Jackie’s quasi-mysticism was unanswerable. It reminded him that at the center of his own life lay a mystery that he had come to regard as both commonplace and disreputable, like a touch of the clap. He had revealed this mystery to the Tru family because their foreignness—that is, their assumed distance from the prejudices and thought patterns of real people—had made them seem safe confessors. Besides, telling his dreams had helped to win Kha over and demonstrably heightened Jackie’s interest in him. At least at first. Now she was blithely dropping depth charges into the fragile fishbowl of his hopes.
“Anyone who’s alive has been ‘spared,’ Jackie. Trouble is, nobody knows for how long or for what.”
“Some do, and some should.”
“Listen to you, you’re gloating.”
“You’re at odds with yourself, Joshua, not with me. So stop it. You’re also at odds with your own family, and there’s no longer any reason to be.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Eden in His Dreams.”
Ah, yes. His mother’s—rather, Jeannette Monegal’s—proposed book about his uncanny chronic affliction. So far as Joshua knew, the book had never appeared, under either that title or another. He had walked out on her, and she had apparently dropped the project. Jeannette still had no idea to what sanctuary he had fled, however, for he had not tried to get in touch with her since his defection from the West Bronx. Nor was he ready to repair the breach with a telephone call. No, ma’am. No long-distance orgy of apology and forgiveness for him. Who would apologize, who forgive? Joshua closed his eyes and tried to center himself in the impenetrable dark.
“You don’t want to talk about that, do you?”
“No,” he said. “Not really.”
After a while Jackie said, “What about your job, then? Are you willing to talk about that?”
“You don’t like my job? You don’t want a steeplejack for a husband? A tank painter’s wages don’t thrill you?”
“None of that has anything to do with what I’m talking about, Joshua. Your job is a detour, a stopgap.
You go into some little town and set about sprucing up its most conspicuous phallic landmark. It’s hard, honest work, but for you it’s also a kind of masturbation. Mindless and lonely.”
“Holy shit. I can’t believe this.”
“Can’t believe what?”
“You sound like Lucy in a ‘Peanuts’ cartoon. Spouting off jargon under a sign that says ‘Psychiatric Care—Five Cents.’”
“You quit your job occasionally, don’t you? And then Mr. Hubbard rehires you when you come back. That’s true, isn’t it?”
Joshua said nothing.
“You’re just preparing yourself for the final break. One day you’ll feel good about quitting forever. You’ll get your mission, and you’ll do what you’re supposed to. So maybe your mission is supposed to be delayed for a while. I’m not telling you to quit your job. I’m not trying to tell you how to run your life.”
“You’re not?”
“You know I’m not. But if we were married I might. And you’d do the same to me, not even meaning to.” She laid her hand on his chest. “Don’t fret, Joshua. It’s not a tragedy that I’ve already got my mission and you’re still waiting for yours. It’ll happen.”
Chuckling ruefully, Joshua covered her hand with his own.
“What’re you laughing at?”
“Getting my mission. You talk about it the way some girls I knew in New York used to talk about getting their periods. You make it sound biological. Inevitable. Foreordained. I don’t think I believe that, Jackie. It doesn’t compute—as an analogy, I mean.” He twisted aside and began feeling about for his clothes. He had struck right through her peculiar variety of psychobabble. For her a “mission” was a kind of psychic menarche, and she was being so understanding about his tardiness in achieving this condition for the same reason that she would avoid ridiculing a girl in a training bra. People develop at different paces. Joshua could feel his gorge rising, a prickle of anger erupting like a rash. “I’m ready to go,” he said. He found the flashlight and fumbled it on.
“Me too,” Jackie acknowledged, her voice as straightforward and bright as the flashlight beam.
That fall Jackie began to attend a local junior college. Joshua saw less and less of her, and his ambiguous passion for the girl with the magic hair modulated into friendship. Later she transferred to George Washington University in the nation’s capital, and their relationship gradually dwindled away to letters, postcards, memories, and silence.
Joshua continued to work for Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., and he continued to dream….
Chapter Twenty-Four
Soon after Mary’s murder we separated from the Huns and made an encampment for ourselves on the northeastern flank of Mount Tharaka, eight or nine miles from our former hosts and at a considerably lower elevation. The mountain appeared to approve of our arrangements, for it refrained from bellyaching about them, and we could lie down at night without fearing that an outbreak of burps and belches would jolt us all awake. I may have been the only Minid who worried at all about the stability of Mount Tharaka’s gastrointestinal tract. These worries I suppressed by a very simple expedient: I shut down most conscious mental activity and drifted from one day to the next as if dreaming the successive episodes of my outward life.
I became, as in my spirit-traveling episodes before White Sphinx, a disembodied observer, a camera on a mobile boom—with the telling exception that among the Minids I retained my body as a camera housing. For the next several weeks, then, my life was a picaresque narrative without a protagonist, a runaway Ferrari from which the driver has leapt, not out of panic but from a ripening indifference to its destination. The wind still scoured my flesh, and the night might kindle my vision with the fagot tips of stars—but now I drank in these phenomena without consciously remarking them.
Helen eventually recovered from the bouts of nausea that had plagued her in the highland kingdom of the Huns. She continued to mourn our loss of Mary, however. Picking a fruit from a galol tree or digging a tuber out of the ground, she would suddenly pause and cast a pitiable glance on Zippy or A.P.B. To distract her I would usually put one of my own grimy discoveries into her hand and gesture her on to the next likely foraging site. When we separated from the others, such descents into funk were rare, for we were away from the stimulus to melancholy that the children represented.
Our new camp—twig and brush hovels through which the wind played sonatinas—lay in a bamboo thicket near a spring not far from the savannah. Temperatures here sometimes dropped alarmingly, and Helen and I would lie entwined in each other’s arms against the cold. My teeth made typewriter racket, and my body often quivered like a clapper-struck bell, but I did not suffer unduly. The running sore at the corner of my mouth, the insect bites damasking my flesh, the bruises and abrasions incising their steel-blue intaglios on my shins… none of these annoyances truly annoyed me. Helen and I held each other, and the nights ricocheted away around us like the fragments of primeval chaos. I had become a habiline. So far as I could tell this transformation did not mark a devolution, but a detour. I was dreaming myself into being out of the forgotten materials of preconsciousness, and Helen was my guide through the dark.
I dreamed that my chukkas were wearing out, and they were. I had already broken and replaced several shoelaces, but now the rubber soles were fissuring, the scuffed Maple Cuddy leather cracking open to reveal the aromatic little piggies penned up inside. Babington would have been ashamed of me for not discarding my boots and going barefoot, but I patched them with bark, bound them with moistened strips of bamboo, and pretended that my repairs were successful. They were not. One day I tripped on a binding, tore out the side of my right chukka, and, in disgust, hurled both my beloved boots into the canebrake below me. Thenceforward, until my feet had developed a new set of calluses, I lurched about like a gimpy middle guard. Surprisingly, maybe because I was dreaming, the calluses were quick to form.