Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Aunty Fan? She loved Albert dearly. According to Aunty Fan, Albert could do no wrong. I’m so thankful you saved me from Albert.” She laughed quaveringly. “Sometimes I scare myself, thinking what might have been, instead of what was. If I hadn’t met Faye, or Ophy …”

  “It’s been a good life.” He tilted her head down and kissed her on the lips, a soft, lingering, lovely kiss. Not passion. Something better, more lasting, than passion—the complete understanding they had always had, from the beginning. A mated pair, they were. Like geese. Hal had always said so.

  “How’s your leg?” she asked, caressing it with her fingertips. “Able to get you back to the bedroom?”

  “Always able to do that.” He rose, leaning on her slightly. She turned off the lights behind them.

  Sunday morning Jagger went into town for a meeting with Raymond Keepe. Keepe had asked for the meeting, at Webster’s direction.

  “I tried to call you yesterday,” said Jagger. “But you were away.”

  “I was away, yes,” said Keepe through his teeth. “Mr. Webster summoned me back! The place was like an anthill. Now that we know what’s going on, all the weirdness makes sense. Have you heard about the lab in Washington that’s been doing hormonal assays? Testosterone levels in men are only one fourth what they were six months ago.”

  “All men?” asked Jagger tonelessly.

  “I haven’t heard that anyone is immune.” Keepe scowled, drew his lips back in a grimace. “According to Mr. Webster, all our allies are in a tailspin. They’re threatening World War Three. Iran and Libya have pulled out of the Alliance. They’re blaming the Great Satan for infecting the Islamic world with this disease. They’ve proclaimed a jihad against all unbelievers, and they’ve started stoning women in the streets, sort of indiscriminately, for supposedly having spread the disease. The U.S. military has been put on full alert.

  “Japan accused China of putting birth control in the water supplies to control its population, thereby affecting the fish that are eaten by Japanese. The commentator said there were rumors of nuclear threats having been made. Three countries not known to have atomic weapons are claiming to have them. The President’s going to appear on TV this afternoon—”

  “So what?”

  “So Webster has put the Alliance plan on hold. For now. Until this sorts itself out, any move might be in the wrong direction. All active political campaigns are off for now. We’re going into a holding pattern.”

  Jagger heard this as he might have heard the clamorous echo of a tomb door slamming shut with him inside. It was all he could do to keep from screaming in frustration. “Until when?”

  “Until somebody finds out what caused this. The U.S. has evidently had every available laboratory working on it for some time. This is what all that CDC nonsense was about, of course. Other nations are no doubt doing the same. Webster says the cause will no doubt be found very shortly, and someone will figure out how to fix it.”

  “Like we fixed AIDS,” said Jagger in a heavy voice.

  “It’s nothing like AIDS.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like! Nobody knows.”

  Except, he thought, a group of women near this very city, who had said on Sunday that one or more of their members had started this thing.

  He asked, “What if I could tell Mr. Webster who caused it?”

  Keepe looked up alertly. “Foreigners? What? Iranians? Chinese?”

  “Americans.”

  Keepe smiled thinly. “Oh, come on, Jake.”

  “Women.”

  “Women? Some kind of psychological castration? Chop it off you—yes, they’re good at that. But something like this? Women haven’t the brains for something like this. They don’t think that way.”

  “Most women don’t, right, but there’s always a freak.” His eyes were fixed on something distant. “Anyhow, suppose it was people I could name? Would that make a good campaign issue? Would that move me up in the estimation of the Alliance?”

  Keepe thought about it. “If you could prove someone specific was responsible, male or female, and if you could get them to cough up the cure or antidote or whatever, I suppose you might come off as a hero.”

  “The public likes heroes.”

  “Oh, yes. You could probably be elected President on the strength of finding out who caused it. But, personally, I find it very far-fetched, and in my opinion, so will the Alliance.”

  “But if I could do it?”

  Keepe shrugged. “It couldn’t be a kind of Joe McCarthy bluff with your waving a piece of paper and saying you have the names. You’d have to have more than that. You’d have to have the cure.”

  Jagger got up angrily, thrust his face at the other man. “Quit patronizing me, damn it. If I named real people, if I could prove they did it, then even if they didn’t have the cure, knowing how they did it will tell us where to look for the cure!”

  Keepe pushed his chair back, shook his head slowly, his brow furrowed. “You’re serious.”

  “Keepe, if you knew me at all, you’d know I’m rarely anything but serious!”

  Keepe stared at him, forehead creased. “Listen, Jake.…” He licked his lips, looked around himself, as though fearful of being overheard. “Listen, if you’re going to get involved in something like that, you should talk to Webster right now. He doesn’t like people going off on their own, and he finds out everything that happens. I don’t know how he keeps up on things the way he does, but he’s … omniscient in some ways.”

  Jagger tapped his fingers on his desk, fascinated despite himself. “Omniscient?”

  Keepe laughed, a hollow sound. “Anything Webster cares about, he’s right on top of, even when you think he’s somewhere else. Like he was … twins or triplets or something.”

  Jake guffawed. “In two or three places at once?”

  “Don’t laugh, Jake. It’s not a joke. I swear to … Well, just take my word for it!”

  “So he’s got a double,” said Jake dismissively. “Or several doubles. It wouldn’t be the first time. Celebrities do that.”

  Keepe breathed deeply, not quite a sigh, more a gasp. “Whatever, Jake. If you’re going to do something, tell Webster. He doesn’t take kindly to people trying to go around him.”

  “It was just a brainstorm,” Jagger said, staring out the window. “An idea. I’ll have to think about it.” He, like Keepe, found it hard to believe that women were bright enough to do something like this. He would have said women weren’t smart enough or efficient enough, but, then, their taped conversation hadn’t sounded so much like a plot as it had a mistake. Women could make mistakes, no doubt about that. And it didn’t really matter whether it had been done accidentally or purposefully. One of the women had done a stupid thing, and another one of them had done something worse and then disappeared, and they had all covered it up. They were all responsible.

  The man who brought them to account would be a hero. Especially if it led to a cure.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Keepe.

  “I don’t know. Even if the Alliance plans are on hold, I still have a trial to finish. And, as I said, it was just a brainstorm. Something that clicked. I’ll think it through. If there’s anything in it, I’ll do what you suggest.”

  Keepe was accustomed to reading faces, and he found Jagger’s features easy to decipher. Jake didn’t intend to consult Webster, and this fact placed Keepe in an awkward position. Whatever Jake did, the Alliance would find out, at once or eventually. And when they did, Webster would find out also that Keepe had known about it.

  As soon as he could, he got to a phone and dialed the emergency number he had been given. It yielded a voice that gave him another number, and that one another yet. At last he got someone who asked a few brief questions; then came a series of clicks and tones that ended when Webster’s familiar voice came on the line.

  “What?”

  The single word rocked Keepe on his feet, stunned him, left him shaking as he told his story, making
it as brief as possible. Something about Webster’s voice was different!

  “You think he knows of women who really did have something to do with it?” Webster asked.

  The vocal difference had to do with … with timbre. As though in all previous conversations Webster’s voice had been somehow muffled and now it was not. Something in the phone line, perhaps? Or the place Webster was speaking from? To make this cutting resonance, this agonizing sound.

  “Keepe! I asked a question!”

  Keepe moved the receiver well away from his ear and moistened his dry mouth. “I have no way of judging that, Mr. Webster. The one thing I’m sure of is that Jagger thinks so, though how he would have become aware of it, I have no idea.”

  He heard something that might have been a chuckle, it, too coming through the phone with that unmuffled clarity, like the slash of a rapier. Keepe shut his eyes and squeezed them tight. He had been injured by that laugh. He knew he had. Cut, somehow. Somewhere. He waited for the pain that would come, had to come as the voice went on:

  “Oh, I have a very good idea, Keepe. Jake is a creature of habit, but, then, most creatures are, have you noticed that? Break a dog to the whip, and he cringes when you speak. Give a dog running room—I like to give my dogs running room—and he jumps gates. Perhaps Jagger has jumped one gate too many. You did tell him that winning the case wasn’t the most important thing? You did give him the hint …?”

  “The hint, sir?” Keepe croaked. He swallowed deeply and tried again. “Hint?”

  “That I want men willing to lose if I tell them to.” The words came out of the phone into his head and manifested themselves as wheels of fire, hot and dangerous. Behind his eyes they spun, sparkling.

  Keepe had to swallow again before he could answer. What was the matter with him! “Oh, yes, sir. More than a hint, sir.”

  Webster laughed again, and Keepe almost dropped the phone as he jerked it farther away from his ear. Oh, to stop that sound. If only he could … could stop that sound.

  Webster said: “Jake evidently didn’t take the hint. Poor Jake. He wants to win so badly. He’s probably bugged the home or office of opposing counsel, female, which probably means the women Jake is talking about are friends or acquaintances of hers. Very interesting. Certainly more of a lead than I’ve had from any other source. Thank you, Keepe. I have a record of all Mr. Jagger’s recent visitors and conversations. Stay where you can be reached.”

  Stay where you can be reached. Each of those six words came with that razor clarity, that fiery power, cutting him through, cauterizing the cuts, leaving him afraid to move. If he moved, he’d fall into pieces, into shreds. He had to heal first, had to let his cells regenerate; otherwise, he would fall on the floor in strands, like noodles. The image was clear in his mind.

  Still, his mouth moved, Keepe surprised that it was possible to move any discrete part of himself without detaching it. “Of course, Mr. Webster.”

  He dropped the phone onto the floor in his attempt to hang it up. He couldn’t pick it up, he was shaking too much, his muscles kept going into spasms. He nudged the phone into the cradle with his foot, leaving it on the floor. Oh, my, he said to himself, as to a child. Oh, my, my.

  Keepe had had a wife once. He did not often think of her, but he remembered her now. Elaine. She had told him it was a mistake to work for Webster. She had told him she couldn’t stay with him if he worked for Webster. He had laughed when she went away. He had called her a stupid bitch. He had understood even then that Mr. Webster was an extremely powerful and dangerous man with motives and strategies that were outside Keepe’s experience, but Keepe had been sure he could work for Webster without getting involved in whatever it was Webster was doing. Elaine had said it wouldn’t work, but Keepe had said he could do his work and get paid for it, that Webster didn’t own Keepe, he only hired him.

  “Give me credit for some sense,” Keepe had told her. “I stand at a professional distance, on my own separate ground as an independent person.”

  “You’re building a house upon sand. You’re a fool, Raymond.”

  “How dare you!”

  “I dare. Just now, I must.”

  Later he learned she was pregnant. Later he learned she had had a child, but those were the last words she had said to him. When he had returned home that evening, she was gone and he never heard from her again. Now that professional distance he had bragged of was gone as well. Now his separate ground was gone. Elaine had been right. It had been sand; it had melted away; he had felt it go from beneath his feet. There was no distance at all between himself and Webster; there was no independence. He and Webster were of one substance—Webster’s substance. They were of one purpose—Webster’s purpose. That intent lapped around his feet like a flow of lava, its heat charring his flesh. His feet were going to burn off, and when they did, he would fall into the stream of Webster’s self. This was not metaphor. He saw the red glow of that self, smelled the brimstone reek of it, felt the pain of burning. There was no way he could stay alive, not even by letting his feet be burned off. Inside himself a trapped creature screamed and ran to and fro.

  Now, now, he assured himself, squeezing his eyes shut, swallowing deeply, moving abruptly as to break the mental webs that bound him suddenly to this place. Now, now, this would not do; it was time to call a halt, time to reassert individuality, time to redefine the relationship. Perhaps it was even time to resign from this job.…

  Some separate part of his mind said all these things in solemn words, which he heard quite clearly, words that echoed slightly in the fiery and vacant vaults where he found himself, like someone calling a lost child in a place too huge to search. He heard the words, he understood the words, but they had no connection to reality. His body paid no attention to the words. The only reality was where he was.

  His hip joints burned away until he leaned against the wall. He felt his backside sliding down the wall, his knees burning, bending, deeper and deeper until they could bend no more, at which point he fell forward, folding in upon himself, curling, crouching, until he was tight against the floor, huddled in the smallest possible compass over and around the silent phone, as though he and the phone were one organism, as though it were the umbilicus that bound him to the source of all his life. No matter what the words in his head said, he was doing what Webster had commanded. He was staying where he could be reached. Forever, if need be.

  BY MIDMORNING SUNDAY, BETTIANN was sitting in the living room of the suite at the Middlebury Mansionhouse, surrounded by the phone books of the close-by communities, looking up names, variations on names, persons possibly related to names: Hotchkiss, Sourwood, Rainford, Glascock.

  Faye, returning from a short walk to get the cobwebs out of her head, asked, “What are you doing? Where’d you get the phone books?”

  “Hotel manager got them from a friend of his at the phone company.” She smiled and pushed half of the books in Faye’s direction. “I told them we’re looking for an heiress.”

  “You told a fib?”

  “Umm. Better than saying we were looking for ex-victims. I think I’ve found one, by the way.”

  And she had. L. Glascock—not Laura, but her brother Lenny, who said Laura lived near a neighboring town, and gave them directions: big house, no phone, set back from the road, look for dogs, cows.

  “Cows everywhere,” Faye objected. “Dogs everywhere.”

  “We’ll find it,” said Bettiann. “It’s a place to start.”

  They waited until Aggie came out of the bedroom, eyes swollen again. She’d been crying more or less since they’d arrived: silent weeping, the worst kind.

  “Aggie …” Tentatively.

  “I’m all right,” she said angrily.

  Obviously she wasn’t. She was no better when they went hunting Glascocks through the high summer day, puffed clouds hanging in the west, white clapboard houses backing explosions of day lilies and blue candles of delphinium, fields of swaying clover, dandelion verges, silos and barns so
berly anchoring the country lanes like weights at the corners of a picnic tablecloth. The Glascock place, found at last behind a gnarled orchard, was weedy, peeling, sagging, gray, and well used, but comfortable and welcoming nonetheless.

  “Laura? She’s inside.” A grease-stained and overalled teenager, only briefly distracted, went back to his enigmatic absorption with the innards of a tractor.

  Laura was a little younger than they, but more worn, more lined, and more contented, so Faye thought, taking in the calm face and relaxed figure with an artist’s evaluating eye.

  “Of course I remember Sophy,” she said, voice rising like a cork on a wavelet, bobbing and lilting. “Come sit on the porch! How could I forget Sophy? Where is she? How is she?”

  “Lost,” said Bettiann as they sat down, she on a rocking chair, Aggie and Faye on a rickety bench. “Disappeared. We’re trying to find her. Talking with anyone who might have known her, anyone who might have talked to her.”

  A sudden watchfulness, a look almost of suspicion. “What do you mean, disappeared?”

  “We haven’t seen her in a couple of years,” said Faye carefully.

  Laura laughed. “Well, that’s no big thing. She’s been busy, that’s all. You read the papers, don’t you?”

  “The papers?” asked Bettiann.

  “All those old ladies—didn’t you think of Sophy right away, when you read about that?”

  “Old ladies …”

  “Burning those fashion places, those shoe shops. Remember how she worried about you?” This to Bettiann.

  “Me?” Her voice squeaked.

  “You. You’re Bettiann Bromlet, aren’t you? Bettiann Carpenter? Are you still trying to starve yourself into a Barbie doll? The ideal woman of the marketplace? One who is less than the sum of her clothing?”

  “Why did she tell you about me?” Bettiann asked, more than a little annoyed.

  “Oh, tush, we needn’t pretend. She told us about all of you. She said you, Bettiann, couldn’t live in your own body because it wasn’t the image you’d been given. She used you as an example when she talked to us about becoming our own icons. Oh, she’d get in a rage, Sophy would. She said we had to reclaim ourselves, relearn to be miraculous and marvelous.…”