The man turned to her and his drink slipped from his knobby hand and shattered. A waiter hurried up with a towel and a dustpan while several other men called to him, Watch it, watch it.
I hate that creep. He’s not real.
The present Facilitator, who had never revealed his name, was a youngish frail man, very blond, who made hesitant gestures. The interviewer was Art Preston. He was dressed in coveralls and ear protectors but the Facilitator floated through the scene like an elf on the loose. In the background walls collapsed and fountains of dust rose in the air. They strolled along while the Facilitator discussed corruption, and why it was so hard to root it out, the mystery of it.
People know but they know they can’t say anything, he said. How we all wish that our private thoughts and public utterances should be one and the same. We think things but we keep them hidden. But someday, yes, people will say aloud whatever they think, without being shot or arrested, cruel or mistaken as those thoughts may be.
In your dreams, said one of the men near Nadia. Ha ha, listen to him. Pool water drained from a young girl’s hair as she rose gasping from the green water like a seal. Loved and cared for, thought Nadia in an instantaneous burst of sheer fury and then told herself Stop, stop, and suddenly felt wet and cold as a dishcloth. The text of The Girl Scout Handbook was gray, it swam with sparks and Nadia pressed her fingertips against her eyeballs.
They cheat and lie and steal from their agency offices, said the Facilitator as if he had personally seen Nadia copping a three-way plug extension from Supply. And much, much worse so they end up in scandal trials, which everyone loves, they just love it, we don’t understand the minds of the lower-downs, do we? We’re taking a risk with televised, public executions. It may change things in ways we don’t understand.
The women had gathered their things and left. They dragged dripping children from the pool. One of the men came and sat beside Nadia. He had a towel over his shoulders and wore a bathing suit. His thighs were hairy.
You’ve been sitting here quite a while, said the man.
Nadia sighed and lowered her book. He’ll be fine if I leave him alone for a while, she said. Thank you for your concern. She crossed her bony ankles and lifted her book again.
The Facilitator said, My job is to coordinate between the agency heads, and so public executions, broadcast live, will require a lot of negotiating between C&E and Forensics and Rehabilitative Labor to choose the right persons. This is not something to plunge into without thought. First of all it will kill all interest in our sitcoms. Does anyone realize that? Nothing can compete with something like that. This fact has been known for thousands of years but since people are completely ignorant of all the literature and the thought of the past, it will appear a wonderfully new and brilliant insight.
Nadia studiously turned another page and said Hmmm! as part of her untidy academic persona and the air conditioners thundered and choked and then went on again.
This guy isn’t resonating anymore, said one of the men beside the pool. He’s poetic and frail and intellectual but the appeal has worn out.
He’s a goddamned egghead. An egghead, said the man beside Nadia.
We need an unclelike masculine person. Live executions are going to require somebody heavy, somebody like a kind but firm parent.
Avuncular.
There, yes. Somebody with a double-breasted coat, gray hair, strong, maybe an old war wound.
What war?
Any war.
I got a name.
Yes?
Stanford West.
Good.
Onscreen the Facilitator and the interviewer waved occasionally to workmen.
We got disentangled from the numbered years, the accumulation of numerical years, say, maybe, 2130, 2131, 2132, on into infinity. He strode on, slim and agile. Numbering each year began ten thousand years ago in Sumer and clearly it had to stop. More and more numbers piled up until they begin to have an actual cognitive weight, an oppressive weight. So we are released into an infinitely repeating present marked by the old holidays, and that was supposed to lighten people but you know, you never know, you can’t know their minds really. Public executions may create an instability in the masses. Human mudslides.
And so, said the man beside Nadia. My wife wouldn’t come swim. Reading, petting the cat. I was going to get a massage but I thought my gorgeous body might give her ideas.
A masseuse is not allowed to have ideas, said Nadia. They just play with them and break them, perhaps releasing noxious chemicals. Your wife has a cat named Edward?
Yeah, you must be the poetry society lady. The man turned in the plastic chair and regarded her. She said you had thick glasses. But you’re reading without any glasses. He stared at her face and then without moving his head stared down at her pressed, starched dress and then her shoes where they stood together, attentive, at the foot of her lounge chair.
The lights had dimmed and the pool water glistened like a lipid; the reflections from the television shone and ran and drowned.
The Facilitator said, I facilitate between the big agencies and prevent them from forming private armies. Most people forget that. Otherwise the agencies will begin to fight each other and then we’re in for more urban wars, and the collapse of the little minor lives we have scraped up out of overpopulation and chronic waterlessness. I am not into attitude enforcement. Acceptable attitude enforcement has to be limited to one agency, one only. Forensics is good at it. Will broadcast, live executions help with the management of public thought?
The interviewer, Tom Preston, said, Aside from all that. Let’s get beyond all that, sir. Studies show that the executed criminal should be attractive. Then you have all the billions in the Western Cessions watching as one person. Think of the psychic power this would discharge.
I can read without them if I rest my eyes, avoid emotional scenes, and use eyedrops. Nadia writhed her toes, ate a crisp. Go away, she thought. Go away.
The men in the pool room were becoming impatient and it was a bad feeling. As long as they were absorbed by the TV Nadia was all right; they wouldn’t pay any attention to her, alone with her book. But for some time now they had been drifting away from all the multisyllabic talk.
But would it really be new? The Facilitator was animated now that he was in an argument. Think about this; from the Paleolithic age every damn thing was always new and it was always historic. Think about it. Pets were new, spoons were new, spears were new, then jewelry was new, plastics, satellites. And so we took a long happy skipping journey out of i-things and toilet paper and wheels, and here we are. Everything was new all the time and it was getting really old.
Yes, sir, and killing people on live TV will also be a first. And it will never get old.
Won’t it?
Nadia wondered where she would go if she had to get out of the pool room.
Maybe some criminals will actually volunteer. The Facilitator looked up into the dusty blue sky, thinking in real time and on live TV. Sometimes I think we just want to be seen. Sometimes when I know everyone has gone to bed and I am on the air, I feel really lonely.
Nadia got up in one smooth movement and slipped her feet into the little, worn-out heels. As she did the man laid his hand on her arm and said, Well, hang on a minute.
Get your hand off me, she said, and walked away.
Chapter 12
She found the stairway to the roof in the middle of the night. She ran up it, her tote in one hand, and when she came to the door at the top she pushed it open without any trouble. She stepped out onto a terrace where the cityscape shone before her in the night.
Streams of bright-lit main avenues shot off to the distant horizon like arrows and in between were millions of points of light from lanterns and single bulbs in rows of windows, the repeating blocks of apartments in a long and barbarous visual rhythm and a smoke haze drif
ting above it all through which hang gliders blundered. A ceaseless racket of human activity that never stopped. On and on to the end of the world. She held on to the balustrade and the hot night wind pulled at her hat.
Above her the peaked tower and the great clock face shone like a moon. She put her hands on the parapet and leaned back and searched the sky. There were the Dipper and the Chair, reminding her once again of Thin Sam Kenobi’s brown hands laying out the foil stars and his patient voice, buried somewhere unknown. Between these great constellations, despite the city lights, she could see the small and timid North Star, an infant pinpoint circled by its two enormous parent constellations who were so full of brilliant luminaries.
For a moment she was struck by a forlorn feeling, a feeling of abandonment, as if her parents had only now deserted her on the street, this very moment. Immense great windy beings, our parents, the immortal possession or gift or misfortune of every solitary human being on earth, all that were and all that are to come in their billions upon billions.
She walked by potted palms that thrashed in the high night wind and were outlined against the avenue lights far below. She reached out to touch the palms and drew their fringed and sashed fronds through her fingers and was amazed at their complexity and irregularity.
These have to be watered, she said aloud, in a low voice. Probably watered every day. Then she continued to walk around the rooftop garden; tock tock tock, her heels sounded on the tile.
Nadia bent over the parapet and searched every dim-lit street and each segment of the horizon. Even if she could have seen her old neighborhood she would not have known it. The apartment she had shared with Josie and Widdy would be far to the south, hundreds of miles away and also the office and Earl Jay Warren and his oversupervisor wife and the young men her own age who spoke in flatlined tones and those who went for the tissue engineering and permissible rage. The unceasing feeling of danger. Of being spied upon. How good to be away from it, if only briefly.
O thank you St. Jude patron semidivinity of escapes and evasions. She bent her head to her hands on the parapet. Sometimes life called for expressions of gratitude sent out into unknown distances.
At one point on the northern horizon she could see a place where there were no lights at all. Just one or two faint orange sparks in a great area of dark. That must be the countryside. The open countryside. Not too far away; within reach.
Her heart leaped with a jet of delight and desire. She was meant to live in a wilderness. She had been born to dwell on an unsettled seacoast or forested hills or dry mountains shouldered by sand dunes or among windy plains and if this included insect life and evil weather that would make her look like crispy fries, there was no help for it. No help at all. The human world was one of metropolii or metropolises and she, on the other hand, was some Homo ergaster left behind and in search of the Paleolithic.
Nadia sat on a bench. It could not be helped. It was like being born with auburn hair. There was a certain fold in her brain matter that caused it (or whoever folded the folds). It was not her fault! Why had she not thought of this before?
She put her hands on the crown of her hat and felt the wind rushing through her clothes. It was intoxicating to be up so high and to see the millions of chimneys spilling out vapors into darkness and the crawling single lamps of bicycles and on the great avenues the double cones of bus headlights and among the taller buildings around her the swinging lights of delivery trucks backing up and turning. Spaced throughout the cityscape were turning windmill blades of wind chargers, the flat reflections of solar panels. She felt released.
Nadia listened to the vague distant sounds of a bicycle bell and two men’s voices fifty stories below in the street arguing and the sound of pigeons and sparrows talking to one another in their sleep. Here and there giant illuminated billboards rippled slightly in the wind. She sat unobserved and rested. The palms clapped their hands.
Then she heard another sound, a low grinding noise from someplace nearby, here on the roof. She gripped the edge of the bench. A rotational noise, steady and repetitive. It was growling toward her out of the darkness. She listened for a few moments as it grew louder and her heart began to speed up.
The noise was coming straight at her back. She finally stood up and turned, her eyes wide.
A man in a wheelchair was moving toward her. He came steadily on over the tiles and the city lights shone on the spokes of the wheels as they rolled. There was no sound of a motor. His hands rose and fell as he spun the wheelchair rims. His face was outlined against the ambient light and he had a broad nose but other than that she could not see his features.
Well, he said. There’s somebody here.
Yes, there is, Nadia said. She shriveled back into Sylvia Plath, poised and neutral.
A flashlight flared in his hand and swept over her from her hat to her shoes.
And so good evening, she said. She wondered if he would go away or not. If he did not she would have to go back downstairs and find some place to sleep like the floor of a shower or some corner of the pool room and take a serious chance of being discovered and questioned. If he did go away, she would sleep up here. She very much wanted to sleep up here and watch the sun come up over the city.
Who are you? The man tipped his head to one side as he spoke and his voice was low and easy. If I may ask, What are you doing up here on the roof?
She said, Just a guest. Seminar guest. I came up for some fresh air.
I see. He regarded her with a wry smile that turned up one side of his mouth. He reached down to the handrims and rolled himself closer. In the dim light she could make out that he had coarse brown hair and a long face, a somewhat broad nose that looked as if it had once been broken and was large at the tip and light eyes that were flat to his face. Limp legs inside thick trousers and neat shoes, a coat wide and ample like a cloak thrown over the back of the wheelchair. His skin was pallid and his hands long and muscular. A bottle of Mamosi glinted in a sort of cup holder on the arm of the wheelchair. He said, So did I.
She lifted her shoulders. She said, The air is swampy down there in the pool room. It’s like a marsh. A fen.
Yes, but you don’t have to hang around the pool room. Fen or no fen. He was watching her with an interested look.
No, true, true. I came up for the view. She turned briefly toward the parapet and the city lights and turned back again. My room is on the third floor. Not much of a view there, just a wall. Very tedious.
He nodded and was silent for a moment. Then he said, The third floor is all linens and dry cleaning.
Yes, she said. She felt her face getting hot. I meant the thirteenth floor. And you are an attendee as well, I guess.
She stepped back because although she was standing he had to remain sitting and it was a way of not forcing him to look up at her.
I am indeed. He turned his head to gaze out over the cityscape. Well, then. Here we have this sector of the city. It goes on forever, doesn’t it? Amazing view from up here.
Well, it does seem to go on forever. The question of the third floor sparked and ran between them like a lit fuse. She had made a terrible mistake. Why could she not just shut up and be mysterious? She said, Except there is a dark space over there. I was wondering if that was a recreational, ah, open space or something.
He leaned forward in his wheelchair and rubbed his knees and then leaned back again. You don’t know what that is, he said.
No, I don’t. What is it?
It’s a neighborhood under interdiction. Everything cut off. Water and electricity and so on. TV reception. They are all perishing for want of TV reception.
Oh. She turned to look again at the distant dark space. Well. They can’t watch Barney and Carmen, then. She felt a sharp, punishing disappointment and knew there might be tears coming to her eyes. It was not the open countryside. No rivers there, no out-of-focus vegetation with tigers, no sea re
flections in any tiger’s eyes. She bit her lip and looked down at her hands grasping the parapet. What is it called? She said this as if it were a normal thing, to ask for the name of a place instead of a gerrymander and neighborhood number. For some reason she was testing him. She did not know why.
He was silent and in that silence the wind seemed to have increased slightly. He said, It used to be called Soldier Bend. It was a wildlife area on the Missouri River, which at one time made a border there between the old units of Nebraska and Iowa. But of course now it’s been swallowed up in apartments and brick factories. They have indulged themselves in strikes and now they’re cut off.
Well. Nadia nodded. I guess they will evacuate them.
The man clasped his hands. They are slated for removal. Workers are needed somewhere, so just cart them off. But you must know that. He paused, and then said, In there are some fifteen-story buildings that will have to be demolished. He stared at the dark hole in the city-world. There were not even the dim sparks of kerosene lamps.
Why don’t the people just go away? she said. Go away to someplace else?
He turned to her and smiled a wry smile and then said, There isn’t anyplace else.
But there has to be.
A person would think so. Depends on what you mean by “else.”
I mean, it’s the planet Earth, isn’t it?
He turned his head up to the thin light of the stars. My dear, we seem to have fallen into a curiously intense conversation here. Within a very short time.
Well. Maybe not a good thing.
Maybe not. The man ran the flashlight beam over the edge of the parapet as if checking it for faults and then clicked it off. You are a curious girl, he said. As in inquisitive.
She gripped the edge of her hat against the wind. I suppose I am. And what conference are you with? To prove your point.
He took a deep breath and sighed it out through his nostrils as if he were tired. I am with the demolition people. Cloud cover and air overpressure. I do demolition and cartography. Actually the cartography is a hobby. He grasped the wheel rims and rocked the wheelchair back and forth. His hands were roped with muscle.
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