Charlie was relieved to hear that someone else had been involved. With only the slightest feeling of betrayal he said, “he crazy, or what? Are the Israelis about to do an Eichmann Brautsch?”
“Poor Felix. God only knows. Of course, he’s probably right, in a way, about Brautsch. The man’s an unreconstructed bloody fascist. Listen to him for five minutes and it’s clear as a bell, but even if it’s true that our Brautsch wrote the article, so what? Anyway, I’m glad Felix has found himself a new confidant. I need no more lectures on the SS: ’Ich schwore dir, Adolf Hitler’ and all that. I know quite enough about the twentieth century, thank you.”
George Bertram turned off toward Faculty Parking Lot B, and Charlie walked on home, to the small apartment that in spite of partitioning still seemed only an alcove in the flow of a large, dismembered old house. Three other fragments of the house’s once generous space were also called apartments.
Charlie Jr., home from kindergarten and forbidden afternoon television, played with a cardboard game whose principle of continuing fascination was a mystery to Charlie. A box rotated by the player emitted, from a slot in its side, cardboard markers of various denominations, and the player with the highest score won. Charlie Jr. played this game by himself, often and very seriously, against what dream fate or bargain with luck Charlie didn’t know.
Margie came into the living room with the momentum of someone about to go out. She was upset, but would probably not say why; it would be up to him to figure that out, a test of his sensitivity, a moral exercise. She was tall, dark, mysteriously soft-fleshed, and liked to wear red. He had always admired things that were large and graceful.
“Felix Tuolemi just showed me proof that Brautsch was in the Gestapo or something,” he said.
“So that’s where you were.”
“I was at the last faculty meeting.” Granted, attending faculty meetings could hardly be called work, but it was part of his job. He didn’t see why he had to prove that he worked. “Isn’t there some old guy in Vienna that hunts Nazis?” he said. “Maybe Felix ought to call him in.”
“Is there gas in the car?”
“I guess so. Where’re you headed?”
The word “headed” was too casual.
“You have no idea, have you?” she said, and left.
He didn’t know where she was headed, and examined his guilt as if it were an abstraction he might try to define, but it was not something he could turn around this way and that; it was as insubstantial as a faint touch of nausea.
Charlie Jr. spun his box and muttered impatiently.
“What do you want the game to do?” Charlie asked him.
“What do you want to happen?”
“I want it to come out right,” his son said without looking up. He spun the box and a marker appeared, evidently a wrong one, and he hit the floor with his small fist.
“Do you know where she was going?” Charlie asked.
“To her class.”
“I thought her class was on Wednesday.”
“It is Wednesday.”
Oh, yes, of course it was Wednesday. When his classes were over he tended to forget the names of days, and it was only luck that had brought him home in time for her to go. Somehow she’d known this immediately, even before he’d given himself away. Her class was at a business college in a town five miles away. He had no objection to her becoming a licensed “Realtor,” though she no doubt perceived, and resented, the phantom quotation marks he always placed around the word.
Charlie Jr. pushed his game away. “What’ll we do?” he asked.
“Monday we’ll go to the lake. How about that?”
“I mean right now.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“You never make anything happen,” Charlie Jr. said. The child’s look was too pure, the eyes too accurate. Charlie was hurt, and felt demeaned because he could let himself be hurt. This five-year-old, forty-pound homunculus, his own flesh, dark-eyed, pale, thin-armed, too “adult” for his age, had hurt him.
“Well, what would you like to do?” he said.
Charlie Jr. gave him a look that said yes, see? Proof again, and rolled under the couch.
The telephone rang.
“Professor Johnson?” said a student, a girl.
“Yes?” he said with dread. She gave her name, which evoked dull, sad eyes in conventional flesh.
“About my mark.”
“But you didn’t do the work. What did you expect?”
“If I don’t get a C I won’t graduate.”
Because she needed, did she think she deserved?
She said, “I’m sorry about the third paper and the final, but my father killed my mother.”
“What?”
“My father shot my mother and himself.”
“Your father killed your mother?”
“So I had to go home, and I couldn’t study. My father’s in the hospital in a coma and I have to take care of my sisters.”
His confusion was caused by the difference between the information given and the matter-of-fact way it had been given, but at the end her voice became damaged and she made sounds that weren’t words. He said he was sorry, and yes, he would change her mark. He still felt a cool wonder separate from the meaning of his words.
He and Charlie Jr. walked to his office, and he sent a change-of-grade form through campus mail. They came back by way of the business district and had soft vanilla cones decorated with chocolate jimmies.
That night he was still bemused in what he thought a morbid, dreamlike way by what his student had so plainly told him. But if one had to impart that information, certain plain words had to be used. He watched Margie remove her clothes. She saw that he watched, and gave him a short glance that didn’t acknowledge anything. Lately she had been wearing skirts and blouses.
He said, “I didn’t think until after I’d sent in the change of grade that the whole thing might have been made up. Some joke, huh? Guaranteed to blow away the prof’s skepticism.”
“Why didn’t you find out whether it’s true or not?”
“I didn’t want to find out.”
“In other words, you just don’t care—is that it?”
“No,” he said. He meant to add that maybe he cared too much, but that wasn’t quite true, either.
She took a shower and afterwards studied for her State Certification exams. He was still awake when she came to bed, and touched her. She was not just another person, a unit defined by its peripheral membranes and defenses, but a process of which he was a part. They were one thing, where they not? The idea burned in him, and she must have known, but she settled in for sleep, that quietness and departure.
At breakfast she told them rather formally that she wasn’t going to the lake this year. She was going to take her exams in the middle of the month. They could go to the lake if they wanted.
Charlie Jr. looked at his father. “Aren’t we going to the lake?” He was upset; his mouth turned down.
“We’ll see,” Charlie said.
“I don’t see why you two can’t go,” Margie said.
Charlie Jr. looked from one to the other, his mouth and chin shriveled by the knowledge of their arbitrary and unpredictable power.
At one o’clock on Sunday afternoon the procession was forming in the green shade of lindens and maples in front of the library, school by school, department by department. There was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that every other year or so one attended commencement, and Charlie had, after all, been promoted and given tenure this year. It might not have been the greatest triumph in the world, but it was something he deserved and had received, and it gave him pleasure. The dark robes and various colorful hoods of his colleagues were real, and meant something not dishonorable.
“A chairperson,” George Bertram said, signifying by his diction that he was uttering a composed statement, “is a small creature who lives in, or under, chairs. A spokesperson is similar and lives in wheels.”
; Charlie responded with the involuntary, mindless yet polite huff of sound required. Though he knew that in this world no pride or pleasure came unalloyed, he couldn’t decide whether or not he was happier, or unhappier, than he ought to be. Was it true that the girl’s father had shot his wife and then himself? The reality or unreality of that event had too much to do, at the moment, with his own mental balance. Had it happened, or not?
“Look out,” George Bertram said. “Here comes Felix.”
Felix wore a heavy black robe over his brown suit, and under an odd academic headpiece that looked like a fat beret, his lumpy face ran with sweat. He stopped abruptly in front of them and said in a conspiratorial and peremptory voice, “Have you seen Brautsch?”
Charlie, hearing and gauging the effect of his own answer before uttering it, was appalled. He’d never been one to poke snake, to change a mood, but he clearly said to Felix, “Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?” Felix said.
“The Israelis got him.”
As Felix heard the words and understood, he began to burn with a flame of joy so pure that anything could be believed, and was, for that one unflawed moment. But even Felix soon recognized the implausibility of his heart’s desire. It had been a joke, that strange, risible alliance between ecstasy and death. He barked once, like a startled dog, and turned away.
The Voyage of the Cosmogon
HOUSES THAT Lenny supposes are only ordinary are here full of ominous strangers. It has always taken him a long time to get used to new streets and houses. He knows no one in this new town, Leah, New Hampshire, where his mother has brought him right in the middle of eighth grade. The children in his new school are hard and self-sufficient. They don’t need him.
Now, in this house without curtains, evening has faded the street outside. The sofa bed is on the rugless floor in front of the television. Voices come from the kitchen.
His mother told him once, “I’ll never bring a man home. ” When she said it he didn’t know what she meant by it, why she had to promise him she wouldn’t. But she lied, or forgot that she ever said it. She looks washed and painted when this new man comes; she makes herself bright as a flag, and simpler than she ever is with him. While he ate his supper their voices seemed bent by smiles and collusion, the man wanting to go to her room the way she agrees to, his car parked a block away so it won’t be seen in front of their house. She is thirty-six years old and looks loose around the eye, too old to have on makeup and make jokes. Her face is worried, knowing that it knows something its expression doesn’t want to admit, yet she laughs at the dumb jokes.
“Hey, Lou, want a screw?” the man said, dropping a silvercolored wood screw on the kitchen table. She laughed and made a disapproving face, glancing at Lenny. She laughed, but she is the loser. There is no honor in that smirking. Why does she subject herself to this man who is shiny around the lips, with young potbelly and long hard arms? He will hurt her for her folly. Though he never comes here in his uniform, he is policeman, and in some remembered sense of order, now invalidated by what he sees and hears, Lenny thinks a policeman should never do what this man does.
But now Lenny is alone in the front room, voices coming from the kitchen, and the television will help stop those sounds. Before its sound rises, though, his mother yelps, or laughs, and a chair scrapes. Then the music of his program rises bravely, its deep space-melody touched by a quick descent into a light but dangerous minor that takes his breath and holds him. Just so nothing from this house will hurt the hour he has here, with the people of the Cosmogon.
It is an old situation, he knows. He has read science fiction since he was ten, watched with interest several versions of this same theme on television and in old movies that seem to suggest it in one way or another. The people of the doomed planet have set off bravely into deep space in search of another home, a new green-blue world where they can breathe, feel the wind, let nonacidic rain glisten on their shoulders. They are a valiant people, like their Patriarch, Noama, who stands in his brown robes, stern, gray, and wise, on the bridge of their great ship, the Cosmogon, a vessel as large and asymmetrical, with its ribs, booms, and quays, as Manhattan Island. There are internal highways and escalators, hydroponic farms, radar complexes, dormitories, even rows of small outer windows whose warm lights glow endearingly against the black vacuum of space.
Lenny is in awe of the immensity of the people’s task. They are clever and intelligent, sometimes silly, sometimes mean or dangerous to each other, sometimes loving and generous, but for all their skills they have a task before them that seems far beyond their powers. Space is too vast, the suns of found planets too unstable or dull, incipient supernovas or red giants brooding slowly over dead worlds. Whole galaxies are barren, poisonous, their planets’ atmospheres instantaneous death to men and women.
But the people, who are called the Intuint, have an even more immediate problem. The evil Gruhazk, a race as sophisticated technologically as it is morally deficient, pursue them across time for the very protein of their bodies and for ancient hatreds the Intuint know only through legend. The Gruhazk were once Intuint, like the people, though it is hard to believe, for now the Gruhazk ships stalk the Cosmogon from galaxy to galaxy, attacking when they can. The small but maneuverable single-seater Intuint fighterships, called Rainfires, again and again have to fight off Gruhazk raids, at great odds, and after such battles there are empty seats at the pilots’ mess.
Now the vast unfamiliar constellations pass, and he enters the Cosmogon, among the people. There is Noama, who is ever strong and kind, and Buck Hurtler, the devil-may-care pilot, and Coraina, his girl who loves him. Lenny is in love with her loving him. She is so clean and beautiful it is almost as if he can fall into her blue eyes, and her golden hair is soft unto pain. Lenny would be Buck’s wingman, flying his own Rainfire against the dark red ships of the Gruhazk. There is Squadron Leader Starr, a handsome, stalwart black man, brave and true, and the clown, Traypots, who pretends to be lazy and clumsy, and the Council of the Elders, some of whom may not be too trustworthy. There is Buck’s friend, Adano, and Adano’s dark wife, Mora, and their children, Bren and Farima.
The plot unfolds, a mysterious document of time, each instant revealing danger, though Lenny can fear without real anxiety for his people who are so lost in space. This is a universe of meaning, in which the good must finally prevail. But now the Gruhazk have broken the outer ring of protection, lightminutes from the Cosmogon. They have a new masking force, an amber cloud of energy composed of particles not at this moment understood by the Intuint. It is Traypots, the outwardly silly young man who masks his care by his clownishness, who perceives the only chance they have. In his sleek Rainfire he patrols that sector, far from his home ship; one thing the Gruhazk cannot understand is a quick and to them irrational decision borne of love.
Meanwhile the Cosmogon on its voyage moves to the laws of mass and momentum, its drive a faint flow of energy against the stars, life against death, life a fragile, gentle nucleus here in the vast of absolute zero.
Buck Hurtler knows what Traypots will do. He has long seen through the clown to the brave man beneath. He runs to his Rainfire, makes a quick instrument check before rolling forward through the pressure lock onto the catapult. He can’t reach Traypots yet on the telerad circuits—distance and the strange amber cloud interfere—but he homes in through other telemetry on Traypots’s distant, lonely Rainfire, a dot of resistance to the assembling Gruhazk fleet.
Will Buck Hurtler get there in time to solve the problem of the amber cloud, and save Traypots from his brave sacrifice?
There is the lively, inane interruption of a commercial, gaudy in exhortation; Lenny doesn’t hear its words, its insane irrelevance. There is the sliding of a chair, and his mother’s stressed voice. “Don’t be so rough! Why do you want to be so rough?” Why does she want the man here at all, if that is so? He looks at his own small hands. Sometimes when the man is not here she says she doesn’t ever want him here aga
in, but that is not the truth.
Then Traypots hears, scratchily, faintly, “Traypots! Traypots! It’s Buck! Hold your position! Hold your position! Code order! Verify! Verify!”
That voice. And Traypots seemingly flippant answer,
“Hey, Bucko!”
With the whoop of sirens and the hurried but controlled manning of the long pulse cannons, the Cosmogon has gone to full battle stations. Everyone has a useful task, even the children over ten years old, such as Bren and Farima in their helmets and antiflash suits of mirror-cloth.
On the battle bridge of the Cosmogon, Squadron Leader Starr confers with gray Noama, Commander of the Cosmogon and Patriarch of the Intuint. Noama says, “Until we know what it is, we can’t risk a squadron; we are few and they are many. The Cosmogon must not be left undefended.” Noama’s face is sad but strong, his voice deep and fatherly with wisdom.
“But what about Buck and Traypots? We can’t just…”
“It’s your job to fight, my impatient friend,” Noama says, putting a hand on Squadron Leader Starr’s shoulder, “but it is mine to ensure the survival of the Intuint.”
Suddenly a mussy-looking woman who is meant to be engagingly stupid says directly to Lenny, “I just can’t face my face in the morning without my Nu-Kreme!” She turns her head abruptly to what she holds in her hand, a small blue jar two inches from her eyes. He turns down the sound, a mistake, since he hears his mother moan. She and the man have gone into her bedroom off the kitchen. Sometimes he can’t tell her cries of pleasure from her cries of dismay. “I’m a yeller,” she said to him once. “I can’t help it when I’m getting satisfied.” She said this as if she were not talking to him at all, but to some person like herself. “Oh, yes my Aunt Fanny,” she said. “A long time ago I truly blew it. I blew it with your father and I know what, when, why, and how I blew it. I blued, screwed, and tattooed it!” Her raucous laughter ignored him, who was the only one there. She was a little drunk then.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 28
