Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  “The soul of a cement mixer, that’s what you need,” Dilbeck said, and looked around. “No fears, no regrets, no attachments. Only an awareness of grinding. Do you follow me?”

  “I think so,” Sharpe said.

  Dilbeck picked up a potted plant and held it to the light. One leaf was touched by brown spots. He ripped it away from the stalk and crumpled it in his hand and looked at Sharpe.

  “Why didn’t you ask for an ashtray?” he said.

  There were perhaps fifty people in the lounge. Some sat on chairs, others squatted on the rug in front of the dais. Marcia took Thorne’s hand and raised it to her lap and let it settle there, smiling at him quickly as if to say: You’ll like this. Be silent and listen. The poet, a fat young man with a slight beard and a dark beret, began to read from a poem called Auschwitz. Thorne barely listened. This was Marcia’s world and he wondered why he had agreed to be dragged along when, in the briefcase that sat now between his feet, there was Burckhardt’s file—a fact that was burning a hole in his attention.

  The young poet had a droning delivery. Marcia listened carefully, her head inclined slightly forward. Sometimes she made notes in the margins of the program; sometimes she shook her head from side to side, as if she disagreed with a line, a phrase, a meter. The barracks here are always gray, the poet said. It rains. My mother stands in a doorway wearing a white apron. Thorne opened the program notes. The poet’s name was Roger Weleba—a curious name, Thorne thought. As he listened he played anagrams in his head. Weelba. Blewea. Baleew. I remember, but memory is no exit.

  He was becoming restless. Marcia squeezed his hand tightly and whispered something to him. He couldn’t catch it but didn’t want to ask her to repeat it. There was an awful quietness, the kind of stillness he experienced in the reference rooms of public libraries: the turning of a page could have the timbre of a sneeze in a place like this. The poet finished. There was scattered applause, more of politeness than enthusiasm. The poet started another. It was called The Death of a Soldier on the Russian Front. He droned. Thorne reached down and touched the clasp of the briefcase. Then he picked up the program and drew sunglasses on the photograph of the poet. Marcia stared at him a moment, then looked back in the direction of the platform.

  When the reading was over, Thorne was introduced to a couple of people in Marcia’s department. A young man in a leather waistcoat whose specialty, it seemed, was Moby Dick, and who spoke with a nervous enthusiasm that suggested he had just come fresh from a seminar with Melville himself; an ancient hippie, behind whose features you could detect an aura of academic middlebrow respectability: beads and beard, Thorne thought—he must have been introduced to mescaline on his fiftieth birthday; a skinny woman with protruding teeth and plum-shaped amber decorations at her throat. Thorne understood that she was running Christopher Marlowe through a computer to assess the quantity of his vegetable imagery. Hands were shaken; the poems were discussed. Weleba’s contribution was considered minor, it seemed. Thorne tried not to yawn. The briefcase, he thought. The goddamn briefcase. Compared to the major general’s file, this gathering was slightly more than unreal. He thought: A man drowns in a swimming pool in a suburban motel and a poet writes of a concentration camp he didn’t experience: there was a division of possibilities here, a kind of concussion that resulted from a head-on collision of the significant and the minor.

  Outside, as they walked to the VW, Marcia said: “I think you’re a Philistine.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “It was altogether a moving experience for me—”

  “Moving, my ass.”

  He took the car keys from his pocket. “Did you really enjoy it?”

  She looked at him, smiling slightly, tossing a strand of hair back from her face. “Weleba just got a Rockefeller.”

  “That’s an evasion.”

  “Some people think highly of him—”

  “What do you think?”

  She leaned against the car in a manner that he knew was calculated to be deliberately provocative: “I think they throw Rockefellers around, love. Like Frisbees. He isn’t exactly my cup of java, if you must know.”

  They got in the car.

  “My problem is I don’t like poetry,” he said. “I never liked it. Even in school.”

  Marcia said nothing.

  “Weleba, I figure, is on a par with Valium,” Thorne said.

  She laughed. She laid the flat of her hand against his leg. He turned the key in the ignition; momentarily the headlamps dimmed as the motor labored.

  “As for your colleagues,” he said.

  “What about them?”

  He edged the VW slowly across the parking lot. At the entrance to the street, he turned to look at her: “How do you put up with them?”

  She stroked the side of his leg and said: “I’ve developed a certain immunity. They practice their eccentricities and I practice mine. It’s simple.”

  “What are your eccentricities?” he asked.

  “I get these overwhelming urges to commit oral sex in automobiles. Except it makes for dangerous driving.”

  There was a red light just ahead; something that Thorne almost failed to notice.

  In the green Catalina Tarkington was saying: “I wander lonely as a cloud.”

  Lykiard, driving, nodded.

  “Shelley,” Tarkington said. “I got an A in junior high for Shelley.”

  Hollander climbed the last narrow flight of stairs to his apartment. He fumbled with his key, unlocked the door, stepped inside the darkened room, and turned on the lights. It was tacky. It was what the realtor called a studio apartment; Hollander had come to understand that this meant it had one window somewhat larger than average. He sat on the edge of the sofa and undid his shoelaces and he remembered Rowley in the green Porsche, the shadow behind the windshield, the way the kids had scrambled into the car after the movie, how their faces had been faint shadows thrown upon the glass, their hands raised in stiff gestures of farewell … Shaking his head, he went into the kitchen. When he turned on the light the congregation of roaches dispersed, scuttling for the darker places. He opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, pulling it from the plastic collar of the six-pack. He popped the tab, took a couple of quick swallows, then returned to the other room and lay down on the sofa. After a moment it came, it came as it always did—a stranger, yet familiar to him in its own dreadful way. Loneliness. He got up from the sofa—as if movement, any kind of movement, might defeat the specter—and walked to the window, passing the typewriter in which there was a piece of paper with the sentence: My career began, unexpectedly, in the winter of 1949.

  We want drama, the editor of the book had told him. What we don’t want in this kind of book is any moralizing or philosophy. We want a lot of action.

  Action, Hollander thought.

  I could give them action.

  He looked from the window at a street of tenements. In some windows there were lights, shabby lights, as if they originated from bulbs that hung suspended inside frayed shades. Over the buildings the sky was impenetrably black.

  He suddenly wished he had never seen the Asterisk file. He wished he had never known.

  But you couldn’t go back.

  Once you had knowledge you couldn’t go back to ignorance.

  If I had been a different kind of person, maybe … He stared at the dark sky in the manner of someone who expects to find solutions to problems in the patterns of stars. It’s the only world we’ve got, he thought. And who were you to trust? Hungry presidents, crazed generals, the hawks of that calcified crew known collectively as the Joint Chiefs of Staff? No. Emphatically no.

  He walked around the apartment, thinking now of Brinkerhoff’s overlords. They weren’t any different from the rest, they listened to the same frenetic melodies of global paranoia, they were eager participants in the same race to destruction. Build the bombs, build them bigger and better with more and more megatons, more and more of the bleak capacity for violence. He sometim
es thought of his own kids blown apart. The worst part. And then at other times he imagined that his mentality was still in some way hooked to the notion of a cold war, that he was stuck in a repetitive groove of thinking—he was being alarmist without any reason.

  Balance, he thought. Yes. The equalization. One side light-years ahead of the other was a true prescription for disaster. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t. He would give Brinkerhoff everything. The whole damn thing. If history ascribed treason to him, then it was too bad.

  He sat down on the sofa, drained the beer can, looked around the bare walls of the room. They menaced him: they were bare in the way he associated with rubber rooms in sanitoriums, padded cells where you could scream until you no longer heard the sound of yourself. Impulsively, he picked up the telephone. He dialed a number: he needed to see the girl.

  “I’m busy, Ted,” she said. “Why don’t you call me back in a half hour?”

  “Okay,” he said. How old was she? Eighteen? Nineteen?

  He put the telephone down.

  He went to the window. In the blackness of the night sky above the tenements he could see, in a faint way, the stars, the smear of the Milky Way. The sources. Beginnings never mattered much to him, only endings, only how things turned out.

  He drew down the blind. Loss: that was what lay at the heart of loneliness. A sense of loss.

  At the kitchen table Thorne opened the file and looked at the stats. Marcia hovered around him, looking over his shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  “Burckhardt’s file,” he said.

  “I shouldn’t be looking, right?”

  “I shouldn’t be looking either,” he said.

  “All that secrecy junk,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t see any difference between how this country is governed and how the Freemasons run their lodges. You know that? The cult of secrecy.”

  He glanced at her, then he began to flip through the photocopies. They felt greasy, as if the letters might come away in his hands.

  Walter F. Burckhardt. DOB 2.2.20.

  Rank, current: Major General.

  Marcia said: “Why the interest?”

  “It’s my kind of poetry,” he answered.

  “Seriously,” she said.

  Thorne looked at her. Why indeed? “I want to find out if he really was deranged or …” He let the sentence trail away into silence. Or what? What was the alternative? The doomed man’s last testament: work it out from twenty-five pages of nothing. It was a hell of a thing to leave behind if you knew you were going; a suicide note without purpose.

  “He was an old friend of Daddy’s, after all,” she said. “Boys must stick together, huh?”

  “You know what they say about sarcasm,” he said. “Put this down to my curiosity—”

  “And your upright sense of duty,” she said. “Yours is the kind of head that hates loose ends. I think the word is fastidious.”

  Fastidious, Thorne thought. It sounded strangely dull; it was an adjective he associated with female career librarians, a life spent lurking in the bookstacks where the gothics and the romances met in some nebulous area of the heart, and where all your passion was distilled in a single drop of perfume placed in the folds of a lace handkerchief that you continually wanted to let float down to some man’s feet. Fastidious.

  “You’re saying these terrible things all because I thought the poetry reading was dull,” he said.

  “Thank you for ascribing motivations to me—”

  “Thanks for calling me fastidious—”

  “But you are, my love,” she said. “You’re the kind of person who can’t sleep at night unless he knows that the mothballs are still operative in the wardrobe where he keeps his suits. Just the thought of lint in your navel makes you cringe.”

  “That’s how you see me?”

  “Part of the picture,” she said. “Because of some perversity of nature, though, you’re also warm and kind and loving, et cetera. I like that.”

  He watched her a moment. She was standing by the stove, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Her legs were parted slightly; her left eyebrow was arched and she was staring at him in a way he found totally distracting.

  “Do we make coffee or love?” she said.

  “It’s got to be coffee first.” He turned the pages. He heard her sigh, then run water into the coffeepot. The sheets in front of him contained details that were cold, sparse, colorless. You could not build a rounded character from the chill of these photostats. He tried to remember Burckhardt’s face. He got nothing. Just that handshake, the strength in the fingers, the clap on the shoulder. Chin up.

  He read through the pages. The details of a career, a life. Somewhere in all this there were the reasons for self-destruction, somewhere.

  Spouse: Anna Fleming. DOB 6.5.40.

  Twenty years between them, he thought. They always said it makes a difference. Not at first, but later, when the man is closing on sixty and the woman touching forty.

  Marcia set down a cup of coffee in front of him.

  “If you’re going to burn the midnight oil,” she said.

  “This won’t take long—”

  “I’m going back to Coleridge, who at least is a faithful old fucker.”

  He heard her go out of the kitchen. He heard her turn the pages of a book. He drank some coffee, stared at the file.

  The war years were covered, pretty much as he remembered them. Liaison officer to General Clay. The congressional committee. Then Korea.

  Wounded in action, 1952.

  It didn’t specify the nature of the wound nor even the nature of the action. Shot out of the sky? Thorne wondered. What exactly? Whoever completed these records and kept them up to date had had no eye for detail.

  Promotion: Major General, 1954.

  Marcia came back into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, added some milk to her coffee, smiled at him, retreated.

  Tattershall Air Force Base, England 1954–1957.

  USAF Liaison Officer, Polaris Site, Garelochhead, Scotland, 1957–1959. Lowery Bombing Range, Colorado, 1960–1962. Naval Air Test Center, Maryland, 1962–1965. Griffis Base, N.Y., 1966–1967.

  Dull, Thorne thought. What would somebody like Marcia be able to read between these dull lines? A career officer, a commitment. But Erickson had said: Something of a radical. How?

  He turned to the final page.

  An appointment to Aerospace Defense Command.

  October, 1969, appointment to the staff of General Whorley, Project Blue Book.

  Blue Book, Thorne thought. They had recently scrapped that, hadn’t they? Tired of watching the night sky. Nothing out there.

  Whatever, Burckhardt had been sent to Oscura, New Mexico, a classified site. His appointment there had apparently lasted for a year. In 1972, he had been posted to Escalante, Arizona, another classified site.

  And that was it.

  That was it.

  Except for a handwritten note attached to the last page by a paper clip. Thorne set it aside, read it.

  This officer is not recommended for further promotion.

  Beneath the sentence there were the initials: WHW. General William Harold Whorley, Thorne thought. Who else? He stacked the papers together, closed the folder. Now, he thought. Why would Whorley block any future promotions for the old man? Too old? Too much of a radical? Why does a man drown himself? Why anything?

  He yawned. He put the folder into his briefcase. He went into the living room. Marcia was still at her Coleridge.

  “Any revelations, Sherlock?” she asked.

  Thorne shrugged. “Dull City,” he said. He was tired. He sat down on the sofa. “If I get myself a beret, could I become a poet too?”

  “Eat it,” she said.

  He rubbed his eyes. He wanted to sleep.

  The telephone rang. Marcia reached for it, then she covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

  “It’s for you, John. Female. Who do you know that talks in low, sexy whispers?�
�

  Thorne took the receiver from her.

  He heard a woman ask: “John Thorne?”

  “Speaking,” he said.

  There was a short silence. Then the woman said: “My name is Anna Burckhardt. I think we should meet.”

  4

  Tuesday, April 4

  It was raining, a thin, drifting April rain that covered the Eastern seaboard all the way from Providence to Savannah. The traffic on Interstate 95 was slow, crawling. Outside Alexandria a school bus had slammed into the concrete support of an overpass; a Volvo, unable to brake, had gone into the back of the bus and was smoldering now on the center strip. Tarkington, who had gone to a motel the previous night, leaving Lykiard outside the apartment complex, was driving alone in the Catalina. On waking, he had taken a couple of tabs of speed, white crosses, and he was beginning to feel them jangle the edge of his nerves. They always fucked him over, upsetting his stomach, making him shake, but on the plus side they guaranteed him alertness.

  He passed the smoking Volvo carefully. The front of the school bus looked like crumpled yellow paper in the rain. There were a few kids with lunchboxes standing in the rain, an anxious driver, two or three cops, flashing lights, the whole bit. Up ahead in the fast lane he saw the red VW. He lit a cigarette, using the dash lighter, and he switched the radio on. Commercials, the jingles of salesmanship. Anything was better than Lykiard’s company, he had to admit. The Greek never spoke unless it was to mumble some incoherency. It was Tarkington’s feeling that the Greek had been in the field too long and needed a break. Like in a home for the criminally insane.

  During the Second World War, Lykiard had strangled Nazis with his bare hands. Jesus. Where were they recruiting these babies from nowadays? Just sitting beside the Greek made him feel chilly.

  He heard the voice of Dolly Parton. She sounded like a girl with a nylon rope stuck in her throat. Tits, though, you had to say that. And those glossy lips. Tits and lips.

  He drove past the turning for Dumfries and Joplin.

  The rain was constant, thin, and steady, the kind you could stand out in and not feel falling but that soaked you just the same. He glanced at his eyes in the mirror. Bags. They looked like small purple grapes. Quantico U.S. Marine Base. Somewhere to the west. Hemp, Morrisville, Remington. Where was Thorne going, anyhow?