Six
Staunt did not feel up to having dinner in the community dining room; he had had a long journey, crossing several time zones, and his appetite was awry. He ordered a light meal, juice and soup and fruit, and it arrived almost instantaneously via a subterranean conveyor system. He ate sparingly. Before I Go, he promised himself, I will have steak au poivre again, and escargots, and a curry of lamb, and all the other things I never cared much for while I was young enough to digest them. James offers me a chance; why not take it? I will become a pre-posthumous gourmet. Even if it kills me. Better to Go like that than by drinking whatever tasteless potion it is they give you at the end.
After dinner he asked where Bollinger was.
“Mr. Bollinger has gone home,” Staunt was told. “But he’ll be back the day after tomorrow. He’ll spend three days a week with you while you’re here.”
Staunt supposed it was unreasonable of him to expect his Guide to devote all his time to him. But Bollinger might at least have stayed around for the first night. Unless the idea was to have the Departing One make his own adaptation to life in the House of Leavetaking.
He toyed with his data terminal, testing its resources. For a while he amused himself by pulling obscure music from the machine: medieval organs, Hummel sonatas, eighteenth-century German opera, odd electronic things from the middle of the twentieth century. But it was impossible to win that game; apparently, if the music had ever been recorded, the computer had access to it. Staunt turned next to books, asking for Hobbes and Hallam, Montaigne and Jonson—not screenings but actual printout copies of his own, and within minutes after he placed the requisitions the fresh crisp sheaves of pages began arriving on the same conveyor that had brought his dinner. He put the books aside without looking through them. Perhaps some telephone calls, he thought: my daughter, maybe, or a friend or two. But everyone he knew seemed to live in the East or in Europe, and it was some miserable early hour of the morning there. Staunt gave up the idea of talking to anyone. He dropped into a dull leaden mood. Why had he come to these three little plastic rooms in the desert, giving up his fine well-tended house, his treasures of art, his dogwoods, his books? Surrendering everything for this sterile halfway station on the road to death? I could call Dr. James, I suppose, and tell him I’d like to Go right now. Save the staff some trouble, save the taxpayers some money, save my family the bother of going through the Farewell rituals. How is Going managed, anyway? He believed it was a drug. Something sweet and pleasant, and then the body goes to sleep. A tranquil death, like Socrates’, just a chill climbing quickly through the legs toward the heart. Tonight. Tonight. To Go tonight.
No.
I must play the game properly. I must do my Going with style.
He turned to the terminal and said, “I’d like someone to show me down to the recreation center.”
Miss Elliot, the nurse, appeared, as though she had been stored waiting in a box just outside his suite. So far as Staunt still had the capacity to tell, she was a handsome girl, golden-haired and buxom, with fine clear skin and large glossy blue eyes, but there was something remote and impersonal and mechanical about her; she could almost have been a robot. “The recreation center? Certainly, Mr. Staunt.” She offered her arm. He gestured as if to refuse it, but then, remembering his earlier struggle to walk, took it anyway, and leaned heavily on her as they went out. Thus I accept my mortality. Thus I speed my final decline.
A dropshaft took them into an immense, brightly lit area somewhere far underground. There was a moving slidewalk here; Miss Elliot guided him onto it and they trundled along a few hundred yards, to a step-off turntable that fed him smoothly into the recreation center.
It was a good-sized room, divided chapel-fashion at its far end into smaller rooms. Staunt saw screens, data terminals, playback units, and other access equipment, all of it duplicating what every Departing One had in his own suite. But of course they came here out of loneliness; it might be more comforting to do one’s reading or listening in public, he thought. There also were games of various kinds suitable for the very old, nothing that required any great degree of stamina or coordination: stochastic chess, polyrhythmers, double-orbit, things like that. We slide into childhood on our way to the grave.
There were about fifty Departing Ones in the center, he guessed. Most of them looked as old as the four who had met his copter earlier in the day; a few, frighteningly, seemed even older. Some looked much younger, no more than seventy or eighty. Staunt thought at first they might be Guides, but he saw on their faces a certain placid slackness that seemed common to all these Departing Ones, a look of dim mindless content, of resignation, of death-in-life. Evidently, one did not have to be heavily stricken in years to feel the readiness to Go.
“Shall I introduce you to some of the other Departing Ones?” Miss Elliot asked.
“Please. Yes.”
She took him around. This is Henry Staunt, she said again and again. The famous composer. And she told him their names. He recognized none of them. David Golding, Michael Green, Ella Freeman, Seymour Church, Katherine Parks. Names. Withered faces. Miss Elliot supplied no identifying tags for any of them, as she had done for him; no “Ella Freeman the famous actress,” no “David Golding the famous astronaut,” no “Seymour Church the famous financier.” They had not been actresses or astronauts or financiers. God alone knew what they had been; Miss Elliot wasn’t saying, and Staunt found himself without the energy to ask. Accountants, stockbrokers, housewives, teachers, programmers. Anything. Nothing. Just people. Ordinary people. Survivors from previous geological epochs. So old, so old, so old. In hardly any of them could Staunt detect the glimmer of life, and he saw for the first time how fortunate he had been to reach this great old age of his intact. The walking dead. Seymour Church the famous zombie. Katherine Parks the famous somnambulist. None of them seemed ever to have heard of him. Staunt was not surprised at that; even a famous composer learns early in life that he will be famous only among a minority of his countrymen. But still, those blank looks, those unfocused eyes. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Stout. How d’ye do, Mr. Stint. Hello. Hello. Hello.
“Have you met some interesting people?” Miss Elliot said, passing close to Staunt half an hour later.
“I’m more tired than I thought,” Staunt said. “Perhaps you should take me back to my suite.”
Already the names of the other Departing Ones were slipping from his mind. He had had brief, fragmentary conversations with six or seven of them, but they could not keep their minds on what they were saying, and neither, he discovered, could he. A terrible fatigue that he had never known before was settling over him. Senility must be contagious, he decided. Thirty minutes among the Departing Ones and I am as they are. I must get away.
Miss Elliot guided him to his room. Mr. Falkenbridge, the orderly, appeared unbidden, helped him undress, and put him to bed. Staunt lay awake a long time in the unfamiliar bed, his tense mind ticking relentlessly. A time-zone problem, he thought. He was tempted to ask for a sedative, but as he searched for the strength to sit up and ring for Miss Elliot, sleep suddenly captured him and drew him down into a pit of darkness.
Seven
In the next few days he managed to get to know some of the others. It was a task he imposed on himself. Throughout his life Staunt had negotiated, sometimes with difficulty, the narrow boundary between reserve and snobbery, trying to keep to himself without seeming to reject the company of others, and he was particularly eager not to withdraw into self-sufficiency at this time of all times. So he sought out his fellow Departing Ones and did what he could to scale the barriers separating them from him.
It was late in life to be making new friends, though. He found it hard to communicate much about himself to them or to draw from them anything of consequence beyond the bare facts of their lives. As he suspected, they were a dull lot, people who had never achieved anything in particular except longevity. Staunt did not hold that against them: he saw no reason why everyone had to
bubble with creativity, and he had deeply loved many whose only gifts had been gifts of friendship. But these people, coming now to the end of their days, were hollowed by time’s erosions, and there was so little left of them that even ordinary human warmth had been worn away. They answered his questions perfunctorily and rarely responded with questions of their own. “A composer? How nice. I used to listen to music sometimes.” He succeeded in discovering that Seymour Church had been living in the House of Leavetaking for eight months at his son’s insistence but did not want to Go; that Ella Freeman had had (or believed she had had) a love affair, more than a century ago, with a man who later became President; that David Golding had been married six times and was inordinately proud of it; that each of these Departing Ones clung to some such trifling biographical datum that gave him a morsel of individual identity. But Staunt was unable to penetrate beyond that one identifying datum; either nothing else was in them or they could not or would not reveal themselves to him. A dull lot, but Staunt was no longer in a position to choose his companions for their merits.
During his first week in Arizona most of the members of his family came to see him, beginning with Paul and young Henry, Crystal’s son. They stayed with him for two days. David, Crystal’s other son, arrived a little later, along with his wife, their children, and one of their grandchildren; then Paul’s two daughters showed up, and an assortment of youngsters. Everyone, even the young ones, wore sickly-sweet expressions of bliss. They were determined to look upon Staunt’s Going as a beautiful event. In their conversations with him they never spoke of Going at all, only of family gossip, music, springtime, flowers, reminiscences. Staunt played their game. He had no more wish for emotional turmoil than they did; he wanted to back amiably out of their lives, smiling and bowing. He was careful, therefore, not to imply in anything he said that he was shortly going to end his life. He pretended that he had merely come to this place in the desert for a brief vacation.
The only one who did not visit him, aside from a few great-grandchildren, was his daughter Crystal. When he tried to phone her, he got no reply. His callers avoided any mention of her. Was she ill, Staunt wondered? Dead, even? “What are you trying to hide from me?” he asked his son finally. “Where’s Crystal?”
“Crystal’s fine,” Paul said.
“That’s not what I asked. Why hasn’t she come here?”
“Actually she hasn’t been entirely well.”
“As I suspected. She’s seriously ill, and you think the shock of hearing about it will harm me.”
Paul shook his head. “It isn’t like that at all.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Visions of cancer, heart surgery, brain tumors. “Has she had some kind of transplant? Is she in a hospital?”
“It isn’t a physical problem. Crystal’s simply suffering from fatigue. She’s gone to Luna Dome for a rest.”
“I spoke to her last month,” Staunt said. “She looked all right then. I want the truth, Paul.”
“The truth.”
“The truth, yes.”
Paul’s eyes closed wearily for a moment, and in that moment Staunt saw his son for what he was, an old man, though not so old a man as he. After a pause Paul said in a flat, toneless voice, “The trouble is that Crystal hasn’t accepted your Going very well. I called her about it, right after you told me, and she became hysterical. She thinks you’re being hoodwinked, that your Guide is part of a conspiracy to do away with you, that your decision is at least ten or fifteen years premature. And she can’t speak calmly about it, so we felt it was best to get her away where she wasn’t likely to speak to you, to keep her from disturbing you. There. That’s the story. I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“Silly of you to hide it.”
“We didn’t want to spoil your Going with a lot of carrying on.”
“My Going won’t spoil that easily. I’d like to talk to her, Paul. She may benefit from whatever help I can give her. If I can make her see Going for what it really is—if I can convince her that her outlook is unhealthy—Paul, set up a call to Luna Dome for me, will you? The Fulfillment people will pay. Crystal needs me. I have to make her understand.”
“If you insist,” Paul said.
Somehow, though, technical problems prevented the placing of the call that day, and the next, and the one after that. And then Paul left the House of Leavetaking. When Staunt phoned him at home to find out where on the moon Crystal actually was, he became evasive and said that she had recently transferred from one sanatorium to another. It would be a few more days, Paul said, before the call could be placed. Seeing his son’s agitation, Staunt ceased pressing the issue. They did not want him to talk to Crystal. Crystal’s hysterics would ruin his Going, they felt. They would not give him the chance to soothe her. So be it. He could not fight them. This must be a difficult time for the whole family; if they wished to think that Crystal would upset him so terribly, he would let the matter drop, for a while. Perhaps he could speak to her later. There would be time before his Going. Perhaps. Perhaps.
Eight
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Martin Bollinger came to him, usually in midafternoon, an hour or so after lunch. Generally Staunt received his Guide in his suite, although sometimes, on the cooler days, they strolled together through the garden. Their meetings invariably fell into three well-defined segments. First, Bollinger would display lively interest in Staunt’s current activities. What books are you reading? Have you been listening to music? Are there any interesting Departing Ones for you to talk with? Is the staff taking good care of you? Do your relatives visit you often enough? Has the urge to compose anything come over you? Is there anyone you’d especially like to see? Are you thinking of traveling at all? And so on and so on, the same questions surfacing frequently.
When the questions were over, Bollinger would glide into the second phase, a conversation with a quiet autumnal tone, a recollection of vanished days. Sometimes he spoke as though Staunt had already Gone; he talked of Staunt’s compositions in the same way he might refer to those of some early master. The symphonies, Bollinger would say: what a testament, what a mighty cumulative structure, nothing like them since Mahler, surely. The quartets, obviously akin to Beethoven’s, yet thoroughly contemporary, true expressions of their composer and his times. And Staunt would nod, solemnly accepting Bollinger’s verdicts in curious, dreamy objectivity. They would talk of mutual friends in the same way, viewing them as closed books, as cubes rather than as living, evolving persons. Staunt saw that Bollinger was helping to place distance between him and the life he had lived. Already, he felt remote from that life. After several weeks in the House of Leavetaking he was coming to look upon himself more as someone who had very carefully studied Henry Staunt’s biography than as the actual living Staunt, the inhabitant of Staunt’s body.
The third phase of each meeting saw Bollinger turn quite frankly to matters directly related to Staunt’s Going. Constantly he pressed Staunt to examine his motives, and he avoided the false gentleness with which everyone else seemed to treat him. The Guide was pursuing truth. Do you truly wish to Go, Henry? If so, have you started to give thought to the date of your Leavetaking? Will you stay in the world another five weeks? Three months? Six? No, no one’s rushing you. Stay a year, if you want. I merely wonder if you’ve looked realistically, yet, at what it means to Go. Whether you comprehend your purpose in asking for it. Get behind the euphemism, Henry. Going is dying. The termination of all. For you, the end of the universe. Is this what you want, Henry? Is it? Is it? Is it? I’m not trying to make it harder for you. I’m trying to make it more pure. A truly spiritual Going, the rarest kind. But only if you’re ready. Are you aware that you can withdraw from the whole undertaking at any point? It isn’t cowardly to turn away from Going. See Hallam: Going isn’t suicide, it’s a sweet renunciation, properly reserved only for those who fully understand their motives. Anyone can kill himself in a fit of gloom. A proper going requires spiritual strength. Some people enroll
in a House of Leavetaking two, even three times before they can take that last step. Yes, they go through the entire ritual of Farewell, almost to the end—and then they say they want to go home, and we send them home. We never push. We are not interested in sending victims out of the world. Only volunteers whose eyes are open. Have you been reading Hallam, Henry? Our philosopher of death. Look into yourself before you leap. Ask yourself, Is this what I want?
“What I want is to Go,” Staunt would reply. But he could not tell Bollinger how long it would actually be before he would find himself ready to take his leave.
There seemed to be some pattern in this thrice-weekly pas de deux of conversation with his Guide. Bollinger appeared to be maneuvering him patiently and circuitously toward some sort of apocalyptic burst of joyful insight, a radiant moment of comprehension in which he would be able to say, feeling worthy of Hallam as he did, “Now I shall Go.” But the maneuvers did not seem successful. Often, Staunt came away from Bollinger confused and depressed, less certain than ever of his desire to Go.
By the fourth week most of his time was being given over to reading. Music had largely palled for him. His family, having made the obligatory first round of visits, had stopped coming; they would not return to the House of Leavetaking until word reached them that he was in the final phase of his Going and ready for his Farewell ceremony. He had said all he cared to say to his friends. The recreation center bored him and the company of the other Departing Ones chilled him. Therefore he read. At the outset, he went about it dutifully, mechanically, taking it up solely as a chore for the improvement of his mind in its final hours. Like an old pharaoh trying to repair his looks before he must be delivered into the hands of the mummifiers, Staunt meant to polish his soul with philosophy while he still had the chance. It was in that spirit that he plodded through Hobbes, whose political ideas had set him ablaze when he was nineteen and who merely seemed crabbed and sour now. It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much as accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? Growing up in a tense, bleak world of peace that was really war, Staunt had found it easy to accept Hobbes’ dark teachings. Now he was not so sure that the natural condition of mankind was a state of conflict, every man at war with every other man. Something had changed in the world, it seemed. Or in Staunt. He put Hobbes away in displeasure.
Something Wild is Loose - 1969–72 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Three Page 16