Collected Short Fiction, page 853
“As I suspected. She’s seriously ill, and you think the shock of hearing about it will harm me.”
Paul shook his head. “It isn’t like that at all.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Visions of cancer, heart surgery, brain tumors. “Has she had some kind of transplant? Is she in a hospital?”
“It isn’t a physical problem. Crystal’s simply suffering from fatigue. She’s gone to Luna Dome for a rest.”
“I spoke to her last month,” Staunt said. “She looked all right then. I want the truth, Paul.”
“The truth.”
“The truth, yes.”
Paul’s eyes closed wearily for a moment, and in that moment Staunt saw his son for what he was, an old man, though not so old a man as he. After a pause Paul said in a flat, toneless voice, “The trouble is that Crystal hasn’t accepted your Going very well. I called her about it, right after you told me, and she became hysterical. She thinks you’re being hoodwinked, that your Guide is part of a conspiracy to do away with you, that your decision is at least ten or fifteen years premature. And she can’t speak calmly about it, so we felt it was best to get her away where she wasn’t likely to speak to you, to keep her from disturbing you. There. That’s the story. I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“Silly of you to hide it.”
“We didn’t want to spoil your Going with a lot of carrying on.”
“My Going won’t spoil that easily. I’d like to talk to her, Paul. She may benefit from whatever help I can give her. If I can make her see Going for what it really is—if I can convince her that her outlook is unhealthy—Paul, set up a call to Luna Dome for me, will you? The Fulfillment people will pay. Crystal needs me. I have to make her understand.”
“If you insist,” Paul said.
Somehow, though, technical problems prevented the placing of the call that day, and the next, and the one after that. And then Paul left the House of Leavetaking. When Staunt phoned him at home to find out where on the moon Crystal actually was, he became evasive and said that she had recently transferred from one sanatorium to another. It would be a few more days, Paul said, before the call could be placed. Seeing his son’s agitation, Staunt ceased pressing the issue. They did not want him to talk to Crystal. Crystal’s hysterics would ruin his Going, they felt. They would not give him the chance to soothe her. So be it. He could not fight them. This must be a difficult time for the whole family; if they wished to think that Crystal would upset him so terribly, he would let the matter drop, for a while. Perhaps he could speak to her later. There would be time before his Going. Perhaps. Perhaps.
Eight
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Martin Bollinger came to him, usually in midafternoon, an hour or so after lunch. Generally Staunt received his Guide in his suite, although sometimes, on the cooler days, they strolled together through the garden. Their meetings invariably fell into three well-defined segments. First, Bollinger would display lively interest in Staunt’s current activities. What books are you reading? Have you been listening to music? Are there any interesting Departing Ones for you to talk with? Is the staff taking good care of you? Do your relatives visit you often enough? Has the urge to compose anything come over you? Is there anyone you’d especially like to see? Are you thinking of traveling at all? And so on and so on, the same questions surfacing frequently.
When the questions were over, Bollinger would glide into the second phase, a conversation with a quiet autumnal tone, a recollection of vanished days. Sometimes he spoke as though Staunt had already Gone; he talked of Staunt’s compositions in the same way he might refer to those of some early master. The symphonies, Bollinger would say: what a testament, what a mighty cumulative structure, nothing like them since Mahler, surely. The quartets, obviously akin to Beethoven’s, yet thoroughly contemporary, true expressions of their composer and his times. And Staunt would nod, solemnly accepting Bollinger’s verdicts in curious, dreamy objectivity. They would talk of mutual friends in the same way, viewing them as closed books, as cubes rather than as living, evolving persons. Staunt saw that Bollinger was helping to place distance between him and the life he had lived. Already, he felt remote from that life. After several weeks in the House of Leavetaking, he was coming to look upon himself more as someone who had very carefully studied Henry Staunt’s biography than as the actual living Staunt, the inhabitant of Staunt’s body.
The third phase of each meeting saw Bollinger turn quite frankly to matters directly related to Staunt’s Going. Constantly he pressed Staunt to examine his motives, and he avoided the false gentleness with which everyone else seemed to treat him. The Guide was pursuing truth. Do you truly wish to Go, Henry? If so, have you started to give thought to the date of your Leavetaking? Will you stay in the world another five weeks? Three months? Six? No, no one’s rushing you. Stay a year, if you want. I merely wonder if you’ve looked realistically, yet, at what it means to Go. Whether you comprehend your purpose in asking for it. Get behind the euphemism, Henry. Going is dying. The termination of all. For you, the end of the universe. Is this what you want, Henry? Is it? Is it? Is it? I’m not trying to make it harder for you. I’m trying to make it more pure. A truly spiritual Going, the rarest kind. But only if you’re ready. Are you aware that you can withdraw from the whole undertaking at any point? It isn’t cowardly to turn away from Going. See Hallam: Going isn’t suicide, it’s a sweet renunciation, properly reserved only for those who fully understand their motives. Anyone can kill himself in a fit of gloom. A proper going requires spiritual strength. Some people enroll in a House of Leavetaking two, even three times before they can take that last step. Yes, they go through the entire ritual of Farewell, almost to the end—and then they say they want to go home, and we send them home. We never push. We are not interested in sending victims out of the world. Only volunteers whose eyes are open. Have you been reading Hallam, Henry? Our philosopher of death. Look into yourself before you leap. Ask yourself, Is this what I want?
“What I want is to Go,” Staunt would reply. But he could not tell Bollinger how long it would actually be before he would find himself ready to take his leave.
There seemed to be some pattern in this thrice-weekly pas de deux of conversation with his Guide. Bollinger appeared to be maneuvering him patiently and circuitously toward some sort of apocalyptic burst of joyful insight, a radiant moment of comprehension in which he would be able to say, feeling worthy of Hallam as he did, “Now I shall Go.” But the maneuvers did not seem successful. Often, Staunt came away from Bollinger confused and depressed, less certain than ever of his desire to Go.
By the fourth week, most of his time was being given over to reading. Music had largely palled for him. His family, having made the obligatory first round of visits, had stopped coming; they would not return to the House of Leavetaking until word reached them that he was in the final phase of his Going and ready for his Farewell ceremony. He had said all he cared to say to his friends. The recreation center bored him and the company of the other Departing Ones chilled him. Therefore he read. At the outset, he went about it dutifully, mechanically, taking it up solely as a chore for the improvement of his mind in its final hours. Like an old pharaoh trying to repair his looks before he must be delivered into the hands of the mummifiers, Staunt meant to polish his soul with philosophy while he still had the chance. It was in that spirit that he plodded through Hobbes, whose political ideas had set him ablaze when he was nineteen, and who merely seemed crabbed and sour now. It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself:, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? Growing up in a tense, bleak world of peace that was really war, Staunt had found it easy to accept Hobbes’ dark teachings. Now he was not so sure that the natural condition of mankind was a state of conflict, every man at war with every other man. Something had changed in the world, it seemed. Or in Staunt. He put Hobbes away in displeasure.
He was almost afraid to turn to Montaigne, fearing that that other great guide of his youth might also have soured over the long decades. But no. Instantly the old charm claimed him. I cannot accept the way in which we fix the span of our lives. I have observed that the sages hold it to be much shorter than is commonly supposed. “What!” said the younger Cato to those who would prevent him from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached with yielding up my life too soon?” And yet he was but forty-eight years of age. He thought that age very ripe and well advanced, considering how few men reach it. Yes. Yes. And: Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The profit of life is not in its length but in the use we put it to: many a man has lived long, who has lived little; see to it as long as you are here. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, to make the best of life. Did you think never to arrive at a place you were incessantly making for? Yet there is no road but has an end. And if society is any comfort to you, is not the world going the selfsame way as you? Yes. Perfect. Staunt read deep into the night, and sent for a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem from the House of Leavetaking’s well-stocked cellars, and solemnly toasted old Montaigne in his own sleek wine, and read on until morning. There is no road but has an end.
When he was done with Montaigne, he turned to Ben Jonson, first the familiar works, Volpone and The Silent Woman and The Case is Altered, then the black, explosive plays of later years, Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn and The Devil Is an Ass. Staunt had always felt a strong affinity for the Elizabethans, and particularly for Jonson, that crackling, hissing, scintillating man, whose stormy, sprawling plays blazed with a nightmarish intensity that Shakespeare, the greater poet, seemed to lack. As he had always vowed he would, Staunt submerged himself in Jonson, until the sound and rhythm of Jonson’s verse echoed and reechoed like thunder in his overloaded brain, and the texture of Jonson’s mind seemed inlaid on his own. The Magnetic Lady, Cynthia’s Revels, Catiline his Conspiracy—no play was too obscure, too hermetic, for Staunt in his gluttony. And one afternoon during this period he found himself doing an unexpected thing. From his data terminal he requested a print-out of the final pages of The New Inn’s first act, with an inch of blank space between each line. At the top of the sheet he wrote carefully, The New Inn, an Opera by Henry Staunt, from the play of Ben Jonson. Then, turning to Lovel’s long speech, “O thereon hangs a history, mine host,” Staunt began to pencil musical notations beneath the words, idly at first, then with sudden earnest fervor as the proper contours of the vocal line suggested themselves to him. Within minutes he had turned the entire speech into an aria and had. even scribbled some preliminary marginal notes to himself about orchestration. The style of the music was strange to him, a spare, lean, angular sort of melodiousness, thorny and complex, with a curiously archaic flavor. It was the sort of music Alban Berg might have written during an extended visit to the early seventeenth century. It did not sound much like Staunt’s own kind of thing. My late style, he thought. Probably the aria was impossible to sing. No matter: this was how the muse had called it forth. It was the first sustained composing Staunt had done in years. He stared at the completed aria in wonder, astonished that music could still flow from him like that, welling up without conscious command from the gushing spring within.
For an instant he was tempted to feed what he had written into a synthesizer and get back a rough orchestration. To hear the sound of it, with the baritone riding tensely over the swooping strings, might carry him on to set down the next page of the score, and the next, and the next. He resisted. The world already had enough operas that no one listened to. Shaking his head, smiling sadly, he dated the page, initialed it in his customary way, jotted down an opus number—by guesswork, for he was far from his ledgers—and, folding the sheet, put it away among his papers. Yet the music went on unfolding in his mind.
Nine
In his ninth week at the House of Fulfillment, finding himself stranded in stagnant waters, Staunt sought Dr. James and applied for the memory-jolt treatment. It seemed to be the only option left, short of Going, and he rarely contemplated Going these days. He was done with Jonson, and the impulse to request other books had not come to him; he peeked occasionally at his single page of The New Inn, but did not resume work on it; he was guarded and aloof in his conversations with Bollinger and with his occasional visitors; he realized that he was sliding imperceptibly into a deathlike passivity, without actually coming closer to his exit. He would not return to his former life, and he could not yet surrender and Go. Possibly the memory jolt would nudge him off dead center.
“It’ll take six hours to prepare you,” Dr. James said, his long nose twitching with enthusiasm for Staunt’s project. “The brain has to be cleared of all fatigue products, and the autonomic nervous system needs a tuning. When would you like to begin?”
“Now,” Staunt said.
They cleansed and tuned him, and took him back to his suite and put him to bed, and hooked him into his metabolic monitor. “If you get overexcited,” Dr. James explained, “the monitor will automatically adjust the intensity of your emotional flow downward.” Staunt was willing to take his chances with the intensity of his emotional flow, but the medic was insistent. The monitor stayed on. “It isn’t psychic pain we’re worried about,” Dr. James said. “There’s never any of that. But. sometimes—an excess of remembered love, do you know?—a burst of happiness—it could be too much, we’ve found.” Staunt nodded. He would not argue the point. The doctor produced a hypodermic and pressed its ultrasonic snout against Staunt’s arm. Briefly Staunt wondered whether this was all a trick, whether the drug would really send him to his Going rather than for a trip along his time-track, but he pushed the irrational notion aside, and the snout made its brief droning sound and the mysterious dark fluid leaped into his veins.
Ten
He hears the final crashing chords of The Trials of Job, and the curtain, a sheet of dense purple light, springs up from the floor of the stage. Applause. Curtain calls for the singers. The conductor on stage, now, bowing, smiling. The chorus master, even. Cascades of cheers. All about him swirl the glittering mobile chandeliers of the Haifa Opera House. Someone is shouting incomprehensible jubilant words in his ear: the language is Hebrew, Staunt realizes. He says, Yes, yes, thank you so very much. They want him to stand and acknowledge the applause. Edith sits beside him, flushed with excitement, her eyes sparkling. His mind supplies the date: September 9, 1999. “Let them see you,” Edith whispers through the tumult. A hand claps his shoulder. Wild eyes blazing into his own: Mannheim, the critic. “The opera of the century!” he cries. Staunt forces himself to rise. They are screaming his name. Staunt! Staunt! Staunt! The audience is his. Two thousand berserk Israelis, his to command. What shall he say to them? Sieg! Heil! Sieg! Heil! He chokes on his own appalling unvoiced joke. In the end he can do nothing but wave and grin and topple back into his seat. Edith rubs his arm lovingly. His glowing bride. His night of triumph. To write an opera at all these days is a mighty task; to enjoy a premiere like this is heavenly. Now the audience wants an encore. The conductor at his station. The curtain fades. Job alone on stage: his final scene, the proud bass voice crying, “Behold, I am vile,” and the voice of the Lord replying to him out of a thousand loudspeakers, filling all the world with sound: “Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency.” Staunt weeps at his own music. If I live a hundred years, I will never forget this night, he tells himself.
Eleven
“The copter went down so suddenly, Mr. Staunt. They had it on the stabilizer beam all through the storm, but you know it isn’t always possible—”
“And my wife? And my wife?”
“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”
Twelve
He sits at the keyboard fretting over the theory and harmony. His legs are not yet long enough to reach the piano’s pedals: a nuisance, but temporary. He closes his eyes and strikes the keyboard. This is the key of C major, the easy one. The tonic chord. The dominant. Why did they wait so long to tell him about these things? He builds chord after chord. I will now moderate into the key of D minor. Modulate. I do this and this and this. He is nine years old. All this long hot Sunday afternoon he has explored this wondrous other language of sounds. While his family sits frozen by the television set. “Henry? Henry, they’re going to be coming out of the module any minute!” He shrugs. What does the moonwalk matter to him? The moon is dead and far away. And this is the world of D minor. He has his own exploring to do today. “Henry, he’s out! He came down the ladder!” Fine. Tonic. Dominant. And the diminished seventh. The words are strange. But how easy it is to go deeper and deeper into the maze of sound.
Thirteen
“The faculty and students take great pleasure, Mr. Staunt, to present you on the occasion of your one-hundredth birthday with this memorial of a composer who shared your divine productivity if not your blessed longevity: the original manuscript of Mozart’s ‘Divertimento in B,’ Köchel number—”
Fourteen
“A boy, yes. We’re calling him Paul, after Edith’s father. And what an odd feeling it is to tell myself I have a son. You know, I’m forty-five years old. More than half my life gone, I suppose. And now a son.”
