"He?" Hansard asked.
"Worsaw. The one you killed in the manmitter. I wish you'd killed all
three of him, instead of just the one."
"How many men -- of our sort -- are there in Camp Jackson?"
Ives turned his gaze away from Hansard's. "I don't know."
"Colonel -- or Major, if you prefer -- I should not like to hurt you again."
"Wouldn't you? I doubt that. You're just the same as Worsaw. You're all
the same, all of you. As soon as the discipline is gone you lose all
sense of what's right and decent. You betray your allegiance. You murder
and rape. You act like . . . like jungle savages. All of you."
"It doesn't seem to me, Major, that you're in a good position to offer
moral instruction. Let me repeat my question: How many -- "
"Seventeen, twenty, twenty-four -- the number varies. Oh, you think you're
so fine and upstanding, don't you! So damn
white
! They always do when
they're new
here
, before they've had to . . . had to eat their . . ."
He trailed off into vacancy.
"What, Major? What is it you eat here? Where do you get your food?"
Ives' eyes dropped in a mockery of shyness to contemplate the buttons
on Hansard's shirt. His smile twisted with a slight, enigmatic contempt
for the man who held him prisoner. It was, in fact, the characteristic
smile of a prisoner who, though powerless, knows what distance separates
himself, exalted in his guilt, from the common run.
With horror Hansard realized what the men of Camp Jackson were living
on. His horror was all the more potent because he also knew that this
realization had been with him from the first moment he had seen the pile
of corpses outside the portal of the manmitter. For he had assessed the
situation correctly. All the food that sustained Worsaw and his men
would have to have come to them through the transmitter.
He knew this, yet even now he refused to believe it. "Then all those
men who went through the transmitter,
all
of them . . ."
"Those niggers, you mean? You're a Northerner, aren't you, Captain?
Only a Northerner would call a bunch of niggers men."
"You foulness! You corruption!"
"You wait, Captain -- wait till you get hungry enough. You talk about
us now, but just wait. Worsaw was the one who saw the way it had to
be. He had the strength . . . and the . . . and the foresight to do
what had to be done. So that we got the niggers and the nigger-lovers
before they got us. He's kept us alive here. No one else was able to;
only Worsaw. I was . . . afraid to face facts; but Worsaw went right
ahead and did it. He's a . . ." the colonel began to choke again but
finished his testimonial first, ". . . a good man.
"I recall that you said the same thing when last we met." Hansard rose
to his feet.
"Where are you going?" Ives asked anxiously. "You won't tell
him
what I've been telling you? I'm not supposed to be here. I -- "
"I'm hardly likely to have many conversations with your master, Ives.
I'm going now, but you just stay here or go back in the bedroom, if you
like, and wallow in your filth. As long as you can't infect
them
,
it can't matter."
Hansard was at the door when Ives called him in a strangely muffled tone.
Hansard looked back. Ives was sitting on the floor, his face buried in
his hands.
"Captain, please! I beg of you, Captain! Do this one thing -- do it,
I beg of you. I don't have the strength myself, but
you
could.
Oh, for the love of God,
please
!"
"You want me to kill you -- is that it, Major?"
"Yes," Ives whispered into his hands, "oh, yes."
"You can go to hell, Major, but it will have to be under your own steam."
When Hansard left him, Ives was crying.
He proceeded back immediately to where he had hidden Ives' field pack.
He pulled it out of the sidewalk; then, in the pool of light beneath a
street lamp, he unbuckled it. The flesh that still adhered to the gnawed
bones had a slightly carrion odor. Hansard dumped the charry remains
into the ground and pushed them down beyond arm's reach. At the bottom
of the pack there was a .45 automatic pistol and ammunition, wrapped in
a plastic poncho. This Hansard kept for himself.
It was after sunset, time to return to the reservoir and fill his canteen.
But when he began walking, his legs betrayed him and he had to sit down.
Likewise, his hands, as he put a clip of ammunition into the automatic,
were trembling.
He was not terrified that the men at Camp Jackson would get him; he was
confident that he could prevent that. He
was
terrified that he might
get one of them -- once he was hungry enough. And then? How much farther
was it possible to sink then? He might have asked Ives while he had
the chance.
SIX
SCENE WITH A SMALL BOY
For a while food and sleep can replace each other. Knowing this, Hansard
refrained from purposeless activities; went on no more idle walks,
and found a residence for himself on the Virginia side of the Potomac
nearer to his water supply. After his encounter with Ives, the idea of
intruding upon the privacy of residents of the Real World was more than
ever distasteful to him. On the other hand he valued his own privacy
and did not want to make his home in a public concourse.
The Arlington Public Library provided a happy compromise. When people
were there, they behaved sedately. It was open evenings, so Hansard did
not have to spend the time after sunset in darkness; even the silence
of this world, so unnatural elsewhere, seemed fitting here.
At such times as Hansard could no longer pretend to himself that
he was asleep (he had made the basement stacks his special burrow),
he could come upstairs and read over the shoulders of whoever was in
the library that day; fragments and snippets of a variety of things,
as Providence saw fit to furnish: The College Outline synopses of
A Farewell to Arms
,
Light in August
, and diverse other Great
Old Novels that were required reading in the Arlington high schools;
paradigms of Bantu verbs; backnumber spools of the
Washington Post
;
articles on how to develop hard, manly arms; on how to retire gracefully;
on how to synthesize potatoes; and several graceful anecdotes from the
lives of Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear. . . .
It was a mistake to go into the children's room and read the Milne book,
for it opened his heart wide to the temptation he had all this while been
strong enough to ignore. His ex-wife and son lived beneath the D.C. Dome.
He could visit them with no more effort than it would take to get on an
S-S-bound bus.
Since the divorce she had managed to make do on her meager alimony by
moving into government-subsidized Sargent Shriver Manors, popularly
known as the S-S, a model development of the early 70's and now the
city's most venerable slum. (Really poor people, of course, had to squat
out in the suburbs, breathing the poisonous air of the megalopolitan
landscape.) Hansard had been able to see his son, who was now eight years
old, one week end each month. But there had always been a constraint
between father and son since the divorce, and Hansard still tended to
think of Nathan Junior as the insouciant, golden-haired four-year-old who
had listened with solemn attention to the adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
The present Nathan Junior was, therefore, in his father's eyes something
of a usurper -- with very tenuous claims to the title of true son or to
Hansard's affection. An injustice, surely, but an injustice that no amount
of fair treatment could expunge: the heart listens to no reasons but
its own.
With Ives's example before him, Hansard should have known better than
to surrender to this temptation. Only a glimpse, he told himself.
I won't look at anything they wouldn't want me to see. Could he really
deceive himself so far as to credit these sophistries? Apparently not,
for as the bus was passing near the Washington Monument, Hansard had
second thoughts and dismounted.
He walked along the edge of the reflecting pool. He had grown so
accustomed to his altered condition that, as he debated with himself,
he did not dodge the lower branches of the cherry trees but passed
through them unheedingly. He knew better than to believe the tempter's
whispered "Just this once." No; there would be a second time, if he let
there be a first -- and a third time, and more. There is no food that
can sate curiosity.
Curiosity? -- the tempter argued. Merely that? isn't there love in it too?
Love is reciprocal, the conscientious Hansard replied. What has a phantom
like me to do with love? And besides (and this was the crux of it)
there is no love there any more.
It can be seen that the debate had insensibly shifted its focus from
Nathan Junior to Marion, and the tempter cleverly pointed this out. Don't
go for her sake then) but for his. it is your duty as a father.
The tempter's arguments became weaker and weaker, his true purpose more
transparent. Hansard would surely have resisted, had not a curious thing
happened at that moment. . . .
Across the reflecting pooi he saw, among the many tourists and lunch-hour
strollers, a woman -- and this woman seemed for a moment to have been
looking at him. She was a handsome woman about Marion's age and, like
Marion, a blonde. It was impossible, of course, that she had seen him;
but for a moment he had been able to believe it. He strode up to the
edge of the pool (but there he had to stop, for the water of the Real
World did not sustain a swimmer's weight as the land would), and called
to her: "Hello, there! Hello! Can you see me? Wait -- listen! No, no,
stay a while!" But already she had turned away and was walking toward
the Capitol and out of sight.
Then Hansard knew that despite all his good resolves, he would become,
like that man he had so much detested, a voyeur. He would trespass against
his wife's and son's privacy. For it was not within him, nor would it
be within any of us, to endure the unrelenting terror of his perfect
isolation and aloneness amid the throngs of that city, where every
unseeing pair of eyes was a denial of his existence. If that seems to
overstate the case, then instead of aloneness let us say alienation.
We will all agree that there is little chance of coping with
that
.
We have observed earlier that Hansard was very little a man of his own
times, and that even in ours he would have seemed rather out of date.
Alienation, therefore, was for him a thoroughly unfamiliar experience,
though the word had been dinned into his ears in every humanities course
he'd ever taken (which had been as few as possible). So that, despite
a well-developed conscience of the old-fashioned post-Puritan sort,
he was singularly ill-equipped to handle his new emotions. The bottom
seemed to be dropping out, as though existence had been a hangman's trap
which now was sprung. He felt a hollowness at the core of his being;
he felt a malaise; he felt curiously will-less, as though he had just
discovered himself to be an automaton as, in a sense, he had.
In his innocence he showed symptoms of classic simplicity, like the dreams
of some forest- or mountain-dweller, someone far beyond the pale who has
escaped even the mention of Freud's name. There is no need to go into
great detail here, except to remind the knowing reader that although
Hansard experienced his first bout of the nausée at a rather advanced
age (for the unfortunate experience that had required his presence some
years before in an Army mental hospital could not fairly have been
said to be "alienation" in the sense we employ here), it was no less
devastating. Indeed, as is so often the case when an adult comes down
with a childhood disease, it was rather worse.
The practical consequence was that he got back on the bus, but not
without first resorting to his cache in the wall of the Lincoln Memorial
and taking out the jacket of his uniform. Then, replacing the attaché
case in the wall and very carefully straightening his tie (his concern
with a good appearance was proportional to his intent to do wrong),
he set off . . . downward.
She was sprawled on the living-room tuckaway -- the tuckaway that had been
their wedding gift from his parents -- smoking and reading a personalized
novel (in which the heroine was given the reader's own name). She had let
herself grow heavier. It is true that a certain degree of stoutness had
been fashionable for the last two years. Even so, she was beginning to
exceed that certain limit. Her elaborate hairdo was preserved inviolate
in a large pink plastic bubble.
There was a man in the room, but he paid little attention to Marion
and she as little to him. His hairdo was likewise protected by a bubble
(his was black), and his face was smeared with a cream that would give
it that "smooth, leathery look" that was so much admired this year. A
typical welfare dandy. He was performing isometric exercises in a kimono
that Hansard had brought back from Saigon for Marion, who had then been
his fiancée.
The surprising thing was that Hansard was not jealous. A little taken aback,
perhaps, a little disapproving; but his disapproval was more of her generally
lax style of living than of another man's presence. Adultery he could not
countenance (and, in fact, he
had
not). But now Marion was free to do
as she liked, within the limits of what was commonly accepted.
Love? Had he, so short a time as four years ago, loved this woman?
How can emotion vanish so utterly that even its memory is gone?
Marion rose from the tuckaway and went to the door to press the buzzer
opening the downstairs entry (her apartment was on 28), then disappeared
into the kitchen. She had left her book open on the table beside the
couch, and Hansard bent over to read a passage from it:
Marion Hansard, sitting up on the bed, glanced into the mirror of
the vanity. There were times, and this one of them, when Marion was
startled by her own beauty. Usually she didn't think of herself as
especially attractive, though she had never been and never would be
drab. But how could Marion Hansard hope to compete with the dark-eyed
beauties of Mexico City, with their raven hair and haughty, sensual
expressions . . . ?