Moo (49 page)

“What goes up must come down, Ivar.”

“I’d have to study up just to teach introductory physics now. I’m that far behind.”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that.”

“You know, I was very romantic about physics when I first started. I came in through astronomy and the big bang theory, but actually, I was more drawn to the steady state theory. Studying physics was my method of contemplation. All through college and grad school, I put myself to sleep every night by imagining that the universe was inside my head, so vast and silent. I could lie there with my eyes closed and contemplate the universal darkness or, if I was in a different mood, I could contemplate the random scatterings of light. Darkness or light. Darkness THEN light. It worked. Every night I eased off into perfect rest, and slept eight productive hours. That was the point. I wasn’t like some of the others, who really got excited devising experiments or arguing about strong force and weak force. Apart from getting to sleep, my only real interest was how Oppenheimer got all those warring personalities to live together in the desert. I didn’t know a single other physicist who wasn’t bored by just the idea of personality. I think that I’ve loved being an administrator after all.” He sighed.

“Would you like another piece?” said Helen. “It’s nearly eight.”

“Let’s get married,” he said. He saw that she could not help looking shocked at this, so he pressed on. “Let’s get married in spite of the fact that we aren’t the marrying kind, even though I’m asking you at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons. I want to marry out of fear and for security, and because Nils is getting married! I want to live here because Marly and Father are invading my space, so I want to invade yours! I’m getting old and I feel alone and I want to feel less alone!”

Helen got up and went to the closet. She returned with his coat. She seemed to have retreated light-years.

He looked up at her and said, “Our getting married can’t be justified by reason or convention. We’re happy the way we are. Our relationship is satisfying to both of us just the way it is. There’s no reason it can’t go on like this for the rest of our lives. We would like it if it did. But, Helen—”

He finished the last bite of pizza and stood up, wiping his mouth on his napkin. She helped him into his coat as if, he thought, she was hardly in the room.

“—Helen, I want to. I want to get married. To you, that is. I want to get married to you!”

“Ivar—” She walked him to the door.

“Say yes just for now, for all the wrong reasons and at exactly the wrong time. Just for now. Let the word ‘yes’ cross your lips.”

She said, “Yes.”

He opened the door and walked out onto the stoop, not daring to look at her. He went down the steps to the sidewalk. His car, he thought, would be cold and unwelcoming. He wanted her to call him back one time, just once.

Then, behind him, she shouted, “Careful on the ice and don’t let them fire Mrs. Walker!”

B
ETH HADN’T BEEN
sure of the exact hospital protocol for ex-wives who weren’t really married to their husbands even though everyone they knew thought they were, who had four children with said non-husbands, but whose children were not speaking to their father because he-had-taken-up-with-a-younger-woman even though according to the terms of their nonmarital compact that no one knew about, outside sexual liaisons were encouraged, at least in theory, in order to subvert the capitalist tradition of marriage as a property relationship and the consequent intrusion of the corporation into private life. On a simpler level, Beth did not know whether X would want her there when he regained consciousness. On the other hand, he would not know whether he wanted her there, either, because he was so in the habit of mistrusting his desires that he never consulted them if he could possibly avoid it. The children, who had been there for about an hour and were now at home with a baby-sitter, were no help. Their notions of protocol did not, to begin with, include having a father who instigated political actions in front of university administration buildings. Beth had been in the room for a while. He was still unconscious, though the doctors said that he seemed to be mostly fine. His CAT scan showed a little swelling at the site of the injury, but no underlying damage. They implied, without saying so, that he chose to be unconscious. Her comment, also implied, was “Well, I wouldn’t put that past him.” Now she was in the vestibule of the front entrance, having a cigarette, her first in eight years. The smoke was simultaneously horrible and delicious. Across the parking lot in the darkness, picking her way around the ice, came a woman Beth knew for certain was The Woman.

Here was a protocol challenge that Beth knew well.

As the woman approached, Beth gave her the obligatory once-over. Nice boots, nice hat, but it was only twenty degrees out, and this woman was bundled up for twenty below. A hothouse flower. When she opened the door and came into the vestibule, she stopped to stamp her feet, and took off her hat and mittens. Dark hair cascaded over her shoulders. Her hands were pale and graceful and long-fingered. She slipped one of them under her hair and lifted it out of her collar.

Protocol demanded that Beth give her a meaningful glance, communicating their, well, not relationship, exactly, but their emotional juxtaposition. Beth did not. Instead, she stubbed out her cigarette and followed the woman back into the hospital as if there were no link at all.

The woman held the elevator for her and, when Beth got on, said pleasantly, “What floor?”

“Four,” said Beth.

“Oh,” said the woman. “Me, too. I have a friend who was beaten unconscious in the riot today.”

“Really?” said Beth.

The woman teared up. The area around her eyes was so delicate that it reddened at once, as if the skin she had there was the very best, most translucent available skin. She said, “It’s been hard to find out what happened. I was here earlier.”

Missed you, thought Beth.

“But he was still unconscious then. People who were there say it was shocking.”

“Oh, really,” said Beth.

The woman fell silent. If they really had been strangers visiting different patients, Beth would have offered her story, but she didn’t. The elevator stopped, the door opened, and Beth followed the woman out. Of course, in her deception, she hadn’t reckoned with the nurses’ station. One of the nurses looked up as the elevator dinged and said, “Oh! Mrs. X! We think he’s waking up!” The woman spun around and stared at her.

Beth smiled and held out her hand. “Oh!” she said. “You must be Cecelia! How lovely to meet you! I’m Beth.” Cecelia shook her hand.

In the end, they went in together, Beth holding the door for Cecelia, but then Cecelia remained at the end of the bed while Beth stationed herself where he would see her when his eyes opened.

And she was sure his eyes opened. She was watching. They opened
and she could swear that he saw her, but then they closed and stayed closed. No fluttering, no struggling toward consciousness. He had seen her and was now playing possum, she thought. After another ten minutes, during which she held his hand and pretended, for Cecelia’s benefit, to be tenderly concerned, she turned to Cecelia and said, “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s go out into the waiting room for a bit.” Cecelia, teary-eyed again at the sight of the large bandage on the back of his head, nodded.

When the door closed behind them, Chairman X opened his eyes and looked around, then shook himself a little. Mimicking a light coma was hard work, especially if she had a hold of your hand. Signs of life were like electricity that could not help passing across that connection, no matter how industriously you visualized your hand as a boiled noodle, etc. He took a deep breath. His head was throbbing, the room twisted a little to the left, and he was glad the light was dim. One display on the monitor he was attached to said, “69.” That would be heartbeat. Another said, “97.9.” That would be temperature. He was fine, then.

There had been someone in the room with her, probably the eldest. While he had not wanted to talk to his daughter any more than he had wanted to talk to the Lady X, it was nice to think that she cared enough to be there, watching from the foot of the bed. Chairman X smiled.

All in all, it had been a good day’s work. He did not quite understand why he was in the hospital or what day it was—the last thing he remembered was hearing the crowd shout, “Stop the Destruction! Stop the Destruction!” Clearly something had happened after that—perhaps one of the cops had hit him over the head with the butt of his pistol?—but he savored the memories he had. Even more students—almost thirty of them—had shown up for the third dawn vigil as had shown up for the first two. Around breakfast time and then around ten a.m. he had worked the crowd, now numbering a hundred or more—firing them up, first about the virgin cloud forest in Costa Rica, then about the ozone layer, global warming, habitat destruction, declining biodiversity, overpopulation. He’d talked and talked, and they’d shouted right back at him. Years of teaching had given him the lung capacity and the improvisational skill to go on and on, spinning out information in great eloquent nets that he threw over the heads of the listeners. He drew them in. They were his.

Without thinking, he reached for the telephone and dialed an outside
line. He needed to ask Joe, his graduate assistant, if the vigil was on for the next day.

O
UT IN THE WAITING ROOM
, Cecelia was saying, “No! They always say that, that the prisoner hung himself in despair or something like that. He was beaten!”

Beth made her voice soothing. “I know, Cecilia, they do always say that, and most of the time it
is
a lie, but in this case, he really did slip on the ice and hit his head on the fountain! I believe it. Joe saw it. Joe is on his side. That’s what happened.”

J
OE WAS SAYING
to Chairman X, “Goddamn! You mean you don’t remember jumping Dean Harstad? Shit, man! You were trying to throttle his eyeballs right out of their sockets! You kept shouting, ‘Admit it! Admit it! Admit the Green Revolution was evil! Admit cocaine is the ultimate cash crop! Admit your life is a bankrupt evil waste!’ ”

“I don’t remember anything about that,” said Chairman X. “You don’t remember rolling around in the snow? Fuck, man, I think you even bit him! You were ticked off, man!” Joe sounded full of admiration, and Chairman X found it tempting to give in to that.

“And then I fell on the ice and hit my head and was knocked out? He didn’t do this to me?”

“No, man, we pulled you off him, and some old guy was helping him over to student health, and you were just standing there, and then you were down, man!”

“Where was Gift? Did I attack him, too?”

“Shit, I don’t know. I mean, no, you didn’t attack him, and I don’t have any idea where he is.”

A
T THE NURSES’ STATION
, one of the nurses said to another one, “Look at that. His phone’s lit up. I thought he was supposed to be unconscious.”

C
ECELIA WAS SAYING
, “You know, to tell the truth, I don’t always get the feeling that he does think about me too much. For a while
there, he was calling me up ten times a day, but it was always to tell me the name of another species that would be threatened by the gold mine. Over Christmas, I made up my mind that too much of the energy of this whole thing came from me—”

“I know what you mean, though over the years, I’ve gotten used to that. But just by the way he told me about you, I could tell you were something special. It wasn’t just looks, either—”

“The thing is, he thinks I’m from Costa Rica, but I’m from L
.A
. My father is Mexican. The link to Costa Rica is fairly tenuous, actually, but he can’t seem to get over it. One thing I would do”—Cecelia eyed Beth, amazed that she was about to make this confidence, but really Beth had a certain way about her, and Cecelia had bottled all of this up for so long—“when he would press me for stories about Costa Rica, I would just make them up. They were, well, lies, really.” Cecelia looked down at her hands, overcome by an actual feeling of shame. “I wanted him to keep coming over.”

“It sounds like you were very lonely.”

A
FTER THE NURSE
finally left, Chairman X relaxed, opened his eyes, and let himself think about what Joe had told him. He had done it! He had actually thrown himself upon that turd Harstad, wrestled him to the ground, tried to strangle the truth out of him, and he couldn’t even remember it! If he fought to get beneath his headache to his memories, as he had twice since hanging up the phone, there was nothing new there at all, only the old image of what it might, would, could, feel like with his hands around Harstad’s throat and Harstad’s water-colored eyes popping and his blue lips croaking, “I’m sorry I destroyed indigenous agricultural systems! I’m sorry I imposed monocultures on delicate and diverse ecosystems! I’m sorry I was so arrogant and so stupid at the same time! I’m sorry I treated people who were well adapted to their ecological niches like fools and knaves!” He found no image, alas, of what it DID feel like. Chairman X looked at his hands. He had heard of kinesthetic memory, but that was something you couldn’t actually revisit. If he recalled correctly, that was simply the promise that if he ever got hold of Harstad again, his muscles and ligaments would already know what to do with him.

Of course, and this unwelcome thought was entirely unredeemed, he hadn’t laid a finger on Gift. Gift, as usual, floated above what you might call the slaughter on a cloud of money. When his fists clenched
themselves at this thought, Chairman X’s head hurt so much that he wished he was still unconscious.

A
T THE NURSES’ STATION
, one nurse said to the other, “His vitals are entirely normal, but I couldn’t get a rise out of him.”

“Maybe he just wants to be left alone. He’s awake, though. What we’ll do is, if the telephone light goes on again, one of us will just go in and surprise him while he’s talking.”

“What about them?” She gestured toward Beth and Cecelia, who were deep in conversation.