Careful not to become separated — they recalled the fuss when they had — the children instinctively gave way, voluntarily allowing others to precede them even if it was not their turn.
My, Eddy thought, watching in the theatrical gloom, his congratulatory pride incremented by the dark, by expectation and a suffusion of love. My, Eddy thought, flooded with his curious content, his madness peaking now, spiking like a fever, how good they all are!
He was pleased even by the serendipitous symmetry of the arrangements. One adult to each pair of buddies — Nedra sat between Janet Order and Tony Word while Colin Bible took his place in the cars with Rena and Noah, and Benny and Lydia Conscience were with Mr. Moorhead — the partners seemed less disadvantaged now, neither ill nor poor nor out of place. It was the adults, he thought, that lent them force, a scant air of there being something premeditated about their quiet good manners, not long-suffering as he had thought but placid, vaguely exhibitionist. And then he had it. Why, he thought, they might be Saturday’s children, here by court order, official decree, sentenced by a judge and their own mixed loyalties, perfecting their expressions, balancing them like books, all the smoky nonchalance of the indifferently loved, rehearsing the customs of visitation and doing God knows what secret sums of custody in their heads, sneaking glances at their watches, timing what was left of the morning, the long afternoon, and wondering if it was time yet to go to the restaurant, how long the line would be at the movies.
Eddy Bale, comforted by his imagination — divorce was a better doom than doom — moved beside Mary Cottle, who’d taken charge of Charles Mudd-Gaddis in his wheelchair, pushing it along the platform like a child’s stroller each time the line inched forward and new people climbed into the cars. In the dim light he accidentally brushed her hip and asked if he could take the tour with them. Mary shrugged and he got into the tram with Mudd-Gaddis and Miss Cottle. Snug, he felt snug. The two grown-ups, the little boy, made a cozy family.
The tram pulled away from the platform, began its long climb, while Eddy speculated about their collective calm, their take-what-came inscrutability.
He didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that they were disinterested, being pulled past the highlights in this palace of highlights, being drawn up the mammoth geosphere as up a well, the history of civilization illuminated on either side like river views from an open boat, like Paris shoreline gliding across the vision in a bateau mouche.
He did not know, could not know, their indifference, absolute now — only Mudd-Gaddis pointed, only Mudd-Gaddis, alternately delighted and fearful, squealed — to humanity’s transitionless breakthrough breakthroughs, detached, drifting through time as across the panels of a comic strip, seeming to slow down for each milestone as if they were pulling into a familiar train station along their route home, sliding past the cave paintings, beasts stylized as jewelry, primitives squatting over their Neanderthal fire like low gamblers at dice. They moved alongside Egyptians chiseling hieroglyphs like great strange keys and, farther up, caught glimpses of ancient Greece’s legitimate theater, its antique declamated tragedies. They traveled Rome’s blocky old roads and saw the great libraries of ruined empires. They saw monasteries where medieval monks, like secretaries taking painstaking dictation, copied out gospel. They passed Gutenberg’s print shop — and didn’t know, couldn’t know, Colin Bible’s held-tongue, bite-bullet pangs at each special effect: the movable type on Gutenberg’s press — and pressed on into the glories of the Renaissance. And were plunged into the twentieth century as into din. A telegraph clicked like a castanet. They saw the stop-press banner hieroglyphs of newspapers. Radio was in it now, TV, computers. And, still climbing, rose into space, the comfortable room temperature of the heavens, galactic swamps swirling above them like fingerprints of starlight, space platforms like futuristic chandeliers.
At Journey Into Imagination they watched a sort of electronic puppet show — to him, they seemed riveted; how could he know? — and saw rainbows stripped as you’d strip paint, and led electronic orchestras, and walked across a floor that turned their footsteps into music, and stared, his distorted kids, into distorting mirrors. He watched a 3-D movie with them and saw them draw back as objects leaped out at them from the screen.
So how could he, how could he know whose uncompromised oohs and ahhs, like someone watching birthday candles being blown out, came from the heart? Or that Colin Bible stifled his injury-nursed gasps and carefully suppressed sighs and whimpers as he stared down from Epcot Computer Central’s glassed-in balcony at the massive and complicated control boards that handled it all?
Or that Nedra Carp, seated between Janet Order and Tony Word, wondered why Mr. Moorhead hadn’t assigned her to a car with children who were her official responsibility rather than hustling her in with strangers? (Did she know the contents of their pockets, what awful contraband candy they might have brought with them? Had they had a B.M. today? Who’d made sure they’d tinkled before permitting them to come out?) And a bit angry with the children, too, or put off — she was not the sort to lose her temper with children, not like that woman Mary Cottle, who used to run off to the bathroom for a sulk whenever things didn’t go entirely spit-spot and now disappeared altogether whenever the poor dears fussed or grew cranky (and now she knew where, didn’t she, and maybe it was something more than a bit of a sulk, and perhaps, if she’d wanted Mr. Bale to find out, it had been something of a mistake to have entrusted Colin Bible, who’d probably known it anyway, with the information, birds of a feather and all that) — because they hadn’t protested, and had abandoned her without so much as a by-your-leave to finicky Tony Word with his peculiar tastes and foul vegetable breath, a boy, she suspected, who, had it been left to him, would actually have gotten down on the ground and rooted for potatoes, carrots, onions, the level radish and asparagus and pumpkin, the foreign zucchini and eggplant and broccoli, eating them from the soil, the earth itself; and that disgusting Janet Order, whose blue dreadfulness, even in the dark, was palpable to her, awful as vein, livid as beetle or basilisk. Or that she could not stop thinking about the woman?
Or that Benny Maxine couldn’t either, or of the two discrete and darkened hollows in her ass, larger, sweeter than dimples?
Or that Mr. Moorhead, having removed his watch and put it in the pocket of his jacket and, out of earshot of the others, inquired of semitic-looking tourists for the one hundred and sixty-eighth time the time of day — he was a scientist, trial-and- error was part of his training, watching their wrists as they raised their arms to within inches of their eyes — and, hypothesis too, they would have at least to be in their late middle age (the youngest among them would have been almost fifty by now) or, more likely, elderly, in their sixties, or, most probable of all, old, in their seventies, nearsighted, waited — patient observation was — and watched for the bookkeeping to appear on their skin, the fadeless, telltale numbers, the careful tattoo audit, and listened also — there could have been shame; they might have been wearing their watches on the opposite arm or worn a timepiece about their neck — auscultating their accents, and had found his Jew?
Or that Lydia Conscience no longer believed she was fooling anyone with her cheap rings and big belly? (That was made quite clear in that dream she’d shared with Mudd-Gaddis and Tony Word. They’d only been patronizing her. Mudd-Gaddis pretending Tony Word was the father! Tony Word! The remarks about morning sickness, her own bitter comments about the buddy system when all she meant, she supposed, was that she didn’t want anyone to know her details. Better to be known for a loose under-age slut than for a terminal! And people stared when they were with her. Mr. Bible sometimes wearing that white nurse’s jacket! Outrageous! Might as well take out an advert. As if Mudd-Gaddis weren’t advert enough. Or Rena Morgan, thinking she fooled anyone with her dumb hidden hankies. Didn’t the twit realize that the wet spots showed when she slipped them up her sleeve again? Or bald Tony Word, who didn’t even have the decency to wear a wig! Or blue-skinned Janet Order, who invaded her dream on the plane. “I dream of Janet with the light blue skin,” she sang to herself in her head. Or bloated Benny with his puffy face, and stupid Noah who couldn’t read and, now he was losing his fingers, couldn’t even count right!) And that was why she still wore the rings even though she knew they didn’t fool anyone anymore and, twice removed — once to make people think she was preggers and now to keep them from knowing just what the hell she was — merely masked the details she couldn’t bear anyone to know? Or that ever since she’d heard about Mary Cottle’s private room she’d been trying to work up the nerve to tell her she hadn’t spent any of her money and to ask her that, if she paid her fair share, could she use it just to get away once in a while?