The Grasshopper King (32 page)

My last stop was the coffee shop I had used to frequent with McTaggett, and where I had met Charlie again. I was hardly surprised to find it replaced by a Grape Arbor franchise. I bought a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter. Here it is, I thought: ordinary life. I gave my neighbors a covert once-over, assigning to each a set of circumstances. The natty gentleman at the far end of the counter I felt to be a salesman of luxury cars; the woman at his side was a traveling executive who'd share his room tonight; then there was a hard-hat; a defrocked priest; a pair of angry youths; a folksinger; and next to me,
communing defeatedly with a cruller, a hobo. None of them knew a word of Gravinic. If, through some absurd mischance, they were to hear it spoken, they would not even recognize it as a language; it would be just gibberish, even the boundaries between words impossible to make out, a hash of phonemes, babble, baby-talk. Higgs was dead. And it seemed to me that his death had propelled me into a subtly revised version of the world, one in which his long silence had never been broken; or perhaps there had never been a silence at all, or even a Higgs. Why else would everything connected to my secret be excised? I wondered whether my apartment was still there. A mad suspicion gripped me that an atlas, in this new world, would not even show the Gravine. In its place there would only be the careful stippling of landform, or a legend indicating scale.

“Are you drinking that?” the hobo asked me. “It's gonna get cold.”

I met his eyes, startled; and as I did I was struck full on by a vision of his solitary life, knocking hopefully at the back doors of farmhouses, huddled under straw in the corner of a freight car, pursuing something unguessable back and forth, east and west along the rails. He used what he needed and answered to nobody. He was my double! I felt like taking him by the shoulders, bursting into tears, calling him brother; but even in my agitated state I knew I was incapable of making such a scene.

Instead I leaned toward him and said, “I
understand
you”—trying to inject into that phrase as much as I could of my desperate comradeship.

The hobo nodded, tranquil. He placed his hand nearer my cup.

“You're not the first person to tell me that,” he said.

I left the hobo my coffee and waded out into the crowded, twilit avenue. People pushed by me, muttering darkly; car horns went off. Across the street a man dressed as a steer was handing out coupons for a steakhouse. It was a far cry from Athens. But then, I thought, where was Athens now? These days I supposed they had municipal buses there, and pickpockets and flower shops and a bickering local government like any
other city. The shrines to philosophy and art had all been broken up and carted off, stone by stone, to air-conditioned museums and the vast backyards of the wealthy. Time had worn the statues down to noseless anonymity. Maybe it was inevitable that it should happen that way.

The traffic carried me toward home, and when I arrived at the old warehouse I found that my apartment was still there, the same as I had left it. My pizza box still rested open on the table; next to it sat Miss Amanezar's letter, and the promotional brochure. I put them back in the drawer. The Belgian deeds awaited me at my desk. I let the familiarity of my surroundings rise up and over me like a warm pool; my terrifying glimpse of the world outside my circumscription began to recede; and as the sun slipped gasping below the line of buildings, I sat down again to work.

Four years later, a pair of London policemen, responding to complaints from a small convoy of collection agencies, hacked down the door to a Fleet Street flat and found a body that had been dead for a long time. The putrefaction was so far advanced that one of the constables had to rush from the room, eyes smarting, to throw up. When the stronger-stomached one, left to carry out the official procedures by himself, tried to turn the corpse's face up, the jaw sloughed off and a vile, lumpy fluid gushed over his hand. He didn't have time to run; he just crouched in the corner and coughed his breakfast out.

The apartment, aside from its occupant, was perfectly empty. There was no furniture but the bed and a low table, no books, no toiletries—no sign, that is, that the man who lived there had done anything in decades but eat and sleep. On the center of the table sat the empty envelope in which Higgs had sent his letter, forty years before.

“The deceased appears not to have been tampered with,” the policeman wrote in his report. “No identifying marks. No evidence of foul play.”

Downstairs, the other constable wiped his lips. A grandmotherly Indian had let him use her sink.

“But why on earth didn't you report the odor?” he asked her.

“The odor?”

“The odor of the . . . deceased. From upstairs. Didn't you find it suspicious?”

“Not a bit,” the woman said.

“How can that be?”

She shook her head, frowned with what looked to be infinite patience; for the stupid world, its stubbornness.

“It's smelled like that for thirty years.”

So Henderson was dead, and as if that weren't bad enough my telephone kept ringing. The calls started in the morning, and kept up through the following day, and the next; first people calling to see if I knew, then to make sure that I knew, then, assuming that I knew, asking what I was going to do about it.
Do
about it? I tried to be polite, though I hardly remembered how. The appropriate formulas came to my lips only slowly, and emerged with the inflections all flattened out and wrong, as if I'd memorized them syllable by syllable. By the time I went home I was exhausted to trembling.

On the third day, when the hubbub had largely died down (it was just the outliers now, lonely one-man Gravinics departments in Singapore and Perth refusing to accept they'd been the last to know), my most recent secretary came into my office to tell me that someone was waiting outside.

“He'll have to make an appointment,” I said. “That's the system.”

The system was that when people called for appointments, my secretary put them off—repeatedly, if necessary. In this way I avoided seeing almost everyone.

“I know,” she said. “But he's come from Japan.”

“McTaggett?” I said hopefully. She shook her head. “His name is Kosugi,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, suddenly without the will or vigor to resist. “Send him in. Thank you, Denise.”

My secretary lingered a little longer in the doorway. I looked down uncomfortably. Oh, God, I thought, wasn't her name Denise?

“I just wanted to say I was sorry about Henderson.”

She cast her eyes down at her headset mike. For the first time I noticed that she was not pretty.

“
OK
,” I said.

She slipped out the door and in a moment was replaced by Koiichi Kosugi. It had been many years since I'd seen him. He was treeish and stern, wide through the shoulders, and his business suit was of a deep, expensive blue. Kosugi had spent the last decade throwing himself into ludicrous business ventures from which he had emerged, time after time, unruined; all the while adding to his collection of Hendersonia, now the largest in the world. Henderson's littering citation was in his hands, and several rare first drafts—rare because Henderson so seldom wrote second drafts.

“Mr. Kosugi,” I said resignedly. “What can I do for you?”

He wheeled away from me so that the great tailored drape of his suit billowed at me like a map of the open sea.

“The Immortal Henderson!” he boomed.

“Died,” I said. “I know.”

“Is the name of the conference you're having. Starting December sixteenth. The ninety-fifth birthday.”

“Would-have-been birthday.”

“Don't stop me. I'm paying, so no difficulty with that. You just need to notify everyone. And arrange for the hall. Are we settled?”

“This is sudden. Even if we do agree to go ahead.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Then can I ask—”

He turned to face me. “
OK
. Ask.”

“Why?”

He put his hands deep, deep in the pockets of his blue, blue suit.

“I found something,” he said.

The morning the conference was to begin, a morning out of which wet snow dropped limply to the red, chopped earth of the campus, I was met on my way to Gunnery Hall by a local television crew. Their leader was a small-boned and purposeful blonde whose face, as I approached, resolved into a mask of professional interest. I recognized her, though I never watched television. She was always riding in parades.

“Professor Grapearbor,” she said, squarely in my way. “Got a minute for the six o'clock news?”

“One minute,” I said.

She made a curt, unreadable signal to the cameraman, who was slouching behind me on the path, chewing gum. He trudged over to his camera, which was covered with a tarp to keep the snow off. A red light lit.

“That's right, Tom,” said the reporter. “And it's all right here in Chandler City, where eggheads and experts from here to Tokyo have gathered to pay tribute to one of literature's all-time greats. I'm here with Chandler State's own Professor Samuel Grapearbor, a Henderson authority. Professor, would you describe this conference as a civic coup for Chandler City?”

“No comment,” I said.

She looked at me oddly.

“I mean yes.”

“According to experts,” she went on, “Henderson, who died this year in London at the age of ninety-four, has left us a long-lasting legacy. Professor, how is it that his poems are still relevant to us today?”

That they'd been relevant even at their writing was news to me. I wondered what experts she'd consulted. I searched for some response that would not make me seem a fraud, or a hopeless rube.

The cameraman made an impatient circle with his hand, catching my eye. He pointed at the camera lens: look here. I obeyed. I had read somewhere that in order to appear relaxed on television one was supposed to imagine the faces of the viewers across the glass, to make a sort of conversation out of it. Try as I might, I couldn't do it: couldn't make
up arbitrary faces. And I needed a backdrop—where would people
be
, at six o'clock? In living rooms? Kitchens? The Tooth and Nail, maybe, watching the big screen? Were they together or alone? Decent or in-? Were they even paying attention? Or were they occupied in something else while they waited for the weather to come on? How was I supposed to make all these decisions? It was ordinary life again, that enduring and intractable mystery. I didn't think I was getting any more relaxed.

“Professor?” the reporter said. “Relevance? We can edit this out.”

“I don't know,” I told her. “Luck, I guess.”

“Well, we all need that, don't we?” she said brightly. But annoyance had crept into her voice and I felt I knew her a little better.

“I'm afraid I'm running late,” I said. This was a lie. I scooted around her and set off down the path. She followed me. So I put my head down and hurried away like a perpetrator. The cameras lumbered along behind us.

“Any truth to the rumors that playboy multimillionaire Koiichi Kosugi will be unveiling a previously unknown Henderson work today?” She was matching my pace easily.

“No comment,” I said, over my shoulder.

“Do you yourself know what's on the agenda?”

“I don't know any more than you do.”

This was true.

“One more thing,” she said. “Some of our viewers will remember you as the person present when the late Stanley Higgs broke his thirteen-year silence. Do you think Professor Higgs would be proud of this weekend's activities here at
CSU
?”

I sped up again, half-jogging now, my feet slipping alarmingly on the slushy path. Finally I was outdistancing the crew. It was the cameras that held them back. “No,” I said breathlessly, “comment.”

The session was scheduled for one o'clock, but at twelve-fifteen, when I arrived, the hall was already half-full. I proceeded to my seat on the stage. Beneath me, the Henderson scholars filed in. In their neat progression
down the rows of seats, in their scarves and flapped fur hats and Gore-Tex parkas buttoned over their noses and mouths, they looked like perplexed schoolchildren, called in on a day when class should by all rights have been canceled by the storm. But looking closer I saw that they couldn't be mistaken for children at all: they were soft around the eyes, grayed and diminished. They looked, that is, like I felt. The shuffling, muttering sound of old men rose off them. I would not have been surprised at that moment to look down and see my own hands spotted and trembling, grooved with age.

One by one the conferees settled into their empty seats and began tugging at their outerwear. The run-off from the piles of hats and coats made channels down each row to the soggy, mud-stamped carpet of the aisle.

At the dot of one, Kosugi bounded onto the stage. I had thought his other suit was expensive; but this one was so black, so rich, that sitting behind him I felt I was looking through a rent into intergalactic space.