Perhaps that was just it, he thought. What had happened to Elizabeth. To anyone that just … “disappeared.” They found themselves living out their lives in other people’s bodies: too exhausted by the effort of it to guess at how they had arrived there, or why.
WHAT LITTLE JOE KNEW of Elizabeth’s actual “disappearance” he had told Alden that night. Just as she had promised, she had—shortly after they had met in Washington—quit the party, as well as her related (unmentioned, but no doubt intricate) involvements with its more sensitive inner workings. And just as she herself had anticipated, an invitation to Moscow had followed promptly—an invitation she had the audacity to refuse. It was directly after that she disappeared. Bits reported that she simply didn’t return from work one day. After quitting her job at the AAA she had got a job as a secretary at a small law firm, Johnson and Mallory, in the Bronx—thanks to the assistance of her uncle, Bob Mallory (Bits’s father), one of the partners there. Bits herself worked in the office, but had taken the day off sick. Elizabeth had left in the morning for work at the usual time, but was reported to have left the office at the end of the day half an hour after she ordinarily did—five-thirty in the afternoon. She had appeared, by all accounts, “her usual self” throughout the day, but, after she took her hat from the hook in the office’s small antechamber, poked her head around the corner to the inner office, shared by three Johnson and Mallory employees, including Bob Mallory himself, said good night, and offered a general wish that the weather would turn soon and relieve them all of the unseasonal humidity (it was only mid-April), she was never seen again.
ALDEN REMEMBERED VERY LITTLE of the rest of that spring. He went to work. He returned. He rarely talked to Joe anymore. Sometimes he saw him in the coffee room at work, and when he did they would both nod solemnly and then one or the other of them would duck his head back into his sandwich or mug of coffee or give a little jump and turn on a heel in an unexpected way as if he suddenly remembered he had forgotten something in another room. To see big Joe Hodge jump was unusual, but it became less and less so as April gave way to May and then to June and the humid air settled in, as if it had no thought any longer, nor ever would, of any other place to go. Then, sometime in the middle of June, Joe suddenly became very still and quiet again, almost like he had the night Alden had sent him off by himself in a cab. Alden thought that this was probably on account of the weather. Imagine that. The man was about to jump to his death from a tenth-floor window, and Alden attributed the strange calm that had settled over him to the oppressive heat.
But by the time Alden learned of it, he had his own worries, and so the details of Joe’s death, accompanied by whispered speculation as to whether or not he was a spy, on whom and what he had or might have been spying if he was, and the sequence of events that led to his untimely end, Alden barely heard.
Just two weeks before, he had been approached by Ted Wainwright, Coates’s boss. It had been brought to his attention, Wainwright said, that there were certain arms of the party that stretched into the very highest government positions, and the thoughts of the repercussions of such an extended influence were making it difficult for him, and most conscientious right-thinking Americans, to sleep at night. Was Alden so afflicted?
Alden swallowed, and nodded yes.
It was not a lie. He had not been sleeping properly since Elizabeth Gregory had disappeared, and that was going on two months. Without the company of Joe after work he went on solitary walks, which extended longer and longer into the evenings. The light didn’t fade until about nine o’clock that time of year, and it would be dark by the time he got in. He would then enter the silent house and go into the kitchen, where he would help himself to whatever he could find. Sometimes there would be a plate left out for him, other times not—there never did seem to be a pattern to it he could rely on. He would wash down the cold meal with a glass of milk, and count the interval between the humming of the refrigerator and the moment it shuddered loudly and was still. Sometimes—and for this, too, there was no regular pattern, at least not one he could easily discern—his mother would call his name out in her high, brittle voice. More often than not this occurred in the moments just after the shuddering motor of the refrigerator had dropped him momentarily into deepest silence.
Is that you? she would call, and each time, without fail, no matter how much or even at times how eagerly (so desperately lonely was he in those days) he waited for it, it would make him jump to hear it when it came. His heart would quicken and he would have to pause in order to regain his composure before he responded—a note of annoyance, on account of being surprised, always therefore pronounced on his tongue.
Yes, it’s me, he would say. Who else?
Sutton would already be tucked upstairs, where she now spent most of her time. His father, equally, kept to his end of the house; more and more they heard from him only the steady swish swish of the old riding whip as it beat time against the empty air.
Despite how much Alden anticipated it, even longed for it, each time his mother’s voice actually arrived—when he was reminded, with the sudden introduction of her voice, that he was not alone; that she was waiting for him behind her semi-shut door, and, now that his identity had been confirmed, expected him to enter; to duck his head down to hers, be kissed by her pale mouth, and sit beside her afterward for a while, her hand from time to time reaching out to touch his own—he would feel a deep resentment begin to stir in him. He no longer wished to be in any company, least of all his mother’s. He did not wish to seek out the correspondence any longer between the voice that had disturbed the brief calm of his after-dinner quiet, as he had swallowed the last of the milk from his glass in the dark kitchen and the refrigerator had shuddered to its brief repose, and the lips that had raised it. Though when the voice did not come he would always await it with anticipation (which was, he told himself, not truly desire but only the usual degree of anxiety produced when there is any degree of uncertainty about what the immediate future will bring), once it came, he could with conviction regret it bitterly, and it was a relief to do so—because it had come.
After he left his mother, planting a final kiss on her thin hair, saying, Good night, Mother, I must leave early again tomorrow, she would often delay him, one excruciating moment longer—reaching up to catch at the sleeve or the lapel of his coat.
You are less and less yourself these days, Alden, she would say.
Given this, or a similar excuse for genuine annoyance, he would bat her hand away.
Good night, Mother, he would say, and climb the stairs to his bedroom, making a note of the pale glow from beneath his father’s office door. The perfect symmetry of the light that leaked from beneath it to lie in a triangle there at the foot of the hall never altered in dimension, day after day. It existed there just as surely as the silence of the house existed—aside from the occasional throat clearings of the refrigerator, or the other small sounds, so ordinary and rhythmic in nature as to not even be heard. (What else, he would wonder sometimes when by some chance occurrence his attention was drawn to them, did he fail to hear?)
Sutton’s room, her door shut tight, would confront him at the top of the stairs. Often, he would linger just outside it for a while, pacing back and forth in as natural a pattern as he could, so that the loose board by the rail would make its characteristic squeak—according to which anyone within hearing range was always alerted to any traffic in the hall. But the door always remained firmly shut, and after a time he would locate his own room, and at the center of it, his bed, and would fall into it with such intense exhaustion that he could almost see sleep as it approached him in a wave.
But then, just at the peak, when he was certain there was no escape— that in another moment it would be upon him—he would be wide awake again, and there was nothing to do but lie there in the darkness—sometimes all night—only falling into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. But this early-morning sleep, with its repetitive dreams of ordinar
y waking tasks (of the alarm’s buzz, of greeting his father as he descended the stairs), would be so tedious it never seemed to provide him any rest at all. So real did it all seem that if it were not for the fact that he could nearly always count on a single skewed detail—a missing tooth in the mirror, an egg that refused to boil, a stranger’s face looking back at him where his father’s should have been—he would never have known that he was dreaming and quite possibly never have awoken.
SO HE COULD ANSWER the question posed to him two weeks before Joe Hodge’s death in all honesty. He was certainly one of those who was losing sleep. It did not take much, after that, for Ted Wainwright to persuade him to report everything he knew: of the professor, of the Indian, of Elizabeth Gregory, and of Joe Hodge himself.
Two weeks later Joe was dead, and Alden was making arrangements to leave the country, with the help of a letter from Wainwright and his father’s connections to the embassy in France. By the middle of August 1934, he had already reached Paris, having purchased a second-class ticket bound for Liverpool—then traveling overland to Dover and, by ancient steamboat, to Calais.
IV.
( INTERLUDE )
TABLE 1 Frequencies of One Million Digits
V.
Douglas
THE BONUS TRAIL. ANNANDALE, VIRGINIA; JOHNSTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA; HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA; WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST–DECEMBER, 1932—ALBANY, NEW YORK; WASHINGTON, D.C.; STAFFORD, VIRGINIA, 1933—VARIOUS LOCATIONS ALONG THE EASTERN SEABOARD AND THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE WEST, 1933–1934—WASHINGTON, D.C.; WINDLEY KEY, FLORIDA, 1934–1935
Each day Douglas rode into the city with Chet to look for his father, hitching a ride with one of the farm trucks that drove in from Annandale every morning and returned every afternoon. Douglas would sit up on top, and more often than not Chet would tuck his long legs into the cab and sit talking to the man who drove. Sometimes there were two men in the cab, and then they would sit three abreast. When there were three in the truck, Chet would ride up top with Douglas. Douglas liked it best, though, when Chet rode in the truck and he rode on top, so that he was all alone up there for nearly an hour, which was the time that it took them to get into the city. In that time, sitting up there alone, with the wind rushing by him, Douglas’s mind would be blank and clear, as in the days, which now seemed so long ago, when he had worked beside his father and it had seemed that nothing had ever or would ever change, and the hours stretched as long and unbroken as the Kansas sky. When the only interruption he could have imagined was the look that would come over his father’s face sometimes just before he’d take off running, Douglas after him. His heart pounding in his chest—bursting with the twin desires he could not separate in his mind: on the one hand, to overtake his father, and on the other for him to remain, as he always did remain. Just ahead. His strong back tilted at an angle to the flat field, the sweat on his neck gleaming—wetting his shirt in the V-pattern that birds make when they fly, all together, in a known direction.
Having until very recently known only the repetitive, instinctive rhythms of the seasons and of parental love—the latter interrupted only, also as if instinctively, by his father’s habitual bursts of anger toward his mother and himself, and his mother’s fiercely reactive affection, which she used against them both—it was strange to discover that there were countless other patterns, possibilities, and limitations to things, and that the endlessness that had so far defined his concept of the world in fact opened off onto something even more endless, which he was incapable of conceiving at all.
THEN THE TRUCK WOULD lurch to a halt and Chet would say, All right, boy, and Douglas would jump down, and feel the heavy thud of his feet hitting solid ground.
They learned nothing of what had happened to his father and did not speak of it—or any other thing. When they returned in the evening, they would sit together in silence, staring up at the sky, and there would be only the clattering sounds of pots and pans, the intermittent shouts of men from the surrounding camps, and, once in a while, the high-pitched yip of a dog.
It was into the space of that silence, or near silence—just as the increasing weightiness of the night sky pressed its vastness and its mysteries upon them, and its utter incomprehensibleness began to take—for each of them—the form of sleep that Chet told Douglas one night that he’d heard of a farm that was hiring. Just south of where they presently were, he said—and that he did believe Douglas stood a fair chance of landing a job.
Douglas was wide awake again, then, in a hurry. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at Chet, who was sitting up, too—his hands on his knees, staring off in the dark.
You could start tomorrow, Chet said. I believe it’s what your daddy would have wanted. Rather than hauling into town every day, risking trouble on his account—and half starved, too.
He looked at Douglas. The cut on the boy’s forehead, received on the day of the riots, had healed, leaving a purple scar—just visible beneath his low fringe.
What do you say? Chet said.
But there was nothing to say.
THE NEXT MORNING DOUGLAS woke early. He stood up, and stomped his feet to get warm. It had been a stifling hot summer and even the night before, as he had finally drifted off to sleep, he could still taste the sourness of humid air. But sometime during the night it had turned cold.
Chet was still sleeping and the whole rest of the world must have been, too, because there weren’t many sounds—only the call of a bird here and there. Douglas rolled up his blanket and sat down on it, and as he sat there—waiting for Chet to wake—it seemed very certain to him that everything that had happened or was going to happen had already happened: that there was nothing unreal, or unrealized, in the world. That everything, instead, was material—existent before him.
The first tentative, almost plaintive notes of the birds he had heard when first waking had grown by that time into a terrific swell of noise, but it had grown gradually—so gradually that he had not attended to the transition, and so could not account for it now. He closed his eyes and tried to hear each sound as it had first occurred, when each was still itself alone, independent of any other, and after a while it seemed to him that he could hear the way each note wove its way among the others. But then he was not sure whether it was the notes themselves he heard, or whether each, in intersecting with the other notes in the air, had already changed, and he could not help perceiving them that way.
He was wondering this, his eyes closed, when Chet woke—his voice (as he cleared his throat, swore out loud, then got up to shake his arms and legs just as Douglas had done, to get warm) interrupting and thus changing all the other notes around him once and for all. By the time Douglas finally opened his eyes, Chet was standing in front of him, looking at him. Then Chet turned, picked up his blanket and bag, and said, Let’s get a move on, then.
So Douglas stood up and everything was as it had been and would be. The ground solid: stretching empty and cold in four directions. And the birds just noise overhead.
THEY WALKED FOR ABOUT a mile ’til they reached the junction where, on previous days, they had flagged down a ride into the city. This time they waited and let four or five trucks go by without waving or thumbing a ride. Then the same truck, a great big flatbed, that had picked them up the morning before pulled up. The driver was the same. A thin man, who kept glancing around him, as though he didn’t want to get caught looking at anything.
This is the man can find you work, Chet told Douglas. The man leaned from his truck, gave them a nod, then let his eyes dance around for a while, asking them how did they do, and if the sudden cold hadn’t taken them by surprise.
Without waiting for a reply, he ducked his head down to light up a cigarette, which turned out to be packed so loose that its flame leapt up and would have singed his long eyelashes if he hadn’t just in time waved it like a match, so that at last it settled itself into a fierce and single glow.
All right, Douglas said. To Chet, who was standing with his hands o
ut as if he had been asking a question.
Douglas shrugged his shoulders and shifted his bag—his father’s name on its side, ablaze in red letters—from one shoulder to the next. He had a hard time looking at Chet, and Chet at him. Neither was looking at the other and there was nothing to say, but Douglas said anyway, I hope it won’t be a very long while, and Chet let his hands fall down abruptly as if what the boy had said were the answer he was looking for.
No, no, son, it won’t, he said. You can count on that. I know where to find you, so your daddy will, too. He cleared the phlegm out from where it had collected; as he did so, his Adam’s apple reared in his throat. Then he reached out his arm again, and held Douglas by the shoulder, this time hard enough that Douglas could feel the pressure of it through his coat. Then Chet dropped his hand and said, Well, good luck to you— and Douglas turned and opened the door opposite the thin man, who had by then nearly breathed in the entirety of his cigarette, it burned so fast, and the door creaked on its hinges and made the most god-awful noise as Douglas got in beside him, clutching his bag tightly to his chest. Then the thin man flicked the still-burning end of his cigarette out the window on his side and gave a short wave to Chet, who stood, still shivering a little, by the side of the road, though the sun had come up by then—and they drove.
WHEN THEY GOT WITHIN a mile of the place, they could see that a crowd had gathered outside a locked gate.
The thin man drove up and tailed a group of men walking at the far end of the crowd.
What’s this? he said. Though it was clear as day.
Hullo, said the man nearest to the truck as it idled beside him. Lemme guess, he said. You all lookin’ for work?
Well, yes, sir, said the thin man. This boy here. I promised his daddy I’d find him some work, and that’s what I am plannin’ to do.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 20
