“LANGUAGE,” BRAND SAID, “IS finished.” He stepped out from behind his enormous desk. Producing an inhaler from a pocket he inserted the tip into each of his nostrils and sniffed.
“Finished?” I said.
“Exhausted. Played-out. Over!”
“Oh.”
His largeness overwhelmed me. Nothing soft there, but massive. I braced myself for a session of alienation clichés. Language finished—communication impossible—I’d managed to purge the curriculum of most of that nonsense during my first year as Director.
“That’s why gesture is so important now. And that’s why the Academy matters. Suicide is gesture. But that’s not why I wanted to speak to you.”
At least I was wrong about the clichés. Now I braced myself for the personal onslaught. “Yes,” I said.
He sniffed again. “Allergic,” he said. “Nose closes up entirely. Can’t breathe without these things.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you know,” Brand said, “that language had me by the throat before I came here?”
Fooled again. “Really?”
“By the throat.” He mimed the action with a ham-like hand and a giraffe neck. “I knew too much, you see.”
“I suppose one can know too much about that,” I said. My way of being essentially inaudible yet responsive, which is what people like the Chairman of the Board want from an audience, was to be absolutely banal. Banality carried to the extreme, when well done, is perfectly silent and cannot be heard by the average human ear.
“Yes,” he said. “Every time I spoke a word, its derivations, the endless backward series of origins, sprang to my mind and choked me with detail. My mother would call me when I was away at college and warn me not to try any college-type antics, and instantly my mind would swarm with pictures of the walls of the Roman Emperor Titus’s villa, the antico carvings; and aware that antic is simply an abbreviation of the Italian word for old I would find myself choking with explanations, none of which I could share with my mother. The result was a pregnant silence which she took to mean the worst, and immediately she put my father on to find out if I’d gotten some unworthy girl pregnant.”
I filled his pause with, “Communication—impossible.”
“After I left school it grew and grew—it became a madness. If someone bargained and said the word dicker I saw the number ten (from the Latin decuria, a set of ten pelts, from the Latin decem, meaning ten). A painting had cobalt blue and I saw a goblin (the demon of the mines—Swedish). If you can’t control a thing like that you’re in trouble.”
“That’s murder” (allied to the Latin mors for death: hence interchangeable with suicide), I agreed.
“It hit hardest when I was trying to make love to a young lady. You can imagine.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can imagine.”
“Listen, Walker,” he said, “how about another drink?”
Guilt froze in my eyes. Did he know about Max’s flask? “Another?” I said.
He ignored the gambit. “What’ll it be?” he asked.
“I never drink on the job,” I said. And trying to lighten the atmosphere I added, “It’s the only resemblance to a policeman I admit to.” Actually my bladder was so full I was as much aware of its pressure as I was of anything else. As much as the thought of Barbara running wild among the guests, or of Jewel making and remaking her decision down in the snow. I pulled my legs together and squeezed tightly.
“Look,” Brand said, “there’s no use in beating around the bush. We’re in trouble!”
“We …?”
“I want you to know, if you cooperate with me I’ll make it worth your while.”
“In what way—I mean cooperate in what way?”
“Never mind. Just make sure you don’t repeat any of what I tell you to your contacts.”
“I have no contacts.”
“Oh, now it’s no contacts.” He was pacing up and down. The conversation had taken an odd turn. He exuded threats from the hunch of his shoulders, from the corrugated gather in the middle of his forehead. “I suppose there has never been a spy here. Is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I’ve always felt that it was exaggerated—all this about spies.”
“I didn’t say you were a spy, Wolf. But there are conspirators.” He took a whiff of his magical inhalator and muttered, “From the Latin—to breathe, closely together—con (with) spiro (breathe).”
“Mr. Brand …” I began.
“Don’t forget—not a breath of what I tell you.”
“All right.”
He paused long enough to let his eyes move across my face from left to right. “Do you speak any foreign languages?” he asked suddenly.
“French, Yiddish, Hebrew.”
“I see,” he mused. “Rath speaks French.”
“Oh?”
“Well, he’s German, you know. His real name is Von Rath. He dropped the Von when he came here as President.” I see.
“I suppose I can trust you,” he said.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Everything. The Academy. Everything this place is built on. It’s not working. Now you never see the final totals—but let me tell you, it seems to me that no matter what we do the number of positive and negative choices remains constant.”
“Oh?”
“Rath thinks we need a re-definition of the terms positive and negative. I don’t agree. I want to go back to original sources. The foundation documents of the Academy.”
The white light from the window slanted into the room. It outlined his massive back as he rustled through some papers and began to read to me. As he read—in a rhythmic way, almost chanting—his face softened. The menace was gone. The documents were typical of many I’d studied in the Academy Library. Purposes and principles were set down never quite clearly enough to be self-explanatory, never quite vaguely enough to be dismissed. In addition they were all cross-referenced with commentary confirming and denying their authenticity. I looked beyond Brand’s shoulders at the sky. Clouds were being massed in broad strokes behind the ragged screen of snow. The afternoon grew limp and mysterious under the reading of the documents. I felt as if the clocks had gone off again. What had Jewel been trying to tell me? Gesture, Brand had said; we have need of gesture. What better gesture than her extraordinary, passionate attempt to envision a way out—to break the biological chain that binds women so that everyone could have a new life, even if it was only a dream or one of her ambitious lies. It wasn’t so far from the ambitions that had brought me here. Her narcissism had driven me crazy. But if persisted in to the extreme it could turn into something beautiful—the eternal mother carrying a baby endlessly into some impossible dream of perfection. (Was not my identification with the surrounding hills and the Academy sky, like the semi-tropical sky of my Florida childhood, a supreme, almost theological narcissism?) How I wished I had halted the curriculum before she’d gotten carried away and recited to me the lie of her experiment. It was as if the very thing I hated most in her, when pressed to the limits, could enthrall me all over again; as if I had never been through the shapeless miseries of our marriage and the pain of her desertion. In saving her, or trying to (I had no way of judging the success or failure of the attempt at this time), I had been forced to create her, to push her to the point where she would perform a simple act from which there was no escape: like teaching an ex-husband, devoid of physical grace, to dance. Now, it seemed, in creating her I might have destroyed myself. Have another drink, Brand had said, while Barbara went on building some lethal weapon out of her grief to conspire in my destruction.)
My bladder was bursting. I could think of nothing but the nauseating pressure, and alternately, the longing for Jewel that I had not left behind me on the ice. But Brand compelled my attention with his words.
“So you realize that the tradition of impartiality is just that—a tradition, not a law. Nowhere is it written.”
“Then what are you suggesting?” An unpleasant premonitory sensation was creeping over me.
“Just that the time has come to take a stand. We should set a quota of positive decisions for each day—and do everything necessary to see that it’s filled.”
I stood up as if the chair were going to crack under me. The pressure on my bladder was suddenly gone, replaced by a sensation of blood flushing my head that made my ears ring.
“But that’s against everything—”
“Come on, Walker. You must know about this issue. Rath doesn’t see it my way. But I’m making my presentation today to the Board. And I’m going to win.”
A slow rise of disgust filled me. Back to the world of accidents, chances, choosing sides, winning and losing! All the floating garbage of Max’s world. My face must have shown my feelings.
“Don’t take it so big.”
“You’ll kill everything,” I said.
“On the contrary.” Brand beamed at me, all threats dissolved in the benign sunshine of his confidence. “Don’t you understand—the way we’re going we’re not affecting the results either way. Statistically we might as well vanish. Don’t you think it’s important that we be of some use?”
“We are,” I said passionately. “We exist. That’s our use. But to manufacture choices, even a choice for life—that’s an ugly goal. That’s a stinking monologue. All you’re proving is that there’s some mystery still. Well, that’s why we’re here. That’s why the research.”
“Aren’t you talking out of both sides of your mouth, Wolf?”
“How?” I was stalling stupidly. If Jewel was enrolled, if she was by now at the Beauty Parlor, for example, then the little desk-top computer could be telling Brand right now about my session on the ice.
“Gilliatt seems to think you are.”
“Gilliatt has his own axe to grind. On my Jewish skull.”
“Of course, we know all about Gilliatt. Even his connection with the two spies who are making films on the grounds today.”
Spies? Did every high office carry with it an automatic electric charge of paranoia? But who was mad? Brand or me? Here was this hulk happily proposing a stand on the side of saving lives, and it filled me with nothing but revulsion. True, I’d slipped because of Jewel. But I was damned if I’d fallen that far. My hands were still wrapped around the silent hills, the icy rocks, the gray sky from which snow spat, goaded by the aimless, ferocious wind; my feelings were still commanded by the search for the special few whose desperation could lead them over me, away from whatever role they were playing toward a destiny. Over me! Pontius Walker. (Pontius—from the Latin pons for bridge.) But I would not wash my hands of them. Surely for such love I could be forgiven the sin of nostalgia, the felony of memory.
But if this afternoon’s program were the program forever—no! Saviours were criminals peddling hope in exchange for this or that choice. An abomination. My mind was running over a hundred remembered fragments of papers, books, treatises on the Academy’s goals. Brand could never make it stick. It was more than heresy. It was betrayal. I was dizzy. All I’d had for food was half the contents of Max’s flask. Right now what I wanted was more of the same. I regretted turning down Brand’s offer.
“Don’t think,” Brand was saying, “that I’m recommending any shortcuts or vulgarizations of process. I have a sense of craft, too. I mean, look, I could produce a hell of a lot of positive decisions by cheap methods.” Chameleonlike, now he was Daddy Brand, full of good-will and common sense.
“I’ve been working on a paper that suggests the possibility that all our exquisite care and planning here—and I know how much of it you’ve been responsible for (this last thick with unction)—we all know—may actually be increasing the daily quota of suicides. Why, I could turn the choice of any given day one hundred percent toward life. You know how? By turning this place into a kind of concentration camp. People could be seized on arrival. They couldn’t do anything about it; the whole thing is illegal anyway. Then, if the place were turned into a pigsty of chaos, filth, cruelty and hopelessness, they’d all choose to go back. You’ve read Gilliatt’s paper on the low rate of Negro suicides. The connection is clear. But hell, boy, that’s not the kind of thing I have in mind.” He did his sniffing act—a deep one, as if breathing were some kind of artificial technique, something you did with tools. One chance, I thought desperately. Appeal. My appointment with Rath. A higher authority. I looked at my watch for salvation. It was four thirty.
“I have to go,” I said. “I understand Rath doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
He waved me out. “Go on,” he said. “It was good talking to you.” His steps paced me to the door. “And listen. If you play ball with me you can forget about Gilliatt’s charges.”
I said nothing. I said it so violently my head ached.
At the door he put a great, enveloping arm around my shoulders. “I feel I’ve gotten through to you,” he said. “Maybe language isn’t finished after all.” His grin threatened to turn into a violent laugh. His white teeth overlapped each other, lopsided. I tensed myself for the explosion. Instead he softly said, “So long. Be good.” (From the Old English god, related to the Gothic term goths, meaning suitable or fitting according to your own lights.)