The Man Who Lost the Sea (21 page)

(Iris begins to laugh. Probably hysteria.)

Dissolve to black, then to starry space. To black again, bring up pool of light, resolve it into:

Burcke, sitting at desk. He closes log book
.

BURCKE: This is, I regret to say, a true story. The Fafnir 203 came in at night six days ago at a small field some distance from here, and Dr. Horowitz phoned me. After considerable discussion it was decided to present this unhappy story to you in the form written up by the four people who actually experienced it. They are here with me now. And here is a much maligned man, surely one of the greatest medical researchers alive—Dr. Horowitz.

HOROWITZ: Thank you. First I wish to assure everyone within reach of my voice that what has been said here about iapetitis is true: it is a synthetic disorder which is, by its very nature, harmless, and which, if contracted will pass away spontaneously in from two to twelve weeks. Not a single child has died of it, and those who have been its victims the longest—some up to two years—have unquestionably been lavishly treated. A multiple murder was attempted upon my three companions and myself, of course, but it was our greatest desire to see to it that that charge is not pressed.

BURCKE: I wish to express the most heartfelt apologies from myself and all my colleagues for whatever measure of distress this network and its affiliates may have unwittingly brought you, the public. It is as an earnest of this that we suffer, along with you, through the following film clip, taken just two days ago in the I. F. clinic in Montreal. What you see in my hand here is a thin rubber glove, almost invisible on the hand. Fixed to its fingertips is a microscopic forest of tiny sharp steel points, only a few thousandths of an inch long. And this metal box, just large enough to fit unobtrusively in a side pocket, contains a jellied preparation of the synthetic virus.

Fade to:

Wild hilarity in a hospital ward. Children in various stages of
iapetitis, laughing hilariously at the capering, growling, gurgling, belching funny man as he moves from bed to bed, Peep! at you, peep-peep at you, and one by one ruffling the little heads at the nape, dipping the fingertips in the side jacket packet between each bed
.

Dissolve, and bring up Burke
.

BURCKE: Good night, ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls …

I’m sorry
.

The lights came up in the projection room. There was nobody there with Heri Gonza but Burcke: all the others had quietly moved and watched the last few scenes from the doorway, and slipped away.

“You did air it?” asked the comedian, making absolutely sure.

“Yes.”

Heri Gonza looked at him without expression and walked toward the stage door. It opened as he approached, and four people came in. Flannel, Kearsarge, Horowitz, Iris Barran.

Without a word Flannel stepped up to the comedian and hit him in the stomach. Heri Gonza sank slowly to the floor, gasping.

Horowitz said, “We’ve spent a lot of time deciding what to do about you, Heri Gonza. Flannel wanted just one poke at you and wouldn’t settle for anything else. The rest of us felt that killing was too good for you, but we wanted you dead. So we wrote you that script. Now you’re dead.”

Heri Gonza rose after a moment and walked through the stage door and out to the middle of acres and acres of stage. He stood there alone all night, and in the morning was gone.

The stone was included in the price of the plot; I hadn’t known. I hadn’t wanted a stone because stones have to say something, and what can you say in a case like this? But unwittingly I’d bought the thing and because I had, the man had put it up—what else? I had anger enough to scatter around heart-deep, but, reasonably, not a flake for the men who had put up the stone.

It was a right and proper stone, I supposed, if one must have one of the things at all: bigger than many of the cheating, bargain sort of stones that stood nearby, and tastefully smaller than the hulking ostentatious ones.
Here lies my wife between poverty and vulgarity
. Now there you go. Have a single elevating thought about that woman and it comes out sounding like that. Soils everything she touches.

The stone called me a liar for that. It was of a whitish granite that would weather whiter still. It had edges of that crinkly texture like matted hair that nothing would stick to because nothing could possibly want to, and a glossy face that nothing would stick to if it wanted nothing else. Whited sepulcher, that’s what the hell. The stone is its own epitaph, because look: it’s white forever, white and clean, and it has no words—which is to say, nothing. Nothing, and clean, ergo,
Here lies nothing clean
.

What I always say is, there’s a way to say anything in the world if you can only think of the way to say it, and I had. I liked this epitaph just fine. There would be no words on this stone, and it had its epitaph.

Laughing out loud is bad form in a graveyard, and stepping down hard on a man’s instep is bad form anywhere. This was the moment when, backing off for some perspective on this my masterpiece, I did both these things. The man, apparently, had been standing behind me watching. I whirled and looked him up and down,
hoping sincerely that he was offended. There are times in a man’s life when he wouldn’t want even his friends to like him, and such a time is no time to pay court to the esteem of a stranger.

He wasn’t offended. All I got out of him (just then) was a pleasant smile. He had a sort of anybody’s face, the like of which you might encounter anywhere, which is to say he had the kind of face you wouldn’t be surprised to see visiting a cemetery. I’ll say this for him: he was harmonious; his voice and clothing exactly suited his face, and though he wasn’t an old man, the things he said weren’t hard to figure, coming from a man like that. You could tell he was experienced.

Neither of us said anything right away when I bumped him. He sort of put his hands on my shoulders for a second either to hold one of us up or to keep the other from falling, which gave the gesture a full fifty per cent chance of being selfish, and I am not about to give away a thank-you in the face of those odds. As for an excuse-me, I didn’t want to be excused, I wanted to be blamed. So I glared at first, while he smiled, and after those things got used up there was nothing for it but to stand where we were, side by side, looking at my wife’s grave because that was straight ahead and we couldn’t just go on looking at each other. It was while we were doing this that he said, “Mind if I read it?”

I looked at him. Even if this had been the perfect time and place for joking, a face that looked the way his face looked contained no jests. I looked from him to the bland, uncommunicative sheet of stone and the raw mound with its neat planes still unslumped by wind or water, and I looked back at him. It occurred to me then that maybe his eyes weren’t so good, and he honestly didn’t know there was nothing on the stone. “Yes,” I said as offensively as I could, “I mind.”

He put up his hands placatingly, and said in that same good-natured way, “All right, all right! I won’t.” And he gave me a sort of friendly half-wave and started off.

I looked at the grave and at his retreating back and “Hey!” I called before I realized I wanted to.

He came back, smiling. “Yes?”

I felt robbed, that’s why I called him back. I’d realized I wanted to see his face when he got close enough to squint at that unmarked stone. I said, “What I mean is, I’d mind if anyone read anything off that. It would give me the creeps.”

He didn’t even glance toward the grave, but said patiently, “It’s all right. I promised you I wouldn’t.”

I said, “Oh for God’s sake,” disgustedly, and with an angry motion beckoned him to follow me. I had that oafish feeling you get when you tell a joke and somebody doesn’t get it, so instead of letting the matter drop you lay your ears back and start explaining, knowing perfectly well that when you finally get the point across it isn’t going to be funny, either to your victim or to yourself. I ranged up on one side of the grave and he came up and crossed over and stood at the other side, not four feet away from the headstone. He was looking right at it, but didn’t say anything, so I barked, “Well?”

“Well,” he asked politely, “what?”

The oafish feeling intensified. “Don’t you find the language of that epitaph a little on the terse side?” I said sarcastically.

He glanced at it. “There’s never very much on the stone,” he said, and added, as if to himself, “while it’s new.”

“New or old,” I said, and I guess I showed something of the anger I felt, “the way it is is the way it stays. Anything that gets written on the rock is not going to be written by me.”

“Naturally not,” he said.

To make it quite clear, I said, “Or by anyone I hire.”

“Well,” he said comfortingly, “don’t worry. I won’t read it, now or later.”

“You can say that again,” I growled. I was finally coming to a certainty about this grave. “The less said about this whole thing, including her
and
her slab, the better. That was her strong point anyway; keeping her mouth shut. At long last, anything she’s hiding, she can keep. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Then you won’t,” he said peacefully, “and neither will I, because I’ve promised.” After a sort of pause, he added, “I think I ought to warn you, though, that somebody else might come along and read it, not knowing of your objections.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not the only one in the world who can read graves.”

“I told you—I’m not putting any inscription on. Not a monogram. Not so much as
Hers
, or even—hey, this would be cute:
Her lies
. Not that she was really ever a liar. She just wouldn’t
say
.”

“The inscriptions never say very much by themselves,” he said in his patient voice, “taken out of context.”

“What do you mean, context?”

“I don’t think you quite understood me. I didn’t say I read gravestones. I said I read graves.”

I looked blankly at that tidy, tamped-down mound and the virgin stone, and back at the shovel-patted yellow earth turning grainy in the late warm sunlight, and a more uncommunicative arrangement I had never laid eyes on. It conveyed nothing about her, and for that matter, nothing about anyone else. Me, for instance. No flowers.

“Not this one, you can’t,” I said finally.

“I wouldn’t.”

“That promise of yours,” I said with a certain amount of smug enmity, “comes in pretty handy, doesn’t it? I think I see what you’re driving at, and I don’t think it’s any too funny. You’ve spent a lot of time ghouling around places like this until you can tell to a dime what the planting cost, how much the survivors give a damn, if any, how long the box has been buried, and how good a job the crew did on the detail. But any time there’s a little more than readily meets the eye, like a guy who says he won’t have an inscription after paying for a stone, you don’t have to risk a wrong guess. You just make a gentlemanly promise, casual-like.” I snorted through my nostrils.

He still wouldn’t let me annoy him. He simply explained where I was wrong. He said, “It isn’t like that at all. There’s nothing to deduce, or to guess at. It’s all there,” he said, nodding at but not looking at the grave, “to be read. I’ll admit that it’s a little harder to do on a very new grave; you might say that it’s all in very fine print and a little hard to see unless you read well. But in time it all comes clear—very clear. As to the promise, it’s very obvious that you wouldn’t want a stranger like myself to know everything about her.”

“Everything?” I laughed bitterly. “Nobody knows everything about
her
.”

“Well, it’s all there.”

“You know what’s happened to me,” I said a little too loudly and a little too fast, “I’m a little bit out of my head from all that’s happened the last week or so, which makes me stand here listening to you as if you made sense.”

He didn’t say anything.

“By God,” I mumbled, not talking to him or to anyone special at the moment, “it wasn’t too long ago I’d given anything you like to know some things about that woman. Only since I made up my mind I don’t want to know, I feel much better,” I said feeling miserable. “You know what she did, she wasn’t home when I got there that night, we’d had a little sort of fight the morning before, and that night she was just gone. No note and she didn’t pack anything or take anything but that one green tweed suit and that stupid hat she used to wear with it. If she had any money it wasn’t much. Then, nothing for three whole days and nights, until that phone call.” My hands got all knotted up and then seemed to get too heavy, pulling my shoulders into a slump. I sat down on the edge of an iron pipe railing at the edge of the next grave and let the heavy hands dangle down between my thighs. I hung my head down so I could watch them while I talked. Watching them didn’t tell me anything. “Phone call from the police who found her driver’s license in her handbag, the one that matched that stupid hat.”

I raised my head and looked across the grave at the man. I couldn’t see him too clearly until I hit myself across the eyes with my sleeve. The cuff buttons had got themselves turned around, and it hurt. “Eight hundred miles from home with some guy in a sports car, and all she had on was one of those fancified bathrobes, you know, hostess gown, a good one, I never saw it before. Don’t know where the green suit got to or the stupid hat either. Bag was in the car. Car was in an oak tree. No kidding. Upside down in an oak tree fifteen feet off the ground. The police said he had to be going a hundred and twenty to hit as hard as that. I never heard of him before. I don’t know how she got there. I don’t know why. Well,” I said after I
thought about it for a minute, “I guess I do know more or less why, but not
exactly why;
not exactly what was in her mind when she did whatever it was she did to get herself into that. I never knew exactly what was in her mind. I could never get her to say. She would …”

I guess at that point I stopped talking out loud, because it all turned into a series of swift pictures, one after the other, inside my head, too fast for words, and too detailed.
What’s the matter?
I’d be saying, and her, kissing my hands, looking up at me with tears in her eyes:
Can’t you see?
And again: me yelling at her,
Well if what I do makes you unhappy, why don’t you tell me what you want? Go ahead, write the script, I’ll play it
. And the way she’d turn her back when I talked like that, and I’d hear her voice softly:
If you’d only—
and
I just
—and then she’d stall, inarticulate, shake her head. She never talked enough. She never said the things that … that … World of feeling, spectrum of sensitivity, and no words, no dammit dammit words. Picture of her smiling, looking off, out, a little up; I say
What are you so happy about?