“No, thanks,” Donald muttered; then, as Norman was about to leave, he called, “By the way! When did I say Guinevere was having her party?”
“Ah—tonight, I guess.”
“Thought so. But I’m so confused … They picked up Victoria pretty quickly, didn’t they?”
“What?”
“I said they picked her up pretty quickly.” Detecting a note of puzzlement in Norman’s voice, Donald raised himself on one elbow. “Didn’t you shop her? When I saw her things were gone, I—”
He broke off. Norman had turned in the doorway to look across the living-room. Without further movement he could see, through the open door of his own bedroom, the closet door standing ajar to reveal vacancy where the current shiggy was allowed to hang her clothes.
“No, I didn’t shop her,” he said at length without a trace of emotion. “She must have decided to shade and fade while her news was still warm. Much good may it do her. But frankly I don’t care. As you saw, I hadn’t even noticed that her gear was gone until you mentioned it.” He hesitated. “I guess I should tell you right away, come to think of it, in case I don’t see you in the morning before I go out. I—ah—I may not be in New York much longer.”
With shocking suddenness Donald remembered the inspiration which had come to him earlier in the evening, and then had been driven instantly to the back of his mind by the irruption of the pseudo cab. Yet weariness overlay even his pride at the insight he had displayed in figuring out the truth. He had to let his head fall back on the soft engulfing mound of the pillows.
“I didn’t imagine you would be,” he said.
“What? Why not?”
“I thought they’d send you to Beninia sooner or later. Sooner, huh?”
“Howinole did you know that?” Norman closed his hand violently on the jamb of the door.
“Worked it out,” Donald said in a muffled voice. “That’s what I’m good at. That’s why they picked me for my job.”
“What job? You don’t have a…” Norman let the word die, listened to silence for a while, and eventually said, “I see. Like Victoria, hm?” The question shook with fury.
“No, not like Victoria. Christ, I shouldn’t have said it but I just couldn’t help it.” Donald forced himself into a sitting position. “No, please, not like Victoria. Nothing to do with you.”
“What, then?”
“Please, I’m not supposed to talk about it. But—oh, Jesus God, it’s been ten mortal years and…” He swallowed convulsively. “State,” he said at last in a tired voice. “Dilettante Dept. If they find out that you know I’ll be activated in my army rank and court-martialled in secret. They warned me. It sort of puts me at your mercy, doesn’t it?” he ended with a wan smile.
“So why did you tell me?” Norman asked after a pause.
“I don’t know. Maybe because if you want a chance to get even with me for what I did tonight I think you deserve one. So go ahead. The way I feel right now, I wouldn’t care if an avalanche fell on me.” He slumped back on the bed and shut his eyes again.
In Norman’s mind there came the grinding sound of rock breaking loose down a mountainside. A pang as sharp as an axe-blow struck across his left wrist from bone-tip to bone-tip; wincing, he caught at the hand to make sure it was still whole.
“I’ve got even with enough people to last me for life,” he said. “And it’s done me no good. No damned good at all. Go to sleep, Donald. You’ll feel better by this evening, I’m sure.”
He closed the door gently, using his left hand and ignoring the pain that was still as violent as if it had been real.
context (12)
THE SOCIOLOGICAL COUNTERPART OF CHEYNE-STOKES RESPIRATION
“If you want to know what’s shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign—a kind of death-rattle—when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them. A sound biological comparison would be the development of the fangs of the sabre-tooth tiger to the point where the beasts can’t close their mouths any more, or the growth of armour that’s indisputably impregnable but which weighs so much the owner can’t support his bulk.
“On this basis, it’s fairly certain that Christianity won’t last out the twenty-first century. To take but a couple of prime instances: the hiving off from Rome of the so-called Right Catholics, and the appearance of the Divine Daughters as an influential pressure-group. The former exhibits a remarkable deviation from the traditional attitude of the Catholic Church as an institution that above all concerned itself with the family, Western style; the Right Catholics have become so obsessed with the simple act of fucking that they appear to have no time left for other aspects of human relationships, although they issue pronunciamenti galore on them. None of these bears even the slight relevance to contemporary reality which a sympathetic eye (not mine) can detect in similar statements originating from the Vatican. And the latter, who professedly model themselves on the mediaeval orders of nuns but who actually have borrowed the majority of their tenets—antimechanisation, distrust of bodily pleasure and so on—from respectable, well-integrated groups like the Amish and then soured them by a judicious admixture of the vinegar of hatred, are capitalising on about the most self-defeating of modern trends, our reluctance to further overburden our resources by having large families. They exploit our vicarious appreciation of people, especially women, who decline to have any progeny whatever, thus relieving us of a sense of personal responsibility for the whole damned mess.
“They won’t last.
“I can’t say I see much better times ahead for Muslims, either; though Islam has become a sizeable minority religion in the Western West in the past half-century, the spearhead of its advance has been the descendant of a schism, like the Right Catholics. I mean, naturally, the Children of X, who have constructed nothing more than an analogue of Christianity using their murdered patron as their Osiris-Attis-Jesus figure. They’ll go the way of the mystery religions of ancient times, and for the same reason: they’re exclusionist, and you aren’t allowed in unless you fulfil certain conditions of birth, primarily that you should be recognisably coloured. (I feel a lot less strongly, by the way, about racial discrimination in organisations I don’t want to join. It’s an indication that they’ll die out eventually.)
“Regrettably, however, this leper-mark of extremism isn’t confined to such expendable traits as religion. Look at sex, for example. More and more people are spending more time at it, and resorting to ever more devious ways of keeping up their enthusiasm, like commercially available aphrodisiacs and parties that are considered to be failures unless they evolve into orgies. A hundred different shiggies a year, which is something a young man can achieve without doing more than taking off his clothes, fulfils neither of the essential biological requirements of the sexual urge: it doesn’t lead to a stable environment for the cubs of the next generation, nor does it establish the kind of rapport between couples (or multiples—marriage works on all kinds of bases, not invariably monogamous) which serves to avert crisis over the possession of other members of the species. On the contrary, it leads rather to a kind of frenzy, because instead of the partners enjoying a continual and reciprocal reassurance about their respective masculinity/femininity they are driven to seek that reassurance anew every few days.
“In effect, applying the yardstick of extremism leads one to conclude that the human species itself is unlikely to last very long.”