The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  She left the bridge and ran through frantic, heedless women to Flagler Street.

  Here the smoke was thick and choking. There were not many people. Light flooded down the side streets in a baleful yellow-orange tide. An august roaring accompanied the con-flagration as it ate toward the city’s heart. It was not so loud, however, that she could not hear a plate-glass window shatter some yards away. She turned. A dozen women were hurling things at the glass. Then they poured into the hole they had made and began stripping garments from the mannequins. Paula realized that the futility, the imbecile greed, should have enraged her; but it did not. For a fleeting instant she thought instead that these women doubtless had never owned such clothes—and she pitied them. Then she saw two girls with drawn revolvers, university girls probably, hurry up the street. The looters shouted to each other and ran, carrying armloads of fluffy fabrics.

  Paula was coughing now, choking. She turned down Flagler Street toward the waterfront. The park that bordered it was crammed with people, most of them black.

  They faced the pyre of their homes, their “town,” and they seemed to be almost wholly silent, overcome with the loss not just of their men, their sons, and their houses but, no doubt, of many relatives and friends trapped in the square-mile tinderbox.

  Paula stood awhile at the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and Flagler Street, gazing from the masses of people to the great buildings and wondering whether or not fire in these nearer edifices would cook the multitude. Probably not. The boulevard was wide, the park of some breadth, and the light wind blew from the ocean. White women and a few colored, several of the former wearing what evidently were the old air-raid warden helmets of their husbands, patrolled nearby streets. Some had pistols, some shotguns, and some rifles. But it seemed to Paula that there was little need for arms at this point. The looting of a few stores had lost all meaning; what was important—the temper of the crowds—was controlled by the awesomeness of the catastrophe. The people were not in physical panic, whatever the state of their minds might be.

  Nothing, exactly nothing, Paula decided, could be done to check the mammoth fires. Those in the park would survive. Those out of the direct fire path would have time to get away. Those in immediate peril were being warned by volunteers. The whole roaring situation was under such management as could be contrived and the human beings who lived now would mostly be saved for the morning.

  She walked back along the boulevard, passing individual women and groups of women hastening with their burdens toward the park at the waterfront. Babies in carriages. Myriad suitcases. A scraggly creature with cropped hair carried nothing but a violin case; it hung open and was empty, which the woman obviously did not know. A fat blonde raced along the street with a young girl and, between them, a hamper jammed with bottles. A thin, dark girl pushed an old woman in a wheelbarrow. Paula helped them across the street. It was not very difficult: in the center of Miami, no vehicles were moving.

  A blast came from somewhere behind Paula, in the fire, and a murmur rose from the park. For one lurid moment Paula thought of Hersey’s account of that night in Hiroshima. Well

  They’ll need—Paula thought.

  Water, her mind said.

  Water to drink.

  But how? She remembered the luxury cruiser. There would be girls who could run boats-and there were boats in the canals and boats anchored off Coconut Grove. There were wells—if the city pressure failed. Drums could be found. By morning, the people in the parks would be very thirsty.

  She hurried back across the bridge, looking over her shoulder once, like Lot’s wife, at the burning metropolis.

  She took her keys from her pocketbook and started her car. She drove across several lawns and through two hedges to avoid a new, croaking snarl of traffic.

  We must keep any more people from coming into town to see what it’s like—the curious jerks! she thought.

  She drove carefully. There weren’t many cars but there were no street lights either, and of the cars on the road most were operated in a reckless and alarming fashion.

  The campus looked almost normal, with lights burning in the buildings and students, girl students, commencing to use the classrooms. For injured people, Paula realized, as she saw four girls carry a stretcher from a laundry truck into one of the buildings.

  Professor Aveley was sitting in the center of a table that, by the addition of similar tables, had grown to a length of fifteen feet or so. Other women—some from the university and some not—sat flanking her. In front of each was a hand-lettered placard that designated the service in her charge: GUARDS, FIRE FIGHTERS, FIRST AID, NURSES, TRANSPORT, RUNNERS, ENGINEER-ELECTRICAL, ENGINEER-WATER, and so on. Girls came and went, bending briefly over the desk chiefs.

  It had grown like that, Paula thought, in just a few hours. A fast-operating, integrated Thing. And it couldn’t do much. They didn’t know how to do much. Or even how to imagine what to do. They’d collected perhaps twenty thousand people in Bayfront Park, for example, and not remembered drinking water. Let alone, Paula’s mind went on, sanitary facilities. But they could use the Bay for that—it wouldn’t matter. The sewers emptied there anyhow.

  Paula’s chair was still vacant. She sat in it.

  ‘What?” asked Professor Aveley.

  Paula told her in short phrases. “Water,” she finished, “to drink.”

  “Lord! Never thought of that! We’ll start a new division. Sue! Mollie! Listen—!”

  Somebody passed sandwiches and coffee. Paula took a cup of coffee but she wasn’t hungry. Women would, she thought; right off; start making sandwiches.

  “Bakeries,” she asked of the woman beside her.

  “Got a division on it,” the other replied. “There’s a big bakery right near. No power, though. Some of the girls think they could get a cable from the university, down there. They’re already running it on the poles—using ladders. We’ve got a hundred volunteer bakers and not one damned girl who can climb a power pole!”

  That was when the rain began—just before one o’clock. Some said later the fire caused it. Others said it was the usual spring rain—mercifully early that year.

  In Miami—as anywhere in a typical “palm forest” belt—it can pour as hard as in the “rainy forest” regions: an inch in a few minutes. During the next hour three inches fell on the area and in some spots even more. That was not unprecedented. Spring, summer and fall, Miami can turn itself in a matter of minutes from a balmy, blue-sky day or starlight night to a dark deluge that floods the flat streets, stalls cars, backs up the storm sewers, spreads acres of lake over pavement, curbing and lawn, and sets rivers raging where man had never intended.

  At the university, the effort continued in the downpour. As energetically as ants faced with a sudden new threat to the colony, students began to move tables, signs and personnel from the patio into the cafeteria. All the women, including the crew chiefs, were soaked; all ignored it. Work was resumed under fluorescent lights in a vast hall amid steel tray rails, steam tables, and an orchestra podium where the uncouth mechanisms of music gleamed meaninglessly.

  Curtains of rain miles thick cut off the volcanic horizon. The women at first hoped and soon knew from incoming runners that the deluge was saving the city.

  When, at the end of an hour, it lifted, they could see only here and there in the distances a stubborn glow where fire remained. The rain, as if dissatisfied, came again to complete the chore.

  Other cities were not so fortunate. . . .

  The east grew briefly gray, then disappointingly dark again. But the pearly undertone returned and stayed and was followed by such a vague light on the landscape as the moon makes. A strip of dull crimson flared above the Bay and at last it was morning.

  Paula surveyed the scene in the cafeteria. New women, women who had learned the ropes in the night, had replaced many of those who first began to organize the students. Professor Aveley was still there, however, at a table now detached from the rest.

  She lo
oked as if she would not need sleep for a month.

  Paula went when they sent her away.

  The trees dripped and glittered in the radiance. Sun would soon bejewel them.

  Birds sang . . . Paula stopped her car sharply to make sure that what she saw was a pair of warblers.

  So birds were all right. And she recalled, now, the barking of a neighbor’s puppy, Buster. Dogs, too, then. She drove slowly. Funny. She hadn’t even wondered, until just this moment. Male birds, male dogs. just men. Male people.

  Sunset Boulevard was no different, no different at all, save for the beneficence of the rain which seemed already to have made the grass greener and revived plants that stood in rows in the Hibiscus Nursery. Washed off the dust, she thought. Her driveway was just the same, too: puddles in it, the scent of night-blooming jasmine still drifting under the live oaks, tassels of Spanish moss swinging in the early currents of air and her own covey of quail running like chickens from the place where she scattered wild bird seed to attract them. Half the world had (she would not say “died”) disappeared: many, maybe millions, had truly died (if that was the way to say it), but her own premises were just as they had been.

  Edwinna’s car was there, too, and parked beyond the turning place.

  A curl of smoke from behind the brick wall startled Paula. She hurried, but even before she could see, she knew. She smelled bacon and was hungry. She rounded the vine-covered wall and saw Hester bending over a fireplace made of two cement blocks.

  The fire was crackling; she had put a large, copper-bottomed frying pan over it. Beside her, on the ground, were split-up pieces of a wooden box and a large coffeepot ready to replace the pan. Hester’s large eyes were warm with relief.

  “Alicia, she’s asleep. Miss Edwinna, she’s on the porch.”

  “Good.”

  “You look tuckered, Mis’ Gaunt.”

  ‘‘I’ll have some of that bacon—and some bread—if there’s enough.”

  Hester nodded. She then carefully considered what she wanted to say and said it with as little emotion as possible. “All the cullud people, they got burned up, I suppose?”

  “Lord!” Paula whispered. She walked across the grass and put her hands on the shoulders of the old, dark woman. “Hester, I wouldn’t try to go down there right away.

  Maybe later in the day. Maybe we can get some word before night. But I think your people are all right. They went to Bayfront Park—all of them—and they’re being taken care of.”

  “Most of them,” Hester said, “aren’t too much account. But my grandchillun. . . .”

  “I’m sure they must have got through, Hester.” Paula could not bear to watch the controlled burgeoning of hope. The older woman wanted, needed, to be by herself. “The whole area burned—where you live—and where your daughters and grandchildren live.

  But the people got out. Perhaps we can find them all a place nearer here, soon.”

  She retreated around the wall.

  Hester had dignity; above all else she hated to display her emotions. Contrary, Paula reflected, to what people say about Negroes, and in spite of any amount of evidence contrary to that!

  Edwinna lay in a wicker porch settee, her feet hooked over its arm, her head propped against a pile of varicolored pillows, a drink untouched, beside her.

  When her mother appeared she moved her eyes but not her neck and said, “I heard about you. We had a delegation—several, in the end—from your schoolgirls’ rescue society. Not that they didn’t help. One of them, some damned chemistry major, even ran a blowtorch and cut steel.”

  “You stayed at the wreck, then?”

  “I stayed,” Edwinna said.

  There was no way to tell: she had bathed and changed her clothes. Paula smiled,

  “Good!”

  “Not that you took any interest in what happened to me, after you sent me flying off to the hospital.”

  Paula sat. She picked up her daughter’s drink and swallowed a third: it proved unwelcome. She hiccoughed. “No. I forgot all about you. You’re twenty-six years old and should be able to look after yourself.”

  Edwinna lighted a cigarette, inhaled and blew smoke at the ceiling. Her wavy blonde hair was combed to its perfect point. She said, “ I never knew before what color people were, inside. I never realized, when you split them open and burst them apart, the same things showed up that you see in butchershops.”

  Paula glanced covertly at her. The voice was even enough. But the words sounded like the edge of a new hysteria. “Oh?”

  “No. I never realized a disemboweled little girl would look a lot like lamb quarters. ‘Intestine’ was just a word. ‘Colitis’ was something you got that made your gut ache. Now I know what it is.”

  “Edifying.”

  “Did you know?” Edwinna answered herself. “But, of course! The buzz bombs and V-2’s in England. I suppose that train wreck wasn’t anything novel—to you.”

  “I’d done a little volunteer nursing in hospitals before that.” Paula said mildly.

  “The human interior wasn’t exactly a secret to me.”

  “Dear old Red Cross! I always thought it was a social thing. Do you know what I did?”

  “No, Edwinna.”

  “Vomited.”

  Paula turned her head away slightly.

  “Did you hear me?” her daughter asked. “I yorked. Upchucked. Snapped my cookies.

  “I did, myself—the first time.”

  “You did!” Edwinna marveled for a moment. Paula watched fingers of the morning sun feel in amongst the Caribbean pines and the bristling, green palmettos. “I was—oh—about your age. I’d been to a hospital for a little repair surgery. Nothing much.

  A young surgeon that I took a fancy to, quite a fancy, wanted me to watch him operate.

  They dressed me all up and just at what he regarded as the most interesting point—well! I got out of the operating room in time, but not the hall.”

  The younger woman digested that. Twice, her eyes moved thoughtfully to her mother’s face. “I never knew you—took a fancy—to any living male but Dad.”

  “Neither did your dad, thank God!”

  “But you did?”

  “All women do, sooner or later, often or rarely, more or less. Only, the ones who have been taught to kid themselves never realize it. Virtue’s cheap, but the virgin heart is merely a blind condition of the brain.”

  Edwinna said gently, “What did you do about-those fancies?”

  “That,” Paula answered, the sound of remembering no longer in her voice, “would be telling!”

  A long moment passed. Finally Edwinna spoke again. “I have never been so shocked in my life. Incidentally, Hester is cooking up some bacon and egg sandwiches.

  And I’m damned glad you’re back. I was worried.”

  Paula said, “Thanks.”

  “Another thing. There’s a kid in Alicia’s nursery that I brought home from the wreck. Her mother was—her mother did what they call died in my arms. A mess. The little girl’s all right. I gave her a sleeping pill. Her name, if she wakes up before I do, is Martha.”

  Paula said very softly, “Okay, Edwinna. Martha. I’ll remember.”

  “I’m bushed,” the blonde girl sighed. “I was waiting around for you.” She rose slowly and lithely. She stretched. “I’ll cadge a sandwich and cork off. Don’t bother looking for the dress I was wearing. I buried everything.”

  Paula, left alone, sat smiling a little, while the intensity of the sunshine increased and until she heard Hester approaching in the paddle-footed way that indicated she was carrying a tray.

  “I hope, Bill,” Paula whispered, “you heard your daughter just now—wherever you are!”

  5

  A JOURNEY IS MADE TO AN ORDERLY BEDLAM.

  “Gaunt—Gaunt—Gaunt—” said the President. “The name’s familiar. He peered into the late night from a window of the White House office.

  “A writer,” said Clayton Mavoley.

  The Pre
sident grimaced and erased the expression so quickly he left his associate stranded with an answering smirk. “Wait a minute! I’ve read a couple of his books! Not a newspaper writer, if it’s the Gaunt I’m thinking of.”

  In front of Mavoley, on a long table, were a half dozen sets of folders in filing cabinet drawers. With these were several reference books. He turned the pages of Who’s Who in America, wetting his thumb. “Here,” he said. “William Percival Gaunt.” His eyes, enlarged by spectacles, jumped along the lines of fine print. “Born in Connecticut.

  Guilford. Eighteen ninety-five. Went to Yale and Harvard. B.S. and it says he was a mathematics major. M.A. in psychology. Ph. D. in philosophy. Sure covered the waterfront! Wife. Son. Two daughters—one deceased. String of honorary degrees.

  Written about four-six-eight-a dozen books. A play. There’s a whole paragraph listing papers and monographs. He worked in Blake’s co-ordinating group during the war—”

  “By golly! I know the man!” The President was thinking back. He chuckled.

  “When I was in the Senate! A big, raw-boned gazebo. Long nose, long chin, forehead enough for three men, looks a good deal like a horse. Did a hell of a piece of work getting research teams together. Talks English like a human being. I remember—”

  “He’s waiting on the line,” Mavoley said. “In Miami. Lives there. We got through on the Navy’s circuit.”

  For the twentieth time that evening the President picked up the phone to talk personally with one of America’s leading citizens. The President was tired. His body ached. It was necessary for him to draw a breath and conjure a smile so that his voice would sound the way he wanted it to. With the right sound of voice, suitable words would follow.