them off, and shouldered his way through that heterogeneous throng that was composed of bustling traders of several nations - English, French, and Dutch - of planters and of seamen of various degrees, of buccaneers who were fruit-selling half-castes, negro slaves, some doll-tearsheets and dunghill-queans from the Old World, and all the other types of the human family that converted the quays of Cayona into a disreputable image of Babel. Winning clear at last, and after difficulties, Captain Blood took his way alone to the fine house of M. d'Ogeron, there to pay his respects to his friends, the Governor and the Governor's family. At first the buccaneers jumped to the conclusion that Wolverstone was following with some rare prize of war, but gradually from the reduced crew of the Arabella a very different tale leaked out to stem their satisfaction and convert it into perplexity. Partly out of loyalty to their captain, partly because they perceived that if he was guilty of defection they were guilty with him, and partly because being simple, sturdy men of their hands, they were themselves in the main a little confused as to what really had happened, the crew of the Arabella practised reticence with their brethren in Tortuga during those two days before Wolverstone's arrival. But they were not reticent enough to prevent the circulation of certain uneasy rumours and extravagant stories of discreditable adventures - discreditable, that is, from the buccaneering point of view - of which Captain Blood had been guilty. But that Wolverstone came when he did, it is possible that there would have been an explosion. When, however, the Old Wolf cast anchor in the bay two days later, it was to him all turned for the explanation they were about to demand of Blood. Now Wolverstone had only one eye; but he saw a deal more with that one eye than do most men with two; and despite his grizzled head - so picturesquely swathed in a green and scarlet turban - he had the sound heart of a boy, and in that heart much love for Peter Blood. |
| 1944 |
The sight of the Arabella at anchor in the bay had at first amazed him as he sailed round the rocky headland that bore the fort. He rubbed his single eye clear of any deceiving film and looked again. Still he could not believe what it saw. And then a voice at his elbow - the voice of Dyke, who had elected to sail with him assured him that he was not singular in his bewilderment. "In the name of Heaven, is that the Arabella or is it the ghost of her?" The Old Wolf rolled his single eye over Dyke, and opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it again without having spoken; closed it tightly. He had a great gift of caution, especially in matters that he did not understand. That this was the Arabella he could no longer doubt. That being so, he must think before he spoke. What the devil should the Arabella be doing here, when he had left her in Jamaica? And was Captain Blood aboard and in command, or had the remainder of her hands made off with her, leaving the Captain in Port Royal? Dyke repeated his question. This time Wolverstone answered him. "Ye've two eyes to see with, and ye ask me, who's only got one, what it is ye see!" "But I see the Arabella." "Of course, since there she rides. What else was you expecting?" "Expecting?" Dyke stared at him, open-mouthed. "Was you expecting to find the Arabella here?" Wolverstone looked him over in contempt, then laughed and spoke loud enough to be heard by all around him. "Of course. What else?" And he laughed again, a laugh that seemed to Dyke to be calling him a fool. On that Wolverstone turned to give his attention to the operation of anchoring. Anon when ashore he was beset by questioning buccaneers, it was from their very questions that he gathered exactly how matters stood, and perceived that either from lack of courage or other motive Blood, himself, had refused to render any account of his doings since the Arabella had separated from her sister ships. Wolverstone congratulated himself upon the discretion he had used with Dyke. |
| 1945 |
There is war - formally war - between France and Spain in Europe. It is the intention of France that this war shall be carried into the New World. A fleet is coming out from Brest under the command of M. le Baron de Rivarol for that purpose. I have letters from him desiring me to equip a supplementary squadron and raise a body of not less than a thousand men to reenforce him on his arrival. What I have come to propose to you, my Captain, at the suggestion of our good friend M. d'Ogeron, is, in brief, that you enroll your ships and your force under M. de Rivarol's flag." Blood looked at him with a faint kindling of interest. "You are offering to take us into the French service?" he asked. "On what terms, monsieur?" "With the rank of Capitaine de Vaisseau for yourself, and suitable ranks for the officers serving under you. You will enjoy the pay of that rank, and you will be entitled, together with your men, to one-tenth share in all prizes taken." "My men will hardly account it generous. They will tell you that they can sail out of here to-morrow, disembowel a Spanish settlement, and keep the whole of the plunder." "Ah, yes, but with the risks attaching to acts of piracy. With us your position will be regular and official, and considering the powerful fleet by which M. de Rivarol is backed, the enterprises to be undertaken will be on a much vaster scale than anything you could attempt on your own account. So that the one tenth in this case may be equal to more than the whole in the other." Captain Blood considered. This, after all, was not piracy that was being proposed. It was honourable employment in the service of the King of France. "I will consult my officers," he said; and he sent for them. They came and the matter was laid before them by M. de Cussy himself. Hagthorpe announced at once that the proposal was opportune. The men were grumbling at their protracted inaction, and would no doubt be ready to accept the service which M. de Cussy offered on behalf of France. |
| 1946 |
Summoned to wait on him, Captain Blood repaired to the Castle of Petit Goave, where the interview was to take place. The Baron, a tall, hawk-faced man of forty, very cold and distant of manner, measured Captain Blood with an eye of obvious disapproval. Of Hagthorpe, Yberville, and Wolverstone who stood ranged behind their captain, he took no heed whatever. M. de Cussy offered Captain Blood a chair. "A moment, M. de Cussy. I do not think M. le Baron has observed that I am not alone. Let me present to you, sir, my companions: Captain Hagthorpe of the Elizabeth, Captain Wolverstone of the Atropos, and Captain Yberville of the Lachesis." The Baron stared hard and haughtily at Captain Blood, then very distantly and barely perceptibly inclined his head to each of the other three. His manner implied plainly that he despised them and that he desired them at once to understand it. It had a curious effect upon Captain Blood. It awoke the devil in him, and it awoke at the same time his self-respect which of late had been slumbering. A sudden shame of his disordered, ill-kempt appearance made him perhaps the more defiant. There was almost a significance in the way he hitched his sword-belt round, so that the wrought hilt of his very serviceable rapier was brought into fuller view. He waved his captains to the chairs that stood about. "Draw up to the table, lads. We are keeping the Baron waiting." They obeyed him, Wolverstone with a grin that was full of understanding. Haughtier grew the stare of M. de Rivarol. To sit at table with these bandits placed him upon what he accounted a dishonouring equality. It had been his notion that - with the possible exception of Captain Blood - they should take his instructions standing, as became men of their quality in the presence of a man of his. He did the only thing remaining to mark a distinction between himself and them. He put on his hat. "Ye're very wise now," said Blood amiably. "I feel the draught myself." And he covered himself with his plumed castor. |
| 1947 |
de Rivarol, as down from a thistle by the winds of autumn. The General of the King's Armies abused him - this man who was Governor of Hispaniola - as if he were a lackey. M. de Cussy defended himself by urging the thing that Captain Blood had so admirably urged already on his behalf - that if the terms he had made with the buccaneers were not confirmed there was no harm done. M. de Rivarol bullied and browbeat him into silence. Having exhausted abuse, the Baron proceeded to indignities. Since he accounted that M. de Cussy had proved himself unworthy of the post he held, M. de Rivarol took over the responsibilities of that post for as long as he might remain in Hispaniola, and to give effect to this he began by bringing soldiers from his ships, and setting his own guard in M. de Cussy's castle. Out of this, trouble followed quickly. Wolverstone coming ashore next morning in the picturesque garb that he affected, his head swathed in a coloured handkerchief, was jeered at by an officer of the newly landed French troops. Not accustomed to derision, Wolverstone replied in kind and with interest. The officer passed to insult, and Wolverstone struck him a blow that felled him, and left him only the half of his poor senses. Within the hour the matter was reported to M. de Rivarol, and before noon, by M. de Rivarol's orders, Wolverstone was under arrest in the castle. The Baron had just sat down to dinner with M. de Cussy when the negro who waited on them announced Captain Blood. Peevishly M. de Rivarol bade him be admitted, and there entered now into his presence a spruce and modish gentleman, dressed with care and sombre richness in black and silver, his swarthy, clear-cut face scrupulously shaven, his long black hair in ringlets that fell to a collar of fine point. In his right hand the gentleman carried a broad black hat with a scarlet ostrich-plume, in his left hand an ebony cane. His stockings were of silk, a bunch of ribbons masked his garters, and the black rosettes on his shoes were finely edged with gold. |
| 1948 |
"With the utmost submission, monsieur. But at the same time I will remind M. le Baron that my buccaneers number eight hundred; your troops five hundred; and M. de Cussy will inform you of the interesting fact that any one buccaneer is equal in action to at least three soldiers of the line. I am perfectly frank with you, monsieur, to save time and hard words. Either Captain Wolverstone is instantly set at liberty, or we must take measures to set him at liberty ourselves. The consequences may be appalling. But it is as you please, M. le Baron. You are the supreme authority. It is for you to say." M. de Rivarol was white to the lips. In all his life he had never been so bearded and defied. But he controlled himself. "You will do me the favour to wait in the ante-room, M. le Capitaine. I desire a word with M. de Cussy. You shall presently be informed of my decision." When the door had closed, the baron loosed his fury upon the head of M. de Cussy. "So, these are the men you have enlisted in the King's service, the men who are to serve under me - men who do not serve, but dictate, and this before the enterprise that has brought me from France is even under way! What explanations do you offer me, M. de Cussy? I warn you that I am not pleased with you. I am, in fact, as you may perceive, exceedingly angry." The Governor seemed to shed his chubbiness. He drew himself stiffly erect. "Your rank, monsieur, does not give you the right to rebuke me; nor do the facts. I have enlisted for you the men that you desired me to enlist. It is not my fault if you do not know how to handle them better. As Captain Blood has told you, this is the New World." "So, so!" M. de Rivarol smiled malignantly. "Not only do you offer no explanation, but you venture to put me in the wrong. Almost I admire your temerity. But there!" he waved the matter aside. He was supremely sardonic. "It is, you tell me, the New World, and - new worlds, new manners, I suppose. In time I may conform my ideas to this new world, or I may conform this new world to my ideas." He was menacing on that. |
| 1949 |
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. The buccaneer's face remained of the utmost gravity. Wolverstone was set at liberty that afternoon, and his assailant sentenced to two months' detention. Thus harmony was restored. But it had been an unpromising beginning, and there was more to follow shortly of a similar discordant kind. Blood and his officers were summoned a week later to a council which sat to determine their operations against Spain. M. de Rivarol laid before them a project for a raid upon the wealthy Spanish town of Cartagena. Captain Blood professed astonishment. |
| 1950 |
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. Volunteers and negroes had brought up the forces directly under M. de Rivarol to twelve hundred men. With these he thought he could keep the buccaneer contingent in order and submissive. They made up an imposing fleet, led by M. de Rivarol's flagship, the Victorieuse, a mighty vessel of eighty guns. Each of the four other French ships was at least as powerful as Blood's Arabella, which was of forty guns. Followed the lesser buccaneer vessels, the Elizabeth, Lachesis, and Atropos, and a dozen frigates laden with stores, besides canoes and small craft in tow. |
| 1951 |
Narrowly they missed the Jamaica fleet with Colonel Bishop, which sailed north for Tortuga two days after the Baron de Rivarol's southward passage. Having crossed the Caribbean in the teeth of contrary winds, it was not until the early days of April that the French fleet hove in sight of Cartagena, and M. de Rivarol summoned a council aboard his flagship to determine the method of assault. "It is of importance, messieurs," he told them, "that we take the city by surprise, not only before it can put itself into a state of defence; but before it can remove its treasures inland. I propose to land a force sufficient to achieve this to the north of the city to-night after dark." And he explained in detail the scheme upon which his wits had laboured. He was heard respectfully and approvingly by his officers, scornfully by Captain Blood, and indifferently by the other buccaneer captains present. For it must be understood that Blood's refusal to attend councils had related only to those concerned with determining the nature of the enterprise to be undertaken. Captain Blood was the only one amongst them who knew exactly what lay ahead. Two years ago he had himself considered a raid upon the place, and he had actually made a survey of it in circumstances which he was presently to disclose. The Baron's proposal was one to be expected from a commander whose knowledge of Cartagena was only such as might be derived from maps. Geographically and strategically considered, it is a curious place. It stands almost four-square, screened east and north by hills, and it may be said to face south upon the inner of two harbours by which it is normally approached. The entrance to the outer harbour, which is in reality a lagoon some three miles across, lies through a neck known as the Boca Chica - or Little Mouth - and defended by a fort. 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. |
| 1952 |
The fort was returning the fire vigorously and viciously. But the buccaneers timed their broadsides with extraordinary judgment to catch the defending ordnance reloading; then as they drew the Spaniards' fire, they swung away again not only taking care to be ever moving targets, but, further, to present no more than bow or stern to the fort, their masts in line, when the heaviest cannonades were to be expected. Gibbering and cursing, M. de Rivarol stood there and watched this action, so presumptuously undertaken by Blood on his own responsibility. The officers of the Victorieuse crowded round him, but it was not until M. de Cussy came to join the group that he opened the sluices of his rage. And M. de Cussy himself invited the deluge that now caught him. He had come up rubbing his hands and taking a proper satisfaction in the energy of the men whom he had enlisted. "Aha, M. de Rivarol!" he laughed. "He understands his business, eh, this Captain Blood. He'll plant the Lilies of France on that fort before breakfast." The Baron swung upon him snarling. "He understands his business, eh? His business, let me tell you, M. de Cussy, is to obey my orders, and I have not ordered this. Par la Mordieu! When this is over I'll deal with him for his damned insubordination." "Surely, M. le Baron, he will have justified it if he succeeds." "Justified it! Ah, parbleu! Can a soldier ever justify acting without orders?" He raved on furiously, his officers supporting him out of their detestation of Captain Blood. Meanwhile the fight went merrily on. The fort was suffering badly. Yet for all their manoeuvring the buccaneers were not escaping punishment. The starboard gunwale of the Atropos had been hammered into splinters, and a shot had caught her astern in the coach. The Elizabeth was badly battered about the forecastle, and the Arabella's maintop had been shot away, whilst' towards the end of that engagement the Lachesis came reeling out of the fight with a shattered rudder, steering herself by sweeps. |
| 1953 |
M. de Rivarol looked at him sharply, suspecting irony. But the swarthy face was bland, the keen eyes steady. "Let us hear your suggestion," he consented. Blood pointed out the fort at the mouth of the inner harbour, which was just barely visible above the waving palms on the intervening tongue of land. He announced that its armament was less formidable than that of the outer fort, which they had reduced; but on the other hand, the passage was very much narrower than the Boca Chica, and before they could attempt to make it in any case, they must dispose of those defences. He proposed that the French ships should enter the outer harbour, and proceed at once to bombardment. Meanwhile, he would land three hundred buccaneers and some artillery on the eastern side of the lagoon, beyond the fragrant garden islands dense with richly bearing fruit-trees, and proceed simultaneously to storm the fort in the rear. Thus beset on both sides at once, and demoralized by the fate of the much stronger outer fort, he did not think the Spaniards would offer a very long resistance. Then it would be for M. de Rivarol to garrison the fort, whilst Captain Blood would sweep on with his men, and seize the Church of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa, plainly visible on its hill immediately eastward of the town. Not only did that eminence afford them a valuable and obvious strategic advantage, but it commanded the only road that led from Cartagena to the interior, and once it were held there would be no further question of the Spaniards attempting to remove the wealth of the city. That to M. de Rivarol was - as Captain Blood had judged that it would be - the crowning argument. Supercilious until that moment, and disposed for his own pride's sake to treat the buccaneer's suggestions with cavalier criticism, M. de Rivarol's manner suddenly changed. He became alert and brisk, went so far as tolerantly to commend Captain Blood's plan, and issued orders that action might be taken upon it at once. It is not necessary to follow that action step by step. |
| 1954 |
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. de Rivarol. Swollen with pride by a victory for which he took the entire credit to himself, the Baron dictated his terms. He demanded that all public effects and office accounts be delivered up; that the merchants surrender all moneys and goods held by them for their correspondents; the inhabitants could choose whether they would remain in the city or depart; but those who went must first deliver up all their property, and those who elected to remain must surrender half, and become the subjects of France; religious houses and churches should be spared, but they must render accounts of all moneys and valuables in their possession. Cartagena agreed, having no choice in the matter, and on the next day, which was the 5th of April, M. de Rivarol entered the city and proclaimed it now a French colony, appointing M. de Cussy its Governor. Thereafter he proceeded to the Cathedral, where very properly a Te Deum was sung in honour of the conquest. This by way of grace, whereafter M. de Rivarol proceeded to devour the city. The only detail in which the French conquest of Cartagena differed from an ordinary buccaneering raid was that under the severest penalties no soldier was to enter the house of any inhabitant. But this apparent respect for the persons and property of the conquered was based in reality upon M. de Rivarol's anxiety lest a doubloon should be abstracted from all the wealth that was pouring into the treasury opened by the Baron in the name of the King of France. |
| 1955 |
Once the golden stream had ceased, he removed all restrictions and left the city in prey to his men, who proceeded further to pillage it of that part of their property which the inhabitants who became French subjects had been assured should remain inviolate. The plunder was enormous. In the course of four days over a hundred mules laden with gold went out of the city and down to the boats waiting at the beach to convey the treasure aboard the ships. During the capitulation and for some time after, Captain Blood and the greater portion of his buccaneers had been at their post on the heights of Nuestra Senora de la Poupa, utterly in ignorance of what was taking place. Blood, although the man chiefly, if not solely, responsible for the swift reduction of the city, which was proving a veritable treasure-house, was not even shown the consideration of being called to the council of officers which with M. de Rivarol determined the terms of the capitulation. This was a slight that at another time Captain Blood would not have borne for a moment. But at present, in his odd frame of mind, and its divorcement from piracy, he was content to smile his utter contempt of the French General. Not so, however, his captains, and still less his men. Resentment smouldered amongst them for a while, to flame out violently at the end of that week in Cartagena. It was only by undertaking to voice their grievance to the Baron that their captain was able for the moment to pacify them. 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. The Baron sat there scrutinizing ledgers, like a city merchant, and checking figures to make sure that all was correct to the last peso. A choice occupation this for the General of the King's Armies by Sea and Land. |
| 1956 |
Awhile yet it continued, to be concluded at last by an ungracious undertaking from M. de Rivarol to submit to the demands of the buccaneers. He gave it with an extreme ill-grace, and only because Blood made him realize at last that to withhold it longer would be dangerous. In an engagement, he might conceivably defeat Blood's followers. But conceivably he might not. And even if he succeeded, the effort would be so costly to him in men that he might not thereafter find himself in sufficient strength to maintain his hold of what he had seized. The end of it all was that he gave a promise at once to make the necessary preparations, and if Captain Blood and his officers would wait upon him on board the Victorieuse to-morrow morning, the treasure should be produced, weighed in their presence, and their fifth share surrendered there and then into their own keeping. Among the buccaneers that night there was hilarity over the sudden abatement of M. de Rivarol's monstrous pride. But when the next dawn broke over Cartagena, they had the explanation of it. The only ships to be seen in the harbour were the Arabella and the Elizabeth riding at anchor, and the Atropos and the Lachesis careened on the beach for repair of the damage sustained in the bombardment. The French ships were gone. They had been quietly and secretly warped out of the harbour under cover of night, and three sails, faint and small, on the horizon to westward was all that remained to be seen of them. The absconding M. de Rivarol had gone off with the treasure, taking with him the troops and mariners he had brought from France. He had left behind him at Cartagena not only the empty-handed buccaneers, whom he had swindled, but also M. de Cussy and the volunteers and negroes from Hispaniola, whom he had swindled no less. The two parties were fused into one by their common fury, and before the exhibition of it the inhabitants of that ill-fated town were stricken with deeper terror than they had yet known since the coming of this expedition. |
| 1957 |
Captain Blood alone kept his head, setting a curb upon his deep chagrin. He had promised himself that before parting from M. de Rivarol he would present a reckoning for all the petty affronts and insults to which that unspeakable fellow - now proved a scoundrel - had subjected him. "We must follow," he declared. "Follow and punish." At first that was the general cry. Then came the consideration that only two of the buccaneer ships were seaworthy - and these could not accommodate the whole force, particularly being at the moment indifferently victualled for a long voyage. The crews of the Lachesis and Atropos and with them their captains, Wolverstone and Yberville, renounced the intention. After all, there would be a deal of treasure still hidden in Cartagena. They would remain behind to extort it whilst fitting their ships for sea. Let Blood and Hagthorpe and those who sailed with them do as they pleased. Then only did Blood realize the rashness of his proposal, and in attempting to draw back he almost precipitated a battle between the two parties into which that same proposal had now divided the buccaneers. And meanwhile those French sails on the horizon were growing less and less. Blood was reduced to despair. If he went off now, Heaven knew what would happen to the town, the temper of those whom he was leaving being what it was. Yet if he remained, it would simply mean that his own and Hagthorpe's crews would join in the saturnalia and increase the hideousness of events now inevitable. Unable to reach a decision, his own men and Hagthorpe's took the matter off his hands, eager to give chase to Rivarol. Not only was a dastardly cheat to be punished but an enormous treasure to be won by treating as an enemy this French commander who, himself, had so villainously broken the alliance. When Blood, torn as he was between conflicting considerations, still hesitated, they bore him almost by main force aboard the Arabella. Within an hour, the water-casks at least replenished and stowed aboard, the Arabella and the Elizabeth put to sea upon that angry chase. |
| 1958 |
The third dawn brought with it a haze which circumscribed their range of vision to something between two and three miles, and deepened their growing vexation and their apprehension that M. 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. As the Arabella with the Elizabeth following closely raced nearer on their north-westerly tack, the outlines of the blazing vessel grew clearer. Presently her masts stood out sharp and black above the smoke and flames, and through his telescope Blood made out plainly the pennon of St. |
| 1959 |
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. "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. |
| 1960 |
Of the four they flung, two reached the Frenchman's decks, and fastened there. Swift as thought itself, was then the action of those sturdy, experienced buccaneers. Unhesitatingly all threw themselves upon the chain of one of those grapnels, neglecting the other, and heaved upon it with all their might to warp the ships together. Blood, watching from his own quarter-deck, sent out his voice in a clarion call: "Musketeers to the prow!" The musketeers, at their station at the waist, obeyed him with the speed of men who know that in obedience is the only hope of life. Fifty of them dashed forward instantly, and from the ruins of the forecastle they blazed over the heads of Hayton's men, mowing down the French soldiers who, unable to dislodge the irons, firmly held where they had deeply bitten into the timbers of the Victorieuse, were themselves preparing to fire upon the grapnel crew. Starboard to starboard the two ships swung against each other with a jarring thud. By then Blood was down in the waist, judging and acting with the hurricane speed the occasion demanded. Sail had been lowered by slashing away the ropes that held the yards. The advance guard of boarders, a hundred strong, was ordered to the poop, and his grapnel-men were posted, and prompt to obey his command at the very moment of impact. As a result, the foundering Arabella was literally kept afloat by the half-dozen grapnels that in an instant moored her firmly to the Victorieuse. Willoughby and van der Kuylen on the poop had watched in breathless amazement the speed and precision with which Blood and his desperate crew had gone to work. 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. |
| 1961 |
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. But for all their stubborn valour, they ended by being pressed back and back across the decks that were dangerously canted to starboard by the pull of the water-logged Arabella. The buccaneers fought with the desperate fury of men who know that retreat is impossible, for there was no ship to which they could retreat, and here they must prevail and make the Victorieuse their own, or perish. And their own they made her in the end, and at a cost of nearly half their numbers. Driven to the quarter-deck, the surviving defenders, urged on by the infuriated Rivarol, maintained awhile their desperate resistance. But in the end, Rivarol went down with a bullet in his head, and the French remnant, numbering scarcely a score of whole men, called for quarter. Even then the labours of Blood's men were not at an end. The Elizabeth and the Medusa were tight-locked, and Hagthorpe's followers were being driven back aboard their own ship for the second time. Prompt measures were demanded. Whilst Pitt and his seamen bore their part with the sails, and Ogle went below with a gun-crew, Blood ordered the grapnels to be loosed at once. Lord Willoughby and the Admiral were already aboard the Victorieuse. As they swung off to the rescue of Hagthorpe, Blood, from the quarter-deck of the conquered vessel, looked his last upon the ship that had served him so well, the ship that had become to him almost as a part of himself. A moment she rocked after her release, then slowly and gradually settled down, the water gurgling and eddying about her topmasts, all that remained visible to mark the spot where she had met her death. |
| 1962 |
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. It was not until the evening of the following day that van der Kuylen's truant fleet of nine ships came to anchor in the harbour of Port Royal, and its officers, Dutch and English, were made acquainted with their Admiral's true opinion of their worth. Six ships of that fleet were instantly refitted for sea. There were other West Indian settlements demanding the visit of inspection of the new Governor-General, and Lord Willoughby was in haste to sail for the Antilles. |
Комментарии