by Robert Stone
“Well,” Duffy said, “it’s serious prose.”
“Is it weird?”
“Not at all. It’s Christmasy. Except he’s got a problem. Do you know what a headstay wrap is?”
“Yes,” she said. “Is he showing normally on the transponder?”
“It’s being monitored around the clock,” Duffy said.
“What position?”
“As of noon, about forty-one south, twenty-eight west.”
She stood holding the phone, chewing a thumbnail. “You know,” she said, “our arrangement is that I don’t call him.”
“That’s my arrangement too,” Duffy said. “The deal is he calls me.”
“Goddam it,” she said. “I’ve got the movie people here.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I guess he’s busy with the wrap. Maybe he forgot to book the call. Maybe he went to sleep.”
“Want to hear some of his statement?”
“No,” she said after a moment. She was afraid it might be grand and embarrassing. “Not just now. Call me before you release it.”
“Get him to read it,” Duffy said. “It’ll play better.”
“I don’t care about that,” she told Duffy, “but I have to know he’s all right. Have someone call him. See if you can get me the weather down there. Call anytime. And tell him to open his presents, if he can find them.”
“Right,” Duffy said. “Merry Christmas.”
Before going back out to Strickland and Pamela she went up to Maggie’s room.
“Don’t worry,” she told her daughter. “He checked in with Duffy so he’s all right. Probably busy.”
“I don’t like it,” Maggie said, “when he calls in and Mr. Strickland tapes it.”
“Why not?” Anne asked, thinking she knew perfectly well.
“I just don’t like it.”
Anne had no words of correction or encouragement. “I’m going back down,” she said. “You needn’t come if you don’t want to.”
“They are like really strange,” Maggie said, sounding well entertained this time. It was educational and cautionary, Anne decided, for Maggie to have a look at Pamela, and a kindness appropriate to the time of year. In future she supposed she would have to discourage Strickland’s bringing her around. “Is she really my age?”
“No,” Anne said.
“I’ll come down.”
In the Browne living room, Strickland was preparing to film and record the Christmas conversation.
“He won’t be calling,” Anne told him. “He’s busy now. He says Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas?” Strickland asked. “That’s it? No poems? No quotations?”
“He’s got a wrap around the headstay.”
“Is that bad or good?”
“Surely you know what that is by now. It’s a pain in the butt, that’s all.”
She brought out presents. Strickland filmed.
“I don’t want to open mine now,” Maggie said. “I’ll wait.”
Anne’s present was a scrimshaw jewelry box, a polar scene with a whale and a walrus.
“I hope he’s O.K.,” Pamela said. “I remember that boat. It’s real small.”
With a firm-jawed formal smile, Maggie left the room. Pamela watched her walk away.
“He’ll cope,” Anne said.
They sat in silence. Anne made two more drinks. Pamela nodded off on a cushion beside the fire.
“I suppose he had some tough times in the Nam,” Strickland suggested.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Some tough jobs.”
“I knew he did some PR over there. He never told me much about his combat experience.”
“He wasn’t technically in combat. He was assigned to a Tactical Air Control squadron.” Strickland waited for her to continue. “Tacrons,” she told him, “are normally part of an amphibious force. They work with carrier-based aircraft. In Vietnam they worked inland. It was all very secret. Still is.”
“Was it particularly dangerous?”
“So I’ve been told,” she said, “although not by Owen. I never knew how dangerous.”
“So,” Strickland said, “no wonder he got bored selling boats.”
Suddenly she found herself unable to politely laugh it off.
“I hope you understand this man,” she said. “I wonder if you do.”
“I’ve dealt with military achievers.”
For a moment his words stopped her cold. “Military achievers,” she repeated. “Is that your word for those guys, Ron? That sounds disrespectful to me.”
He looked right back at her quite shamelessly.
“I don’t want you to get mad at me,” he said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
“Really?” she asked. “But I am. How come it’s not right?”
“Because I’m your friend and I like you. And I’m not disrespectful. I’m referring to my own experience. I was there too.”
“Don’t play veteran, please. You were the press and that was different.”
“Hey,” he said warmly, “there ain’t no false hair on my chest, lady. Not much hair of any kind. Your husband was known to work with the press. And I had a few bad days of my own.”
“Tell her about LZ Bravo, Ron.” Pamela had come out of her doze and was looking at them bright-eyed. She lay across the wide red-print cushion in a fetal position, fists at her shoulders. “Tell about what happened,” she said with a lazy smile.
“LZ Bravo,” Strickland said, “was my Vietnam-related venture.”
“I know,” Anne said. “I understand it was antiwar. Or whatever they call it now. Critical.”
“I had a little trouble after the shooting.”
Pamela laughed engagingly. “The guys nearly killed him.”
“I made this film,” Strickland said. “I was a young man. I had an attitude. We were all competing with the military machismo that prevailed.”
“So,” Anne said, “somebody didn’t like your style?”
“I had no trouble with the men who appear in my film. They didn’t like me much but we coexisted. I had nothing against them. I sympathized. When shooting was over I was up in Cu Chi waiting for a ride out, living with the Twenty-fifth Division. I fell in with some tunnel rats. Rather, I fell out with them. They knew me only by reputation.”
“What happened?” Anne asked.
Strickland knitted his brows and took a sip of his drink. He spoke with difficulty.
“Tunnel r . . rats were small men. They went into the Vietcong tunnels with miners’ hard hats and pistols with silencers. Some of them had switchblades. They were tiny, swarthy predators. They were starvelings. R . . rickety. Hillbillies. Hispanics. Really more like mongooses than rats.”
“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” said Pamela.
“They decided to play a joke on me. So they took me out to a hot tunnel. One in use by the National Liberation Front. It had a bamboo wicker cover over it like a manhole. Down in it there was a stake covered with human shit, a trap. They tied me to it. Left me there all night.”
Anne looked into her drink.
“It was a long night,” Strickland said. “But it came to an end. As even the longest night must.”
“Even the longest night has to end,” Pamela agreed.
Anne was chastened.
“So many bad things came,” Anne declared, “to so many people. Over there.”
“Well put,” Strickland said. “And that was hardly the worst. In fact, the tunnel probably wasn’t even really hot.”
“All the same,” Anne said, “it couldn’t have been pleasant.”
“No,” Strickland said. “But I take comfort. I was doing my job. Follow truth too close by the heels, it kicks you in the teeth. Famous saying.”
“Yes, I see,” Anne said.
“Right,” said Strickland. “And I’m still here. Still doing it.”
Later, because everyone had been drinking, Anne had Pamela and Strickland stay overnight. Pamela took the guest room,
was heard to prowl during the night, but caused no trouble. Strickland slept on a sofa in the study.
Just before they retired Strickland distributed some presents he had brought. For Pamela there was a woolen ski cap from Finland, white with purple trim. She put it on at once and looked very fetching, gamine and somehow medieval. Anne got a book of Pre-Raphaelite reproductions.
Anne had presents for them. A sailing calendar for Strickland; for Pamela a bar of scented soap.
The next morning she woke up with a headache and an imperfect recollection of the late conversation. The book Strickland had given her was on the dresser. It had some striking pictures: Millais’s Annunciation, Holman Hunt’s Lady of Shalott. They were beautiful and faintly disturbing.
Downstairs Strickland was making coffee.
“So much for Christmas,” he said. “Next year in Teheran.”
“It was nice to have you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. You weren’t on your best behavior, though.”
“Who, me? I don’t get any mellower than that.”
“Well, you were nice to Maggie. You were kind to your friend Pamela.”
“She is my friend,” Strickland said. “I try to look out for her.”
Anne took her coffee to the window and drank it looking into the fog outside. The trees were black and dripping.
“Why did you tell her that story about yourself in Vietnam?”
“Do you think I shouldn’t have?”
“Well,” Anne said, “obviously she likes it. She forces you to tell it.”
Strickland shrugged.
“It’s a terrible story,” Anne said.
“She told me her stories,” Strickland said. “I had to trade for them with mine.”
“Most of the men I know wouldn’t tell a story like that,” Anne said. “Not to a woman.”
“You mean not in front of a woman?”
“No,” Anne said. “I mean most guys wouldn’t tell a woman that story.”
“Most guys wouldn’t have to. Most guys wouldn’t have been there.”
She laughed at his solemn insolence. “Most guys have it easy, you mean?”
“Many do,” Strickland said. “There’s a lot most guys never find out.”
“Lucky for them.”
“Lucky,” Strickland said, “but nobody cares.”
She had to wonder who it was that cared for him.
38
THE SOUTHERN SUMMER, Browne discovered, had light more radiant than that of autumn in Connecticut. Its shadows seemed darker and deeper. Day after day, the sky was luminous. The cool weather and the dry pure air aroused him to a faint excitement. Every night, the dazzle of stars overhead kept him awake and on deck.
His single-handed struggle with the headstay had cost him much sleep and hours of rage and frustration. Now he was tacking south, looking for the big winds below forty. Since crossing the line, he had found no air heavier than twenty knots. Every day the fax reported a stationary front off Patagonia. After a while, the bright intensity of things gave him a headache. He felt as though his personal rhythms were a fraction too fast. He kept starting jobs and leaving them incomplete. The color of the water reminded him of something he could not bring to mind. It had grown a richer blue as he had gone farther south.
One evening, he was on deck listening to the radio when the sky filled with colored light. Curving bands in violet and dark green undulated across the dark blue sky. Bank after bank of purple light radiated from the southern horizon in regular repeated patterns. So orderly were the emanations that they seemed to Browne to be a kind of signal. It was hard to believe that no unitary purpose was behind them.
The aurora reminded Browne of the night sky over the Song Chong valley in 1969. He had seen the most spectacular displays there, tracer rounds in red and green, parachute flares every night. Behind each illumination was some intention, it was being organized and coordinated, but to see it all was to know that things had gone beyond the compass of human will.
Over the radio, as the colored lights ranged across the sky, a man was explaining time: “If we can speak of an absolute future and an absolute past,” said the speaker, who had a brusque South African accent, “we can also make distinctions outside the continuum. What is outside and never to be intersected by our lines of event? We call it absolute elsewhere.”
The aurora seemed somehow to interfere with the radio signal, so that the lecturer’s voice waxed and waned with the throbbing of the lights overhead. Eventually it faded away. The lights were still shimmering when the stars came out. Browne looked up and saw his friends from home, Orion and Canis Major. Sirius burned away.
In the cabin he tried, perversely, to find the missionary station. He had been listening to it with amusement almost every night since crossing forty. This time it was not available.
At latitude fifty south, although the skies were still clear and the air light, Browne secured the hemispheres of his cockpit bubble to the deck. To keep the Plexiglas clear, he washed it with the Clearade he used for his dive masks. He decided to leave the bubble open until the weather changed. The same evening he sought out the missionary station again. Instead there was more mere physics.
“What are we to say,” asked the learned Boer, “of particle histories occurring in imaginary time? How can time be imaginary? Yet it can be. For imaginary time works its force on the continuum with the same degree of influence as so-called real time. How can we speak of histories occurring over imaginary time?”
The signal faded out. That night Browne lay in his bunk unable to sleep. Although the pain in his bruised fingers kept him awake, he found rest in the notion of imaginary time. To consider it was like being reminded of something one had always known. It was as though things had a delicious secret side that had been inexplicably forgotten. The trick was to remember it in difficulty, so there was something at the worst of times. If we could experience that, Browne came to believe, we would understand a level of existence at which things were basically all right. He fondly remembered the sound of the broadcaster’s voice which seemed pregnant with that experience. Although the savor of the thing kept him from sleep, he could not quite bring it to bear.
39
THE NEW buildings stood in the marshes thirty miles or so beyond Fort Monmouth, on a hummock called Craven’s Point. There were five of them, each over thirty stories high, white inside and out, and resplendent with glass. The interiors had tiles and aluminum fittings and an art-deco geometry that suggested both hope and nostalgia. It seemed to Strickland as though someone’s lost world, out on the edge of town, might be waiting for a comeback.
The complex was well set on that January day. The newly cleared Jersey ash pits were under fresh snow and the bay ice-flecked. The winter sky itself looked high and white.
On the lobby floor of the principal commercial tower Strickland was shooting the opening of a display of oil paintings. The paintings had marine subjects: tugs, boatyards, docked trawlers, freighters under steam at night. They were really very atmospheric, Strickland thought. They captured something lonely and frightening. The painter was an elderly Lithuanian with a cruel, sensual face, the man whose work adorned Jack Campbell’s office. He had been a Soviet seaman who had succeeded in escaping to the States where Anne’s father had given him employment. Jack Campbell was a ready supporter of the victims of communism and a collector of marine art. He was also part owner of the bright new buildings whose completion was celebrated with the exhibit. Harry Thorne was among the guests. When Strickland had filmed and recorded all he thought he needed, he sent Hersey back to New York in the van.
It was not easy to catch Anne alone after her father left. For quite a while, his work done, Strickland watched her attended by ham-faced men in dark suits. The men kept bringing her white wine and she kept drinking it. When she found her way to one of the cathedral windows that faced the bay, he went over.
“Sort of like the Hindenburg.”
“Why�
�s that?”
Strickland shrugged. “The lines of force. The politics. The fact that it’s New Jersey.”
“Will we crash and burn?”
“I don’t know,” Strickland said. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“I like the paintings,” she said. “You can’t spoil the view. What politics?”
“Of course,” Strickland admitted. “There are no more politics.”
“My God,” Anne said, “does it bother you that these men own real estate? That the artist is a Lithuanian? You’re really the last Bolshevik.”
“What are you doing later this afternoon?” Strickland asked her. “Are you busy?”
“I’m going home,” she said. “Aren’t you finished?”
“Not quite,” he said. “There’s a place down the road I want you to see.”
She looked at him curiously. “Really? What place?”
Harry Thorne disengaged himself from another group and came over. He looked at Strickland with what appeared, superficially, to be an affable expression.
“He’s everywhere, this guy.”
“I’m everywhere,” Strickland agreed, “but you’ve been scarce, Mr. Thorne. Any word from Hylan?”
“According to the paper,” Thorne said, “Mr. Hylan is a fugitive. It may very well be true.”
“What do you think happened?” Strickland asked him.
“We may never know what happened,” Thorne said. “I can’t answer for Matty Hylan. But everyone who has a deal with me still has a deal.”
“Funny,” Strickland said, “the way it all turned out.”
“It is funny,” Thorne said. “Another thing I notice is that your assistant was taking film of me earlier without notification or permission. I would like that not to happen.”
“O.K.,” Strickland said. “Sorry.”
“It was good to see the captain,” Thorne told Anne. He meant her father. “You know we’re old friends.” Without looking at Strickland, he drew her aside. Strickland watched him address her earnestly at close quarters.
“My driver will take you home,” he heard Thorne tell her. “I’ll call you. We’ll have a conversation.”
Strickland brought her another wine when he had her back. “Thorne likes you.”