OPUS 21 Read online

  I flew with gulls once more, skittered with flying fish, and bathed in the limpid, tepid surf with every sand flea. That is what I remembered, exactly, in Warsaw where I lay dying, as usual.

  Remembering, I determined to go back to that sea.

  My shoulder was disjointed and full of slime. Certainly. My left leg was also paralyzed. I was ankylosed and calcified and atrophied. But of course. Agony-- sic. What was left of me might be a stumblebum but the outside part could somewhat swim still and the inside part could fly.

  My brother was dead.

  There was work to do.

  To hell with Dr. Jerkski, great man of the Institute.

  I would frustrate every specialist in Poland.

  Take up your bed and totter, Wylie.

  It required a year for the doing--in Warsaw and Paris, Manhattan, Connecticut, and California. Then I had entirely recovered. Trauma excepted. Now that is what I thought of in the space of time it took to smoke a cigarette on my divan at the Astolat--

  that, and several thousand more items. That is why, so to speak, I had nodded courteously at the Ghoul.

  He is always hanging around.

  One has only to turn one's head fast enough-and there he is. Most people, by the cortico-schizoid mechanism I have described a few pages back, partition him off.

  He is not behind me, they convince themselves.

  But he is.

  There are always exactly enough Ghouls to go round.

  Billions of people apply the blindfold technique in another way: He is not a Ghoul, they say, but the God of Heaven.

  The Eternal Grocer, who will dole out milk and honey forever. The Great Conductor whose baton will direct my Everlasting Harp. The Keeper on the Inexhaustible Preserves who will set infinite game before my arrow in the Happy Hunting. Chairman of the Greens Committee of the Elysian Fields. The Sublime Pander who will fit an houri to me on the hour, each hour, and I shall be the Paramour of Paradise. The Universal Usher who will take the stub of my ticket and lead me to my seat in the Reserved Section at the Right Hand. What asinine measurements of man are furnished by his Heavens!

  My own opinion of the Functions of the Ghoul is different, as I am gradually trying to imply here. And I am certain, furthermore, no one really believes, in his heart, that such heavens be. His mouth says it, his cortex confirms it, and his heart gives him the lie; so he has his Hell.

  For how could Nature come to as tawdry an end as Heaven?

  Even human nature?

  I told the Ghoul, after this sweating, to get behind me, like Satan, while I cut my serial.

  4

  This is the way of it.

  You take out an adjective here, an adverb there, a prepositional phrase yonder--

  and so gain a line.

  You make the first mark on a tally sheet. When you have four marks set parallel, you cross them with the fifth. When you have a row of twenty-eight marks, you have removed one page. When you have forty of these, you have completed the task--provided they are distributed through the installments in such a fashion that each part will be tailored to the desired length.

  It was a story of manners--a light thing, with a plot.

  I had enjoyed writing it.

  I did not enjoy the cutting.

  Every syllable scratched out is likely to take away some quality of a character upon which a subsequent event will turn. It is necessary to remember to the last detail what is removed and what remains. The elimination of a noun in the first installment may reduce the impact of a scene in the last. The contraction of a scenic description may ruin the comprehensibility of the hero's actions later on in the tale. And, when the most careful economy has been achieved, the goal of decimation may still be at a distance so that the writer is obliged to select this situation, that dialogue, yonder tender scene, and recast the whole in briefer compass, the while omitting no cogent phrase or fact, however trifling.

  It is a big puzzle and a hard job.

  It took me, I should think, another quarter of an hour to stowaway my Ghoul completely, divert attention from the prick in my throat, and become immersed in the running words.

  My editors say I am a good professional.

  And that, my liberal-intellectual critics add, is all: a capable hack.

  O liberals.

  O cognoscenti.

  O critics. I give you my death-wish--and the atom bomb for its consummation.

  Why didn't you study it sooner?

  You copied into your literature whatever you saw on washroom walls--and little else--while brighter boys copied Bohr's equations from blackboards.

  Both were true.

  Both were real.

  One was old.

  The other new.

  And where are you tomorrow?

  Anyway, as I was suggesting, I write for money, usually.

  I enjoy it--the writing and the dough. If writing isn't fun, I give it up. And I spend the money.

  Here today and marlin fishing tomorrow.

  Here today and at the couturiers with Ricky tomorrow.

  Night club today and novelette tomorrow.

  Serial today, book, movie, play.

  Sarcophagous tomorrow.

  I am at least one two-billion-three-hundred-millionth responsible for the contemporary world and bear the burden gamely. Why not take up my burden and follow me as I, too, follow? The burden of Light.

  Or why not take up, better than I have, the same burden and improve upon my shambling progress?

  I am the occasionally somewhat rich man who finds the Kingdom of Heaven at hand this day--and the next, discovers in his private concerns and small affluence that the door has narrowed down and his camel is balked by its load. The little acre I have dedicated stays where it is but wants, sometimes, for cultivation. I have sinned; that is why I understand sin. Men have made enough things for me to last fifty lifetimes; I have given them away for newer, more expedient things. Enough substance has been dug out of the earth and grown upon it and sold to me to support a tenementful of more intent philosophers. And I cannot compare myself favorably with other men: perhaps they lacked my environmental opportunities--a Princeton education, for instance--or a youth's experience of Montclair, New Jersey. (What grim lessons!). If, furthermore, my assigns perish with the yuts and their barbarous impedimenta, they will have no reason to remember me kindly.

  But these are my problems.

  And these are your problems, too.

  Do you repent at all?

  Or ever act?

  Or merely join another lunch club and boost your voice loose? What fagins brought you up?

  Old Bob Durfree, editor of the magazine for which I'd written so many yarns about Cynthia Davis and Cynthia's silly mother and Cynthia's patient pop would welcome this one. My short stories, my serials, were a branded feature of Bob's magazine.

  Struggling years! A hundred serials--froth composed of my blood and sweat and tears--

  were written for nothing. And then, at last, Success. Chimes in the mercantile establishments! Fiesta for salesmen! Orgasms in banks! The Cynthia stories belonged more to Bob Durfree's magazine than to me--and nearly as much to the taste of millions as to my taste, although I sometimes put spices in the meringue that offended the flaccid palate of Mrs. America and the lovely abscess she rears as a daughter.

  At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the dignities I have referred to--and in light scorn of those critics who can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.

  It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.

  I was surprised it hadn't rung sooner.

  People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions, Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go. They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishin
g. I always tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.

  I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe--my brother. I thought, We, the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.

  "Sorry--I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks. Yes--exactly.

  Keeps you jumping."

  "Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"

  "Well, come up." I gave him the room number.

  Paul is the eldest of my nephews--twenty-five now, or perhaps only twenty-four.

  His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and hectic--continually outraged by the course of human events and continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do. Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a difference between us of great magnitude.

  Where I was an interested but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I was captivated by every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention and mastered nothing. He has--

  as I have--the familial facility for expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.

  Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me, still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother--which occurred when I was small--she was always a nebulous member of the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored dresses-

  -brown, as a rule--and rolled her hair in tight coils, like rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her. The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot--or within harmonium-shot of it--and she died giving birth to Paul.

  Wilson, the professor, meantime had done the right thing by her; they were married by an uncle of mine.

  "Georgianna," my aunt used to say, "was the most docile, uncomplaining human being on earth. A true Christian. If she hadn't met that vile seducer--that atheist, Willy Wilson--she'd be serving her Lord in some distant land to this very day. She expiated her sin, believe me. The night she died, she said so. 'I'm going, Effie,' she told me. 'Bring up the boy in the Master's steps: I failed her! Willy Wilson insisted on taking the boy--and brought him up a nonbeliever, like himself. Poor Georgianna!

  "'I know He has forgiven me!' Those were her last words--excepting for what she said after the delirium set in."

  My aunt would frown and shake her head at that point. "Two more mortal hours she lay there, twisting and trying to sit up--with me holding her. And the whole time she cursed the name of Wylie with words you wouldn't believe a girl like that would know.

  Of course--she meant Wilson--it's a common befuddlement. But whenever I think of the language she heaped on that evil man, I know what human torture is!"

  It was one of our favorite family stories.

  And, needless to say, Georgianna didn't mean Wilson at all. He's still a good chemistry prof-a husky, redheaded guy whom everybody likes. Georgianna was cursing her own blood the way people curse the day they were born--and for sufficient reasons.

  She had glimpsed--all but too late--the hypocrisy implicit in Scotch Presbyterianism. The strong, lucid mind that burned in silence beneath her clumsy exterior had finally cut through that wall between reason and instinct which men call Faith. Just before her

  "delirium" Georgianna had realized that Willy, not Jesus, had forgiven her (or would forgive her) for deserting him after their marriage, for working as a farm cook, and (as the result of overfatigue) for falling down a back stairs in the ninth month of her pregnancy, thus bringing about her own demise through stubbornness and vanity. She had figured out the family--and Willy too. She got at least one moment of transcendent understanding, and followed it with two sound hours of profanity--crowding into the racing moments as many repressed sensations of her life as she had time for. Not a bad job, on the whole.

  After Willy had explained it to me, I'd always wished I'd investigated Georgianna more attentively.

  There hadn't been much chance.

  Paul--her son--came in. The one we were so proud of.

  Pushed the door open, kicked the book away, and let the automatic closer snap the lock. He took off a seersucker jacket that had flapped around his slatty shoulders. He picked up the book and said, "Jesus Christ. I thought I explained quantum mechanics to you ten years ago!" He went through my bedroom to the bathroom. A firm, pounding stream. He kicked the toilet handle, missed, kicked again--and it flushed resentfully. His jacket had fallen to the floor.

  When he returned, he kicked that. It rose in the air and he caught it. He whipped off his shirt.

  "Buy me a drink," he said.

  "What?"

  "Scotch and soda."

  "Order it yourself--and order me a coffee."

  He went to the phone. I cut one more line, and then tidied up the bridge table, stacking things so I could start in quickly where I had left off.

  "I didn't know you were in town," I said.

  "I didn't know you were. Took a chance. I had to see a gook who lives near here--

  so I stopped in. How's Ricky? Recovered now?"

  "Swell."

  "What you down for? Cheating?"

  "Work."

  He considered that, pinching the flared nostrils of a long nose, peering luminously over his fist, wrinkling his forehead. "It's possible, anyhow. You're getting pretty old."

  ' I'm not too old to take you on, Spare-ribs."

  His dark eyes twinkled. "No. You're getting oaken, Phil. Late maturing and frost resistant. Someday, though, I'll be like that myself--and then you'll be a wizzled shard who goes around feeling young girls. I'll bring over a pretty one to bait you up, and when you reach for her, I'll wallop you till they have to put you in an iron lung."

  "By God, I believe you will!" I was laughing. "How's physics?"

  His face became taut. "Don't you know Congress will crucify you for merely asking?"

  Paul worked for Johann Brink, at the Belleau Lab. For the Atomic Energy Commission. Brink had picked him from a prepared slate of geniuses at M.LT., Caltech, and several other schools. Paul was that good.

  I said, "Congress has got one of my arms pinned down already and a hole in my foot, besides. If you don't want to tell me how physics is--I'll tell you. Put it this way.

  There was an atmosphere at Eniwetok you didn't like--"

  "What do you know about that?" he said swiftly.

  "I just listen to what Truman says," I answered, "and then I extrapolate." I shook my head. "It's funny. As soon as anybody has a dose of military security, he gets the soldier's creed--assumes people stop thinking because certain thoughts are classified.

  Everything about atomic energy is secret, hunh? Well--who has Brink been seeing, lately? "Who was he photographed with? Old man heavy water. So now you come in here--looking like an underfed caribou with the wind up--and what must I think? That your little cadre of nuclear physicists is fooling with the hydrogen-helium cycle and getting hotter than the rotor in a turbo-jet. You're scared you'll figure out that one-thousand-times-more-powerful-than-Nagasaki bomb. The atomic cloudmaker. The continental broom. The universal gene-mangler. Or crack light metals or separate isotopes by heat. Don't tell me if I've read your mind, doctor. I would rather be calm in my surmises than fearful I might
say something in my sleep that could be checked. Do you guys really think it is smart to cause officials to go around positively announcing that the number of bombs we have in our beloved stockpile is smaller than anybody who knew the prewar radium production could figure out? When you discuss atomic

  'weapons' in the press--without specifying--doesn't it seep into the dull heads of us laymen that, for instance, hot isotopes would make a nifty charge for ordinary high-explosive bombs--against warships, for example? And can't anybody make a pile, now--

  and start the isotopes flowing? Crop-dust cities? And don't you incessantly talk too much about how long it will be before you can do thisa and thata? Remember when your spokesmen were telling us of the inutility of thorium? Cannot we, the plain people, add and subtract neutrons in our heads? Aren't you protesting too much now about how long it will be before you can push a couple of hydrogen atoms into one helium, with great and beneficial new release of energy?"

  Paul was unamused. "Someday G2 is going to walk in here and walk out with you."

  "Thought control," I said. "Never worked. Never will. Whenever a nation uses it, you can know that nation's washed up." The coffee came in--and the highball. I signed the check and tipped Karl. "Danke schoen," I said, and turned to Paul again. "G2 came after me long ago. I wrote a story before the war about uranium bombs and how they would be made and what they'd do--and it wasn't accepted until 1945. It went to censorship automatically--and when the censors read it--they hit the ceiling. Thought there was a leak in the Manhattan District. The only leak was in their heads. They sent a major out after me--like the hounds on the tail of Uncle Tom--"

  "I recall the escapade," Paul said wearily. "You lead such a harrowing life, Mr.

  Wylie. And tell about it over and over."

  Nobody likes that one. I said, "Sorry," and carried Paul his drink. He was sitting in one of my chairs; he had his legs on another; his elbow rested on my coffee table. I saw in my mirror that I was flushing a little: I felt embarrassed.

  But Paul had already forgotten chiding me. "Phil," he said, jiggling his glass to cool his psyche with the ice-clink, "it gets worse and worse. It is beyond horrible. Past hideous. More than unthinkable. And it surpasses the unbearable."