The Grasshopper King (27 page)

All week I had wrestled with the problem of how to suitably commemorate my hoax before the very people it was intended to delude.
I had assured myself as the days passed that the solution would come to me, in a dream or a daytime visitation; but the clouds had stayed shut, and I'd woken up each morning as clueless as the night before, and here it was, almost time. If inspiration arrived now it would have to get straight to the point.

With me on the proscenium were the surviving principals of the Higgs affair. Ellen was there, along with Higgs himself, sitting at the table's head. Rosso and McTaggett sat side by side across from me; Dean Moresby, wheelchair-bound now, was at the foot of the table, the point farthest from his daughter. There was dour Slotkin, my predecessor, and to his left, seated in order of their service,
his
predecessors, whose names I had immediately and willfully forgotten after the initial round of introductions. The president of the Society was there, flanked by Treech and Mayor Meadows. Next to Treech sat Cheryl Hister, middle-aged and sallowed, with her husband beside her and a grim toddler clamped in her lap. Once again they'd made her wear her Happy Clappy's uniform; sallowed too, it bound her across the breasts and belly like a post-surgical dressing. Even Karl-Heinz Sethius had made it. The Society had flown him in, and now he sat on Higgs's other side, a tiny bright-eyed lawn statue of a man, talking vigorously to his correspondent, whether in English or German I couldn't tell, either not noticing or not minding Higgs's failure to respond.

Julia was at my left, observing the proceedings with a sharp, unsettling eye.

“But these are the same people who were ready to kidnap him,” she'd said the night before. “It just seems weird to be their guest of honor.”

“But what can I do? Protest? Make myself absent? It would look funny. Which is exactly what we have to avoid.”

“I know that,” she said. “I'm just saying.”

In the end she'd come along willingly, had even displayed a little enthusiasm at the outset; but that had drained as the room filled. She remarked sourly on my series of gin and tonics and snubbed the scholars to whom I grandly introduced her—ever more grandly as the
series of gin and tonics proceeded. Finally, recognizing that the night, for her, was past salvaging, I asked her simply not to say anything that would jeopardize my new standing among the Hendersonists.

“Then I won't say anything at all,” she'd responded.

Despite what I'd told Julia, I was not very worried about arousing suspicion. The scholars had swallowed our deception without a hint of skepticism; they had practically lined up to be fleeced. All the precautions I'd taken against exposure seemed foolish now. The scholars, handed what they'd awaited for so long, were in no mood to ask questions. Instead, they had thrown themselves fully into the project of deciphering Higgs's revelation. Already some had approached me with lines of Henderson's where insects appeared, asking almost demurely for my opinion.

All the same, I was desperately afraid of making a poor impression. In spite of all that had happened, these were my colleagues now.

Rosso got up to introduce me, and there went whatever calm I had. A dribble of sweat nagged at the collar of my hastily rented tuxedo. Rosso was lauding my unflagging devotion to the field, my academic courage . . . what was “academic courage”? Hardly listening, I didn't catch it. I was trying to compose my speech, or at least some innocuous opening from which I could spin off five minutes of nothingness—but all I could think of was
ladies and dupes, ladies and dupes, ladies and dupes
. . .

Then the introduction was over, and I found myself standing. I remarked the smoothness of my rise from my chair, and the great distance that now separated me from the half-drained gin and tonic I had left on the table—my seventh. I was more drunk than I had realized. With my head high and my mind empty of all thought and with the tag I'd forgotten to take out of the tuxedo pants rubbing a now-raw spot on the small of my back, I made my way to the lectern.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, my voice thundering from the
P
.
A
., queer and timbreless. “Scholars, friends, members of the Society, my soon-to-be colleagues and collaborators!”

I stopped to let that sink in. I was thinking of Higgs at Trieste—the audience reshaped itself into that long-ago crowd. There they were, sooty and bombed-out, innocent, rapt, and their various tongues all silenced in expectation. What would Higgs have said in my place? I felt that with a word—if I knew the right one—I could strike some resonant linguistic frequency, set the columns shivering on their plinths; the walls would bend outward in a soft plié, and the ceiling would come down to meet us. But I had no idea what that word could be.

I realized with a start that I had been silent for some time.

“Let me conclude,” I began, “with a joke, from which I think all of us, as academics, have much to learn. It seems there were these two racehorses.

“One night, the two horses were discussing their ambitions.

“The first racehorse said, ‘Listen. This business is all-or-nothing. Every race ought to be like life or death. Someday you break your leg and bam, that's it. If you were good enough your name lives on after you.'

“The second racehorse snorted and replied, ‘If that's the way you want it, fine. Me, I take it easy. I may never be famous but I'll live long enough to retire. I'll carry little kids around on trail rides. Peace and quiet, my friend, peace and quiet; that's the goal in life.'

“The two horses argued far into the night, each putting forth persuasive arguments for his position, neither gaining any clear advantage. Just before dawn a dog sidled into the stable.

“‘You two make me laugh,' the dog said contemptuously. ‘For your information, I just came from the house, and I heard both of you are being put down in the morning for glue.'

“The first racehorse turned to his companion, overcome with surprise. ‘My God!' he said. ‘A talking dog!'”

The scholars chuckled doubtfully.

“I think we can agree that all of us here tonight are talking dogs,” I said. “Albeit some of us talk more than others.”

And with that, having nothing more to say, I sat heavily down. I was dismayed to find that someone had taken my drink away. Rosso stood and beckoned up the crowd; they popped up from their chairs, clapping lustily and whistling, and over the loudspeakers came the recording of Higgs's appropriated voice, spliced into a loop: “Grasshopper. Grasshopper. Grasshopper. Grasshopper.” The words, repeated over the applause and the taped drumming of rain, sounded martial, like a coded plea for reinforcements from a plane lost in a hostile zone. I imagined Higgs strapped into a cockpit, plunging toward the wine-dark fields of occupied France, murmuring into his crackly radio: “Grasshopper. Grasshopper. Grasshopper,” as if his life depended on it, all the way down.

“That was disgraceful,” Ellen whispered in my right ear. Somehow she had spirited herself into the chair next to mine. I realized that she was even drunker than I was. She smelled like a rum cake.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I should have prepared something.” At the time there had seemed to be a reason for my feeble joke. No amount of effort could recover it now. I was exhausted and aware again of my uncomfortable tuxedo.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no,
no
.” She jerked her hands about in despair of getting her point across. “It was just what Stanley wanted.”

We both looked down the table to where Higgs sat. He was eating rolls from the wicker basket on the table, chewing methodically as his phony pronouncement rolled through the hall like a call to action, like ventriloquism. Beside him, Sethius had turned his attention to Mayor Meadows. He was chattering contentedly—it was definitely German—and the mayor was nodding, or nodding off. His lucid hours, I'd heard, came between breakfast and lunch, if they came at all, which (I'd heard too) was now at best a fifty-fifty bet. He had never faced a serious opponent.

Mayor Meadows propped his chin up on his fist.

“Come again?” he said amiably. And Sethius was off again, in his stutter-step German, and the mayor started up nodding, and I saw
that his elbow was planted in his bread pudding; and this sight was so unutterably sad that I almost began to weep. I wished Julia would say something. I lifted one hand to my temple.

Ellen slapped it away. “Don't you be sad,” she said.

I muttered some kind of denial.

“We won,” she said. “You saved him.”

Well, maybe I had. I looked at Higgs again; wasn't he a little different? Still silent, sure, his eyes still fixed forward like a plebe's, yet different, I told myself, some tension in his posture gone; but I could have been imagining this, and it would have been natural for me to do so.

And things were different for
me
, anyway; that much was clear. My job was finished, and so was my time with Higgs. Oh, I could go back to the house, back down to the basement—but I would only be a guest now. My life before Higgs had diminished, in my estimation, to a dreary prologue; and here I was already in the epilogue, not ready yet, I thought, to sum up what I'd learned. But Ellen was right. We'd won, and it was over. I allowed this fact to buoy me up to a wistful gladness. Happy now, I felt no less like weeping. But then, I was very drunk, and like all drunk people I was looking for an excuse to cry.

But I didn't cry, because now the scholars were coming toward me in a wave, clambering onto the stage, approaching me with hands outstretched. All of them had veiny old man's hands—even the women. As they neared me I could hear their noises of congratulation, thrillingly subservient. I was expected to shake every one of those pale hands. Above me, the lights were booming out, row by row.

“Julia,” I whispered, “keep me company. This is the part I hate.”

She turned slowly, like a turret, to face me. She looked incredulous and a little perplexed.

“You love it,” she said. And I had to admit that she was right.

I saw Higgs one more time after that. It was two weeks after the banquet; I had spent the interval in congress with the visiting scholars,
one at a time, twenty minutes each, nine to five. Each professor, I learned, had his own theory about Henderson, which he held tight to his chest like a helpless chick, guarding it from the cruelties of the world and enveloping it in warm assurances, feeding it the occasional regurgitated worm of his researches. And each was certain that from my “recollections” he could glean some once-and-for-all advantage for his cherished hypothesis; his chick would fledge, would own the air, while the others grew skinny, pinkened, and finally died open-beaked, half-buried in the bottom of the nest.

“Are you absolutely certain Dr. Higgs didn't mention lactation?” one scholar would say; or another, “Did anything in Professor Higgs's body language suggest Henderson's resigned acceptance of phenomenology?”

“Grasshopper,” I told them all, pleasantly, finally. “All he said was ‘Grasshopper.'” Then I sent them off, with a handshake that surprised them, even, at first, me, with its hammy state-senator firmness. At the door the outgoing scholar met the incoming one, the former trying to conceal his disappointment, the latter his scorn. And me? I was hiding a grin, a doozy, the kind they paint on clowns. I
liked
disappointing them. And I liked the puppyish expectance on their faces as they angled open my door; and I liked the sun-struck little office the department had supplied me, and I liked the secretary outside, perched on her ergonomic chair, blank-faced as a seal on a rock.
From now on
, I told myself, and I didn't have to finish the thought; didn't, in fact, have time to, because the next disappointment was already arranging himself in the seat across from me, already with his hands squirming in his hair, beginning to set out the foundations of what he'd come for.

Finally the last interview—with a genial Zimbabwean who wanted nothing more from me than some inkling that Higgs was aware, as anyone serious must be, of Henderson's lifelong preoccupation with the redistribution of mineral rights—came to its crestfallen close. The other scholars had dispersed to their institutions with their downy
theories and I was free to go. I passed out of the building into the drizzling, gouachy afternoon. The breeze smelled of distant barbecue and dust. I affected a jaunty hands-in-pockets step, imagining myself an absurd musical hero, peeked at by girls in windows. My thoughts wandered: the epinumerative case and its dual, possible triple function, all dependent on what was being overcounted and to what end; a woman passing by me with shopping bags, her mysterious frosted lipstick and fruitcake scent; then some words, just for sound, erudite, flagrant, derelict; and the handsome cash prize the Henderson Society had voted me, which would serve admirably in lieu of a new job to pay my rent; and could you barbecue in the rain or would it have to be inside? And another woman, in a marble-gray suit with heroic shoulders, and the position that would soon be offered me at Chandler State, which I would accept, and Julia. I stopped at a florists' and bought a spray of orchids the color of sunset. Carrying the flowers only reinforced my feeling that a song was about to start. Somehow the sun came out without the rain ceasing.