Echo Round His Bones

by Thomas Disch

  Ives turned his gaze away from Hansard's. "I don't know."

  "Colonel -- or Major, if you prefer -- I should not like to hurt you again."

  "Wouldn't you? I doubt that. You're just the same as Worsaw. You're all the same, all of you. As soon as the discipline is gone you lose all sense of what's right and decent. You betray your allegiance. You murder and rape. You act like . . . like jungle savages. All of you."

  "It doesn't seem to me, Major, that you're in a good position to offer moral instruction. Let me repeat my question: How many -- "

  "Seventeen, twenty, twenty-four -- the number varies. Oh, you think you're so fine and upstanding, don't you! So damn white ! They always do when they're new here , before they've had to . . . had to eat their . . ." He trailed off into vacancy.

  "What, Major? What is it you eat here? Where do you get your food?"

  Ives' eyes dropped in a mockery of shyness to contemplate the buttons on Hansard's shirt. His smile twisted with a slight, enigmatic contempt for the man who held him prisoner. It was, in fact, the characteristic smile of a prisoner who, though powerless, knows what distance separates himself, exalted in his guilt, from the common run.

  With horror Hansard realized what the men of Camp Jackson were living on. His horror was all the more potent because he also knew that this realization had been with him from the first moment he had seen the pile of corpses outside the portal of the manmitter. For he had assessed the situation correctly. All the food that sustained Worsaw and his men would have to have come to them through the transmitter.

  He knew this, yet even now he refused to believe it. "Then all those men who went through the transmitter, all of them . . ."

  "Those niggers, you mean? You're a Northerner, aren't you, Captain? Only a Northerner would call a bunch of niggers men."

  "You foulness! You corruption!"

  "You wait, Captain -- wait till you get hungry enough. You talk about us now, but just wait. Worsaw was the one who saw the way it had to be. He had the strength . . . and the . . . and the foresight to do what had to be done. So that we got the niggers and the nigger-lovers before they got us. He's kept us alive here. No one else was able to; only Worsaw. I was . . . afraid to face facts; but Worsaw went right ahead and did it. He's a . . ." the colonel began to choke again but finished his testimonial first, ". . . a good man.

  "I recall that you said the same thing when last we met." Hansard rose to his feet.

  "Where are you going?" Ives asked anxiously. "You won't tell him what I've been telling you? I'm not supposed to be here. I -- "

  "I'm hardly likely to have many conversations with your master, Ives. I'm going now, but you just stay here or go back in the bedroom, if you like, and wallow in your filth. As long as you can't infect them , it can't matter."

  Hansard was at the door when Ives called him in a strangely muffled tone. Hansard looked back. Ives was sitting on the floor, his face buried in his hands.

  "Captain, please! I beg of you, Captain! Do this one thing -- do it, I beg of you. I don't have the strength myself, but you could. Oh, for the love of God, please !"

  "You want me to kill you -- is that it, Major?"

  "Yes," Ives whispered into his hands, "oh, yes."

  "You can go to hell, Major, but it will have to be under your own steam."

  When Hansard left him, Ives was crying.

  He proceeded back immediately to where he had hidden Ives' field pack. He pulled it out of the sidewalk; then, in the pool of light beneath a street lamp, he unbuckled it. The flesh that still adhered to the gnawed bones had a slightly carrion odor. Hansard dumped the charry remains into the ground and pushed them down beyond arm's reach. At the bottom of the pack there was a .45 automatic pistol and ammunition, wrapped in a plastic poncho. This Hansard kept for himself.

  It was after sunset, time to return to the reservoir and fill his canteen. But when he began walking, his legs betrayed him and he had to sit down. Likewise, his hands, as he put a clip of ammunition into the automatic, were trembling.

  He was not terrified that the men at Camp Jackson would get him; he was confident that he could prevent that. He was terrified that he might get one of them -- once he was hungry enough. And then? How much farther was it possible to sink then? He might have asked Ives while he had the chance.

  SIX

  SCENE WITH A SMALL BOY

  For a while food and sleep can replace each other. Knowing this, Hansard refrained from purposeless activities; went on no more idle walks, and found a residence for himself on the Virginia side of the Potomac nearer to his water supply. After his encounter with Ives, the idea of intruding upon the privacy of residents of the Real World was more than ever distasteful to him. On the other hand he valued his own privacy and did not want to make his home in a public concourse.

  The Arlington Public Library provided a happy compromise. When people were there, they behaved sedately. It was open evenings, so Hansard did not have to spend the time after sunset in darkness; even the silence of this world, so unnatural elsewhere, seemed fitting here.

  At such times as Hansard could no longer pretend to himself that he was asleep (he had made the basement stacks his special burrow), he could come upstairs and read over the shoulders of whoever was in the library that day; fragments and snippets of a variety of things, as Providence saw fit to furnish: The College Outline synopses of A Farewell to Arms, Light in August, and diverse other Great Old Novels that were required reading in the Arlington high schools; paradigms of Bantu verbs; backnumber spools of the Washington Post ; articles on how to develop hard, manly arms; on how to retire gracefully; on how to synthesize potatoes; and several graceful anecdotes from the lives of Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear. . . .

  It was a mistake to go into the children's room and read the Milne book, for it opened his heart wide to the temptation he had all this while been strong enough to ignore. His ex-wife and son lived beneath the D.C. Dome. He could visit them with no more effort than it would take to get on an S-S-bound bus.

  Since the divorce she had managed to make do on her meager alimony by moving into government-subsidized Sargent Shriver Manors, popularly known as the S-S, a model development of the early 70's and now the city's most venerable slum. (Really poor people, of course, had to squat out in the suburbs, breathing the poisonous air of the megalopolitan landscape.) Hansard had been able to see his son, who was now eight years old, one week end each month. But there had always been a constraint between father and son since the divorce, and Hansard still tended to think of Nathan Junior as the insouciant, golden-haired four-year-old who had listened with solemn attention to the adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

  The present Nathan Junior was, therefore, in his father's eyes something of a usurper -- with very tenuous claims to the title of true son or to Hansard's affection. An injustice, surely, but an injustice that no amount of fair treatment could expunge: the heart listens to no reasons but its own.

  With Ives's example before him, Hansard should have known better than to surrender to this temptation. Only a glimpse, he told himself. I won't look at anything they wouldn't want me to see. Could he really deceive himself so far as to credit these sophistries? Apparently not, for as the bus was passing near the Washington Monument, Hansard had second thoughts and dismounted.

  He walked along the edge of the reflecting pool. He had grown so accustomed to his altered condition that, as he debated with himself, he did not dodge the lower branches of the cherry trees but passed through them unheedingly. He knew better than to believe the tempter's whispered "Just this once." No; there would be a second time, if he let there be a first -- and a third time, and more. There is no food that can sate curiosity.

  Curiosity? -- the tempter argued. Merely that? isn't there love in it too?

  Love is reciprocal, the conscientious Hansard replied. What has a phantom like me to do with love? And besides (and this was the crux of it) there is no love there any more.

  It can be se
en that the debate had insensibly shifted its focus from Nathan Junior to Marion, and the tempter cleverly pointed this out. Don't go for her sake then) but for his. it is your duty as a father.

  The tempter's arguments became weaker and weaker, his true purpose more transparent. Hansard would surely have resisted, had not a curious thing happened at that moment. . . .

  Across the reflecting pooi he saw, among the many tourists and lunch-hour strollers, a woman -- and this woman seemed for a moment to have been looking at him. She was a handsome woman about Marion's age and, like Marion, a blonde. It was impossible, of course, that she had seen him; but for a moment he had been able to believe it. He strode up to the edge of the pool (but there he had to stop, for the water of the Real World did not sustain a swimmer's weight as the land would), and called to her: "Hello, there! Hello! Can you see me? Wait -- listen! No, no, stay a while!" But already she had turned away and was walking toward the Capitol and out of sight.

  Then Hansard knew that despite all his good resolves, he would become, like that man he had so much detested, a voyeur. He would trespass against his wife's and son's privacy. For it was not within him, nor would it be within any of us, to endure the unrelenting terror of his perfect isolation and aloneness amid the throngs of that city, where every unseeing pair of eyes was a denial of his existence. If that seems to overstate the case, then instead of aloneness let us say alienation. We will all agree that there is little chance of coping with that .

  We have observed earlier that Hansard was very little a man of his own times, and that even in ours he would have seemed rather out of date. Alienation, therefore, was for him a thoroughly unfamiliar experience, though the word had been dinned into his ears in every humanities course he'd ever taken (which had been as few as possible). So that, despite a well-developed conscience of the old-fashioned post-Puritan sort, he was singularly ill-equipped to handle his new emotions. The bottom seemed to be dropping out, as though existence had been a hangman's trap which now was sprung. He felt a hollowness at the core of his being; he felt a malaise; he felt curiously will-less, as though he had just discovered himself to be an automaton as, in a sense, he had.

  In his innocence he showed symptoms of classic simplicity, like the dreams of some forest- or mountain-dweller, someone far beyond the pale who has escaped even the mention of Freud's name. There is no need to go into great detail here, except to remind the knowing reader that although Hansard experienced his first bout of the nausée at a rather advanced age (for the unfortunate experience that had required his presence some years before in an Army mental hospital could not fairly have been said to be "alienation" in the sense we employ here), it was no less devastating. Indeed, as is so often the case when an adult comes down with a childhood disease, it was rather worse.

  The practical consequence was that he got back on the bus, but not without first resorting to his cache in the wall of the Lincoln Memorial and taking out the jacket of his uniform. Then, replacing the attaché case in the wall and very carefully straightening his tie (his concern with a good appearance was proportional to his intent to do wrong), he set off . . . downward.

  She was sprawled on the living-room tuckaway -- the tuckaway that had been their wedding gift from his parents -- smoking and reading a personalized novel (in which the heroine was given the reader's own name). She had let herself grow heavier. It is true that a certain degree of stoutness had been fashionable for the last two years. Even so, she was beginning to exceed that certain limit. Her elaborate hairdo was preserved inviolate in a large pink plastic bubble.

  There was a man in the room, but he paid little attention to Marion and she as little to him. His hairdo was likewise protected by a bubble (his was black), and his face was smeared with a cream that would give it that "smooth, leathery look" that was so much admired this year. A typical welfare dandy. He was performing isometric exercises in a kimono that Hansard had brought back from Saigon for Marion, who had then been his fiancée.

  The surprising thing was that Hansard was not jealous. A little taken aback, perhaps, a little disapproving; but his disapproval was more of her generally lax style of living than of another man's presence. Adultery he could not countenance (and, in fact, he had not). But now Marion was free to do as she liked, within the limits of what was commonly accepted.

  Love? Had he, so short a time as four years ago, loved this woman? How can emotion vanish so utterly that even its memory is gone?

  Marion rose from the tuckaway and went to the door to press the buzzer opening the downstairs entry (her apartment was on 28), then disappeared into the kitchen. She had left her book open on the table beside the couch, and Hansard bent over to read a passage from it:

  Marion Hansard, sitting up on the bed, glanced into the mirror of the vanity. There were times, and this one of them, when Marion was startled by her own beauty. Usually she didn't think of herself as especially attractive, though she had never been and never would be drab. But how could Marion Hansard hope to compete with the dark-eyed beauties of Mexico City, with their raven hair and haughty, sensual expressions . . . ?

  Hansard looked away from his ex-wife's romance with the same embarrassment he would have felt had he walked in upon her in the performance of a shameful act. He made up his mind to leave the apartment.

  Then his son came into the room.

  It must have been to let him in that Marion had risen from the couch. His hair was darker than Hansard remembered, and he had lost another milk tooth. Also, he was dressed more poorly than when he went for a week-end expedition with his father.

  The man in the black hair-bubble spoke to Nathan Junior in an equable manner, and Hansard was more than ever assured that he enjoyed resident status in his ex-wife's apartment. Marion returned from the kitchen and also addressed her son, whose cheeks were beginning to color. He seemed to be protesting what his mother had just told him or commanded him to do.

  More than ever Hansard was distressed by the vast silence of his present world. It may be amusing for a few moments to watch television with the sound cut off, but it is quite another thing when you see the words spilling soundlessly from your own son's lips.

  The man in the black hair-bubble concluded what must have been an argument by pushing Nathan Junior gently but firmly into the outer hall and locking the door behind him. Hansard followed his son into the elevator. He knew from experience that no elevator in S-S Manors could move quickly enough to be any danger to him.

  S-S Manors had been so designed that children played on the high rooftops instead of cluttering up the sidewalks and streets below. The architects had designed the lofty playgrounds with considerable imagination and poor materials, and now the labyrinth, the honeycomb of playhouses, and the elaborate jungle-gym were all in the first stages of disintegration. Originally a cyclone fence had screened the entire play area, but there were only a few shreds and tatters left. Even the guardrails were broken through in places.

  As soon as Nathan Junior came out of the elevator he was herded into the labyrinth by an older boy. Hansard followed him inside. The twisting concrete corridors were jammed with children, all as small or smaller than his son. Any kind of games were out of the question here. The rest of the playground was monopolized by the older boys for their own games.

  Nathan Junior fought his way to a group of his own friends. They stood together whispering, then the seven of them ran peil-mell out of the labyrinth toward that corner of the roof where a game of isometric baseball was in progress. The leader of the escapees (not Nathan Junior) caught the ball and ran with it back to the labyrinth. Nathan Junior, not being a very good runner, lagged behind and was caught by one of the older boys.

  This boy -- he was about fourteen -- took hold of Nathan Junior by the ankles, turned him upside down, and carried him to the edge of the roof where the fencing had been caved through. He held the smaller boy, twisting and screaming (though for Hansard it happened in dumb-show), out over the abyss. It was a sheer drop o
f thirty-five stories to the street. He let go of one ankle. Hansard had to turn away. He told himself that what he was seeing was a common occurrence, that it had probably happened to every one of the children up here at one time or another, that his son was in no real danger. It helped not at all.

  At last the torture was brought to an end, and Nathan Junior was allowed to return to the little prison that the architects had unwittingly provided. I'll leave now, Hansard told himself. I should never have come here. But he was no more able to follow his own good advice than he had been to help his son. He followed him into the labyrinth once more.

  Nathan Junior pushed his way through to where his friends were, and immediately he struck up an argument with a slightly younger and smaller boy. The victim became the aggressor. A fight started, and it was clear that the smaller boy stood no chance against Nathan Junior, who was soon sitting on his chest and pounding his head against the concrete surface of the roof.

  "Stop it!" Hansard yelled at his son. "For God's sake, stop it!"

  But Nathan Junior, of course, could not hear him.