“MAX,” I YELLED, AND ran toward him.
He turned and, seeing me, waited. He was laughing by the time I stumbled in the snow and almost fell at his feet.
“What happened?” I said. “Gilliatt said you saw Barbara.”
“I saw her.” He was still laughing.
“What the hell is so funny?”
“That girl is all right,” he said. He stopped laughing abruptly.
“What girl?” For a crazy moment I thought he meant Jewel.
“Barbara,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that babe. She’s all right.”
“Where is she?”
“Can’t tell. Wouldn’t be fair.” He was exhilarated. His scarf was tied around his neck, skier-style, and his color was high. “I’ll tell you this, though. She knows what to do. She knows when something is finished.”
“What’s she up to? Suicide? I’ll know soon enough—you may as well tell me.”
“In exchange for my suggesting it to her, she’s going to let me film the whole thing.”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “Listen. I have Security Police I can call in if I have to.”
“You don’t understand anything, Walker. Do you know that? Do you know how much you don’t understand?”
“I’m warning you, Max.”
“Where’s my flask?” he said. He looked at me mock-wisely. It seemed I could not control even madmen any more.
As a matter of fact, the first thing I’d done outside was to drain the rest of the liquid from Max’s flask and hurl it far out into the snow. Then I opened my fly, right there in the anarchic afternoon, and pissed against the wall of the Administration Building in steaming relief.
I remember you, I said to myself amid the ecstatic smoking flow. The middleman. And here between Brand’s anti-Suicide Academy and Rath’s suicide manufacture plan you stand, once again, firm as a cloud.
I finished the zipper business just in time as a guide led a group of guests toward the movie theater at my right. Carefully, I stood in such a way as to hide the give-away patch of yellowed snow from their sight. I remember you, I thought in shame, but not this way. The once-proud Director splashing his urine in drunken protest.
You perverse bastard. All you’ve ever wanted is an answer—to make dialogues instead of monologues. And when you get two straight answers you’re destroyed. You’re like the suicides who come here with their fake dialogues, the second voice dubbed in by self-pity. Which led me by the direct process of thought to the unresolved question of Barbara. Perhaps I had been through enough on this extraordinary day that I would find an eloquent tongue and convince her subtly, brilliantly, of the place of the innocent child in a world of guilty self-destroyers. I would be a Cicero of rationalizers, a Demosthenes of suffering half-logic. Together she and I would lead the next child-chosen happily into silence.
“Max!” I said, surprising myself with my own words, “it’s time now. You can tell me. Did you sleep with Jewel while she was still my wife?”
“You poor bastard, that’s what you get for living in the jungle of yes and no. Get out of it, man. Didn’t I tell you. When I was dead back there in Doctor Pollikoff’s office, I found out there is no yes and no after death. And the way it is afterward, that’s how it has to be before you die. It stands to reason, man. Yes, I slept with her while she was still tied to you in holiest bonds of mattress-mony.”
I made a convulsive move toward him.
“And no, I didn’t touch her until she was completely free of you. Until I couldn’t smell your sweat on her in the night. Wolf, you are badly hung-up on possession.”
“Can the avant-garde clichés, will you, Max?” I said.
“Nothing’s worth having unless it’s worth destroying.”
“Is that why you let Jewel have a neat, bloody abortion?”
“Why do you believe her?”
“I was born under Capricorn. Capricorns are gullible.”
“It’s going to be a pleasure,” he said, “to see you finished here.”
“You’re counting on a lot.”
“I’m counting on what I can count on.”
“Barbara’s sick. We have a number of these breakdowns every year. Occupational hazard. Do you know,” I added, “that there are those here, in authority, who think you’re a spy?”
“But you know I’m not.”
“Do I?”
“Because you know who the real spy is.”
My anxiety suddenly shifted back to its real center.
“Where’s Jewel?” I asked.
“The concept
Of a totally controlled
Environment leads
To the peak
Of Hazards—hap
Or otherwise.”
Oh, God, I thought, I’ve triggered him again. “Where’s Jewel?” I persisted.
“Choosing me
She chose a madness
She could handle—
Instead of her own.
Don’t tamper
With that kind
Of choice.”
“Where’s Jewel?” I insisted. If I could bring him to a peak of collapse again as I had that morning, perhaps I could break the back of the Barbara business.
As if sensing this he told me, humoring me, as if I were the madman. I fled from him and the absent Barbara and their plans to film my defeat.