She wore a simple plain white robe looped at her waist. On her feet she had sandals. The cloth seemed to cling to her breasts which were full and upright. Her body moved as she walked.
“You are here,” she said calmly. The strange smile on her face had grown. She led him stumbling from the glade down to the edge of a mountain. The sun blazed down on them and temporarily he was blinded. When he opened his eyes what he saw was impossible. He cried out but there she was beside him. She sensed and knew.
For what he saw was that he was still on Earth. There was the ruined cities all broken and ruined as he remembered them. It was the regular Earth! He was stunned.
“This is your real world,” the woman told him. She pointed with her bare arm out over the ruins at the foot of the mountain. “I have brought you back to it. I and you will rebuild together. We will not turn inward and shrink our terrible responsibility. We offer eternal hope to mankind which deserves being rebuilt. With your ability and our money we can help repair the damage bacteria and H-bombs did. Millions have died horribly. War has taken a ghastly toll. But do not despair of men, it was the military not all men. I am a woman, you a man. We will help man, not turn our backs on them.”
He listened to her, and gradually a dawning discovery came to him. The point she was saying was this, that he had been wrong. He had taken the easy road. And the woman had helped him to see what he had to see.
“And all the Cot. Peters?” he asked.
“We have triumphed over them,” was the answer as she stood beside him on the mountain top. “They are no more. The power of goodness and love finally won out over war.”
Already, far below the two of them, the rebuilding had began. They walked slowly to greet it.
END
Joe Mantila returned the manuscript and folder. “It sure is corny,” he said. He started up the Plymouth.
“No good,” Ferde Heinke agreed, discouraged. “Is that what you mean? You don’t think I ought to submit it?” He knew in his own mind that the story was hopeless.
“Was that Rachael?” Joe Mantila said. “That goddess?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I don’t get the ending.”
Ferde Heinke said, “The idea is that she was really a human being and not from some other universe.”
“You mean like a Martian?”
“A mutant. He thought she was a nonhuman mutant.”
“Is that supposed to be Art, that whatever his name is?”
“It’s based on Art.”
“What’s he supposed to be, a mutant like her?”
“That’s what he found out,” Ferde Heinke said. “He was a human being, too. His duty lay with mankind, not to himself. She showed him that. His duty was to rebuild the world.”
After a while Joe Mantila said, “I sure wouldn’t mind being married to her.”
“You can say that again,” Ferde Heinke said.
“And you know, she’s real smart.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
Joe Mantila said, “What do you think the purpose of life is?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“You mean the ultimate purpose?”
“What we’re here on Earth for.”
Ferde Heinke, pondering, said, “To help mankind evolve up the next step in evolution.”
“You think the next step is with us already, but we don’t know it?”
“Maybe so,” he said.
“I used to think the purpose of life was to do God’s will,” Joe Mantila said.
“How do you define God?”
“God made the universe.”
“Have you ever seen Him?”
“Hey,” Joe Mantila said, “I read this story where the military shoots down this angel. You know? And it’s wounded or something.” He developed the plot for Ferde Heinke’s benefit, repeating the details endlessly.
“I read that,” Ferde Heinke said.
Joe Mantila said, “It’s funny all the different things she knows. Rachael, I mean. Maybe she really is a superior mutant.” Gesturing, he went on, “I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she has those powers mutants have. I mean, she’s not like anybody else. When she says something, you know—it’s right. Maybe she has that faculty of—what is it?—reading the future.”
“Precognition,” Ferde Heinke said.
“You think so?”
“No,” he said. “That was the whole point of the story. She’s actually a human being, and there’s really a lot of human beings not like the military.”
“If she was here now,” Joe Mantila said, “and she heard us talking, you know what she’d do?”
“She’d laugh.”
“Yeah,” Joe Mantila said. “You notice that most things like what other people like you and I believe, she don’t believe? When you talk to her, she doesn’t even hear you. Like all the different things we do, the Organization and the Beings from Earth. I think she really is a superior mutant, and after everybody else is gone she’ll take over the world.”
Ferde Heinke said, “I think this is the last dying days of our society, the way Rome went out.”
“Why did Rome fall?”
“Rome fell because their society became hollow. And then the barbarians swarmed in and that was the end.”
“They burned all the libraries and buildings,” Joe Mantila said.
“Tough,” Ferde Heinke said.
“That was wrong; they killed all the Christians, they walled them up in the catacombs and set animals on them.”
“It was the Romans that did that,” Ferde Heinke said. “In the gladiator fights. The Romans hated the Christians because they knew that the Christians would pull down their empty society, and they did.”
“The Emperor Constantine was a Christian,” Joe Mantila disagreed. “It was the barbarians who killed the Christians, not the Romans.”
They argued indefinitely.
17
The Four Aces Motel was a series of square stucco cabins, modern in appearance, Californian in style, well located at the edge of the highway entering San Francisco from the south. The neon sign was immense. The interior of each cabin was a dim chamber, and in the center of the chamber was the shower.
After the paying guest had set down his suitcases and closed the door against the fatigue and glare of the drive, he looked about and saw the bed—clean, wide—and the lamp—brass and slender and amazingly tall—and then he saw the shower. And the guest stripped off his sweaty clothes, his slacks and shorts and sport shirt and shoes, and went happily into the shower.
Under his bare toes the floor was a rough and sensuous porous stone, similar to limestone but sprayed a pastel blue-gray. The walls, also porous and stone-like, were green. The shower was a part of the room, not an annex. A foot-high rampart of adobe blocks retained the water. The blocks, were irregular, like the foundation of a ruined Spanish fort, and the guest felt as if he—or she—were standing in the center of some ancient, secure, unchanging structure in which he or she was free to do what he liked, be what he wished.
Beneath the shower of cabin C, Patricia Gray stood with her legs apart as she reached to scrub her ankles.
The door of the cabin was partly open, and the late-afternoon sunlight poured in through the slot. And with the sunlight, the image of gravel, a field of gravel, spreading to the square of lawn and deck chairs and beach umbrellas in the shade behind the neon sign. And then El Camino itself The trucks and the San Francisco commuter traffic went nose to tail, and the noise was a deep, ceaseless drumming. Now they were leaving the city. Now, at this moment at the end of the day, the traffic moved south.
Over the bed a plastic Emerson radio played a dance record. On the bed Art lay spread out in his slacks and shirt, reading a magazine.
“Do me a favor?” Patricia said.
“A towel?”
“No,” she said, “turn off the radio, would you? Or get something else.” The jukeb
ox tunes reminded her of the station, her job, and Jim Briskin.
Art made no move to get up.
“Come on,” she said. He did not stir, so she took the immaculate white bath towel supplied by the motel and padded across the room. Drizzling water from her hair and head and body, she clicked the switch of the radio.
“Okay?” she said. She was afraid enough of him to remain close to the radio as she dried herself.
The silence seemed to oppress him. “Get something on it,” he said.
She said, “I don’t want anything from the outside.” This must be complete, she thought. If it is going to have any chance at all.
From the clothes that she had bought him, she picked up a red-and-gray sport shirt. He had worn it once, on the drive from San Francisco; holding it, she went to the bed and said, “Can I wear this?”
Glancing up, he saw her and the shirt. “Why?”
“I just want to,” she said.
“It’s too big.”
But she put on his shirt. The bottom of it trailed across her thighs. From one of her suitcases she took a pair of jeans and put them on; she unfastened her hair and began to comb it. In the jeans and sport shirt she padded about the room; she carried bottles and jars and tubes and packages to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and to the top of the dresser. The closet was already full of her clothes. She did not unpack the rest; there was no room.
“You sure have a lot of stuff,” Art said.
“No,” she said, “not so much.”
“All those b-b-bottles.”
She went into the tiny kitchen to see if there was cupboard space. They had brought no cooking utensils. On the drainboard was a package of cookies and four navel oranges and a carton of milk and a loaf of Langendorf bread and ajar of cheese spread. And, by itself, a fifth of Gallo port. She opened the wine and, rinsing out the tumbler supplied by the motel, poured herself a glass.
Through the back window of the motel, she saw a yard of planks and uncompleted concrete foundations. On a clothesline trousers and work shirts hung. A desolate scene, she thought. Returning to the living room, she said, “This is nice here.”
At the front door she stood watching the trucks go by. The time was seven o’clock, and the sun was beginning to set. The flow of traffic had dwindled. They were already home, she thought, the commuters in their business suits and neckties.
“When did you want to eat?” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“There’s a coffee shop up the road,” she said. “You want to go there?”
He tossed aside the magazine. “Sure.”
As they walked along the shoulder of the highway, she said, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to drive on? Stop somewhere else? We could drive all night, if you want.”
“You got your s-s-stuff unpacked.”
“I can repack it,” she said.
The door of the coffee shop was propped open. It was a wide, modern coffee shop, with a counter at one side and booths at the other. Cars were pulled up in the gravel lot beside it. Most of the people were from the motel, middle-aged men and women on their vacations. She thought: From the East, from Ohio, coming out hereto California for a week, in their Oldsmobiles.
At the counter Art spun a stool and seated himself he picked up the menu and examined it.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “I have an appetite…you know what I’d like to do? Let’s ask them if they can fix the food to take out. So we can take it back with us.”
“What?” he murmured.
“To our cabin. And eat it there.”
The waitress was before them. “Are you ready to order?” she said, swabbing the counter with a white cloth.
Pat said, “Can you fix food to go?”
Speaking in the direction of the cook, the waitress said, “Can we fix food to go?”
“Depends on what they want,” the cook said, appearing. “Salads, sandwiches, coffee. Not soup.”
“What about the dinner?” Pat said. On the menu they listed veal chops and green peas and potatoes.
“If you have a plate,” the cook said. “But we don’t have any kind of cartons.”
“We can eat it here,” Art said. He ordered two of the dinners; the waitress went off with the order.
Pat said, “How do you feel?”
“Fine,” he said.
The food arrived and they ate. “Is this what you wanted?” she said. “I mean—all of this. Where we are. What we’re doing.”
He nodded.
After they had eaten, they ordered beer. Nobody questioned him; he was served his bottle and glass. The beer was cold; the bottle was white with frost.
“Let’s go back to the cabin,” Pat said suddenly.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. These places—you can sit in them for hours.” All the times, she thought, that she had sat with Jim in a bar and eatery like this, at the edge of the highway. Drinking beer, listening to the jukebox. Fried prawns and beer…the smell of the ocean. The hot night air of the Russian River.
On the way back to the cabin Art seemed resentful. She could not tell; now the sun was gone and the sky was dark. Beside her he was a dim shape, plodding over the gravel. Bugs, perhaps moths, flew in their faces, and Art swiped wildly.
“Do they bother you?” she said.
“You darn r-r-right.”
She said, “Let’s lock ourselves in; let’s stay inside and not come out.”
“Ever?”
“As long as we can. The rest of the night, until tomorrow. Let’s go to bed early.”
They entered the cabin and she closed the door; she bolted it and pulled down each of the window shades. The cabin was air-conditioned and she turned on the fan. It roared, and the noise gratified her.
“This is what I want,” she said. She felt elated. This was complete; they had everything they needed. Finally they were self-sufficient. Throwing herself down on the bed, she said, “Come and lie with me. Please.”
“And do what?”
“Just lie,” she said.
Begrudgingly, he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“No,” she said, “don’t just sit, lie down. Why don’t you? Isn’t this what we ought to be doing?” Trying to explain to him what she meant, she said, “This just involves the two of us. Lying here like this.”
Kicking his shoes off, he put his arms around her. Then he reached up to turn off the lamp above the bed.
“No,” she said. “I’ll won’t let you turn it off.”
“Why not?”
“I want you to see me.”
“I know how you look.”
“Leave it on,” she said.
Arising, he left her. He went over and picked up his magazine and seated himself in a chair.
“You are ashamed,” she said. “You really are.”
He did not look up.
“I wanted to look at you,” she said. “Isn’t that all right? Shouldn’t I do that? I like the way you look.” She waited and then she said, “Could you leave on some light? The light in the bathroom, how about that?”
His magazine under his arm, he went to the bathroom and turned on the lamp by the washbowl. Then he came back, and on his face was the fretful look; he reached past her head for the lamp. When it was off, he returned to the bed. The bed sank under his weight.
At first she saw nothing, and then she was able to make out the texture of his hair, the bridge of his nose, his eyebrows and ears, his shoulders. Lifting her hand, she unbuttoned his shirt. She slipped his shirt from him, and then she raised herself up and clasped her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest. He did not move.
“Take off your clothes,” she said. “Please. For my sake.”
When he had taken off his clothes, she lay beside him, her arm under his head. But there was no response. She slipped down until her dark hair flowed across his stomach, but still he did not stir. No, she th
ought. Not at all.
“This is fine,” she said. “Just lying here.”
“Okay,” he said.
She kissed him. His body was cold, hard, without spirit. “Can’t we just lie here?” She unfastened her shirt, and then she took off her jeans; she lay against him with her mouth at his neck, her eyes shut. She buried her fists in his armpits, and she thought: Never. Never at all.
“It’s only around eight o’clock,” he said.
“I love you,” she said. “Do you understand what I mean? For god’s sake—” She dug her nails into his face and made him look at her. “I want to stay with you. This is exactly what I want, what we have now. This is enough.”
He said, “I’m not just going to lie around here.”
“What do you want? What do you need?”
“Let’s go somewhere.”
She held him down; she pressed down his wrists, his loins—she gripped him with her legs; she hugged him until her body ached and her breasts were bruised. “Where?” she said at last.
He said, “I saw this skating rink up the road. We d-d-drove by it.”
“No,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. With his hands he lifted her from him; he set her beside him in the bed.
Getting to her feet, she began putting her clothes back on. “What sort of skating?”
“Ice skating.”
“You want to go ice skating?” she said. She went away and put the palms of her hands to her chin; her fingers covered her eyes. “I can’t believe it, Art.”
“Why not?” he demanded. “What’s the matter with that?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Don’t you want to?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t feel like it. I’ll stay here.”
“Don’t you know, how? I’ll teach you.” He arose and rapidly dressed. “I’m pretty good; I taught a couple of people.”
She went into the bathroom and locked the door.
“What are you doing in there?” he demanded at the door.
“I don’t feel well,” she said. She sat down on the clothes hamper.
“You want me to stick around?”
“No, go ahead,” she said.
The Broken Bubble Page 20
