The Steps of the Sun

by Walter Tevis

  “Is it heated?”

  “Every room.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  It was overpriced, and the gray sofa in the parlor had coffee stains on its arms. But there was space to move around in, and a combination kitchen and dining room of the kind that is dear to my heart. I christened it the Belson Grass Room and decided to use it for meditation.

  I had to get out of my wet clothes and I didn’t have any dry ones. The suite was warm, so I undressed, wrung out my clothes, hung them on the shower rod in the bathroom and padded around naked. That turned out to be a good thing; it brought me back to my nights on Belson.

  There was an oriental carpet under the table in the dining room. I pushed the table over against the wall and lay down naked on my back on the rug. The floor was warm and the carpet thick, with a slightly musty smell. After I had lain there awhile I began again to feel the tingling down my back, neck to heels, that I’d felt in the train station. The confused voices in my head, and the anger that had begun to gather in me while I was registering in the hotel, began to leave me. Eventually I dozed off.

  I woke up late in the afternoon and just lay there and contemplated the state of my affairs for a while. What I needed first was money. More cash to supplement what Myra had given me and then some real money. I pushed myself up from the floor, padded into the bathroom to check my clothes. They were still damp. I went to the viddiphone by the living-room sofa and set its lens for a head shot, so my nakedness wouldn’t show. I seated myself, touched the switch on the phone, and told it to get me a banker I knew. His home phone. In fact he worked for me, since I owned about 40 percent of his savings and loan. And he owed me a favor.

  He didn’t recognize me with the dyed hair and the beard. I identified myself, told him to keep quiet about my presence in Ohio and to have his savings and loan lend me a half million, in large bills. To fit my money belt. “I’ll think of something to give you a mortgage on, Gordon,” I told him. “Bring papers.”

  He cleared his throat and looked humble. “Mr. Belson,” he said, with some of the soft-mouthed arrogance the hotel clerk had tried on me, “I’m not certain it would be within my authority. As much as I’d like to accommodate you…”

  “I’ll accommodate your ass out of the loan business for the rest of your life,” I said. “You dumb son of a bitch. You have those bills here tomorrow morning or you’ll be sweeping streets for a living.” The pompous little fart. He was one of those Warren G. Harding types, with the silver hair at the temples and the grandfatherly ways. Probably younger than I. Ask him to break a law and he turns Sunday school. “Bring that money personally. If you don’t you’re a fiscal ruin.”

  There was silence for a moment. I stared at him and let myself float on my rage.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Belson…” His voice was creaky.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at ten.” I felt righteous, ready to excoriate greedy foolishness and malfeasance in general.

  Gordon looked dazed; I felt suddenly a little dazed myself. “See you in the morning,” I said and hung up. Then I walked back through the dining room and out onto the terrace. This turned out to be a six-by-eight-foot permoplastic apron with an Astroturf rug on it. So much for Neil Armstrong. So much for his dumb remark about that first step. No feeling in it. No more life than Astroturf. At least I had announced the first human steps on Belson with a yelp and a broken arm.

  But where was my peace—my Belson peace? My hands were trembling with anger.

  The drizzle had lightened but I didn’t stay on the terrace. I had begun thinking of Neil Armstrong and of those bland, tightly smiling descendants of people like him, who were more and more coming to rule the world. The John Glenn Hotel, indeed. John Glenn had been orbited like a fetus a hundred years ago, crouched in the belly of the hurtling whale more for publicity reasons than for engineering ones, and the people of Ohio had allowed him to make laws for all of us because of it. What folly. What an omen! I’d have voted for him maybe, for his being a sound, middle-aged test pilot before the razzmatazz of NASA, but never for his orbits, those pawn moves in the unholy game my country was playing with Russia at the time. What dangerous idiots we were in those days, with our weapons and our paranoia!

  These thoughts about the United States and its long tradition of folly were doing me no good. Why was I so angry? My nose was itching. I was catching cold.

  My shorts in the bathroom, a sky-blue pair I’d worn halfway across the Milky Way and back, were dry enough to put on, since I’d draped them over a hissing radiator. I took a quick shower, got into the shorts, and with a restored sense of purpose went to the viddiphone in the parlor. For a moment I wanted to call Ruth, but I put that out of my mind. I told the machine to give me her brother’s number. I got him on the first try. “Howard,” I told him, “I need to see you and for God’s sake don’t tell anyone I’m in Columbus.”

  ***

  I’d quieted down a bit by the time Gordon got to my room with the money. He tried to be hearty and companionable about it, but I wasn’t buying. I signed first-mortgage papers with him for a house I own in Key West and sent him on his way. Then I put what I could of the money into my belt, rolled the rest into a crapshooter’s roll and stuffed it in my jeans. When I put the belt on it was like putting a bicycle chain around my waist, but it’s the best way I know to carry liquid assets. They’d have to sever me to get at it.

  Howard arrived a few minutes after Gordon left and I greeted him with a hug. It was good to see someone from the Isabel again.

  “Well, Captain,” he said, “you look healthy. But I liked you as a blond.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Let me get you a drink.”

  I poured us both some Chinese wine. The living room had a fake fireplace with a pair of high-backed red armchairs by it; we sat in these facing each other. “Did you marry again, Howard?” I asked.

  He shook his head slowly. “After the ship landed in Florida and the court let us go I was excited about finding a new wife. I felt…” He was sitting hunched over his wineglass and holding it in both hands. “I felt like a sailor in port, if you know what I mean.” He finished his wine. “But nothing happened.”

  “You didn’t meet any women?”

  “It seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing, once I got down to it. I took the bus to Columbus.” He smiled shamefacedly. “I suppose I’m getting older.”

  I stared at him.

  “I’m forty-four.”

  I could have hit him with one of the artificial logs. But I didn’t do anything. The man had six divorces behind him. Maybe he knew something.

  I got up and went to the bedroom. When I came back to my chair I handed him a packet. “Howard,” I said, “I need to have this analyzed by somebody who’s really good at it.”

  “It looks like dope,” he said.

  “It’s endolin. I want to find out if it can be duplicated.”

  “I know just the man. A professor at Ohio State.” He held the packet in his hand as though weighing it. “Endolin didn’t look like this on Belson.”

  “I learned a way to concentrate it.” I found myself getting more irritated with this conversation. Also, I was beginning to get a serious cold. I excused myself again and went to the bedroom for a handkerchief and blew my nose violently. My throat was sore and my skin felt prickly. I got out another pack of endolin and took a pinch, chasing it with the rest of my wine.

  “Captain,” Howard shouted from the other room, “did the grass sing anymore?”

  I felt annoyed with the question. “Yes,” I said, “once.”

  He nodded. “Wasn’t the grass why you stayed? So you could hear it again?”

  “I wanted to consolidate myself.”

  “You could have done that on Juno.”

  “I can be very self-defeating in how I live.”

  He laughed as though I was joking, although I certainly wasn’t. “You know,” he said. “I wanted to stay myself.”

&nbs
p; I stood in the doorway and looked at him awhile—at his sad face and stooped shoulders. He did look old. Then I said, “On Juno or on Belson?”

  “Belson,” he said.

  Oh yes, I thought, furious. There’s a lot of it going around.

  ***

  I woke before dawn with my bedsheet wet from sweat and my nose and throat feeling stuffed with steel wool. My head throbbed. I got up shakily, feeling wretched, took some endolin and a glass of warm water and then got back in bed and waited. After a few minutes the throbbing stopped and I felt the fever abate, but the baroque world of predawn sickness was enveloping my spirit.

  Eventually I fell asleep again, or something like asleep, with twisting around and fighting with the sheets, which would not seem to get straight and smooth no matter what I did. I remember sitting up in bed sometime that morning after the sun had risen and shouting, “Motherfuckers motherfuckers motherfuckers!” and trying to get the top sheet to cover my toes. “Motherfuckers!” Someone below me pounded on the ceiling and, fuming, I became quiet again.

  I slept till ten and felt better when I awoke, again, to wet sheets. I called room service and got four soft-boiled eggs and a bloody mary. Then I put on my jeans and my red shirt, went to the living room and called Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals.

  It took about an hour of switching around from office to office before I could get anybody important—which really meant anybody Chinese. She was a junior vice-president in charge of Development and clearly a fan of the National Cultural Revival: Pear Blossom Loo. A young woman of about thirty, with black bangs above a face as inscrutable as a cue ball. Nice teeth, though, as well as I could see. I was sitting with the shades down and in dim light to make sure I wasn’t recognized.

  “Miss Loo,” I said, “my name is Ben Jonson. I’m a professor of biochemistry at Stanford and I’ve developed an analgesic substance that should be of interest to you.”

  “I see,” she said. “The Research Division of Lao-tzu International is not here. Not in Columbus. Bogota.”

  My fever was coming back and for a minute I just wanted to hang up and go back to bed and drink bloody marys. Damn these uptight Chinese women! Damn doing business anyway! But I pulled myself together as well as I could and tried to sound charming. “Of course,” I said, “but the research is done. What you need to do is test it out. That’s not really research.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jonson,” she said, “we do not have the personnel or the equipment in Columbus to do what you say.”

  “Look,” I said, “you have a Shartz Analyzer, don’t you?”

  “We have several.”

  “That’s all you need for now.” I sneezed suddenly. “We’ve run tests for a year at the University. It kills pain as well as morphine and it’s not a narcotic.”

  “I’m not certain, Mr. Jonson, that Lao-tzu…”

  “Come on, Miss Loo!” I said. “You look like a smart woman to me. This will take a half hour of your time and it can give you the most profitable pill since Glandol, or time-release Valium. Since Fergusson, for Christ’s sake. Do I sound like a lunatic?”

  “Yes you do, Mr. Jonson,” Pear Blossom said crisply. I found myself staring at a blank viddiphone screen. She had hung up on me. “Son of a bitch!” I said and began sneezing. Then the sneeze turned into a cough. I got up and went to the bathroom and coughed and sneezed and spat voluminously into the toilet, occasionally stopping long enough to shout, “Motherfucker!” Whoever was below me pounded the ceiling again. I could picture some chubby, balding druggist hitting upward with a broom handle. I went on coughing, bent over and holding my belly. My nose was running.

  Eventually the coughing stopped. I called room service for two bloody marys and then reached out for the Repeat button on the phone to get Pear Blossom back, but interrupted myself with another fit of coughing. What the hell, I thought, and called Ruth.

  She came on looking sweet and chubby and a little disheveled. Good old Ruth! I thought, and my heart warmed at the sight of her there in front of me.

  She was staring at me, apparently not sure who it was. “Ben?” she said.

  “That’s right, Ruth,” I said warmly, with the cold now in my voice, since my nose was plugged up. “I’m in Columbus.”

  She kept staring. Then suddenly she looked almost awed. “Oh Ben,” she said, “I thought I’d never see you…”

  “I’m at the John Glenn, Ruth.” Just then a knock came on the door. “Wait a minute,” I said. I left the phone and walked over, opened the door and took the tray with the drinks from the waiter. I pulled a fifty from my jeans pocket, handed it to him and went back to the phone. “Ruth,” I said, “you don’t know how much good it does just to see your face.” I guzzled one of the bloody marys and snorted.

  Ruth looked worried. “Are you drunk, Ben?”

  “I’m sick, Ruth honey. I’ve got a cold. It feels… interstellar.”

  She looked relieved. “Do you want me to bring you some hot soup? I go to work in twenty minutes, and I could drop by…”

  “Ruth,” I said, interrupting, “I want more than soup. I’d like to move in with you for a week or two, while I get over this thing. I need to get a World Viddiphone Line and I need a set of barbells…” I sneezed again. “How about it?”

  She hesitated, started to say something. Then she said, “Are you all right, Ben? Weren’t the police…?”

  “I eluded them, Ruth, as the papers said.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Ben, you look strange. Did you kick it? Morphine?”

  I was starting to feel angry again. “Yes. I changed a lot, on Belson. Can I come and stay for a week?”

  She looked at me silently for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Ben, it’s too late for that. I have a man living with me. I can bring you some food, and a doctor if you need one…”

  It was a setback for my vanity, but I managed to hide it well enough. “I’ll be all right, Ruth.”

  She smiled sadly. “Sorry, Ben.”

  ***

  After talking with Ruth I sipped another bloody mary and permitted myself the old childhood gloom, then shook it off. What the hell, it was time to be grown-up about it. I’d tried the alternative enough in my life. There was business to take care of, and Isabel to locate. I pressed the Repeat button on the phone twice and got Lao-tzu again.

  “Pear Blossom Loo, please,” I said.

  The head on the screen disappeared and was replaced by that of Pear Blossom’s secretary. He put me through to Pear Blossom with some reluctance.

  When she saw me she looked ready to hang up again. “The Research Division of Lao-tzu is in Bogota, Colombia, Mr. Jonson.”

  I kept my composure, although I felt like throwing an ashtray at her disembodied head. “Miss Loo,” I said, “I’ll be in your office tomorrow afternoon. Do you really want me going to Parke-Davis first?”

  “I will be in conference all day tomorrow.” Her face was a study in blank dislike.

  “I’ll be there anyway,” I said, and hung up. Her head and shoulders disappeared from the screen.

  I fumed around the room for a while after that, cursing China in general and Chinese bureaucrats in particular. What Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals needed was somebody like Arabella Kim to run it, with her good wrinkled face and tobacco-stained teeth. It was about noon, and there were things I wanted to do in Columbus—like getting a set of barbells—before going out to Lao-tzu in the morning, but I was beginning to feel as if I wouldn’t be able to do any of it. This cold, or whatever it was I had, was bad. I was sticky from sweat and my nose and throat were stinging. I took endolin and it kept down the pain, but it didn’t do anything for the cold itself. I knew what I needed was a transfusion from Belson grass, but that was out of the question. I climbed into bed, jabbed out my cigar in an ashtray, put a pillow over my head, and passed out. Falling asleep, I wondered briefly about Sue—about where the train would have been when she came to and found me gone.

  I awoke late in the afternoon feeling feverish
, dazed and unworldly. I knew I was sick, but I also knew it was only a cold. Something deeper was troubling me, some old loneliness. I’d had a Private World Line installed in the room and could talk through scrambled microwaves with considerable security to any phone in the world. I could do therapy this way. I sat up in bed, adjusted the sheets, relit my cigar, and called Orbach.

  Orbach came on with his usual somberness. “Hello, Benjamin,” he said. “Welcome back into the world.”

  “Orbach,” I said, “can you spare me an hour? Things are happening.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I have a patient arriving. I can connect you with my surrogate…”

  “Orbach!” I said, desperate. “I don’t want to talk to a computer. Give me twenty minutes.”

  Orbach looked at me sadly. “I’m truly sorry, Benjamin,” he said. “I can give you the noon hour on Thursday.”

  “I don’t want Thursday,” I said. “Give me your computer.”

  “It’s good to see you back safely, Benjamin,” the Great Orbach said. There was a slight click and the screen went milky white. Then Orbach’s synthesized voice came from the speaker. “Hello, Benjamin,” it said. “We can talk if you’d like.”

  “Hell yes, I’d like,” I said.

  “You sound angry,” the voice said.

  “I’d like to talk to my mother,” I said grimly. What the hell.

  “Your mother is dead, Benjamin.”

  “I’ve heard that you machines can fake it.”

  “I don’t know the voice,” the machine said. “I know parts of the personality, from your remarks in the office. Perhaps you can help me.”

  I nodded. I’d been offered the chance to do this before but refused it as being too contrived. “First, she was a woman. Of sorts.”

  “Yes,” said Orbach’s voice, now female.

  “I want you to be her at about thirty-five, when I was a teenager. There was a nervous quaver in her voice. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987 and she spoke with an Ohio accent. She was a narcissistic drunk and she tried to be casual in her speech, but the self-regard and worry were always there.”