"And where will you be on that day?"
"Africa," I said.
He was silent. His mouth did not work. His eyes did not shift.
"Not far from Nairobi," I said.
He nodded, once, slowly.
"Africa, not far from Nairobi."
I waited.
"And when we get there, if we go?" he said.
"I leave you there."
"And then?"
"You stay there."
"And then?"
"That"s all."
"That"s all?"
"Forever," I said.
The old man breathed out and in, and ran his hand over the edge of the doorsill.
"This car," he said, "somewhere along the way does it turn into a plane?"
"I don"t know," I said.
"Somewhere along the way do you turn into my pilot?"
"It could be. I"ve never done this before."
"But you"re willing to try?"
I nodded.
"Why?" he said, and leaned in and stared me directly in the face with a terrible, quietly wild intensity. "Why?"
Old man, I thought, I can"t tell you why. Don"t ask me.
He withdrew, sensing he had gone too far.
"I didn"t say that," he said.
"You didn"t say it," I said.
"And when you bring the plane in for a forced landing," he said, "will you land a little differently this time?"
"Different, yes."
"A little harder?"
"I"ll see what can be done."
"And will I be thrown out but the rest of you okay?"
"The odds are in favor."
He looked up at the hill where there was no grave. I looked at the same hill. And maybe he guessed the digging of it there.
He gazed back down the road at the mountains and the sea that could not be seen beyond the mountains and a continent beyond the sea. "That"s a good day you"re talking about."
"The best."
"And a good hour and a good second."
"Really, nothing better."
"Worth thinking about."
His hand lay on the doorsill, not leaning, but testing, feeling, touching, tremulous, undecided. But his eyes came full into the light of African noon.
"Yes."
"Yes?" I said.
"I think," he said, "I"ll grab a lift with you."
I waited one heartbeat, then reached over and opened the door.
Silently he got in the front seat and sat there and quietly shut the door without slamming it. He sat there, very old and very tired. I waited. "Start her up," he said.
I started the engine and gentled it.
"Turn her around," he said.
I turned the car so it was going back on the road.
"Is this really," he said, "that kind of car?"
"Really, that kind of car."
He looked out at the land and the mountains and the distant house.
I waited, idling the motor.
"When we get there," he said, "will you remember something . . .?"
"I"ll try."
"There"s a mountain," he said, and stopped and sat there, his mouth quiet, and he didn"t go on.
But I went on for him. There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carca.s.s of a leopard. No one has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that alt.i.tude.
We will put you up on that same slope, I thought, on Kilimanjaro, near the leopard, and write your name and under it say n.o.body knew what he was doing here so high, but here he is. And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer gra.s.s and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.
The old man shaded his eyes, looking at the road winding away over the hills. He nodded.
"Let"s go," he said.
"Yes, Papa," I said.
And we motored away, myself at the wheel, going slow, and the old man beside me, and as we went down the first hill and topped the next, the sun came out full and the wind smelled of fire. We ran like a lion in the long gra.s.s. Rivers and streams flashed by. I wished we might stop for one hour and wade and fish and lie by the stream frying the fish and talking or not talking. But if we stopped we might never go on again. I gunned the engine. It made a great fierce wondrous animal"s roar. The old man grinned.
"It"s going to be a great day!" he shouted.
"A great day."
Back on the road, I thought, How must it be now, and now, us disappearing? And now, us gone? And now, the road empty. Sun Valley quiet in the sun. What must it be, having us gone?
I had the car up to ninety.
We both yelled like boys.
After that I didn"t know anything.
"By G.o.d," said the old man, toward the end. "You know? I think we"re . . .flying?"
THE MAN IN THE RORSCHACH SHIRT.
BROKAW.
What a name!
Listen to it bark, growl, yip, hear the bold proclamation of: Immanuel Brokaw!
A fine name for the greatest psychiatrist who ever tread the waters of existence without capsizing.
Toss a pepper-ground Freud casebook in the air and all students sneezed: Brokaw!
What ever happened to him?
One day, like a high-cla.s.s vaudeville act, he vanished.
With the spotlight out, his miracles seemed in danger of reversal. Psychotic rabbits threatened to leap back into hats. Smokes were sucked back into loud-powder gun muzzles. We all waited.
Silence for ten years. And more silence.
Brokaw was lost, as if he had thrown himself with shouts of laughter into mid-Atlantic. For what? To plumb for Moby-d.i.c.k? To psychoa.n.a.lyze that colorless fiend and see what he really had against Mad Ahab?
Who knows?
I last saw him running for a twilight plane, his wife and six Pomeranian dogs yapping far behind him on the dusky field.
"Good-bye forever!"
His happy cry seemed a joke. But I found men flaking his gold-leaf name from his office door next day, as his great fat-women couches were hustled out into the raw weather toward some Third Avenue auction.
So the giant who had been Gandhi-Moses-Christ-Buddha-Freud all layered in one incredible Armenian dessert had dropped through a hole in the clouds. To die? To live in secret?
Ten years later I rode on a California bus along the lovely sh.o.r.es of Newport.
The bus stopped. A man in his seventies bounced on, jingling silver into the coin box like manna. I glanced up from the rear of the bus and gasped.
"Brokaw! By the saints!"
And with or without sanctification, there he stood. Reared up like G.o.d manifest, bearded, benevolent, pontifical, erudite, merry, accepting, forgiving, messianic, tutorial, forever and eternal . . .
Immanuel Brokaw.
But not in a dark suit, no.
Instead, as if they were vestments of some proud new church, he wore: Bermuda shorts. Black leather Mexican sandals. A Los Angeles Dodgers" baseball cap. French sungla.s.ses. And . . .
The shirt! Ah G.o.d! The shirt!
A wild thing, all lush creeper and live flytrap undergrowth, all Pop-Op dilation and contraction, full flowered and crammed at every interstice and crosshatch with mythological beasts and symbols!
Open at the neck, this vast shirt hung wind-whipped like a thousand flags from a parade of united but neurotic nations.
But now, Dr. Brokaw tilted his baseball cap, lifted his French sungla.s.ses to survey the empty bus seats. Striding slowly down the aisle, he wheeled, he paused, he lingered, now here, now there. He whispered, he murmured, now to this man, this woman, that child.
I was about to cry out when I heard him say: "Well, what do you make of it?"