The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  And, second, they began to breed as fast as they could. Driven by nothing the population experts could understand because those wiseguys did not reckon the terrible and deep forces of animal instinct on their slide rules.”

  “Never thought of that,” Gaunt murmured.

  “I did. And when I did, I got that sensation of being near a solution to the mess that you mentioned. Our instincts, back in the old days, were trying to deal in the only way instinct can with forces of fear and with real dangers that our collective, conscious American mind had refused to face and put a stop to. We were trying blindly to get enough A-bomb fodder on hand to make up for the coming casualties! That explained the reversal of a trend everybody had thought was firmly established! That explained the millions of unexpected babies!”

  For a long time Gaunt said nothing. Then he rallied from his thoughts. “The positive experience?”

  His son also seemed bemused. He opened his mouth, closed it, murmured, “We wouldn’t face reality. That was our biggest mistake.” His head shook. “Almost everybody tried to keep everybody even from trying to find out what reality was.

  Ridicule Einstein, repudiate Freud, suppress Kinsey, let’s hear from His Holiness, the Pope. That was the real attitude of everybody, whoever or whatever their particular

  ‘pope’ happened to be. Yep! Insane!” He hesitated and then continued, “The other?

  During the war I was stationed on a Pacific island for a while.

  “Loka Sorambi?”

  “Yeah. Nice place. Polynesians. No shame sense. None of the decayed ideas of Hindus or Chinamen, either. None of that Presbyterian purity-in-talk, obscenity-of-behavior, either. Family ties strong. Marriages entirely happy—not entirely faithful—

  nobody minded. They all did everything together. Men, women, kids. Planted, fished, hunted, laundered, bathed in waterfalls, entertained whole villages, rested up from parties, made clothes, houses, tended babies. All together. Now look. They could have had a certain amount of machinery and medicines and drugs. They could have developed science to any degree and philosophy and art. And still lived pretty much as they did, felt exactly as they did, behaved socially the way they did. Only a little compartmentizing of their society would have been necessary for that. If they’d wanted to know and learn—

  and remained modest in what they applied and exploited—they probably could even have developed atomic energy without ruining human life, as such.”

  Gaunt grinned. “Could you sell that bill of goods to Americans?”

  “Too late, isn’t it?” Edwin grinned also, but differently. “Those were the only happy people I ever knew or saw or heard of. The only contented human beings. The only decent ones. The only ones who loved sunrise and sunset, each other, food and air, rain-loved loving, loved kids, loved life. The only ones. The only ones on the planet! Now there’s nobody.”

  “What about your family?” Gaunt asked.

  “Frances?” Edwin lighted another cigarette while he considered memories of his wife. “Frances had a single principle: it was to maintain the systems and methods recommended by the least unenlightened magazines for bearing and rearing children and keeping a husband what was called happy.”

  “And that kept her happy?”

  “It kept her busy which most people identify as the same thing. That’s because when they have nothing to do they’re instantly wretched. In other words, they don’t like themselves. Frances as a matron, a wife and a mother was a social success and a family success. Emotionally, she was a well-adjusted six-year-old. As a wife to me, she was a pretty and perfumed machine. And that was just dandy so long as I didn’t have time for anything else, either. Most people never grow up any more than she did. And, God, how I envied them! How convenient it is to go through life as a child!”

  “And how inevitable that religion should stress just that!”

  The younger man nodded. “Nobody mature could stay in a pattern designed for children! Well, Pop, those were the two reflections that put me nearest to a sense of some other, larger reality that existed but that I couldn’t see because of the wrongness of all we believed, stood for, did every day, felt, refused to feel, didn’t do and so on. If I could do it over—” His voice trailed off.

  “You’d what?”

  Edwin laughed. “I’m sleepy now.”

  “What?” Gaunt persisted.

  His son rose and stretched and kicked a spark-making log. “Lead a rebellion I guess. Against materialism. Against every ism, communism or fascism or pigheaded Americanism, that pretends to be no more than a thing-maker. Start a religion. A cult of learning and expression and enjoying and loving but not of so damned much

  ‘progressing.’ A procountry, pronature religion. A cult for reducing the human stock to a tenth of present numbers and bettering the breed a few thousand per cent. A religion that had wiser ‘thousand-year’ programs than old Hitler. There was nothing wrong with the period. Why shouldn’t we plan for a mere thirty or forty generations, instead of just our one? Rather, why didn’t we? My cult would be anti-city, also. Did you ever think that, just as I suggested the birth rate went up in response to a threat to the species-at least in America where the threat was dimly appreciated, so, perhaps, people invented atomic bombs because actually they hated cities, hated modern civilization, longed of inner necessity to smash the whole worthless, foolish mess? Start over?”

  Gaunt was standing also, now. He yawned tremendously. “Yeah.” His eyes met those of his son with affection but with irony too. “What I’ve thought about most is the difference between what people said they believed and what actually happened. Right there is the measure of the unconscious mind of everybody. The yardstick of instinct. The gulf between pretense and fact. It went unheeded in our time and we fell prey to it, finally, because what you refuse to look at is what gets you, always. The rebellion you talk about and the ‘religion’ belong someplace thousands of years ahead of where we were.”

  “Why, necessarily?”

  The philosopher chuckled. “Because Frances wouldn’t like it!”

  “If Frances had gone through what we have, Frances might,” the younger man replied grimly. “Even Frances.”

  “And where’s even Frances?”

  They looked at each other in the firelit night and without saying any more they started toward the place where the others slept. . . .

  Toward the end of the afternoon of the day following Gaunt started to the island in the sailboat with Gordon. They had a load of oranges, lemons, limes, taro root and monstera deliciosa, harvested from the remains of a plantation that had been established on one of the keys long ago and long ago abandoned.

  There was no breeze, so Gordon was rowing, eagerly. They’d had a fine day.

  Looking at the boy, Gaunt had, not his usual sense of tragedy, but a sudden feeling of hope. Here was the future, still. And all his extrapolations of despair did not darken the face or stem the energies of the boy. To this lad, Jim and Edwin and Teddy and he were as father and as mother also. But to this lad the world belonged and all future time. Not to them. They had no right to assume that Gordon would fail, as they had, to discover the answer to the Sphinxlike conundrum of the Absence. They had only the right to give him all they could, tell him all, teach him all, make him as honest as they knew how. The rest was his.

  It was a new thought to Gaunt, and a comforting one.

  He let the sense of it beguile him, stared composedly at the infinite blue of the pale Bay, watched the life on the bottom through the poured-glass water and reflected that spring was on the way. It came very early, always, in South Florida. He wondered about the date. It required some moments of calculation before he remembered: February, it was, the fourteenth.

  Anniversary.

  He snapped his fingers with surprise.

  19

  HOMECOMING AND CONCLUSION.

  Gaunt snapped his fingers: the light lost its blue luminosity. The vast dimensions contracted. He and the boy were no lo
nger dots in a matchstick sailboat on a pale and vacant sea. His eyes took an instant to reaccommodate. Vista, but where sea had been was a yellow greenness. A less bright sun glittered on a different surface. The one small mast turned into a hundred larger masts, and darker: the boles of trees. It took Gaunt a few seconds to realize this was his own pineland seen from the window of his own office.

  Seen absently: he felt he had been staring at it, thinking of other things the nature of which momentarily escaped him.

  He detested confusion of the mind, aberration, uncertainty. A scowl came on his high forehead; he moved his head. “Good God!” he whispered.

  There, in front of him, was his typewriter and part of a page on which he had evidently been writing. His far-focused eyes could not instantly read but soon they made out two lines below the finished paragraph:

  Prolix.

  The dopes won’t get to first base with it.

  The words had the sense of something forgotten but familiar, something written a long while ago. Years ago. And soon he remembered.

  He shut his eyes, for an instant utterly appalled; his ears took up the shocked function. A woman was singing. A woman. High notes trilled; it was the “Italian Street Song”: Edwinna.

  He knew what he had to do now; he did it with agony.

  He moved his head. Paula was there.

  But by now she had ceased digging in the peat moss. He remembered that also, remembered particularly because, in the attempt to solve the riddle, he had often recalled and pondered every detail of the instant of Vanishment.

  Paula was there. In the same dress. With the same immaculate coiffure a copper-pink blaze in the sunshine. But her face had turned white as chalk, as the coral roads, as powdered shells. She clung to the rim of the wooden tub that contained the gardenia. Her hands were blanched like the flowers. And she, too, was trying to look.

  A half inch at a time, as if her head were a great stone that could be moved only by extreme effort, in fractions of an are, she faced toward his office. Her eyes, dilated, at length met his. Her lips parted a little, then widely: she would have screamed if she could have found the strength.

  Edwinna’s song died away in mid-trill.

  Upstairs, for another second, the waxer hummed. Then it was shut off and Hester cried out incomprehensibly. Byron, the gardener, made two or three desultory cuts at the roots and then stopped. Alicia gave a sudden wild cry in the living room: “Mummie!”

  Paula lurched as if a wrestling ghost were trying to loosen her hold on the tub. He thought, We have come back. Those were the words that said what his senses recorded.

  He maneuvered his feet under his body, braced his hands on the arms of the swivel chair, rose like an aged man, and then ran like a boy.

  Paula had seen him. He knew that. To look had been anguish because she had feared not to see him. As he had feared.

  Porch. Screen door. Lawn. She was in his arms.

  “Darling,” he said. “Oh, my darling!”

  She murmured, “Bill, Bill, Bill!” Then she yelled it: “Bill!”

  Gaunt kissed her violently.

  She began to cry.

  “It’s over,” he said to her in a reedy voice. “Ended. We’ve come hack to now.” He realized she might not understand, suspected, suddenly, it had not happened to anyone but him. Stunned anew, he recalled and analyzed the fact of her equal shock, but he said,

  “I’ve had a sort of nightmare.”

  “Nightmare!”

  “Did you—?” He felt her nod against his cheek. “But it wasn’t a nightmare! It was real. Oh, God!”

  A few moments passed; she sobbed and they held each other.

  Then there was Edwinna, coming through the screen door with Alicia in her arms.

  She stopped to kiss the child and stopped again. “Dad!” she called hoarsely.

  Gaunt reached out a hand. Girl and child plunged into his embrace. Edwinna put her head beside her mother’s. Tears like drops of rain ran down her face. Presently she whispered, “Dad. Were you—? Were the men—?”

  “For four hellish years, alone—!”

  “It was the same with us!”

  Gaunt laughed in a high, wavery fashion. “Let’s sit down, before all four of us collapse!”

  They sat, then, hanging to each other, kissing. At last Alicia spoke, perplexity in her childish voice. “I had an awful tummy-ache a while ago, Mummie! It went away. Can I pick a flower?”

  Gaunt saw horror in the women’s eyes and murmured, “What—?”

  Edwinna said flatly. “It’s the last thing she remembered. The pain.” Her still-stunned eyes lifted to those of her father.

  “Go pick a flower,” Paula said softly. “Pick them all, if you like, Alicia.”

  “She died,” Edwinna muttered. “Years ago.”

  They didn’t seem to know what to say then. How to explain.

  “There was a hurricane—” Paula began.

  “We had one also,” he said, when his wife halted. “A couple of years ago. I was away at the time. It dropped a tree on the living-room eaves.”

  “Here, Bill?” Paula asked earnestly. “You were here?”

  “A good deal of the time. Lately on the keys. With Jim and Gordon—Teddy—and Edwin.”

  “Edwin!” both women gasped.

  He said, “Let’s just sit a minute. Let’s—thank God.”

  Paula had moved so close to him that they touched from ankle to shoulder and Edwinna was as close on the other side.

  The child plucked gardenias and piled them on the grass.

  They looked at the sky where, presumably, God was.

  They did not say anything. They did not know what to say.

  It was Paula who finally made the attempt. “We are thankful for our deliverance.

  We implore it will endure.”

  Gaunt said, “Amen.”

  But Edwinna was not satisfied. Her handsome eyes probed the blue zenith with sudden fury. “And if You send us back, I will hate You through eternity!”

  “We can’t hate any more,” Paula said reproachfully.

  Edwinna’s change was as swift as the coming of her rage. “I know. I won’t. It’s only that I had to tell Him how I really felt then.”

  A confused ululation came from the rear of the house.

  “It’s Hester,” Paula said quickly, “having hysterics, poor darling! I’ll go talk to her.”

  But Edwinna was on her feet. “I’ll go!” She started, stopped, thought of taking the child along, and did not. The kitchen sounds quieted.

  Wife and husband, father and mother, woman and man, grandfather and grandmother gazed eyes into eyes for a long space of time. The child brought the flowers to them and walked a little distance to watch a mockingbird splash in the scooped-out coral bath.

  At last Gaunt sighed and said, “So you went through it—right here—the way we did. Alone.”

  “Yes, Bill. All those years.”

  “It must have been terrible.” The faintest shadow of his grin showed evanescently.

  “Or was it a relief sometimes?”

  She turned slowly and examined her home. “Don’t make jokes.” She looked out across the palmettos and spoke dazedly. “We cleared the whole thing. Yams grew out there. Pigeon peas. Colored women had log cabins beyond.”

  “The last time I saw it”—he plucked grass blades, tossed them, caught some on the back of his hand, threw them again and let them sift away on the mild breeze—“I was out there, myself, with a rifle. Killing men.”

  She had looked at him attentively, her thumbnail caught under the white row of her upper teeth. Now she smiled a little bit. “You did, Bill? Shot men?”

  He nodded. “Several.”

  “Defending your home?”

  “Which wasn’t even home, really. A shambles.”

  “Did that happen—in many places?”

  “Everywhere. For a long time men slowly degenerated. Finally, for a while, most of them behaved like brigands.”
r />   “You weren’t hurt? Sick? You didn’t?” She glanced apprehensively at the child.

  “Die?” He shook his head. “Wasn’t sick. Or hurt. You?”

  “No.”

  “Edwinna?”

  Another pause. Paula drew a deep breath. “Edwinna was magnificent! She had more courage than anyone. She was a Diana. She quit niggling and complaining. She went out in the Everglades and hunted for the whole community. When the cholera struck—”

  “Cholera!”

  Paula looked down. “We never could manage things well. Yes, cholera. A hundred families depended on Edwinna, finally, till most of them died—till all the rest of us moved away. In Minnesota she shot deer. She—oh—Bill!—she was splendid!”

  Then, only then, Gaunt burst into tears.

  Paula comforted him.

  In a little while Edwinna returned, carrying two glasses. “Iced tea,” she said. “Do you want it? Or a drink? Or anything? Hester’s okay.”

  They took the glasses. Edwinna gathered up Alicia and fondled her.

  Paula and Bill tasted the cold tea. They said together, “It’s been a long time”—

  and they laughed.

  Edwinna kept watching her daughter with a look in her eyes both tremulous and astonished, as if she had never seen a child before, never felt the indelibility of something of one’s self recapitulated, alive and discrete, never thought sympathetically of littleness; never really known that Alicia was real, was hers, was herself over again. But while she watched—surprised, attentive—she picked up the words her parents had spoken.

  “A long time?” Edwinna’s smile was dubious. “Is it? Or is it—no time? Have four years passed? Or is it only half an hour later? The way you two drink tea—were you thirsty, before we vanished from each other—or is it that you’ve had no tea for such a long, long time? What do you think?”