Adano says, “We have four minutes and fifteen seconds of optimal time; then it’s nip and tuck, Noama.”
“I’m afraid our strategy is up to Buck and Traypots,” Noama says. Then he gives the command: “Rainfires scramble in three minutes.” His steady voice penetrates the Cosmogon, echoing in every chamber of the great ship.
The theme music rises; the hour has passed and the episode will continue next week. That music, its triumphant hope, its sadness into the minor, says farewell, for a time. Lenny knows the Gruhazk will be outthought and outfought by the brave Intuint. He knows it, but there will be that gray time without their companionship.
He turns off the television, because anything on it is now meaningless, and he hears these sounds: “Jesus, keep it down, will you? My kid’s out there!”
He goes to the kitchen to get a glass of milk, or a Coke if there is one. The warped linoleum his mother calls “horseblanket” is worn to the brown beneath table legs and chair legs. His mother and the man are behind one painted door, the narrow stairs to his own room behind another. In his small room, imprisoned behind a dresser, is another door beyond which an old man, the owner of the house, has his apartment. He takes his glass of milk to his room.
That night he dreams that he is in school and his mother comes to get him. There is a whisper throughout the room: She masticates. All are looking at him and then at the door, his mother a disorganized presence there in the hall, with strange straps and tubes coming and going in her clothes. The whisper continues: She masticates. Lenny knows that “masticates” means only to chew the food in your mouth, but in the dream it means something crude and reprehensible.
In the morning he makes his breakfast of cornflakes and piece of toast. His mother isn’t up; maybe she isn’t going to the restaurant today. Maybe she’ll lose her job. He has no power in these matters.
On the bus a girl deliberately sits next to him. Her name Ruth and she is pale, unattractive, and bigger than he is. Because he is new she is trying to be kind to him, he knows. She is not trying to make fun of him or anything; she’s too vulnerable herself for that. But for some reason he acts as if he can’t understand anything she says. He pretends to be deaf, he doesn’t know why. Maybe he thinks it’s just a joke, but she soon embarrassed and silent, and he didn’t mean to do that, but it’s too late.
Maybe he’ll just play deaf all the time. All the subjects in his classes he’s already covered in his other school, so he doesn’t listen much anyway. And out of class the kids all talk about things he’s never paid much attention to, like music; he doesn’t care about the noisy singers and bands they admire. He’s heard the names and the music, but he hasn’t the slightest idea why one should be better than another. They all seem to hate x and admire y. Why?
One day he asked a boy named Walter, who was about as plain as himself, and in whom he thought he saw some sort of kinship, if he liked The Voyage of the Cosmogon. Walter said he never watched it. He still feels as if he tried to suck up to Walter, and even worse he did it at the expense of what means more than anything to him. He doesn’t really want to share the Cosmogon with anyone.
His English teacher, Mrs. Martin, is beginning to look at him with worry, so he gives her some of the deaf treatment too. He can’t seem to help it; he’s never been like this before, but now he seems willing to throw the whole place away, to act crazy even though he really doesn’t think he should. But it’s almost a relief to act crazy.
If it could only be Sunday night, at eight.
Mrs. Martin says, “Leonard, are you with us?” She is nice, so why does he want to act crazy? He just looks at her, and it’s so easy, knowing his look is odd, sort of wall-eyed, and it feels like wetting his pants or something.
For twenty years, Marsha Martin has been doing all the chores required of a junior high school teacher in Leah, New Hampshire. Her husband, Ray, taught English for twenty-two years in the senior high school. They’ve had no children, though they’ve tried. Two years ago last fall, a week into the school year, Ray found that he could no longer enter a classroom. They found him in the small teachers’ lounge next to the principal’s office smoking cigarettes, something he hadn’t done since the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964. After twenty-two years he was due a year’s sick pay, and his therapy, which is supposed to help him return to teaching, is still being paid for under the group plan, though they have to pay the premiums themselves.
Marsha is forty-two, and things aren’t going very well between her and Ray. He doesn’t seem to think of ever working again, at anything. He’s like a boarder in the house. He’s gone to his study, in which he sits all day reading old magazines and sometimes watching sports on the small black-and-white TV set her mother gave them long ago. Now he’s begun to sleep there, too. She may be a little overweight, but she’s willing to diet and do exercises if that will please him. She doesn’t know how else to please him. She tries to be nice to him, but then she’s always tried to be nice to him. He’s depressed, too, because they are living on less than half of what they’ve been used to. They’ve had to give up his car, and her old Toyota is rusting out.
Late one afternoon she knocks on his study door. It’s the room off the kitchen that was once a big pantry. When they bought the house in 1964 he had so much fun fixing the room up with a desk and bookshelves and a large casement window onto the backyard, where the apple tree, now an unpruned giant, was framed in his view. Now the tree is everywhere, brown angled branches like legs and arms all over the yard and the sky.
“Yes,” he says from inside the room.
“It’s me. May I come in?” She hears him heave himself off the sofa he now sleeps on. She hears him rustle and stack his magazines, mostly old copies of Life and Esquire.
“Come in,” he says, and opens the door. Against what he once was, the hopeful young writer to whom teaching was a stopgap, is this ruddy, middle-aged, overweight man whose skin seems under pressure from its contents. He wears jeans and a plaid cotton shirt, tails half out, his fringe of reddish hair uncombed, his beard honey-colored now because of all the white in it. Cigarette stink makes the air seem as old as the inside of a moldy trunk. His shame at his present condition is strong in the room, and they never speak of it.
“I thought we’d have frozen entrees or something like that for dinner,” she says. “Maybe some soup with it.”
He shrugs. He can no longer sit at his desk, at his typewriter, he’s told her. Twenty years ago he sold a story to Yankee, about a man hunting grouse with his son, the story showing how such sport requires responsibility and a sense of love and honor toward the wilderness and its inhabitants. Its “denizens, ” he’d called them, but really the grouse were the inhabitants and the hero and his son were the denizens. He used to laugh at that boner of his, saying there really was a difference; look it up in the dictionary.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you’re tired. You shouldn’t have to think about dinner.”
“We’ve got those Stouffer Lasagnas. They’re always pretty good. Would you like that?”
“Sure.”
She can’t make him come out of this funk, or spell, or whatever it is. She’s tried, but when he sees her trying, or hears her allude to the future in any way, he goes back in and shuts the door.
One evening, sent by his mother to the store for milk and Coke, Lenny notices that a picture of Noama, Coraina, and Buck Hurtler is on the cover of the new TV Guide, so he buys it, and later takes this treasure to his room to look at it more carefully. Noama’s face is broad, old in a clean, wrinkled, coppery way, his mouth wide, with a wise and kindly half-smile. He stands above and to the left of the young couple, who are brilliant in their beauty and strength; it is the strength of love and justice, of course, in a dangerous universe. Inside TV Guide, where the words about them begin, is another picture, of Squadron Leader Starr, Traypots, Adano and Mora, and Bren and Farima, who are his age. Sometimes he is older, a Rainfire pilot, but sometimes as he enters their w
orld he is their age. Farima is dark, with luminous, lively dark eyes, and small, new breasts. Often he envisions a strangely endless scene in which he and Farima are lying next to each other in the Cosmogon’s fitness room under the sunlamps. He has on only the skin-tight bikinis worn there, and she the same except for a small bra. And there they are, and remain, next to each other. They don’t talk. This scene can go on forever. It is as though she is the sun, and he is the sun, and they are radiant in each other’s presence. And nothing, nothing ever has to change.
But there are words connected to the pictures in TV Guide. Will Darryl Grossman’s Super Space Opera achieve orbit? Retail outlets report that sales of tie-ins such as T-shirts, toys, and dolls are not going all that well, and network executives are tracking the ratings progress of this potential $20 million bomb with extreme care.
Toys. Yes, there are toys—Rainfire fighters, Gruhazk fighters, the Cosmogon itself. Though his fingers, in an earlier, juvenile way, wanted to hold and poise those toys in the air, he quickly thrust this childish desire away as a form of sacrilege. The plastic dolls with their shiny foreheads disgusted him from the beginning.
“I want to be in the Cosmogon,” he says now, out loud, listening to his own yearning voice. He doesn’t want to bring some imitation of the Cosmogon to this world, he wants to go there, to them. He knows they are all actors, and that the whole thing is staged for the cameras. But if such beauty and honor and symmetry can be created, why can’t it be? Someone loves it besides him. Maybe they all do, so it must exist, even if only in an imagined universe. It will be there at eight o’clock on Sunday night, and things will happen that he doesn’t have to imagine. It will all happen in his eyes that the Intuint will in some heartbreaking way once again temporarily defeat the Gruhazk, and their own selfishness, their imperfections, and their fears.
He has no other base that he can trust. He remembers his father as a threat to his mother. He took his mother’s side only because she was weaker, though she was always louder. They both seemed insane to him, but she was the one who, when struck, fell down, her violent, insulting voice fragmented, finally, into meaningless noises. He believed she was what his father called her, and that she had done what his father said she had done. He has studied her all his life and never shut his eyes or stopped up his ears, powerless as he is. He once asked her why she acted the way she did. “Don’t you think I’m pretty?” she asked back. “Do you think I’m ugly or something? Look at that leg—don’t you think that’s a pretty sensational leg?” Drawing up her skirt so he could see her leg all the way to her pink panties, she gave a saucy lift to her chin and a tilt to her head. It was wrong of her to ask him this, but it was the violation of the meaning of his question, of the logic he asked to be put into consideration, that orphaned him, and made him so apprehensive about the future.
When he reads stories he becomes afraid for those characters into whose minds he can see. When he read The Wind in the Willows he knew what Mole truly felt, and he read on fearfully, wondering just when Mole’s friend Rat would betray him. Even if Rat never did betray Mole, he was anxious about it all the way through. The world he knows is more like his meanness to the girl, Ruth, who tried to be kind to him on the bus.
He hears his own voice, in a trembly, shameful way near to tears, say, “I’m homesick for the Cosmogon.”
Whenever Traypots is about to go into combat, when his laser cannons are fully armed, he sings a sad little song:
Love, I’ll sing you
Of sweet yarrow
In the valley
Of the Harrow—“
We never see the faces of the Gruhazk, just their cruel scarlet ships, which are bigger and better armed than the Rainfires, but not as maneuverable. Traypots often looks surprised, as if he’s just sat on something he didn’t know was there, and his freckles are sometimes shiny with sweat, his red hair spiky and surprised-looking too. On his forehead a fringe of it sticks down like bangs from under his blue helmet. He is not careless, however, and he is not foolhardy. Before any dangerous business begins there is a moment, just a moment, when his eyes are deep with an awareness of honor and of death. And then comes the grin, the daring, the little love song that is sincere, too, a sad little song about something that is lost but might someday be found again. First, however, there is a battle to be fought.
Lenny, too, would die for the Intuint—for Coraina and Buck Hurtler, Bren and Farima. There is no one in his life worth such dedication, but he would fight to the death for them. In the next episode Traypots might be killed because he will try to save Buck Hurtler. Maybe Traypots will attack the leader of the Gruhazk fighters, or even their base ship. Maybe neither he nor Buck will be killed, but if one of them is lost all the Intuint will mourn a brave comrade.
He wakes alone in the winter night, snow at the panes of his bare, luminous window. The snow has in it a soft phosphorescence, diffused and white, a reflection of the streetlights of this strange town. He is a prisoner of where he is.
The man who comes to see his mother, her partner in their folly, always wears a small revolver high on his right hip, beneath his parka. Sometimes he puts it on the kitchen table in its black holster, where it lies as strange on the table as a shoe. Lenny is powerfully curious about the gun, but between him and his curiosity is his disapproval of the man, like a shield; he pretends not even to look at it.
Now, in the cold snow light, he would like to rise, just his self, whatever it is that is his self, out of the peeling barrenness of his room in the rickety house. He would rise through and above the night. There is fantasy in his rising above the town, the state, the Western Hemisphere, the globe of the earth diminishing below him. He doesn’t like fantasy; he wants to deserve what he gets, but now he has no ship to take him to far space where the Cosmogon journeys between the stars.
Is there anything scientific about the method he must use? He must translate the substance of his body from here to there. And how can he so easily find the Cosmogon? He wills it, and thus it is imperfect, all of it, because it is only his creation.
They meet him in the transporter room: “Who are you?” they say. “Where did you come from?” He stands there, embarrassed, in his thin pajamas and bare feet. Then Farima brings him sandals and a dark cloak, which she helps put around his shoulders. Her cool dark arm brushes his cheek.
Again they meet him in the transporter room, a room something like the one in Star Trek, created here by Lenny, for Lenny, because he has no ship. This time only Bren and Farima are there. He can’t be sure who the others were, in the first scene. Bren, curious and friendly, holds out his hand for a handshake, and so does Farima.
He is some kind of hero, or at least a wonder, because he has appeared here all by himself in deep space. “Where are you from, lad?” Adamo asks in a kind voice.
“From what galaxy, young fellow?” Noama asks.
“The Milky Way,” he hears his own voice say. It seems a frivolous thing to call a galaxy, and he wonders if there is a more scientific name for it.
Again, as he becomes visible in the transporter room, only Farima is there. She has a soft blue robe for him to wear, just like her own, and as she helps him into it her cool dark arm brushes his cheek. “Where did you come from—from what far place have you come?” she asks him.
“From the planet Earth,” he says.
She looks into his eyes with sympathy and kindness. She takes his hand to lead him somewhere, he hasn’t yet thought where.
As he shimmers, becoming visible in the transporter room, Mora, Adamo’s wife and the mother of Bren and Farima, has a soft blanket ready to wrap around him. “It must have been a cold journey for a brave boy,” she says, and hugs him, blanket and all, to her warmth, which is deep and complicated, as are the soft mounds of her body into which he melts like an infant.
Adamo appears and puts his hand on Lenny’s head. “You will live with us in our quarters,” he says, “and be a special friend to Bren and Farima.”
&nb
sp; Lenny, Bren, and Farima are at their battle station, dressed in mirror-cloth uniforms, their flame-damper tanks and nozzle guns worn over their shoulders. They can see from their round window most of the great living breadth and length of the Cosmogon as it slowly turns to a new course. Stars slide beneath and then reappear as the great ship turns. But the battle never comes, because he cannot make it happen.
In a wide sky-chamber of the Cosmogon are forests where, in moments of peace, the Intuint can walk, and breathe the freshness and the moisture of the trees. He and Farima walk a long green path among evergreens, holding hands. A cool brook flows alongside the path. His love for her causes her dark hair and skin to gleam in all their little spatial curves and turns—nose, cheek, a wavelike whorl of her hair, red highlights in its ebony. They sit down side by side, and her cool arm touches his. There is no need to say anything. She is smooth and her young breasts are like little tangerines, or smooth like hard-boiled eggs.…He has no right to know this yet. But by luck he is important, a curiosity, with no history here of shame or embarrassment. It is all so delicate, and no one says anything that doesn’t have to be said.
He shivers and is a billion miles away, alone in his room, snow at the window. The Cosmogon is a tiny speck far beyond his ken.
But tonight at eight o’clock there will be a renewal, their shapes and colors close to him again. More than vision, there will be action, to move them forward in time. All he wants to do is to be with the Intuint on the Cosmogon. That is all he wants to do. He doesn’t want to do anything else. There isn’t an occupation in the world he’s the slightest bit interested in, or a place in the world, or a time in it, or anything that could happen in it that might interest him. He’s not interested in NASA, or in the shuttle and its careless accidents. They all saw the Challenger blow up, and Mrs. Martin cried. It was all stupid and ugly, and the kind of people responsible for it don’t interest him. That kind of people bore him, bore him, and they are everywhere. They are like his mother, like his schoolfellows, like his teachers, like the policeman who comes to drink and leer and make dangerous, unfunny jokes.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 29
