First Person Peculiar (24 page)

“If my princess were to die, I would have no desire to live another day, even another moment, without her.”

“It has nothing to do with a desire to live.”

“Then what is it?”

I shrugged. “Instinct. Inertia. I don’t know. I certainly haven’t enjoyed being alive the past year.”

“And yet you have not ended it.”

“Maybe it’s not courage at all,” I said. “Maybe it’s cowardice.”

“Or maybe there is a reason.”

“For living? I can’t give you one.”

“Then perhaps it was Fate that I should appear at your house.”

“You didn’t magically appear,” I said. “You walked here from wherever it was you left your clothes.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head firmly. “One moment I was strolling through the gardens of my palace in Helium, hand in hand with my princess, and the next I was standing in your yard, without my harness or my weapons. I tried to return, but I couldn’t see Barsoom through the swirling snow, and if I can’t see it I can’t reach out to it.”

“You’ve got a smooth answer for everything,” I said wearily. “I’ll bet you ace all your Rorschach tests, too.”

“You know all your neighbors,” said John. “Have you ever seen me before? How far do you think a naked man could get in this blizzard? Have the police come by to warn you of an escaped madman?”

“It’s a terrible night to be out, even for the police, and you seem like a harmless enough madman,” I replied.

“Now who has the smooth answer?”

“Okay, fine—you’re John Carter, and Dejah Thoris is up there somewhere waiting for you, and it was Fate that brought you here, and tomorrow morning a very worried man won’t show up looking for his missing cousin or brother.”

“You have my books,” he said. “Some of them anyway. I saw them on a shelf in your study. Use them. Ask me anything you want.”

“What would that prove? There’s probably a thousand kids who can recite them word for word.”

“Then I guess we’ll spend the night in silence.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll ask you some questions—but the answers won’t be in the books.”

“Fine.”

“All right,” I said. “How can you be so smitten with a woman who was hatched from an egg?”

“How can you love a woman of Irish or Polish or Brazilian descent?” he asked. “How can you love a black woman, or a red one, or a white one? How can you love a Christian or a Jew? I love my princess because of what she is, not what she might have been.” He paused. “Why are you smiling?”

“I was thinking that we’re growing a perceptive crop of madmen this year.”

He gestured to one of Lisa’s photos. “I take it she had nothing in common with you.”

“She had everything in common with me,” I said. “Except heritage and religion and upbringing. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Why should it be?” he asked. “I never thought it was odd to love a Martian woman.”

“I suppose if you can believe there are people on Mars, even people who have hatched from eggs, it’s easy enough to believe you love one of them.”

“Why do you feel it’s so insane to believe in a better world, a world of grace and chivalry, of manners and nobility? And why should I not love the most perfect woman that world has to offer? Would it not be mad to feel otherwise? Once you met your princess, would it have been rational to cast her aside?”

“We’re not talking about my princess,” I said irritably.

“We are talking about love.”

“Lots of people fall in love. No one else has had to go to Mars because of it.”

“And now we are talking about the sacrifices one makes for love.” He smiled ruefully. “For example, here I am, in the middle of the night, 40 million miles from my princess, with a man who thinks I belong in an asylum.”

“Why did you come back from Mars, then?” I asked.

“It was not an act of volition.” He paused, as if remembering. “The first time it happened, I thought the Almighty must be testing me as He had tested Job. I spent ten long years here before I could return.”

“And you never once questioned if it had really happened?”

“The ancient cities, the dead sea bottoms, the battles, the fierce green-skinned warriors, I could have imagined them. But I could never have imagined my love for my princess; it remained with me every minute of every day—the sound of her voice, the feel of her skin, the scent of her hair. No, I could not have invented that.”

“It must have been a comfort during your exile,” I said.

“A comfort and a torture,” he replied. “To look up in the sky every day and know that she and the son I had never seen were so unthinkably far away.”

“But you never doubted?”

“Never,” he said. “I still remember the last words I wrote: ‘I believe that they are waiting for me, and something tells me I shall soon know.’”

“True or not, at least you could believe it,” I said. “You didn’t watch your princess die in front of you.”

He stared at me, as if trying to decide what to say next. Finally he spoke. “I have died many times, and if Providence wills it, I shall die again tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Only my consciousness can traverse the void between worlds,” he said. “My body remains behind, a lifeless hulk.”

“And it doesn’t decay or rot, it just waits for you to return?” I said sarcastically.

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “I can only take advantage of it.”

“And this is supposed to comfort me—that a madman who thinks he’s John Carter is hinting that my Lisa might somehow be alive on Mars?”

“It would comfort
me
,” he said.

“Yeah, but you’re crazy.”

“Is it crazy to think she might have done what I did?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“If you had a terminal disease, would it be crazy to seek out every quack in the world who thought he could cure it rather than to sit around passively waiting to die?”

“So now you’re a quack instead of a madman?”

“No,” he said. “I’m just a man who is less afraid of death than of losing his princess.”

“Bully for you,” I said. “I’ve already lost mine.”

“For ten months. I lost mine for ten years.”

“There’s a difference,” I pointed out. “Mine’s dead; yours wasn’t.”

“There’s another difference,” he replied. “I had the courage to find mine.”

“Mine isn’t lost. I know exactly where she is.”

He shook his head. “You know where the unimportant part of her is.”

I sighed deeply. “I’d settle for your madness if I had your faith.”

“You don’t need faith. You only need the courage to believe, not that something is true, but that it is possible.”

“Courage is for Warlords,” I replied, “not for 64-year-old widowers.”

“Every man has untapped wells of courage,” he said. “Maybe your princess is not on Barsoom. Maybe there is no Barsoom, and I am every bit as crazy as you think I am. Are you really content to accept things as they are, or have you the courage to hope that I’m right?”

“Of course I hope you’re right,” I said irritably. “So what?”

“Hope leads to belief, and belief leads to action.”

“It leads to the funny farm.”

He looked at me, a sad expression on his face. “Was your princess perfect?”

“In every way,” I said promptly.

“And did she love you?”

I saw his next question coming, but I couldn’t help answering him. “Yes.”

“Could a perfect princess have loved a coward or a madman?” he said.

“Enough!” I snapped. “It’s been hard enough staying sane these last ten months. Then you come along and make the alternative sound too attractive. I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking that I’ll somehow find a way to see her again!”

“Why not?”

At first I thought he was kidding. Then I saw that he wasn’t.

“Aside from the fact that it’s crazy, if I bought into it I wouldn’t accomplish a damned thing.”

“What are you accomplishing now?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I admitted, suddenly deflated. “I get up each morning and all I do is wait for the day to drag to a close so I can go to sleep and not see her face in front of me until I wake up again.”

“And you consider this the rational behavior of a sane man?”

“Of a realistic man,” I replied. “She’s gone and she’s not coming back.”

“Reality is greatly overrated,” he responded. “A realist sees silicon; a madman sees a machine that can think. A realist sees bread mold; a madman sees a drug that miraculously cures infection. A realist looks at the stars and asks, why bother? A madman looks at those same stars and asks, why not bother?” He paused and stared intently at me. “A realist would say, My princess is dead. A madman would say, John Carter found a way to overcome death, so why couldn’t she?”

“I wish I could say that.”

“But?” he said.

“I’m not a madman.”

“I feel very sorry for you.”

“I don’t feel sorry for
you
,” I replied.

“Oh? What do you feel?”

“Envy,” I said. “They’ll come by tonight or tomorrow or the next day to pick you up and take you back to wherever you wandered off from, and you will believe just as devoutly then as you do now. You’ll know beyond any doubt that your princess is waiting for you. You’ll spend your every waking moment trying to escape, trying to get back to Barsoom. You’ll have belief and hope and purpose, which is a pretty impressive triumvirate. I wish I had any one of them.”

“They’re not unattainable.”

“Maybe not to Warlords, but they are to aging widowers with bad knees and worse blood pressure,” I said, getting to my feet. He looked at me curiously. “I’ve had enough craziness for one night,” I told him. “I’m going to bed. You can sleep on the sofa if you want, but if I were you I’d leave before they came looking for me. If you go to the basement you’ll find some clothes and an old pair of boots you can have, and you can take my coat from the hall closet.”

“Thank you for your hospitality,” he said as I walked to the staircase. “I’m sorry to have brought back painful memories of your princess.”

“I cherish my memories,” I replied. “Only the present is painful.”

I climbed the stairs and lay down on the bed, still dressed, and fell asleep to visions of Lisa alive and smiling, as I did every night.

When I awoke in the morning and went downstairs he was gone. At first I thought he’d taken my advice and gotten a head start on his keepers—but then I looked out the window and saw him, right where I’d spotted him the night before.

He was face-down in the snow, his arms stretched out in front of him, naked as the day he was born. I knew before I checked for a pulse that he was dead. I wish I could say that he had a happy smile on his face, but he didn’t; he looked as cold and uncomfortable as when I’d first found him.

I called the police, who showed up within the hour and took him away. They told me they had no reports of any nut cases escaping from the local asylum.

I checked in with them a few times in the next week. They simply couldn’t identify him. His fingerprints and DNA weren’t on file anywhere, and he didn’t match any missing persons descriptions. I’m not sure when they closed the file on him, but nobody showed up to claim the body and they finally planted him, with no name on his headstone, in the same cemetery where Lisa was buried.

I visited Lisa every day, as usual, and I started visiting John’s grave as well. I don’t know why. He’d gotten me thinking crazy, uncomfortable thoughts that I couldn’t shake, blurring the line between wishes and possibilities, and I resented it. More to the point, I resented him: he died with the absolute knowledge that he would soon see his princess, while I lived with the absolute knowledge that I would never again see mine.

I couldn’t help wondering which of us was truly the sane one—the one who made reality conform by the sheer force of his belief, or the one who settled for old memories because he lacked the courage to try to create new ones.

As the days passed I found myself dwelling more and more on what John had said, turning it over in my mind again and again—and then, on February 13, I read an item in the newspaper that tomorrow Mars would be closer to Earth than at any time in the next sixteen years.

I turned my computer on for the first time in months and verified the item on a couple of Internet news services. I thought about it for a while, and about John, and about Lisa. Then I phoned the Salvation Army and left a message on their answering device, giving them my address and telling them that I would leave the house unlocked and they were welcome to everything in it—clothes, food, furniture, anything they wanted.

I’ve spent the past three hours writing these words, so that whoever reads them will know that what I am about to do I am doing willingly, even joyfully, and that far from giving in to depression I am, at long last, yielding to hope.

It’s almost three in the morning. The snow stopped falling at midnight, the sky is clear, and Mars should come into view in any moment now. A few minutes ago I gathered my favorite photos of Lisa; they’re lined up on the desk right beside me, and she seems more beautiful than ever.

Very soon I’ll take off my clothes, fold them neatly on my desk chair, and walk out into the yard. Then it’s just a matter of spotting what I’m looking for. Is it Mars? Barsoom? Something else? It makes no difference. Only a realist sees things as they are, and it was John who showed me the limitations of reality—and how could someone as perfect as my princess not transcend those limitations?

I believe she is waiting for me, and something tells me I shall soon know.

***