Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

  “I have something else for you,” he said.

  “Indeed?”

  Carlos produced a harmonica from his pocket and urged her to play along with “Here Comes the Sun,” a song by Beatle George Harrison that she had often performed during the siege at Casa Piadosa. The old woman demurred, insisting that the damage done to her mouth and lips by El Presidente’s henchmen had robbed her of the necessary strength and skill. She laid the instrument on an end table and stared out the window with a faraway frown so devoid of condemnation that Carlos, condemning himself, felt caddishly opportunistic. How could he make amends?

  “At this stage in your life, Mrs. Galvez, what would make you most happy?”

  “Ah. You ask because I’m dying.”

  “I ask because you’re recovering,” Carlos said, parroting Dr. Petitt’s own cheerful prognosis. “You have a future in store—twenty more years at the least. It’s not your dying wish I want to know.”

  She looked through him. “What would make me most happy?”

  “Yes, señora.”

  “Do you want a hypothetical response, something grandiose and far-fetched like World Peace or An End to Poverty? Or would you prefer something within the pale of possibility, something that would really increase my small stores of happiness?”

  “The latter, of course.” But Carlos found these finicky qualifications baffling and wondered if he had answered correctly.

  “Are you going to try to grant my wish if I reveal it?”

  “Well, Video Verdadero might. If it’s grantable.”

  “Queen for a Day,” said Eleanor Riggins-Galvez abstractedly. “World Peace, Carlos. An End to Poverty. Those are the things that would make me most happy. I wish Video Verdadero great success in bringing them about.”

  Caressing his video gun, Carlos sat down on the window seat near the old woman’s wheelchair. She had withdrawn into herself, and he wanted to reestablish contact. “In Atlanta last night, I did some checking on the Internet. Three of the members of this group—the Beatles, yes?—are still alive. One lives in England, one divides his time between Scotland and the West Coast of the United States, and one has a domed villa in the Sea of Rains on Luna. The low gravity eases a peculiar medical condition that has been troubling him for the past few years.”

  Mrs. Galvez laughed, a birdlike titter. Then, less than enchantingly, she sang three or four lines of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

  “What would you say if these former members of the Beatles got back together to commemorate your recovery?” Carlos said.

  “They must be in their seventies. They’re older than I am.”

  “Would it make you happy—such a stellar reunion?”

  “Not if it discomfited them. Let the rich old farts live out the remainder of their days in peace. Me, too, for that matter.”

  “Video Verdadero may be able to arrange it.”

  “Why bother? There’ve been partial reunions before, Carlos, and John Lennon’s dead. Besides, nobody cares anymore.”

  “It wouldn’t gladden your heart to see these three men singing together again?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. If it didn’t convulse me with laughter.”

  “Ah,” said Carlos. He played the Abbey Road CD again. This time Ramon Covarrubias, still in his gym shorts, returned to the room with a party of more conventionally clad torture victims from the same wing. Eleven well-mannered auditors, ranging in age from a pale young woman in her early twenties to a balding Oriental-looking gentleman not much younger than Mrs. Galvez, crowded in. This last patient, Carlos was surprised to note, had tears in his eyes.

  With his hostess’s permission, then, the correspondent used his video gun to record the entire surreal scene. It gave him almost exactly what he wanted for a segment of El Tiempo Turbulento to be devoted to the Saint of Casa Piadosa.

  This segment ran on the Video Verdadero network on the last Thursday in October. The staff and patients at the Warm Springs Torture Victim Rehabilitation Center convened in the cafetorium and entertainment hall to watch it on the enormous wall screen there. The onlookers wore earplugs that provided simultaneous translation of the Spanish commentary for any who required it. Much laughter and applause greeted La Gran Dama’s sallies at either the previous Guacamayan government’s or her earnest young interviewer’s expense. In fact, the laughter and applause frequently overrode the segment’s embarrassingly upbeat narration. A good thing, too. The subject of the piece was beginning to choke on Carlos’s unadulterated praise.

  At the conclusion of the program, when the hall had pretty much emptied, Karen Petitt came to Eleanor and handed her a printout of a standby front page for the following morning’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The lead story was labeled “special to the Journal-Constitution,” and its author was Carlos Villar. Dr. Petitt conjectured that the wire services would pick up the story and distribute it to the print and electronic media worldwide. This likelihood appalled Eleanor. In a fashion that made even fulsome praise seem a blessing, the story’s headline sabotaged her dignity:

  Saint of Guacamayo’s Dying Wish:

  That Liverpudlian Rock and Rollers

  Reunite for Warm Springs

  Torture-Rehab Concert

  “Oh, no,” said Eleanor.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dr. Petitt. “It’s a lot of garbage about Beatlemania and La Fiebre Furtiva.”

  “Oh, no, Karen.”

  “He had the good sense—the decency—to leave both those topics out of the video broadcast, but he’s playing them up now in the hope of staging an even bigger coup for Video Verdadero.”

  “A show in my honor here at the center?”

  “Exactly. He refrained from using El Tiempo Turbulento to make such an appeal only to preserve his employer’s credibility—to save face—if the appeal fails. His own credibility, too, so far as that goes. He’s really an unscrupulous schemer, Mrs. Galvez.”

  Eleanor laughed. “Handsome, though. And sincerely solicitous in person. I’ve got a kind of radar for such things.”

  “Do you really want him to show up here again with two or three doddering ex-Beatles in tow?”

  “I’d be happier,” said Eleanor after pondering for a moment, “if he showed up with Adolfo, my Adolfo, instead—but I certainly wouldn’t turn away Messieurs McCartney, Harrison, and Starr. I just regret not having mentioned the chance to see Adolfo again when young Villar asked me what would make me most happy. At the time, though, that seemed as far-fetched a wish as World Peace, and certainly a more selfish one.”

  Adolfo Galvez, an Argentine by birth but today the director of a classical theater group in Maracaibo, was Eleanor’s estranged husband. They had been separated for twelve years, a schism dating back to the third year of her mission in Guacamayo. And if any person (the long-suffering Dr. Petitt aside) had received dramatic proof of Eleanor’s unworthiness for canonization, it was Adolfo Galvez. To further her work, she had married this taciturn wealthy man as a matter of convenience, believing that Adolfo fully understood and acquiesced in the nature of their partnership. He was to sponsor her activity in the field; she was to boost his reputation in theatrical circles by reflecting on his surname the glamour of her high-profile humanitarianism.

  Instead, Adolfo had come to live with her at Casa Piadosa, a declaration of commitment that he abandoned only when it became clear to him that his wife was never going to retire from the compassion business into orthodox domesticity. In the meantime, though, she had let him know how unsuited he was to such simple menial tasks as taking a temperature, dressing a superficial wound, or comforting a frightened child. More often than not, he had been in the way—a clumsy well-intentioned man whose demonstrated aptitude for management she had chosen to ignore. After all, Casa Piadosa was hers. More saintly than she, Adolfo had hung on for two years before confessing his unhappiness and retreating to the bright lights of Buenos Aires, Caracas, and finally Maracaibo. Then, in order to increase his contributions to Venezuelan artistic causes, ove
r a five-year period he had gradually phased out his financial support of the Guacamayan mission.

  “Adolfo came to see you soon after you got here,” Dr. Petitt reminded Eleanor. “You ran him off.”

  “I regret that, too. I didn’t like the way I looked. And I didn’t want to face anyone I’d treated as badly as I had Adolfo.”

  “But you’re ready for the Beatles?”

  “If our friend Carlos can arrange it, bring them on. I’ve never done anything to hurt those chaps.” And to hell with my “dignity,” she thought. Maybe I’m finally old enough to dispense with it.

  Two days later, in Bogota, Carlos was startled to receive a televideo communication from the chief neurologist at the Warm Springs center. The woman did not like him, and as soon as her face materialized on the console screen in his office, he braced himself for a torrent of invective and recrimination. After all, he had trespassed on her grudging hospitality by releasing to the American press word of Mrs. Galvez’s fatal illness—an illness, moreover, in which neither Dr. Petitt nor he truly believed. Also, there was Carlos’s altogether outrageous call for a reunion of superannuated rock ’n’ rollers at the treatment center itself.

  “My superiors at Amnesty International, London, have given their okay,” the woman said, obviously trying very hard to be pleasant. “You may arrange the concert, and if the event actually occurs, you have our permission to provide video coverage. Other details you’ll have to work out with the principals themselves. They may not wish to grant your organization exclusive rights to their performance.”

  Dumbfounded, Carlos gaped at the neurologist’s image. At last he said, “Muchísimas gracias, Dr. Petitt. How have I won your cooperation?”

  “Wars and rumors of wars abound, Mr. Villar. Political hit teams kill three or four people every day. Territorial disputes make enemies of former allies. Terrorist activity has increased every decade since the 1960s, and, after electronic surveillance, torture has become the most widely used instrument of oppression in the world. The Asian nuclear ‘demonstrations’ of the past five years have claimed more victims than anyone but bleeding-heart alarmists ever supposed possible, and recent numbing real estate negotiations between multinationals have put even the moon at risk. In comparison, your own petty opportunism pales.”

  “Thank you,” said Carlos.

  “What I’m trying to say is that against such a climate of perpetual crisis, my superiors think your self-serving scheme may be good for morale everywhere—especially here at the center. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Doctor. But what of Mrs. Galvez?”

  “I have some things to tell you about her, too. Please keep my confidences in mind while you’re planning this event.”

  “Of course, Doctor. Of course.”

  Karen Petitt talked for ten more minutes. Although his vidcom unit was automatically recording their conversation, Carlos took notes in longhand. This activity, by focusing his attention, always steadied his nerves. Then, when the neurologist had signed off, he set to work pulling strings, calling in IOUs, renewing potentially useful contacts, and, in general, pretending to be an entrepreneur of staggering clout and competence. Over the next several days he was astonished to learn how many people were willing—even eager—to believe in his masquerade.

  At the Torture Victim Rehabilitation Center, reporters from dozens of American and European print publications, video magazines, and web outlets tried to call on Eleanor, but Dr. Petitt and the uniformed security personnel held them at bay. One afternoon, in fact, while taking the sun on one side of the hexagonal walkway surrounding the gazebo, Eleanor heard a man with a battery-powered handmike call, “Mrs. Galvez, Mrs. Galvez, are you really dying? Do you have any last words for the millions of people who admire you?” But this reporter beyond the fence palings fled before a leash-tugging German shepherd, and she never replied.

  Then the weather turned cold, Eleanor could no longer sit on the lawn, and the world press corps, for all it impinged on the day-to-day routine of her life, went into something resembling hibernation.

  Carlos Villar was a remote memory. Eleanor was certainly not thinking of him when she set about putting her affairs in order so that when La Fiebre Furtiva claimed her, no one at the hospital would have any doubt about what to do with either her body or her belongings. Cremate the former. Sell the latter and divide the money between the World Health Organization and Amnesty International. She had absolutely nothing else to divest.

  In the second week of November, then, she was thinking that perhaps she should make Ramon Covarrubias a gift of the harmonica that Carlos had given her, when an orderly knocked on her door. The orderly had brought with him a stranger, a portly septuagenarian with sad eyes, a heavy mouth, pendulous dewlaps, and a crown of white hair cut in the Roundhead style of Lord Cromwell’s seventeenth-century followers. This man walked with a noticeable limp, almost dragging himself across the room to shake her hand.

  “Richard Starkey, mum. Pleased to meetcha.”

  “Starkey?”

  He showed her the ornate ruby ring on his little finger. “Me nom de nativity, I’m afraid. It’s an incognitoism I’ve taken to using here on Mother Earth. As if it mattered much anymore.”

  “You’re the one from the Sea of Rains,” Eleanor said. “The drummer.”

  “Only I’m not selling anything, mum. Meself, p’raps. I’ve come to see yer because me agent said I should.” With obvious pain, he eased himself down on the window seat next to her wheelchair. “If I may. It’s been an age since I banged the skiffle cans. Or acted, for that matter.”

  “You live on Luna for your health, don’t you?”

  “Right,” the mournful little man said. “It’s more exciting than Flagstaff and closer to heaven.”

  Eleanor cast about for a response. “How do you like Georgia this time of year?”

  “Arfly warm, ain’t it? Actually, though, it’s not the heat, mum, it’s the gravity. The bare-O-metric pressure, too. I’ll adjust well enough inna nother coupla weeks. Me doctors say I’m a Methuselah-in-the-making.”

  “I’m so glad,” said Eleanor, meaning it.

  Their conversation, to this point little more than an exchange of awkward pleasantries, ran up against a brick wall. So this was one of the surviving former Beatles. Just to look at, he could have been a greengrocer (a prosperous one) or a vice president of a late twentieth-century dotcom. Nice enough, of course, but what did the two of them really have to say to each other? Her zeal for the Chaplinesque figure he had cut in his youth had always taken a back seat to her late-blooming enthusiasm for the Lennon-McCartney team; even the aesthetic-looking George Harrison, the group’s single-minded proponent of sitar and tabla, had initially seemed a more likely candidate for idolization. And then, of course, she had set aside such childish concerns by tackling the demanding disciplines of theology and medicine. The Beatles had disbanded about the time she was coming into her own. Now, she and this wrinkled simulacrum of one-quarter of a former legend were struggling to exchange their credentials as human beings. And only narrowly succeeding.

  “You said your agent told you to come?”

  “Right. To see if you’d really like us to put on a show here. Most of the video loot we’ll shove along to the rehab centers, keeping a moiety for ourselves to cover expenses and feed the hangers-on. Whaddaya say, mum? Would you like us to do yer a Christmas gig?”

  “Of course, Mr. Starkey.”

  “Call me Ringo. Or Ishmael, if you’d rather.” He pointed his nose at the harmonica in her hands. “You play that, doncher?”

  “Once upon a time. No more.”

  “John was our harmonica player. Remember ‘Love Me Do’? We did fifteen cuts o’ that one before George Martin was satisfied with the instrumental track. John’s mouth went running back ’n’ forth on the grill. Fookin’ hard work, that. If you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “I’ll second it if you like.”

  Mr. Starkey laughed, brushed
off the thighs of his trousers, and stood. “Well, I’m off to Californication Land, then. When I come back, we’ll do for you and yer friends here just like the Beatles of yore. That’s a promise.”

  “Your harmonica player’s dead,” Eleanor heard herself say. The words leapt out before she could stop them.

  “And the rest of us’ve gone plump—well, maybe not George—and grizzly-gray. You’ll just have to fill in, Mrs. Galvez. That’s all there is to it.” He saluted her and limped out of the room.

  November passed on. Seasonal decorations—flocked trees, Santa Claus cutouts, even elaborate Yuletide mobiles revolving in the corridors—popped up around the center as if by magic. Eleanor drew Ramon Covarrubias’s name for the annual gift-exchange, but she could not bring herself to give up the harmonica. What Ramon really needed, she told herself, was a brand-new pair of cotton Winterskins.

  In a conference room in Southern California, where hanging green plants and the amplified white noise of the surf did little to soothe his nerves, Carlos Villar listened to the “principals” debate the merits of a private performance for recovering torture victims, foremost among them Eleanor Riggins-Galvez. Repeatedly, Carlos assured the three men—only two of whom were in the room, Harrison auditing the proceedings via a television hookup in London—that a videocast of their concert would go out to the world at large only after they had edited the tapes.

  “This is exactly what John didn’t want to happen,” said McCartney, big-eyed and pudgy in a fuzzy beige sweater. “Didn’t he swear we’d be four rusty old men playing out somebody else’s fancy? It’d be even worse now, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That’s why we get to edit the bugger,” said Starkey. Carlos had worked long and hard to persuade him to make the three-day crossing, first to sound out Mrs. Galvez and then to attend this meeting as his most powerful ally.

  “We’re pretty bleeding likely to stink,” McCartney said. “Is Video Verdadero going to be happy with a two-minute program?”