Roo had been right that management wasn't interested in his past. The people on the line were cautious in asking personal questions too, less from indifference than from delicacy; he might not want to say much, neither might some of them. The few facts they got from him right off were enough to classify him, even get him a nickname (Cowboy, from the smokes he rolled himself at breaks, no other reason; that was the joke). A few facts about themselves enough for them too, it seemed, repeated over and over.
She had been wrong about the hair, though, not keeping up lately maybe. That moment had come when hair was getting shorter on those who had first grown it defiantly long, and beginning to grow out on the heads of those whom they had once defied, rednecks and crackers and truckers and tattooed ex-servicemen: for they had a defiance of their own to express. For the rest of the century it would be so.
What was hardest about it wasn't the work, or the isolation he'd expected to feel among people too different from himself, or the hours of boredom; all of that was actually okay; the hardest thing was how at some time in the past the many-paned windows of the plant, as tall as a cathedral's or a palace's, had been boarded up on the inside and the daylight replaced by banks of fluorescents, the outside air by conditioned air. He came in from sunstreaked moist summer mornings and stamped his time card and till late afternoon, sky fading to green or clouds forgathered, he knew nothing of the day. Did they mind, those around him? It seemed impossible to ask, and he never heard; better than not working, surely. Something else that others bore continually without (it seemed) complaint, that he hadn't ever borne. He remembered the miners in Kentucky, remembered hearing how in winter they went down before dawn into the darkness and unvarying cold, and didn't come out till darkness had come in the upper world as welclass="underline" how hurt he had been for them, how afraid for himself.
He didn't miss a day's work, or only one or two, days when he couldn't get out of bed, lay struggling with something that held him: or not struggling.
Roo once came to him as he lay there at the Morpheus Arms, neither struggling nor resting from struggle, because she'd called Novelty and they said he hadn't come in to work. And a man living alone in a motel room who hasn't come in to work needs to be visited.
"You sick?"
"I don't think so.” He climbed back into the bed he'd left to open the door to her. The sleazy blanket made of chemical waste must not be touched; he slipped under the sheet with care, wiggled his toes in the warm bed's bottom.
"I can call a doctor."
"He wouldn't come."
"You go to him. New thing."
"I'm all right."
For a long time she looked at him, and he tried to hold her look, to be placid and resistant.
"I could beat you up,” she said. “I could go buy you a bottle."
"I'm all right."
There was the longest pause then, the pause between two people that starts as absence or emptiness but that fills as it goes on with thick stuff, stifling or tickling, so that it might result in an explosion of laughter or a gasp for breath if it isn't ended. Who was going to end it?
"I need to know what you want from me,” she said at last, her voice reaching him through the cotton batting. “I don't mean just right now. Maybe I can't give it and maybe I won't want to give it but I won't know if you won't tell me."
"Nothing, nothing. Really. I'm okay."
"Nothing.” She crossed her arms. She was dressed in heels and capris, for work at the dealership. “Nothing gets you nothing."
"I know. Nothing will come of nothing."
Another pause, or the same one, not yet dissipated. Then she turned and took the two steps to the door and was gone.
He found his tobacco on the bedside table, rolled a cigarette, and lit it, though there was already a horrid brown blister on the chemical blanket where he had dropped an ash.
He heard her car depart.
He was afraid, is what it was. He knew she wouldn't like to know that he was afraid, and he would try hard to keep it from her, but he was; more than anything he was afraid of her, afraid of her certainty that he had choices to make, things to ask of life, a deal to strike. Of course it was impossible to claim that no, he was quite sure there were no choices to be made, not for him, that it was his particular condition or job to have to await what became of him, and see what it was when it arrived. That sounded ridiculous, but it was so; he believed in choice no more than he believed in fate. The best he could hope for was that he would recognize his own story as it unfolded, the path of it as it came to be beneath his feet, and could follow it.
But if there was no more path, what then? How did you hew one, what huge appetite did it take, what certainty of need or desire? What did he want from her? Why did she say she needed to know? She'd spurn him if he couldn't answer, that seemed clear. Would that be bad? How the hell did he know? He seemed to have no warrant for such a person as her in his story at all, and how could he tell her that? She'd only tell him to make a new story, as if that was easy. Easy as pie.
He had never made his general happiness, the furtherance of his goals or the fulfilling of his needs, a condition of his love for anyone, certainly not any of the women he had been with. He had tried to find and supply what they needed; hadn't asked anything for himself but that they not go, not tire of him, not discard him. He'd never learned—who could have told him, if he didn't simply know?—that one thing you can do to keep her by you, given a general good disposition toward you, is to give her something to do for you: something that, maybe, would take a lifetime. That way she'd remain, maybe. And the thing you asked for would be done for you, too, to some degree, in some way, which would be heartening and lovely even if it wasn't always or entirely successful. I need your help. He felt like a robot or a brain in a jar, working his way by deduction toward these unfamiliar common human things.
What, then, could he ask for? What did he want or need? How long was the acceptable wait till you finally declared, if you could? What would the negotiations be like, and how long would they go on, how often be repeated? He might want to just say Give me something to want and I'll want it for your sake, but of course that would precisely not do, so he had to think, in his bed in the Morpheus Arms, the bedclothes drawn up to his chin.
After a time—it was long, or short—he heard a big car roar into the parking lot and brake with a pissed-off squeal before his unit, and he waited motionless in alarm and hope for his door to be flung open again.
* * * *
On Midsummer Day, Rosie and Spofford were married at Arcady. Pierce and Roo went down in the Rabbit. She claimed not to be a friend of theirs or even to know them at all, to know nothing of their circumstances and lives anyway, though it seemed to Pierce that she knew more than she ever said about everything that went on around her, at least in certain strata about which he (for instance) truly knew nothing; she had firmly decided not to go with him, then said she had nothing to wear, and finally came anyway, in a white lace dress and cowboy boots, more visible than she supposed herself ever to be.
"Never been here before,” she said as the drive approached. “Big."
Their car was one of many; there was even a boy to point you to a parking place. A Rasmussen wedding could not be small, or hidden; Rosie Rasmussen had tried in every way to make it small, and wherever she pressed it down or trimmed it off it sprang out elsewhere; finally she called her mother in and gave it over to her, and did as she was told. Which for some reason allowed her mother to regard her for the first time as an adult, and enjoy her company, and laugh with her and dispute and approve, as though they were any two people, any two friends with a history. Her mother, rosy cheeked and tireless, seemed drawn back from limbo, at whose gray doors Rosie had last parted from her. She could see now (from the windows of the study, where she and Spofford waited to appear, like actors in the wings) her mother making her way amid people she knew long ago, who greeted her with what appeared to be the same pleased surprise.