OPUS 21 (45 page)

"Something funny, Mac?"

"Not very. It's just that I've lost my mind."

"People have lost everything else in this damned hall!"

He went away.

Out in back, I suppose he had a boat to ferry people across the Styx. Soon I stumbled to the skirling thoroughfare and waved at cabs until one stopped.

Or maybe it was a hearse.

Or maybe it was a singsong boat plying in the ram alongside the doorman's draped dinghy. Certainly it was occupied by a multitude of people, many of them dead and many of them trollops.

Want Immortal Life?

Want me?

My reaction would come--next week--next month--never. I'd already had it. Since Thursday, I had been consumed by my reaction. This was robust information. My heart resumed its job. The infinite, posterior brain relaxed. The small, frontal analogue took sensible direction.

Our house in Florida would go on building now--for us. The flower-filled patio and the white roof with bunting vines abloom--the cypress bedroom up among the branches of live oaks, melaleucas, orchid trees, and sweet frangipanis--the workroom with books all around, a raised fireplace and a rail to put my feet on while someday, perhaps, I marked the typed pages of the long-projected Explanation. I could write it. I could devote all my time to it: twenty-four thousand dollars were going--not into my estate--but my account.

I spun the Astolat's revolving door. Ricky stood there-bright omen and good harbinger! Prayer answered and that best conduct I am capable of, rewarded. She wore a violet suit to match the strangest tint of her bejeweled gaze. She wore a hat with a violet feather to joust adversity and make the place for joy. Raindust glittered in her dark curls and the silver in her curls. She was smiling as she signed the register. How much she smiles!

She saw me.

"Darling!"

We kissed casually. We always do. Perhaps we are a little self-conscious in public and this may be because we are not, when we are alone with each other.

I thought she was there in response to the mute messages of the weekend. To go back with me if I wanted to go back--to stay if I wanted to stay. Possibly to shop for a day. But suddenly I could sense the wrongness of that.

"I decided I better fly down to see the doctor," Ricky said. "You won't mind waiting over another day?"

"What's the matter?"

You would have to know Ricky to know all that made up her expression, then. In her eyes was the way she felt about herself, about me; her mouth spoke of courage. ''I'm afraid the undulant fever's back."

"No. Please God, no!"

"I think I ought to be checked. The past few days, I've been running a temperature. And the old megrims have begun."

She smiled again.

It was one of her masterpieces.

We were together.

We had our lives. . . .

I patted her. The wings of my spirit began to beat against her pitiable prospect--

the racking weeks ahead, the shots and blood tests, clinical examinations, probings and slides and stains, reports, hospitalizations while the doctors observed, sweats, chills, toxic horrors, frets, pains, and bravery summoned every morning from the deep well of her to last another day.

The elevator rose.

"Hell," I said, the best I could say, "we'll get you on the vaccine today. You phone Dr. Frank immediately. And then lie down. I'll unpack you. In a few weeks, you'll be right as rain."

I fumbled my key into the lock and automatically took from the doorclip my accumulation of morning mail and messages. She asked about Paul and I told her the tale.

Afterwards, she went to the phone, dialed, and watched me with loving, apologetic eyes--as if it were her fault she was infected.

While she described to the specialist the symptoms of this new malevolence I went through the mail, stopped at a letter from my lawyer, ripped it open.

Enclosed in it was a note from my accountant. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, he wrote, wanted, on the following Thursday, to go over with me the records pertaining to my income tax declarations for 1945 and 1946. Records in filing cabinets in storage in Miami Beach. Records on high closet shelves in Rushford. Records stored here in the cellar of the Astolat. In suitcases, boxes, portfolios and old trunks. Records they would not be able to check over next Thursday--because it would take a week and cost hundreds of dollars to get them together. They'd be willing to wait the week and they did not care about the cost to me; their interest would be to see if perhaps, after interminable scrutiny of the dollars and cents of forgotten years, they could find any reason to add a few more hundreds, or a thousand, to the taxes already paid.

Were I a businessman, enamored of columns of figures, such a prospect might scarcely have scarred the surface of my attention. I am not. The order was another garnishee of tranquility--from then until I had assembled the records, held the conferences, and paid up, if any misjudgment were claimed or any disagreement ensued.

I felt chained to a tormented system I could forever deplore but never alter. The wasteful exigency closed around
me
like a jail.

Ricky hung up. I put the letter into my pocket. She would be harassed by it--

because I was. Let it wait till some happier time.

"Dr. Frank wants me to come right down," she said.

"Before lunch?"

' I'm not hungry, anyway, dear."

' I'll go with you."

"You stay here and eat!"

"You need somebody along--"

"Nonsense! I'm used to it. I won't hear of your going!"

And so we argued a little and she had her way. She went out alone in the rain with her misery.

There was a message saying that Harold had called.

I phoned back.

His usually calm voice was raised with emotion. "I got word the serial was done and Bob Durfree called before I sent for it. I've got some bad news for you, Phil. They've been dissatisfied with Durfree's editorial policy for quite a while. Over the weekend, the Board met and they've hired a new editor. Serials are out, from now on. I reminded the new editor that the characters in your story belong to them--and you can't sell it anywhere else. He said he was sorry; said he wanted short stories about Cynthia, as usual. But no serials. You know, they never consider a request as a commitment. I'm as sore as I can be! I realize you were counting on the money for your new house. But--can't you change the characters and do it over and let me try it on somebody else? It's a mighty good story!"

Harold is not just my literary representative. He is my friend. I didn't want him to guess how I really felt.

I told him I'd decide later whether to write the serial over or to chuck it. I hung up.

Went to the desk. The carbon copy of my summer's work was sitting there, mute and blurry in its box. I took it out and fingered it and wondered how long it would be before I'd get to that sober book which would try to tell what certain men had learned of human instinct and how different it was from what most of the rest of mankind believed.

Quite a while, I thought.

There were other things to do first. A wife to heal, a kid to send to school, a house to finish, taxes to pay, trips to make, furniture to buy.

Maybe a war to fight at some frustrated desk.

But then

the future didn't belong to me, anyway.

It doesn't belong to you.

It belongs to our children and their children; to God--whom I call instinct--whom you may never call or call upon--or whom you may prayerfully confuse with your own good opinion of yourself.

Look and see.

I went down to the Knight's Bar alone.

I was hungry.

(This is one of the marvels of Nature.)

Jay brought a menu.

"Terrible, about your nephew," he said.

"It's all right, now. He'll pull out of it."

"That kind of thinking, I guess, is more than men can stand."

"It's the thinking they don't do that they can't stand." Jay smiled a little. "Then they aren't any different from the rest of us."

"They aren't. Only--they don't know it." Jay glanced down at the menu. "Sole," I said, "and parsley potatoes. Tartar sauce and a baked apple."

My mind flared and guttered over the anticlimaxes of the day. Soon, it commenced to take its ribald revenge.

I sent a message to the neurologists:

Gentlemen:

Yours of the twentieth century received and lack of contents noted. Item. You have cut out hunks of the anterior brains of monkeys and found, after the surgery, they were able to live in the jungle just as well as before. Item. You have hacked out hunks of the posterior cerebral tissue of cats with the result that they lost their instincts: they no longer tended to their kittens, fed them, or defended them. Item. Your colleagues in medicine are getting similar results with human prefrontal lobotomies. And yet--you still deny that man and his works repeat the great pattern of his instincts! You deny that his reason, his image of himself which he alone deems reasonable, is but another reflection of this same pattern in another dimension. In closing, nuts.

I sent a message of truth to the theologists:

Dear Fellow Compulsives:

To insist you know God when you do not know logic or science is hideous. Those who say they know God and yet reject truth, however selectively, are playing at
being
God. And those men who play they are God, perforce use men as toys. When will you end this dreadful game? Sincerely.

A time will come, I thought, when man's chief passion will be to observe and to learn dispassionately--his passions.

But you won't be there, Mac.

For this reason, I sent a telepathic message to the School for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, where--at long last--the professors are assembled to try to find out something to teach:

Persons:

Cease trying to rectify the Bhagavad-Gita by means of the Uncertainty Principle.

Try algebra--since you are so much simpler than you think. Query: When will you exchange truths evenly with the Believers? So long.

As I say, I nonwired this missive. I got no answer.

The oscilloscope of my mind rippled sadly. Its little line ran straight, then finally shot up with further inquiry: Who sees that day is the augury of coming night? And who--

looking at the darkened sky--sees it to be the daylight of a trillion suns? Who further sees the great initial in the stars themselves--the F for Freedom that I dreamed of in a dream?

Whose brain will abide it all? Who will continue our Quest?

And next, I felt my solitude.

If any man is more alone than I in this society I would know it, for I would have met him in the spaces I inhabit.

True, I've seen a few in my distances. And Ricky goes there with me sometimes--

as she must.

In another sense, indeed, the whole company of my contemporaries is with me and I am alone only in knowing it.

For the dignity and purpose we dreamed of in the youth of this century has gone.

We do our work. We mind our manners. But our young hope has been dimmed by the predictabilities. Hence we all know how temporary we are, how brief our routines, how probably it is futile to quarry or to breed, to build or to wish, to sell or to instruct, to make these civilized exertions.

Camus' plague is on us; it has been here a long while. We call it materialism.

Progress that excludes Man.

We have no peace of mind.

And here is the question of it that the theologists and the scientists have not yet hit upon:

So long as one man suffers unjustly from his fellows, be he yellow or black or white, there shall be no peace of mind for anybody.

And here is the demonstration:

Whatever Man does that he should not, and knows he should not, and whatever man does not, that he knows he should, becomes the substance of the fear of every man, lest it happen to him in his turn.

Integrity of man to man is not a paltering "ideal"; it is man's most essential ingredient, for it measures his potential for continuum in the sufficient space and patient time of God.

Whoever thinks to have peace of mind, these days, is therefore the figment of his own imagination; whoever wants it for himself without thought to others is a criminal.

Only the man-concerned ever knows that fragmented trifle of tranquility permitted by our noxious times and customs. The rest are dead already in their souls--of science, of religion, of egoistic lust, of a deliberate return to childishness, of every fatal evidence of our plague.

Now a man--the Englishman--opened a newspaper noisily at his table across from me.

This is what I read:

Soon, fifteen million Americans would be organized (voluntarily, they call it) for Civil Defense.

A tenth of us regimented--willingly--for Civil Defense.

(Yet everyone who knows, proclaims there is no defense!) The men without imagination have spoken.

We shall be ready to police and put out fires, to evacuate and rope off radioactive areas, to deal with gas, bacterial clouds, falling fungi and shots caromed off the moon.

In the name of courage, fifteen million of us will be, if possible, meticulously imbued with the latter-day alarms.

Who says now that we are even a little sane?

For a moment, my mind was blacked out by despair.

But again and still its show went on.

We, who did not have knowledge enough of ourselves to fight, when the time came, for liberty at its source--for freedom of knowledge itself--are day by day losing the rest of our freedom.

It is a working of the great law.

And in what noble names the old tyrant takes us over!

Perhaps, I thought, we may understand in time, or be lucky, and get back a brighter version of the lost principle of freedom. And if not, the quicker we are slaves the better--for the necessity of freedom shall become plain that much the sooner.

I could see the exultant marching of the fifteen million defenders of the indefensible. The burial squads of the Atomic Age are forming. Soon it will be fashionable for women to knit Geiger counters. Two-minute speakers, hastily instructed at the Y.M.C.A. will explain the need for volunteers and tell us what must be done when it is too late to do anything. Boy Scouts will learn to decontaminate the same, old, innocent surfaces. And the prizes at ladies' bridge will have the shape of guided missiles.