334

by Thomas M. Disch

  The condition of the cities at this time was even less agreeable than that of the countryside. Burned and pillaged by barbarians and then by the troops (themselves mostly recruits from lands bordering the Danube) that had been sent in to dispel these invaders, the cities existed, if at all, in ruins. “Though doubtless no one wished to die,” Salvian writes, “still no one did anything to avoid death,” and he welcomes the advent of the Goths into Gaul and Spain as being a release from the despotism of a totally corrupt government.

  My dear Gargilius,

  Alexa wrote.

  It’s one of those days and has been for weeks. Rain, mud, and rumors of Radiguesis north of the city, west of the city, east of the city, everywhere at once. The slaves fret and dither but so far only two have run off to enlist among our would-be conquerors. On the whole we’ve done better than our neighbors. Arcadius has nothing left now but that cook of his who has such a mistaken notion of garlic (the one person who should have joined the barbarians!) and the Egyptian girl Merriam brought with her. The poor thing speaks no known language and probably hasn’t been told the world is coming to an end. As for the two we lost, Patrobas always was a troublemaker and so good riddance. I’m sorry to tell you the other one was Timarchus, whom you had had such hopes for. He went into one of his snits and shattered the left arm of the wrestler down by the pool. Then he had no choice but to leave. Or perhaps it was the other way round—he smashed up the statue as a gesture of farewell. Anyhow, Sylvan says it can be repaired, though the damage will always be visible.

  My own confidence in the Army is undiminished, darling, but I think it wisest that I close the villa till the rumors have abated somewhat. I shall get Sylvan—whom else can I trust now?—to help me bury the plate and the bedposts and the three remaining jugs of Falernian somewhere quite secret (as we discussed the last time). The books, those that matter, I’ll bring with me. I wish there were even a morsel of good news. Except for being lonely, I am in good health and good spirits. I do wish you were not so many miles …

  She crossed out “miles” and wrote “stadia.”

  … stadia away.

  For a moment in the mirror of art, for the blinking of an iris, Alex a witnessed her life the wrong way round. Instead of a modern house-wife fantasying herself in classical poses, the past stiffened and became actual and she thought she could see clearly, across the span of years, the other Alexa, the sad contemporary self she usually managed to avoid, a shrill woman in a silly dress who had been equal to the small demands neither of her marriage nor of her career. A failure or (which was possibly worse) a mediocrity.

  “And yet,” she told herself.

  And yet: didn’t the world, to keep on going, need just such people as she was? It had only been a moment. The question had restored a comfortable perspective, and she would end her epistle to Gargilius with some chilly, true-to-life endearment. She would write—

  But her pen had disappeared. It was not on the desk, it was not on the rug, it was not in her pocket.

  The upstairs noise had begun.

  Two minutes to twelve. She might reasonably complain, but she didn’t know who lived in the apartment above, or even for certain that that was where the sound came from. “Cheng-cheng,” and then, after a pause, “Cheng-cheng.”

  “Alexa?” She could not place the voice (a woman’s?) summoning her. There was no one in the room.

  “Alexa.”

  Tancred stood in the doorway, looking a perfect cupid with an old silky shawl knotted at his hips, lemon on chocolate.

  “You startled me.”

  Her left hand had lifted automatically to her lips, and there, lapsing back into existence, was the ballpoint.

  “I couldn’t sleep. What time is it?”

  He stepped toward the table soundlessly and stood with one hand resting on the arm of a chair, his shoulders level with hers, his eyes steady as a laser beam.

  “Midnight.”

  “Could we play a game of cards?”

  “And what about tomorrow?”

  “Oh, I’ll get up. I promise.”

  G., when he begged a favor, always smiled; Tancred, a better tactician, remained perfectly solemn.

  “Well, get out the cards. One game and then we both have to get to bed.”

  While Tancred was out of the room, Alexa tore out her own pages from “What the Moon Means to Me.” A face clipped from a news magazine came unstuck and fluttered to the rug. She stooped and got it.

  “What were you writing?” Tancred asked, beginning, neatly, to shuffle.

  “Nothing. A poem.”

  “I wrote a poem,” he admitted, excusing hers.

  She cut. He began to deal.

  She studied the newsprint face. It seemed oddly devoid of experience despite its years, like a very young actor got up as a very old man. The eyes regarded the camera lens with the equanimity of a star.

  Finally she had to ask: “Who is this?”

  “That! You don’t know who that is? Guess.”

  “Some singer?” (Could it be Don Hershey? Already?)

  “It’s the last astronaut. You know, the three who landed on the moon. the other two are both dead.” Tank took the scrap of paper from her and returned it to its place in his project. “Now he is too, I guess. You start.”

  4

  From Roman times until the closing years of the 20th Century the Bay of Morbihan on the southern coast of Brittany had been the source of the world’s most delectable seed oysters. Then in the late 80’s the oystermen of Locmariaquere were alarmed to notice that their seedlings sickened when they were transplanted and that soon even those that remained in their native waters had become unpalatable. Researchers hired by the departement of Morbihan eventually tracked down the source of infection to wastes dumped into the estuary of the Loire, some sixty miles down the coast. (Ironically, the polluter was a subsidiary branch of the pharmaceutical concern that had supplied the investigators.) By the time this was discovered, sad to say, the Morbihan oyster was extinct. However, in death the species bequeathed mankind its final inestimable gift, a monomolecular pearl, Morbehanine.

  As synthesized by Pfizer, Morbehanine quickly became the most popular drug in all countries where it was not prohibited usually in some gentling combination with the traditional. Modified by narcotizing agents it was marketed as Oraline; with caffeine it became Koffee; with tranquilizers Fadeout. In its crude form it was used only by the half million or so members of the intellectual elite who practiced Historical Analysis. Unmodified Morbihanine induces a state of intensely experienced “daydreaming ” in which usual relationships of figure-to-field are reversed. During a common hallucinogenic high the self remains a constant while the environment, as in dreams, undergoes transformation. With Morbehanine the landscape that one inhabits, after the initial “fixing” period, is not much more malleable than our own everyday world, but one is aware of one’s slightest action in this landscape as a free, spontaneous, willed choice. It was possible to dream responsibly.

  What determines the outlines of the alternate world is the subject’s sum knowledge of the period he chooses to fix during his first trips. Without continuous research one was apt to create a fantasy life as monotonous as the afternoon sex features. Most people, sensibly, preferred the mild, multidirectional zonk of Oraline, its euphoric illusion of freedom every which way.

  For the few, however, the more strenuous pleasures of Pure Will were worth a greater effort. A century before the same people had covered themselves with useless degrees in the humanities, filling the graduate schools to overflowing. Now, with Morbihanine, there was a use for all the history history students are forever studying.

  It had often been debated, among analysands, whether Historical Analysis was the best way to work out one’s problems or the best way to escape them. The elements of psychotherapy and of vicarious entertainment were inextricably knotted. The past became a kind of vast moral gymnasium in which some preferred a hard workout in the weight room o
f the French Revolution or the Conquest of Peru while others jiggled about lickerishly on the trampoline of Casanova’s Venice or Delmonico’s New York.

  Once a particular stretch of time had been fixed, usually with the help of an expert in that era, one was no more at liberty to depart from it than one could walk away from the month of June. Alexa, for instance, was confined to a period of less than eighty years, from her birth in 334 (which was also, not coincidentally, the address of one of the buildings on East 11th Street for which she was responsible at the MODICUM office) up to the lovely pink evening when the twice-widowed Alexa, lately returned from a lifetime in the provinces, was to die of a stroke just a providential few days before the Sack of Rome. If she tried, during contact, to broach either barrier, 334 or 410, she experienced nothing more than a mild pastoral flickering—leaves, clouds, a blurry water-glass, sounds of troubled breathing, a smell of melons rotting—like the test-patterns of some sempiternal teevee network.

  On Friday morning, despite the weather, Alexa took the malls downtown and arrived at Bernie’s office ten minutes early. A good-sized hole had been punched through the fiber panel of the outer door and the furniture inside was in a state of delirium. The couch had been sliced open, its innards garnishing the ruins.

  “But,” Bernie pointed out cheerfully, sweeping up the fluff and plaster dust, “they never got into the office, thank God. They might have done actual harm there.”

  “That’s a rosy view.”

  “Well, the way I look at it, this is the best of all possible worlds.” Without a doubt he was soothed by the consolations of chemistry, but amid these ruins, why not?

  “Do you know who did it?” She picked a lump of plaster off the bench, dropped it into his basket.

  “Oh, I think I do. A pair of girls that the Council saddled me with has been threatening to scrub the office for months. I hope it was them—then the Council can pick up the bill.”

  Like most analysts, Bernie Shaw did not make a living from his fees. Unlike most, he didn’t teach either. Instead he received a comfortable retainer from the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Youth Council for occasional services as a Reader and Advisor. Bernie had an uncle on the Council’s advisory board.

  “Which is just the same as Historical Analysis, really,” he would explain at parties (and thanks to the same uncle he was invited to some very good parties), “except that it doesn’t involve history or analysis.”

  When the basket was full, Bernie slipped on his professional manner, and they entered the inner, vandal-proofed office. His face gelled into a handsome, immotile mask. His voice thickened to a droning baritone. His hands froze into a single neat rock of thoughtfulness, which he planted in the middle of his desk.

  They faced each other across this rock and began to discuss Alexa’s other inner life—first money, then sex, then whatever odds and ends were left. Moneywise she would soon have to decide whether to accept Arcadius’s long-standing offer to buy her melon fields. His price was tempting, but it was hard to reconcile the sale of farmland—and her patrimony at that—with an affectation of republican virtue. On the other hand, the land in question could hardly be called ancestral, having been one of Popilius’s last speculations before his death.

  (Alexa’s father, Popilius Flamininus—born 276 a.d., died 354 a.d.—lived most of his life as a relatively impoverished Senator of Rome. After years of vacillation he decided to follow the Empire eastward to its new capital. Accordingly, one fine day Alexa, aged ten, was bundled into an oxcart and told to wave good-bye to the pretty idiot daughter of the superintendent of their apartment house. The journey to Byzantium took them two hundred stadia to the north and no distance eastward at all, for Popilius Flamininus had discovered that his purple stripe, so useless to him in Rome, was a social and financial asset in the hillside towns of Cisalpine Gaul. By the time she’d married Gargilius, Alexa was considered, locally, a tolerable heiress.)

  Bernie took up the matter of her legal position, but she could cite Domitian’s revival of the Julian laws governing the property rights of married women. Legally the fields were hers to sell.

  “So the question remains. Should I?”

  The answer remained, adamantly, no. Not because it was hers from her father (who would have probably advised her to take the money and run); her piety was on a grander scale—Rome! Liberty! Civilization! It was to that burning ship that duty bound her. Of course, she didn’t know it was burning. One of the knottiest problems in analysis was to keep the historical Alexa innocent of the fact that she was fighting, for the short term anyhow, a losing battle.

  She might have her suspicions—who didn’t, then?—but this was reason rather for resolution than for faintheartedness. A lost battle is not a lost cause. Take Thermopylae.

  The contemporary transfigure of this temptation, whether she ought to keep her job with the MODICUM office, had the same hydraheaded way of surviving her most final decisions. She didn’t, except now and then, enjoy her work. She often suspected that the great machineries of the welfare service might actually do more harm than good. Her salary was only large enough to cover the extra expenses the job involved her in. Duty in these circumstances was an article of faith as thorny as the resurrection of the body. Yet it was only this faith—and a vague conviction that a city ought to be lived in—that helped her resist G.’s gentle, persistent drift suburbsward.

  They breezed through sex by mutual agreement, for in that respect the last three or four months had been unadventurously pleasant. When she indulged in daydreams just for fun they were likelier to be about barbecues than orgies.

  Alexa could compensate for her stints of dieting in the present with bouts of exquisite excess in the past, fantasies which she lifted whole from Petronius, Juvenal, or the younger Pliny—salads of lettuce, leeks, and fresh mint; the cheese of Trebula; trays of Picenumine olives, Spanish pickles, and sliced eggs; a roasted kid, the tenderest of his flock, with more of milk in him than blood; asparagus covered with the willful anachronism of a Hollandaise sauce; pears and figs from Chios, and the plums of Damascus. Besides, unnecessary talk about sex tended to make Bernie nervous.

  With fifteen minutes still to go a puddle of silence formed between them. She searched through the week’s memories for an anecdote to float across it. The letter she’d written last night to Merriam? No, Bernie would accuse her of literature.

  The puddle spread.

  “Monday night,” she said. “On Monday night I dreamed a dream.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think it was a dream. Maybe I tinkered with it a little before I was completely asleep.”

  “Ah.”

  “I was dancing out in the street with a lot of other women. In fact I was sort of leading them. Down Broadway, but I wore a palla.”

  “That’s a dichronatism.” Bernie’s tone was severe.

  “Yes, but as I say, I was dreaming. Then I was in the Metropolitan Museum. For a sacrifice.”

  “Animal? Human?”

  “One or the other. I don’t remember.”

  “Blood sacrifices were prohibited in 341.”

  “Yes, but in a crisis the authorities would look the other way. During the siege of Florence in 405, which was years after the destruction of the temples—”

  “Oh very well.” Bernie closed his eyes, conceding the point. “So, once again the barbarians are storming the gates.” The barbarians were always storming Alexa’s gates. Bernie’s theory was that it was because her husband was fractionally a Negro. “Then what happened?”

  “That’s all I remember. Except one detail earlier in the dream. There were heaps of dead babies in the cess trenches in the middle of Broadway.”

  “Infanticide was a capital offense from the beginning of the third century,” Bernie pointed out.

  “Probably because it was becoming too common.”

  Bernie closed his eyes. Then, opening them: “Have you ever had an abortion?”

  “Once, ages ago, in high school. I
didn’t feel much guilt though.”

  “What did you feel about the children in your dreams?”

  “Anger, at the untidiness. Otherwise they were just a fact.” She looked at her hands, which seemed too large, the knuckles especially. “Like a face in a news magazine.” She looked at Bernie’s hands folded on the desk. Another silence began to form, but gracefully, without embarrassment. She remembered the moment she’d found herself alone on the street; the sunlight, her pleasure. It seemed quite reasonable that people should expose their children to die. There was what Loretta had said yesterday—“I’ve stopped trying”—but it went beyond that. As though everyone had come to see that Rome, civilization, the whole burning issue wasn’t worth the effort any longer, theirs or anyone’s. Every infanticide was the kindness of a philosopher.

  “Pish,” Bernie said, when she’d said this four or five different ways. “No one sees his own culture declining till around the age of forty, and then everyone does.”

  “But things had been going downhill for two hundred years.”

  “Or three, or four.”

  “Farmlands had become deserts. It was visible. Look at the sculpture, the architecture.”

  “It’s visible with hindsight. But they could be as blind as their comfort required. Trivial poetasters like Ausonius were declared the equals of Virgil, of Homer even, and the Christians, now that they were official, were positively giddy with optimism. They expected to see the city of God shootup like an urbal renewal project.”

  “Then explain those dead children.”

  “Explain the living ones. Which reminds me. Last week you still hadn’t madeup your mind about Tancred.”

  “I sent off the letter this morning, with a check.”

  “To?”

  “Stuyvesant.”

  The rock on the desk split open and became two hands. “Well— there you have it.”

  “What?”