Shiva and Other Stories Page 10

  If I expect this to hit him to the bone I am quite disappointed. “Of course I’ve lost my nerve,” Gerald says, looking at me disarmingly. “Any feeling man would. Just how much self-confrontation do you think any of us can take? I’ve learned to love to kill.”

  * * *

  Events muddle, accelerate. It is perhaps best to handle this difficult material through transition, whisk, whisk. Sequentiality is too painful. Also predictable. After a suitable lapse of time the baby smuggler does indeed emerge from his offices. Perhaps it is on the next evening, perhaps it is several weeks later (when his informants have wrongly advised the dogs have been called off). He sways on stairs, adjusts lapels, breathes deeply and begins his descent. The first shot goes wide of the left temple by many feet and the baby smuggler sways in astonishment, saves himself from toppling by gripping a pole and then begins to shriek. The next shot is even more embarrassing, slashing into brick a yard from his head. He shrieks, gathers himself into an urgent fetal ball, propels himself in the direction from which he has come and the third shot can be seen only as obeisance to form—it is below the fleeing target by a man’s height. The baby smuggler forces the door open, staggers inside. In the dreadful quiet I say to Gerald, “That was quite unnecessary. Quite shocking really to be so deliberately inept. Whatever your feelings, you do have a job. You have responsibilities.”

  “I tried,” says Gerald P__. Sullenly, I would say. “He was agile. These things happen.”

  “They are not supposed to happen.”

  “You are dooming me by my competence, by my unusual luck.”

  “You had no luck trying to stay in E-flat,” I remind him. I am chilled and disgusted. I will have to report failure and the baby smuggler deserved death as much as any victim. A case can be made for the concrete manufacturer, even the politician is known to have had a generous thought, a loving mistress, but for the baby smuggler a clean death was the only epitaph. “You will pay for this,” I say. “I am simply warning you as your oldest and closest friend: I wouldn’t exact the penalty but someone will. I am sorry for you, Gerald.”

  “My name is Brown,” Gerald P__ says determinedly and breaks down the carbine, turns it to litter on the floor of the Skylark. I look at him with disgust. A fallen saint is no saint at all: a fallen saint is a clown.

  * * *

  Brown (no longer Gerald P__; the epaulet of his pseudonym has been stripped from him with the key to his post office box) is brought before the delegate committee for a hearing. It is my duty, per custom, to defend him but I have little enough to say. “Thirteen successful assignments,” I say, “should mitigate one abysmal failure.” It is the best I can do. “Consider who freed us from B-. Consider the hero who exploded W- from the planet. Have some compassion for the mighty rifle that sprang loose X-, who as we only know should have died in his cradle or at his mother’s bosom. Remember the great shot that tore off M-’s skull in the stadium, that was no small accomplishment and what a shot!” No use, of course. These cases all have precedent; the hearings are pro forma. “Perhaps you would like to say a few words,” I advise Brown. “I can do nothing more.”

  He shakes his head, picks up his trumpet and plays the opening notes of the bass-baritone aria of the last part of Handel’s Messiah. The trumpet shall sound and so forth. Somehow in this difficult time he has recovered his ear. The notes are purifying, exalting, even the committee sheds a tear. “Consider that,” I say, hard put to make a point. “Shall I essay a shaky metaphor and say that our Angel Gabriel has returned to his instrument of choice?” The committee squints. “I didn’t think so,” I agree. Brown laughs, plays a high D. The eaves shake.

  “I can do nothing more,” I say. “Defense is a hard business.”

  The committee nods sympathetically and pronounces sentence. It is the usual, of course. “I must say in closing,” it offers, “that thirteen successes only make failure more dreadful. The first crime may be the most heinous. It usually is.”

  “It is not my first crime,” Brown says mildly. “It would have been my fourteenth.” He fingers a valve and begins the Gloria from the Bach B Minor Mass. The committee and I listen with pleasure. If nothing else, Brown’s recovered gifts must give humility. Anything, then, should be possible. “A single person cannot clean up the world,” Brown says, behind the trumpet. “No one can clean up the world. One can only enact one’s desires.” He stands, looking quite impressive for all his new seediness: Brown is trying a martyr’s persona. “If you are quite ready,” he says.

  Dolefully, committee and I watch as he is led away. He had all the makings and was great in his time. But the makings and the moment are never enough. Life teaches us plenty.

  * * *

  The baby smuggler, having been approached and primed, is ready for his first assignment. He has accepted it with eagerness; even as he wipes damp palms on denim waiting for the party to appear, he knows he will not fail. The carbine is comforting. When they come into view he will lead the shot and so on. Having taken the honored name of P__ to continue his work, he feels he has paid sufficient homage to form and there is nothing else he need do. He owes them nothing.

  * * *

  In due course, if the new Gerald shows signs of wilting I must, as his oldest and closest friend, perform once again the ritual of encouragement and succor but now, as is usual at the outset, I am given time to rest and I look forward to a brief vacation. Reparations are a hard business. They take their toll. They sure do take their toll.

  The Trials of Rollo

  OH, YOU FOOL, ROLLO, OH YOU FOOL: and yet you have a decent heart, old onions. Your sins can be said to come from an excess of feeling and perhaps this will save you in the end, good luck chum pawn of darkness. Oh Rollo it is a big story: you create at enormous expense and psychic debt an illegal time machine, travel back to that evening when you lost your own true love. She married the calibrator seven months later, it didn’t work, she drowned in Miami Division a decade after that but it could have all been different. If you had but touched her. If you had had the grace to admit fault. Right? Right, Rollo? Right old suspirer, old dribble-face. You heave yourself into that enormously lawbreaking time machine, your belly trembling, small droplets of remorse condensing on your chin. You incantate. This time it will be different. All different; all different.

  Ah, Rollo. You travel back in time and space to Dance VI, stumble from the machine, leave it in the corridors disguised as trash for the bearers, take the lift to communications shack and seize the talker. “Helen,” you say when you hear her mother’s voice. You pant. Pant pant. “I want to talk to Helen, is she there?” Oh let her be there, eh, Prince of Skedaddles?

  “Who is this?”

  She does not recognize your voice. Ah, mon frere, but you and the lady never got along. Was that the problem? Blame it on the mother, of course, the woodwork, the climate, the winter wind. “A friend,” you say. You dare not introduce yourself. Later, perhaps, amends might be made. Now it is best to conceal identity, you surmise. You were always a terrific surmiser, Rollo. “A friend of Helen’s.”

  “From the school?”

  “What school?” you blunder. Helen was a Freestyle at the time you knew her, she had bypassed tutoring. “This is just a friend.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know who you are or what this is all about. You can’t talk to Helen; she’s sleeping. She went to bed an hour ago.”

  “An hour ago?” But of course you have not checked the time: for all you know you have coincided at three in the morning and this would be the night call of a lunatic. “What time is it anyway?”

  “It’s two thousand hours. Past Helen’s bedtime.”

  Two thousand hours? But only a child or a very old or sick person would retire so early! And then the truth begins, dimly and unspeakably to break over you, my quiver, my danseur, it is all too painful, Rollo, let me intercede. I will make an elision for you so that you can deal with this privately; you may retire to the corridors, thank you. Very well n
ow: technically incompetent you have failed to properly calibrate your clumsy time machine, the obsession of love and departures of age have snatched from you the ability to fathom charts and have left an absurd figure out of joint. Helen is two, not twenty-two, you have missed intersection by a full score and your own true love, your perishing, your destiny lies in her snuggle bed surrounded by stuffed animals and suspiring in the huge dreams of childhood.

  She is a little girl, your Helen, a little girl and the machine in your haste to get it working was not geared for return. You saw no need to ever return to your hideous cubicle, your awful chronology, you would make it right with Helen—you, Rollo, you forty-seven-year-old fool!—and live your lives as they should have been. Now you are trapped and the only introduction to Helen you could properly obtain would be to find a tutor’s credential.

  And then, crumpled cookie of fate, what would you say?

  Ah, Rollo, this is a sad time, a mad time, narrative poise fails, control is lacking, considerations of transition quite evade: I have made your elision but there is little else to offer. Dry your eyes, Rollo, stop whimpering, this must be faced. You could try to deal with the mother, not unreminiscent of Helen, you think, who would be in her late twenties at this time, but you know the circumstances of the mother. Helen told you everything. Isn’t that one of the reasons you fled? The mother is crazy, Rollo, as crazy—how it hurts to say this but truth must be faced even at forty-seven—as Helen herself. (Helen is crazy. A thirty-six-year-old woman traveling to Miami Division on a recreational to deliberately drown? It was deliberate, you know; and you think of love of you? For unrequited hopeless longing? Don’t, even by your standards, be an ass.)

  So what are you going to do? Here you be in the aseptic corridors of Dance VI, 14b Complex, hunched in the communications shack and you are going to have to face this and it might as well be now. Let us think, Rollo, what are you going to do? You cannot return to the burdens of your life, you must remain here in 2122, you will have to manage in a time two decades earlier than the one you planned. You were just a kid in 2122 yourself, it is not familiar. What next?

  And what are you going to say? If you could approach her, your pure and gentle love, her dark hair glinting red in the fluorescence, shading to gold through your tears; if you could approach that little girl, touch her, take her hand, hold her, what would you say? That she will love you in eighteen years, be damaged in twenty, be long gone in forty? “You will drown, Helen, you will drown for love of me.” Is that what you would say? She will be holding a doll, her eyes will be full, her cheeks glinting. “I’m scared of you. You scare me. I want to go home, scary man, bad man.”

  Scary man, bad man, out-of-time fool. Ah Rollo, none of this is my fault: I could have warned had you but asked. Scary man, bad man, out-of-time fool. “Goodbye,” you say into the unit. “Goodbye, goodbye.” You break the passage and stand there.

  There should be a way, you think, that I can find this two-year-old, let her know I love her; the genes are timeless, in the genes she will know and I will wait, I will be a menial, I will pace twenty years for her to come to me. Maybe fifteen. Fifteen years, yes. She will be seventeen. And I?

  I will be sixty-two and you, Helen, twenty-five years dead for me, your atoms consumed by the ocean, the memory of you hideous because lost. I am a fool, Rollo says aloud. I am a fool. He weeps. How touching.

  Me too, Rollo. Watch me cry with you. We weep.

  And Helen’s asleep.

  In the moist and darkness: we’ll figure it out. Right? We’d better, dondolier of doom. We’d just better.

  Tap-Dancing Down the Highways and Byways of Life, etc.

  HE CAME OUT OF THE HEDGES with an angrily uncertain expression, a hesitancy in his gestures. The gun, however, looked quite positive as he shoved it in my ribs. “Give me all your money,” he said, “right now.”

  “This isn’t very nurturing of you, Cecil,” I said. “It also isn’t legal.”

  “Don’t give me ‘nurturing,’ ” he said in a tortured whine. “Just give me the money.”

  Carefully I put my hand in my pocket, fumbled for my wallet. “You’ll regret this, Cecil,” I said. “I know your parents. They’ll be ashamed of you—”

  He reversed the gun and slammed me across the face with the butt. I do not mind saying that it hurt, but I took it with frozen expression, resolved not to show emotion. As he shifted the gun back to firing position, I could feel the blood crawling down a cheekbone. How humiliating, I thought. But of course, humiliation is part of the package here.

  “Just shut up and hand it over now,” he said. The gun shook in his hand. Overhead a helicopter prowled, rattling the sky. I could smell the gasoline fumes, leaching onto the pastoral, deserted suburban street. This civilization guards at all times against the illusion of beauty.

  I opened the wallet and stroked the bills, took out the clumped hundreds. “Now,” I said, “you should understand remorse—”

  “Fool!” he said, snatching the wallet from my hand. “The whole thing!” He backed away two paces, clawed through it. “Three thousand dollars,” he said at length. “You’re holding out on me. Where’s the rest of it?”

  “I gave you all I had, Cecil—”

  “You’re a liar!” he said. His face clutched in petulance, he looked as if he were going to cry, a most embarrassing posture for a man of his age and history. “I want it all!” He seized me by the throat, squeezed. The impact made me groan, and I could feel a fresh wave of blood cascading. “Give it to me!” he said.

  I struggled in my pocket, removed the ten hundreds I had folded away separately. “Here,” I said, suffocating in his grasp, barely able to articulate. “As if it will do you any good.” He released me, pushed me away, counted the money frantically. “There’s still another hundred,” he said. “You’re holding out on me.”

  “That’s all of it,” I said. I stood shaking by the fence, the helicopter clattering overhead, feeling the pain now. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Cecil. A man of your background, your opportunities. Your parents will be horrified when I tell them—”

  He looked at me with fury, and then, suddenly, centered the gun. “I told you to shut up!” he said. “You mention my name or my parents again, and I’ll blow you away!”

  “It’s the truth, Cecil!” I said angrily, touched, felt the pain in my injured throat. “You’re a disgrace to your heritage, and everyone should know about it. I’ll tell—”

  He fired the gun.

  The bullet caught me squarely in the forehead, and I fell. His receding footsteps mingled with the sound overhead.

  I lay near the tangled bushes for a good fifteen or twenty minutes this time. I must have been dead when they finally pulled me up with the ropes, took me inside, returned me to the all-purpose institute, and performed the standard procedures. At length, cleaned up and given fresh clothing—the cuts on the face were superficial, but they had to do painstaking work on a bruised larynx—I was hauled in front of them and roundly chastised. “I know,” I said, hoping to forestall more of it after the initial onslaught. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “You’re a fool,” the examiner said. “You did everything wrong. You were even worse than the first time.”

  “Sometimes I have to be given a little more time,” I said—rather sullenly, I suppose. “I may not be the quickest learner, but once I know, I really know—”

  “You mentioned his name, you invoked a personal relationship, you mentioned his parents. You held out on him, not once but twice. That’s really stupid—”

  “I got angry,” I said.

  “You can’t get angry if you want to survive, you fool. How many times must you be told that?”

  “I’ll be better,” I said. The cut still stung. I ran a finger over it lightly. “I don’t want to go through much more of this.”

  “Then get it right,” the examiner said. “We have only so much time for each of you, you understand.”

  “
All right,” I said. I knew that I should be submissive, cooperative, but a tiny core of revulsion still persisted. “These are our streets, you know. It was my neighborhood.”

  “You cannot get ideological. That is the last thing—”

  “All right,” I said. “I know.” I sat there quietly, nodded with agreement to everything that was subsequently said to me, and at length they let me go. It was agreed to run the circumstance immediately: the best lessons are not assimilated to be reenacted in the morning.

  * * *

  As soon as he came from the hedges, I knew I was in trouble. His eyes looked desperate, and the gun was shaking in his hand—probably because this was his first robbery. “Oh my God,” I said, “please don’t shoot! I’ll give you everything.”

  “Give me the money,” he said. With the cap pulled over much of his head and with the huge gun, he was a menacing figure, if one could look past the facts that I knew all so well. I allowed the terror to fill me. “Here,” I said, handing him my wallet. “Oh, here it is, just don’t shoot me.”

  He clawed rapidly through the contents. “They told me you were carrying five thousand,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s all there,” I said, “just count it again.”

  The clatter of the helicopter rattled the street; a shadow passed across us. I was careful not to look up, not to acknowledge the observation in any way.

  He jammed the wallet into his pocket. “All right,” he said, “turn around and start walking. Don’t look back.”

  “Can’t I just stay here?” I said. “You’ll shoot me in the back—”

  “Stop complaining! Just turn around and start walking.”

  “Oh Cecil,” I said, “these cheap theatrics, these little scenarios of intimidation—”

  He stared at me. “Don’t use my name!” he said. “I hate my name!”

  “Maybe if you stopped hating yourself, Cecil, you wouldn’t do things like this—”