The Wretch of the Sun, page 23
Outside she suddenly catches sight of a young woman wearing a green blouse and green scarf over her blond hair, waving a second green scarf gaily at the train from the embankment, well back enough so she won’t just flash by. The train is already slowing and swerving as it begins to bump from line to line through the tangled rust of the switching yard. The green girl means there are police in the terminal. Trudy gets up quietly and excuses herself, shoving by the knees of her neighbor who eyes her speculatively as she goes by. She kneads her way along the aisle. She knows how to look demure while exerting considerable shoving force with her shoulders.
Now she’s in the enclosed coupling between two cars. A lean man with a high circular forehead is there too, holding a briefcase like a liquorice animal flattened by a—Trudy turns from the man, grabs the door handle fiercely and snaps it to one side. Outside the green embankment is still going by black with green, and saffron earth, the wheels are complaining icily as the train shunts from track to track.
Trudy crouches in the open doorway and jumps from the train, landing amazed on her feet. The forward momentum makes her squat down and throw her arms forward, to keep from stumbling. She checks for the packet—a flash of the man in white leaning from the car, brandishing it, grinning—the packet is still there in her bag. Trudy crosses the tracks, a few other trains around but not many, and gets to the embankment. Skirted in tall green weeds, she begins walking directly away from the terminal, which is still a bit farther off and around a bend.
Over there is where the enormous trains go by, like monster serpents with ancient minds, and not far from a highway that’s empty in daytime, but which at night is haunted by unmarked white trucks packed full of people. At intervals all along the edge there are short stacks of ties. Two men, wearing helmets and work clothes stiff with grease, are walking the tracks. One is tall lean and black, and the other is only a little less tall, black and large. The latter, turned away, says,
“What happened to my logs?”
The other one turns toward him, while the speaker scans the ground. The reference is to a particular heap of ties marked in chalk for this section of track.
“Well it was right round these . . .”
The taller one looks about squinting, arms hanging loose.
“I don’t know—shit keeps moving around here . . .”
He begins tapping the sleepers between the rails with a long metal implement. The wood is gradually splintering into thick straws. They’re deteriorating, because the creosote can only stave off decay for a limited time. The piled ties along the embankment are their replacements, although they’ve been sitting for months already and the brown of the creosote has given way to a roasted darker color. The sleepers are like piano keys. The overcast gets denser and denser, shedding brown light. The train has to be pulling in by now, who knows if white shirt hasn’t blabbed up a storm about her jumping off—then again people jump on and off all the time. She just happened to be the only one doing it then. So let’s say he doesn’t mention it, saves it for his clown wife: the police will be watching the crowds, hanging back. Are they watching her now? Will they follow, but not arrest? She glances again at the two men on the rails. Somehow she doesn’t mistrust them. The simple, unembarrassed bewilderment and tiredness of their faces is too human.
The air is pretty close and still. She treads along a green and brown curtain. There’s nothing wrong with nature, she thinks. She wants to stay out here where it’s clean, and only live inside the rain and wind or whatever freshens the air, the grass; she doesn’t want to go back into all that human . . . She wouldn’t mind if it was just ordinarily bad. Rest is what she needs; her body feels all right, but her mind is worn out. She imagines him withering away, patiently, while she’s right there within call. At night dragging himself up and down the stairs. Just keep your face straight and they’ll think if anyone sees you that it’s started raining already. We loved each other. We really did. Trudy glances around in a blast of unaccountable alarm and catches sight, over the tops of the trees to her right, of the roofs of Sanglade. She glares at it with hate. Sure go on, keep cranking! What it doesn’t understand is that she wants to break. She does not want to break. The two men are calling back and forth. Maybe one of them found his heap of ties. Up ahead, there’s a brick building the size of a small house, with tall weeds by the open doorway and daylight, such as it is, visible straight through on the far side, like looking edgewise through a transparent bruise. Suddenly in the gap she sees someone big, just like Celada, step over some debris on the floor and cross past the doorway, down sweep of a pale white hand, the silent image of a face with two wings of light hair. Desire to see him again, even if it is only a hallucination. Thin vines of ivy cleave stubbornly to the brick, a few oily flakes of black there. The wall across from the door is partially collapsed, a wide gap open to the floor. In between gap and door is a jumble of wood and metal in beams and irregular machine part shapes. Inside, the place smells like tar paper and treated wood, rust. Sacks of pitchy stuff, and a floor strewn with iron junk, rags, a sink shaggy with mildew. His back is to the door, hands in front of him. Trudy goes up to him. He turns to her, silhouetted against the light from the door so close he’s looking down at nearly the top of her head.
Celada or not, only for a moment.
J.’s face, intense in the dark.
“Did you get it?”
Trudy doesn’t let anything show. Her face stays the same but grows a little more stern.
“Of course,” she says after a moment. She glances down at his clasped hands and a bloody rag.
“You’re hurt!”
He says nothing as she takes the rag away and examines a rip in the skin along the edge of the left hand. She takes a handkerchief from her bag and pulls him toward the light of the doorway.
“Not too close,” he says. “The light.”
After a moment, “I just did it, coming in through there.” He nods at the hole in the wall.
“Get a tetanus shot at the school.”
He guides her from the building to a dirt path that angles away from the tracks, nearly overgrown with soft grass like an untended canal. They remain within sight of the great open zone of the train tracks. K. leads.
A few dozen yards along, they pass close by a mammoth black boulder lying in two halves with a big smooth rock wedged in the gap. It looks a little like a heart with its point pointing at her, and also a little like the head of a contemplative dolphin. Black woods sigh there around them, the path goes between two masses of trees. It joins a dirt track emerging from the deeper wood, but they pass this Trudy looking back.
“Where are we going?” she asks in a hushed voice.
L. points down the path.
“Where?” she presses.
He glances back at her.
“And don’t just say ‘up ahead’—tell me.”
“We’re nearly there. There’s a road, and a car waiting.”
After ten more steps, Trudy stops.
“You go look,” she says.
He turns and sees she is not going to move and transparent drapes of undersea luminosity flit around her. Pursing his mouth he nods and goes ahead bending low. When he’s out of sight, Trudy hops over the tufts of grass and hides behind a tree. He comes back, moving quickly his face tense, nods her to follow him back up the path in the direction they came. Silently and swiftly they return to the fork they’d passed before and take it, slipping into the woods. Once covered there, he begins trotting, she speeds up. Their feet thud hollowly on the thick earth of the trail. The ground cover is wet cork, pungent like pipe tobacco, water drips on her from the canopy. Suddenly he breaks from the trail and begins climbing a dry stream bed. Trudy follows him, her feet slipping. At the top of the stream, he leads her through drier foliage to a second path or perhaps the same one further along, and they arc out in the direction they had originally taken when they left the brick building.
“What happened?” she asks his back.
“He was gone,” he says over his shoulder, his voice absorbed at once by space. “Somebody else was waiting in the car.”
“They didn’t see you?”
“No. But they’ll start searching when we don’t turn up.”
She’s not at the end of her tether. There is no tether on her. She can’t even begin to say who she is. When they don’t turn up, that is, when it not-happens. Trudy turns aside, right into the ornamental garden. The narrow flat white walkway angles around sterilely tranquil planters, the house towers over her. She sweeps the far border of the empty clearing for any sign of human tampering, happily in vain, as she says, “This is where we should finish the isolaton experiment.”
“You’re almost right,” says Celada’s voice behind her.
(.)
Where is the jovial word order or the shaft of intelligence the eye darts as she knows she’s being kindly tricked as part of the training because, where that is gone, something critical is lost. Coming in the door, from the corner of the room behind her, she is something that makes her turn her head and a moment later nearly break into tears, un-
. . . Intimidater overhead, thumping along low. They hold themselves in the air with brute force and waste and it roars by, on its way to go spy somewhere else. The barked command and the stupid and suspicious shielded stare, to train her in stupidity,
And sirens now and then to goose foot traffic along under livestock the . . . the contemptuous . . . the contemptuous gaze of the detest the despised—the enmity, the enemy she means the mean enemy— She’s going to run out her limit and give it her all like Celada
Not like him. A disgusting waste.
—the secrets of the universe, is that it?
something like that, why not?
. . . well, tell me
—no. you tell me.
it’s not the sort of thing you tell
—are you afraid you’ll sound ridiculous?
i’m sure it does sound ridiculous—i mean why bother? You’ll say i’m nuts and that will be the end of it, and a good thing too
—humor me—i’ll believe You (that was a slip)
why? someone tells You an incredible story and is believed just like that?
—well, i’ll believe You believe it
then what does it matter what it is? let’s just say i believe in martians and fairies and pixie dust and leave it at that
—all right but how did You come to believe those things? You must have believed someone—or did You see something
i may have—i may have seen—that and a few other things make me think . . .
—what other things?—
‘circumstantial evidence’ . . . because when You may see something like that, no matter how real it may be, or how crazy You are, You can only tell Yourself it was a—hallucination—that and only that is what You want to believe.
The committee of secret students have been reviewing the information Trudy brought back in the packet. Teachers of forbidden subjects have to be brought to the school under false pretenses, or smuggled in and out. There is a reference to a meeting yet to take place between agents and “simia” at such and such a time and place “re: Chethosto.”
“Simia” means informer.
The meeting is to take place at the train station, where Trudy only just was. Apparently the informer is to be given something too important or incriminating or valuable to trust to the inefficiency and larcenousness of the post office.
There is good reason to believe M. would not be recognized by them, so he and a committee member will observe the meeting.
The station: a few days beforehand, N. started putting in a regular appearance by the tobacco stand, shining shoes. He keeps a calm, glazed-looking eye on the steel post marked D4. The other, a secret student, is reading a paper, evidently waiting for a train, taking pictures with an illegal camera hidden in a satchel. The informer enters the train station and walks to the post marked D4. The student keeps his paper up and his satchel-camera trained on the post. The shutter release is operated by a squeeze bulb in the hollow of the handle, and he has practiced using it. O. takes his time with the shoe in front of him, not wanting to let the man go, so as not to be distracted talking to a new customer when the meeting happens. The meeting doesn’t happen. The informer paces with arms crossed, eyes on the ground. P. finishes shining the man’s shoes and smiles strainedly taking the meager tip. The man walks over to the informer smiling. Q. immediately seizes on his memory of the man’s face, trying not to let it dissolve. If he himself has been recognized, there will be no sign. The informer, with the advanced warning of that smile, doesn’t start as the man approaches. They converse, the man smiling, the other responding, responding. They leave together. R. flashes the student a look that means stay there, and, not having a client at the moment, he stretches and ambles over to the bathroom, feigning fatigue, staring sidelong out through the glass doors. The shopping bag the man had been carrying has switched owners, and the man himself is already out of sight. The informer passes across the glass doors and up the street, face pinched.
Read it back phonetically—he went around to the side of the house, to the same window. He didn’t see his reflection. Inside the room, two men he’s sure he’d never seen before occupied the two beds with their feet against the wall and the crowns of their heads pointing in to the center, blankets drawn up to their chins. Then he was uncertain it was really two people and not one person in an alternation too rapid to follow. The scene suggested ritual surgery. The room grew dim, and high above them a knot of darkness gathered into a rosette, the absence of light pinched together in folds—he realized or remembered that at that moment he had no body at all, at most a question mark of luminous vapor top of his “head,” a tail descending behind. Calmly he accepted it as an unintended consequence of his proximity to them. Suddenly he understood the unfolding of the rosette of dark was the approach of death, acting independently of death itself, undefeated, that unfolded at the rhythm of the room. The operation had to involve an encounter.
Her brain is burning; the inner triumph is universal but the outer one can’t be, don’t get them confused she thinks. There are not four rooms exactly, but a space with a partition dividing it like an ice cube tray into four chambers without tops, and the thick mist isn’t coming from any one of them. It comes from the intersection of the partition—it’s crucially important to remember that, meaning it comes from him, whoever he is. There’s one person sitting hunched forward in each partition. What is that in fog? The human images in the room began to seem slack. Only one figure, in the left-hand bed, was there now, and he was misshaped. There came out of him a disk face of glistening snow-white cartilage, all ribbed smooth and powdery material like an elastic ceramic. It crowns a musculature of linked articulations without a skeleton, composed of a variety of elaborate configurations like universal joints, just now all of which are at rest, having no plain overall outline. Nor can his face be seen when she looks at his body: he never saw the two of them at once after all; either the face was an intermittent projection ineffectively masking the body, or the body was producing the face, which wore a placid expression at all times. Looking at the man’s face, she experienced something not unlike the gradual recognition of a familiar person after a protracted separation, as the alterations of time and exigency are harmonized in a solution with the memory.
(.)
Dr. Cottataris habitually works late in her office, which at the moment is a studio on the top floor of a half-empty building. The main floor is a makeshift student-run coffee place; many entrances and exits, hard to watch all at once.
That night, Dr. Cottataris is ambushed in her office—out of dead silence suddenly there are dark figures everywhere, the lights are off and big flashlights are blazing in her face. Without a word they grab and bind her, pulling a coarse black bag over her head. In a flash she is thrust down onto her knees, a searing hot light inches from her face turned by the bag into a blinding star nursery.
“What do you want?” she sobs with exasperation. “What did I do wrong?”
“We like to feel we can drop in freely,” a voice buzzes. It’s a genderless, musical chord produced by speaking through a portable electronic distorter. A sudden rustle of fabric and she feels an elbow resting on her back.
“What are you doing?!”
“Shhhh,” the warbling voice sizzles. “We enjoyed your stories so well we thought we’d drop by and hear them again.”
All just like the movies.
“I’ve told you everything,” she says, afraid.
“We know,” says the voice. “We’ve come to hear it again.”
“I want to see my sister!”
“We know,” says the voice slowly. “You know how to make that happen.”
Dr. Cottataris is shaking. She begins to talk about Celada, Dr. Crapelin, Dr. Camatsura, Dr. Czechoslovakia, Trudy, the student committees in general. She says she thinks Miss Houseman and William Carlsroja are working with the student committees.
“Did you think that perhaps members of the student committees were watching you at the train station?”
