He was almost afraid to turn to Montaigne, fearing that that other great guide of his youth might also have soured over the long decades. But no. Instantly the old charm claimed him. I cannot accept the way in which we fix the span of our lives. I have observed that the sages hold it to be much shorter than is commonly supposed. “What!” said the younger Cato to those who would prevent him from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached with yielding up my life too soon?” And yet he was but forty-eight years of age. He thought that age very ripe and well advanced, considering how few men reach it. Yes. Yes. And: Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The profit of life is not in its length but in the use we put it to: many a man has lived long, who has lived little; see to it as long as you are here. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, to make the best of life. Did you think never to arrive at a place you were incessantly making for? Yet there is no road but has an end. And if society is any comfort to you, is not the world going the selfsame way as you? Yes. Perfect. Staunt read deep into the night, and sent for a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem from the House of Leavetaking’s well-stocked cellars, and solemnly toasted old Montaigne in his own sleek wine, and read on until morning. There is no road but has an end.
When he was done with Montaigne, he turned to Ben Jonson, first the familiar works, Volpone and The Silent Woman and The Case is Altered, then the black, explosive plays of later years, Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn and The Devil Is an Ass. Staunt had always felt a strong affinity for the Elizabethans, and particularly for Jonson, that crackling, hissing, scintillating man, whose stormy, sprawling plays blazed with a nightmarish intensity that Shakespeare, the greater poet, seemed to lack. As he had always vowed he would, Staunt submerged himself in Jonson, until the sound and rhythm of Jonson’s verse echoed and reechoed like thunder in his overloaded brain, and the texture of Jonson’s mind seemed inlaid on his own. The Magnetic Lady, Cynthia’s Revels, Catiline his Conspiracy—no play was too obscure, too hermetic, for Staunt in his gluttony. And one afternoon during this period he found himself doing an unexpected thing. From his data terminal he requested a print-out of the final pages of The New Inn’s first act, with an inch of blank space between each line. At the top of the sheet he wrote carefully, The New Inn, an Opera by Henry Staunt, from the play of Ben Jonson. Then, turning to Lovel’s long speech, “O thereon hangs a history, mine host,” Staunt began to pencil musical notations beneath the words, idly at first, then with sudden earnest fervor as the proper contours of the vocal line suggested themselves to him. Within minutes he had turned the entire speech into an aria and had. even scribbled some preliminary marginal notes to himself about orchestration. The style of the music was strange to him, a spare, lean, angular sort of melodiousness, thorny and complex, with a curiously archaic flavor. It was the sort of music Alban Berg might have written during an extended visit to the early seventeenth century. It did not sound much like Staunt’s own kind of thing. My late style, he thought. Probably the aria was impossible to sing. No matter: this was how the muse had called it forth. It was the first sustained composing Staunt had done in years. He stared at the completed aria in wonder, astonished that music could still flow from him like that, welling up without conscious command from the gushing spring within.
For an instant he was tempted to feed what he had written into a synthesizer and get back a rough orchestration. To hear the sound of it, with the baritone riding tensely over the swooping strings, might carry him on to set down the next page of the score, and the next, and the next. He resisted. The world already had enough operas that no one listened to. Shaking his head, smiling sadly, he dated the page, initialed it in his customary way, jotted down an opus number—by guesswork, for he was far from his ledgers—and, folding the sheet, put it away among his papers. Yet the music went on unfolding in his mind.
Nine
In his ninth week at the House of Fulfillment, finding himself stranded in stagnant waters, Staunt sought Dr. James and applied for the memory-jolt treatment. It seemed to be the only option left, short of Going, and he rarely contemplated Going these days. He was done with Jonson, and the impulse to request other books had not come to him; he peeked occasionally at his single page of The New Inn, but did not resume work on it; he was guarded and aloof in his conversations with Bollinger and with his occasional visitors; he realized that he was sliding imperceptibly into a deathlike passivity, without actually coming closer to his exit. He would not return to his former life, and he could not yet surrender and Go. Possibly the memory jolt would nudge him off dead center.
“It’ll take six hours to prepare you,” Dr. James said, his long nose twitching with enthusiasm for Staunt’s project. “The brain has to be cleared of all fatigue products, and the autonomic nervous system needs a tuning. When would you like to begin?”
“Now,” Staunt said.
They cleansed and tuned him, and took him back to his suite and put him to bed, and hooked him into his metabolic monitor. “If you get overexcited,” Dr. James explained, “the monitor will automatically adjust the intensity of your emotional flow downward.” Staunt was willing to take his chances with the intensity of his emotional flow, but the medic was insistent. The monitor stayed on. “It isn’t psychic pain we’re worried about,” Dr. James said. “There’s never any of that. But. sometimes—an excess of remembered love, do you know?—a burst of happiness—it could be too much, we’ve found.” Staunt nodded. He would not argue the point. The doctor produced a hypodermic and pressed its ultrasonic snout against Staunt’s arm. Briefly Staunt wondered whether this was all a trick, whether the drug would really send him to his Going rather than for a trip along his time-track, but he pushed the irrational notion aside, and the snout made its brief droning sound and the mysterious dark fluid leaped into his veins.
Ten
He hears the final crashing chords of The Trials of Job, and the curtain, a sheet of dense purple light, springs up from the floor of the stage. Applause. Curtain calls for the singers. The conductor on stage, now, bowing, smiling. The chorus master, even. Cascades of cheers. All about him swirl the glittering mobile chandeliers of the Haifa Opera House. Someone is shouting incomprehensible jubilant words in his ear: the language is Hebrew, Staunt realizes. He says, Yes, yes, thank you so very much. They want him to stand and acknowledge the applause. Edith sits beside him, flushed with excitement, her eyes sparkling. His mind supplies the date: September 9, 1999. “Let them see you,” Edith whispers through the tumult. A hand claps his shoulder. Wild eyes blazing into his own: Mannheim, the critic. “The opera of the century!” he cries. Staunt forces himself to rise. They are screaming his name. Staunt! Staunt! Staunt! The audience is his. Two thousand berserk Israelis, his to command. What shall he say to them? Sieg! Heil! Sieg! Heil! He chokes on his own appalling unvoiced joke. In the end he can do nothing but wave and grin and topple back into his seat. Edith rubs his arm lovingly. His glowing bride. His night of triumph. To write an opera at all these days is a mighty task; to enjoy a premiere like this is heavenly. Now the audience wants an encore. The conductor at his station. The curtain fades. Job alone on stage: his final scene, the proud bass voice crying, “Behold, I am vile,” and the voice of the Lord replying to him out of a thousand loudspeakers, filling all the world with sound: “Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency.” Staunt weeps at his own music. If I live a hundred years, I will never forget this night, he tells himself.
Eleven
“The copter went down so suddenly, Mr. Staunt. They had it on the stabilizer beam all through the storm, but you know it isn’t always possible—”
“And my wife? And my wife?”
“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”
Twelve
He sits at the keyboard fretting over the theory and harmony. His legs are not yet long enough to reach the piano’s pedals: a nuisance, but temporary. He closes his eyes and strikes the keyboard. This is the key of C major, the easy one. The tonic chord. The dominant
. Why did they wait so long to tell him about these things? He builds chord after chord. I will now moderate into the key of D minor. Modulate. I do this and this and this. He is nine years old. All this long hot Sunday afternoon he has explored this wondrous other language of sounds. While his family sits frozen by the television set. “Henry? Henry, they’re going to be coming out of the module any minute!” He shrugs. What does the moonwalk matter to him? The moon is dead and far away. And this is the world of D minor. He has his own exploring to do today. “Henry, he’s out! He came down the ladder!” Fine. Tonic. Dominant. And the diminished seventh. The words are strange. But how easy it is to go deeper and deeper into the maze of sound.
Thirteen
“The faculty and students take great pleasure, Mr. Staunt, to present you on the occasion of your one-hundredth birthday with this memorial of a composer who shared your divine productivity if not your blessed longevity: the original manuscript of Mozart’s ‘Divertimento in B,’ Köchel number—”
Fourteen
“A boy, yes. We’re calling him Paul, after Edith’s father. And what an odd feeling it is to tell myself I have a son. You know, I’m forty-five years old. More than half my life gone, I suppose. And now a son.”
Fifteen
The sun is huge in the sky, and the beach is ablaze with shimmering heat-furies, and beyond the crescent of pink sand the green Caribbean rests against its bed like water in a quiet tub. These are the hours when he remains under cover, in some shady hammock, reading, perhaps making notes for an essay or his next composition. But there is the girl again, crouched by the shore, gently poking at the creatures of the tidal pool, the shy anemones and the little sea-slugs and the busy hermit crabs. So he must expose his vulnerable skin, for tomorrow he will fly back to New York, and this may be his last chance to introduce himself to her. He has watched her through this whole week of vacation. Not a girl, exactly. Surely at least twenty-five years old. Very much her own person: self-contained, coolly precise, alert, elegant. Tempting. He has rarely felt so drawn toward anyone. Preserving his bachelorhood has been no chore for him; he glides as easily from woman to woman as he does from city to city. But there is something about the eyes of this Edith, something about her smile, that pulls him. He knows he is being foolish. All this is pure fantasy: he has no idea what she is like, where her interests lie. That look of intelligence and sympathy may be all his own invention; the girl inside the face may in truth be drab and empty, some programmer on holiday, her soul a dull haze of daydreams about glamorous holovision stars. Yet he must approach. The sun pounds his sensitive skin. She looks up, smiling, from the tidal pool. A purple sea-slug crawls lightly across her palm. He kneels beside her. She offers him the sea-slug, and he lets it crawl on his hand, and they laugh, and she points out limpets and periwinkles and barnacles for him, until there is a kind of contact between them through the creatures of this salty pond, and at last he says, feeling clumsy about it, “We haven’t even introduced ourselves. I’m Henry Staunt.”
“I know,” Edith says. “The composer.”
And it all becomes so much easier.
Sixteen
“—and the gold medal for the outstanding work in extended symphonic form by a student under sixteen years of age goes, as I’m sure everyone has already realized, to Henry Staunt, who—”
Seventeen
“And my wife? And my wife?”
“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”
Eighteen
“As long as we’re getting into that end of the evening, Henry, I’ll allow myself the privilege of delivering a little analysis, too. Do you know what the real trouble with you is? With your music, with your soul, with everything? You don’t suffer. You’ve never been touched by pain, or, if you have, it doesn’t sink in. Look, you’re forty years old, and you’ve never known anything but success, and your music is played everywhere, an incredible achievement for a living composer, and you could pass for thirty. Or even twenty-seven. Time doesn’t claw you. I don’t recommend suffering, mind you, but I do say it tempers an artist’s soul; it adds a richness of texture that—forgive me—you lack, Henry. You know, you could live to be a very old man, considering the way you don’t seem to age, and someday, when you’re ninety-seven or one hundred five or something like that, you may realize that you’ve never really intersected reality, that you’ve kept yourself insulated, and that in a sense you haven’t really lived at all or created anything at all or—forgive me, Henry. I take it all back, even if you are still smiling. Not even a friend should say things like that. Not even a friend.”
Nineteen
“The Pulitzer Prize for Music for the year 2002—”
Twenty
“I Edith do take thee Henry to be my lawful wedded husband—”
Twenty-One
“It isn’t as if she was a bride, Henry. God knows it’s terrible to lose her that way, but she was yours for fifty years, Henry, fifty years, the kind of marriage most people hardly dare to dream of having, and if she’s gone, well, be content that you had the fifty, at least.”
“I wish we had crashed together, though.”
“Don’t be childish. You’re—what?—eighty-five, eighty-seven years old? You’ve got fifteen or twenty healthy and productive years ahead of you. More, if you’re lucky. People live to fantastic ages nowadays. You might see one hundred ten or one hundred fifteen.”
“Without Edith, what good is that?”
Twenty-Two
“Put your hands in the middle of the keyboard. Spread the fingers out as wide as you can. Wider. Wider. That’s the boy! Now, Henry, this is what we call middle C—”
Twenty-Three
In haste, stumbling, he goes on into his studio. The big room holds the tangible residue of his long career. Over here, the music itself, in recorded performance: disks and cassettes for the early works, sparkling playback cubes for the later ones. Here are the manuscripts, uniformly bound in red half-morocco, one of his little vanities. Here are the scrapbooks of reviews and the programs of concerts. Here are the trophies. Here are the volumes of his critical writings. Staunt has been a busy man. He looks at the titles stamped on the bindings of the manuscripts: the symphonies, the string quartets, the concerti, the miscellaneous chamber works, the songs, the sonatas, the cantatas, the operas. So much. So much. Staunt feels no sense of having wasted his time, though, filling this room with what it holds. Never in the past hundred years has a week gone by without a performance of one of his compositions somewhere. That is sufficient justification for having written, for having lived. And yet, one hundred thirty-six years is such a long time.
He pushes cubes into playback slots, getting three of his works going at once, bringing wild skeins of sound out of the room’s assortment of speakers, and stands in the middle, trembling a little, accepting the sonic barrage. After perhaps four minutes he cuts off the sound and orders his telephone to ring up the Office of Fulfillment.
“My Guide is Martin Bollinger,” he says. “Would you let him know that I’d like to be transferred to the House of Leavetaking as soon as possible?”
Twenty-Four
Dr. James had told him, long before, that Departing Ones invariably came out of memory jolts in a state of ecstasy, and that frequently they were in such raptures that they insisted on Going immediately, before the high could ebb. Emerging from the drug, Staunt searched in vain for the ecstasy. Where? He was wholly calm. For some hours past, or maybe just a few minutes—he had no idea how long the memory jolt has lasted—he had tasted morsels of his past, scraps of conversation, bits of scenery, random textures of contact, a stew of incidents, nonchronological, unsorted. His music and his wife. His wife and his music. A pretty thin gruel for one hundred thirty-six years of life. Where were the storms? Where were the tempests? A single great tragedy, yes, and otherwise everything tranquil. Too orderly a life, too sane, too empty, and now, permitted to review it, he found himself with nothing to grasp but applause, which slipped through his f
ingers, and his love of Edith, and even that had lost its magic. Where was that excess of remembered love that Dr. James had said could be dangerous? Perhaps they had monitored him too closely, tuning down the intensity of his spirit. Or perhaps it was his spirit that was at fault. Old and dry, pale and lean.
Unlike the others he had heard about, he did not request immediate Going after his voyage. Without that terminal ecstasy, why Go? He felt not exactly depressed but certainly lowered; his tour of his yesterdays had thrust him into a sort of stasis, a paralysis of the will, that left him hung up as before, enmeshed by the strands of his own quiet past.
But if Staunt remained unready to Go, not so with others. “You are invited to the Farewell ceremony of David Golding,” Miss Elliot told him the day after his memory jolt.
Golding was the man who had had six wives—outliving some, divorcing some, being divorced by some. His heroic husbandry was no longer apparent: now he was small and gnarled and fleshless, and because he was nearly blind, his pinched ungenerous face was disfigured by the jutting cones of two optical transducers. They said he was one hundred twenty-five years old, but to Staunt he looked at least two hundred. For the Farewell ceremony, though, the technicians of the House of Leavetaking had transformed the little old man into something sublime. His face gleamed with make-up that obliterated the crevices of decades; he held himself buoyantly upright, no doubt inflated into a semblance of his ancient virility by some drug; he was clad in a radiant, shimmering gown. Scores of relatives and friends surrounded him in the Chambers of Farewell, a brightly decorated underground suite opposite the recreation center. Staunt, as he entered, was dismayed by the size of the crowd. So many, so young, so noisy.
Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Three Page 17
