by Kate Wilhelm
It took them five hours to get to the rocks and back. All along the way the storm debris invited investigation. There were strands of seaweed, eighteen feet long, as strong as ropes; there were anemones and starfish and crabs in tide pools, all of them colored pink or purple, blue, green, red ... there was a swath of black sand where Werther said there was probably gold also. It was often found among the heavy black sand; washed from the same deposits, it made its way downstream along with the dense black grains. They found no gold, but they might have, Lyle thought happily. She spied a blue ball and retrieved it. It was a Japanese fishing float, Werther said, examining it and handing it back. He talked about the fishing fleets, their lights like will-o'-the-wisps at sea. They had not used glass floats for thirty years, he said; the one she had found could have been floating all that time, finally making it to shore.
At one point Carmen produced sandwiches and a bottle of wine from his backpack, along with three plastic glasses. They sat on rocks, protected from a freshening breeze, and gazed at the blue waters of the Pacific. A flock of sea gulls drifted past and vanished around the outcropping of granite boulders.
“It's a beautiful world,” Werther said quietly. “Such a beautiful world.”
Carmen stood up abruptly and stalked away. He picked up something white and brought it back, flung it down at Werther's feet. It was half a Styrofoam cup.
“For how long?” he said in a hard furious voice. He picked up the wine bottle and glasses and replaced them in his backpack, then turned and left.
“You could bury it, but the next high tide will just uncover it again,” Werther said, nudging the Styrofoam with his foot. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. “Speaking of high tides, we have to start back. The tide's turning now, I think.”
They watched the sunset from the edge of the beach, near the car. The water covered their footprints, cleaning up the beach again of traces of human usage. It was dark by the time they got back to Werther's house.
“You must have dinner with us,” he insisted. “You're too tired to go cook. You'll settle for a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk. I feel guilty just thinking about dinner while you snack. Sit by the fire and nurse your images of the perfect day and presently we'll eat.”
Lyle looked at Carmen who nodded, smiling at her. It was he who knew what she would eat if she went home now. She thought of what he had said about understanding and accepting Werther, and she had the feeling that he understood and accepted her also, exactly as she was, nearing middle age, red-faced, frizzy hair going gray. None of that mattered a damn bit to him, not the way it mattered to Lasater whose eyes held scorn and contempt no matter how he tried to disguise it. She nodded, and Carmen reached out to take her coat; Werther said something about checking the wine supply, and needing more wood. She sank into the chair that she thought of as hers and sighed.
Perhaps she could say to Werther, please just give me a set of good fingerprints and let's be done with that. She could explain why she needed them, tell him about the hook Lasater had baited for her and her eagerness to snatch it. He would understand, even be sympathetic with her reasons. And if he was the man Lasater was after, he would forgive her. She snapped her eyes open as a shudder passed over her. Lasater was sure, and she was too. She felt only certainty that Werther lived under a fearsome shadow. She felt that he was a gentle man, whose gentleness arose from a terrible understanding of pain and fear; that underlying his open love of the ocean, the beach, the gulls, everything he had seen that day, there was a sadness with a depth she could not comprehend. She believed that his compassion, humanity, love, warmth, all observable qualities, overlay a core as rigid and unweathered and unassailable as the rocky skeletons of the mountains that endured over the eons while everything about them was worn away. He was a man whose convictions would lead him to action, had already led him to act, she thought, and admitted to herself that she believed he was wanted for something very important, not what Lasater said, because he was a congenital liar, but something that justified the manhunt that evidently was in progress. And she knew with the same certainty that she had been caught up in the middle of it, that already it was too late for her to exclude herself from whatever happened here on the coast. Unless she left immediately, she thought then.
“You're cold,” Carmen said, as if he had been standing behind her for some time. He was carrying wood. “These places really get cold as soon as the sun goes down.” He added a log to the fire, tossed in a handful of chips, and in a moment it was blazing. “You're in for a treat. He's going to make a famous old recipe for you. Fish soup, I call it. He says bouillabaisse.” He stood up, dusting his hands together. “Be back instantly with wine. Do you want a blanket or something?”
She shook her head. The shiver had not been from any external chill. Presently, with Carmen on the floor before the fire, and her in her chair, they sipped the pale sherry in a companionable silence.
Carmen broke it: “Let's play a game. Pretend you're suddenly supreme dictator with unlimited power and wealth, what would you do?”
“Dictator of what?”
“Everything, the entire earth.”
“You mean God.”
“Okay. You're God. What now?”
She laughed. Freshmen games out of Philosophy 101. “Oh, I'd give everyone enough money to live on comfortably, and I'd put a whammy on all weapons, make them inoperative, and I'd cure the sick, heal the wounded. Little things like that.”
He shook his head. “Specifically. And seriously.” He looked up at her without a trace of a smile. “I mean if everyone had X dollars, then it would take XY dollars to buy limited things, and it would simply be a regression of the value of money, wouldn't it?”
“Okay, I'd redistribute the money and the goods so that everyone had an equal amount, and if that wasn't enough, I'd add to both until it was enough.”
“How long before a handful of people would have enormous amounts again, and many people would be hungry again simply because human nature seems to drive some people to power through wealth?”
She regarded him sourly. He was at an age when his idealism should make it seem quite simple to adjust the world equitably. She said, “God, with any sense at all, would wash her hands of the whole thing and go somewhere else.”
“But you, as God, would not be that sensible?”
“No, I'd try. I would think for a very long time about the real problems—too many people, for instance—and I'd try to find a way to help. But without any real hope of success.”
He nodded, and a curious intensity seemed to leave him. She had not realized how tense he had become until he now relaxed again.
Very deliberately she said, “Of course, solving the population problems doesn't mean it would be a peaceful world. Sometimes I think history was invented simply to record war, and before records, there were oral traditions. Even when the world was uninhabited except for a few fertile valleys, they fought over those valleys. There will always be people who want what others have, who have a need to control others, who have a need for power. Population control won't change that.”
“As God you could pick your population,” Carmen said carelessly. “Select for nonaggressiveness.”
“How? With what test? But, as God, I would know, wouldn't I?”
“There would be problems,” he said, looking into the fire now. “That's why I started this game saying dictator; you said God. Where does assertiveness end off and aggressiveness start? There are real problems.”
She was tiring of the adolescent game that he wanted to treat too seriously. She finished her wine and went to the sideboard to refill her glass. There was a mirror over the cupboard. She stared at herself in dismay. Her hair was impossible, like dark dandelion fluff, her cheeks and nose were peeling; her lips were chapped. She thought with envy of Carmen's beautiful skin. At twenty you seemed immune to wind damage. Sunburn on Saturday became a lovely glow by Sunday. She thought of Werther's skin, also untouched by the ele
ments, too tough to change any more by now. Only she, in the middle, was ravaged-looking. She hoped dinner would be early; she had to go back to her house, take a long soaking bath, cream her skin, then get out her checkbook and savings passbook and do some figuring. She could do the book somewhere else, but if Bobby didn't take it, would anyone else? She remembered her own doubts about a second one so closely following the first, and she was afraid of the question.
The real fear, she thought, was economic. Whoever controlled your economic life controlled you. Overnight she could become another nonperson to be manipulated along with the countless other statistics. Her dread was very real and pervasive, and not leavened at all by the thought that Hugh Lasater understood how to use this fear because he also harbored it. That simply increased his power because he too was driven by uncontrollable forces.
Carmen joined her at the sideboard, met her gaze in the mirror. “You said you would heal the sick, cure the wounded. What if you had a perfect immunology method? Would you give it to the drug manufacturers? The government?”
Slowly she shook her head, dragged back from the real to the surreal. “I don't know. Perfect? What does that mean?”
“Immune to disease, radiation, cellular breakdown or aging...”
She was watching the two faces in the mirror, hers with its lines at her eyes, a deepening line down each side of her nose, the unmistakable signs of midlife accentuated by the windburn; his face was beautiful, like an idealized Greek statue, clear elastic skin, eyes so bright they seemed to be lighted from behind. She knew nothing changed in her expression, she was watching too closely to have missed a change, but inside her, ice formed and spread, and she was apart from that body, safely away from it. Is that what Werther had? she wanted to ask, wanted to scream. Is that why they wanted him so badly?
She started to move away and he put his hands on her shoulders, held her in place before the mirror. At his touch the ice shattered and she was yanked back from her safe distance. Startled, she met his gaze again. “Would you?”
She shook her head. “I don't know. No one person could make such a decision. It's too soul-killing.” It came out as a whisper, almost too low to be audible.
He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “I'd better see if Saul needs any help.” He left her, shaken and defenseless. When she lifted her glass, her hand was trembling.
Saul? Saul Werther. He called him Saul so naturally and easily that it was evident that they were on first-name terms, had been for a long time. Had Saul Werther promised him that kind of immunity? Was that the bond? Slowly what little she had read of immunology came back to her, the problems, the reasons that, for example, there had not been a better flu vaccination developed. The viruses mutate, she thought clearly, and although we are immune to one type, there are always dozens of new types. Each virus is different from others, each disease different, what works against one is ineffective against the rest. But Carmen believed. Saul Werther had convinced him, probably with no difficulty at all, considering his persuasiveness and his wide-ranging knowledge of what must seem like everything to someone as young and naive as Carmen was.
He was crazy then, with a paranoid delusional system that told him he could save the world from disease, if he chose to. He was God in his own eyes, Carmen his disciple.
She went to stand close to the fire, knowing the warmth could not touch the chill that was in her.
She would leave very early the next day. There were other eagles in other places, Florida, or upper New York, or Maine. And she would start filling applications for a job, dig out her old resume, update it ... If she stayed, Lasater would somehow find a way to use her to get inside this house, get to Saul Werther. And she knew that Saul and she were curiously allied in a way she could not at all understand. She could not be the one to betray him, no matter what he had done.
She hardly tasted dinner and when Saul expressed his concern, she said only that she was very tired. She found to her dismay that she was thinking of him as Saul, and now Carmen did not even pretend the master/servant roles any longer. Saul left his place at the table and came up behind her. She stiffened, caught Carmen's amused glance, and tried to relax again. Saul felt her shoulders, ran his hands up her neck.
“You're like a woman made of steel,” he said, and began to massage her shoulders and neck. “Tension causes more fatigue than any muscular activity. Remember that blue float? Think of it bobbing up and down through the years. Nosed now and then by a dolphin, being avoided by a shark made wise by the traps of mankind. A white bird swoops low to investigate, then wheels away again. Rain pounding on it, currents dragging it this way and that. And bobbing along, bright in the sunlight, gleaming softly in moonlight, year after year ... Ah, that's better.” She opened her eyes wide. “Let's just have a bite of cheese and a sip of wine while Carmen clears the table, and then he'll take you home. You've had a long day.”
He had relaxed her; his touch had been like magic working out the stiffness, drawing out the unease that had come over her that night. His voice was the most soothing she had ever heard. Perhaps one day he would read aloud ... She sipped her sweet wine and refused the cheese. He talked about the great vineyards of Europe.
“They know each vine the way a parent knows each child—every wart, every freckle, every nuance of temperament. And the vines live to be hundreds of years old...”
The flame was a transparent sheet of pale blue, like water flowing smoothly up and over the top of the log. Lyle looked through the flames; behind them was a pulsating red glow the entire length of the log. There was a knot, black against the sullen red. Her gaze followed the sheer blue flames upward, followed the red glow from side to side, and Saul's voice went on sonorously, easily...
“My dear, would you like to sleep in the spare room?”
She started. The fire was a bed of coals. She blinked, then looked away from the dying embers. At her elbow was her glass of wine, she could hear rain on the roof, nothing was changed. She did not feel as if she had been sleeping, but rather as if she had been far away, and only now had come back.
“We have a room that no one ever uses,” Saul said.
She shook her head and stood up. “I want to go now,” she said carefully, and held the back of the chair until she knew her legs were steady. She looked at her watch. Two? Everything seemed distant, unimportant. She yearned to be in bed sleeping.
Carmen held her coat, then draped a raincoat over her. “I'll bring the car to the porch,” he said. She heard the rain again, hard and pounding. She did not know if she swayed. Saul put his arm about her shoulders and held her firmly until the car arrived; she did not resist, but rather leaned against him a bit. She was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Then Saul was holding her by both shoulders, looking at her. He embraced her and kissed her cheek, then led her down the stairs and saw her into the car. He'll get awfully wet, she thought, and could not find the words to tell him to go back inside, or even to tell him good night.
“Good thing I know this driveway well,” Carmen said cheerfully, and she looked. The rain was so hard on the windshield the wipers could not keep it cleared, and beyond the headlights a wall of fog moved with them. She closed her eyes again.
Then the cold air was on her face, and Carmen's hand was firm on her arm as he led her up the stairs to her house, and inside. “I'll pull those boots off for you,” he said, and obediently she sat down and let him. He built a fire and brought in more wood, then stood over her. “You have to go to bed,” he said gently. “You're really beat tonight, aren't you?”
She had closed her eyes again, she realized, and made an effort to keep them open, to stand up, to start walking toward the bedroom. She was surprised to find that her coat was off already, and the raincoat.
“Can you manage?” Carmen asked, standing in the bedroom doorway.
“Yes,” she said, keeping her face averted so he could not see that her eyes were closing again.
“Okay. I'll look in on you i
n the morning. Good night, Lyle.”
She got her sweater off, and the heavy wool slacks, but everything else was too much trouble, and finally she crawled into bed partially dressed.
* * * *
The cabin was dark when she came awake. She could not think where she was for several minutes. She was very thirsty, and so tired she felt she could not move the cover away from her in order to get up. Her head pounded; she had a temperature, she thought crossly. In the beginning, the first several times she had come home soaked and shaking with cold, she had been certain she would come down with a cold, or flu, or something, but she had managed to stay healthy. Now it was hitting. Sluggishly she dragged herself from bed, went to the bathroom, relieved herself, and only then turned on the light to look for aspirin. She took the bottle to the kitchen; it would burn her stomach if she took it without milk or something. But when she poured a little milk into a glass, she could not bear the sight of it, and she settled for water after all. It was six o'clock. Too early to get up, too dark...
The cabin was cold and damp. She remembered how she had been chilled the day before and thought, that was when it started. She should have recognized the signals, should not have spent the day on the beach in the wind ... She had been walking back toward the bedroom, now she stopped. How had she got home?
There was no memory of coming home. She tried to remember the evening, and again there was nothing. They had gone to Saul's house, where she and Carmen had played a silly game, then dinner, then ... Then nothing.
Like the night before, she thought distantly, the words spaced in time with the pounding of her head. Ah, she thought, that was it. And still distantly, she wondered why it was not frightening that she could not remember two evenings in a row. She knew she was not crazy, because being crazy was nothing like this. She could even say it now, when she had been crazy she had been frightened of the lapses, the gaps in her life. And suddenly she was frightened again, not of the loss of memory, but of her acceptance of it with such a calm detachment that she might have been thinking of a stranger. She turned abruptly away from the bedroom and sat down instead on a straight chair at the kitchen table.