Seventeen
“And my wife? And my wife?”
“We’re so sorry, Mr. Staunt.”
Eighteen
“As long as we’re getting into that end of the evening, Henry, I’ll allow myself the privilege of delivering a little analysis, too. Do you know what the real trouble with you is? With your music, with your soul, with everything? You don’t suffer. You’ve never been touched by pain, or, if you have, it doesn’t sink in. Look, you’re forty years old, and you’ve never known anything but success, and your music is played everywhere, an incredible achievement for a living composer, and you could pass for thirty. Or even twenty-seven. Time doesn’t claw you. I don’t recommend suffering, mind you, but I do say it tempers an artist’s soul; it adds a richness of texture that—forgive me—you lack, Henry. You know, you could live to be a very old man, considering the way you don’t seem to age, and someday, when you’re ninety-seven or one hundred five or something like that, you may realize that you’ve never really intersected reality, that you’ve kept yourself insulated, and that in a sense you haven’t really lived at all or created anything at all or—forgive me, Henry. I take it all back, even if you are still smiling. Not even a friend should say things like that. Not even a friend.”
Nineteen
“The Pulitzer Prize for Music for the year 2002—”
Twenty
“I Edith do take thee Henry to be my lawful wedded husband—”
Twenty-One
“It isn’t as if she was a bride, Henry. God knows it’s terrible to lose her that way, but she was yours for fifty years, Henry, fifty years, the kind of marriage most people hardly dare to dream of having, and if she’s gone, well, be content that you had the fifty, at least.”
“I wish we had crashed together, though.”
“Don’t be childish. You’re—what?—eighty-five, eighty-seven years old? You’ve got fifteen or twenty healthy and productive years ahead of you. More, if you’re lucky. People live to fantastic ages nowadays. You might see one hundred ten or one hundred fifteen.”
“Without Edith, what good is that?”
Twenty-Two
“Put your hands in the middle of the keyboard. Spread the fingers out as wide as you can. Wider. Wider. That’s the boy! Now, Henry, this is what we call middle C—”
Twenty-Three
In haste, stumbling, he goes on into his studio. The big room holds the tangible residue of his long career. Over here, the music itself, in recorded performance: disks and cassettes for the early works, sparkling playback cubes for the later ones. Here are the manuscripts, uniformly bound in red half-morocco, one of his little vanities. Here are the scrapbooks of reviews and the programs of concerts. Here are the trophies. Here are the volumes of his critical writings. Staunt has been a busy man. He looks at the titles stamped on the bindings of the manuscripts: the symphonies, the string quartets, the concerti, the miscellaneous chamber works, the songs, the sonatas, the cantatas, the operas. So much. So much. Staunt feels no sense of having wasted his time, though, filling this room with what it holds. Never in the past hundred years has a week gone by without a performance of one of his compositions somewhere. That is sufficient justification for having written, for having lived. And yet, one hundred thirty-six years is such a long time.
He pushes cubes into playback slots, getting three of his works going at once, bringing wild skeins of sound out of the room’s assortment of speakers, and stands in the middle, trembling a little, accepting the sonic barrage. After perhaps four minutes he cuts off the sound and orders his telephone to ring up the Office of Fulfillment.
“My Guide is Martin Bollinger,” he says. “Would you let him know that I’d like to be transferred to the House of Leavetaking as soon as possible?”
Twenty-Four
Dr. James had told him, long before, that Departing Ones invariably came out of memory jolts in a state of ecstasy, and that frequently they were in such raptures that they insisted on Going immediately, before the high could ebb. Emerging from the drug, Staunt searched in vain for the ecstasy. Where? He was wholly calm. For some hours past, or maybe just a few minutes—he had no idea how long the memory jolt has lasted—he had tasted morsels of his past, scraps of conversation, bits of scenery, random textures of contact, a stew of incidents, nonchronological, unsorted. His music and his wife. His wife and his music. A pretty thin gruel for one hundred thirty-six years of life. Where were the storms? Where were the tempests? A single great tragedy, yes, and otherwise everything tranquil. Too orderly a life, too sane, too empty, and now, permitted to review it, he found himself with nothing to grasp but applause, which slipped through his fingers, and his love of Edith, and even that had lost its magic. Where was that excess of remembered love that Dr. James had said could be dangerous? Perhaps they had monitored him too closely, tuning down the intensity of his spirit. Or perhaps it was his spirit that was at fault. Old and dry, pale and lean.
Unlike the others he had heard about, he did not request immediate Going after his voyage. Without that terminal ecstasy, why Go? He felt not exactly depressed but certainly lowered; his tour of his yesterdays had thrust him into a sort of stasis, a paralysis of the will, that left him hung up as before, enmeshed by the strands of his own quiet past.
But if Staunt remained unready to Go, not so with others. “You are invited to the Farewell ceremony of David Golding,” Miss Elliot told him the day after his memory jolt.
Golding was the man who had had six wives—outliving some, divorcing some, being divorced by some. His heroic husbandry was no longer apparent: now he was small and gnarled and fleshless, and because he was nearly blind, his pinched ungenerous face was disfigured by the jutting cones of two optical transducers. They said he was one hundred twenty-five years old, but to Staunt he looked at least two hundred. For the Farewell ceremony, though, the technicians of the House of Leavetaking had transformed the little old man into something sublime. His face gleamed with make-up that obliterated the crevices of decades; he held himself buoyantly upright, no doubt inflated into a semblance of his ancient virility by some drug; he was clad in a radiant, shimmering gown. Scores of relatives and friends surrounded him in the Chambers of Farewell, a brightly decorated underground suite opposite the recreation center. Staunt, as he entered, was dismayed by the size of the crowd. So many, so young, so noisy.
Ella Freeman sidled up to him and touched her shriveled hand to Staunt’s arm. “Look there: two of his wives. He hadn’t seen one in sixty years. And his sons. All of them, his sons. Two or three by each wife!”
The ceremony, conducted by the relatively young man who was Golding’s Guide, was elegiac in tone, brief, sweet. Standing under the emblem of the Office of Fulfillment, the wheel and the gears, the Guide spoke briefly of the philosophy of making room for others, of the beauty of a willing departure. Then he praised the Departing One in vague, general terms; one of his sons delivered a more specific eulogy; lastly, Seymour Church, chosen to represent Golding’s companions at the House of Leavetaking, croaked out a short, almost incoherent speech of farewell. To this the Departing One, who seemed transfigured with joy and already at least halfway into the next world, made reply in a few faint syllables, blurrily expressing gratitude for his long and happy life. Golding barely appeared to comprehend what was going on; he sat beaming in a kind of throne, dreamy, distant. Staunt wondered if he had been drugged into a stupor.