Against the Day (131 page)

   
“Could’ve
been the light.”

   
“I
sure don’t know what to believe.”

“Take a picture next time. Whenever
that is.” Reef oddly unsure of himself. He gazed resentfully at his hat. “Look
at me. This hat. What am I doing here with these people? I thought I made my
choice back in New Orleans. Thought it was Anarchism from here on in all the
way till they couldn’t afford to have me around ’cause it’s the type of
persuasion only has one outcome don’t it. Kit.” It almost sounded like a call
for help. “I don’t even know who I fuckin am anymore.”

In the dream
they are all together at a social of
some kind, it is unnamed but familiar high country, spruce and aspens, water
running everywhere, creeks, ponds, fountains, more food than a church supper,
cooks in those tall cooks’ hats carving and dishing it out, barbecued ribs and
baked beans, icecream cones and sweetpotato pies, presentable girls, many of
them distant relatives, each face all but unbearably distinct, familiar though
never met before, fiddles and guitars and an accordion and people dancing, and
off at the edge of it Kit sees his father alone at a wood picnic table with a pack
of cards, playing poker solitaire. He notices at the time the cards are not
only marked with numbers, they somehow
are
numbers, some real, some
imaginary, some complex and even transcendent, Webb setting them each time in a
fivebyfive matrix whose eigenvalue situation is not so straightforward, but in
parallel to this Kit is still about six years old, and goes running over to
Webb. “You all right, Papa?”

   
“Real
dandy, Christopher. Everthin all right with you?”

   
“I
thought you looked, looked like you were feeling lonely?”

“Just
’cause I’m sittin here alone? Sakes, alone ain’t lonely. Ain’t the same thing
at all. They didn’t teach you that yet in school? Here.” The boy comes in close
and stands awhile in Webb’s onearm embrace, while Webb continues to lay down
the cards, making remarks—“Well look at this,” or “Now what do I do
here?” and Kit’s trying to identify characteristic polynomials, at the same
time nestling close to his father as he can get. “There’s worse than being
lonely, son,” Webb tells him after a while. “And you don’t die of it, and
sometimes you even need it.” But just as Kit’s about to ask what you need it
for, something out in the great neversleeping hydropathic, a sneeze, a dropped
omelette pan, a swamper whistling, woke him up.

 
Kit coalesced slowly into the dark
institutional hour when guests deferred to all day lay shelved, numbered,
irrelevant. Confused for a moment, thinking he was somehow in jail, that the
sounds of the place going about its slow digestive life were all voices and flows
and mechanical repetitions he was forbidden to hear in daytime, he stared
mouthupward at nothing, hope, or maybe only the
vis inertiæ
which
had kept him till now in
motion, draining away—approaching a terrible certainty he couldn’t
immediately name but which he knew he had to live under the weight of now.

He
must have wanted all along to be the one son Webb could believe in— no
matter what kind of trouble Reef might be rambling around out there looking to
get into, or how proor antiUnion Frank’s engineering ambitions might turn out
to be, Kit had always thought he would be there for his father no matter what,
if only because there was nothing in the way of it, nothing he could see. But
then just like that there he was, out of the house and down in the meanest part
of the U.S., and before he could even remember who he was, Webb was gone. If he
could only’ve been surer of Kit, maybe when the awful hour came to claim him,
he could have fought back by just enough extra will to survive after all.
Restricted now to séances and dreams, he could no longer say this to Kit in so
many words but must use the stripped and dismal metonymies of the dead.

Just
because Webb hadn’t denounced him tonight didn’t mean Kit was off the hook. He
had betrayed his father, that wouldn’t change—collaborated with his
father’s murderers, lived the richkid life they were paying him to live, and
now that that was over, he understood that whatever he might want to use for an
excuse, it couldn’t be his youth anymore, or what might be left of his
compromised innocence. He had turned against Webb the night he got back from
Colorado Springs with Foley’s proposition, and had made no effort to make it
right, till it was too late to do anything right.

He
lay there, sick and hollow with shame. How had this happened? What used to be
home was five thousand miles away now and another couplethree

straight up and down, and the only one back there who
mattered anymore was Mayva, the dwindling, resolute figure at the depot, in the
wind and the immense sunlight, the weight of all the shining metal under the
earth balanced against her and what she wanted, which God knows had always been
little enough. “Your Pa spent most of his life down there
. . . .
All he gave them, for what he got
back
. . .
their boughtandsold
vermin, and there’s still traces of his blood all up and down this country,
still crying out, that’s if blood was known to cry out, o’ course—”

It
might have been comforting to think of himself as one of Yashmeen’s holy
wanderers, but he knew the closest he’d ever got to a religion was Vectors, and
that too was already receding down a widening interval of spacetime, and he
didn’t know how to get back to it any more than Colorado. Vectorism, in which
Kit once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a coexisting world of
imaginaries, the “spirit realm” that Yale legend Lee De Forest once imagined he
was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, a way to escape the world
governed by real numbers. His father had been murdered by men whose allegiance,
loudly and often as they might invoke Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that
real axis and nothing beyond it. Kit had sold himself a bill of goods, come to
believe that Göttingen would be another step onward in some journey into a
purer condition, conveniently forgetting that it was still all on the Vibe
ticket, paid for out of the very account whose ledger he most wished to close
and void, the spineless ledger of a life once unmarked but over such a short
time broken, so broken up into debits and credits and too many details left
unwritten. And Göttingen, open to trespass by all manner of enemies, was no
longer a refuge, nor would Vectors ever have been Kit’s salvation.

Someplace
out ahead in the fog of futurity, between here and Venice, was Scarsdale Vibe.
The convergence Kit had avoided even defining still waited its hour. The man
had been allowed to go on with his dishonorable work too long without a
payback. All Kit had anymore. All there was to hold on to. All he had.

As
light began to seep in around the edges of the window blinds, Kit fell asleep
again and dreamed of a bullet en route to the heart of an enemy, traveling for
many years and many miles, hitting something now and then and ricocheting off
at a different angle but continuing its journey as if conscious of where it
must go, and he understood that this zigzagging around through fourdimensional
spacetime might be expressed as a vector in five dimensions. Whatever the
number of
 
dimensions it inhabited,
an observer would need one extra,
n +
1, to see it and connect the end
points to make a single resultant.

   
While
Kit struggled through the cheerless and unproductive time of night

known to Chinese of his acquaintance as the Hour of the Rat,
and Reef was

off being entertained in some steamy hydropathic swimming
tank with an undetermined number of erotomaniac tourist ladies, Ruperta
ChirpingdonGroin was wrapping up an allnight frolic with Yashmeen, most of
which regrettably had been passed in negotiation—there was to be no
question of sweet equality or even symmetry. As this process of
counterfeinting, flirtation, and deception carried its own lowintensity erotic
energy, it did not apparently collapse into the bothersome chore it too often
becomes for men and women, so the long evening wasn’t a total loss. Yashmeen
had been granted ten minutes’ reprieve from worrying about her uncertain
future, and Ruperta’s jealousy, a beast with an exotic dietary, had been fed.
The women were in fact surprised to find a sky full of morning light outside the
curtains, the sun about to clear the peaks, a sailboat or two already out on
the lake.

All
the world in love with love, except it seemed for Kit, whose desires were
consulted by no one, least of all himself. When he and Yashmeen met in the
Kursaal later in the day, both were disoriented from lack of sleep, and his
announcement of a detour to Venice for purposes of vendetta might have
exhibited a certain bluntness.

“Can
I square this with Brother Swome? He says I need to pick up the train to
Constantza, and according to the schedule he gave me, there’s some extra time
to get there. How much of a hurry do you reckon he’s in?”

“I
think getting me out of Göttingen was the main point for them. You were a
convenient element, you did your job. You needn’t feel obligated to them any
further.”

“But
this
. . .
other thing, we need to
see about it while the chance is open. And as long as Reef thinks he needs me
to watch his back, I can’t walk away from it. And whatever happens, it’ll move
fast.”

She
watched him, her brow troubled. “Good job your ticket’s to Kashgar, then, isn’t
it.”

   
“Maybe
nothing’ll happen.”

   
“Or
maybe they’ll kill you.”

   
“Yashmeen,
the son of a bitch has destroyed my family. What am I—”

“Only
envy. You are lucky to have any recourse. A name, someone who can be held to
account. Too many of us have to sit foolishly by while something comes out of
the dark, strikes, returns to wherever it came from, as if we are too fragile
for a world of happy families, whose untroubled destinies require that the rest
of us be sacrificed.”

   
“But
if it was you, and you had the chance—”

“Of
course I would. Kit.” A hand on his arm for only as long as it had to be.
 
“My plans are no longer mine to make,
these T.W.I.T. people believe that I

owe them my continuing survival, and someone has decided now
is the moment to collect the debt.”

   
“So
they’re taking you back to London?”

“First we go to Vienna, and then
BudaPesth. Some mysterious burst of Psychical Research activity. I gather I am
to be an experimental subject, but when I ask for details, they say it would
compromise the integrity of the study for me to know too much.”

“Is it worth writing you care of the
T.W.I.T., or will they open and read your mail?”

   
“I
wish I knew.”

   
“Who
can we trust, then?”

She nodded. “Noellyn Fanshawe. We
were at Girton together. Here is her address, but don’t expect quick replies.”

   
“And
your father—”

She handed over a sealed Sanatorium
envelope, embossed with the usual grandiose coat of arms.

“What’s this? Thought you two only
used telepathy.” He slipped it into an inside coatpocket.

Her smile was thin, formal.
“Telepathy, marvelous as it is, would not be—you say, ‘a patch’?—a
patch on the moment you actually put this into his hands.”

She’d
said more flattering things, he supposed, but none so trusting. He had a quick
thirdparty glimpse of them, renegades keeping up a level of professionalism
even if the profession had more or less done with them.

He
saw her off from a little quay where a lake steamer waited. T.W.I.T. personages
milled around, repeatedly throwing her looks of impatience and, it almost
seemed, of reproof. The sky was dark with rushing rain clouds. She wore a
simple waist and skirt, and a waterproof with a hood, and no hat. He would not
know how to manage coweyed pleading even if they gave lessons. He took her hand
and shook it formally but didn’t let it go right away. “Do you think—”

“We
would ever have run away together in real life? no. I find it hard imagining
anyone stupid enough to believe we would.”

The
boat backed into the lake, turned, and she was swept away, not bothering to
look back. Kit found Reef nearby, smoking cigarettes, pretending not to notice.

 
Kit allowed himself for a minute to
wonder how many more of these tearless adieux he was supposed to go through
before the one he really didn’t need, the one that’d finally be one too many.