Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  “What about this?”

  Havelmann stared. His back straightened and he leaned forward. He tugged at his earlobe.

  “Isn’t that a bitch. If you don’t like the weather here—wait ten minutes.”

  “What about the redbuds?”

  “This weather will probably kill them. I hope Helen made the kids wear their jackets.”

  Evans looked out the window. Nothing had changed. She slowly drew the blinds and sat down again.

  “What year is it?”

  Havelmann adjusted himself in his chair, calm again. “What do you mean? It’s 1984.”

  “Did you ever read that book?”

  “Slow down a minute. What are you talking about?”

  Evans wondered what he would do if she got up and ground her thumbs into his eyes. “The book by George Orwell titled 1984.” She forced herself to speak slowly. “Are you familiar with it?”

  “Sure. We had to read it in college.” Was there a trace of irritation beneath Havelmann’s innocence? Evans sat as silently and as still as she could.

  “I remember it made quite an impression on me,” Havelmann continued.

  “What kind of impression?”

  “I expected something different from the professor. He was a confessed liberal. I expected some kind of bleeding heart book. It wasn’t like that at all.”

  “Did it make you uncomfortable?”

  “No. It didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already. It just showed what was wrong with collectivism. You know—Communism represses the individual, destroys initiative. It claims it has the interests of the majority at heart. And it denies all human values. That’s what I got out of 1984, though to hear that professor talk about it, it was all about Nixon and Vietnam.”

  Evans kept still. Havelmann went on.

  “I’ve seen the same mentality at work in business. The large corporations, they’re just like the government. Big, slow: you could show them a way to save a billion, and they’d squash you like a bug because it’s too much trouble to change.”

  “You sound like you’ve got some resentments,” said Evans.

  The old man smiled. “I do, don’t I. I admit it. I’ve thought a lot about it. But I have faith in people. Someday I may just run for state assembly and see whether I can do some good.”

  Her pencil point snapped. She looked at Havelmann, who looked back at her. After a moment she focused her attention on the notebook. The broken point had left a black scar across her precise handwriting.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said quietly, her eyes still lowered. “You still don’t remember arguing with me this morning?”

  “I never saw you before I walked in this door. What were we supposed to be fighting about?”

  He was insane. Evans almost laughed aloud at the thought—of course he was insane—why else would he be there? The question, she forced herself to consider rationally, was the nature of his insanity. She picked up the paperweight and handed it across to him. “We were arguing about this paperweight,” she said. “I showed it to you, and you said you’d never seen it before.”

  Havelmann examined the paperweight. “Looks ordinary to me. I could easily forget something like this. What’s the big deal?”

  “You’ll note that it’s a model of the Lincoln Memorial.”

  “You probably got it at some gift shop. D.C. is full of junk like that.”

  “I haven’t been to Washington in a long time.”

  “I live there. Alexandria, anyway. I drive in every morning.”

  Evans closed her notebook. “I have a possible diagnosis of your condition,” she said suddenly.

  “What condition?”

  This time the laughter was harder to repress. Tears almost came to her eyes with the effort. She caught her breath and continued. “You exhibit the symptoms of Korsakov’s syndrome. Have you ever heard of that before?”

  Havelmann looked as blank as a whitewashed wall. “No.”

  “Korsakov’s syndrome is an unusual form of memory loss. Recorded cases go back to the late 1800s. There was a famous one in the 1970s—famous to doctors, I mean. A Marine sergeant named Arthur Briggs. He was in his fifties, in good health aside from the lingering effects of alcoholism, and had been a career noncom until his discharge in the mid-sixties after twenty years in the service. He’d functioned normally until the early seventies, when he lost his memory of any events which occurred to him after September, 1944. He could remember in vivid detail, as if they had just happened, events up until that time. But of the rest of his life—nothing. Not only that, his continuing memory was affected so that he could remember events that occurred in the present only for a period of minutes, after which he would forget totally.”

  “I can remember what happened to me right up until I walked into this room.”

  “That’s what Sgt. Briggs told his doctors. To prove it he told them that World War II was going strong, that he was stationed in San Francisco in preparation for being sent to the Philippines, that it looked like the St. Louis Browns might finally win a pennant if they could hold on through September, and that he was twenty years old. He had the outlook and abilities of an intelligent twenty-year-old. He couldn’t remember anything that happened to him longer than forty minutes. The world had gone on, but he was permanently stuck in 1944.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “So it seemed to the doctor in charge—at first. Later he speculated that it might not be so bad. The man still had a current emotional life. He could still enjoy the present; it just didn’t stick with him. He could remember his youth, and for him his youth had never ended. He never aged; he never saw his friends grow old and die, he never remembered that he himself had grown up to be a lonely alcoholic. His girlfriend was still waiting for him back in Columbia, Missouri. He was twenty years old forever. He had made a clean escape.”

  Evans opened a desk drawer and took out a hand mirror. “How old are you?” she asked.

  Havelmann looked frightened. “Look, why are we doing—”

  “How old are you?” Evans’ voice was quiet but determined. Inside her a pang of joy threatened to break her heart.

  “I’m thirty-five. What the hell—”

  Shoving the mirror at him was as satisfying as firing a gun. Havelmann took it, glanced at her, then tentatively, like the most nervous of college freshmen checking the grade on his final exam, looked at his reflection. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He started to tremble.

  “What happened? What did you do to me?” He got out of the chair, his expression contorted. “What did you do to me! I’m thirty-five! What happened?”

  DR. EVANS STOOD in front of the mirror in her office. She was wearing her uniform. It was quite as rumpled as Havelmann’s suit. She had the tunic unbuttoned and was feeling her left breast. She lay down on the floor and continued the examination. The lump was undeniable. No pain, yet.

  She sat up, reached for the pack of cigarettes on the desktop, fished out the last one and lit it. She crumpled the pack and threw it at the wastebasket. Two points. She had been quite a basketball player in college, twenty years before. She lay back down and took a long drag on the cigarette, inhaling deeply, exhaling the smoke with force, with a sigh of exhaustion. She probably could not make it up and down the court a single time any more.

  She turned her head to look out the window. The blinds were open, revealing the same barren landscape that showed before. There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Havelmann entered. He saw her lying on the floor, raised an eyebrow, grinned. “You’re Doctor Evans?”

  “I am.”

  “Can I sit here or should I lie down too?”

  “Do whatever you fucking well please.”

  He sat in the chair. He had not taken offense. “So what did you want to see me about?”

  Evans got up, buttoned her tunic, sat in the swivel chair. She stared at him. Her face was blank, pale, her thin lips steady. It was the
expression of a woman terminally ill, so accustomed to her illness, and the necessity of ignoring it, that all that showed of the pain was mild annoyance. I am going to see this through, her face said, and then I’m going to kill myself.

  “Have we ever met before?” she asked.

  “No. I’m sure I’d remember.”

  He was sure he would remember. She would fucking kill him. He would remember that.

  She ground out the last inch of cigarette. She felt her jaw muscles tighten; she looked down at the ashtray in regret. “Now I have to quit.”

  “I should quit. I smoke too much myself.”

  “I want you to listen to me closely now,” she said slowly. “Do not respond until I’m finished.

  “My name is Major D. S. Evans and I am a military psychologist. This office is in the infirmary of NECDEC, the National Emergency Center for Defense Communications, located one thousand feet below a hillside in West Virginia. As far as we know we are the only surviving governmental body in the continental United States. The scene you see through this window is being relayed from a surface monitor in central Nebraska; by computer command I can connect us with any of the twelve monitors still functioning on the surface.”

  Evans turned to her keyboard and typed in a command; the scene through the window snapped to a shot of broken masonry and twisted steel reinforcement rods. The view was obscured by dust caked on the camera lens and by a heavy snowfall. Evans typed in an additional command and touched one of the switches on her desk. A blast of static, a hiss like frying bacon, came from a speaker.

  “That’s Dallas. The sound is a reading of the background radiation registered by detectors at the site of this camera.” She typed in another command and the image on the “window” flashed through a succession of equally desolate scenes, holding ten seconds on each before switching to the next. A desert in twilight, motionless under low clouds; a murky underwater shot in which the remains of a building were just visible; a denuded forest half-buried in snow; a deserted highway overpass. With each change of scene the loudspeaker stopped for a split-second, then the hiss resumed.

  Havelmann watched all of this soberly.

  “This has been the state of the surface for a year now, ever since the last bombs fell. To our knowledge there are no human beings alive in North America—in the Northern Hemisphere, for that matter. Radio transmissions from South America, New Zealand and Australia have one by one ceased in the last eight months. We have not observed a living creature above the level of an insect through any of our monitors since the beginning of the year. It is the summer of 2010. Although, considering the situation, counting years by the old system seems a little futile to me.”

  Doctor Evans slid open a desk drawer and took out an automatic. She placed it in the middle of the desk blotter and leaned back, her right hand touching the edge of the desk, near the gun.

  “You are now going to tell me that you never heard of any of this, and that you’ve never seen me before in your life,” she said. “Despite the fact that I have been speaking to you daily for two weeks and that you have had this explanation from me at least three times during that period. You are going to tell me that it is 1984 and that you are thirty-five years old, despite the absurdity of such a claim. You are going to feign amazement and confusion; the more that I insist that you face these facts, the more you are going to become distressed. Eventually you will break down into tears and expect me to sympathize. You can go to hell.”

  Evans’ voice had grown angrier as she spoke. She had to stop; it was almost more than she could do. When she resumed she was under control again. “If you persist in this sham, I may kill you. I assure you that no one will care if I do. You may speak now.”

  Havelmann stared at the window. His mouth opened and closed stupidly. How old he looked, how feeble. Evans felt a sudden wave of pity and doubt. What if she were wrong? She had an image of herself as she might appear to him: arrogant, bitter, an incomprehensible inquisitor whose motives for tormenting him were a total mystery. She watched him. After a few minutes his mouth closed; the eyes blinked rapidly and were clear.

  “Please. Tell me what you’re talking about.”

  Evans shuddered. “The gun is loaded. Keep talking.”

  “What do you want me to say? I never heard of any of this. Only this morning I saw my wife and kids and everything was all right. Now you give me this story about atomic war and 2010. What, have I been asleep for thirty years?”

  “You didn’t act very surprised to be here when you walked in. If you’re so disoriented, how do you explain how you got here?”

  The man sat heavily in the chair. “I don’t remember. I guess I thought I came here—to the hospital, I thought—to get a checkup. I didn’t think about it. You must know how I got here.”

  “I do. But I think you know too, and you’re just playing a game with me—with all of us. The others are worried, but I’m sick of it. I can see through you, so you may as well quit the act. You were famous for your sincerity, but I always suspected that was an act, too, and I’m not falling for it. You didn’t start this game soon enough for me to be persuaded you’re crazy, despite what the others may think.”

  Evans played with the butt of her dead cigarette. “Or this could be a delusional system,” she continued. “You think you’re in a hospital, and your schizophrenia has progressed to the point where you deny all facts that don’t go along with your attempts to evade responsibility. I suppose in some sense such an insanity would absolve you. If that’s the case, I should be more objective. Well, I can’t. I’m failing my profession, I realize. Too bad.” Emotion had gradually drained away from her until, by the end, she felt as if she were speaking from across a continent instead of a desk.

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Where are my wife and kids?”

  “They’re dead.”

  Havelmann sat rigidly. The only sound was the hiss of the radiation detector. “Let me have a cigarette.”

  “There are no cigarettes left. I just smoked my last one.” Evans’ voice was distant. “I made two cartons last a year.”

  Havelmann’s gaze dropped. “How old my hands are! . . . Helen has lovely hands.”

  “Why are you going on with this charade?”

  The old man’s face reddened. “God damn you! Tell me what happened!”

  “The famous Havelmann rage. Am I supposed to be frightened now?”

  The hiss from the loudspeaker seemed to increase. Havelmann lunged for the gun. Evans snatched it and pushed back from the desk. The old man grabbed the paperweight and raised it to strike. She pointed the gun at him.

  “Your wife didn’t make the plane in time. She was at the western White House. I don’t know where your damned kids were—probably vaporized with their own families. You, however, had Operation Kneecap to save you, Mr. President. Now sit down and tell me why you’ve been playing games, or I’ll kill you right here and now. Sit down!”

  A light seemed to dawn on Havelmann. “You’re insane,” he said quietly.

  “Put the paperweight back on the desk.”

  He did. He sat.

  “But you can’t simply be crazy,” Havelmann continued. “There’s no reason why you should take me away from my home and subject me to this. This is some kind of plot. The government. The CIA.”

  “And you’re thirty-five years old?”

  Havelmann examined his hands again. “You’ve done something to me.”

  “And the camps? Administrative Order 31?”

  “If I’m the president, then why are you quizzing me here? Why can’t I remember a thing about it?”

  “Stop it. Stop it right now,” Evans said slowly. She heard her voice for the first time. It sounded more like that of an old man than Havelmann’s. “I can’t take any more lies. I swear that I’ll kill you. First it was the commander-in-chief routine, calisthenics, stiff upper lips and discipline. Then the big brother, let’s have a whiskey and talk it over, son. Yessir, Mr.
President.” Havelmann stared at her. He was going to make her kill him, and she knew she wouldn’t be strong enough not to.

  “Now you can’t remember anything,” she said. “Your boys are confused, they’re fed up. I’m fed up, too.”

  “If this is true, you’ve got to help me!”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about helping you!” Evans shouted. “I’m interested in making you tell the truth. Don’t you realize that we’re dead? I don’t care about your feeble sense of what’s right and wrong; just tell me what’s keeping you going. Who do you think you’re going to impress? You think you’ve got an election to win? A place in history to protect? There isn’t going to be any more history! History ended last August!

  “So spare me the fantasy about the hospital and the nonexistent nurses’ station. Someone with Korsakov’s wouldn’t make up that story. He would recognize the difference between a window and a projection screen. A dozen other slips. You’re not a good enough actor.”

  Her hand trembled. The gun was heavy. Her voice trembled, too, and she despised herself for it. “Sometimes I think the only thing that’s kept me alive is knowing I had half a pack of cigarettes left. That and the desire to make you crawl.”

  The old man sat looking at the gun in her hand. “I was the president?”

  “No,” said Evans bitterly, “I made it all up.”

  His eyes seemed to sink farther back in the network of lines surrounding them.

  “I started a war?”

  Evans felt her heart race. “Stop lying! You sent the strike force; you ordered the pre-emptive launch.”

  “I’m old. How old am I?”

  “You know damn well how—” She stopped. She could hardly catch her breath. She felt a sharp pain in her breast. “You’re sixty-one.”

  “Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you can say?”

  The old man stared hollowly, then slowly, so slowly that at first it was not apparent what he was doing, he lowered his head into his hands and began to cry. His sobs were almost inaudible over the hissing of the radiation detector. Dr. Evans watched him intently. She rested her elbows on the desk, steadying the gun with both hands. Havelmann’s head shook in front of her. Despite his age, his gray hair was thick.