OPUS 21

by Philip Wylie

  "Don't tell me!" she exclaimed. "We just had the house in Pasadena done over!"

  Her eyes faded. "For what?" She murked about inside herself briefly. "I'd like very much to go out with you--if you really want me to. On one condition."

  "I know."

  She turned quickly, unbelievingly. "You do not!"

  "Bet?"

  "Bet you flowers for me tonight."

  "Generous wager, I must say. Indecently feminine!

  Okay. Promise to admit it-if I have the right answer? No hedging?"

  "Promise. "

  "You'll go out--on condition I won't make a pass at you." She flushed a faint peach color. "I thought you were going to guess I wanted to go Dutch."

  "I know you did."

  "How?"

  "I know how women think, as they term it."

  "You're right, though."

  I picked up her check and signed it and signed my own and signed the two sets of bar checks and gave Fred--who was loitering about in the background with overt patience--a sound tip.

  "Buy yourself," I said to her, "some dandy flowers. I like gardenias. I hate orchid-colored orchids. On second thought, if flowers remind you of Roland--"

  "He never grew them to wear--or for bouquets. Just to breed."

  "See you. And thanks for the indiscreet lunch."

  3

  It was, as they say, sweltering in my suite. Sweltering, like every term, is comparative and relative and also tentative. I like to swelter, as a rule. To work stripped and sweating, with a vasomotor system engaged in cooling me, rather than the opposite, which others prefer--a pumping system busy stoking the body against cold air. This--like most events and experiences--is more a matter of mental climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught, or environment-taught.

  One's frontal lobes are liable-unless trained in every particular at autocriticism--to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment: great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord, nerves, organs and muscles.

  These, then, like a converted Christian, are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to live; people aren't very critical--or even observant.

  Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough, reasonable, even charitable.

  Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man.

  Thus, in trifling example, where you might have been sweltering, I was sweating without psychic trauma. You may have taught yourself, been taught, or may have decided from observation that ninety degrees is an insufferable temperature. I have concluded it is pleasant. My constitution is no different from yours. The concept of thin blood is mythical--mine, indeed, is probably "thicker" than yours, for it contains a very high number of red cells. But the opinion my cortex holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain-where the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold.

  I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquility and this is the message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel--not as the authority for a trance--but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good result.

  The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one voice on earth--

  God's, of course.

  The point here is--I liked the warm day.

  But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter, now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy?

  The elevator gnashed its teeth.

  I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my serial. I set up a card table and put my portable machine on a comer of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles, pencils, and my pen.

  I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of--of what in hell was her name?--Yvonne Prentiss--as a barricade. Now, it dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the Cheshire Cat's--that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had been.

  I had expected it would.

  I said hello to the Ghoul.

  I knew the bastard.

  George T. Death.

  The analgesia was absorbing, or it had been absorbed. My throat felt as if a tack were stuck in it. A stinging sensation--hardly noticeable (to the properly-hypnotizing cortex). One could scarcely expect a lavish use of clinical techniques for blocking off the mere prick of a biopsy. Still--it would be inconvenient to be reminded by my own flesh, prematurely, of what it had fallen heir to. There was stir enough in my gray matter on the topic, already; no additional goad was needed.

  We death-dreaders--we victims of the marvels of science-souped up to the last ganglion by every advertisement, billboard, radio commercial, lecture, and editorial--by damned near every syllable we read or hear--to live to enjoy things (rather than to stand ready to die for the sake of ideas) are poorly prepared for carcinoma--for whatever your equivalent may be.

  Or--was I afraid, not so much of dying as of the manner? Get busy, I said to myself; you'll have plenty of time to savor these notions.

  Or--was I even afraid? Shocked, rather?

  Work.

  There's the drug you need, boy.

  I lay back on the divan, smoking.

  George T. Death. I knew him of old.

  In several guises.

  I remembered the year I was ten, the year I had appendicitis, then peritonitis, then general blood poisoning. Sometimes, at night, the pain of my body, the pain of my tube-filled, pus-lathered guts will come back to me. And the smell. The fever. The thirst. They didn't believe in giving you liquids, then--not any--and I know what it's like to be on the Sahara without a drop to drink--and your viscera opened up, in the bargain.

  I know.

  Father came to the hospital during one of the spells of consciousness. His eyes were desperately gentle. "How's the fight, son?"

  "Am I going to die?"

  "You're pretty sick, son."

  I laughed a little with my curdled belly. Too soon to answer, You're telling me.

  Nineteen-twelve. That was what I meant.

  "But--will I die?"

  His tender passion became tenderer still. "Would you be afraid to, son?"

  "No."

  "Do you believe in God?" "Of course."

  "Want to live--still?"

  Still, he had said. He could see--what I could only feel.

  "Yes."

  "Then--fight."

  That time I looked right smack into George T. Death's eye sockets and fought. But I was a kid then--and kids are brave if they have brave parents.

  In some ways, my father is the bravest man I've ever known; in others, a coward.


  Who's different?

  ''Who's different without being more coward?

  There was the time in Warsaw.

  My half brother Ted and I had finished our tour of Russia and come shaken across the Polish frontier--like two unconvinced readers of Dante who had gone there ourselves to be sure which part was poetry and which was accurate reporting. We found out. Our Dante was a good journalist.

  In Tiflis, after too much vodka, in the biggest, best restaurant where the rats were so bold they would sit under your table and nibble your crumbs and run off a little way if you took the trouble to skid your feet at them--in Tiflis, where every kind of man goes by on the street, Negro and Turk, redhead and ash-blond, because every kind of man has poured through the Caucasus for thousands of years on the way to conquer Europe or the way back in conquest of Asia--in purple-walled Tiflis where the archeological strata are as clear as the story of the stones in a cross-cut syncline and bare human feet have drilled deep paths in the rock floor of the old Roman baths--in Tiflis where Persians still sit cross-legged on tables and play what Ted called snake-charmer music on bulbous pipes--

  we talked too much.

  We drank too much and talked too much--to a dozen tourists who sat about the big table, waiting for their late dinner--waiting an hour or two, as you do in Russia.

  Tourists who, for the most part, had come from France, Germany, England, and the United States so pre-entranced with communism, so ignorant of farming and industrial process, so self-blinded to horror and despair as to imagine, even after seeing some of it, that the Soviet Experiment offered hope to any man. Not being blind--being noncommittal at the outset--we had seen better.

  Wait till we get home, Ted and I told them.

  We'll put the truth in America's magazines.

  Police state. Prison. Human abattoir. Endless steppes of horror. Perversion of the mind. Destruction of the spirit. A factory of torture to keep the factories running. Hunger and helpless hatred. Dirt.

  The old, old, old abomination in new clothes: tyranny.

  We'll tell them.

  It began, after that.

  The GPU men everywhere we went--pretending they spoke no English and reddening when Ted and I blasphemed and insulted them in their hearing. The trip to the tea plantation in Batum--on a bus that deposited its other passengers and started up a series of hairpin turns--with a driver and Ted and myself on board. The slide--the driver jumping out. Ted and I jumped, too--but the bus didn't go over the cliff. It merely caught on the edge and hung there. (Was the driver chagrined because it failed to go over--or because we jumped also--or because he had steered so incompetently? How could you tell?)

  Odessa.

  The bartender offered us a bottle of Scotch--the first we'd seen in the long, grim way from Leningrad. We drank some and gave the rest away. And took the night train for Shepatovka, exulting in the thought that we would never see the UCCP again, come the morrow.

  There was no water on the train.

  All night, we turned on the hard boards.

  In the blazing forenoon our car was shunted onto a siding and the Red Army soldiers--its only other occupants--marched away. Nothing was in sight but the sparse wheat of the Ukraine and its scalding mirages. We waited--with our thirst. Hung-over, desperate. Another train finally picked up our car and we went on--at the galling pace of communist transportation.

  I found the carafe of water in the toilet--where no water had been before.

  Recklessly, tremblingly, we drank it--equally dividing the thankful drops. And late that day, without further ado, we crossed the border to the relaxation, the seeming luxury, the comparative freedom of Poland.

  It was some days later, in the Palace Polonia Hotel, in Warsaw, when I woke with the cramps in my belly and legs. With a climbing fever.

  Time spun-hours commingled in the familiar wastes of pain. I knew belly-fire. I did not know my legs could hurt so hideously or curl up against my will. I lay vomiting, fainting, crawling to the bathroom and there, too weak to lift myself, pouring out rice water. Areas of my skin turned purple.

  Ted, untouched by an affliction neither of us recognized, took care of me. On the fourth day he brought a doctor and a nurse. On the fifth, I was briefly better.

  That evening, on my insistence, he left me for the first time since I'd fallen sick.

  He came back to the hotel alone, late, and sober--for he talked awhile with the concierge. He went to his room--beside the one where I lay ill--and opened the French windows, apparently to stare at Warsaw in the vermilion dawn. They found him on the sidewalk five floors below--dead.

  When the consul came to see me, and the pleasant young men from the embassy, we were unable to make out what had happened. Had he stepped too far out? Climbed up on the roof for a better view? Had the concierge mistaken his condition and had he lost his balance? Jumped? Or had he been pushed--in the fashion of political assassins who pursue their foes into other nations so as to conceal their bloody reach?

  We can never know.

  The embassy and the consulate thought he was murdered.

  And when I told Tom, my friend and doctor, the step-by-step progress of the first phase of my sudden sickness--when I remembered the thirst and the miraculous appearance of a carafe of water--Tom said, "I think you had cholera. It could have been in the water. Some people are immune to it. Maybe Ted was."

  Maybe.

  He was not immune to a five-story fall onto a cement sidewalk.

  What matter?

  Ted was dead.

  I sent the cables.

  And the second phase of my illness began. The swelling joints, the atrophy of muscles, the inflammation of nerves, the--why go into it? They sent to the largest institute for the best specialist in whatever this sequel might be.

  And there was G. T. Death again.

  The specialist seemed seven feet tall--a skinny man--who wore such a mustache as only the Poles can grow. He sat on my bed after the torturesome examination and told me about it, in French.

  "I am afraid, my American friend, that I have bad news for you. You are a man.

  You will want the truth. It is a progressive malady. Your foot--your arm--already crippled. When it reaches the heart--"

  He went away.

  My nurse wept.

  Ted was the one we counted on to be the great man. The strong, the good-humored, the precocious, the gifted, the good, the young Paul Bunyan of the family.

  Dead.

  And now I had a tum at it.

  I, the elder brother.

  I, who had taken Ted on his first trip abroad.

  I, who had led him to miserable accident, to foul execution, or to horrible impulse--bred, perhaps, in the vile durances of the vast nation we had traversed. Abrupt hate of life. I lay in that hotel bedroom--they had told me that a Warsaw hospital was to be avoided--and rehearsed the placid, polite syllables of the specialist. He had been interested, as one foreigner inspecting another, to observe reactions. I had therefore been careful to exhibit none.

  Alone, I could react.

  As now, I thought of my wife and my daughter and the insurance and the banks.

  And having finished with that, I turned to rue.

  Feeble fool. Wretched clot!

  How little of what you felt and thought did you take the trouble to express!

  When your corpse follows your brother's to the crematory in Gdynia, what epitaph?

  Here lies a minor author--an excessive curiosity and a penchant for investigation--

  who never bothered to write up his reports.

  So every artist and would-be artist makes this same phrase.

  I knew: I never got it said.

  Isn't it true of you, also?

  Didn't you know--and weren't you always on the verge of saying so--when you had to go to the movies, lunch, the bathroom, bed, or the jute mill in quest of new shoes for baby?

  Yanh-yanh.

  Each generation learns enough too late to pass it to the next, fo
r when the learning's accomplished the newcomers have always been educated ahead of the achievement--in ignorance.

  So when will cradles be rocked by wise men and good women?

  They never know it will take a thousand years, and perhaps a thousand times a thousand years; they think it will be tomorrow; that is the trouble with them--it is the trouble with them all.

  I lay in the Palace Polonia, with the European cars blatting in the sacrificial street and the trains hooting across the moribund way and it vividly occurred to me that in a few more years Hitler's men would blow down these corridors and blow up those cobblestones. I lay in Jericho.

  I thought, finally, about a palm frond.

  There was a day in Florida when, in a mood of black despair, I stretched out beside the sea with all the cabanas of the Roney Plaza and all the dollars lying round about, reciting to myself the abhorrent antics of my compatriots and my own repulsive participation. The beach boys laughed; the handsome harlots splashed; and the purple sea came meaninglessly ashore. My eye, tired of the drenched blue firmament, came to rest on the frond of a coconut. It was a young leaf, very green, and it glistened in the sun like lacquered metal.

  While I regarded it, the leaf had a sudden meaning--the meaning of life and growth and Evolution. Not the idea--but the felt significance. (You would say, doctor, that some biochemical process completed itself in that instant--a change came in the endocrines. Or you, doctor, that the individual unit shares with the group the Toynbean shift-to-the-opposite--the yin-yang--and hence, sometimes, joy-through-funk.) Anyhow, I looked at the damned palm frond and a great peace came over me, followed by an excitement. I decided to leave the American scene and make a personal inquiry of Hitler's Germany and Mr. Stalin's Russia and to take my brother along.

  I got up and said so. The purple sea also took back its meaning, then, and all its other meanings. And that was that.