The League of Grey-Eyed Women

by Julius Fast

  "This isn't a drug, nor does it work like a drug. I just don't know how the hell it does work."

  "Do you think the worst is over?"

  "If he follows the pattern of the rats, it should be. They try to tear through the steel of their cages for the first week, but then it tapers off. It isn't a question of getting used to the pain. You can't get used to pain like that." The sound of a cigarette being stubbed out. "God, Rhoda, I think I've lost a dozen pounds in the past few days. No one should see a man go through this." She sighed. "The pain should begin to lessen now."

  He carried that sentence and promise into sleep, nursing it to his bruised and frightened mind. He awoke again to eat, for the first time in a week, Steve informed him.

  "I was getting ready to rig up intravenous feeding." Her face was wan and grey, her eyes harassed. "It's been one rough week."

  Through dry, cracked lips he said, "Thanks Steve, for everything."

  She grinned at that. "Look who's thanking who. I'm just glad you're alive. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what we'd do with the body. Now you'd better get to sleep again."

  He reached up and put his hand on her arm. "Did it work?"

  She looked at him curiously. "I don't know. Stiener was right about one thing. We had no real control."

  "Have you seen him?"

  "He's been here every day. He examined you thoroughly to check out your story. He also guessed that your two months was an absolute maximum," she finished drily.

  "But has there been any change?"

  "It's too soon to tell. We'll need another week or so."

  He closed his eyes. "Is Stiener still angry?"

  "More than ever. We're through, he and I, but that doesn't stop his interest in you."

  He fell asleep on that.

  During the next day he slowly came out of his drugged half-sleep. He ate ravenously once out of bed, and he prowled the house restlessly. The burning pain had left as quickly as it had come. He had lost a lot of weight and his clothes when he tried them on hung shapelessly in spite of Rhoda's efforts at taking them in.

  "I'm just not a tailor," she said finally, handing his jacket back. "I think I did pretty well on the pants, but the jacket's beyond me."

  "The pants are fine," he agreed.

  "Except that your side pockets are in back of you," Steve added. "Why don't we take you down to a clothing store?"

  He shook his head. "I've decided to fly home in a day or so. I can get along with these until then."

  Steve raised an eyebrow. "Stiener won't like your going. You are, after all, his only human experiment."

  "I thought he washed his hands of us."

  "Of me, yes. He won't let me near the lab, and I'm going to have to start thinking of work again. Oh, he still likes me as a person—we have something pretty good going." She hesitated. "But as a researcher, I'm finished. He won't give me even a lukewarm recommendation. But that has nothing to do with you. He's still interested in you."

  "Could you use me as a lever to make him hire you back?"

  "Not a chance. That's a very stubborn young man. But what I was thinking of..." She hesitated. "Albert Einstein Medical Center made me a very decent offer before this all came up, and there won't be any question of references now. They know my work—if I wanted to relocate in New York."

  He looked beyond her to where Rhoda was putting away needles and thread in an old-fashioned wooden sewing box. Her head was bent forward, her dark blond hair falling in two smooth waves on either side of her face. "You'd give up all your friends here?" he asked. "Just pull up roots like that?"

  Steve snorted. "What roots? I've never gotten under the surface of this city." She walked to the window and pushed the curtains aside. "I'll hate to give up my garden, though maybe I can pot a few beauties."

  Across the room Rhoda looked up, her eyes meeting Jack's briefly, a searching, questioning look, as if he was supposed to answer. He looked back in bewilderment. Abruptly Steve turned. "How about it, Rho? Could you stand a spell in old New York?"

  "Albert Einstein's in the Bronx. If we could find a quiet place in Westchester ... but I suppose nothing will satisfy you except the Village."

  "Oh, come off it. I'm no beatnik. I'll settle for a place out of town. Where do you live, Jack?"

  "In Manhattan. Are you serious, Steve? Are you both serious?"

  "That I am, son."

  But later, in the afternoon, he wandered out into the garden and found Rhoda leaning against one of the twisted, outlandish trees. She rubbed her face guiltily as he came up, but traces of tears remained on her cheeks and her pale eyes were reddened.

  "I have to fight the impulse to shout watch out," he said, coming up to her, "when I see you next to one of those trees. What monstrosities!"

  She smiled, her face suddenly alive and mischievous. "I know what you mean. You expect them to reach out a branch and pull you to their trunk."

  "Like overgrown Venus's-flytraps." He looked around with a shiver. "Steve hasn't monkeyed around with any of those?"

  "Those?"

  "You know, Venus's-flytraps?" Not yet." There was an awkward silence while Jack searched for something to say, to strengthen the tenuous thread he had felt between them.

  "Would you really go to New York with Steve?"

  "Of course. She's all I have."

  "Won't you be lonely?"

  "We're never really lonely. We can't be." She bit her lip and added, "Steve has been mother and father and sister to me."

  "Have you known her long?"

  Rhoda smiled. "It seems as if it's been all my life, but let's see, it was back in 1956. I was only fifteen then, a sad, lost child. Oh, (»o(l!" Her smile had faded and her face was drawn, her grey eyes clouded with the shadow of frightening memory.

  'It's a crazy thing," she said slowly, "but I can look back at that child as if she were no part of me, a stranger in time. I can look back at her and feel such pity, such sadness! If I could take her and hold her and comfort her, that child I once was."

  "What was wrong?" Jack asked.

  "I never knew my mother, Jack. She died when I was born. I'd like to say my father went to pieces afterwards, but that isn't true. He was always in pieces, a fractured man. That really was my father, the original fractured man, completely unable to function in a put-together world. He loved me and he hated me and he wished I was a boy and—loved me as a woman, not a child."

  She brushed her hair back. "You must have heard the same story a dozen times. There's nothing very new in it, except that I've made a good and decent adjustment, thanks to Steve."

  "How did she find your '

  Rhoda looked up at him out of those strange, wide eyes. "She heard me one day when she was passing through Albany. She heard me and got off the bus she was on and took a room and searched till she found me."

  Bewildered, he said, "I don't understand. What do you mean, heard you?"'

  Suddenly her seriousness left her and she reached up and broke off a branch from the tree, a branch with a misshapen blossom. She touched it caressingly with her fingers. "I'm talking nonsense," she laughed.

  "No, tell me about how Steve found you." He tried to recapture the mood.

  She shrugged. "After my mother died, I was just kind of dragged up by an aunt and some neighbors. Sometimes my father would take off on a long drunken spree, taking me with him. No one really cared enough to stop him. He was killed like that."

  Her voice fell so low Jack had to strain to hear her. "He had taken me to Albany for the weekend and we stayed at a little, run-down hotel. He was drunk most of the time, and Monday he called the office and found out he hadn't any job. He dragged me out of the hotel. He was taking me somewhere, to some relative, and then he suddenly saw someone he thought he knew, a man who owed him money. At least that's what he told me, pushing me back on the sidewalk. The whole thing is so damned clear ... how I hate this total recall we've all got."

  Her fingers were tearing away at the blossom, petal
by petal. "He darted across a street full of traffic and a car hit him." She closed her eyes. "He didn't stop yelling, even when the ambulance came, and he was yelling when they took him away, and the man at the ambulance said he was dead, but I heard him yelling."

  She looked up at Jack. "I heard him inside me, in my mind, as the ambulance pulled away, and I knew he wasn't dead yet, only his body was dead, but his mind was still alive, prisoned in that dead body and slowly screaming itself into death ... Do you understand?"

  For one moment he thought he did and shuddered, and then he reached out and took her hand. "I'm sorry, Rhoda, sorry..."

  "But it wasn't I. It was a child who lived thirteen years ago." He felt her hand shake. "Steve found me after three days, three days with no food and no home, no one to go to, no money ... God, how terrified I was, how alone. Fifteen years old! But she found me in a crowd, and just reached in and lifted me out of myself. I am with you, she said, you are never alone while I am with you. It was like light after an endless night. She was the first one."

  Confused he said, "You mean she helped you somehow, knew you were alone."

  "Somehow." Rhoda laughed, her eyes wet with tears and she pulled away. "Yes, somehow. She took my hand without ever touching me or seeing me." At his puzzled expression she shook her head. "No, of course you can't understand. None of you men can." She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked around the garden. "It's chilly and I've talked too damned much and said a lot of nonsense. Come on in and I'll make you some tea. Steve should be home soon."

  Afterwards he tried to reconstruct the conversation, to remember how much was real and how much a part of the effect of the DNA. He had followed her into the house and afterwards, sitting with the tea in front of them, she asked, "Are you afraid to die?"

  He considered that. "I am, very much afraid, and part of it is that I'm just beginning to realize how little I've lived. I've been in a sort of suspended animation most of my life. Maybe all of us are like that, but it's been even more so for me. The day after I found out about this cancer I looked around my room and really saw it for the first time. I saw how little of me there was in it, how little of my life."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It was so barren and empty ... Maybe I don't mean how little of me there was, but how little there was of me, how little there was to my life, how little meaning. I've never been able to feel, Rhoda, to really feel either love or hate, and until this happened, not even fear. Maybe feeling fear woke me up. Maybe that's why death is so terrifying now, to have to die before we feel, before we really live, to die like that is to be doubly dead. What I'm trying to say is that nothing that's happened to me before this meant much—I just never gave a damn about anything.

  "I didn't even have any friends. There were Clifford and Anna."

  "Anna?"

  "A—a woman I've known for years." Anna, someone to call once a week, to drink with and to sleep with, and you didn't call a woman like that a prostitute. You sent her presents on a regular basis, clothes, jewelry—but you gave her as little of your time as you could.

  "And Clifford."

  "Just a friend, someone to talk with." How little he knew Clifford too, for that matter.

  He stood up suddenly. "What a hell of a morbid afternoon. Neither of us has said a cheerful word all day. Where did she go?"

  Rhoda glanced at her watch. "Out, I guess." She started clearing away the tea things. "We both need someone else today."

  "I tell you what, let's go out, you and I. We'll take in a movie."

  A quick smile lit her face. "I'd like that, but are you up to it?"

  "Why not. I could use some life, if I'm fit to be seen in public in these clothes."

  "You look fine. Let me clean up and I'll be right with you."

  It was dark out when they left the house, a crisp autumn dark and they held hands and talked easily and lightly, both filled with an infectious excitement. Almost, Jack thought, as if we were doing something wrong, kids out on a lark, a boy and a girl on a date. But in reality we are a girl and a ghost, a dead man.

  Stop it, he told himself sharply. Stop it!

  They settled for a bubbly musical in technicolor with dancing girls and lovely scenic views of Paris and Rome. He laughed at the right spots, but during most of the movie he watched Rhoda's profile. Later they stopped into a bar for a drink and listened to a facile jazz pianist reminisce musically about the twenties. Rhoda sang one of the songs softly in a clear light voice, and he tried one in his tone-deaf baritone, both dissolving in laughter at the attempt.

  "I'm really a drummer," he said apologetically and took two knives to perform a brilliant tattoo on the tabletop.

  "You're good!" Rhoda said, and the pianist grinned and called him over, handing him two drumsticks. "We keep these for cats with itchy fingers."

  Rhoda joined him at the piano with their drinks and he accompanied the pianist in a few numbers, tapping with the drumsticks on the tilted piano top, the drinks loosening up his fingers and his inhibitions.

  Afterwards they walked home arm in arm, laughing foolishly, pointing out the stars to each other, talking of nothing and everything.

  His last night, he told himself afterwards, looking back, his last normal, sane, everyday, down-to-earth night.

  Chapter Five

  Stiener examined him at the laboratory the day he left, after he had taken a series of gastrointestinal X rays. "I don't know what your condition was before," he said solemnly, "but it couldn't be much worse than it is now."

  "There's no change then, no remission?" He knew then how much he had hoped.

  In exasperation Stiener said, "What did you expect? I told you it was experimental. Did you think I was denying you a cure? That I had a magic secret and I was keeping it from you?"

  "I don't know what I thought. I took a far-out chance. What did I have to lose?"

  Stiener adjusted his microscope, studying the chromosomes he had prepared from a culture of Jack's tissue. "I don't suppose I can really blame you. It's Steve I'm furious with. God help her if she ever tries to get a job in any institute where I've got any influence."

  "Did the DNA have any effect?"

  Stiener wiped his glasses. "It's done something to your chromosomes, but I can't for the life of me tell what. They're erratic as hell in this culture." He shook his head. "If I had to guess, I'd say it's riddled your body with even more neoplastic growth."

  "A polite word for cancer."

  Stiener grinned, looking suddenly like the undisciplined teenager he had seemed when Jack first met him. "You don't look any different."

  "I don't feel any different."

  "Cancer you know is the most unpredictable disease in the world."

  "Are you trying to offer me some hope?"

  The grin died away. "You're after the truth, aren't you? No. I can't offer even a glimmer of hope. What the hell can I say? We all die, sure, but ... oh, hell, I wish you were staying on in Montreal."

  "To keep me under observation? Or to offer me comfort?"

  "Bitterness is a coward's refuge," Stiener said tartly. "Sure, to keep you under observation. And what's wrong with that? You may die ... all right, you will die, but I may learn something from your death."

  He was silent for a long time, and then he shook his head slowly. "I'm sorry. Death has come to be something of an obscure word and yet every one of us goes through it."

  It was on the plane going back that he realized that there was a difference in the way he felt, no matter what Stiener had said. The pain in his gut was gone. He realized it when he tightened the safety strap and he pressed his abdomen tentatively. No, it was gone, completely gone. How long since he had felt it last? Not since the pain of the injection. Not since he had awakened at Steve's house.

  But had the pain gone or was it only blocked? Did pain still exist when you could no longer feel it? Wasn't pain a sign of the cancer's progress? Hadn't Turel told him it would get worse? Did this mean the cancer was arrested, in
spite of everything Stiener had said?

  The flush of wild hope died down. No, Stiener and his tests, his X rays and biopsies had made it clear. If he felt no pain, it was only because his ability to feel pain was affected. Had Stiener then discovered the ultimate pain-killer for terminal cancer? That would be a laugh. Why not market it? He knew enough of the tricks of the trade to put it over. He settled back in the seat staring out the window and smiling.

  The boys at the agency would like that. The agency ... He had acted pretty stupidly about that. He'd call them up and explain, say it had been some sort of breakdown. There was no need for them to know anything about his real condition. Breakdown was a magic word in advertising. It implied sensitivity and overwork, the two honorable badges of the account executive.

  What had Stiener said, "Bitterness is a coward's refuge." He must remember that.

  He thought of Steve then and of Rhoda. They hadn't said goodbye. "We'll see you in New York in a week or two."

  "Better hurry. I may not last that long."

  "You'll last, you old phony," Steve had grinned. "Remember your promise."

  "What promise?

  "I'll remind you when you get better."

  He took a cab home from the airport, enjoying the lavish fare and tip. At least he could live well for these last few days. But the apartment, once he opened the door, was unbearable. How had he lived here so long? How had he endured it? It was so empty, without color or character. Had he done that deliberately, or was it just a reflection of himself?

  He remembered a story he had once read of a man who had no reflection in mirrors, who threw no shadow in sunlight, who made so little impression on the world that finally people failed to see him.

  In a deeper sense he had lived like that, a colorless existence that impinged on nothing, that nothing could affect. Had it been only since Anita left? Or was it always like that? Was this what he really was, a man without a reflection?

  The room with its Spartan simplicity was a symbol of his life, a life just as empty and barren. Whom could he turn to now? Whom did he know well enough to confide in, to ask for understanding? The men at work? He had not made a friend in all his years at the office, not a real friend.