The Wretch of the Sun, page 2
“The department sent me.” He exhibits a badge in a wallet. “May I come in?”
They sit in the parlor and F. repeats his story, pausing near the beginning to introduce June, who is on her way out the door. Shopping. She hates being a bad hostess, but the ration cards expire at noon. He suspects the man to be a psychologist from the first. He doesn’t have the build or manner of a detective, and the man’s questions reinforce his suspicions. When he introduces himself, there is what sounds like a momentary pause before the name—pronounced “robe,” last name. Is that where “doctor” usually goes? Every now and then, “__ Robe” mentions reports, higher-ups, talks about getting the details of his story straight. And more often than he should he reminds G. that this is procedural and that the department considers his information very important. “__ Robe’s” line doesn’t blend well with the types of questions he asks. Finally he all but breaks cover and leans in with,
“Now, you understand I have to ask you this, so please don’t be offended. But, you understand, I must make absolutely certain, so that there is just no doubt at all about it, as a matter of procedure. You understand. If you have any family history of . . . mental instability, it’s vital that we know about it because, after all, that could be used to discredit you. We have to be especially careful in how we handle information of the particular type you’re giving us.”
There is nothing to tell. H. sits there, earnestly.
“Well,” says “__ Robe,” putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward to get up. “I’ve been instructed to inform you you’re on leave for the time being, until the next phase of the investigation is determined by you-see-eye, the supervisor, and the chief. You know the chief himself is involved, very interested in your case.”
I. continues to look at him a moment, then rises.
“He should be. It’s of the utmost importance. I mean, I don’t think we can possibly have had much experience with this kind of thing.”
“They do think, though, that it would be best for you to keep quiet about it for now. You understand. As you say, we don’t know what we’re dealing with here, not quite, and so . . . And moreover any officer involved in a shooting is given time off right away. That’s you-see-eye policy. Even if he was only a witness.”
At the door, he holds out his puffy hand again.
“I’ll tell the supervisor he can put his complete confidence in you. Speaking personally, I think you’ve handled yourself very well, quite well. And do,” he says, turning as he goes, “remember to keep this cozy for a while, eh?”
J. nods and closes the door.
Two hours later, K., out of uniform, walks into the station. He enters the main room, stands on a chair, and calls the officers present to hear him.
All the way there, drumming in his mind, a voiceless voice incredulously demands of him what he thinks he’s doing, whether or not he really is crazy.
“Can I have your attention please?” he calls out in a strident voice, loud and clear but with a little tremble, a little haltingly.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told, but the man who was shot yesterday was not the perpetrator my partner and I were pursuing. The man they brought in was already there at the time we, and the suspect we were pursuing, arrived on the scene.”
He sees his partner appear in the doorway across the room from him, mouth ajar.
“The suspect is still at large.”
He tells them about the woman coming out of the sky with the sun for a face, and the disappearance of the man in her luminous arms. Tears well at the corners of his eyes. The words gush from his lips. No one is snickering. He speaks like a man who is about to be executed.
His partner is bustling forward, bringing the supervisor and a pair of other men.
“Also,” he says, his voice cracking, accelerating, “there were two officers present who were in plainclothes. I’ve never seen these officers before, and they left the scene almost immediately after they shot their man—”
His partner and crew break into a jog, swinging their arms.
“Th-they were the ones who shot him, i-if he was shot then, I’m just about certain of that—and they had submachine guns. They were not detectives. I believe they may be watching me—”
“For Pete's sake!” his partner says, standing in front of him and drowning him out.
The two other police reach up and L. steps obediently down between them.
“I think they may belong to some other organization—”
They grab him.
“Remember what I said!” he cries.
They rush him outside and leave him on the curb. His partner, who has plainly been given charge of him, paces to and fro, fuming and disappointed.
“I thought they told you to shut up about that. You know they said they’d handle it. Listen,” he puts up his hands when M. tries to talk. “Just get back to your house and stay there, all right?”
He glances around.
“Look, the plain clothes guys? Those were just regular cops.”
“. . . What are you talking about? They had submachine guns.”
“Yeah, look, those weren’t submachine guns. They were pistols modified to shoot rubber bullets—look, you’ve done your part. You stood up in there and said what had to be said. Now you have to stand down and let us do our part. The matter is under investigation. Now you could have blown things for us in there. You got to rest because the full—”
He gropes a moment.
“—uh, force, of this kind of situation, always comes down on you later than you’d expect. After you get over the initial shock.”
His partner holds his eye for a long moment, then starts to walk away, then turns back and comes up to him again.
“Maybe you should get away for a while, huh?”
His voice is low.
“You and June haven’t been married that long, right? Let me ask the super, maybe he’ll give you a long leave. Clear your head, uh? You and June?”
It’s the first thing he’s said that he hadn’t rehearsed.
N. drives home again and parks in front of his house. He sits there for a while, without getting out of the car, lost in a wafting, disembodied, dreamlike feeling. As though he’d become transparent.
He looks at his house.
June’s inside, but suddenly the thought of her smile repels him and he turns away from the front gate. He walks down the street and angles toward a little park nearby. Walking its lanes with his hands in his pockets, from time to time he throws his head back to peek curiously up at the sun, which winks at him through the leaves of the trees. He’d thought of this as going off on his own to think, but he isn’t doing any thinking. At most, he’s just seeing images. It’s like he can’t think.
“Maybe I am still in shock.”
Here the lane passes between two dense, tall hedges, like a gap in a wall, overhung with trees whose branches knit with vines to form a heavy canopy. Dead center in this dark passage, he suddenly hears a shoe scrape on the path behind him.
His hands turn clammy. His tongue swells. Two figures step out to meet him from behind the hedge. He stops, turns, and sees the other two behind him as they firmly grip his arms, all of them in dark, plain clothes.
He shakes, they are crowded around him like the four corners of a box. A paralyzing fear like nothing he’s ever known sluices through him. Their eyes are like glass. They are so silent they don’t even seem to breathe. O. struggles against a suffocating weakness, trying to make any kind of sound, and a bag of coarse fabric drops over his head and cinches around his neck. Handcuffs roughly bind his hands.
Now he struggles. Now he cries out. They are lifting him off the ground. He is smashed over the head, and goes limp, though he murmurs through his sack.
*
A barren room with two high windows, or vents, near the ceiling. Footsteps rasping on the floor, brush trash aside.
The air on his bare, wet legs is cold. He’s in his undershirt and shorts. There’s a gag in his mouth and his wrists are tightly bound to the arms of the dentist’s chair.
Four heads appear above him. He can feel the warmth of their bodies through their uniforms as they close together, with him in the middle.
Street sounds come in with the daylight through the vents. The sound of a bus. He can smell a little diesel. The bus is revving. His fingers are like ice. The bus groans and its voice rises to a howl as it pulls forward. There’s a sustained, swelling roar that gets louder and louder, and does not dwindle, as if the bus were standing still. As if it were only a recording of a bus.
He looks from one face to another, as if there were still some way to escape through them. The faces, all together, suddenly, tense. They bend over his body with tools in their hands.
(.)
In the window, there’s a reflection of a black young woman in a shawl. She stands in front of an iron fence that squares off a little patch of shattered paving stones, and to her right there’s a message case on a metal pole. She’s been reading the notices pinned to the board inside the case, and rain drummed on its metal roof, ornamented in cut steel siltische that reminds her of the top of a cuckoo clock. Her name is Trudy Bailey.
Her eyes slide from the announcement lists. She can see her counterpart in a transparent, washed-out image that sways in the glass.
Trudy is hunting all over for registration instructions. Although she’s only done it once before, she approaches registration with the tested sturdiness and know-how of a proven veteran. None of the information you find will mean anything, but you still have to play along until you find the right person to talk to. That’s how it’s done. Registration is semi-accidental. She’s lost some time today following posted instructions and, having returned to subject these same instructions to a more exacting scrutiny, she notices, just now, last year’s date down at the bottom of the sheet.
There is no campus and no map. The college called Chthethostoa originally occupied a pair of buildings that faced each other across Agua Seca. Over time it was forced to move to other buildings in the area, mixing classrooms and offices with private homes and shops. The school owned (under assumed names) two houses that were nowhere near each other: you had to rent a bicycle or take a once-a-day bus to reach them, then walk back. There was no boundary dividing the school from the rest of the town of Cimelia Cisterna. Each class or office had streets and businesses between them, so that you couldn’t feel but a very fleeting and weak sense of shelter in school when there was the usual trouble just a wall away. But there was a mood boundary all the same that couldn’t be missed. Trudy could always tell when she was in the presence of the school. Something heavy would lift slightly, and something heavy would sink slightly.
Initially meant to be an academy for exceptional children, endowments that invariably managed to be both generous and insufficient at the same time made possible its eccentric growth until it warrened a whole neighborhood. Walk down Corcoran past Agua Seca, go by a lunch counter, a laundry, a ration office, a bookstore with classrooms above it and in the back, three police kiosks, a tiny pharmacy. Out of uniform rows of concrete houses, a few with signboards or message cases on every side street.
Trudy walks, holding her shawl around her. She’s a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in art history, specialty textiles. She shields her incongruously heavy bust from view with her shawl, folded arms, and unflattering sweaters. Her face, never adorned with makeup, has a smoldering, stoic look, and she keeps her hair drawn severely back into a bun. Trudy’s eyes are keen, the whites very white and the irises a deep brown. Those eyes can level themselves so steadily on a face that her gaze seems to press the other person back, away from her.
She recognizes Vicq d’Azyr and turns downward following its slope, a furrow five feet wide. It bends out into the little square in front of the red brick swimming school, faced by several buildings habituated by the academy. Students and professors like to gather there and exchange information informally. Chthethostoa’s students couldn’t afford to miss a single class, because most classes were held at different times and places from session to session and the location date and hour would only be announced at the preceding meeting. Many professors and students made it a point to be found here at certain times, just in case any absentees needed to know where or when to go and how to prepare. Word of mouth was safer. Originally just a wide section of street cut off from traffic more or less by chance, some students years ago began prying the asphalt up in the center of this place, and now some bushes, and small trees even, have emerged from the exposed earth. Trees line the shallow sidewalks, making the area a partially paved park.
As usual, there are students strolling the circle around the “planter,” many of them with teachers. Some of the faculty like to teach peripatetically, as if they were merely making conversation. Celada is there—Trudy sees him first of anyone, at once—walking and speaking animatedly, in his big weightless way, to Dr. Crapelin. There’s Miss Houseman crossing the square, and smooth William behind her, canopying her head with his umbrella. Professor Czochkralski has stopped and is heatedly jawing at three students in front of the dentist’s office. The first one to greet Trudy is Dr. Cottataris, who smiles in passing and dangles a hand she can’t raise because she has an armload of books, disappearing into the offices closest to the swimming school. The looks and gestures are furtive without any acuity of fear, and mixed with the uncertain gaiety of getting away with it for now.
Trudy glances again at Celada, uncertain whether she wants to greet him, an ambiguous heat playing over her entrails, a little embarrassment. So as not to be seen looking in his direction should his head swivel her way, she steers herself into his wake and is hailed by an old chum named Brandy who tells her where to retrieve the right forms. Last year, she had the money for school but couldn’t attend full-time because she couldn’t get time vouchers, even with a recommendation from her boss. She kept working at the bank and took classes part-time. This year, no recommendation, but she applied for new vouchers anyway and got them. She’ll quit the bank and take up school full-time.
The school is officially recognized, but only for the purposes of providing some supplementary secondary education and vocational training chiefly for accreditation purposes; the rest of the school’s business, which is the vastly greater half, is illegal education. The degree Trudy is studying for does not officially exist, but will have more actual weight with other scholars than a similar degree from one of the sanctioned colleges, which are staffed with functionaries and relatives of officials, all more loyal than learned.
Registration supposedly happens upstairs in one of the rooms facing the square, on rickety tables in front of filing cabinets. The place smells like the inside of an old tube radio. She’s putting her index cards in her bag by the window, peeking out through the grime to see if he’s still there. The sun has broken out; clear, red-orange light of intense color but not intense brightness rakes the square diagonally. Opposite, the baleful swimming school throbs with red. It has insect composite-eye windows of glass blocks and a throat clogged with trash and dead leaves. The space in front of the doors is enclosed by a warped metal comb. She’s always liked the ominous expression of the swimming school, its sinister name. Celada has been inside; he’s described to her the phosphorescent blue craters, the upright ranks of tin caskets, tiled caverns with metal stalactites and mushrooms of spotted steel, and said every sound you made went on forever in there.
A cloud throws its shade over the square very quickly and the swimming school’s shadows change indigo, its red turns violet, and leaves go tumbling past it.
As she heads back toward the bus station she stops to look at the rooftops against the sky. Not having to hurry just at this moment, she wants to luxuriate a bit in her own time. This is a good vantage point, near the corner. The sky is metallic and the shadows of the buildings are purple. There’s one of the protruding angles of the library, formerly a fine home and architectural something special, or that’s not the library that’s the Milk House, which stands on its grounds.
Trudy looks at the skyline expectantly and listens down into herself. A sexual feeling appears, adjacent to her kidneys, her microsexual way.
(The ring she wears belonged to her father, which is the only reason she wears it; it is made of plain silver, with three steel nail heads melted into the inside, so that they are always in contact with the skin of her finger. These are the heads of nails, taken from the coffin of her grandfather. Her uncle drove the nails in himself on the day of the funeral, then drew them back out again in order to fashion this ring, which is supposed to prevent seizures.)
A man steps around her without a word or a glance.
(So what do you think? Are these just ‘black memories’? Is that a name a memory can have?
When she was six or seven, she lived with her parents at the building on English Street; her father was having trouble with the bank and needed to go downtown. That day, her mother had to go to work, and so her father was forced to bring her along with him because she was not to be left alone in the house.
The office at the bank was expanding, with many cubicles, and walls of glass that let in light but made it nasty. Her father was tense and on the verge of anger, which was unusual for a sleepy sort of man like him. While she loitered off to the side, her father sat across a desk from a young, slicked-back white man, and she heard her father’s voice growing steadily more insistent. The clerk called another man over; his legs scissored in crisp slacks against the white light of the windows, and his hair had been sculpted a little in front to form a bit of a visor.
The three of them kept on arguing, all standing in front of the cubicle. Her father was making gestures that looked like dividing, measuring, weighing, sometimes tossing something aside. If he had been invisible, an observer might have thought the two clerks were gazing at a natural wonder off in the distance, along a line of sight that only coincidentally passed through her father’s face.
