by James Gunn
But he said to Elaine, “Where did you get your weary load of cynicism?”
“Easy,” she said. “I was orphaned at the age of two. You learn a lot about human nature when you aren't protected from it. I grew up in a creche with a lot of other underprivileged children—black, red, brown, yellow, white—all there to give them an equal start in life, free from the inequalities of birth and environment.”
“I'm sorry,” Gavin said.
“Don't be,” she said. “All I missed was parents to rebel against. Maybe that's why I enjoyed your parents so much. They gave their affection without demanding anything back. Oh, we had official surrogate parents in the creche, selected for warmth and empathy and emotional stability, but it wasn't the same. It was their job.”
“The child-parent relationship is unnatural,” Gavin said, quoting the Professor.
“Maybe it would have been different if I had been their child,” Elaine said. “Maybe they'd have demanded something from me. But I was my own person, and that was all I wanted to be—beholden to nobody, independent of everybody, free from the constraints of poverty and of job alike.”
“I can see,” Gavin said considerately, in the attitude of “to know all is to forgive all,” “how you might have grown up selfish—”
“Selfish! That's not the point. Free! Free to be myself! Free to be as much a me as I can! Free from the tyranny of equality and political justice and intellectual fads. That's why I never went to college—too much conformity in speech and dress and thought.”
“Conformity!” Gavin exclaimed. “That was liberty.”
“Then why did you all dress alike? Those ridiculous peasant clothes. None of you were peasants.”
“That,” Gavin said, “was an expression of solidarity. With workmen and peasants everywhere in all times. And with students who, like us, were protesting the conformity of forced consumption by advertising and styles and the uptight generation.”
“You all talk alike, too,” Elaine said. “Anyway, I wanted to be able to do what I wanted, as long as I didn't hurt anybody.”
“That's a passive approach to morality,” Gavin said. “And it will never help create a better world.”
“On the other hand,” Elaine said, “I won't do evil under the illusion that I am doing good.”
Gavin found her attitude incredible. “I thought all young people were revolutionists!”
“I don't believe in philosophies,” Elaine said. “They only serve to rationalize your prejudices or institutionalize your practices. But I have a rule of thumb: do good slowly, if at all. That gives people a chance to protest the damage you are doing to them. Or, if you like more elegance in your rules of thumb, don't do to other people as you would have them do to you, because they're all different.”
“Then you consent to the oppression of the people,” Gavin said.
“I don't know who ‘the people’ are or the nature of their oppression,” Elaine said. “All I really know is that nobody authorized me to act in their behalf. And if ‘the people’ are ‘oppressed’ in sufficient numbers, they will know it and will do something about it.”
“But they have no power.”
Elaine shook her head. “What you revolutionists object to is that they don't know they're oppressed, so you invent terms like ‘brainwashing,’ ‘social behavior conditioning,’ ‘cooptation,’ ‘media massage,’ ‘unconscious rebels,’ ‘mute protest,’ and all the rest—when what you mean is that you want revolution for your own purposes, to satisfy your own emotional needs, and you find that rationale distressingly insufficient to justify all the damage you are willing to inflict on others.”
Gavin shrugged. ‘Tm afraid your political naïveté is showing. Perhaps you should have gone to college. In any case, all this has no relation to the simple kindness of picking up fellow travelers.”
“Just as I would not do harm to others,” Elaine said, “I choose not to put others in the position to do harm to me.”
“Yet you picked me up,” Gavin pointed out.
Elaine hesitated. “I didn't say that I took no risks; I choose them carefully. And I feel I know you—at least well enough to believe that you will do me no harm.”
“I guess that's a compliment,” Gavin said. “If it is, thanks.” But he wondered if they had a common definition of “harm.”
They followed the setting sun and a trail of pills and bottles and discarded clothing into the outskirts of Junction City. By then the sky was dark, and Elaine turned the car into the driveway of a motel whose illuminated sign had lost some letters and read “L—s Arms.” As they passed beneath the sign, Gavin could read the missing letters. They were “over,” and above the sign, unilluminated, was a reproduction of the Venus de Milo.
Gavin smiled and said, “It would be cheaper and more virtuous to sleep beside the car.”
“I prefer a few comforts,” Elaine said.
“I don't have any money,” Gavin said.
“I have something better,” Elaine said, opening the door on her side of the car and getting out, “a universal credit card and money in the bank. Of course, you're welcome to sleep in the car or in the nearest field.”
Gavin got out of the car and followed her into a shabby lobby. Broken venetian blinds only partially covered the front windows, and the old green theater-type carpeting on the floor was worn down to the rubber backing in a pathway leading from the doorway to the desk. It looked like an animal runway through a meadow. To the left a flickering red neon sign spelled out “Restaurant.” To the right, twin doorways were identified as “Fillies” and “Colts,” and patches, about shoulder height, next to the edge of the door, had been worn through the varnish and stained by human oils. Between the doors were two vending machines, one for cigarettes, tobacco or marijuana, and the other for pills and capsules.
At first Gavin thought no one else was in the room, and then an old woman struggled upright from an easy chair behind the desk. A straw-colored wig was slightly askew on her head, exposing dirty gray hair beneath, and makeup made a clown's mask of her face. Once, perhaps, she had been a woman with a figure, but the figure had drooped and inflated until it was virtually impossible to carry. Gavin suspected that even standing was torment. But the woman had not given up. She pushed out her pillowy chest and gave Gavin a challenging smirk that cracked her makeup.
“You two together, lovies?” she asked.
“Yes,” Gavin said.
“Yes and no,” Elaine said.
“Well, which is it, dearies? You want one room or two?”
“One,” Gavin said.
“Two,” Elaine said simultaneously.
Gavin shrugged. “Two,” he repeated. “Just trying to save you money,” he whispered loudly to Elaine.
“You paying, love?” the landperson said suggestively. “No need to be coy with me. I know what it's like to be young. God knows, I'm not so old yet I couldn't give some fella a good time in a motel room, but it's different when you're young and your skin is smooth and tight, and you're all warm and excited inside so you can hardly—”
“Two rooms,” Elaine said, removing her credit card from a small case at her waist.
“Well,” the landperson said, winking broadly at Elaine, “you do it the way you think you should. You know best, love. Trust your instincts. Play hard to get. Sometimes it works out. They respect you more, and it gets them even hotter.”
“Just give us the keys,” Elaine said.
“Sure, dearie,” the landperson said, and dropped the card into a slot in her computer. She pushed a button, and two keys fell out the bottom, a receipt came out the middle, and the card came out the top. She handed them all to Elaine. “Staying more than an hour or so?” she asked.
“All night,” Elaine said.
“That's good,” the landperson said. “That's the best.” She turned to Gavin. “She don't treat you right, you come see me,” she said, winking with both eyes. Her face seemed contorted with message. “Was the time,” s
he began, “when all the young men came in from Fort Riley to see Maude Frumkin...”
They turned and left her remembering. They got back into the car, and Elaine drove them around to the appropriate doors. They were side-by-side on the first floor of a two-story wing. The balcony of the second floor sagged a bit, but it looked as if it would remain standing for another night.
Elaine handed Gavin a key. She looked at the number of the one she retained. “I'm going to clean up,” she said. “Then we'll get some dinner, if you're hungry.” She got out of the car, took a small red suitcase from the luggage compartment, opened the door of the motel room, entered, and closed the door firmly behind her.
Gavin stared after her for a moment, recalling the brisk way her hips had swayed under the skirt, and wished she wasn't so reactionary and such a cold fish. He carried the thought with him through the doorway of his room and into the shower, where he stood soaping himself in the lukewarm spray from the shower head, thinking of Elaine standing not two feet away from him doing the same thing. What a waste it was, he thought, and wondered when the playfulness which began under the motel sign had changed to reality.
Dinner was available in the small dark restaurant just off the lobby. The landperson was the waitperson, the barperson, and the cook as well. She waddled to the table they selected, put down two glasses of lukewarm water, lit a candle inside a vase of red glass, handed them two menus bound in imitation leather now old and cracked and smeared with the dirt of a thousand fingers.
Elaine ordered a bloody mary and made a face at the first swallow. Gavin got bourbon and water. It was fair bourbon, not very good water. He told Elaine that travelers should never order mixed drinks.
“They also should carry money,” Elaine said.
Gavin stiffened and stood up. “If you're going to keep reminding me of your charity...” he began.
Elaine put a hand on his arm. “Don't be so touchy,” she said, “and I'll try to be less bitchy.”
Gavin thought of the meal to come and sank back into his chair. “Well,” he said, and thought of her room next to his, and tried to be as charming as he could.
Elaine lifted her drink. “I hope,” she said, smiling, “that she doesn't salt the drinks with aphrodisiacs.”
Gavin laughed. “Then you noticed the name of the motel.”
“Only when it was too late,” she said, and laughed. “I was afraid you'd think I suspected you of amorous intentions. You should see my room—red plush on the furniture, pink-nylon sheets on the bed, and a mirror on the ceiling.”
Something magical happened to Elaine's face when she smiled. Only ordinary in repose, it became beautiful when she smiled, illuminated from within like a painting by Michelangelo. And with her eyes turned on him, pupils large, Gavin felt a compulsion to make her smile again.
The food turned out to be frozen meals thawed in a supersonic oven and hardly worth the pride he'd swallowed. But Elaine smiled several times as he told her about life on the campus, about Karnival and classes and the Professor, about how he had been expelled from the campus, making it all seem unimportant and amusing.
She ended up laughing with him at his bravado at the campus gate and at his illusions about coming home, although he thought he detected a bit of moist sympathy in the corners of her eyes as he described the way his expectations had turned out.
So when they left the little restaurant and walked back to their rooms across asphalt still radiating the sun's heat, Gavin felt faint stirring of anticipation as they stood at Elaine's door. She turned toward him, and he bent his face toward hers, and she said, “Good night, Gavin,” and turned, slipped through her door, and was gone.
Gavin stood for a moment, poised over nothing, and then straightened and impulsively knocked at her door. The door opened, and Elaine stood in front of him, her head turned to one side, looking up at him. “Yes,” she said.
Gavin looked at her, silhouetted against the light of the room, and whatever ideas he'd had fled from his mind. “Good night,” he said, and turned and went into his own room.
His sheets were dark red, though patched and faded in places, and he lay awake for a long time staring up at the dark mirror in the ceiling where his shadowed face looked back down upon him. He imagined he saw other faces and other events behind his own, and he thought, “Ah, love, let us be true to one another...” And when he slept, he dreamed of Jenny and Gregory and the whine of bullets above his head. He woke up when they began to hit his body, and he rose and urinated, washed his face, and put on his clothes and went out into the morning sunshine.
Elaine was already up. She had changed into a lightweight white dress. She was putting her red suitcase in the luggage compartment when he came out his door. They breakfasted on soggy toast and weak coffee while the landperson simpered at them.
“Didn't get much last night, did you, young fella?” she said. “Went in separate doors and never crossed over once, did you, now?” She chuckled. “How would I know something like that, you want to know. Got me a surplus nightscope when the boys were still at Fort Riley. Good-hearted lads, they were. When they didn't have money, they brought what they could. Anyway, I keep an eye on my customers, you see. A little extra service for which there is no extra charge. You'd be surprised what I seen in my time. Should've come to me, though, young fella. Wouldn't have gone to bed with your guts aching....”
But Elaine walked out before the landperson had finished her description of what Gavin had missed, and Gavin followed her, arriving at the car just before Elaine pulled it away.
They drove in silence. Gavin didn't know what Elaine was thinking about, but he was beginning the long, difficult process of sorting out what had happened to him in the past month. Professor, he thought, what happened? What price learning? What cost wisdom? And he thought he heard the Professor say, “The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.”
Shortly before they reached the turnoff to Abilene, they began to notice objects scattered on the highway: first colored pills and capsules, then a broken bottle, articles of clothing, strips of rubber from a tire, black skid marks on the pavement, and finally, as they rounded a gentle curve, the bus itself lying on its side beside the road, pieces of it strewn behind, and a jagged, doorlike piece of the rear-left side ripped up. The bus was like an animal they had seen bounding along, brimming with vitality, apparently indestructible and perhaps immortal, now lifeless and still.
Marks on the road and the grassy median between the divided highways, along with broken glass, twisted metal, oil spills, and dried brown stains on the edge of the pavement, suggested that the bus had skidded into the median and then into the opposite lane of traffic, hit a vehicle, rebounded into its own lane, overbalanced, and skidded on its side for more than a hundred yards. Elaine stopped behind the torn bus and scrambled out of the car. She ran to the bus, across the scuffed and scarred shoulder, to the doorlike opening at the rear, Gavin just behind. As Gavin got closer, he could see that the opening had been cut and then the metal wrenched outward. A vision flashed through his mind of a giant hand reaching down with a can opener while the screams of the frightened and injured and dying sounded from within.
Elaine turned from the opening and vomited in the grass beside the road. Gavin climbed a collapsed tire and then walked along the side of the bus to the hole. He peered into the dark interior and then climbed down into the bus carefully so as to avoid the sharp edges of the metal, and then the blood, splashed and puddled everywhere, most of it dried and brown, but some still sticky.
The bus was empty. All of the down windows and some of the upper windows had been broken, and glass was splintered into scythes and daggers. Clothing was scattered throughout the interior, hanging from seats and racks as if tossed there by careless children. Luggage and packs had broken open and lay with their contents exposed like entrails. Gavin had once visited a packing house on a primary-school educational tour, and the bus smelled like the slaughter room.
Ga
vin climbed out over the seats before he, too, was sick. He went to Elaine. She was still bent over, but she straightened as he came close. He put his arm around her. She was shivering.
“They must have taken everybody to a hospital last night,” he said.
Her shivers grew less violent. “Or to a morgue,” she said. “Poor buggers. Like mayflies.”
“'Don't pity the dead,’ the Professor used to say. ‘All their questions have been answered.'”
“Life isn't all questions,” Elaine said. She took a deep breath and moved back to the car.
“The Professor would say, ‘No, it isn't all answers,'” Gavin said, and followed her.
When he reached the car she was looking down at her right arm. A brown handprint marred the white skin. She rubbed it away. Gavin looked down at his bloody right hand and turned to scrub it clean with a handful of grass. When he turned, she was seated on the passenger side of the car.
“Why don't you drive?” she said.
He nodded and got into the driver's seat. He had never before driven an electric, but it wasn't difficult to adjust. The car accelerated smoothly, and they swung out around the corpse of the bus. “So long, rite of passage,” he said.
The silence of the electric motors was distracting, as well as the lack of power in a sudden surge. Gavin soon found, as the landscape began to slip behind, that he had to plan his maneuvers early, making his turns in slightly wider arcs, swinging out to pass a car several yards sooner than usual, but the quiet, even movement was exhilarating, like riding a silky roller coaster, gliding, swooping, turning, climbing, without end, without effort, or like flying itself. He felt pleased with himself and pleased with the girl who sat brooding beside him.
He turned toward Elaine and smiled. After a moment she smiled back, and the warm autumn breeze poured over the windshield of the car, and he felt good. For a moment or two he forgot the bus, forgot the campus, forgot the Professor, forgot even Jenny, and he enjoyed the day for what it offered him.