The Night Ocean

by Paul La Farge

  Despite his aversion to danger, Tudhope had ended up with one of the war’s riskier jobs: driving a crocodile, a flame-throwing tank. “The Mof were scared of those fuckers, and for good reason,” he said. “We grilled ’em by the dozen. In houses and out-of-doors. You don’t even know what can burn until you’ve shot the cannon of a crocodile.” “What about Kip?” I asked. “Drummond?” Tudhope sucked his teeth. “Well, that stank. We were up by Rastede”—a town in northern Germany, through which I had also passed—“when we got word to stand down. We were most of us too fucking tired to care. But Drummond said, I’m going out to organize us drinks. He walked into the woods and some Germans in the next valley shot him. They hadn’t heard the war was over, apparently.” “Oh.” “What about you? Sink any more of the German Navy?” Over many drinks, I told Tudhope where I’d been, and what I’d done. Tudhope grinned. “Fuck me, Leo, you’re the luckiest man I know.”

  10.

  Spinks stretched his interlaced palms toward me and cracked his knuckles. “I’ve been sitting for quite a long time,” he said. “My physical therapist would be furious.” He took his cane from where it was propped by the windowsill, and stood up slowly. The room was dim. The sun had set, and the last red-gold light was draining out of the sky over the bay. “He wants me to walk for thirty minutes a day,” Spinks said, “but the truth is, even that is getting to be too much. Will you join me?” I followed him down the shadowy hall, out of the house, into the street. The air was pleasantly warm. Barn swallows swooped around, vacuuming up bugs. “What happened to Luiza?” I asked. “Did you see her again?” “Remember your promise, Dr. Willett,” Spinks said. He squeezed my forearm. His grip was very strong. We kept on and stopped at the top of a hill that led down to the water. “I think this is as far as I go,” Spinks said. Far out in the bay, a motorboat threw up a violet wake. We watched it for a while, then Spinks said, “I’m sure your husband is alive.” “How are you sure?” I asked. “Because that’s the kind of person he is,” Spinks said. “He struck me as someone who was unlikely to give up on anything.” Well, that was true. Charlie hadn’t even given up on Spinks. Suddenly, I was uneasy. “I should go,” I said. “I have a ticket for the sunset cruise.” “Ah, the sunset cruise,” Spinks said. Clearly he knew I was lying. “Too bad. I was hoping you might stay for dinner.” “No, sorry,” I said. “It’s all right,” Spinks said. We made our slow way back, and at the foot of his porch steps, Spinks stopped again. “Come earlier tomorrow,” he said. “I still have a lot to tell you.” He went up the steps and vanished into the house.

  I walked up Waubeek Street and climbed Belvedere Avenue. There was a little park overlooking the bay, its multitude of islands black against the sunset. A seaplane came in for a landing and taxied to the dock. It was a pretty town, I thought. I ate dinner in a fancy-ish restaurant overlooking the mouth of the Seguin River, and went back to my B&B, which was unfortunately situated beside the Canadian Pacific viaduct. I checked my recorder to be sure I had captured Spinks’s story, and wondered again what Charlie might have learned from it. I thought about going through the recording and making notes, but I was too tired, and anyway, I thought, it would be better to do that in New York, when I had some literal and figurative distance from L. C. Spinks. I slept badly. Part of it was the train, which thundered overhead like a war; but I was also frightened by Parry Sound and what I was doing there. I felt like I had put myself in danger, although I couldn’t say what the danger was. As soon as it was light, I jogged down Gibson Street to the bay. I ran past a pizza restaurant and the Bobby Orr Hall of Fame, a modernist metal barn with an ambitious parking lot; then I picked up a walking trail that cut through the woods on the town’s western shore. A hundred yards down the trail, there was a monument to the soldiers of the Algonquin Regiment who had died in the war. I scanned it for the names Spinks had mentioned and found them: Robert Ellenwood, Kip Drummond. It was strange to see Spinks’s story fact-checked in stone. I realized, after a moment, that I was relieved: I wanted to believe Spinks. And that, I thought, was the danger.

  At eight thirty, I was back at the house on Waubeek Street, all business. Spinks let me in. He, too, looked as though he’d had a bad night. His cheeks were unshaven and purplish, like maybe he had been drinking. But he was wearing a fresh outfit, a navy shirt with a Byron collar, and pressed white slacks. I followed him down the hall, past the intriguingly open door of his book-filled study, to the kitchen. “Would you like coffee?” Spinks asked. I held up my to-go cup. “Some eggs? I make very good scrambled eggs.” “No, thanks,” I said, then I felt bad for being so curt. “I went for a run this morning,” I said. “I saw the Algonquin memorial.” “Yes, they just put it up,” Spinks said. “People here still make a fuss about the war, probably because so little has happened since.” He sat in his usual place at the kitchen table and rubbed his temples. “Shall we begin?” he asked.

  That spring, Spinks said, I began to see Parry Sound the way Luiza had seen it. I lived in a small, provincial town, full of sober Scotch-Irish shopkeepers whose great misery was the unplowed snow in the streets, and whose great delight was the annual fur sale at Florence’s Finery. It would have been cruel to bring my wife back from Edmonton. Charlotte tried, tactfully, to show me all the ways in which my situation had improved now that Luiza was gone. I could get a good night’s sleep! I could go to the Saturday concerts at Hagan’s Hall! She didn’t go so far as to suggest that I take her to the concerts, but if I had invited her, I think she would gladly have accepted. I dreamed of writing stories again, but didn’t write a word. By day, I worked mechanically in the hardware store; at night, I lay awake, listening to clods of snow thunder off the roof and detonate in our backyard. I might have gone on like that forever if I hadn’t received a letter from Wollheim. The Futurian Literary Science Society had broken up, he wrote. He wouldn’t bother me with the details. Suffice it to say that some of the ex-Futurians were very angry with him, even though the situation was all their fault. They were mailing defamatory letters to everyone in fandom, and Wollheim worried that I might have got one. I wrote back that his reputation in Canada was unsullied, and by the way, had the breakup left any of the Futurians with an extra room? Wollheim’s reply was brief: If you’re thinking of coming to New York, he wrote, why don’t you get in touch with Doc Lowndes? I regard him as a traitor, but I hear he’s looking for a roommate. He was; and in early May, I told Charlotte I was going back to New York. She pretended to think it was for the best: “You have so many friends in New York, Leo!” Then she implored me not to stay away too long. Her health was poor. She had terrible constipation, and arthritis in both knees. I shrank from her last selfish kisses and got on a southbound bus.

  The city I returned to was very different from the one I had left seven years earlier. The buildings were grimier; instead of the automated expressways of the Futurama exhibit at the World’s Fair, a somber parade of whalelike vehicles crept along West Street. Doc Lowndes lived on Eleventh Street, in Greenwich Village. He, too, had changed: the red-shirted gypsy of 1939 was now a chubby bachelor with pipe and dressing gown, who lived among stuffed armchairs and Axminster rugs. He edited a magazine called Crack Detective, listened to classical music, and swore the Communist Party was a plot to turn healthy Americans into robots. Four times a week, he went to see Dr. Fish, a Reichian analyst on Twelfth Street, who was teaching him how to liberate his body from the psychic armor in which it was imprisoned. He told me the story of the Futurians’ rupture: Wollheim had expelled Pohl for being too bourgeois, and Kornbluth quit. The end came when Wollheim ordered Johnny Michel to break up with his girlfriend, a fellow Futurian named Judy Zissman, on the grounds that she was a Trotskyite. Judy called the society’s remaining members to arms, and they expelled Wollheim on the grounds that he was a manipulative bastard who wanted everyone to be as miserable as he was.

  Now the Futurians were scattered: Wollheim and his wife, Elsie, lived in Forest Hills, where, it was rumore
d, they had a sunken living room. Asimov was in Boston, teaching chemistry and becoming famous. Michel was on Fourth Street. Pohl lived on Grove Street, with a Florida girl named Dorothy, an ex-WAC who wanted to make it as a screenwriter. “What about Doris?” I asked. I was so excited, it was like being afraid. “Remarried,” Lowndes said, “to an artiste named Owens. They have produced an offspring and retreated with it to the wilds of Long Island.” “Oh,” I said. “When did they get married?” “I believe it was in Forty-two,” Lowndes said. “In love with Doris, were we?” “No,” I said. In 1942, I had been stationed in Newfoundland, guarding the Botwood harbor and getting drunk on a vile local distillate called screech. How could Doris have fallen in love with someone else when I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it? “Don’t bother denying it,” Lowndes said. “Analysis has made me keenly empathic. And besides, who wasn’t in love with Doris?” “What should I do?” I asked. “My dear,” Lowndes said, with a smile so tender that it could only have been contemptuous, “remember, you are now a resident of the Village.”

  So I was. I consoled myself for the absence of Doris in all the bars within staggering distance of Lowndes’s apartment, and there were many. In six weeks I dated a painter, an ex-dancer who had married an accountant, and two NYU students, one of whom was studying French and the other, anthropology. I caught gonorrhea and lost the last traces of my Canadian prudishness. All in all, I wasn’t much happier than I had been in Parry Sound. I had hoped that I’d be able to write in New York, but when I sat at my little desk in Lowndes’s back bedroom, I had no idea where to begin. Anything I could invent would be too flimsy, and everything I remembered was too sad. I tried to see Wollheim, but he was working at Avon Books and didn’t have time for me. Pohl didn’t return my calls. I did, however, manage to see Michel, by the simple expedient of visiting him in person. His building was, like all the others on his block, gray, with the rudiments of a grocery downstairs and silver cans of uncollected garbage huddled by the stoop. He answered the door with an angry “What?” but when I told him who it was he opened right away. “Leo! Hermano! I’d shake your hand, but I have to be careful. G-germs.” I was surprised at how much he had aged. His sandy hair had climbed his forehead, and his face had swollen up and turned an unhealthy pink. His two-room apartment was neat to the point of sadness: bare floor, tidy piles of books pushed against a wall on which hung one of Michel’s own paintings, of a red square balanced on a swerve in a landscape of lightly crackled white. The tabletop squeaked under my finger. “It does me g-good to see you,” Michel said. “Spinks of the old days. In thirty-eight the sky was red, and Gernsback rumbled overhead,” he half sang, forgetting that I hadn’t been around in 1938. He poured us each a drink. “Where have you b-b-been?” he asked. I answered briefly. Michel was impressed. “What we need, Spinks, are more people like you, who say what they mean and aren’t afraid t-to fight.”

  We got through the bottle, and I was ready to go home, but Michel threw on a corduroy jacket and insisted that we go for a drink at Goody’s, on Sixth Avenue. The bar was nearly empty, and we took a table at the back. Michel talked angrily about how science fiction was dead. “It’s pure bullshit, emphasis on pure,” he said. “I’m not kidding myself. I write aviation stories now. Tom Trouble and His B-big B-b-bomber. I save the political stuff for Mike Gold at New Masses.” He coughed. “I wonder if anything would have been different if we had won.” “Won what?” I asked, perplexed. “Jesus, Spinks, the c-c-convention. You were th-there.” I listened with amazement while Michel unreeled his theory. It was a given, he said, that for the last decade, science had only been catching up with science fiction. We had the atomic bomb already, and television, and the Radar-Range. Next would be ray guns, space rockets, space suits. “Not flying cars?” I asked. “Who cares?” Michel said. “The underlying situation won’t be any d-different. We’ll all be slaving away, saving up to buy the new gadget. Does your flying car have V-venusian leather seats? Does it have a three-speed f-fan? Did you know Pohl is an a-adman now?” I hadn’t heard that. “He works on Madison Avenue,” Michel said. “It makes me s-sick to think of what we could have been.”

  If only the Futurians had seized control of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, he said, we might have changed the world. “You really think?” I said. “Of course I think!” Michel said. He was furious. “Who reads science fiction, Leo? Scientists! They g-get their ideas from us!” To hear Michel tell it, if we had defeated the fascists in 1939, we wouldn’t be living under their iron heel now. “I thought we did defeat the fascists,” I said, doubtfully. To me, too, it seemed that our victory had been less resounding than it might have been: we had won the war, but we had not been able to restore some vital quality that the world had lost. Michel smirked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “haven’t you h-h-heard of J. Edgar Hoover? Jesus, Spinks, we’re probably under surveillance right now.” He told me that the members of the Communist Party were all being wiretapped, and had been for months. “Any d-d-day now they’re going to r-round us up,” he said. “They’ll p-p-put us in the internment camps where they had the Japanese.” He smacked the table. “Leo, we f-fucked up!”

  I saw Michel again a couple of weeks later. As before, we ended up at Goody’s, and we were talking about more or less the same things when a pallid man in a trench coat crept up on us. “Are you gentlemen interested in some atemporal fun?” he asked. I had never heard a dope pusher use the word atemporal before. “What have you got?” I asked. He stuck his hand into his pocket and it came up with two yellow cardboard tubes. “Morphine syrettes,” he said. “Four dollars each.” “Take a hike,” I said, but Michel stopped him. “How about f-five dollars for b-both,” he said. “Sold,” the stranger said. Michel looked in his wallet, which was empty. I paid the stranger and took the syrettes. “What’s with that?” I asked. Michel grinned. “I’ve got a b-bad b-b-back. Come on.” We went into the men’s room, which smelled of urine and sweat and something old and entombed. Michel pulled me into a stall and shut the door. “How do you use it?” I asked. The syrettes were like tubes of toothpaste with needles on the cap; you pushed a pin down through the cap, stuck the needle in your arm, and squeezed the tube. Almost immediately, there was a loose feeling in my calves, which spread up the back of my legs. I felt like I was floating in warm salt water. I pulled the syrette out of my arm and pressed my finger on the blood that welled up. Michel hadn’t got that far. He leaned against the stall with his eyes closed. “Johnny.” I took out his needle and pulled down his sleeve. “You all right?” “Mm,” Michel said. “You faggots finished in there?” someone asked, not unkindly. I flushed the syrettes and got us back into the bar. The stranger in the trench coat sat with us. His name was Lee, he said. He told us that, in his opinion, the purpose of morphine was to escape from the system of human time, which, like psychoanalysis, advertising, and the Ford system, was intended to keep human beings in chattel slavery. He talked and talked, and what he said must have made an impression on me because in the end I did escape from time. I was sitting on the shore of a lake, looking for the shadow of a boat. My eyes hurt. My brother was out there, on the water, and my mother was standing beside me, wearing a brown dress. She, too, was looking at the water. Then she turned and hurried back up the path. “Where are you going?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. And my brother, where was my brother?

  I wanted to sleep, but someone had to keep watch. I forced myself to sit up. I was in the back of Goody’s, and Michel slumped against my arm. Lee was gone. We were going to have trouble getting home, I thought. We would have to take a train to Antwerp, and wait for a ship. Then we’d take another train . . . “Hey!” I shook Michel’s shoulder. “What,” he said. “Are you all right?” I asked. “I don’t know,” Michel said. “We should go,” I said. I tried to stand up, but all I could do was sit and hope that my brother would come by. I looked anxiously at each person who went past our table. These, I thought, were the dead: a parade of the dea
d. The god who rules the underworld had ordered them to march past me. “You can have anyone you recognize,” he told me, laughing. I sat up as straight as I could. If I closed my eyes for even a moment, someone I loved might pass, and I would lose that person forever. But the parade was endless. Why did I agree to this deal? You can’t bargain with the god of the underworld; he always wins! What was worse, to make sure that I didn’t save anyone, the god had given each dead person a false name, which was very terrible indeed, because names, as I understood, in that moment, are the channels by which spirits move from one body to another. You can’t have anyone back unless you know his name. I watched and waited and finally I fell asleep. When I woke up, Michel lay with his head in my lap. There was a puddle of vomit on the floor and streaks of it on the legs of my pants and my shoes. Amazingly, it seemed to be only ten p.m. I groaned. “Johnny. Wake up.” With the Negro busboy’s disgusted help, I got him to his feet. Sixth Avenue was as black and vast as the space between the stars. I carried Michel home and deposited him on his bed. I tried to untie his shoes, and gave up. I went home and found Lowndes in an armchair, reading manuscripts. Elgar came mournfully from the record player. “Good grief,” Lowndes said, rising. “Leo, where have you been?” “Tell me your name,” I said. “Robert Lowndes,” Lowndes said. “No, your real name,” I said. I lay on the sofa and closed my eyes.