by James Gunn
“We'd be dead already,” the Poet had said. “We are dead. We just haven't admitted it yet."
“Anyway,” Teddy had said, holding up the bottle of absinthe in triumph, “we can go out in style. We'll hold an end-of-the-world party better than any wake."
“I'm not sorry for myself,” Elois had said. “I've had my chance, and I didn't do much with it. But I feel sorry for all the people who didn't have that chance—born and unborn."
“'Some say the world will end in fire,'” the poet had quoted, “'some say in ice.’”
“Are those your lines?” Teddy had asked, pouring himself a big glass of absinthe.
“A far better poet than I,” the poet had said. “His name was Frost. Isn't that irony for you?"
“I don't see how you can all just go on talking when any minute that glacier is going to lurch again and kill us all,” Susan had said, looking pretty and helpless.
“It's just because that is going to happen,” Elois had said. “There's nothing to do but talk."
“Drink!” Teddy said.
“Drink!” the Poet echoed.
“Have a drink, Susan,” Elois had said. “A new ice age is beginning, and you may not have another chance for five thousand years."
“First act curtain,” Josh's voice had said from the dark auditorium. “Let's have some lights."
The house lights had brightened. The actors had walked toward the front of the stage.
“It's coming together,” Josh had said. “I'll have notes for all of you in the morning. In general, however, we need a little more life. Susan, more bubbling intensity, more desire to survive. Teddy, a bit more drunken charm. Poet, a bit more gravel. And, Elois—you've got it just about right. But I'd expect that of an old pro like you. You have any comments, George?"
George, his chins draped over his collar and his tie askew, was sitting beside Josh. “It's going great, people. Just great. But I've got a couple of words, in private, for Susan."
“Okay, let's take an hour for lunch,” Josh said. “Be back by one-thirty, and we'll run through act two."
They had scattered, and Elois had made her way into the audience toward Josh. As she approached, he was getting to his feet. “Who are you trying to kid?” she had asked.
He had raised his eyebrows at her.
“This is a piece of shit, and you know it,” she had said.
He had raised a finger to his lips and nodded toward the back of the theater. In the last row she had seen a figure that she recognized now as the playwright, Fred Hampdon. George had invited him to the apartment once, early in the negotiations, and Elois had considered him likable enough but a nonentity.
“He might as well know it, too,” she had said. “Poet, indeed! And the cast. That Susan is only a willing body."
She had looked toward the front of the theater where her husband and Susan were disappearing backstage, his arm around her shoulder, his head bent close to hers.
“I think it's got a chance,” Josh had said mildly. “Maybe it's not great literature, but it has a certain timeliness."
“A new ice age? Come on!"
“That's what some experts are saying. Anyway, it's just a way of dealing with approaching catastrophe. What's the line? Fire or ice? What does it matter?"
Elois had shivered. “It matters to me,” she had said. “Sometimes I look out that window and think I really see the glacier approaching."
“Maybe that's your problem,” Josh had said. “It makes too much sense to you. If you can just get that feeling into your performance—"
“You know me,” she had said ironically. “'The old pro....’”
“You know what I meant, darling. Purely a compliment."
Elois had shrugged and walked on up the aisle thinking about lunch: a salad, certainly, and a glass of wine. If she had the salad without dressing, maybe she could have another glass or even a bottle. She needed something to get her through the second act.
“Can I buy you lunch?” someone had said.
Elois had been drawn out of her thoughts into the presence of Hampdon.
“I couldn't help overhearing what you said to Josh,” he had said with a boyish grin that Elois found unexpectedly appealing. “Maybe you can tell me what's wrong while there's still time to rewrite,” he had said.
She had looked at him with eyes appraising and lips half-parted and said, “Why not?"
Hampdon had taken another swallow of his scotch. He had ordered veal parmesan with a side order of spaghetti, but he had hardly touched either one though he was on his third scotch. “Of course the glacier is just a metaphor,” he had said, trying hard to convince her. “I mean, the possibility of an ice age is real enough, but the glacier really stands for a dozen different calamities that might overtake the human species."
Elois had dutifully finished the last bite of her dry salad. He had been talking almost continuously since they left the theater. Ordinarily she found that kind of self-absorption offensive, but, by comparison with those men who had talked about her and solicited her opinions, in Hampdon it seemed only a kind of ingenuous enthusiasm. “Mm-m-m,” she had said.
He had needed no more encouragement than that. “I could have chosen the sun turning nova, say, but that would be over so quickly that there would be no time for dialogue. Pollution and overpopulation take too much time and seem too grim."
“Catastrophe ought to seem grim,” she had murmured.
“Of course,” he had gone on, unheeding. “But the characters have to be able to reveal a variety of responses. They can't all just lie down and die."
He had started the discussion innocently enough, asking why she didn't like the play, half turned toward her, half trotting along beside her as she spoke. And when he had dragged out of her the fact that she thought the characters weren't real people but attitudes with names, stock responses without any other characteristics, he had admitted his inadequacies as a playwright and then launched into a discussion of his ideas.
“This is the year when everything changes,” Hampdon had said. “Not only the year but the century, and not only the century but the millennium. After this everything will be different. And that's what The North Wind is all about. Change."
Elois had taken a sip of her white wine. It had been only her first glass, and she knew, now, as late as it was, she would not have time for another. Maybe she wouldn't need it. “But why couldn't it be change for the better?"
“Oh, it could,” he had said enthusiastically. “I'm not one of your doomsayers. I really think things are getting better. But you can't make a play about that. And there is a widespread uneasiness about the possibility of catastrophe. Don't you ever think about that?"
“Yes,” she said. “Sometimes I wake up in the night—"
“If you want to get heard, you have to give people what they want—or what they think they want—or what they're most afraid of. Get their attention, and then you can talk to them. That's what my old professor at Yale used to say. Was he surprised when I told him my play was going to be produced on Broadway by George Witherspoon and directed by Josh Nugent and that the part of Peggy would be played by Elois Hays herself!"
He had looked at her so proudly that she felt her heart turning mushy. She had recognized the feeling. She had felt it often enough before. How old was he? No more than thirty. And she was forty-two. But she had felt herself falling in love with this sorry excuse for a playwright, with this puppy of a man, and it would mean no end of complications.
“Well,” she had said, steeling herself to be brutal, “the play will be a flop as it's written. The critics will savage it. Take it from me."
He had turned suddenly sober and silent. “But what about Witherspoon and Nugent? They liked it."
“They have their own reasons,” she had said, seeing again her husband leaving the orchestra with his arm around Susan. “My husband needs a tax writeoff and Josh needs to get back into harness, no matter how."
“What can I do?” he
had asked humbly.
It had almost broken her heart. She had drawn a deep breath and said, “Change the Poet. He's such a stock figure he's laughable. Maybe Saroyan could get away with it, but you're no Saroyan. Make him my husband. Make Teddy less of a lush. Have them both panting after Susan while my character looks on and then steps in at the last moment to bring them to their senses.
“Make Susan less of an ingenue and more of a real person. Make them all into real people, not standing around uttering stagy lines but acting and talking the way people would really act and talk in a situation like that. And don't make it a glacier. Real people would simply get out of the way. A blizzard maybe, maybe the blizzard of the century."
She had stopped for lack of breath, certain that she had destroyed whatever chances she had had with him and sure that it was the right thing to do but a bit wistful about it all the same.
But he had looked at her as if he had heard her for the first time. “You're right,” he had said. “You sound just like my professor. You're both right. I know it. I'll do it. But what are George and Josh going to do?"
She had looked at him. Maybe he wasn't such a fool after all. “They'll be surprised as hell,” she had said. “They'll object at first to all the changes and the delay, but then they'll see the improvements and go along with them. They wouldn't mind having a better play. But don't tell them I suggested it. Tell them it was your idea."
“I will,” he had said. “I will. I don't know how I can thank you."
“Keep me from having nightmares,” she had said. And then, when his expression had asked for explanations, she had looked at her watch and said, “It's almost one thirty. Got to get back. Even to a second act that is under revision."
Hampdon had left her as they approached the lobby, in a hurry to get back to his apartment and his word processor. She had felt a kind of pleasure at that, a mixed feeling of power and the compliment he paid to her mind by accepting her suggestions, even though, she knew, he would soon forget that the changes had been her idea. She was used to that.
She should have been used, as well, to the reason for the strange sounds that awaited her backstage. She would have turned and gone back if she had deciphered them earlier, but by the time she had glanced through the gap left by the unlatched door it was too late.
Susan was bent back over the arm of a couch, naked to the waist, her skirt thrown back to reveal the startling white slimness of her thighs. George was in front of her, his hands holding her buttocks, his trousers and underpants in a comic heap around his ankles while he shoved himself into her again and again in an absurd parody of lovemaking. His fat bottom and flabby thighs jiggled ridiculously each time he thrust. His eyes were closed in rapture, but his breathing was harsh and gasping, not with passion but with the effort demanded of his out-of-condition body.
Elois wished she had a video camera. “If he could see himself,” she found herself thinking, “he wouldn't be so pleased with his conquests."
Susan, she saw with fleeting satisfaction, was not caught up in the excitement her husband felt. Instead Susan's face was set in lines of discomfort and resignation. She was paying the price for her part in this poor excuse of a play.
And then Elois saw that Susan's eyes were open and turned toward her in an expression that could have been embarrassment or an appeal for understanding or even for help. But George did not see her, and Elois turned away.
Now she knew what it was like to face the coming ice. She would not divorce George, that she understood. She had known about his affairs for several years, and they had enjoyed no intimacy for even longer, once he had allowed himself to get fat beyond the fleshiness that he had allowed himself before their marriage. It was his innate grossness emerging, she had decided, and his lack of self control and concern about how she felt about him had turned her away.
His infidelities were only to be pitied. His pursuit of conquests without affection, lust without love, and, now she knew, sex bought with position, were only his frantic efforts to deny his mortality. But she would not admit to the world another failure. He was witty when he wanted to be, charming when he had to be, and an entertaining companion, full of stories of the theater, always. She would not divorce him, but she knew the deep winter of the soul when she thought of their life together for the coming years, and perhaps, although she pushed the thought away as quickly as it came to her, because she could never again make love without realizing it was the same gross, ridiculous act whose parody she had just witnessed.
Well, she could play the part. She would play the part. The rehearsal was over. Let the play begin.
CHAPTER FOUR
April 11, 2000
Sally Krebs
The armored helicopter hovered above the battlefield like a clumsy valkyrie. Below, the sound from its ungainly blades made the soldiers jerk up their heads, even while the bullets whined among them. And then they looked down again, into random violence of lead and steel, reassured by the insignia they recognized as CNN.
Inside the helicopter the sound was muffled, but the occupants could feel the vibrations inside them like a second heartbeat. Sometimes Sally Krebs felt like screaming, if only to take her mind for a moment off the relentless thumping, but she didn't. Someone would be sure to mark it down to female fragility, and that weakness would damage the reputation she had worked so hard to build, and the cause of all women everywhere.
And the soldiers below, as ragged, ill-fed, and poorly armed as George Washington's more than two and a quarter centuries before—their sufferings were so much greater that she would have been ashamed to show her discomfort. They advanced and died by the thousands, taking and surrendering and retaking the same barren, pock-marked wasteland until nothing had any meaning any more except dying.
She took a deep breath and studied the battlefield. There was no shape to it, just the boys and the old men advancing raggedly toward more worthless desert. Here and there some were going the other way, retreating or simply turned around in the confusion, and in places officers were threatening them with pistols or here and there shooting those who kept moving in the wrong direction.
“Get the officers shooting their own men,” Krebs said into her throat microphone.
The camera lenses swiveled underneath the helicopter, and a bullet pinged against the underside. Krebs flinched instinctively, and then forced her eyes back to the monitor. One of the officers was firing his pistol at their ship, in defiance of international convention and the orders of his own leaders. He was commanding the soldier near him to fire as well, and Krebs stared down at a dozen automatic rifle barrels raised toward her.
“Get that picture and let's get out of here,” she said. “No use precipitating an incident.” Too much paperwork, she thought. Her superiors wouldn't thank her for that, and even though they would back her in public, the cost and delays of the action would count against her record.
“Let's find the front, wherever it is, and get some defenders in our footage,” she said. “Maybe some armor. The defenders still have some, I understand."
The helicopter tilted and swung as if fastened by an invisible wire to some child's finger high in the sky, and then slid off in the direction the soldiers were moving. Within a few moments, the bodies on the ground outnumbered those standing.
Beyond the field of bodies the positions of the other army were relatively untouched, though mortar and artillery shells landed occasionally in their midst. Their fixed machine guns and tank artillery were leveled across the field, harvesting the attacking forces as if by some invisible machine. And yet the attackers continued to advance, and an experienced observer might have detected a certain uneasiness in the defensive positions, as if the inflicting of casualties had a psychological limit.
It could have been World War I below, Krebs thought, with its massed armies advancing into fixed positions, except for the helicopters and jets that occasionally still made their appearances above the battle, and the television eyes in the sky rec
ording it all to enlighten, or enliven, the sets of avid viewers around the globe. The world had not changed much in eighty-five years.
And in the fact that this war had lasted, on and off, for twenty years—if one counted from the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war—and for more than fifty years if one counted from the beginning of the Arab-Israeli Wars. And it had dragged in the whole Muslim world, the Kuwaitis, the Saudi Arabians, the Syrians, the Lebanese, the Jordanians, the Palestinians, the Libyans, and, in the end, Turkey and Egypt, and Israel, when it was attacked. The fifty-year war had started for religious reasons, first as the Muslims against the Jews, and then, when the Israelis won every war, Shiites against Sunnis—and continued as a war about power. Or perhaps that was what it had always been about.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent destruction of its military machine by the coalition forces had changed not only the balance of power but the nature of the battles themselves. Arab forces began to choose up sides against the strongest. Peace, such as it was in the midst of widespread terrorist attacks, had been brief. And when Israeli-Palestinian accords had been signed, old enemies began eyeing their neighbors uneasily, and small acts of violence or territorial encroachment, or changes in oil quotas, became magnified into causes. Tribalism, once stifled by nationalism and police power, re-emerged throughout the Middle East and Africa, and inevitably the entire Middle East exploded, while Europe looked the other way and the United States, disillusioned, brought all of its forces except the news agencies back to the North American continent and began pursuing a policy of energy conservation and alternative sources.
It would be a different world, Krebs thought, if women ran it. And then she thought about Golda Meir, who had presided over the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and Margaret Thatcher, who had her jolly little war with Argentina. Maybe it was not the sex of the politicians, she thought, but their positions that determined their actions. Or maybe politics.
No matter. As a news gatherer Krebs knew that she had to make the same decisions a man in her position would have made. She had to do it or be replaced. And she had to do it, because it was her job and she was a professional. She had to get the pictures that showed the way things were, no matter how she felt about what they revealed.
