Against the Day (209 page)

   
“Wait,”
Reef said, “who are you?”

   
“They
call me ‘The Obliterator.
’ ”

   
Reef
came to think of it as a kindness on the part of some cryptoAnarchist

who’d drifted into government work but could still recognize
and help out a fellow outlaw. Not that Idiocy couldn’t have been a useful
cover, or was even that far wrong. They had arrived in the middle of the Red
Scare and the Palmer raids, and soon enough began to wonder what they could
have been thinking.

They headed west, Reef propelled by
his old faith in the westward vector, in finding someplace, some deep
penultimate town the capitalist/Christer gridwork hadn’t got to quite yet. In a
train depot up in Montana during a snowstorm one day, who’d they happen to run
into but Frank, Stray, and Jesse, who had the same thing in mind.

   
“O.K.
if we come along?” Reef said.

“Hell yes,” Frank and Stray said
pretty much together. “Course there is my reputation to worry about,” Frank
couldn’t help adding, “bein seen in your company and so forth.”

Jesse didn’t look all that surprised
but was sure annoyed. “How do you think it feels, comin in bein hit with that?”

“Could’ve introduced him as your
Uncle Reef I guess,” Frank said. “But you haven’t been that easy to fool
lately.”

   
“But
what do I even call him? ‘Pa’ ain’t quite right, is it?”

Frank, who really wanted to squeeze
the boy in a lengthy embrace, left his hand on Jesse’s shoulder awhile. “See,
once I would’ve been all right with just ‘Frank,’ then you drifted into calling
me ‘Pa,’ and I didn’t exactly forbid it ’cause it feels too good to hear it. It
does. Maybe you’ll see. Meantime you could call him ‘sir,’ till he gets so
uncomfortable with that he’ll say, ‘Oh, just call me Reef,’ or somethin.”

Which
is how it would work out. Reef would one day be able to pass along pieces of
paternal wisdom like how to stack a deck or recognize a company detective, and
he and Jesse would have some good days together on streams in the region,
though neither was a topnotch fisherman, barely catching enough some days even
to keep the dogs happy, but the Umpqua in particular had a way of magically
making indifferent anglers into accomplished masters, so helping Reef and Jesse
learn their way into companionable silence, which both would come to admit was
more than either had hoped for.

Yashmeen,
beginning to lose the edges of her allpurpose European accent, one day found
herself pregnant again, which both women took as a sign that nothing in their
lives all together was about to get too discombobulated by anybody’s second
thoughts. Especially noting how Reef had begun drifting around in that
wellknown daze. They had been watching the brothers day to day, alert to signs
of buried anger, understanding after a while that they’d been collaborating to
the same end. Yashmeen developed a particular

affection for Frank and Stray’s daughter Ginger and the baby
Plebecula. Ljubica and Ginger were about the same age, and hit it off pretty
good except for an inevitable kickup now and then. The girls spent hours with
the baby, sometimes just gazing at her. Their other gazing was reserved for
Jesse, who abruptly found himself with a couple of kid sisters to deal with.
Sometimes they would start laughing, and he couldn’t help thinking it was at
him.

   
“Not
at,
”
both women assured him.

   
“Ljubica
wants to marry you,” Yash said, “but don’t tell her I told you.”

“That’d sure give the Sheriff
somethin to think about,” Jesse muttered, strangely having trouble knowing what
to do with his hands.

   
“Oh
it’ll pass,” Yash said. “Then look out.”

   
“Your
job, really,” Stray added, “ ’ll just be to keep a quiet eye out when they all
start showin up at the door with flowers and smellin like hair oil and bay rum
and so forth.”

   
“Chores,
chores, chores,” Jesse snarled contentedly.

For a while
they
were up in the redwoods, and then for a little longer in a town on the Kitsap
Peninsula, up in the last corner of the U.S. map, and after this it would have
to be Alaska or B.C.

Jesse
brought home as an assignment from school “write an essay on What It Means To
Be An American.”

“Oboy,
oboy.” Reef had that look on his face, the same look his own father used to get
just before heading off for some dynamiterelated activities. “Let’s see that
pencil a minute.”

   
“Already
done.” What Jesse had ended up writing was,

It
means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike
or their soldiers will shoot you down.

   
“That’s
what they call the ‘topic sentence’?”

   
“That’s
the whole thing.”

   
“Oh.”

It
came back with a big A+ on it. “Mr. Becker was at the Cour d’Alene back in the
olden days. Guess I forgot to mention that.”

   
“We
should start our own little republic,” Yash said one day. “Secede.”

“Yeah
but hell,” Stray, who never was much of a sigher, would sigh, “em things never
work out. Fine idea while the opium supply lasts, but sooner or later plain old
personal meanness gets in the way. Somebody runs the well dry, somebody rolls
her eyes at the wrong husband—”

   
“Oh,
my,” Yashmeen pressing her hands to her bosom as if for palpitations.

   
“No,
no, no, we’re all way past that, I hope.”

A
nice long gaze then. Nobody would’ve said “the wrong wife.” Meantime,
motherhood and political danger had done little to discourage Yash’s desire for
other women, though the practical demands of the day would too often keep it in
the realm of daydreaming. Stray for her part would remember enjoying a
delirious moment or two, usually in city hotel rooms considerably to the east
of here, with flushed and trembling younger women pretending to be helpless.

Their
moment now would stretch, as if it were awakening after a long snooze
someplace. “We about to do something stupid here?” one of them would ask after
a while.

   
“Sure
hope so,” the other would reply.

“
’
Soir,
Dally
.”

   
It
was Policarpe, an old acquaintance of Kit’s once, she gathered, back in
Belgium. “Just out licking a few vitrines. You looked about to get lost in
thought. Can’t have that.”

She
bought him a cognac. They sat and watched the lighted boulevard. Policarpe
worked for a Socialist newspaper. Death had not taken up residence in his eyes
but had visited often enough.

   
“We’re
in Hell, you know,” he said conversationally.

   
“Everybody
thinks we’re finally out of there,” she said.

A
shrug. “The world came to an end in 1914. Like the mindless dead, who don’t
know they’re dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever
since that terrible August.”

   
“But
this”—gesturing round at the blossoming city—“how could
this—”

“Illusion.
When peace and plenty are once again taken for granted, at your most languorous
moment of maximum surrender, the true state of affairs will be borne in upon
you. Swiftly and without mercy.”

He
looked across the street suddenly, reaching for his eyeglasses. “Hallucination,
obviously. For a moment I thought I saw your former husband.”

In
fact he had. Kit had returned to Paris unexpectedly, after some time in Lwów,
formerly the metropolis of Galicia, lately the capital of the shortlived West
Ukraine Republic.

After
Dally had left, and Reef and his family, Kit went on soldiering, or more like engineering,
alone, except for an interlude with Dally’s friend Fiametta, who had worked at
the same hospital. Until one day the War was over, and by then he had run into
a strangely possessed algebraist named E. Percy Movay, who was full of news
about a fabled group of mathematicians in Lwów, out at the wild frontier of the
nowdefunct AustroHungarian

Empire. Which was how Kit discovered
the Scottish Café and the circle of more and less insane who frequented it, and
where one night he was presented with a startling implication of Zermelo’s
Axiom of Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to
take a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely
shaped pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun.

   
“Because
one emits light and the other doesn’t, don’t you think.”

   
Kit
was taken aback. “I don’t know.”

He
spent awhile contemplating this. Zermelo had been a docent at Göttingen when
Kit was there and, like Russell, had been preoccupied with the set of all sets
that are not members of themselves. He was also notorious around the beer halls
for a theory that no expedition could ever reach either of the poles, because
the amount of whisky needed was directly proportional to the tangent of the
latitude. Polar latitude being 90°, this meant a value approaching
infinity—Q.E.D. It didn’t surprise Kit much that the peculiar paradox
should be traceable in some way back to Zermelo.

“But
staggering subsets, fellows—you see what this means don’t you? those
Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were right all along, the world
we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds,
each as real as ‘this’ one.”

It
took Kit awhile to locate the speaker, and was agreeably confounded to see,
emerging from behind a gigantic beer stein, the face of Professor Heino
Vanderjuice, now strangely youthful, his hair dark again, with a few streaks of
gray, his hesitant classroom stoop unbent into a bearing of forthrightness and
responsibility.

“Why
bless my soul if it isn’t Mr. Traverse. You were leaving for Göttingen the last
time I saw you.”

   
“It’s
so good to see you again, sir,” Kit embracing him. “Out here.”

   
“Out
of the Vibe pocket, I’ll bet you mean.”

   
“Well
most of all alive and kicking.”

“Same
goes for me, young fellow.” They had another round, left the Scottish Café, and
began to stroll down past the University toward Kliński Park. “With so
many dead,” the Professor reflected after a bit, “it seems disrespectful to
them—but I’m glad Scarsdale Vibe is now among their number. Though the
company is too good for him. My only regret is that it wasn’t I who finally
plugged him.”

Kit
paused in the middle of lighting a cigarette. “Didn’t know you’d ever been out
gunning for him.”

The
Professor chuckled. “Had a crack at him once, must’ve been after you’d left for
Germany. Sort of relapse into allpurpose loathing, saw how

easily I’d been bought—nattered
into thinking myself the equal of Tesla, though of opposite polarity. Beneath
Vibe’s contempt, though not my own. Furious with myself, more with Vibe, I
fetched down my old singleaction Navy Colt and got on the morning express to
New York. Some vague idea of turning it on myself once I’d done for him. Got to
Pearl Street, found a rooftop nearby and settled in to wait. But something
curious happened. It had taken me only thirteen steps to climb to where I was,
and I saw I was standing not on a roof but on an executioner’s scaffold, as if
somehow I had already carried out my modest
attentat,
been arrested,
tried and condemned for it, and was now awaiting the ultimate penalty. Talk
about anomalies in Time!

“It
appeared to be somewhere outside New York City, one of those oldtime county
courthouses with a large gilded dome. A crowd was gathering, a military band
was playing marches and airs, children were selling lemonade, American flags,
corncobs, hot dogs and so forth. I was plainly visible to all, but no one
seemed to be paying me much notice. Then the dome of the courthouse began to
lift, or expand skyward, till after a moment I saw it was in fact the spherical
gasbag of a giant balloon, rising slowly from behind the dome, where it had
been hidden. Sort of that peaandsun conjecture again, only different. Of course
it was the Chums of Chance, not the first time they’d come to my
rescue—though usually it was from professorial inattention, walking off
cliffs or into spinning propellers
. . . .
But
this time they had rescued me from my life, from the cheaplysold and dishonored
thing I might have allowed it to become. Young Suckling of course liked to
pretend it was nothing—‘Eeyynnyyhh, the old coot’s telling that one
again—that sixgun wasn’t even loaded’—but they saved me,
nonetheless.”

Evening
crowds streamed unhurriedly through the park. Somewhere an accordion was
playing a jazzinflected
hopak.
Small boys ran up to pull the braids of
girls and run away again, and slightly older couples stood out of the light,
embracing. Peacetime.