Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  At last the policeman said, “We can’t leave him in the street, so we’ll have to bring him in. How will it look if there’s no complaint?”

  Then I understood that they were afraid of what their superiors might say if it became known that they had beaten him unconscious when no charge was made against him; and when I became aware that if I would not press charges, the charges they would bring themselves would be far more serious—assault or attempted murder—I agreed to do what they wished, and signed a form alleging the theft of my sketchbook.

  When they had gone at last, carrying the unfortunate Kreton across a saddlebow, I tried to reenter the theater. The side door through which we had left was locked, and though I would gladly have paid the price of another ticket, the box office was closed. Seeing that there was nothing further to be done, I returned here, telling myself that my introduction to Ellen, if it ever came, would have to wait for another day.

  Very truly it is written that we walk by paths that are always turning. In recording these several pages I have managed to restrain my enthusiasm, though when I described my waiting at the back of the theater for Ardis, and again when I recounted how Kreton had promised to introduce me to her, I was forced for minutes at a time to lay down my pen and walk about the room singing and whistling, and—to reveal everything—jumping over the beds! But now I can conceal no longer. I have seen her! I have touched her hand, I am to see her again tomorrow, and there is every hope that she will become my mistress!

  * * * *

  I had undressed and laid myself on the bed (thinking to bring this journal up to date in the morning) and had even fallen into the first doze of sleep when there was a knock at the door. I slipped into my robe and pressed the release.

  It was the only time in my life that for even an instant I thought I might be dreaming—actually asleep—when in truth I was up and awake.

  How feeble it is to write that she is more beautiful in person than she appears on the stage. It is true, and yet it is a supreme irrelevance. I have seen more beautiful women—indeed Yasmin is, I suppose, by the formal standards of art, more lovely. It is not Ardis’s beauty that draws me to her—the hair like gold, the translucent skin that then still showed traces of the bluish makeup she had worn as a ghost, the flash-ing eyes like the clear, clean skies of America. It is something deeper than that, something that would remain if all that were somehow taken away. No doubt she has habits that would disgust me in someone else, and the vanity that is said to be so common in her profession, and yet I would do anything to possess her.

  Enough of this. What is it but empty boasting, now that I am on the point of winning her?

  She stood in my doorway. I have been trying to think how I can express what I felt then. It was as though some tall flower, a lily perhaps, had left the garden and come to tap at my door, a thing that had never happened before in all the history of the world, and would never happen again.

  “You are Nadan Jaffarzadeh?”

  I admitted that I was, and shamefacedly, twenty seconds too late, moved out of her way.

  She entered, but instead of taking the chair I indicated, turned to face me; her blue eyes seemed as large as the colored eggs on the dresser, and they were filled with a melting hope. “You are the man, then, that Bobby O’Keene tried to rob tonight.”

  I nodded.

  “I know you—I mean, I know your face. This is insane. You came to Visit on the last night and brought your father, and then to Mary Rose on the first night, and sat in the third or fourth row. I thought you were an American, and when the police told me your name I imagined some greasy fat man with gestures. Why on earth would Bobby want to steal from you?”

  “Perhaps he needed the money.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. I had heard her laugh in Mary Rose when Sirnon was asking her father for her hand, but that had held a note of childishness that (however well suited to the part) detracted from its beauty. This laugh was the merriment of houris sliding down a rainbow. “I’m sure he did. He always needs money. You’re sure, though, that he meant to rob you? You couldn’t have…”

  She saw my expression and let the question trail away. The truth is that I was disappointed that I could not oblige her, and at last I said, “If you want me to be mistaken, Ardis, then I was mistaken. He only bumped against me on the steps, perhaps, and tried to catch my sketchbook when it fell.”

  She smiled, and her face was the sun smiling upon roses. “You would say that for me? And you know my name?”

  “From the program. I came to the theater to see you—and that was not my father, who it grieves me to say is long dead, but only an old man, an American, whom I had met that day.”

  “You brought him sandwiches at the first intermission—I was watching you through the peephole in the curtain. You must be a very thoughtful person.”

  “Do you watch everyone in the audience so carefully?”

  She blushed at that, and for a moment could not meet my eyes.

  “But you will forgive Bobby, and tell the police that you want them to let him go? You must love the theater, Mr. Jef— Jaff—”

  “You’ve forgotten my name already. It is Jaffarzadeh, a very commonplace name in my country.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten it—only how to pronounce it. You see, when I came here I had learned it without knowing who you were, and so I had no trouble with it. Now you’re a real person to me and I can’t say it as an actress should.” She seemed to notice the chair behind her for the first time, and sat down.

  I sat opposite her. “I’m afraid I know very little about the theater.”

  “We are trying to keep it alive here, Mr. Jaffar, and—”

  “Jaffarzadeh. Call me Nadan—then you won’t have so many syllables to trip over.”

  She took my hand in hers, and I knew quite well that the gesture was as studied as a salaam and that she felt she was playing me like a fish, but I was beside myself with delight. To be played by her! To have her eager to cultivate my affection! And the fish will pull her in yet—wait and see!

  “I will,” she said, “Nadan. And though you may know little of the theater, you feel as I do—as we do—or you would not come. It has been such a long struggle; all the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive. We have been doing well here in Washington, Nadan.”

  “Very well indeed,” I said. “Both the productions I have seen have been excellent.”

  “But only for the past two seasons. When I joined the company it had nearly fallen apart. We revived it—Bobby and Paul and I. We could do it because we cared, and because we were able to find a few naturally talented people who can take direction. Bobby is the best of us—he can walk away with any part that calls for a touch of the sinister.…”

  She seemed to run out of breath. I said, “I don’t think there will be any trouble about getting him free.”

  “Thank God. We’re getting the theater on its feet again now. We’re attracting new people, and we’ve built up a following—people who come to see every production. There’s even some money ahead at last. But Mary Rose is supposed to run another two weeks, and after that we’re doing Faust, with Bobby as Mephistophe-les. We’ve simply no one who can take his place, no one who can come close to him.”

  “I’m sure the police will release him if I ask them to.”

  “They must. We have to have him tomorrow night. Bill—someone you don’t know—tried to go on for him in the third act tonight. It was just ghastly. In Iran you’re very polite; that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “We enjoy thinking so.”

  “We’re not. We never were, and as…”

  Her voice trailed away, but a wave of one slender arm evoked everything—the cracked plaster walls became as air, and the decayed city, the ruined continent, entered the room wit
h us. “I understand,” I said.

  “They—we—were betrayed. In our souls we have never been sure by whom. When we feel cheated we are ready to kill, and maybe we feel cheated all the time.”

  She slumped in her chair, and I realized, as I should have long before, how exhausted she was. She had given a performance that had ended in disaster, then had been forced to plead with the police for my name and address, and at last had come here from the station house, very probably on foot. I asked when I could obtain O’Keene’s release.

  “We can go tomorrow morning, if you’ll do it.”

  “You wish to come too?”

  She nodded, smoothed her skirt, and stood. “I’ll have to know. I’ll come for you about nine, if that’s all right.”

  “If you’ll wait outside for me to dress, I’ll take you home.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “It will only take a moment,” I said.

  The blue eyes held something pleading again. “You’re going to come in with me—that’s what you’re thinking, I know. You have two beds here—bigger, cleaner beds than the one I have in my little apartment—if I were to ask you to push them together, would you still take me home afterward?”

  It was as though I were dreaming indeed—a dream in which everything I wanted, the cosmos purified, delivered itself to me. I said, “You won’t have to leave at all—you can spend the night with me. Then we can breakfast together before we go to release your friend.”

  She laughed again, lifting that exquisite head. “There are a hundred things at home I need. Do you think I’d have breakfast with you without my cosmetics, and in these dirty clothes?”

  “Then I will take you home—yes, though you lived in Kazvin. Or on Mount Kaf.”

  She smiled. “Get dressed, then. I’ll wait outside, and I’ll show you my apartment; perhaps you won’t want to come back here afterward.”

  She went out, her wooden-soled American shoes clicking on the bare floor, and I threw on trousers, shirt, and jacket, and jammed my feet into my boots. When I opened the door, she was gone. I rushed to the barred window at the end of the corridor, and was in time to see her disappear down a side street. A last swirl of her skirt in a gust of night wind, and she had vanished into the velvet dark.

  For a long time I stood there looking out over the ruinous buildings. I was not angry—I do not think I could be angry with her. I was, though here it is hard to tell the truth, in some way glad. Not because I feared the embrace of love—I have no doubt of my ability to suffice any woman who can be sated by man—but because an easy exchange of my cooperation for her person would have failed to satisfy my need for romance, for adventure of a certain type, in which danger and love are twined like coupling serpents. Ardis, my Ellen, will provide that, surely, as neither Yasmm nor the pitiful wanton who was her double could. I sense that the world is opening for me only now, that I am being born, that that corridor was the birth canal, and that Ardis in leaving me was drawing me out toward her.

  When I returned to my own door, I noticed a bit of paper on the floor before it. I transcribe it exactly here, though I cannot transmit its scent of lilacs:

  * * * *

  You are a most attractive man and I want very much to stretch the truth and tell you you can have me freely when Bobby is free, but I won’t sell myself, etc. Really I will sell myself for Bobby, but I have other fish to fry tonight. I’ll see you in the morning and if you can get Bobby out or even try hard you ‘II have (real) love from the vanishing

  Mary Rose

  * * * *

  Morning. Woke early and ate here at the hotel as usual, finishing about eight. Writing this journal will give me something to do while I wait for Ardis. Had an American breakfast today, the first time I have risked one. Flakes of pastry dough toasted crisp and drenched with cream, and with it strudel and the usual American coffee. Most natives have spiced pork in one form or another, which I cannot bring myself to try, but several of the people around me were having egg dishes and oven-warmed bread, which I will sample tomorrow.

  I had a very unpleasant dream last night; I have been trying to put it out of my mind ever since I woke. It was dark, and I was under an open sky with Ardis, walking over ground much rougher than anything I saw in the park on the farther side of the channel. One of the hideous creatures I shot night before last was pursuing us—or rather, lurking about us, for it appeared first to the left of us, then to the right, silhouetted against the night sky. Each time we saw it, Ardis grasped my arm and urged me to shoot, but the little indicator light on my pistol was glowing red to show that there was not enough charge left for a shot. All very silly, of course, but I am going to buy a fresh power pack as soon as I have the opportunity.

  * * * *

  It is late afternoon—after six—but we have not had dinner yet. I am just out of the tub, and sit here naked, with today’s candy egg laid (pinker even than I) beside this book on my table. Ardis and I had a sorry, weary time of it, and I have come back here to make myself presentable. At seven we will meet for dinner; the curtain goes up at eight, so it can’t be a long one, but I am going backstage to watch the play from the wings, where I will be able to talk to her when she isn’t performing.

  I just took a bite of the egg—no unusual taste, nothing but an unpleasant sweetness. The more I reflect on it, the more inclined I am to believe that the drug was in the first I ate. No doubt the monster I saw had been lurking in my brain since I read Mysteries, and the drug freed it. True, there were bloodstains on my clothes (the Peri’s asphodel!), but they could as easily have come from my cheek, which is still sore. I have had my experience, and all I have left is my candy. I am almost tempted to throw out the rest. Another bite.

  Still twenty minutes before I must dress and go for Ardis—she showed me where she lives, only a few doors from the theater. To work then.

  Ardis was a trifle late this morning, but came as she had promised. I asked where we were to go to free Kreton, and when she told me—a still-living building at the eastern end of the Silent City—I hired one of the rickety American caleches to drive us there. Like most of them, it was drawn by a starved horse, but we made good time.

  The American police are organized on a peculiar system. The national secret police (officially, the Federated Inquiry Divisions) are in a tutorial position to all the others, having power to review their decisions, promote, demote, and discipline, and, as the ultimate reward, enroll personnel from the other organizations. In addition they maintain a uniformed force of their own. Thus when an American has been arrested by uniformed police, his friends can seldom learn whether he has been taken by the local police, by the F.I.D. uniformed national force, or by members of the F.I.D. secret police posing as either of the foregoing.

  Since I had known nothing of these distinctions previously, I had no way of guessing which of the three had O’Keene, but the local police to whom Ardis had spoken the night before had given her to understand that he had been taken by them. She explained all this to me as we rattled along, then added that we were now going to the F.I.D. Building to secure his release. I must have looked as confused as I felt at this, because she added, “Part of it is a station for the Washington Police Department—they rent the space from the F.I.D.”

  My own impression (when we arrived) was that they did no such thing—that the entire apparatus was no more real than one of the scenes in Ardis’s theater, and that all the men and women to whom we spoke were in fact agents of the secret police, wielding ten times the authority they pretended to possess, and going through a solemn ritual of deception. As Ardis and I moved from office to office, explaining our simple errand, I came to think that she felt as I did, and that she had refrained from expressing these feelings to me in the cab not only because of the danger, the fear that I might betray her or the driver be a spy, but because she was ashamed of her nation, and eager to make it appear to me, a foreigner, that her government was less devious and meretricious than is actually the ca
se.

  If this is so—and in that windowless warren of stone I was certain it was— then the very explanation she proffered in the cab (which I have given in its proper place), differentiating clearly between local police, uniformed F.I.D. police, and secret police, was no more than a children’s fable, concealing an actuality less forthright and more convoluted.

  Our questioners were courteous to me, much less so to Ardis, and (so it seemed to me) obsessed by the idea that something more lay behind the simple incident we described over and over again—so much so in fact that I came to believe it myself. I have neither time nor patience enough to describe all these interviews, but I will attempt to give a sample of one.

  We went into a small, windowless office crowded between two others that appeared empty. A middle-aged American woman was seated behind a metal desk. She appeared normal and reasonably attractive until she spoke; then her scarred gums showed that she had once had two or three times the proper number of teeth—forty or fifty, I suppose, in each jaw—and that the dental surgeon who had extracted the supernumerary ones had not always, perhaps, selected those he suffered to remain as wisely as he might. She asked, “How is it outside? The weather? You see, I don’t know, sitting in here all day.”

  Ardis said, “Very nice.”

  “Do you like it, Hajji? Have you had a pleasant stay in our great country?”

  “I don’t think it has rained since I’ve been here.”

  She seemed to take the remark as a covert accusation. “You came too late for the rains, I’m afraid. This is a very fertile area, however. Some of our oldest coins show heads of wheat. Have you seen them?” She pushed a small copper coin across the desk, and I pretended to examine it. There are one or two like it in the bracelet I bought for Ardis, and which I still have not presented to her. “I must apologize on behalf of the District for what happened to you,” the woman continued. “We are making every effort to control crime. You have not been victimized before this?”