Julian Comstock

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Julian had also made friends in Montreal, and he used the time before the wedding to take his leave of them. These were the Philosophers and Aesthetes who gathered at the coffee-shop called Dorothy’s. Julian had not introduced me to any of them, and they seemed exactly as loose-limbed and pallid as Lymon Pugh had described them, when I saw them from a distance; but I was no judge of Philosophers. At least they did not parade around with unpatriotic signs, or get themselves locked up in military prison.*

  As for me, I spent my time with Calyxa. Part of this devotion was practical, since there were arrangements to be made and invitations to be delivered. But it was an indulgence, too; for we were at that stage of betrothal in which we craved each other’s company in all ways and at all hours. If we “anticipated our vows,” perhaps the reader can forgive us for our eagerness; and I’ll say no more on the subject, except to repeat that it was a very happy time for me.

  Of course I wrote to my mother to announce the occasion, and to apologize for not being able to bring Calyxa to meet her, though I assured her I would do my best to make that happen, preferably sooner rather than later. Calyxa had no family except Job and Utty, who had a prior engagement—they were to be hanged on the day of the wedding—but all the Parmentierists would be there, and the staff of the Thirsty Boot, and assorted street musicians and sundry revolutionaries; and “my side of the aisle” would be full up with survivors of the Saguenay Campaign, and perhaps a few Philosophers, Jews, and Aesthetes, at the invitation of Sam and Julian.

  In the end it was a wedding like any other—familiar enough in its trappings to subdue the need for description. In short: we were wed; we kissed; there were cheers; refreshments were served.

  A carriage had been hired for our trip to the train station. It was not quite a “wedding carriage,” for Sam and Julian shared the transportation with us. All of us had purchased tickets for the New York Express, which was due to leave Montreal at sundown. I rode with my arm around Calyxa, and we cooed at each other, and uttered pleasant trivialities, while Sam and Julian blushed, or coughed into their hands, or made a point of staring out the curtained windows even though the city was dull in the fading light and decorated only with gray banners announcing BOIL ALL WATER or similar hygienic instructions.

  There was one stop Calyxa insisted on, however, before we reached the train station, and that was the public square where the Army of the Laurentians conducted its hangings.

  Job and Utty had already met their fate, at about the time Calyxa and I solemnized our vows. I suggested she might not want to sully the memory of the day by visiting a gallows; but she needed reassurance that her brothers were truly dead, she told me, and that they wouldn’t spring back to life at some inconvenient time in the future.

  So I told the hired driver to stop where the hangings had taken place. It was the policy of the Army of the Laurentians to leave corpses dangling from the gallows until a day or two had passed, so the dead would serve as a useful advertisement of the wages of vice and rebellion. This custom had been but partially honored in the case of Job and Utty. Two ropes dangled from the elaborate scaffold, but only one was occupied. I asked a bystander about this, and the man explained that Utty Blake had been hanged first, but that the scaffold had been built too high, or the rope made too long, and at the critical moment Utty’s head had been “nipped off,” as the man put it, so that the body no longer depended from the rope, but slipped through at the neck and had to be hauled away in two pieces. Stains on the ground attested to the truth of this.

  But Job was still “on duty.” He looked much smaller in death. His face was purple, and not pleasant to contemplate, though I had seen uglier corpses during my military career. A chill wind had come up, and it flapped the banners adorning the nearest buildings and turned Job’s corpse like a pendulum at the end of his mournfully creaking rope. Ponderous clouds swept through the darkening sky, and the mood of the place was altogether dour and unhappy.

  Nevertheless Calyxa sprang from the wedding carriage energetically, and walked right up to the unkempt and frankly foul body of her brother. His bootless feet dangled at about the level of her shoulders.

  I let her stand alone on that dusty, windy square, in contemplation of the ephemerality of life and all worldly things, for many long minutes. Then I joined her, and put a consoling arm around her waist.

  “As awful as your brothers were,” I said, “this must be hard to endure.”

  “Not very hard,” she whispered.

  “Say your goodbyes, then, Calyxa—we have a train to catch.”

  I was moved by her somber expression, which implied a soul less hardened than she liked to pretend; and I was even more moved when she found the Christian charity to utter a quick prayer* for the soul of poor dead Job.

  Then we climbed back into the carriage, and I instructed the driver to take us on to the train station. The atmosphere had cooled somewhat, and there was no more post-nuptial cooing. Instead, Calyxa attempted to make conversation.

  She didn’t know Sam or Julian very well just yet. In a sense she didn’t know them at all: despite the confidences we shared, I had avoided telling her that Julian was actually Julian Comstock, the President’s nephew, or that Sam had been the best friend of Julian’s murdered father. I had promised Sam and Julian that I wouldn’t mention these awkward truths, and I had been true to my promise.

  But I had told her other things about my friends and my adventures with them. She looked squarely at Julian and said, “You like to tell Bible stories.”

  Julian was uncomfortable—as he often was in the presence of women—and seemed not to know how to respond. He swallowed repeatedly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Ah, well… do I?”

  “According to Adam. Bible stories of your own invention. Most of them blasphemous.”

  “Perhaps Adam exaggerates.”

  “Tell me one,” Calyxa said, as the carriage rattled down the gloomy, windy street, and a small rain began to fall. Her gaze drifted to the window of the carriage. “Tell me an Easter story, if you know one.”

  I didn’t like the trend of this conversation. Julian’s apostasies were often shocking to the uninitiated, and I had hoped Calyxa would get to know him better before he trained the cannon of his Agnosticism on her at close range. But Julian liked a challenge; and I think he was charmed by Calyxa’s boldness and directness.

  He cleared his throat. “Well, let me see.” The overhead lantern teetered on its gimbals. Rain drummed on the carriage-roof, and Julian’s breath hung visibly in the chill air. “God created the world—”

  “That’s starting a long way back,” Calyxa said.

  “Perhaps it is; but do you want to hear this story or not?”

  “I beg your pardon. Continue.”

  “In the beginning God created the world,” Julian said, “and set it turning; and let events transpire without much in the way of personal intervention. He stage-managed a few tribal disputes, and arranged a misguided Flood that cost many lives and solved very few problems; but in the end He decided the human race was too corrupt to be salvaged, and too pathetic to destroy, and so He stopped tinkering with it, and left it alone.

  “But humanity, on the whole, was conscious of its fallen condition, and went on petitioning God for unearned gifts or the redress of grievances. All this badgering, in God’s eyes, amounted to a lament for lost innocence—a nostalgia for the abandoned paradise that was Eden. ‘Make us innocent again,’ humanity cried out, ‘or at least send innocence among us, to serve as an example.’

  “God was skeptical. ‘You wouldn’t recognize Innocence if it handed you a calling card,’ He said to humanity, ‘and Goodness exceeds your grasp with the regularity of clockwork. Look for these things where you find them, and leave Me alone.’

  “But the prayers never ceased, and God couldn’t indefinitely ignore all that grief and lamentation, which lapped at the walls of Heaven like a noxious tide. ‘All right,’ He said at last, ‘I’ve heard your
noise, and I’ll give you what you want.’ So He fathered a child by a virgin—in fact a married virgin, for God was fond of miracles, and for a woman to be simultaneously a wife, a virgin, and a mother seemed like a miracle with compound interest accrued. And so in the fullness of time a child was born—innocent, bereft of sin, invulnerable to temptation, and good-hearted down to the very marrow of him. ‘Make of him what you will,’ God said grimly, and stood back with His arms folded.”

  (I tried to evaluate Calyxa’s reaction to these blasphemies. She kept her face motionless, but her eyes were attentive and unblinking. The rain came down stiffly, and the wheels of passing carts made a muted sound in the dusk.)

  “A quarter-century or so went by,” Julian continued. “And eventually that child of God was returned to his Creator—scorned, insulted, beaten, humiliated, and finally nailed to a splintery cross and suspended in the Galilean sunshine until he died of his wounds both physical and spiritual.

  “God received this much-abused gift by return mail, as it were, and He was ferociously scornful, and said to humanity, ‘See what you do with Innocence? See what you make of Love and Goodwill when it looks you in the eye?’ And so saying He turned His back on Mankind, and determined never to speak to the human race again, or have any other dealings with it.

  “And even this,” Julian said, “might have been a useful lesson, taken as such; but Man misunderstood his own chastening, and imagined that his sins had been forgiven, and put up effigies of the tortured demigod and the instrument on which he had been broken, and marked the event every Easter with a church service and a colorful hat. And as God made Himself deaf to Man, so Man became deaf to God; and our prayers languished in the dead air of our cavernous churches, and do so to this day.”

  The carriage was silent in the aftermath of this cruel and frankly blasphemous narrative. Sam sighed and stared out into the rain. The vehicle’s springs creaked as we bounced over wet cobblestones, a sound that reminded me of the creaking rope where Job Blake had been hung. Julian looked at Calyxa boldly, if a little apprehensively, while she pondered her response.

  “That’s a fine story,” she said finally. “I like that story very much—thank you, Julian. I hope you’ll tell me another one some day.” She essayed a smile. “Perhaps I’ll make up one of my own, now that you’ve shown me how.”

  It was Julian’s turn to gawk in astonishment. He slowly took the measure of Calyxa’s sincerity. Then he grinned—perhaps the first genuine grin I had seen on him since the Saguenay Campaign.

  “You’re welcome!” he said. Then he turned his grin on me. “You married well, Adam! Congratulations!”

  “Oy,” said Sam, in the cryptic language of the Jews.

  * A custom that can’t be described outside of a medical textbook; though by Sam’s account of it I was astonished that he would consider himself “lucky.”

  * They were sometimes locked up for other reasons, Julian said; but he changed the subject when I asked him to explain.

  * “Passe mon bonjour au Diable quand tu le verras.”

  10

  The future defied our expectations. The future always does, as I’m sure Julian would say. “There’s no predicting Evolution,” he used to say, “either in the long or the short term.”

  Still, the shock of our arrival in New York City can hardly be overestimated.

  This is what happened.

  Our train, although an Express, slowed at every switch yard, and the journey lasted all night. Calyxa and I had a stateroom to ourselves. We were awake until the early hours, and consequently slept past sunrise. We did not see anything of the City of New York until the porter knocked at the door to announce our imminent arrival.

  We dressed quickly, and joined Sam and Julian in the passenger car.

  I was sorry I hadn’t arisen earlier, for we were already well within the boundary of Manhattan. I will not detail its wonders here—those will emerge in the later course of the story. But I knew something exceptional was going on as soon as we rolled into the columned interior of the great Central Train Station. Visible through the rain-streaked windows of the passenger car were many bays and depots where trains could embark or dispense passengers, and the one we approached was crowded with people in all kinds of colorful dress, many of them carrying signs or banners. A wooden stage had been erected, and a band played patriotic songs. The exact details were hard to distinguish through the smudged and grimy glass, but the mood of excitement was unmistakable.

  We asked a passing porter what the occasion was, but he didn’t know. “Someone famous in from the battle-front,” he said, “probably.”

  Someone famous! It would be ironic, I thought, if we had come all this way with General Galligasken for a fellow traveler; but there was no hint that such was the case. We didn’t know which passenger was being honored until we stepped out onto the platform. Then a ticket-taker pointed at us—at Julian, specifically—and the band promptly struck up a march.

  “Dear God!” Sam said, paling, as he read the signs and banners held aloft by the crowd—and I read them, too, and my expression must have been equally gap-jawed.

  WELCOME THE HERO OF THE SAGUENAY CAMPAIGN! said one.

  NYC POLICE & FIREFIGHTERS SALUTE THE CAPTOR OF THE CHINESE CANNON!—another.

  And a third said, simply,

  HURRAY FOR CAPTAIN COMMONGOLD!

  Sam trembled as violently as if he had looked at the jubilant crowd and seen, in its place, a firing squad.

  Julian was even more bewildered. He opened his mouth and couldn’t muster the strength to close it.

  At that moment a white-haired woman came to the fore of the crowd. She was not young, nor especially thin, but her manner was vigorous and purposeful. She was clearly an Aristo—she was dressed expensively and gaudily, as if she had marched through a milliner’s shop and a tropical aviary and emerged with bits of both places adhering to her. She carried a wreath of flowers on which was laid a paper banner bearing the words WOMEN’S PATRIOTIC UNION OF NEW YORK WELCOMES CAPTAIN COMMONGOLD. The wreath was so extravagant that her face was all but concealed by it, until she lifted it up with the intent of settling it around Julian’s neck.

  Then she got a good look at the intended object of all this adoration, and froze as if she had been struck by a bullet.

  “Julian?” she whispered.

  “Mother!” cried Julian.

  The wreath dropped to the floor. Julian’s mother embraced him. The photographers in the crowd grew interested, and hoisted their cameras, and the reporters took their pencils from behind their ears.

  ACT THREE

  EVENTS PATRIOTIC AND

  OTHERWISE

  CULMINATING IN INDEPENDENCE DAY, 2174

  Keep thy peaceful watch-fires burning, Angels stand at all thy doors, Washing from thy homes dissension As the oceans wash thy shores.

  —“A HYMN FOR AMERICA”

  1

  I was hastily introduced to Julian’s mother as a friend from the Army, and Calyxa as my wife, and then we adjourned (at Mrs. Comstock’s insistence) to a luxurious carriage, big enough to contain all five of us. A team of fine white horses carried us away from the noise and confusion of the rail station.

  The upholstery of the carriage was lush, the city outside was astonishing … but I was hardly conscious of any of those things. In fact I was in a stricken state. I did not yet fully understand the mechanism by which this unwelcome Welcome had worked out; but I was already convinced that I had upset the plans, and perhaps hastened the doom, of my friend Julian.

  Calyxa was even more bewildered by this turn of events, for which her experience supplied no antecedent or explanation. The carriage might have been silent, each of us dwelling on private thoughts and fears, but for Calyxa’s periodic demands to be “let in on the joke.”

  “I wish I could oblige you, Mrs. Hazzard,” said Julian’s mother, who had succeeded in committing our names to memory despite the chaotic conditions under which we were introduced. “But I�
�m not sure I understand it myself.”

  In fact Mrs. Comstock was exhibiting an admirable degree of level-headedness, as I saw it. She was a solidly-built woman of middle age, her coifed brown hair streaked at the temples with white. She occupied a central carriage-seat. Julian brooded to her left, while Sam on her right looked pale and stricken (except when he glanced at Mrs. Comstock, which action caused a ferocious blush to rise to his cheeks).

  “Excuse me,” Calyxa said, “and probably this question violates some etiquette I haven’t been warned about, but who are you exactly?”

  “Emily Baines Comstock,” the older woman said gamely. “Julian’s female parent, if you haven’t inferred that fact already.”

  “The name ‘Comstock’ comes as a surprise,” Calyxa said, casting me a sour glance.

  I immediately confessed that I had deceived her about Julian’s pedigree. I apologized but cited my promise to Julian and Sam.

  “I thought you were a Western lease-boy, Adam.”

  “I am! Nothing less, nothing more! I was befriended by Julian Comstock when he was sent to Williams Ford to protect him from possible conspiracies.”

  “Comstock,” Calyxa repeated. “Conspiracies.”