The Grasshopper King (22 page)

“You know,” he said, “things move slowly. There are certain elements within the Society that were resistant. The older professors. It's sentimental; respect for our stricken comrade, and all that. And I won't say I don't understand that way of thinking.”

“No, of course not.” I was dazed. Behind Treech a shirtless boy leaped, hollered, spiked.

“And frankly,” Treech continued, “when you first told me what was going on I didn't think much of it. After all, who were you? Honest truth here: nobody. All that's changed now.”

“The Sethius letter.”

“You're worth quite a bit more than you used to be.”

“But listen—”

“I know,” Treech said, “the photos.” He waggled his head slowly. “An unavoidable measure. We needed it for the hearing; the judge wanted some cover. In addition to what we paid him. You can't believe how much these guys ask for! Thank God for Kosugi.”

Then he glanced at me slyly. “Oh—but
I
know what you're worried
about. Nobody thinks that you and Ellen—you know! I hope you're not in too much trouble with your girlfriend!”

He clapped his hand to my shoulder, like a comrade. The volleyball game was breaking up; I imagined one of those tanned and bright-toothed players catching sight of us on the bench, and I realized with a little horror that we would look perfectly natural, Treech and I. We made sense together.

“I noticed that the girl seems to have developed an attachment to him,” Treech went on. “Well, that's the way. You know women; they go for the vulnerability.
Woundedness
. She'll get over it. Buy flowers, that usually works.”

“There's been a mistake,” I said.

“Yes?”

Confessing was easier than I would have thought.

“I made it up,” I told Treech. “I didn't hear him saying anything. I just wanted to get back at Ellen.”

Treech stood up and began to pace out a slow, wobbly circle.

“I'll tell you what, Sam; I'm inclined to believe you.”

I buckled a little with relief. “I'm so sorry for all the trouble this must have caused.”

“And I
will
believe you—as soon as our results at the clinic back you up.”

“I'm serious!”

“How did he get to you?” Treech asked sharply.

“He?”

“Higgs!”

“Higgs?” I said. “Higgs doesn't get to anybody!”

Treech gazed back at me, coolly.

“I'll find a way to stop this,” I said.

“That's easy enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“All you have to do,” Treech said, “is get him to talk.”

That night I sat on the bed, unable to concentrate, trying to force down an egg salad sandwich that tasted like dirt, like accusation. My gaze crawled from the yolk-flecked wax paper to our swaybacked, sweat-yellow mattress to Julia at her desk, her back to me, bent ostentatiously over a stack of folios. I'd told her I hadn't been able to find Treech, no better lie having occured to me. And she'd believed me; no surprise. Hadn't I already proved myself a liar of the first class?

“Stop staring,” she said, without turning around.

“Let's go for a walk,” I said. “It's too hot in here. You're not working.”

“I
am
working.”

A little while later she stood up, set her hands on her hips, and stretched backwards, cracking her waist.

“Well, let's go,” she said.

We walked up Epimenides into what had been the industrial section of town. It wasn't any cooler than in our apartment; but outside, at least, one could dangle before oneself the false promise of a cooling wind, and the scenery was somewhat less familiar. The sun was still up, barely. It wouldn't start to cool down till well past dark. We walked, hand in damp hand, past the empty warehouses with their painted-on pediments and columns, over the cracking streets, through intermittent clouds of gnats and flies. Julia was reading the faded emblazons of commerce off the bricks, one by one: McHenry Bros. Joseph Parson Sinks. Dry Goods. Sons of Jacob Henneman. The column of quiet smokestacks ahead of us seemed part of a gigantic municipal pipe organ, three-quarters submerged, poised to explode at an appropriate moment into song.

“Do you think we should get married?” I said.

“You mean now?”

We walked another block.

“I mean eventually. Sometime specific.”

“Maybe.” Another block, then: “Why do you ask?”

“It's obviously of some interest to me.” Wry was what I was going for but it came out stuffy, as if we were negotiating a bank loan.

“I mean why do you ask
now
,” she said. “Because of Treech?”

Honestly, I wasn't sure. I had proposed, if proposal it was, almost before it had occurred to me that I was going to speak. But it must have been Treech; because all day I'd been thinking of his hand on my shoulder. And
You know women
, he'd said, as if admitting me with these words into some unpleasant fraternity with him, with the Society, with garreted, scheming men everywhere. I didn't want any part of it. I wanted to marry Julia; wanted to move away somewhere, maybe take up psychology or art history again. I could learn to respect that. What I wanted most of all was to drive down the conviction I'd felt, there on the bench, bubbling up in me like crude oil, that Treech had me pegged; that at my cloistered heart I was one of his. I nodded: it was Treech.

“What do you think will happen?” she said.

“I think Treech'll take him away on Friday. I guess I'll have to get a new job for a while. Maybe work in the restaurant. My mother said we could move in.”

“We are
not
moving in with your parents.”

But she must have known we would have to; our rent had gone up again, and there was no way I could make enough at the restaurant to pay my share. Not even if I worked nights at the copy store besides. That and my plasma wouldn't be enough.

“Anyway,” she said, “what I meant was once they take him. With the shock treatment.”

I knew, of course, what she'd meant.

“I don't know anything about it,” I said. “Could be he'll be brain damaged. Could be he'll die. I guess there could be no effect at all. Could be he'll talk.”

“You're awfully calm about it.”

“There isn't much we can do.”

It was true; Julia had talked to every lawyer in town and none was inclined to take us on, not for what we could pay. Not that it mattered; I didn't doubt the Society would buy as many judges as they needed to, if it came to a fight.

Julia laced her fingers up behind her and lifted her gaze to the tiny, faraway clouds. “It's terrible,” she said.

Once we'd laughed about suicide: remember? And not just that, but floods and earthquakes, girls down wells, the situation in the Middle East, widow-burnings and ritual mutilation, the way a teenager might shoot you for a parking spot. We'd sent half the world down to Davy Jones. There wasn't anything awful enough to sober us up—until now. With a little perspective it made no sense. One old man and a few thousand volts against the great parade of suffering we'd already allowed to go by: it was nothing. And yet there she was, cloud-gazing, pronouncing it terrible, her lips set without a trace of joking. It's my fault, I thought suddenly. Not the whole catastrophe with Higgs, though that was my fault too, but her seriousness. I'd exhausted something in her. Whatever it was that was meant to lift me up had dragged her down instead, to the gloomy, hot, humorless land of me and people like me.

Anyhow, it was clear enough what I had to do. I took Julia's hand and ordered myself to commiserate, with all the gravity that I owed her. But what I said was “Although.”

“Although?” she said, stopping, letting my hand go. “Although what?” We had come into the shadow of the cloverleaf; ahead of us, a finger of road swung upward and traced a dramatic gesture over our heads, on its way to join the interstate on its charge to the Pacific.

“Although there's not really anyone to blame,” I said. “When you look at it rationally. It's not as though they
want
to hurt him.”

“But?”

“But he's getting old. That's all it's about. What if he dies without saying what he's going to say?”

“Somebody else would figure it out.”

“Not necessarily.”

“And so what anyway?”

“I'm not trying to defend it,” I said. “All I'm saying is that they want the same thing we want; for Higgs to talk again.”

“The same thing
you
want.”

“So what do you want?”

She shrugged. I felt duplicitous, weak as a reed. How had it come out this way?

“To get married?” I suggested.

“I said maybe.”

I was sorry I had brought it up again. It would now be more difficult to raise the next point at hand.

“I hope you understand Treech changed those photographs,” I said.

“That's obvious.”

“At this point I feel very close to Ellen,” I pressed on. “But you can't think that anything's gone on between us besides what's natural.”

At this Julia made a noise very much like a gargle.

“Could you not,” she said, “be a
complete
idiot.”

“I worry.”

“Just don't say anything.”

And the rest of our walk passed in silence. The air was as thick and soggy as hot milk.

When we got to our door, Julia said, “What if he talks before Friday?”

“Then they won't take him.”

“And do you think he will?”

I sensed the opportunity, a drab consolation, to be reassuring. “I do.”

“You really think so?”

“In his situation,” I said, “wouldn't you?”

But he didn't say anything: not the next day, not Sunday, not Monday, and my optimism—forced, let's face it, even at the time—began to seem ill-considered, even meaningless. “In his situation,” I'd said; but what
was
Higgs's situation? How could I, or anyone, begin to guess?

Of course, I had theories. Here was the simplest one: the Society was right, and Higgs was still wrestling, after thirteen years, with the Henderson problem. Maybe he was too proud, even in this extremity, to
admit defeat. It was noble, at least; and it admitted the possibility of a last-second turnaround. Or: he'd forgotten about Henderson altogether; maybe from boredom, maybe from some tiny and irreversible malfunction. There were embolisms no bigger than a flea. All those thoughts we'd been ascribing to him were creatures of our own desire, as phony as the faces people see on Mars. This smacked of easy irony and I rejected it.

But what if he'd succeeded? That was the idea that started looking better as the week trickled on. He'd found it: the truth about Henderson, distilled into a few neat sentences, or words, or, who knew, one word! Certainly he'd had enough time to pare it to the kernel. I didn't know why he wouldn't tell us, unless his conclusion was so disappointing that he thought it better not to release it on the world. Or
dangerous
—that idea appealed to me a little. The order of things upset, all bets off . . . In any event it did not seem likely that the threat of the electric therapy would change his mind.

But Ellen and Julia, less susceptible than I to theory-making, were sure that Higgs would save himself; and I was eager to be proved wrong. So over the harried days that followed we tried everything we could think of to spur Higgs into speech.

On Tuesday it was arguments. “He'll listen to reason,” Ellen insisted; and we offered him reasons, we pelted him with reasons.

“All you have to do,” Julia said, pacing out the room's perimeter, “is say something—anything. It doesn't have to be the final say-all. Just to let them know you're still working on it.” I was sucking sullenly from a can of too-sweet lemonade.

“A reassurance,” Ellen said.

“You don't even have to tell Treech yourself,” Julia pointed out. “The tape recorder's on. Just tell us what you're thinking.”

We held still, neither breathing nor swallowing; lemonade pooled brackishly around my teeth and the bottom of my tongue. But nothing. Higgs seemed to be listening to a different station, and intently.

We presented him with ever more fanciful cases. Ellen unearthed photographs of long-forgotten family, nephews and
nieces and in-laws of Higgs who had long since severed all ties with their silent, embarrassing relation; she entreated Higgs to believe that missing the Society's deadline would condemn them en masse to crippling years of grief. Julia reminded Higgs that his prominent position made him a role model, and that were he to submit without protest to the Society's treatment he would be endorsing a dangerous precedent for any other professor judged to be underproductive. (Did Higgs have a single colleague at Chandler State who could not reasonably be so judged?) We trotted before him the demands of finance, of Christian ethics, of national security. Higgs did not budge.