Eagle Eye

by Hortense Calisher

  That’s where the stress is, onka-bonka. When you imitate.

  “Not even in bed, she couldn’t. She said.” I saw the second capsule slip from his hand onto the Navajo rug Ike and I used to shoot immies on. “Tell you something, Buddy. Maybe it’s only because I’m young. But I never yet paid for it.”

  What independence. Only one I have.

  “Wait. Just you wait.”

  What else is fear?

  “No it’s not only that, kid. Look at yourself. You take after her. I’m the boy his mother had to tell him any boy doesn’t look like a monkey is okay.”

  That’s one way they get at you—humility. Do I prefer pride?

  “That lummox she had. A seed cataloguer. From Idaho.”

  “Does she know you know?”

  “I never said. In our family the women never—” He shrugged. Put his head on his fists. “God, I have to sleep.”

  Never said, never went downtown, never did. I thought of the child I’d had for minutes—Jasmin’s. I’d have fed it all the music, from all the dixie cups.

  He was scrabbling on the carpet for the capsule. On the pattern I knew by heart, I saw it, in the cranny where the smallest agates used to lodge.

  He was watching me. “What do you think of us, Quentin? Tell us the truth.”

  That trap.

  “I mind inheriting it.” My lips went stiff. “It’ll come on me, and I won’t know how. Or even when. That’s the thing I mind.”

  “What will?”

  “The shabbiness.”

  When he got up from the carpet, he studied the piano, ran a nail so lightly over the full keyboard that only one or two notes spoke. Came down hard forefinger, on middle C. “Shall I phone her? You didn’t say.”

  When I didn’t answer at once, he slapped a pillow. Then the sofa. No dust flew, as it used to do. “I have his number. I talk to him.”

  I picked up the capsule, still sticky from his hand. “I’d begin—not calling.”

  He lay down slow, white, his eyes ranging the ceiling. I could give him his pill. I owed him something. I searched the room, looking for it. “You sure one-upped me with this place, though. This room I mean. You sure one-upped me there.”

  Buddy looked at the wall. The computer-room, with its Zebel must be just outside, then the common room, the business ones and the pleasure ones, circled tight and interdisciplined, out to the city periphery that viewers up here owned.

  “You don’t mind about that, huh? You don’t mind I one-upped you on that.” He smiled.

  “No, I like it,” I said. “It makes me feel safe.”

  When he slept, I laid the throw over him and lay down on the other sofa, our heads almost touching. Before I had television in my room we listened to the radio like that. Or the record player. Falling asleep until Maeve called. One thing I had managed for him tonight. He got to sleep without that capsule.

  I got up after a while and flushed it down the toilet. Toilet was handy here; food would come on carts down the corridor, as wanted; the girl-market would be as easy as dialing a prayer. And when she got here, no matter her size and shape for the night, that brilliant band of city windows would hem her in like a diamond-broker’s inventory. Except for the room’s having no windows itself, and a certain taint in the air of crushed apartments, it would be a handy place to live. I didn’t suppose he’d figured in the computer that was just outside. I lay there, figuring it.

  Now and then I could feel his breath on me, irregular. I could see how a letter to a son could be hard. Full of the naked family facts. So instead he wrote those crummy, humbly notes I got all year, full of his humility to my youth. Like the one I got in Paris that day and left on the washbasin, hoping the ink would run. He writes them virile, with a felt pen. “Full of his duty to me—what shit is that of mine?” I was holding onto Monica at the time, helping her over the bad spot. When she was coming down, she said, she always had trouble remembering who she was. She’d been repeating all the names she’d been christened with. “Monica Mary, shit. Isadora, shit.” She croaked. “Wigglesworth, shit.” She gave a hoot of laughter. “Ellsworth.” She took a deep breath. “Shit. When all we want—.” I wiped the spit from her hair. She was down. When she was leaving, she offered me her applecheek. The rest of her hadn’t been much. “Thanks for the assist. Maybe it’ll work out for me with those kids in Boston. If I can be an assist, to them.”

  He used to breathe over me like this, in my youth-bed. When I got a full-sized one, he stopped, and I was glad. I was king of the mountain then. They told me so daily. It made him angry now. When what I needed now was what Monica called, “the other thing.”

  I was on the same trip as her, really, I could smell how it should have been. Never spelled out or pressed, but a birthright too. A sense of my duty—to them.

  It’s no trick at all to break away from a family. I can’t understand the public concern. You can cut up a family in one day’s night. With the facts. As a one-minute father, I knew that. But where do the facts go then? Can they be saved? Maybe there’s a vocation in that.

  I thought I heard the computer breathing, outside, telling me so. But it was only my father.

  “Doughty,” my father murmured, rolling deeper on his reef. “Blinded. They want permission to put me away.”

  “We sup with devils,” I said.

  In front of the computer it was cool as a field of cucumbers nobody had planted yet. I lay down on the rug with my face into the rug fibers, smelling the moths that never came.

  I want to live in a room that is real.

  What’s smart about me? What’s dumb?

  I WENT TO SEE Janacek. Sitting behind a desk, he looks like a man with a lion’s head over his shoulders. But you can see the seam where it stops.

  “How is she?”

  “Calm.”

  I doubted that. But it must be a relief to her that the sadness isn’t joint anymore.

  “Want to tell me where she is?”

  “Better not.”

  He really believes we haven’t guessed.

  “Does she want to see me?”

  “Rather not.” He gazes at me without triumph. He must have to do this sort of thing all the time. For the families of the patients he is protecting from their families.

  “She decide that?”

  He nodded. I believed him. She’s smarter than Buddy there. The Bunty-doll—she’s throwing it away.

  “Want to talk about it?” he said.

  “You first. I’ll watch your earring.”

  He laughed.

  “Your mother was miming the stress put upon her,” he said artistically. “Those weights.”

  “Screw that. It’s a simple country device. Let the porch fall.”

  I could see her standing on the loaded back porch. Looking out. At the brambles.

  “Amenia? Ah well, we believe in dwelling more on things that happen now.”

  “Me—I’m reading a book about time-binding.” I was reading everything I could on that, and giving myself a course in the newest computer applications as well. And I was reading Babbidge at last. “You know we’re the only animal does that? Binds itself to time? Even the king of beasts doesn’t do that. Or so they say.” I was watching his ear-wire, but it wasn’t sending. “I’m not so sure though. Time’s an audience. Haven’t you watched even animals want that?”

  “Animals?” He shrugged. “Animals.”

  I thought I could smell the camp on him. Far, far back in memory veins he no longer thought funneled that black blood to his heart.

  “Sure, you know. Performing dogs. Horses at dressage.” I mixed them more recklessly. “Flea circuses. Seals, kangaroos. Teddy bears.”

  The earring jumped. “Shall we talk about your mother, please? I have only this hour to spare.”

  He wanted to know. Already she was puzzling him.

  He was formed to be puzzled if any child was. His own mother, sitting in her Queens kitchen all these years, folding gingham and ironing it, befo
re the highest court. Jasmin went there once without his knowing. No gas in that kitchen. All electric. Very clean. No bones in the Disposall; it won’t take them. But she was proud of it. When she died, he thought he had disposed of her.

  “A lot boils down to what audience a person has. I been thinking that out. In front of a good one. Best I could find.”

  “God?” he said politely.

  I burst out laughing.

  “Ah. Another doctor, then.”

  I couldn’t laugh twice. “A computer works by a magnitude of association, too. Only it isn’t burdened with its own time sense. It doesn’t have that dimension. For it, time isn’t either a poison or an antidote. Time is only a test. And one life isn’t long enough for all the storage it can take … Like if you could find a way to record your life in a 7090, you might have something. When you checked back.”

  He leans back. The better to observe me, he thinks. The resemblance is remarkable. Eyes used to seeing the kill brought in. The big cat’s nose that must smell itself more than anything.

  “A computer. Very chic. But will it listen? Like me now?”

  We smile. At how much he must know about listening.

  Everything—except that the children who talk to him nowadays are his audience.

  “No. You’d be learning the language of your own life, that’s all. In enough time.”

  If the computer could free us of our time—binding by seeing us free of it? By assessing us, assessing it all. As we went along.

  I saw his fur stand up. But I wasn’t afraid of him—yet.

  “Like, we’re so slow, Jannie. Like, when you told me about her—at my party. That second before you told it all. I was maybe a forty-five-second father. Or for minutes even. It gets longer and longer, in my mind. But it’s too late.”

  “Bunty, we are not going to talk about her.”

  Aren’t we. You are going to tell me about her. I am going to tell you about Maeve.

  On the wall behind my head there was a picture. I saw it the minute I came in. I wonder if he kept the katipo.

  “Want me to tell you about the picture behind my back, Jannie? … I will anyway. The shop also had one where the raindrop lines said merde. She thought that was too simple. The artist would do them to order, the shop said. But only if the artist liked the word suggested. And only five-letter words.” There was one picture that said other, and one said given, but those two were bespoke. And one, the raindrops said Deary: she thought that was kind of nice—did I?” Cooperative art, the village is full of it, though, she said, and buried her head in my neck. “I asked her why she chose nihil.” She bit me, and said did I know it was the Latin for nothing? “She said—‘Because it goes with rain’.”

  We both glanced at the window. Today was rainy. She knew what she was doing.

  “I always wondered, Jannie. If she ordered it.”

  He stared up at it, over my chair. I stared at my knuckles. People fall. In all variations. I suspect him of nothing. Except of knowing. “The day she was in that crowd was rainy. I looked it up.”

  I got up; in a second I was going to be very afraid of him. “Do you really believe? In light skulls?”

  He lowered his head. I could smell his childhood on him. It reached out for me. I stepped back just in time.

  “Keep your dirty kid hands off that.”

  “I keep wondering if I should have broken in on her, that’s all.” I could have, once. He couldn’t have. Too late for him, by then.

  He knows that. She was wrong though, if she thought he doesn’t feel. He’s leading the linear life, that’s all. They’ve straightened him out.

  “I thought she always let you in,” he said. Hoarse.

  When I came.

  “I came to talk about her because she’s dead. Don’t we have to? Don’t I? From now on, she’s only in what we say. Forget I was one of her guys.”

  “Why are you here then?”

  “What you said. Hunting necessity. I remembered it.”

  He was shivering like a cat about to spring. Forward. Or back.

  “What we say of the dead—that’s our language too, Jannie, isn’t it? I never had anybody dead before. Much.”

  “Wait till you have hundreds. All the same age.”

  That whisper. How often she must have had to hear it, talking of the dead.

  “The same age?”

  “As yourself.”

  So that’s why I came to him. K-k-k. Blood soy.

  “I went to Riverside Church, once,” I told him. “In that program they had—maybe they still do; why should it stop? Reading out the names of the war dead. You take your turn, then the next one does, like a marathon. After a while the names become a nothing. It’s on a long roll of paper you hand to the next reader; you don’t see the end of it.” Then you go home.

  He was listening.

  It does help.

  “I get a bug sometimes,” I said. “Intestinal.”

  “All the deaths you didn’t die,” Jannie said.

  “What do you do about it?”

  “I wear an earring.”

  He got to his feet. “Time’s up. Sorry.”

  Somebody ought to touch that seam of his. I wasn’t afraid any more.

  “Listen, Jannie,” I said quick. “Watch out. About her audience. Maeve’s. Buddy could take it small at home, because he had his business scope. But she never had a scope. So her audience stayed shapeless. And that’s terrifying. That’s why her white hair looks too old for her. She stayed young.” How could I tell him quick enough? “She dwarfed the world down to him.”

  “Okay, Bunty … Okay, young man.” He had opened the door. The next comer, a tyke, was standing there patiently. It sobered us both.

  “I’m calling myself Quentin now. When you go home—tell her that.”

  He half-closed the door again. “One of her guys? You were the only one.”

  So that’s why I came to him. To be told.

  “I didn’t pay in, did I Jannie? A machine would have done better. If properly set.”

  He doesn’t answer. We’ve done our bit for each other, that’s all. But I’m not his style of listener.

  I opened the door to the tyke. Leaned down to him. “Touch his earring.” And pushed him inside.

  Small wars. Small wars.

  But it’ll be all right about Maeve. Jannie will talk to her like to a child. And she will cradle him.

  I WENT TO SEE my father, who was in the kidney-machine.

  Two of the cousins were just leaving him. One sister said loud in my right ear “Thank God—” The other, softly into my left one, “—that he can afford to pay for it.”

  We don’t mention Maeve. Blum tried to get in touch with her. No soap, but Blum tried. The family is rallying round. All of us.

  Because Buddy wants to talk about Maeve. And Buddy is going to be lost.

  I talk to him about her, about everything. He’s helpless now; even at his best he can’t walk much, or screw, or work. And that—helps.

  Watching him on the machine is like watching a birth. Of a full-grown man. And during that time, all the time he can, he is watching me.

  I do my best.

  “Like it down there?” Buddy’ll say. “At the office.”

  He’s always a better color, afterwards. And he keeps a tanning lamp here. The only telltale is that over-clean look he has, of the well-hospitalized. In my mind I keep dressing him in street clothes, walking him down the corridor he does twice a day—and out. But the machine doesn’t work on his heart. His faithful, imitative heart.

  “It’s neat down there. Great.”

  I’m living in that room at One Chase, weekends. And working up at MIT, on my life.

  “Blum leaves me pies. Last week, apple. This week, coconut.”

  “When she makes it champagne, look out.” He’s got an imitation smile on him.

  “I don’t bring girls there. At least, not yet.”

  “Cambridge okay, hmm?”

  “Ca
mbridge okay.”

  “MIT’s great, hmm; I always respected it.”

  “I’m learning to.”

  Doing a thesis on Babbidge, on what he might do with computers, if he lived now.

  “Great stuff … Look behind my pillow. That section you gave me last week. I did it all.”

  At the start I gave him Babbidge, but he didn’t dig it.

  Digs everything modern I can get him; he’s following my course. He’d be a hotshot at it, if he had the time.

  Nowadays I give him all the pills he wants. “Not everybody in the class can do his homework on his own set-up.”

  “Works fine, huh? … I wish—”

  Works like a dream, like a fucking dream … I wish he could.

  “Lucky I only live there weekends. I’d never get away from it.”

  “David and Sol give you any more trouble?”

  His loving partners. “Those two? Vultures in wolf’s clothing. But at the moment, they don’t have their eye on me.”

  “Who then?” His face went dark.

  “Can they buy you out?”

  “Ha. Not unless they persuade me.”

  “They’re going to try.”

  “Ha.”

  “On the grounds you’ve got nobody in the firm coming after you. Or in the family.”

  “Nobody else but them, they mean.”

  Or me.

  “Can you buy them out? Blum says the agreement between you and them at the outset was written so you always could.

  “They can never get control. Even if we go public. I have the controlling shares. Plus the right to buy them out at any time, at market value, plus a certain sum not less than their joint compensation. Based on their salary for that fiscal year—for the next five years. That was the deal.”

  I leaned back. Some men lean forward when they mean to make a deal, some back. I see it all the time at One Chase. Getting there a little early now and then, Friday afternoons maybe. Staying on Monday-Tuesday, a little late.

  “Got the cash to do it?”

  “Got the—.” He chuckled.

  I knew he did. Just doing everything I can.

  “Then will you?”

  “Who for?” It’s been ravaging him.

  I’m wearing a pair of shades I bought one Saturday night in Montmartre, because everybody seemed to be wearing them to keep their eyes from exploding in the fireworks of spring. Purple-green lenses (very popular that year with cyclists) that reminded me of the Jap beetles I had collected all one summer and kept in a jar on a window-ledge, until Doorman Shannon, spotting one, flicked the little mirror-back plague from my palm. “Want to murder the park?” he said. Sure enough, in Paris the next morning, the lenses turned out to be reflectors on their other side. So now, all that summer in Paris is an iridescent jar. And Buddy, looking at himself in my shades, sees a clean, little oval of a man, with plague.