by C. L. Moore
It almost seemed to me, in the haze of whiskey that hummed above my ears, that he was speaking not in words at all. He was speaking in letters of fire which I didn't have to read because I didn't want to. Because it hurt too much to understand what he was really saying ...
I think I was in and out of more than one bar that night. seem to remember a lot of yelling and singing. I can't be sure because my little buzzing room had rebuilt itself around me and through those walls nothing unpleasant can ever penetrate. I balanced it delicately around me like a big, humming bubble. I wasn't quite sure what went on outside any more. Sometimes it seemed maybe I was back in that Cropper bus jolting along the road between the Ohio fields. Other times I could almost think I was back with the troupe, also jolting along, but this time in the caravan trucks, a tight little working group talking over the play, heading for—where was it?—Carson City and a new performance.
Except that I was washed up for good as a performer. If tonight had proved anything it had proved that.
And I couldn't really imagine even in my buzzing magic room that I was with the troupe again. I remembered too vividly standing in the road with my travel pack in my hand, watching them diminish in the moonlight. They had said good-by in subdued voices, not quite meeting my eyes. And the little world they were part of went spinning away down the dark road, leaving a hollow inside me too cold for liquor to warm and too vast for liquor to fill.
But I tried. I tried hard.
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CHAPTER XXII
THE SKY WAS transparently blue far up straight over my face. Treetops leaned together up there, swaying with a slow, dizzying motion. There seemed to be pine needles under me, but I had no idea where I was, or even who. A flicker of warning at the back of my mind suggested it would be better not to remember who. No good could come of that.
I sat up slowly. The motion made my head open and close once like a thunderclap. I held it together with both hands, fighting nausea. A hangover? Then I must have been drunk ... Step by step I retraced the immediate past, working backward from the hangover. Then the mellow sunlight went black around me as I remembered.
Everything was over. The dazzling future I'd thought I had secure had slipped like quicksilver through my fingers and I was right back where I'd started. Not an actor after all. Nothing. I remembered the dead, frozen hour on stage. I saw Guthrie again, standing over me, looking down, pronouncing the words of excommunication. And everything had ended.
And I had dreamed a strange dream again ...
I looked around the little clearing in the woods where I seemed to have spent the night. The night and a good part of the day, if the westering sunlight that slanted through the trees was anything to go by. I was trying to remember the dream.
Miranda. What was it? The theater had been in it—how? Something ridiculous—the traveling theater was a ring of bombs ticking toward explosion, set up on end like a circular palisade and inside it Miranda, going through some scene of infinite importance to me, but quite soundlessly, her lovely mouth opening and closing without a word while letters of fire shimmered over her and her corn-silk hair blew softly about her face.
Wait. Corn-silk? Miranda's hair was dark. It was Cressy who had the corn-silk curls. Something had been wrong in the dream. Miranda and Cressy blended into one? I didn't like it. Miranda and Cressy had nothing in common at all. Miranda was love and loyalty and brilliance and beauty. Miranda was all of me that had been worth having. Miranda was the rock I had stood on and the fire that had lighted me and made me what I was. Without her the world was a quagmire and the light a darkness. And I nothing.
In the dream rage and frustration had bubbled up in me. Miranda was saying something I had to know, had to, but the letters of fire wouldn't stand still to be read, and some kind of roaring like a hurricane had troubled my dream, and I remembered dimly doubling my fist hard and hitting someone, some enemy who stood between me and all I wanted. I hated him. I felt my fist sink into him and I heard him grunt.
But then, in the midst of the hurricane roar, I had opened my eyes and found I was hitting the carpet of pine needles over and over, hard, angry blows. The roar diminished into distance and my hand hurt from beating my enemy the earth. And I had sunk again into a confusion of dreams, because waking was even worse than sleep.
I heard the roaring rise again as I sat here trying to remember. It rushed toward me in crescendo, shivered the leaves around me, and swept by fast into the distance. A truck on the highway. So I had somehow last night stumbled out of town and found this hollow among the pines beside the road the troupe had taken going away. Polly and Roy, Cressy and Guthrie, the Henkens diminishing down a long highway with all their plans and problems, leaving me alone with mine.
My head ached. I rubbed my bristling cheek and wondered what came next. A faint hopefulness flickered in me and I asked myself why, after all, everything had to be over. Guthrie had fired me, yes. But who had the final word? Nye was the man I worked for, not Guthrie. Would Nye care if I froze up in the play? So maybe the job of actor wasn't for me any more. I was here for more than acting. I was on the track of the Anti-Com itself and Guthrie had no authority to stop me. All I had to do was get in touch with Nye, finish up my job of finding the Anti-Com, and——
And what? And earn back the theater I couldn't use any more? Step back into the old life as an actor who couldn't act? What place would there be for Rohan in a world he couldn't function in? No, I'd been right all along, from a long time ago, from the hour of Miranda's death. Maybe that's what the letters of fire had said in last night's dream. Without Miranda I was nothing. I'd always known it. With her I was more than myself, strong and powerful and alive. Alone I was less than a single person. So that one good performance when I'd turned the world underfoot had been one last flash before darkness, and the bad performance was the true reflection of myself.
So what good was Nye to me now? What could he give me that I cared for? Miranda back again?
Still, I had to do something. I couldn't sit here forever. I got up stiffly and looked at the sinking sun. A few hours from now the Swann Players would be setting up their grandstands in Carson City. Where would I be? Did it matter? Of its own accord the memory of the dream came back urgently into my mind. The theater was a ring of bombs minute by minute ticking toward the blowoff. And it did matter that I should be there. Why, I didn't know. But an anxiety trembled in me for something I couldn't name. Something furiously raging to be heard in my mind, and an inward force that said "No, no, be quiet, I don't hear you."
Moving stiffly, I toiled up the slope toward the sound of passing traffic.
The heavy truck rumbled to a halt in the twilight. "Here we are," the driver said. "Carson City." He slanted a look at me. "You all right, bud?"
I got my chin off my chest and forced a grin. I'd been bad company all the way from Douglass. There was too much on my mind. I said, "Sure, I'm fine," and got painfully out of the cab. He watched me, taking in my scratches and bruises, the rips is my clothing. He shook his head at me. I said, "Well, thanks for the lift."
He hesitated, looking me over. Then he reached into one of the dash compartments and tossed a package at me. "Here, catch," he said. It was a ration pack, one of the food boxes drivers carry on long hauls. I wondered if I looked that hungry, but I caught it gratefully. There was no knowing how long I'd have to make my money last from now on. The driver was still looking at me as he pulled away, and just before the motor downed out all other sound, I think he spoke. I think what he said was, "I used to like your pictures, Mr. Rohan." But I'll never know now.
I got some coffee at a stand near the highway. It helped a little. Carson City isn't very big. There's a park near the center of town, with a pool in the middle and big trees deep with summer leaves that have a rich, rolling motion when the wind blows. I found a bench and ate some of the food in the ration pack, not wanting any and hot liking it much, but knowing I'd feel better when it was down. I did.
By t
hen darkness had fallen, and now all I had to do was follow the crowd. Crosswords pulled very well in Carson City. This was the town which Nye had told me was important. This was the place where he wanted a big audience with all the rebels in it he could get. Looking up at the bleachers from outside, hearing the first familiar lines sounding in familiar voices, I wondered in how many other towns in California tonight Crossroads was being played. And whether there was something really special about Carson City. And what.
All the voices from inside the magic ring were familiar except one. The one that spoke my lines. I felt like a ghost.
I waited until I was sure Guthrie would be busy doing whatever it was he did do in the sound truck and the cast was all on stage. Then I slipped between the girders and the wall and climbed up the stands to a seat high up, near the top. Almost every seat had been taken. I fell over a few feet and dropped into a vacant spot.
Sitting there looking down at the lighted stage, I felt very strange. I was part of the play and not part of it. I couldn't quite believe I was sitting here as an onlooker, because I knew the play so was And the oddest titling of all was watching the man who played my part. The man pretending to be Howard Rohan in the role in which I'd hit such heights and such depths. He handled it well. Well enough. He was about my size and coloring, and he played with a clean, sharp accuracy and no life at all. For the first time Crossroads was going to be seen in this theater exactly as it was written.
The cast was nervous. The man in my part was just a little off in his timing because he'd rehearsed with a different group. More than once he wasn't quite where he should have been when somebody turned to speak to him. Once I noticed Polly's face draw tight and a little bleak at a moment like that, and it seemed to me that she was seeing me, Rohan, a ghostly presence in that vacant spot exactly as I was seeing myself there. I thought with some wonder, watching her face, Maybe they miss me after all.
My hangover had receded a long way by now. I felt almost willing to cope with being alive again. I looked at the audience and wondered what they made of this exotic thing, a live play in the street of Carson City. They were laughing responsively in all the right spots, the kind of audience the people on the stage love and appreciate.
I found, rather to my surprise, that I was thinking about the Anti-Com.
I noticed that Cressy's pale gold hair needed retouching along the part, seen from this high up. I noticed that Roy had used too much eye shadow, so his deep-set eyes looked small and haggard. I made mental notes to speak to them both, and brought myself up with a shock, remembering that I and the Swann Players had nothing to do with each other any more.
I saw a familiar head down there a couple of rows ahead of me and leaned forward to look with surprise. I had seen her in San Andreas bending over the lie box I was hooked to. I had seen her in the mountain valley above the rebels' distribution center, with the 'hopper exploding before her and the Comus forces closing in. Dr. Elaine Thomas. She sat composedly on the bench below me wearing a yellow dress with a blue sweater thrown across her shoulders. The black hair was drawn tight in its usual coronet of braids, and the slightly tilted eyes were intent upon the stage. I looked quickly at her hand and saw a ring upon it with the big blue stone intact.
Cressy in the strong lights below us swung her bright pink skirts in a half circle and put out both hands to the man who was playing my part. They stood there laughing at each other, radiant in the brilliant light. I felt a twinge of curious jealousy. Cressy was putting more intimacy into the part than Susan Jones had to put. She was Cressy Kellogg, too, the little opportunist, playing up with all the sparkle that was in her to the new man in the cast. Because, who knows, there might be something in it for Cressy Kellogg.
She tipped her head sidewise and the corn-silk curls swung out. A shudder of anxiety without any cause I could name went through me coldly. She was Miranda suddenly, the Miranda of my dream moving in the circle of ticking bombs. For some reason my eyes moved to Elaine Thomas there on the bench below me smiling and watching. And it seemed to me death was in the air around us, chilly and smelling of dust.
Something strange was happening in my min. The old, violent clash inside me between the thing I had to remember and the thing I could not endure to know. Miranda, I thought. Miranda ...
Why did I hate to see Cressy in the role I had cast for Miranda in last night's dream? Because Cressy and Miranda were women at opposite poles in my mind and I didn't want them confused? Cressy wasn't Miranda. Miranda was light and life, loyalty, security, love.
Miranda?
I felt a kind of thunderclap in my head.
Somehow so many things fell neatly into pattern with a series of soundless clicks. Elaine Thomas and the blue ring unbroken on her hand, the thought and the smell of death, the dream of bombs ringing the theater in, Cressy imitating Miranda, and my mind rejecting their likeness ...
For an instant I saw the thing in my memory I tried so hard not to see, only let float to the surface when I was very drunk or very despairing, too despairing to care. I saw again, clear and vivid, Miranda lying dead in her bright kimono on the bright green hillside, her cheek upon the grass and her hair stirring in the breeze, the only thing about her that moved at all.
And lying a little way beyond her I saw the man who had been her lover.
The man I never knew. The man I had never guessed existed. Whose very name I had told myself did not matter. And it didn't. Not as a name. But whoever he was, he was the man she died with and went away with into infinity, leaving me behind.
Miranda was not loyalty and love and security.
How strangely the mind works to deceive itself. How totally I had shut off that unbearable thought, walling it securely behind the memory of Miranda as I wanted to remember her. A Miranda who never existed. How fully I had convinced myself of the lie.
Why did I see the truth now? Something had happened in my mind to let this much of reality come through. Some gate opening because of—what? And why did the desperate anxiety well higher and higher like a tide that was going to spill over the brim any minute and inundate me?
Miranda was not loyalty and love.
I needed to think that over in solitude and silence. As I sat on the hard metal bench, it seemed to be there was nothing around me but the blinding glare of what I just come to realize, the paralyzing silence of the pain. I had a thought to examine too private and too shattering to share the same enclosure with any other human being.
I got up almost without knowing I was moving and went down quietly along the side of the stands, slipped out between the building and the girders into the still street beyond. I was thinking of the little park with the pool and the big, quiet trees.
That was what I needed. The grassy place, the solitude.
Nobody seemed to be in the park tonight but me. I sat down on a bench beneath one of the big trees near the water. I leaned my back to the trunk and looked at the stars shining in the faintly troubled pool. I let my mind remember.
What was the real Miranda? Not the goddess I had made her into. Only a woman of beauty and talent and no faith. A woman who found me less than she wanted and who went elsewhere for the love I had not succeeded in giving her. No goddess. No talisman whose faith and love were the foundation of my success. She gave me neither faith nor love. She was a woman who must have smiled just as easily and invitingly at any likely man as Cressy had smiled at me.
I leaned my back against the tree. There was an immense stillness around me and through me. Far off I heard the voices from the stage, the laughter and response of the audience. In the dark street an occasional car went by. Over me the leaves rustled. But the stillness in my mind hushed every other sound. I could not think or feel. Not in that long silence.
Then feeling came back. I didn't want it. I couldn't face it. But I couldn't evade it, either. I felt the impact of that full knowledge of what Miranda was smash into me with paralyzing clearness. I tried to stand up, but my legs wouldn't hold me. For
the first time physical reaction hit me like a hammer All the small muscles of my shoulders shivered, and the muscles at the inside of my thighs shook until I could hardly stand. I dropped back to the bench and threw my arm around the tree trunk to keep the world from tilting.
I could see so clearly the bright colors of Miranda's kimono on the green eastern grass. The beautiful dreamer who would never wake again. This final loss was worse than the first shock of her dying, because until now I had kept so much of her with me, part of me, very precious and very safe in my mind. And gone now out of reach, out of time.
There let your sweetheart lie, untrue forever. Who said it? Never mind. Never mind. The tree was rough against my cheek. I hugged the hard trunk to keep my arm from trembling and felt the tears slip down my face between me and the insensate bark. The night was infinitely still.
Without opening my eyes I could feel its quiet presence. I heard the water making its faint, troubled sounds upon the shore. I heard the leaves heaving softly above me. I thought I could feel the tremor of their motion transmitting downward through the solid trunk I clung to, tugging at the deep roots spread out and clenched solidly far underground. The tree had stood here a long time, withstanding the shocks of all its lifetime. As I had to withstand the shocks of mine.
I felt the life of the tree against me. I felt the water lapping on the shore and the motion transmitting from molecule to molecule of the ground that upheld us both. The water and the wind, the living tree, the earth and I were all knit together in a single unit that breathed and was one.
And I wasn't alone. Miranda wasn't lost. Nothing is lost. Miranda was no goddess, but neither had she betrayed me—not in any way that mattered now. She did what she had to do. There is a term set on marriage, and beyond that I had no claim on her or she on me. I had to let her go.
I had been trying all this while to hold her closer in death than I had ever been able to hold her in life. But now I could accept what she was and wasn't and love her, and let her go.