Novelties & Souvenirs

by John Crowley

  “I sent a message,” he said. “Didn’t you get it?”

  “No,” she said. “I never go to the terminals. You haven’t come to stay, have you?”

  “No,” he said. “No, of course not.”

  “You still have work, at the project?”

  “Yes.” If he had said no, would her face have darkened, or brightened? “It’s not the same work.”

  “Oh.”

  She had done nothing since he had known her but pose questions he could not answer, problems without solutions; why then did he hunger for her as though for answers, the answers that might unburden him? All at once his throat constricted, and he thought he might sob; he looked quickly around himself, away from Eva. “And you?” he said. “What will you do now?”

  Eva was coming near the end of her time at the crèche; she would soon have to decide what she would do next. She couldn’t return to work on any of the major projects whose people were housed in the agglomerate dormitories such as Hare and Willy lived in. There were cadre who lived outside such places, among the people, but for the most part they did work for which Eva wasn’t trained.

  She could also ask to be released from cadre: put off her clothes of Blue and join the people, and live however she could, as they did. She and Boy.

  “What will you do?” Hare said again, because she hadn’t answered; perhaps she hadn’t heard him. Eva only looked down at Boy absorbed in opening the tetrahedron. For a moment it seemed to Hare she resembled the statue of the crowned woman in the cathedral. Ave Eva.

  “It might be,” he said, “that they would have work for you here, if you asked for it. For another year or more. So that you could stay on here. Isn’t that so?”

  Boy had turned and stood between his mother’s legs, lifting the tetrahedron to her, patient to be helped. Eva only laughed, and picked him up.

  “Would you want to do that?” he asked. And just then Boy, in Eva’s arms, reached out for him, gleefully, and clambered from his mother to Hare.

  The first thing Hare perceived was the boy’s weight, much greater than he had expected from the compact miniature body; yet heavy as he was he seemed to fit neatly within Hare’s lap and the compass of his arms, as though they were made to go together—which they were, in a way, Hare thought. The second thing he perceived was Boy’s odor, a subtle but penetrating odor that widened Hare’s nostrils, an odor of skin in part and a sweetness Hare couldn’t name. He could almost not resist thrusting his face into the crook of Boy’s neck to drink it in.

  Eva had begun to talk of her life at the crèche. It was tedious, she said, and every day was much like every other, but she had come to prefer it to the city. All summer, she said, she had worked in the gardens, learning the work with a man who had been a long time in the country, working with the people. He was someone who couldn’t be predicted, she said, just as she was herself such a person; someone outside the predictions that were made for everyone, for every person. She had liked talking with him, hearing about other ways of life in other places, other possibilities; after work they had often gone walking with Boy, in the evenings that had seemed to her so huge and vacant here, quiet, as though waiting to be filled.

  “As though you could step into them and keep walking away forever,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Yes.” But Hare had not been listening; he had been hearing Boy, and feeling him, the solidity of him in his lap. He had begun to imagine what it would be like to live here, as Eva and Boy did. He thought of the passage of days, the work that there would be to do—work which Hare had never done but which he could just now imagine doing. Have you come to stay? Eva had asked him, as though it were possible he might. He was Boy’s father, after all; he had a place here with him, too. Perhaps, if he did, if he came to stay with Eva and Boy, he might in the course of a year recover the balance he had lost, shake off the lethargy that bound him.

  “Would you want to do that?” he asked again.

  “Do what?”

  “Stay here. If you could.”

  She looked at Hare as though he had said something not quite intelligible. “I’m not going to stay here,” she said.

  “Where are you going?” Hare asked.

  “I’m going,” Eva said. “They can’t have me any longer.”

  “But where?” Hare insisted. “What city? What town? Are you going to look for another project? Are you going to give up Blue?”

  She had begun to shake her head, easily but certainly rejecting each of these possibilities. It would not be, her face seemed to say, anything that could be predicted.

  “Eva,” Hare said. “You know you can’t just…just fall out of the universe.” He had begun to experience an awful swooning vertigo. “You can’t, you can’t. You’ll be alone, you…”

  “I won’t be alone.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I told you,” Eva said. “I told you about him. I was telling you all about him. Weren’t you listening?”

  “Oh,” Hare said. “I see.”

  “You tell me there’s no place to go. But there has to be.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant—”

  “There has to be,” Eva said, looking away.

  Hare sat still and said nothing further, but it seemed at that moment that the color began to be drained from everything that he looked at: the fruits and orange gourds on the tables, the people in Blue, the colored tiles of the floor. The boy he held, who had a moment ago seemed as large as himself, no, larger, seemed to grow small, distant within his arms, a foreign thing, something not connected to him at all, like a stone. He looked up. Had the sun gone behind clouds? No, it still shone. Where did this awful chill come from? “It’s not what I meant,” he said again, but did not hear himself speak it; he could only marvel at what had happened, what had happened and would not cease happening. Boy fell silent, and slipped out of his arms to the floor.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said, and stood abruptly. “I’d better go.”

  Both Boy and Eva were looking at him, curious and not unkind, not kind either; not anything. Their faces were stones or closed doors, the faces of those at accidents or public quarrels. Hare thought he would see such faces if he were to die in the street.

  “Do you want to go to the infirmary?” Eva asked.

  “No. I’ll go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll go,” Hare said. “I’ll go. I’ll go. I’ll go.”

  He had thought it was just a story he was being told, about working in the gardens, about summer evenings, empty and vast. He hadn’t listened carefully; he hadn’t known that there would come this sickening reversal of figure and ground, showing him a story he had not suspected, that he was all unready for. Nothing had been as he thought it was; he had walked into what was the case as into a truck’s path.

  Hare stood at the crossroads awaiting the trucks returning from the farmlands to the city. The strange gray blindness that had afflicted him at the cadre crèche had not passed, nor had the dreadful stonelike weight in his chest. He patted his chest as he stood waiting, trying to press it down. He thought perhaps he would go to the infirmary when he returned.

  It was true what he told her, though, what he knew about heterarchy and she did not, that it was limitless, that it could not be got outside of, that to think about it as though it had an inside and an outside was a kind of pain, the pain of error that is fruitless, unnecessary, because self-inflicted: this conviction that by choice or by some dreadful mistake it is possible to fall out of the universe. Hare knew (it was all that he had ever tried to make her see) that it was not possible to fall out of the universe.

  He thought of her and Boy and the man they were going away with. His thought followed them into a featureless stony landscape, without weather or air, under a vault of dun sky. Forever and ever would they be there.

  He tried to draw breath deeply, but the painful bolus beneath his stern
um seemed to prevent it; he could not get the air he needed.

  Perhaps he would die. He wasn’t old, but he seemed to be suffering some irreversible debility that quickened almost daily. He could not clearly remember, but he thought he had not really been well since the time when he was a boy and had cut off his penis.

  No, that was a dream. Wasn’t it? Yes, of course it was. With horror Hare realized that for some hours he had actually been assuming it to be so: that he had done such a thing and was now living with the consequences.

  No. He wasn’t truly ill. It was only this weather oppressing him, airless and chill, this close vault of dirty sky. He was grievously thirsty. Perhaps he would die.

  The trucks surprised Hare, appearing suddenly past sundown; apparently he had been standing and waiting for hours without noticing time pass. He waved. The truck that stopped to pick him up was not the one that had brought him out; the young people who helped him in were not the same, were not the cheerful boys and girls who had sung children’s songs and talked and laughed. These looked at Hare in silence, their faces in the twilight pale and reserved.

  Hare thought he should explain himself to them. Perhaps he could ask them for help. He opened his mouth, but his throat was so dry and constricted that no words came out; he gaped foolishly, he supposed, but no one smiled. He forced his throat to open, and a gout of language came out that Hare did not intend or even understand.

  He had better not talk more, he thought. He sought for a place to sit down; the silent young people drew away from him as he crept toward the shelter of the cab. He supposed that after all no one had heard the nonsense he had spoken, not over the noise of the truck’s engine: an awful imploding roar that grew steadily worse, sucking the air from Hare’s mouth and the thoughts from his head. He leaned against the cab, his hand hanging loosely over his knee; with his thumbnail he flicked the fragment of cigarette he held between his fingers. He was certain now that he would die of his old wound, or, far worse, that he would live forever. Forever and ever. “Ave Eva,” he said, and a woman laughed. Hare laughed, too. The words seemed the only thing that could relieve his thirst. Ave Eva, he said again, or thought he said, unable any longer to hear himself under the withering roar Ave Eva. Ave Eva. Ave Eva. Ave Eva.

  The committee had high seats behind a long desk. This was not so that they sat above those who came before them to be examined—Hare’s guard explained this to Hare—but so that everyone in the room could see them clearly. The committee leader had a seat on one side, and before her she had some dossiers and some things taken from Hare’s room, including the sketches of old buildings and the attempts Hare had made to decipher their inscriptions. Hare found it hard to recognize these things; when the committee leader held up a sketch and asked Hare if he had made it, he couldn’t answer. He tried to answer; he opened his mouth to answer, but could not make an answer come out.

  The committee was patient. They listened to testimony about Hare, what he had done, how he had been found. They rested their cheeks in their hands, or they leaned back in their chairs with their hands folded in their laps; they asked gentle, unsurprised questions of the people who came before them, trying to get a clear story. When there seemed to be a contradiction, they would ask Hare what had happened. Hare opened his mouth to answer; he thought he could answer, possible answers occurred to him, then other possibilities, opening and branching like coincidence-magnitude calculations, switching figure and ground. Still he thought he could answer, if he could only say everything at once, describe or state the whole situation, the whole act-field, at once; but he could not, so he only struggled for a while with open mouth while the committee waited, watching him. Then they returned to questioning the others.

  The two women who lived in the dormitory room next to Hare described how he had got into their room late at night: how he had forced his way in, though talking all the time very strangely and gently, about how he meant them no harm, wanted only to explain. They told (interrupting each other, finishing each other’s sentences, until the committee head had to speak sharply to them) of their fear and confusion, of how they had tried to get out of the room, how Hare had prevented them. A torn nightdress was shown to the committee. The committee talked among themselves about attempted rape, asking questions that embarrassed the two women, but asking them so gently that answers were got at last.

  Some others from the dormitory described how they had come to the women’s room, and their struggle with Hare. They were eager to explain how or why it was that they had let Hare go, had not apprehended him and taken him then and there to security or to the committee representative. The committee head, not interested in hearing this, kept guiding the witnesses back to the facts of Hare’s struggle: what weapons he had had, how he had behaved, what he had said.

  Willy came in. He wanted to go and stand next to Hare, but the committee asked him to stand where the other witnesses had stood; and all through his story he kept looking at Hare, as though pleading with him to say something, to behave in some way that Willy understood. Hare saw that Willy’s hands shook, and he wanted to take his hand, to say something to calm him, but he couldn’t move. His guard sat behind him with his hands in his lap and probably wouldn’t have prevented his going to Willy or speaking to him, Hare thought; but he couldn’t do it, any more than he could answer the committee’s questions.

  Much of Willy’s story was taken up with how tired and upset Hare had been before this incident, the bad dreams he had had, the troubles at the project. Hare couldn’t remember any of the things Willy told about—any more than he could remember going into the women’s room, or fighting with the people in the dormitory—but it seemed to him that the more that Willy, with every kind intention, tried to explain away Hare’s behavior, the worse it looked to the committee. It sounded as if Willy knew something really terrible about Hare, and out of love was covering it up.

  But Willy had once said to Hare that he knew all about him, and there wasn’t anything terrible.

  Hare wanted to say that, more in Willy’s defense somehow than his own, but he could not.

  Then, as Willy told about going out after Hare, and searching the city for him, Hare began to remember something of the events that were being told to the committee. In the same way that a dream that is forgotten on waking can be brought into the mind, disconnected but vivid, by some event of the day, some word or sight, Hare caught sight of bits of the story he had been in. When Willy told of finding him at last, huddled on the wide steps of the building whose inscription he had copied out, he remembered. Not how he had come to be there, or what had happened to him before, but that alone: Willy’s hand on his shoulder, Willy’s face before him, speaking to him. And he knew also, with a deep horror that deafened him to the committee’s further proceedings, that that had not happened yesterday, or the day before, but weeks ago; and he remembered nothing at all of what had happened between then and now.

  The committee leader was speaking, summing up the committee’s findings. The case was really out of their provenance, she thought, and should probably not have been brought before the committee. She asked Hare if he had anything further to say.

  The guard behind Hare leaned forward and tapped Hare’s shoulder. Hare stood.

  “Do you have anything you want to say?” the committee leader said again, patiently and without insistence.

  “It’s hard,” Hare said. This came out of his mouth as though it were a stone he had dislodged from his throat, not like something he had decided to say. “It’s very hard!”

  He looked at the faces in the room, the committee, his neighbors, Willy. He knew, suddenly, that they would understand: they must, for they were all engaged with Hare in this hard thing together. “We all know how hard it is,” he said. “The work of the Revolution. To grasp its principles isn’t easy. To live them isn’t easy. I’ve tried hard. We all have.” They would understand how he had stumbled, they must; they would help him to rise. Together, in the face of the awful dif
ficulties of the Revolution, they would go on. If he could lean on them, then as soon as he regained his feet, he could try again to be someone on whom others leaned. He smiled, and waited for their smile in return. “It’s hard, always grappling with these difficulties. Act-field theory: that’s hard to think about.” He shook his head in self-deprecation. “Oh, I know. And the duties of cadre. The duty to understand. The committee knows how hard it is; everyone knows. I only want to say that I’ve tried. I want the committee to understand that. The committee understands. You understand.”

  He stopped talking. The circle of faces around him had not changed. It watched him with what seemed to him a terrible reserve, and something like pity. He knew he had not been recognized. He said, to the calm, closed face of the committee head: “Don’t you think it’s hard?”

  “No,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t.”

  Frankly. Hare could not stand up any longer; his knees were unable to support him. Frankly. She had spoken with that remote, unmoved concern, the remote concern with which an adult will speak to a child in moral difficulties, difficulties the adult doesn’t feel; without anger, with some impatience, without collusion: collusion would be inappropriate. Hare knew himself to be absolutely alone.

  He had stopped speaking. After a moment the committee head gave the committee’s resolution. Hare was to be remanded to a hospital. The committee head said she was sure that with rest and attention, Hare would return to normal. When he was better, they might have another meeting, and consider what amends Hare might be able to make for his behavior, if any were thought to be necessary then. Her last words to Hare were the usual formula spoken at the end of committee deliberations, when disposition of someone’s case was made. She said: “Did you hear that?”

  In the spring, discharged from the hospital, Hare was given a paper with an address on it, an address in an older part of the city where he had used to go often, to look at buildings.