Shuffling wearily, he made his way over to the ample medical supply cabinet, feeling at last the effects of so much lack of sleep. An overdose of quinidine, he said to himself as he lifted out the hypodermic; that should provide the necessary cardiac arrest.
With a grunt, he sat down at the foot of his analyst’s couch, rolled up his sleeve and gave himself the injection. His arm, from so many previous injections, had become insensitive; he felt nothing.
The needle broke as it fell to the floor from his suddenly stiffening fingers, and, with a sigh, he slid back onto the couch.
His subordinates were so much afraid of him that they did not break in and find his body until a day and a half later.
THIRTEEN
“What do you mean, you don’t know where he is?” Dr. Choate demanded.
“Just what I said,” answered Ed Newkom, shrugging his shoulders. The two men faced each other for a moment in silence in the little Knoxville hotel room and then Dr. Choate turned away.
“He must have left some indication of how he could be reached,” Choate said.
“Nope,” Ed Newkom said flatly.
“And he took the girl, Joan Hiashi, with him?”
“That’s right, Dr. Choate.”
It had become hot in the hotel room. Choate brought out an Iris linen handkerchief and mopped the perspiration from his forehead; he squinted at the bright sunlight streaming in from the window and felt angry and irritable. “I have to locate him; I have to know whether he plans to undertake the Percy X mission or not. It’s been five days; he may be gone for good. ” Defected, he thought, or just plain copped out.
“You don’t know Paul very well, do you?” Ed Newkom said.
“That’s the trouble; I do know him. I know how involved he gets emotionally with his patients. It’s part of his style of therapy to treat the patient almost as an equal. A bad policy—it puts too much strain on the therapist. He’s probably cracking up.” He felt all at once—not irritation—but genuine concern.
Paul Rivers, at that moment, knew an inner calm and peace with himself such as he had never before experienced. He had begun to learn how to do nothing. The Sexual Freedom Society had not understood how to achieve it, but Joan Hiashi did; now she was teaching him, in a run-down one-room cabin in the woods of Tennessee, a good distance from the nearest paved road. She had taught him how to lie in the sun like a vegetable—and grow roots.
Side by side the two of them lay, on the ramshackle porch, only their fingertips touching. Once Paul had half-heartedly tried to kiss her, but she had pushed him gently away and he had taken “no” for an answer. Now, after more than an hour of torpid, mindless silence, she had begun to speak, very slowly.
“I can’t make love anymore; it makes me feel false, now. I’m not a woman, or a man; I’m both and neither. I’m the entire universe and just a single tiny eye, watching. To be a man or a woman is to put on an act—and I’m through with acting. It is good to touch me, though, isn’t it? As it’s good to touch a dog or a cat?”
“Yes,” Paul said, almost inaudibly. This is the first time, he thought, that a woman has known how to let me be. How to be with me without requiring that I pay attention to her, constantly prove to her that she exists. It’s true in a way, he realized, that being a man or a woman is, in a large measure, just an act, a certain culturally determined role that may have very little to do with how we really are inside. How many times, he asked himself, have I made love not because I wanted to but because I wanted to prove to myself and some poor woman that I was a “real man”?
He glanced over at Joan’s expressionless profile and thought, But she seems so far away. I wonder where she’s gone, deep in her hidden depths.
“Where are you, Joan?” he asked.
“Nowhere.”
“You’re the little Nowhere Girl, aren’t you?”
“You could call me that.”
A bird, probably a hummingbird, caught Paul’s eye; it sat on a tree-branch beyond the weed-infested yard, singing. It had one short song which it sang over and over again, always exactly the same. As Paul watched it, he could have sworn that the bird paused and looked back at him, silent for a moment, and thoughtful. Man and bird contemplated each other across the expanse of undulating heat and then, abruptly, the bird resumed its singing. Suddenly, and without warning, Paul felt painful emotions rising into activity within him. Fantasies danced on his brain and unexplainable tears dimmed his vision. Perhaps he had been a bird, once; perhaps this small bird had recognized him as a brother.
The bird came closer, still singing.
I have wings, too, Paul thought. But you can’t see them. And I can feel the wind under them, feel the air bearing up the weight of my body.
When his vision cleared, the bird had gone.
“He knew you were listening, Joan said. “He’s a terrible ham.”
“Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“Yes,” Joan said. “They’re all hams, the birds and animals, but they won’t show off to you unless they sense that you won’t hurt them. They don’t have as much knowledge as humans, but much more wisdom. Some of them, particularly cats, are great philosophers and holy men.”
“Are you a holy woman?” he asked, surprised at his own question.
“Perhaps. If I have any ambition it’s to be something like a saint or holy woman. What else is worthwhile?”
Paul said thoughtfully, “You’ve made it about halfway.” He chose his words with care. “Buddha and Christ began by going off into the wilderness, into the kind of aloneness you seem to be in now, but they didn’t stay there. They came back—to try to do something for the rest of us. Maybe they failed. But at least they tried.” With a grunt he rose unsteadily to his feet, stood swaying, then stretched and felt all right.
“Where are you going?” Joan asked.
“Back to the city,” Paul said grimly. “I’ve got work to do.”
Much to his own surprise, Gus Swenesgard found himself still alive after the Great Battle. And, being alive, he could indulge himself in the luxury of admiring his enemy.
“We got some pretty good Neegs in these hills,” he said to nobody in particular as he stumped through the lobby of his hotel and out into the morning sunshine. Pausing, he inhaled a good, hefty amount of dusty air laden with the healthy smell of decaying weeds; he then ran his hand over his somewhat unshaven jowls, coughed and spat. “I gotta quit smoking one of these days,” he muttered under his breath. But he knew, deep inside, that he didn’t have the strength to do it.
Instead, he pulled out a cigar and lit it.
Ah, he thought dreamily, that’s better. There was nothing that covered up the taste of old, stale smoke quite so well as new, fresh smoke. Gus exhaled, then swaggered down the front steps—carefully avoiding the broken one—and headed for the prisoners’ compound down the street; several vacant lots had been fenced in to provide a temporary dwelling-place for the Neeg-part deserters that streamed into Gus’ plantation in ever-increasing numbers. Since the battle of the phantoms the trickle of turncoats had become a torrent. If they just keep using that illusion machine, Gus said to himself, I’ll be sittin’ pretty.
When he reached the fence of the prisoners’ compound he paused a moment, pondering. It’s no good, he decided, keeping those good, black bucks standing around idle; I think we’d better get a little public works goin here. First off I’ll get a sign-painting factory going to make signs and posters that say “FULL EMPLOYMENT” and “LETS ALL PULL TOGETHER” and that sort of thing, and then we’ll have to get a money factory going to pay them. I think we got some old steel engravings of confederate money in the museum that are still as good as in the old days when Jeff Davis lived.