Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  And all of it culminating in this embarrassment today. This was the worst so far, to be bloodied in front of television cameras, to give the bastards of the media exacdy the kind of false violent story they preferred, the kind of story they could use to avoid and obscure the real story. Then, still dazed from that inadvertent blow to the head, she’d permitted herself to be taken away from the action, away from where she should be, to sit here in this car full of strangers. “I am Maria Elena Auston,” she said. “And I thank you, but I really shouldn’t leave my friends. They’ll worry about me.” Which wasn’t at all true, a reality she resolutely ignored. “If you could just let me out,” she went on, “I’ll walk back.”

  They all argued that: the handsome young man who’d pulled her out of the picket line, the pleasant young woman driving, the very thin man in the passenger seat in front. They said her head was cut, was still bleeding, had to be seen to. “We’re just a couple of miles from the hospital,” the young woman said, and the thin man said, “That’s very true.”

  “I don’t want to take you out of your way. Please, I’ll just get out—”

  The thin man laughed, then coughed, then turned to smile at her, saying, “It is not out of our way. I am afraid I live at the hospital.”

  Now she actually looked at him and listened to him for the first time. He spoke English with an accent, possibly a stronger one than hers, but very different. Polish? And he was so thin, the shape of his skull was absolutely visible through the translucent blue-gray skin of his face. Knowing what the truth must be, she nevertheless said, “Are you a doctor?”

  “Much more important,” he said, smiling again. “I am a star patient”

  “I’m sorry,” Maria Elena said, feeling sudden embarrassment.

  “Don’t you be sorry,” he told her. “Fll be sorry for both of us.” It was strange to have such a skeletal figure behave in that elfin fashion. But then his expression became more sober, and he looked past her out the rear window of the car, saying, “If I had the strength, I might march with you.”

  She read the connection immediately: “You mean, the nuclear industry is why you’re sick?”

  “Nuclear industry,” he echoed, as though the words contained a joke only he understood.

  The young woman driving said tonelessly, “Grigor was at Chernobyl.”

  Something constricted Maria Elena’s throat. Unable to speak, unsure even what to call the emotion that had suddenly flooded her, she reached out to fold her palm over his bony shoulder. So bony.

  He smiled over her hand at her. Gendy, to make her feel better, he said, “I’ve had time to get used to it.”

  18

  Forty-five minutes later, Susan was alone in the car with Andy Harbinger, driving south on the Taconic, heading toward New York. How it had worked out that way she still didn’t quite understand.

  Grigor had taken charge of Mrs. Auston at the hospital, which was a research center, not a regular hospital at all, and so without an emergency room. The doctor Grigor finally rounded up for the task of examining Mrs. Auston’s wound and then bandaging it was wildly overqualified for the job, but took it in good spirit. That was no surprise; the entire hospital staff was friendly and supportive and indulgent toward Grigor.

  Meantime, one of the other doctors had taken Susan aside and told her that tomorrow’s outing with Grigor would not be possible. ccGrigor doesn’t know it yet,” this doctor said, “but we’ll be starting a new therapy in the morning, and generally it’s going to be unpleasant for him for a few days. He should be in better condition by next weekend, but tomorrow he’s going to be quite sick.”

  “Oh, poor Grigor.”

  “You know this routine by now, Susan,” the doctor said. ccWe make him very sick from time to time, because the other option is that he dies.”

  “You don’t want me to tell him about tomorrow?”

  “Why give him a sleepless night?”

  So she had lied to him—“See you tomorrow!” “See you tomorrow!”—hating it but knowing it was better than the alternative, and then as she was heading for the exit Andy Harbinger appeared and asked if she was driving back to the city today, and if so, could he hitch a ride, since he felt no need to see any more of today’s demo. It was impossible to say no, and in fact Susan didn’t particularly want to say no. She was feeling glum, and the two-hour drive back to the city could get boring.

  Then there was Mrs. Auston. She wanted nothing but to get back with her protest group, so Susan brought her along as well. The three of them left: the hospital and drove together as far as the power plant entrance, which was much calmer than before, the TV crews having all left, though the demonstration continued. Mrs. Auston, a strange self-absorbed woman, left the car with only minimal thanks to her rescuers, and then Susan and Andy Harbinger drove on down the road to the Taconic entrance and headed south.

  Once they were on the highway, streaming with moderate traffic toward the far-off city, the late afternoon sun reddening ahead and to the right, Andy Harbinger broke into Susan’s fretful thoughts about Grigor by saying, “Susan? Do you mind if I interview you?”

  “What?” At first, the words made no sense at all; she frowned at him, ignoring traffic, finding it hard to see his face clearly in the orangey sunlight. “I’m sorry, what?”

  He smiled, his manner easy, non-threatening, friendly. “I’m always working,” he apologized. “I can’t help it. And I noticed, when Mrs. Auston and I first got into the car, when you thought I was one of the demonstrators, you disapproved of me.”

  Feeling the heat of embarrassment rise into her cheeks, Susan faced the road again, gazing steadfasdy through the windshield as she said, “Disapprove? That’s a funny word. I didn’t say anything like that.”

  “You didn’t say anything, but it was in your expression and the tone of your voice.” Harbinger grinned at her. “I’m not trying to get you mad, Susan,” he said. “It’s just my professional nature. You’re good friends with that Russian guy. With that illness of his, I’d think you’d be on the side of the demonstrators.”

  “Until they get ugly,” Susan said, and then was sorry she’d been prodded into giving any reaction at all.

  Because of course now he burrowed in a little more, saying, “Ugly? I guess they are, sometimes. But isn’t it because they feel powerless? They’re trying to make themselves heard. It isn’t easy.”

  “No, I know it isn’t,” Susan said, uncomfortable at having to defend a position that even to herself sounded prissy, narrowminded, irrelevant. “And I do agree with them. It’s... it’s when there’s violence, then I can’t stand it. When people are doing violent things, they make themselves wrong, even if they were right to begin with.”

  Gendy, he said, “And if there’s no other way?”

  “There’s always another way,” Susan insisted, even though she wasn’t herself sure that was true. Then she thought of something to bolster her argument and added, “Gandhi always found another way.”

  He chuckled that off the field, saying, “Gandhi was a saint.”

  “Then we should all be saints.”

  This response seemed to capture him in some way she didn’t understand. Looking at her more openly, twisting to put his right shoulder blade against the door so he could face her more fully, he said, “You keep surprising me, Susan. You really do.”

  If he’s trying to pick me up, she thought, it’s a very weird method. She shot him a quick glance, trying to read beneath that open friendly face, and when she looked away from his impenetrable smile, out at the road again, he was reminding her of somebody or something. Who? What?

  Mikhail. Whatever his name was, Mikhail something, the nice economist at the party in Moscow, where she’d first met Grigor; where all this started.

  As though reading her mind, he said, “Your Russian friend— Grigor, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Grigor”

  “Do you think he agrees with you? About the protestors. That they should give it less t
han their all.”

  “That isn’t what I said! Not give their all, what do you mean?” She was really annoyed with him, for twisting her words like that.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to smile the offense away. “I apologize, that was careless phrasing. All I was trying to ask, really, was do you think Grigor would disagree with the protestors if they resorted to violence?”

  Reluctantly, but having to be honest, Susan said, “No, I don’t think so. I think he’d agree. Before you got into the car, he even said so. When we were driving down toward the demonstration, he said, ‘They’re right.’” She looked over at him again, seeing concern and sympathy now on his face, and she told that face, “Grigor’s almost never bitter, you know. He’s amazing that way. He has so much to be bitter about.”

  “Life is unfair,” he suggested.

  Ignoring the coldness in that, “It shouldn’t be,” she said.

  He laughed, and shifted to face forward again as he said, “How did you ever meet up with him, anyway? It’s so unlikely.”

  “More unlikely than you know.”

  “Really?” He was ready to be interested, amused. “How’s that?”

  So she told him about the vodka contest, and the trip to Moscow, and the completely unexpected cocktail party thrown there by an organization she still didn’t know anything about, and the strange litde waif-man who’d showed up and talked with her; and then the round-half-the-world phone calls to her cousin at NYU Medical Center, and getting Grigor’s passport, and permission for him to leave Russia, and his strange jokesmith occupation since Chernobyl had killed him; and still doing it, still faxing those unfunny topical jokes to the Russian Johnny Carson, even while the disease ate away at his body like a child licking an ice cream cone.

  Andy Harbinger asked questions here and there, showing his interest, encouraging her to expand on the^story, and half the trip went by as she talked. But finally there was nothing more to say, not on that subject, and after a little silence he said thoughtfully, “It isn’t just pity, though, is it? What you feel toward him.”

  Pity? There were moments when this man seemed very intuitive and sensitive, and yet other times when he was just so bluntly wrong, almost cruel—life is unfair, it isn’t just pity— that it was impossible to know how to react. Didn’t he know how dismissive he sounded, as though life and emotion didn’t matter?

  She really didn’t know how to answer him, and the silence stretched between them, she unusually aware of her own breathing, and then he said, much more softly, “I know what it really is, Susan. You’re in love with him. And you wish you weren’t. And you hate that wish.”

  So here was the sensitive Andy Harbinger back again. And he’d defined the problem, all right; she knew she shouldn’t feel about Grigor the way she did, she shouldn’t lash herself so securely to a man who would be dead within the year. But the very knowledge made her guilty, as though she couldn’t forgive herself for even that much dispassion, didn’t believe in her own right to see the pit she was falling into. “I can’t talk about it,” she whispered, and it took all her effort to concentrate on the driving, not just to close her eyes and let events take her away.

  “Stop the car,” he said.

  “What?” She’d clenched the steering wheel so hard her hands ached, but she couldn’t make them let go.

  “Pull off the road and stop,” he told her, his voice calm and authoritative, like a doctor in the examining room. “Until you relax a little. Come on, Susan.”

  She obeyed, her right leg made of wood as she forced it off the accelerator and onto the brake. The car wobbled, not entirely under her control, but slowed as she steered it off the pavement and onto the rough dirt surface of the shoulder. It stopped and she shifted into park, and then all at once she was trembling all over, but dry-eyed. Staring hopelessly out at the hood, as aware of the traffic whizzing past on her left as she was of the man listening to her on her right, every sense painfully alert, she said, “It’s so awful, and it just keeps going on. I come up every week, and every week he’s worse, and how much worse can it be? He gets thinner and thinner, and he just...”

  She shook her head and lifted her aching hands from the steering wheel to gesture vaguely her despair.

  “He doesn’t die,” Andy Harbinger said.

  “Oh, God.” She hadn’t talked about this with anyone before, not even very much with herself; maybe what it needed was a stranger, somebody she wasn’t already connected with in the usual web of history and knowledge and opinions and shared experience. “I don’t want him to die,” she said, her throat aching as though she had a terrible flu. “That’s the truth. If he could live forever, if he could—well, not forever, nobody lives forever, but you know what I mean.”

  “A normal life span.”

  “Yes. Normal. So I could—” There was no way to even think this last thought, much less express it.

  But Andy Harbinger knew, anyway, what she couldn’t describe. “So you could decide for yourself,” he said gendy, “whether or not you’d like to spend that normal life with him.”

  “Oh, I suppose so.” She sighed through her burning throat. “To be able to do it all normally, let it grow in a normal way instead of, instead of this water torture. I hate blaming him, but I do, I can’t help myself, and then I can’t stand myself, and then I don’t even want to come up here any more, go through it all any more. We’re all so trapped. And then I say, Well, it won’t last much longer,’ and I feel satisfaction.”

  “The truth is,” he said, “it actually won’t last much longer, no matter what you do or how you feel or whether or not you feel guilty. It all doesn’t matter.”

  “Which doesn’t help,” she said stiffly, responding to that cold side of him again. “It doesn’t help because I can’t just shrug and be indifferent, as though I was in one of those cars there, and this was an accident here, and it wasn’t anybody I knew, and I just drove on by.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “But you can’t take on yourself the responsibility for things going wrong in other people’s lives. We’d all like life to be milk and mell, but it just isn’t, not all the time, there’s bound to be some—”

  She frowned at him, distracted. “What? Milk and what?”

  He was confused for just a second, obviously trying to remember what he’d just said. “Milk and honey,” he finally decided. “I said we’d all like life to be nothing but milk and honey, but there’s bound to be acid, too, along the way.”

  “Is that what you—?” She frowned, trying to recall his earlier words. “It sounded different.”

  “Well, I don’t know what I said,” he told her, beginning to get impatient. ‘The point was, it’s natural for you to want this trouble you’re going through to be over with, and it doesn’t mean you’re unfaithful or cold to Grigor when you feel that way. You know that, in your head, but your emotions won’t listen.”

  She had to smile at that phraseology, and nod, looking at him at last. The tears were starting now, after the attack, but not out of control. She blinked them out of her eyes, saying, “Emotions never listen, that’s the way they are.”

  “So we just do our best, okay?” He smiled at her, warm and concerned. “And we try to think about things other than Grigor.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “And we don’t feel guilty when we succeed.”

  “That,” she said, “is the hard part.”

  “I know.” He shifted in the seat, clearly ready to move on to other things. He said, “Do you have any idea how good Italian food is when you’re an emotional wreck?”

  Now she had to laugh. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said. “It’s a miracle I don’t weigh eight hundred pounds.”

  “I know a great place in the Village,” he said. “Let me take you there.”

  Doubtful, afraid, she withdrew from him, saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I haven’t been..

  “Dating?” He grinned at her. “This isn’t a
date, this is dinner. Believe me, Susan, I’m not gonna try to compete with a tragic hero.”

  Ananayel

  Foolish. Foolish. Mell! It isn’t mell now, it hasn’t been mell for hundreds of years. It’s honey now, I know that as well as anybody.

  I was distracted by having to deal with my litde Judas ewe, that’s all, and for just a second I forgot the situation, the time, and made that slip. The problem is, I am not living in time in the same way the humans are, so I don’t have the same temporal relationship with their languages. I have in my mind and at my command all of English, from its earliest guttural beginnings in the fifth century, when speakers of Anglo-Frisian first crossed the then-unnamed stormy water from the European continent to the British islands, and took up residence there, so that their dialect began to alter away from its Dutch, Frisian, and Low German cousins in the Plattdeutsch family, down through its endless changes to this ultimate moment. (I know it into the now-canceled future as well, all the way to its final commingling with pan-Mandarin.)

  Mell entered English early on, from the Greek, MeaA, and at one time the language was lush with mell-derived words, of which now only a few remain. Mellifluous, originally meaning something sweetened with honey, soon was adapted to mean sweet speech, as in honey-tongued Shakespeare’s line in Twelfth Night, “A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.” Melianthus is the honeyflower, a mellivorous bird feeds on honey, and molasses is a later corruption of the original melasus. In medicine, meliceris denotes a tumor containing honey-like matter, and in some technical specialties mellaginous still means anything that is like honey

  But it’s in the now-forgotten words that mell was at its most mouth-watering. A sweet medieval Breughelesque pastorality seems to cling to these words, as of a better world, lost and forgotten, replaced by this intolerable world. Mellation was the special time for collecting honey, meliturgy was the process of making honey, and anything as sweet as honey was said to be melled. Such things include meliorate, a drink of honey and water, and melitism, a mixture of honey and wine. And melrose was a nostrum of honey, alcohol, and powdered rose leaves used by doctors in the eighteenth century.