Orbit 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  You can’t know how masculine I wanted to be for Kitty. She was without question the prettiest doll around. She looked like—well, like Ginger Rogers, if you remember, with a clean, friendly face and the neatest, slimmest hips. She knew that. She was studying dancing. She was also studying men, and God knows what she thought she was learning from me.

  When we got to Dean Street I changed from authority on war to authority on science and told her that the heat was only at ground level. Just a little way above our heads, I told her, the air was always cool and fresh. “Let’s go up on the fire escape,” I said, nudging her toward the Atlantic Theatre.

  The Atlantic was locked up tight that year; Paulie and I were not the only kids who didn’t have movie money. But the fire escapes were open, three flights of strap-iron stairs going up to what we called nigger heaven. I don’t know why, exactly. The colored kids from the neighborhood didn’t sit up there; in fact, I never saw them in the movies at all. The fire escapes made a good place to go. Paulie and I went up there a lot, when he wasn’t working, to look down on everybody in the street and not have anyone know we were watching them. So Kitty and I went up to the second landing and sat on the steps, and in a minute I put my arm around her.

  And all of this, you know, I’d thought out like two or three months in advance, going up there by myself and experimentally bouncing my tail up and down on the steps for discomfort, calculating in a wet morning in May what it would be like right after dark in August, and all. It was a triumph of fourteen-year-old forethought. Or it would have been if it had come to anything. But somebody coughed, higher up on the fire escape.

  Kitty jabbed me with her elbow, and we listened. Somebody was mumbling softly up above us. I don’t know if he had heard us coming. I don’t think so. I stood up and peered around the landing, and I saw candlelight, and an old man’s face, terribly lined and unshaven and sad. He was living there. All around the top landing he had carefully put up sheets of cardboard from grocery cartons, I suppose to keep the rain out. If it rained. Or perhaps just to keep him out of public view. He was sitting on a blanket, leaning his forearm on one knee, looking at the candle, talking to himself.

  And that was the end of that. We tiptoed down the stairs, and Kitty said she had to go home. And did. Otherwise I honestly think that in the long run I would have married her.

  * * * *

  I remember the years of the war, the headlines and the blackouts and the crazy way everything was changing under my very eyes. Paulie had it made. He enlisted first thing, and wrote me clipped, concise letters about the joys of close-order drill. I remember buying his old car the last time he came home on furlough, with his cuffs tucked in his paratrooper boots, telling deadpan stories about the hazards of basic training. The car was a 1931 Buick, with a jug cork in the gas tank instead of a cap. I sold it for the price of two train tickets when I ran out of gas-ration coupons in Pittsburgh, on my honeymoon. Not with Kitty. Kitty had gone far out of my life by then. Her dancing lessons had paid off: amateur-night tap dancer to Film Fun model to showgirl at the International Casino; and then she’d gone abroad to Paris with a troupe and been caught in the Occupation. Well. Mutatis mutandis and plus ça change and so on. Or, as one might say, things keep getting all screwed up.

  I breezed through the war. Barring a company clerk in Jefferson Barracks who I really wanted to kill, there was nothing I couldn’t handle; Paulie had lied. Or maybe for me it was a different war. I had got into newspaper work, which let me get into Special Services when my time came. Nobody was shooting at unit managers for USO shows. I went through forty-one months of exaltation and shame. You see, this was the war that really mattered and had to be won; and how I burned, with what a blue-white flame, with pride to be a part of it. And how I groveled before anyone who would listen because my part was mostly chasing enlisted men away from big-breasted starlets. Do you suppose it’s really true that somebody had to do that job, too? I couldn’t believe it, but it was because of that that I met Kitty again.

  She turned up looking for a job as a translator, looking very much as she always had. She was different, though. She was married, to this very nice captain she had met during Occupation days in Paris, and she had become a German national. It was a grand reunion. I took her to dinner and she told me that Paulie had been wounded in the Salerno landing and was still in the hospital. And a little bit later she told me about her husband, the darling, dimpled SS officer, who was now a POW on the Eastern front. And for four months in Wiesbaden she lived in my billet with me, translating day and night; and, actually, that’s what happened to that first marriage of mine, because my wife found out about it. I don’t think she would have minded a Fraulein. She minded my shacking up with a girl I’d known before I knew her.

  * * * *

  I remember more consequential causes than I can count. When I look inside my skin I don’t see anything but consequences; all I am is the casual aftereffects of, item, an unemployed carpenter evicted from his home and, item, a classification clerk who had been in the newspaper game himself once, and all the other itemized seeds that have now blossomed into fifty-two-year-old me.

  I remember more than I absolutely want to, in fact, and some things I remember in the context of a certain time and a certain place when, in fact, I really learned them later on.

  The man on the landing. Years after the war, when I had become a TV producer doing a documentary on the Depression, I put one of my research girls on checking him out. She was a good girl, and tracked him down. That’s how I know he had been a carpenter. The banks closed and the jobs vanished, and he wound up on the fire escape. It happened that when the police chased him away a reporter was in the precinct house, and he wrote the story my girl found.

  And I remember Paulie, twenty-nine years old and weighing a fast ninety pounds, gasping hoarsely as he reached out to shake my hand in the VA hospital ward, the day before he died. He had been there for three years, dying all that time. He looked like his own grandfather. That was a consequence too: a landing in the second wave at Salerno and a mine the engineers had missed. He got his Purple Heart for a broken spine that kept getting worse until it was so bad that it killed him.

  I think I’ve seen the place where he got it—assuming that I remembered what he said well enough, or understood him well enough, when he was concentrating mostly on dying. I think the place it happened was on the city beach at Salerno, way at the north horn of that crescent, about where there’s a little restaurant built out over the water on stilts. I stood there one afternoon on that beach, looking at the floating turds and pizza crusts, trying to see the picture of Paulie hitting the mine and being thrown into the sky in a fountain of saltwater and blood. But it wasn’t any good. I can only see what I’ve seen, not what I’ve been told about. I couldn’t see the causality. All I could do was ask myself questions about it: What made him sign up for his hero suit? Was it really reading that Percival Christopher Wren book when he was thirteen years old? Or: What made me alive, and sort of rich, when Paulie was so poor and dead? Was it the four or five really good contacts I made in the USO that turned me into a genius television producer? Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?

  I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, producing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever. Just being careful isn’t enough to save us, but we do have to be careful. Smokey Bear wouldn’t lie to you about that.

  If I’d married Kitty I think we would have had fine kids, even grandchildren by now; but I didn’t, not even batting .500 out of my two chances at her. First it was the old man on the fire escape, then it was the kindly Nazi she decided to go back to waiting for. She waited very well and for a long time, all through the years while the Russians were taking their time about letting him go and all through the denazification trials after that. I suppose by then she felt she was too
old to want to start a family. And none of my own wives have really wanted the PTA bit.

  And think of the consequences of that—I mean, the negative consequences of the babies that Kitty and I didn’t have. Did we miss out on a new Mozart? A Lee Harvey Oswald? Maybe just a hell of a solid Brooklyn fireman who might have saved a more largely consequential life than his own, or mine? Think of them. And that’s all you can do with those particular consequences, because they didn’t get born.

  Percival Christopher Wren didn’t mean to kill Paulie. The sad old derelict on the fire escape never intended to break up Kitty and me. Intentions don’t matter.

  We all live in each others’ pockets. If I drive my car along Mulholland Drive tonight, I only mean to keep my date with that pretty publicity girl from Paramount. I don’t even know you’re alive, do I? But the car is burning up the gasoline and pumping out the poison gas that makes the smog; and maybe it’s just that little bit of extra exhaust fume in the air that bubbles your lungs out with emphysema. It doesn’t matter to you what I meant to do. You’re just as dead. I don’t suppose I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except possibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch, and meanwhile I may be killing you.

  So I walk out on my balcony and stare through the haze at the lights of Los Angeles. I look at where they all live, the black militants and the aerospace engineers, the Desilu sound men and the storefront soul-savers, the kids who go to the Académe Française and the little old ladies with Back Up Our Boys bumper stickers on their cars. I remember what they, and you, and each and every one of you have done to me, this half a century I’ve been battered and bribed into my present shape and status; but what are they, and all of you, doing to each other this night?

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  * * * *

  James Sallis

  DOUCEMENT, S’IL VOUS PLAIT

  They’re forwarding me on to Versailles now. At least I think it’s Versailles. I watched the postman’s lips as he readdressed me, concentrated on the stammering pressure of the pen as it darted across my face—the a’s and e’s, unaccountably, in small capitals, the rest properly in lower case—and tried to ignore, to block out, faire taire, the dragging accompaniment from the side of his hand. And I think the word he printed, with his felt-tip pen, wasVersailles. I felt the four strokes of the V and l’’s quite distinctly; they were rapid, hard. That I am being forwarded is certain, for I saw the stamp descending like a dark sky and was able to read quickly, and backwards through the smear of ink before it moved away, leaving my eyes blotched with black, the words prière de faire. And if the next were renvoyer, there would have been no need for the postman’s pen, for the additional letters among which I was able to discern only (I think) the single word Versailles; a simple circling, an arrow, should have been sufficient to send me on my way back to 1, Petherton Court, Tiverton Road. It must have been, then, suivre. So at least, for another day, another few weeks, perhaps my abiding fear—that I bear no return address and will end among the dead letters—this fear is allayed.

  * * * *

  I am dropped from a box into a hot canvas bag. The smell of paste and ink, of dry saliva and, somewhere deep inside us, perfume. Apparently, while sleeping I have gone astray and been returned—to travel to some scrawled new address, to be set aside for inspection and at least referred back—to the post office collection box. It was the shock of falling through the slot onto hard edges and sharp corners, no doubt, which awakened me. The other letters will have nothing to do with me; they sense difference. And their language is unfamiliar now. Something guttural, that might be German. My questions go unanswered. Deep in the canvas (the perfume?) I can hear a British accent, a soft weeping, but am unable to make out the words.

  * * * *

  I wait in a cold hall, propped against the frosted mirror of an ancient oak wardrobe near the door, for a week before someone finally scribbles Not at this address in a cramped, small hand, afterwards retracing several of the letters and scoring beneath them, four heavy lines which feel at first like rips then like deep bruises, and drops me in the corner mailbox on his way somewhere. The mailbox is round. British.

  Why do they move about so much? How are they able; where does she get the money? And is there the faintest remain of a familiar perfume in this box. . . .

  I am being forwarded again. I have no idea where.

  * * * *

  It is Christmas, I think, and I am lost in the deluge of mail. Crushed with parcels, shuffled like a card but never dealt. High in my solitary forgotten pigeonhole now, I observe the functioning of our postal service. It never before occurred to me how astounding, what an efficient, essential instrument of society, this service is. Or the complex problems dealt with each day as little more, actually, than part of the routine. I watch with fascination. Perhaps this is the work I was meant for.

  I was a writer. More and more, my attention centered about the mail: my correspondence, the possible arrival of checks or hopeful word from my agents, rejected manuscripts that must be sent back out at once, copies of my books or magazines containing some small piece of mine, perhaps a foreign translation of something I’d done long ago and almost forgotten, packets of books about which publishers hoped I would be inclined to say something complimentary, a note of praise from some editor of a non-paying quarterly. The post was delivered twice daily, nine in the morning and just after noon. I would sit on the steps in the hall with a cup of tea, or the worst times, days I was definitely expecting something, with a drink, waiting. My wife and I got into shameful screaming fights over this, and once I struck one of the children who raced out of the flat before me and grabbed the mail from the postman’s hands. (I always waited, looking away, until he had deposited it in the box and left the building; then forced myself to walk slowly to it, whistling, and to every appearance completely uninterested. I believed that somehow this outward display of unconcern would influence what was there.) After we left the States and came to live in London, things became much worse; my expectations more desperate. And while my wife was conscientious about collecting it from the box, that having done, mail lost all importance to her, as though for some reason she could not accept it as a real thing, part of the daily discourse of our lives. Forced to be away from the flat during the time of delivery, I would return to look hopelessly into the empty box, and then to spend untold minutes searching the flat—for she could never remember just what she had done with it. Often I would find an important letter leaning against a dirty cup among stacked lunch dishes, forgotten. Others would finally appear in my oldest son’s wastebasket, the stamps having just been torn away for his collection. Generally, considerable portions of the message were torn away as well.

  * * * *

  Faces bend down and leer at me where I lean in the boxes. Shade light from the small window with their hands so they can see my diagonal cutting through the stream of fluorescent light from behind. Breath frosts the glass. Finally I’m removed between two fingers, crushed with others in a gloved hand. The thumb of the glove is empty and flops against us.

  Later a man stands over me. All the others have been opened. They are lying, torn and empty, at one side of this table, and he is turning me over and over again in one hand, mumbling to himself, a pink plastic letter opener in the other hand that I see periodically, rising jerkily toward me as though by its own will, then retreating again from sight. Minutes pass, and the next time the hand appears, the letter opener has been replaced by a pen; then a rapid scribbling. He puts me down, goes away. From beside me, among torn bodies, comes the scent of familiar perfume. It is fading.

  It would seem that I am in Poland. Or perhaps Yugoslavia.

  I always wanted to travel. Jane and I would lie for hours in bed with carlights sliding in sheets across the walls and ceiling and talk of all the places we should go—making plan after plan and abandoning each in turn, as some consideration of my work intervened. Departures were postponed time and again, applications
for visas were canceled, passports expired. Jane collected a sizable library of travel guides, two cardboard boxes full of travel folders. She became well known in the lounges of airports, ticket agents, foreign consuls. Soon she read nothing else, thought of nothing else.

  “How were the children today?”

  “They were in Hawaii.”

  * * * *

  Other places.

  * * * *

  They’re forwarding me on to Rhodes now. Ailleurs. Gdzieś. I have no idea where. And my sole, my only consolation, is that somewhere, at the end of all this, somewhere my wife and family wait to receive me. I imagine how they will discover me one morning on the floor by the door, beneath the mail slot—perhaps they will have heard the outside door, the brass lid swing shut as I’m pushed through, even the sound I make striking and sliding out onto tile or wood, a few inches—and how then they will prop me up lovingly on the table between them; between, perhaps, the cornflakes and Billy’s strained fruit.

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  * * * *

  C. L. Grant