Collected Short Fiction, page 967
There are no limits to my vision. Here are the labyrinths of tomorrow’s cities, rising and falling and rising again, New York in lunatic growth, tower piled on tower, the old foundations becoming the rubble on which the new foundations rest, layer upon layer down below like the jumbled strata of Schliemann’s Troy. Through twisted streets scuttle strangers in unfamiliar clothing, speaking a jargon beyond my understanding. Machines walk about on jointed legs. Mechanical birds, twittering like creaky gates, flutter overhead. All is in flux. Look, the ocean recedes, and slippery brown beasts lie stranded and gasping on the naked sea floor! Look, the sea returns, lapping at the ancient highways that span the city’s margin! Look, the sky is green! Look, the rain is black! Look, here is change, here is transformation, here are the whims of time! I see it all!
These are the eternal motions of the galaxies, dim and fathomless. These are the precessing equinoxes, these are the shifting sands. The sun is very warm. Words have become needle sharp. I catch quick glimpses of great entities sprouting and rising and decaying and dying. These are the boundaries of the empire of the toads. This wall marks the place where the republic of the longlegged insects begins. Man himself changes. His body is transformed many times, he becomes gross and then pure and then more gross than ever, he evolves strange organs that tremble like tuning forks from the nodes of his leathery skin, he has no eyes and is seamless from lips to scalp, he has many eyes, he is covered with eyes, he is no longer male and female but functions in the form of some intermediate sex, he is tiny, he is vast, he is liquid, he is metallic, he leaps across the starry spaces, he huddles in moist caverns, he floods the planet with legions of his own kind, he diminishes by choice to a few dozen, he shakes his fist at a red swollen sky, he sings frightening songs in a nasal drone, he gives love to monsters, he abolishes death, he basks like a mighty whale in the sea, he becomes a horde of buzzing insectlike toilers, he pitches his tent in blazing diamond-bright desert sands, he laughs with the sound of drums, he lies down with dragons, he writes poems of grass, he builds vessels of air, he becomes a god, he becomes a demon, he is everything, he is nothing.
The continents move ponderously about, like hippopotamuses doing a stately polka. The moon dips low in the sky, peering out of its own forehead like an aching white blister, and shatters with a wonderful glassy ping! that reverberates for years. The sun itself drifts from its moorings, for everything in the universe is in constant motion and the journeys are infinitely various. I see it slide into the gulf of night, and I wait for it to return, but it does not return, and a sleeve of ice glides over the black skin of the planet, and those who live at that time become things of the night, cold-loving, selfsustaining. And across the ice come hard-breathing beasts from whose nostrils fog issues, and from the ice come flowers of blue and yellow crystal, and in the sky shines a new light, I know not from where.
What do I see, what do I see?
These are the leaders of mankind, the new kings and emperors, holding their batons of office aloft and summoning fire from the mountaintops. These are the gods yet unimagined. These are the shamans and warlocks. These are the singers, these the poets, these the makers of images. These are the new rites. These are the fruits of war. Look: lovers, killers, dreamers, seers! Look: generals, priests, explorers, lawgivers! There are unknown continents to find. There are untasted apples to eat. Look! Madmen! Courtesans! Heroes! Victims! I see the schemes. I see the mistakes. I see the miraculous achievements, and they bring tears of pride to my eyes. Here is the daughter of your daughter’s daughter. Here is the son of your sons beyond reckoning. These are nations still unknown; these are nations newly reborn. What is this language, all clicks and hisses? What is this music, all stabs and snarls? Rome will fall again. Babylon will come a second time, and lie astride the world like a great gray octopus. How wondrous are the times to come! All that you can ever imagine will befall, and more, much more, and I see it all.
Are these the things I see?
Are all doors open to me? Are all walls made into windows?
Do I look upon the murdered prince and the newborn savior, on the fires of the destroyed empire burning on the horizon, on the tomb of the lord of lords, on the hard-eyed voyagers setting forth across the golden sea that spans the belly of the transformed world? Do I survey the million million tomorrows of the race, and drink it all down, and make the future’s flesh my own? The heavens falling? The stars colliding? What are these unfamiliar constellations that shape and reshape themselves as I watch? Who are these masked faces? What does this stone idol, tall as three mountains, represent? When will the cliffs that wall the sea be ground to red powder? When will the polar ice descend like inexorable night upon the fields of red flowers? Who owns these fragments? Oh, what do I see, what do I see?
All of time, all of space.
No. Of course it won’t be like that. All I’ll see is what I can send myself out of my own few scruffy tomorrows. Brief dull messages, like the vague transmissions of the tin-can telephones we built as boys: no epic splendors, no baroque apocalypses. Yet even those blurred and muffled sounds are more than I could have hoped to have, when I was asleep like you, when I was one of those blind and stumbling figures moving in clumsy sluggish lurches through the kingdom of shadows that is this world.
32.
Mardikian found me a lawyer. He was Jason Komurjian—another Armenian, of course, one of the partners in Mardikian’s own firm, the divorce specialist, a vast fullback of a man with oddly sad little eyes set close together within a massive swarthy slab of a face.
We conferred in his office on the 95th floor of the Martin Luther King Building, a dark incense-ridden office almost rivaling Bob Lombroso’s for pomp and circumstance, a place as rich and heavy in ornamentation as the imperial chapel of a Byzantine cathedral. “Divorce,” Komurjian said dreamily, “you wish to obtain a divorce, yes, to terminate, yes, a final parting,” rotating the concept in the vast vaulted arenas of his consciousness as though it were some fine point of theology, as though we were talking about the consubstantiality of the Father and Son or the doctrine of the apostolic succession. “Yes, it should be possible to obtain that for you. You live separately now?”
“Not yet.”
He looked displeased. His heavy lips sagged, his beefy face took on a deeper hue. “This must be done,” he said. “Continued cohabitation endangers the plausibility of any suit for termination of matrimony. Even today, even today. Establish separate lodgings. Establish separate financial conduits. Demonstrate your purposes, my friend. Eh?” He reached for an ornate jeweled crucifix on his desk, a thing of rubies and emeralds, and played with it, running thick fingers over its sleek well-worn surface, and for a time he was lost in his own ruminations. I imagined the tones of an unseen organ; I saw a procession of bedecked and bearded priests strolling through the choirs of his mind. He looked up, spearing me with an unexpectedly intent stare. “Grounds?”
“No, not that kind of divorce.
We just want to break it up, to go our individual ways, a simple termination.”
“Of course you’ve discussed this with Mrs. Nichols and come to a preliminary understanding.”
I reddened. “Ah—not yet,” I said, uneasy.
Komurjian plainly dis approved. “You must introduce the subject at some point, you realize. Presumably her reaction will be tranquil. Then her lawyer and I will meet and the thing will be done.” He reached for a memo belt. “As for division of property—”
“She can have whatever she wants.”
“Whatever?” He sounded amazed.
“I don’t want a hassle with her over anything.”
Komurjian spread his hands before me on the desk. “What if she demands everything?” he asked. “All the assets in common? You yield without contest?”
“She won’t do that.”
“Is she not of allegiance to the Transit Creed?”
Startled, I said, “How do you know that?”
“Haig and I have discussed the case, you must realize.”
“I see.”
“And Transit people are unpredictable.”
I managed a choked laugh. “Yes. Very.”
“She might whimsically ask for all the assets,” Komurjian said.
“Or whimsically ask for none.”
“Or none, true. One never knows. Are you instructing me to accept whatever position she takes?”
“Let’s wait and see,” I said. “She’s basically a reasonable person, I think. It’s my feeling that she won’t make any unusual demand about division of property.”
“And settlement of income?” the lawyer asked. “She will want no continuing payments from you? You have a standard two-group contract, yes?”
“Yes. Termination ends all financial responsibility.”
Komurjian began to hum, very quietly, almost beneath my threshold of hearing. Almost. How routine all this must seem to him, this severing of sacramental unions! “Then there should be no problems, yes? But you must announce your intentions to your wife, Mr. Nichols, before we go further.”
Which I did. Sundara was now so busy with her manifold Transit activities—her process sessions, her volatility circles, her ego-decay exercises, her missionary duties, and all the rest—that close to a week passed before I was able to have a quiet word with her at home. By then I had rehearsed the whole thing in my head a thousand times, so that the lines were worn like tracks; if ever there was an instance of following the script, this would be it.
Almost apologetically, as though it were an intrusion on her privacy for me to request the privilege of a conversation with her, I said early one evening that I wanted to talk to her about something important; and then I told her, as I had so often heard myself telling her, that I was going to get a divorce. Saying it, I understood something of what it must be like for Carvajal to see, because I had lived this scene so often in imagination that it already felt like an event of the past to me.
Sundara regarded me thoughtfully, saying nothing, displaying neither surprise nor annoyance nor hostility nor enthusiasm nor dismay nor despair.
Her silence baffled me.
I said, eventually, “I’ve hired Jason Komurjian as my lawyer. One of Mardikian’s partners. He’ll sit down with your lawyer, when you’ve got one, and they’ll work everything out. I want this to be a civilized parting of the ways, Sundara.”
She smiled. Mona Lisa of Bombay.
“You don’t have anything to say?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“Is divorce such a trifle to you?”
“Divorce and marriage are aspects of the same illusion, my love.”
“This world seems more real to me than it does to you, I think. That’s one reason why it doesn’t appear to be a good idea for us to go on living together.”
She said, “Will there be a messy fight about dividing the things we own?”
“I told you I want this to be civilized.”
“Good. So do I.”
“Do all Transit people accept great upheavals in their lives so casually?” I asked.
“Is this a great upheaval?”
“It seems like one to me.”
“To me it seems only the ratifying of a decision made a long time ago.”
“It’s been a bad time,” I admitted. “But even at the worst of it, I always kept telling myself it’s just a phase, it’s a passing thing, every marriage goes through it, we’ll get back together eventually.” As I spoke, I found myself convincing myself that all that was still true, that Sundara and I could still work out a continuing relationship like the basically reasonable human beings we were. And yet here I was asking her to hire a lawyer. I remembered Carvajal telling me, You’ve lost her, with inexorable finality in his voice. But he had been speaking of the future, not the past.
She said, “Now you think it’s hopeless, is that it? What made you change your mind?”
“Well?”
“Did you change your mind?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t think you really want a divorce, Lew.”
“I do,” I insisted hoarsely.
“So you say.”
“I’m not asking you to read my mind, Sundara. Just to go along with the legal rigmarole we have to follow in order to be free to live our separate lives.”
“You don’t want a divorce, but yet you do. How strange, Lew. An attitude like that is a perfect Transit situation, you know, what we call a keying-point, a situation where you hold opposing positions simultaneously and try to reconcile them. There are three possible outcomes of that. Are you interested in hearing this? One possibility is schizophrenia. One is self-deception, as when you pretend to embrace both alternatives but really don’t. And the third is the condition of illumination known in Transit as—”
“Please, Sundara.”
“I thought you were interested.”
“I guess I’m not.”
She studied me for a long moment. Then she smiled. “This divorce business is connected somehow with your gift of precognition, isn’t it? You don’t really want a divorce now, even though we aren’t getting along very well, but you nevertheless think you ought to start arranging a divorce, because you’ve had a hunch that sometime in the near future you’re going to have one, and—isn’t that right, Lew? Come on: tell me the truth. I won’t be angry.”
“You aren’t far off the mark,” I said.
“I thought not. Well, what shall we do?”
“Work out terms of a separation,” I replied grimly. “Hire a lawyer, Sundara.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You mean you’ll contest it?”
“I never said that. I simply don’t want to deal through a lawyer. Let’s handle it ourselves, Lew. Like civilized human beings.”
“I’ll have to check with Komurjian about that. That way may be civilized, but it may not be smart.”
“Do you think I’ll cheat you?”
“I don’t think anything any more.”
She walked up to me. Her eyes glowed; her body radiated a throbbing sensuality. I was helpless before her. She could have had anything from me. Sundara kissed the tip of my nose and said huskily, stagily, “If you want a divorce, darling, you can have your divorce. Whatever you want. I won’t stand in the way. I want you to be happy. I love you, you know.” She smiled wickedly. Oh, that Transit mischief! “Whatever you want,” she said.
33.
I rented an apartment for myself in Manhattan, a three-room furnished job in an old, once-luxurious high rise on East 63rd near Second Avenue, which is an old, once-luxurious neighborhood not yet seriously into disrepair. The building’s pedigree was evidenced by an assortment of security devices dating from the 1900’s or thereabouts through the early 1990’s, everything from police locks and hidden peepholes up to early-model filter-mazes and velocity-screens. The furniture was simple and timeless in style, venerable and utilitarian, couches and chairs and bed and tables and bookcases and stuff of that sort, so anonymous as to be invisible. I felt invisible too, after I was completely moved in and movers and the building superintendent had gone away, leaving me standing alone in my new living room like an ambassador newly arrived from nowhere to take up residence in limbo. What was this place, and how had it happened that I was living here? Whose chairs are these? Whose fingerprints on the bare blue walls?
Sundara had let me take some of the paintings and sculptures, and I set them up here and there; they had seemed magnificently integral to the lavish textures of our Staten Island condo, but here they looked awkward and unnatural, penguins in the veldt. There were no spotlights here, no cunning arrangements of solenoids and rheostats, no carpeted pedestals: just low ceilings, dirty walls, windows without opaquers. Yet I felt no self-pity, finding myself here, only confusion, emptiness, dislocation. I spent the first day unpacking, organizing, setting up the lares and penates, working slowly and inefficiently, pausing often to think about nothing in particular. I slept alone, and, to my surprise, I slept very well. In the morning I phoned Carvajal and told him what had been happening.
He grunted his approval and said, “You have a view of Second Avenue from your bedroom window?”
“Yes. And 63rd Street from the living room. Why?”
“Light-blue walls?”
“Yes.”
“A dark couch?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just checking,” he said “To make certain you found the right place.”
“You mean, that I found the one you’ve been seeing?”
“That’s right.”
“Was there any doubt?” I asked. “Have you stopped trusting the things you see?”
“Not for a moment. But do you?”
“I trust you, I trust you. What color is my bathroom sink?”
“I don’t know,” Carvajal said. “I’ve never bothered to notice. But your refrigerator is light brown.”
“Okay, already. I’m impressed.”
“I hope so. Are you ready to take notes?”
I found a scratchpad. “Go ahead,” I said.
“Thursday, October 21. Quinn will fly to Louisiana next week for a meeting with Governor Thibodaux. Afterward Quinn issues a statement declaring his support for the Plaquemines Project. When he gets back to New York he fires Housing Commissioner Ricciardi and gives the job to Charles Lewisohn. Ricciardi is named to the Racing Authority. And then—”
I took it all down, shaking my head as usual, hearing Quinn mutter, What’s Thibodaux to me? Why should I give a crap about the Plaquemines Dam? I thought dams were obsolete, anyway. And Ricciardi’s been doing a reasonably good job, considering his limited intelligence; wont it offend the Italians if I kick him upstairs like that? Et cetera, et cetera. More and more frequently, these days, I had been coming to Quinn with bizarre stratagems, inexplicable and implausible, for now the pipeline from Carvajal was flowing freely out of the immediate future, carrying advice for me to relay to Quinn on how best to maneuver and manipulate; Quinn went along with everything I suggested, but sometimes I was hard put to make him do the things I asked him to do. One of these days he’d turn down an idea outright and would not be budged; what would happen then to Carvajal’s unalterable future?
