Heathern

by Jack Womack

  "Joanna," he said, "something I've always wanted to tell you-"

  "What?" I asked, not yet leaving; certainly it shouldn't have been hope that caused me to linger, one second more.

  "I never really did think you ever put your heart into this, hon," he said. "You can't go halfway and get anywhere."

  I almost laughed; didn't; couldn't. "I know. I'll stop off in Security so they can remove me from the records. I know it's required."

  "I'd have trusted you to do that, hon," he said. "It'll be hard living without you."

  "You'll manage." He smiled, and nodded to himself. It pleased him when people accepted his worth. I closed his door, and walked to my office.

  Desks breed trash as closets breed hangers; from the drawers of mine I drew forth and disposed a hundred restaurants' matchbooks, long-forgotten memos from Finance concerning medical bills, programs from events unimportant at the time, and less so now; old disks, empty boxes once housing pens, three dozen copies of my resume in various states. A memo Bernard sent to me on our first day at Dryco marked a page in the Executive Health Plan Guide; he wrote it down, having not yet ascertained if the offices were bugged.

  At least we're working.

  The page marked concerned obstetrical care. Into the bin all went; what I had at home could now be dispersed as easily as Jensen's had been, as his grandmother's had been, as Gus's would be. Hard copy memories so transmogrify with time: notes fade until the words written are not so unreadable as incomprehensible; letters of love undergo a reverse metamorphosis, dropping their brilliant wings within safely sealed cocoons and emerging, if broken into, as something to crawl over the skin. at night; only photographs, as those in more primitive cultures believed, catch a shard of the soul of the one photographed, nonetheless memorable only to those who were there at the time.

  "Joanna."

  Jake startled me, knocking on the doorframe at my office's entrance; he clung to its side, as if fearful to enter without an invitation.

  "Come in, Jake. It's all right."

  "Why the open road?" he asked, stepping in cautiously, as if uncertain who else might be in there with me.

  "It lies before me," I said, placing my purse beneath my desk. In it were snapshots, combs, two dozen credit cards, my licenses, my makeup, one hundred new dollars; my earthly possessions, all unnecessary. "Come to say goodbye?"

  "To escort out," he said. He'd had a new cast applied, I noticed, a simpler splint free of obvious hazard. "Forgive what was necessary."

  "Don't look so sad, Jake," I said. "Your face will freeze like that. You did what you should have." As he stood there I thought he might be wondering why he should disagree. I shredded my superfluous documents.

  "I'll miss you overmuch," he said.

  "I'm sure you miss Gus more than you'll miss me."

  "No," he said. "Why waste the look when you won't see the bullet?"

  "That's so."

  "You vizzed ahead?" he asked. "That they'd take Macaffrey?"

  "It was too late to stop it, even before it happened. Do you understand that?" He nodded.

  "What now?"

  "Getting out of town. A clear life ensuing," I said. "What strength I have's my own."

  Jake smiled, recognizing my quotes. "Flying?" he asked.

  "You know a better way?"

  His grin was that of a boy much younger than he could ever be again. The windows in the Dryco building were hermetically sealed so that on days when the air conditioning faltered the place might quickly become more unbearable than it already was. As Jake sat down on the couch I walked across my office, to my own window, one not nearly so large as any of Thatcher's. The drapes had to come down to be laundered anyway.

  "Joanna," he said, "What's desired? I'll do-"

  I climbed up, stepping into the niche between wall's edge and windowpane. Reaching high above my head I disconnected the hooks; the veil dropped away. From my new vantagepoint I saw city, land, and ocean; saw the curve of the world and the unceilinged sky.

  "Joanna," Jake said. "Head floorways. You'll fall-"

  Lester came to earth, lived and died. Who doesn't? I didn't.

  "Joanna-!"

  So through winter morning I flew on alone. A snowfall of glass showered down, chiming as it drifted toward the street far below. Sparrows and gulls and doves circled round me, their wings so like those of angels. The mist of the clouds wet my face as I cried: cried for my friends, for my parents, for the millions of this city of God; for those who were lost, for those who would never be found. The tears I shed for Lester were ones of joy. There could be no separation from him; that which once was one would soon be one again. On the desolate isle a river's width away I'd wait until the day came, and then return that our world might be recovered: our sick world, our wonderful world, our blessed world that wept for its mother. Our first night together, Lester told me what I once knew I'd hear; I'd always wanted to hear, and see, and remember all I'd known. You're the Messiah, he told me, and I remembered, and I knew. You're the Messiah, he told me; I'd always been the Messiah.

  From a report of the 2nd Battalion, 405th Infantry, U.S. Army, April 1945:

  We discovered near Gardelegen an atrocity so awful that it might well have been committed in another era, or indeed, on another planet.