Unfunny jokes are dangerous, he would like to tell his mother, because they bully her into false signals of pleasure. Or are they false? He doesn’t know.
That day, Monday, Mrs. Martin asks him to stay after school and talk to her.
“You’ve been acting strange in class,” she says. She is sloppy with her smile and breasts and kindness, all of them sort of bouncy and loose, but he doesn’t dislike her; how could he? When he first came to this school he made the mistake of putting up his hand and answering a question, so she knows he knows things. She knows, and she talks to him and looks at him in class. She looks hurt when he won’t answer her, really hurt, and this makes him feel bad, and stubborn, and dangerous. He hurt the girl Ruth that way too. What a world, in which you hurt those who mean well.
“Are you very unhappy, Leonard?”
What is unhappy? He’s always been the way he is, except while he’s with the Intuint.
“I know you’re bright, and I can’t blame you for being bored in class sometimes when we have to go over and over what you already know.”
He should be flattered by this, but instead he feels his face begin to turn into the face of a lizard, and he can’t stop it.
“When does your mother get home from work?”
“Urk, urk,” he says. His throat says this, but his hands decide to try to be helpful, so he signals with six fingers.
“At six?”
His head nods, his eyes cross, and his tongue goes under his upper lip and bulges it out.
“Oh, Leonard,” she says softly, disappointed but with affection, and in return he gives her the wall-eyed, deaf look, feeling bad about it and out of control. Just so she doesn’t come tonight and disturb The Voyage of the Cosmogon. He must keep her away.
“At night he’s there,” he says.
“He? Oh. I’ll call her first, of course.”
“Not tonight.”
“No?”
“Tomorrow.”
“All right,” she says. The calm straightforwardness of the words shock him; he can’t remember ever speaking to an adult who could make a decision based purely upon his unargued preference.
That night at eight o’clock it is announced that this will be the final episode of The Voyage of the Cosmogon in this time slot. At least two more episodes have been filmed, but they may or may not be shown some time in the future, at some other hour, under some other sponsorship. The station management apologizes for the unexpected schedule change, which is the responsibility of the network, not of the station.
At first he doesn’t quite listen, just as he didn’t pay too much attention to what he read in TV Guide last week. But now he understands.
When she calls Leonard’s mother, a little after six, she hears immediately that the woman isn’t very bright. “Yeah, certainly,” Lenny’s mother says. “Any old time.”
Why is it that intelligence can be heard, or not heard, in a phrase? To the eye it’s even more obviously there or not there, and when she meets Louise she wonders how she can be Leonard’s mother. There is nothing of him there in her eyes, which seem to see very little but the reflection of how she is observed, as if she constantly looks at a moving picture of herself. She is vivacious in crude, gesturing ways, and in her middle thirties she’s too worn for her dyed auburn hair, green eyelids, and bright slacks slashed with stylized paintbrush strokes of yellow and pink.
The apartment in the run-down house has an empty, echoey feeling, old paint discolored on floors and walls. The uncurtained front room they sit in has a sofa, a recliner, a metal stand for an ashtray, and a television set.
“Yeah, it’s hard on the kid to move so much, but my cousin got me this job, you know? But I didn’t like it so I went back to waitressing but anyway here we are, stuck in East Overshoe. I mean, life’s like that when you’re kind of out of money. You got to go where you got to go,” Louise says, shrugging the jaunty, philosophical shrug of experience, of hard knocks. She’s bragging. But she’s not a cruel or really indifferent woman, it’s obvious. Her dullness, however, must be dangerous to a bright and solitary child.
As they talk, Marsha sees that there is nothing she can ask Louise to do.
“He never had no trouble in school before.”
“Does he ever bring any friends home?”
“Well, we just got here. He never did bring no little friends home, though, come to think of it. But we always moved a lot. I mean Natick, Lowell, Manchester, a real bad year in Belmont you don’t want to hear about, believe me, and now he’s stuck here in this godforsaken—excuse me—little burg about halfway to the North Pole, it feels like.”
Maybe it isn’t time yet to suggest counseling for Leonard, or maybe she doesn’t want to say such a thing to Louise, at all, anytime. She’ll try to talk to him, but when that will be, or can be, she just doesn’t know. All she can do is try to make friends with him. He isn’t the only pupil she has whose consciousness is semi-moribund in school, but he’s the smartest one. She knows that he hears not just words, but what she means to say, and this in spite of his facial tics. There is that sub-glow of intelligence in his narrow face, his face that reminds her of a hatchet, his mouth, when pursed up, like a nick in the blade, his narrow eyes always a little swollen.
After half an hour she leaves, after promising, though she wasn’t asked, to try to help Leonard as much as she can.
He has lived with the Cosmogon and the Intuint for the last time. All through the last episode he watched through a haze of farewell. What happened near the amber cloud was that Buck Hurtler and Traypots went into their “antilogic attack mode. ” The Gruhazk were strictly logical; everything they did was based upon “best case—worst case” suppositions. Knowing this, Buck and Traypots acted absurdly, according to their sense of humor. First they chased each other’s tail, then seemed to shoot at each other, barely missing. And they had some luck, too—why not? Traypots loosed a pulse torpedo into the cloud, just to see what would happen, and by sheer luck destroyed a Gruhazk ship on the far side. It was just pure luck, but all of this information, fed into the Gruhazk battle computer, caused a sort of paralysis of will, and the two Rainfires managed to fight off at least a hundred Gruhazk ships until the Rainfire squadrons arrived. With that, and the loss of eight of their ships, the Gruhazk retreated into far space.
And that is all, forever, as though a Gruhazk torpedo has come sliding in from space and blown the Cosmogon and all the Intuint into a brief flash of dust. He can make that end in his mind because he knows they are gone. Even if by chance he gets to see the last, lost episodes, they will just be history, incidents from past lives.
There is loss, like a cold wind through his chest.
The next day, after work, his mother comes clattering in with noisy shopping bags and, squatting, lets them thump out of her arms onto the kitchen table.
“He’s coming over around eight,” she says. “I asked him not to come anymore ’less he can make up his mind between her and me. He says he’s going to make up his mind. Ha! Little bears like their honey but I told him he better make up his mind whose honey he likes best. I guess I made myself pretty clear this time.”
As she reaches to a cupboard, Lenny looks at her buttocks and shanks. Beneath the cloth, between her legs, sticky-sweet is the honey the policeman craves without love, without even politeness. She could get pregnant, and she could get a disease—even a fatal one. Then he realizes that he doesn’t really care. He has no power anyway, except maybe the power to leave. He’s going to leave here, why not? There is such a thing as choice.
Marsha asks Leonard to stay after last class. Today he seems farther away than ever, in a sort of waking sleep, and she has to make up her mind about some help for him, from someplace.
He sits at his desk in the third row and doesn’t even look at her.
“Leonard?” she says, and then the gray waste of her own helplessness, or maybe incompetence, stifles any further thought she might have had. “Leonard, what’s the mat
ter? You don’t do anything, you don’t say anything. What’s the matter?” All she can think of to do is ask that question, and her helplessness makes her want to cry.
He glances at her for a second and she sees, clear as a wink of light, that he has sympathy for her, but emotionally he is so far away his understanding is almost an abstraction, something he has left behind.
The present school counselor is a young woman who seems nice enough, in a way, but after the shuttle blew up in front of the children there was an awful lot of doubtful advice, or melodramatic advice, from that quarter. But who knows? She has never met the psychiatrist in Northlee that Ray sees every other week. Ray thinks he isn’t doing much good, trying to cure a wasted life, which is an impossibility anyway.
But you’ve taught so many students! she cried. How can you say that’s a waste? I never wanted to teach, Ray said. And I never did it very well anyway.
“Leonard? I want to help you. You know that, don’t you?”
He raises his head and smiles at her, briefly, but the smile is cool, too ancient and understanding to have come from a thirteen-year-old. She has to ask for help for him outside of herself, something she would never have thought of doing a few years ago.
When they’ve been silent for a while, she lets him go.
That night, alone in the king-sized bed, she is awakened by a percussive crash that is damped by walls and doors but still imperative, its following hush full of apprehension. She goes downstairs to the kitchen, to the door to the pantry room, in the fluorescent kitchen light. She knocks on the door and calls to him, but there is no answer. Light shows beneath the door, but he doesn’t answer.
The next day Mrs. Martin is not in school, so they have a substitute teacher. On the bus after school, Ruth tells him in a mean and even gleeful voice that Mrs. Martin’s husband blew his brains out. “Did you hear about Mrs. Martin?” she says. “Her husband blew his brains out!” She speaks this way for revenge, to startle him, not because she feels glad about it. He doesn’t think to have any reaction at all. He just looks at her, and soon she feels so sorry about what happened and how she spoke about it that she looks sick.
Lenny feels nothing about it at first—nothing but the feeling he has when he hears about an accident that happened to strangers, or sees the aftermath on TV, or the way he first felt about the shuttle when it blew up—a sort of thrill mixed with an icky feeling, as if his hands were greasy.
But then he has a closer vision of Mrs. Martin, not as a teacher but as an ordinary person who is soft and pleasant, who cares about what she does. She might have loved her husband. She may be jiggly and a little sloppy, unlike the people of the Cosmogon, who are beautiful and clear, but that wouldn’t make her feel any less, would it. Maybe even worse.
It has been two days since Marsha found Ray’s body. She had to observe that he’d removed the vinyl storm window from the frame and opened the casement window before he did it. He took his shotgun, with which he used to hunt grouse, when that was a joyful thing for a man to do, put the barrel in his mouth, and blew the back of his head out the window into the backyard. It is inescapable that he removed the vinyl frame from its magnetic tape and opened the casement window in order to save her from having to clean up the pieces of his head. And that seems to be his only testament. There is no note, no words for her, so everything is gone, and what she meant to him, if anything, is gone without a word. Then she feels guilty that she has translated his death into her own selfish resentment.
She reads the obituary in the Leah Free Press:
Raymond Martin
LEAH—Raymond S. Martin, Jr., 45, of 6 Water St., died at his home Wednesday, March 8, 1986. Born June 17, 1941, the son of Raymond S. and Mary (Hooper) Martin, he grew up in Leah, attended Leah schools and the University of New Hampshire. He taught English and social studies, coached the Debating Team and various sports at Leah Senior High School for twenty-two years.
He is survived by his wife, Marsha.
Memorial services will be held at Balcher’s Funeral Home.…
There are so many things not there. He was a good teacher once, when he had the energy of his youth and could take the unending hours. But he “burned out.” Twenty-two years and he had nothing to look forward to. Not like Christa McAuliffe, with all the smiles and promise, in her baggy space suit. It took longer to kill Ray. Of course, he might have done the other things he wanted to do, but he didn’t, and then he found all of this time gone, and he hadn’t done what he wanted. But who has? Why do we live? Just to put in the time? No, it can at least feel good to live. Tastes and touches, sights and sounds and smells.
Maybe if she hadn’t given him the frozen entree, and the canned soup…But she was tired that day, and all he did was study his damned old magazines.
Her glance falls upon a headline.
Despondent Over TV Cancellation
Hastings, Minnesota (AP)—14-year-old Judson Paul White, after leaving a note saying that he didn’t “choose to live” after the cancellation of the television serial The Voyage of the Cosmogon, jumped to his death from a bridge over the frozen Mississippi River.
A ninth-grader. Think of the emptiness of that boy’s life. There must have been nothing at all left for him. Just nothing.
Around ten o’clock Lenny goes down the narrow stairs to the kitchen. He hasn’t heard their voices for a while, so they’re probably in her room. He doesn’t know what he wants, whether he’s thirsty or not. He doesn’t think there’s anything about to happen, unless it’s something he might do himself, that has caused his breath to leave him like this. He’s so anxious he has trouble breathing, and he can’t understand how he can be this anxious about nothing.
The policeman has left his revolver in its black holster on the table. It’s partly covered by the Enquirer, slightly behind an empty six-pack carton and empty beer bottles, but its heavy presence is immediately clear. From its darkness comes darkness. It’s some kind of a Gruhazk weapon, not that it isn’t interesting, and of such power, if he can believe anything he’d seen and heard, that a finger’s worth of pressure can cause instant oblivion.
It is forbidden to him, but he picks it up. At first he can’t get the revolver out of its black holster, but then he finds that if he presses a metal pad in the holster, the weighty gun comes out into his hand. Marcas Registradas, Smith & Wesson, Springfield, Mass., it says on the frame. It’s like toy pistols he’s had, except for the weight and smooth blue-black finish. The lead noses of bullets can be seen in the chambers, and brass gleams at the back of the cylinder. The policeman never before left it out here when he was in there with her, but from the noises he heard tonight, and the empty six-packs and nearly empty vodka bottle, they must have gotten especially drunk. A cigarette has burned out down to its filter on the Formica tabletop. His mother’s green shoes are under a chair, one on its side.
He takes the revolver in his right hand and aims it at the sink, at the faucet, at the soap dish, at the vodka bottle, at a highball glass smudged with greasy red at its rim. “Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam,” he whispers. Then, a little surprised that he does it, he points the revolver at his own head, the cool muzzle at his ear. “Blam,” he whispers.
Why not? He can’t think of anything else he wants to do. It’s sort of a balance. It isn’t that he has no friends, for instance, it’s that he doesn’t want any. And this world is not being run correctly—it’s as if the Gruhazk have taken over; all his life he’s been told that there’s going to be a war, started by men, which will cook everybody’s face off and destroy the world. And that “we” are doing this and that, out of greed, to kill everything alive. His breath comes hard, but his hand doesn’t tremble, in spite of his anxiety. He could get out of it right now. He pulls the trigger just a little bit, against a spring, then takes the revolver away from his ear and looks at it. The hammer rises as he pulls; he lets it go back down. Pulling the trigger cocks it first, then…
Say he does do it. In that case he must ima
gine what will happen after he’s gone. All he would like to do is leave, but he’s still got to think of the result. He always thinks of results, like how he hurt Ruth and Mrs. Martin by pretending to be deaf. Why did he do that? Because they aren’t as handsome as the Intuint? Because he is just naturally cruel?
Before, when he thought of Farima, he thought of her dark skin naked. He’d saved her from the Gruhazk, and she was grateful, and he was going to do something he shouldn’t. But the Intuint are all gone. They are gone and they were all just actors in the first place, so they’re doubly gone, and what is left is the embarrassment and shame of his belief.
From his mother’s room comes a mumbling, and a sleepy, high complaint, and then the rhythmic plunging of bedsprings. A shot would stop that. They would find him on the floor in a syrup of blood. His mother is weak and scatterbrained, but no matter what she’s ever done or not done, she will be hurt and sorry.
He’s not worried that they will come out and see him playing with the gun, because he can dematerialize instantly, with the pull of a finger. And what will Ruth say then, and what will Mrs. Martin say? These thoughts are shameful, because enjoyed, almost in the way his sexual thoughts about Farima were shameful. And there has been the one death, of a man he doesn’t know except as a dark mist of fascination and horror surrounding Mrs. Martin, who called him Leonard in spite of his willful craziness. There is still a balance, but there is also the choice he now wearily makes, to put the revolver away, the black holster accepting it with a cold Gruhazk click, metal to metal.
Marsha is in the room off the kitchen, in the cigarette stink that seems to have entered every texture—books, curtains, rug, walls. She’s still looking for a note, a goodbye, anything. There’s the tape recorder she gave him for Christmas seven or eight years ago—he had the idea that he could dictate his book to himself, but that didn’t work. She finds the recorder on a shelf, uniformly whitened by dust. He used to keep notebooks, but the latest ones she can find are dated more than a year ago, and have to do with his novel—mostly questions to himself. Anything he might have mailed to her would be here by now. They’ve never made out wills, so they’ve never had a safedeposit box. It looks more and more as if he just didn’t bother to say anything to her at all, and it makes her seem so worthless.
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