Shiva and Other Stories Page 2

  * * *

  At the cabinet the Soviets’ latest ultimatum is discussed. Some suggest withdrawal while others counsel invasion or at least a fierce reply. Anderson shrugs, waves his hands. “Whatever you say, whatever you think.” It is all too much for him, poised as he is on the edge of a new idea.

  * * *

  Forbes, the White House doctor gives him an unscheduled and unexplained physical. Sylvia’s instigation? Rumors he is losing his grip? News reports that he seems to be tottering and losing the thread of his speeches? Anderson submits wearily. Bowels, digestion fine, he tells Forbes, mind focused and clear. In the sack? Forbes says shrewdly, his eyes glittering with interest. “No difference,” Anderson says. It is an answer to cover everything. Forbes squeezes the sphygmomanometer bulb furiously until the constriction forces metal and then releases: in the expiring hiss Anderson hears the sound of a crowd. State has fumbled. He will get a chalice with the ball again.

  * * *

  At three in the morning he gets the call from Bitters, acting for the Joint Chiefs, he says. Tracers in Alaska have found activity, radar had subsequently picked up a convoy of jets of undetermined origin streaking over the Pacific toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Bitters says.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Anderson says. He has slept badly, moving from one convolute dream to the next, sound stages of memory inhabited by goblins and archetypes and for a moment he thinks that this is yet another dream but the speaker phone glints, Bitters’ whining, melodramatic voice is not the voice of recollection. “Are they aggressive forces or not?”

  “Well we don’t know. They’re moving aggressively.”

  “Is it possible the radar is wrong?” These things have happened, Anderson knows.

  “No. We’ve ordered a retaliatory strike force into the air as a matter of fact.”

  “You did all this without clearing?”

  “It’s in the statutes,” Bitters says nervously. He has been with Anderson for a long time. Since the Senate campaign as a matter of fact. Anderson has never been able to figure out exactly how Bitters has insinuated himself so deeply into his political life and the administration but it was never worth the trouble of confrontation. Get along, go along. He had been a good appointments secretary anyway.

  “Then why are you clearing it with me now? Why don’t you just go ahead and deliver the payload? Isn’t that what you want?”

  Bitters says nothing. That is the key to his power; he responds only to those questions which he can answer, ignores the rest. Anderson has come to admire the quality; he has learned a bit of it himself. “Well,” he says, “what am I supposed to do? Wake the Premier and tell him what’s going on here? Is it an international crisis or not?”

  “I’m just advising you of the situation,” Bitters says.

  Anderson reaches out and cuts the connection. For an instant he is insanely attracted by the idea of going back to sleep. The bombers will meet on their suicide collision or they will not; the retaliatory strikes will begin or they will not . . . but in a few hours it will all be over anyway and either way it goes there will be no penalty for him. None whatsoever.

  The idea lunges at him like a lover, casts tentacles heavy with desire over him; it is with an effort that Anderson drags himself from the iron compulsion and stumbles from the bed. He hits switch after switch, floods the room with light. The entire mechanism of this government is his to command, the awesome technology that can spirit his voice to the Premier or a hundred thousand missiles to deadly target is waiting to serve, but at this moment, in this room, it is to Anderson as if none of it exists, as if all of it, the situation, the Presidency itself, is hallucinatory and that if he were to fully concentrate he would be fourteen years old and back in his Omaha bedroom, peeping at the more benign shapes of the night. Shakily he pours himself a drink from the bottle by his bedside, thinking of the sounds of the flatlands as they poured through his bedroom. There were no planes in the sky then, no missiles, no bombers, no retaliatory strike forces or warheads or Joint Chiefs. No Bitters. There were only he and hope in the darkness but that was a long time ago to be sure and of no moment. What is happening now is that he is in the grip of some kind of international crisis and he cannot find a position.

  What would a President do? Anderson thinks about it. There was that Henry Fonda film which dealt with something similar but he had never seen it, just heard about it. Actually he was pretty weak on movies in which he had not acted, he was too busy making films in that time to watch them, and there are serious gaps in his background, important matters hence which he will never come to understand. The phone lights and he thinks about ignoring it, then sighs and activates. “All right,” Bitters says, “this has been discussed and the decision is that there’s no alternative but a full retaliatory strike.”

  “What if it’s a mistake?”

  “Everyone knows the rules of this. There’s no mistake anyway; we’ve checked it visually. Those jets are a thousand miles outside circumference in a target zone.”

  Circumference. Target zone. Anderson has always admired the cool language of the military; they seem to have a handle on things. “So you want the bombers ordered up.”

  “That’s already done.”

  “What if I countermand?”

  “That would he unwise.”

  “For God’s sake,” Anderson says, “you’re talking about the end of the world, don’t you know that?”

  “You’re talking about the end of San Francisco regardless.”

  “So does attacking them bring it back?”

  “Does not attacking them save the rest of the country? This is just the first step. They’re testing our will.”

  “What if it’s just a bluff?”

  “They’re over the perimeter. You don’t understand that this is very serious business.”

  “The fate of the world is my concern.”

  “Unless you countermand, then,” Bitters says and cuts the connection. Anderson looks at the speaker in amazement. The dull sound of transmission warns him that he must cut his own end. What the hell do I do now? he thinks. He cuts the connection. What have I gotten myself into here? I didn’t want any of this. I was just doing a favor for some friends. What the hell kind of ambitions did I have anyway? I wanted to save the world, not to end it. This is craziness. I’m an old man, I need my rest. I should be asleep now.

  * * *

  “Take them out,” Tom Lump says wisely, clutching his withered hands. Tom and he have become more intimate in recent days; unlike his brother he feels free to come into the Presidential bedroom and engage in reminiscence, now offer advice. “What the hell else can you do? They’ve strayed.”

  “This could be the end of the world, Tom.”

  “Oh come on,” Tom says calmly. “Shoot. The world isn’t going to end. All that we’ve heard since 1946 is that if we did this, if we did that, the world would end and nothing much has happened except that every time we didn’t take that stand they’d nibble another piece off. If we’d just gone ahead and acted like men from the start they wouldn’t be putting bombers over us now but that doesn’t mean we have to back off.”

  Tom spits, rubs his heel over the spot. “Awful sorry to do that in your bedroom,” he says. “The White House and all. I mean this is the President I’m talking to, I mean to show a little respect.”

  “It isn’t that simple you know,” Anderson says, “I used to think it was but it’s different once you get into this office; you see all kinds of problems—”

  “Shoot again,” Tom says wisely, “we’ve heard that kind of crap from anyone who ever came into the government; they campaign that they’re going to clean things up, change them, stop putting up with what got us here and the next thing you know they’re talking about the powers and problems of office and the humility of leadership and the complexity of the times and the next thing you hear it’s the same crap all over again until someone else shoots
them or blows them out.” Tom clutches his emaciated wrist. “Long time ago when something had to be done you just went ahead and did it,” he reminds Anderson. “Wasn’t kind and hurt like hell but I’m still walking around and it sure cleaned up the problem, didn’t it? You were right to do it and I’m the first one to say it. You had no choice. It was a lucky thing you spared my life but you could have cut me down and my brother too in that street and it would have served us right.

  “That was the movies,” Anderson said. “That wasn’t really happening, that was film. Wasn’t it? You can’t take that kind of stuff all that seriously, Tom.”

  “Really?” Tom says. “Seemed real enough to me. Seems real enough right now. Can’t pick up a coffee cup in this hand, hurts all night and real bad when I get up in the morning. I reckon it was real.”

  “It wasn’t,” Anderson says. But maybe it was, he thought. It was certainly as real as this. He had lines which made more sense than anything going on here and the heat under the camera had been terrific. The pain was real, later, in the daily rushes it carried. “I’ve got to make a decision here,” he says. “I’ve got to face up to it.”

  “Seems to me the decision is made. All you got to do now is let events take their course.”

  “I’m the President. I’m supposed to control events.”

  “That’s just stuff you heard on television,” Tom says. “That’s just stuff you seen in the movies.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You start to talk about what’s real, what’s not real,” Tom says, “you ought to think about that Bitters.”

  “What?”

  “He don’t seem so real to me,” Tom says. “Seems to me that he’s carrying on like something out of the movies. Where the hell did he come from, huh?”

  Anderson stares at him.

  “Just think about that,” Tom Lump says, “just think about that.”

  He winks and vanishes.

  * * *

  Anderson can’t think about it. Not now. If Bitters isn’t real what is he then, a figment of his imagination that he has dragged from the Nebraska Senate campaign clear on, a dozen years later, to the White House and nuclear crisis? What is he, a hallucination, someone be has invented to blame for the acts which he cannot accept himself? No, he will not even think about it; what he has to decide now is if this is all some kind of psychological test. Maybe that is the answer.

  Forbes and Sylvia and Bitters are in on it; probably the Lump brothers too. They are testing his will and resolve. Anderson knows all about the rumors from the press digests Bitters puts in front of him: that he has gone senile, retreated behind a wall in the White House, lost his grip, allowed matters to be taken out of his hand. The cut down in public appearances suggests that he might be a babbling fool. There are those who say that he has become a drooling oldster; that a stroke or irreversible kidney damage has done him in.

  Now, it is possible that he has been showing symptoms and that they have banded together to test him. That is a possibility: under the 25th Amendment the determination of a President’s capacity to govern can be made outside of him and they have grouped to see if he really has lost his marbles. That would explain everything: the way that Sylvia is making insatiable sexual demands and the Lump brothers checking into the Presidential quarters and now this damned nuclear strike which was made up to see if he could control himself in a crisis. He had no evidence after all that any of this was happening, just a couple of calls from Bitters (who according to Tom might be imaginary, in which case none of this was really going on except inside his own head but he could not tangle with the meaning of that; better to say that Bitters was real. Sure he was real; no one could invent someone like that hard, ungiving man).

  They were trying to find how he would react. Forbes and a team of shrinks were probably monitoring everything to get a sense of the situation. And in that case, Anderson thinks sullenly, the hell with all of them. He kicks off his shoes, sits on the bed. It would serve them right if he failed their goddamned test. It would serve them exactly right if he were to collapse under all of these pressures deliberately heaped on him: the sex, the crisis, the suspicions and the complaint and they had to invoke the 25th and put the vice president whoever the hell that was in. Maybe they would get a good dose of the situation and see exactly what he’d been dealing with all of this time. They’d have to have someone else play President for them and let’s see if he would do any better, Anderson thinks bitterly. He stares at the telephone for a long time, pondering his next move.

  His next move is going to be a big one and he wants to make sure that it will be exactly right for the situation. No margin for error now.

  Could he have invented Bitters and dragged him through a dozen years? Why, that would make him crazy.

  It surely would.

  * * *

  After the holocaust, Anderson thinks, it will be wonderful. No more problems, questions, conflicts. Simple resolution. Plans have been made in a top-secret fashion for decades to spirit the leaders of government and industry underground at the first indication of nuclear strike and so he will be sped to an enormous shelter just south of Roanoke, Virginia, where luxurious quarters have been hollowed out miles under the surface for a luxurious existence while waiting for the fallout to clear. Several hundred of them will be in this most ornate and homelike of all the shelters; a small city underground with the appurtenances of modern living and he will still very much be the President. Anderson knows how it will be there. They will leave him alone and he will have miles of glistening underground corridor to explore should he ever become bored. Millions of dollars have been spent over the years on this shelter; it is packed with devices to amuse. His old films are there, a screening room, light and speed and sound.

  It may be possible, he thinks, to come to terms with the key questions of his life underground. In these dozens of years he has not had much time for contemplation, the kind of pondering in which a man must engage as he nears the end of his days. It had been his hope before politics intervened to use time to read and think but neither the Senate nor the White House were places where a man could come to terms with philosophy. Among the questions that he would consider in the deeps, Anderson supposed, were: the true weight of his marriage, the sense of his career, the influence of having been a fantasy figure upon his own inner life (could fantasy figures have fantasies themselves?) and the question as to whether being a wish fulfillment figure had made him capable of wishes. A lot had to do with the acting, of course: you took direction, first from your agent, then the scriptwriter and producer, then the director himself; you were always following someone’s conception of what you should be and why and you tend to be measured as an actor in how well you came up to others’ expectations. But that could be dangerous because all of his life he had been working for the others.

  Could that be the reason for Bitters? So that even here, at the pinnacle, he would have someone to work for?

  Well, goddamn it, maybe it was time that he did something for himself, looked for his own goals and desires. Struck out. But that left another hard question: if you played it their way for almost three quarters of your life, doing what they wanted you to do to their satisfaction, could it be said at the end of this that you had anything inside independent of them? Did he have any goals and desires? Or was it just a matter of being a people pleaser, a box office winner? He would give this some thought too while he prowled the corridors and networks of the gleaming underground city. He would not let possibilities of the slightest substance whisk by.

  * * *

  Anderson sees himself on the rim of the underground city. He has left quarters early, before the full fluorescence that in the controlled, timeless environment would be “day”; in the controlled seventy-six-degree temperature pouring from the canisters he walks in golfer’s clothing past the tightly closed cubicles of his sleeping brethren, past the darkened cafeteria and recreation quarters, the closed library, past the exercise courts
and into the deeper network. The tunnels fan here like flowers, open up like tumors, the lighting spurts uncontrolled reds and purple. Determinedly, Anderson walks through this, wallowing in the silence, fixated on his goal, which is the great, gray space into which the tunnels feed and where the network ends. The space is framed by a high wall which dwindles into the fading light; in the wall are carved the letters and numerals which cryptographically instruct the engineers on how to maintain. Anderson has access to the codes but will never study them. Senseless. Technology has always mystified although he has enjoyed its benefits no less than any other American. It made him a fortune, put him in power.

  Now, on the stone floor into which the tunnels empty, Anderson stands, faces the wall and in the gray light deduces the sense of this greatest adventure of his life. Not two weeks ago he was the President in the country at the height of power; now he may be President but he lives with two hundred others underground and for all he knows the rest of his constituency is dead. Communications with the outside do not exist. Communication links with other shelters were planned but do not work. For all Anderson knows he may be with the last on earth but he does not want to deal with this complexity. The reality, the sheer weight of his present environment involves and amazes; for now they are all he needs to know of circumstance. He stands looking at the wall.

  “Position,” Bitters says. He has followed him all the way out here. “You know what to do.”

  Anderson knows what to do. He has always known; that is his strength and curse. “Only one more chance,” Bitters says.

  “And Tom?”

  “Right,” Bitters says. “For Tom.”

  For Tom, then. He always knew that it would be this way, didn’t he? It would come to this. Anderson crouches. Position.

  “Now,” Bitters says. His face is obdurate, magnificent in the stricken light. “Now.”

  Now. Fourth and one on the ten-yard line, thirty-six seconds left on the stadium clock, no time-outs, game hanging in the balance. Anderson perches over the center, his eyes filled with alertness, his chest heaving with the excitement of it all, the lacerating cold turning warm inside, each exhalation truly a burst of fire.