OPUS 21 (37 page)

and I let him have it."

"He asked for it."

"Did he!"

"But you gave him the wrong medicine. Why didn't you tell him it wasn't the disapproval of an uncle--the looks to come from men--but--the spruce routine?"

"Haven't you any feelings? That was his dream. Why louse that up, too? Let him dream! Someday, God knows, he may even meet one of those spruce-loving dopes with cute little things in her flannel blouse and her jodhpurs. Let him have her! I got tired of my uptown personality the minute I realized it led straight to the Rocky Mountains--and the farther from camp the better."

"He grew up in the West."

"Pardon my spurs!" Tears filled her eyes. ''I'm a sap, too. For a while--I really was in heaven. I really thought--this is love. Ye gods! What can happen to people who should know better is-unfair to humanity! And then I began looking for an out. I worked. Sure.

Honest working wife--for a couple of weeks. Then--working wife has lunch with the floor manager--in a hotel room rented for the lunch. One club sandwich--and one good, busy change from Paul. Then the stockboy--a hot-looking wop with long hair--took me out in his department to show me the new materials--and the place was deserted. So I knew I was a sap!"

I thought that over. "I'm glad you told me. I know how it is. I don't mind. It's you-and that's that. But there's one thing I wish you'd do. Write Paul a letter. Don't try to teach him a lesson by letting him see you here. He'd just tear up the place--or maybe hurt you--

"

"We've got a boy in the kitchen to take care of rough stuff.

"So Paul would get tossed on the street. And come back. And you'd have to call cops. I'm sure Hattie knows the ones to call. Then I'd get a buzz from jail. And Paul would have that indignity to sweat out--on top of everything else. Don't you see he holds the whole business against me--and he likes me? Against family, friends, the kind of people from whom he comes? Against the people he cares about--and the way of life he's been brought up in? If you'd write him the truth--he could transfer the damage to the place where it belongs. He'd hate you for a while--and what would that mean to you?

Nothing. By and by--he'd see that he didn't even hate you--maybe even liked you.

Understood. Then he'd be pretty grown up. Enough to hate the way we do on the earth, all of us, if he had to go on hating anything.

Marcia smiled gently. Her eyes were inaccessible. "You're right. I liked you--at lunch."

"Good."

"It could be. I'll tell you what. I'll write--on one condition."

"What?"

She moved quickly. She moved into my lap and put her arms around me. "My room's just three doors from here."

I didn't say a word.

"You'll remember it all your life. And I'll have something to remember, too. Paul's uncle! They all go for Marcia! Then--"there's about Gwen--"

"What?"

"She told us this afternoon. I'm jealous of Gwen. I'd like--just for once--to fix her.

After all--you're not like Paul; it isn't as if you'd never met a girl in my trade before. What have you got to lose? And I'll write that letter. When he sees it--he'll toss his damned torch in an icebox."

What about this Greater Love stuff? I asked myself.

She was kissing me--giving me, not invitations, but commands.

I got up with her and set her on her feet.

"No, baby. You're something. I don't blame Paul. But I play only for myself.

Never mix romance in a deal."

She slapped me and ran out of the room.

My ears ring all the time, anyway--night and day, day and night, as in the song, a sound like spring peepers at a distance, sometimes like a million dinner bells tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, and at other times like a flutenote I'd give a great deal to stop. They rang harder, now. She'd hit with her hand taut and compressed hard air against the shrill, soniferous membrane. It hurt like the dentist. I scrunched myself together and let the sweat roll and looked out the window. The pain calmed down and I kept staring out, hating the earth, afraid, miserable, cheap. I fought back.

Once upon a time, billions of years ago, there was a Knower who is identified these days by the name of God.

He was totally conscious.

He was the Custodian, which is to say the Other Property, of mass-energy and space-time. He was the sublime entropy of the primordial atom, It, the universe, the stable pattern, the All, harmoniously balanced, a fixed ecstasy unmoving and so without Age.

Unfortunately, He-She developed an Ego. (Serpent? Eve? The Old Adam?) It occurred to Him that the perfection whereof he was the Cognizant Comptroller might be more interesting if set in motion. A slight swirl, perhaps: something gentle, along an elliptical path.

(Such an impulse, of course, expresses a Flaw in God's consciousness, or perhaps only an extra electron in the whole, or--it may be--the infinite tedium of Infinity; most likely of all, the idea that Perfection is predictably unpredictable.) Anyhow--one deduced that He gave all His electrons and His positrons a twist.

Naturally, there followed an explosion. Naturally, this puffed Space into existence, to make room for itself.

(Out went the windows, the doors, and the walls.)

It follows that a fragment was a writer in the pre-Sanskrit tongues, and another was Abbé le Mâitre.

Of course--we want to be God's Little Helpers, wee bits of Him, and put it back together again so as to become Timeless composites of His Awareness.

Shall we, therefore, on the epochal day when the island universes start homing, be wise enough to rejoice?

When brighter, brighter, brighter glows the firmament?

When night becomes as day, and day as a blast furnace?

(Or--will the infalling clots by then be cold and ourselves so drowned and immobilized at the bottoms of hydrocarbon oceans as to be already avid for one more experimental whirl?)

Think why you fornicate! Is it not to bring together again these thunderous, silent fires? To perform your little, local reassertion of the reburgeoning I-am-so-God-is?

Look at the stars! What suitable illumination shines for love from every pretty pore of heaven!

Look at the city! The noisiest palaver of tenement, of factory and store--the talked-up edifices that speak back anathema--(removed some ways, or in some degree) lose their ugliness. Even they are like the stars which are beauty at a distance and might be beautiful close up--if you knew how to see, there.

Heat's haze--night's dark--snow--the gentle perspectives.

Look at the night!

The infernal Jersey shore battled the oblivion with Mazda bulbs, neon, sizzling arcs, and the globe's shadow eliminated all but beauty. Lights swam on the river.

Antediluvian animals with pairs of red-green eyes swam up and down the Hudson. Fish from the abyss--mammoth--with ladders of light along their shining sides surfaced and sloshed in the current, hooting and humming. Ah, Jersey! Fields of phosphorescent flowers and hills set out with lantern-bearing trees! Night-blooming paradise! The magic is our own--collective. What matter that beneath
one
particular lavender string of streetlights mad boys pitch clinking pennies--curse--push frowsy, young, reluctant girls up alleyways--and mad, obscene old men tipple in bars that reek with millenniums of human hellishness--and mad, subpersonal old
women
maliciously fling slops in
the
yards of their neighbors? This is not the one man but his panorama.

For can
they
not, all of them, stinking of their sweat and overswarming with diseased intent, look east across their river and see a pattern of illumination that would have made Nero hang himself with envy and Rameses change his gods?

Manhattan!

They
look. Great Heaven,
they
never see!

Directly below, on
the
sidewalk, a woman went one by one through the circular pools of
street
light. I could hear her heels crossing my life and every time she reached a
new
radiant circle I could
see
she had golden hair.
The
very beasts in the river ceased boasting to let her print the small, enchanting sound of woman's passage on the attentive dark. Her dress was green.

I soon took my leave.

7

My double bed was a sea and I was its derelict.

I read an article by a steelmaker that tish-pished those who are concerned over the possible exhaustion of America's iron ore. Run out in twenty years? this tycoon asked.

Ridiculous! There is iron enough for a century and no corporation is anxious at all, where such extensive futures can be seen.

I gave this oaf a hundred years to come to his senses in the third generation. It was an insufficient period. The iron ran out and he still foraged--a ghost rummaging in the raped premises of his great-great-grandchildren.

Go rue the deserts man's already made!

Paul didn't come.

I read some poetry I could not understand in
Harper's.

I got out the medical book on cancer and looked at throats for a while. I took the Gideon Bible from the bureau drawer and read the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians.

Then Psalms, awhile.

Then Luke, awhile.

I went into my bathroom and swallowed one of Tom's capsules.

8

It could have been morning; it could have been night; the light on the airfield was such as seeps across the northern pole in winter. Engines hiccupped and caught fire within themselves. Gouts of blue fire streamed from their steel nostrils and human figures warily aimed extinguishers as they crouched under the great wings. One B-29--a special craft--sucked up its ladder.

"Good luck!" a thin voice called.

The slam of a hatch replied. The plane snorted, bellowed, vibrated against its chocks, and lurched about. Like a house on casters--like a house-sized aluminum insect, it moved in the opalescent murk.

There was a pause.

At Flight Control, the ground officers of the Twentieth Air Force made a last check. It was not sergeant's work, or lieutenant's. Brass looked at the weather maps--high brass read the bulletins, squinted into the instruments, followed the meterological balloons, talked through telephones. Anxious brass at the hangar interrogated the mechs--

studied the quadruple checks, the four-colored V's ranged after a list of thirteen hundred and eleven critical parts of a very heavy bomber. In the officers' mess, captains, young majors, young lieutenant colonels filled their trays, walked to the tables, sat, listened while the juke box sang--

My mammy done tole me--Listened not to the song but to the quartet of motors on the gloomy, loud field. Above the coughing and the clamor, the roar and thump of other engines--came the long run, tightening nerves.

"There she goes!"

"War's over."

"Shut up! And who told you, lieutenant, anyhow? And what?"

The ship-wider than she was long and just under a hundred feet from tail fin to bombardier's glass snout-gained altitude. Below, the island sank in the sea of air-palms, runways, warm, damp tropical odor of mold, hangars and administration buildings, flags.

There was now only the sky and the Pacific. . . .

They would--someday--laugh at the B-29 even while they admired her, and more especially, the men who flew her. Schoolkids in a museum of the far centuries--walking along plush ropes--examining the early aeronautical exhibits. "What a clumsy contraption! How dangerous! They used to explode in the air, you know. They could only fly about five thousand miles--bumped along at three hundred an hour. Hour, mind you!

What on earth did they do to pass the time in such tight quarters? They fought with guns-

-yeah--those tubes. Central fire control, they called it--they could shoot eleven pairs at once. Shoot? A chemical explosion that pushed streamlined bits of metal from the tubes at low velocities--fast enough, though, to kill a man--or bring down such a crazy craft.

Who'd think--one just like that--took the first real missile--?"

The bright kids-to-be, perhaps. Their galleons and triremes.

She took off--the then-perfect air-frame, slick and silver--a multiplicity of engineering feats. She climbed. Five thousand. Eight.

"Okay. Pressurize."

The ears, hearts, lungs of sixteen men lost the feel of altitude and swiftly accepted the bubble of air that now flew in a metal skin.

Colonel Calm turned over the controls to Major Waite. The colonel's famous fighting smile flashed upon the proud navigator, the flight engineer, the idle bombardier, and the co-pilot. "You know the course, major."

The course, he meant, to the enemy.

The major had set plenty of cities on fire in his time. His brief time; he was twenty-six. Twenty-six years old and he'd flown courses that had burned out, smothered, smashed, and otherwise eliminated something on the order (he figured. being a man of mathematical bent) of three billion hours of human life. Expunged on that milk run. (You take the average life expectancy in enemy cities, multiply by days in a year and hours in a day, and multiply that by two further factors: average fatalities in a raid and number of raids led by Major Waite. Three billion man-woman-child hours, conservatively).

Colonel Calm glanced at Mr. Learned, the lone journalist permitted to go along--

to write the eyewitness account. Mr. Learned sat on a parachute, his spectacles aslant, his hair awry, lost sleep whitewashed on his sharp countenance. His knees made a desk for an aluminum hospital chart board and on this, on yellow paper, using a pencil of a soft sort with which his pockets bulged, he scribbled. Once, he hitched at the collar of his unfamiliar uniform. A moment later, he glanced up. He smiled.

Colonel Calm nodded and scrambled into the tunnel that ran to the rear of his ship.

It was a journey he detested.

The passageway--a straight, metal intestine lined with cloth--traversed the bomb bay and was of a diameter sufficient to contain one crawling man. If a pressurized B-29

were hit badly--or if it blew a blister--a man in the tunnel would be rammed through it by compressed air like a projectile and hurled against a bulkhead-head first, or feet first--at the speed of a hundred and sixty miles an hour.