11
When Jason Taverner went to get his clothes he found Ruth Rae seated in the semi-darkness of the bedroom on the rumpled, still-warm bed, fully dressed and smoking her customary tobacco cigarette. Gray nocturnal light filtered in through the windows. The coal of the cigarette glowed its high, nervous temperature.
"Those things will kill you," he said. "There"s a reason why they"re rationed out one pack to a person a week."
"f.u.c.k off," Ruth Rae said, and smoked on.
"But you get them on the black market," he said. Once he had gone with her to buy a full carton. Even on his income the price had appalled him. But she had not seemed to mind. Obviously she expected it; she knew the cost of her habit.
"I get them." She stubbed out the far-too-long cigarette in a lung-shaped ceramic ashtray.
"You"re wasting it."
"Did you love Monica Buff?" Ruth asked.
"Sure."
"I don"t see how you could."
Jason said, "There are different kinds of love."
"Like Emily Fusselman"s rabbit." She glanced up at him. "A woman I knew, married, with three kids; she had two kittens and then she got one of those big gray Belgian rabbits that go lipperty lipperty lipperty on those huge hind legs. For the first month the rabbit was afraid to come out of his cage. It was a he, we think, as best we could tell. Then after a month he would come out of his cage and hop around the living room. After too months he learned to climb the stairs and scratch on Emily"s bedroom door to wake her up in the morning. He started playing with the cats, and there the trouble began because he wasn"t as smart as a cat."
"Rabbits have smaller brains," Jason said.
Ruth Rae said, "Hard by. Anyhow, he adored the cats and tried to do everything they did. He even learned to use the catbox most of the time. Using tufts of hair he pulled from his chest, he made a nest behind the couch and wanted the kittens to get into it. But they never would. The end of it all--nearly--came when he tried to play Gotcha with a German shepherd that some lady brought over. You see, the rabbit learned to play this game with the cats and with Emily Fusselman and the children where he"d hide behind the couch and then come running out, running very fast in circles, and everyone tried to catch him, but they usually couldn"t and then he"d run back to safety behind the couch, where no one was supposed to follow. But the dog didn"t know the rules of the game and when the rabbit ran back behind the couch the dog went after him and snapped its jaws around the rabbit"s rear end. Emily managed to pry the dog"s jaws open and she got the dog outside, but the rabbit was badly hurt. He recovered, but after that he was terrified of dogs and ran away if he saw one even through the window. And the part of him the dog bit, he kept that part hidden behind the drapes because he had no hair there and was ashamed. But what was so touching about him was his pushing against the limits of his--what would you say?--physiology? His limitations as a rabbit, trying to become a more evolved life form, like the cats. Wanting all the time to be with them and play with them as an equal. That"s all there is to it, really. The kittens wouldn"t stay in the nest he built for them, and the dog didn"t know the rules and got him. He lived several years. But who would have thought that a rabbit could develop such a complex personality? And when you were sitting on the couch and he wanted you to get off, so he could lie down, he"d nudge you and then if you didn"t move he"d bite you. But look at the aspirations of that rabbit and look at his failing. A little life trying. And all the time it was hopeless. But the ra6bit didn"t know that. Or maybe he did know and kept trying anyhow. But I think he didn"t understand. He just wanted to do it so badly. It was his whole life, because he loved the cats."
"I thought you didn"t like animals," Jason said.
"Not anymore. Not after so many defeats and wipeouts. Like the rabbit; he eventually, of course, died. Emily Fusselman cried for days. A week. I could see what it had done to her and I didn"t want to get involved."
"But stopping loving animals entirely so that you--"
"Their lives are so short. Just so f.u.c.king G.o.dd.a.m.n short. Okay, some people lose a creature they love and then go on and transfer that love to another one. But it hurts; it hurts."
"Then why is love so good?" He had brooded about that, in and out of his own relationships, all his long adult life. He brooded about it acutely now. Through what had recently happened to him, up to Emily Fusselman"s rabbit. This moment of painfulness. "You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and start packing their things and you say, "What"s happening?" and they say, "I got a better offer someplace else," and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you"re dead you"re carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over. Or you call them up on the phone one day and say, "This is Jason," and they say, "Who?" and then you know you"ve had it. They don"t know who the h.e.l.l you are. So I guess they never did know; you never had them in the first place."
Ruth said, "Love isn"t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That"s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"--she paused, reflecting--"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person."
"And that"s good?" It did not sound so good to him.
"It overcomes instinct. Instincts push us into fighting for survival. Like the pols ringing all the campuses. Survival of ourselves at the expense of others; each of us claws his way up. I can give you a good example. My twenty-first husband, Frank. We were married six months. During that time he stopped loving me and became horribly unhappy. I still loved him; I wanted to remain with him, but it was hurting him. So I let him go. You see? It was better for him, and because I loved him that"s what counted. See?"
Jason said, "But why is it good to go against the instinct for self-survival?"
"You don"t think I can say."
"No," he said.
"Because the instinct for survival loses in the end. With every living creature, mole, bat, human, frog. Even frogs who smoke cigars and play chess. You can never accomplish what your survival instinct sets out to do, so ultimately your striving ends in failure and you succ.u.mb to death, and that ends it. But if you love you can fade out and watch--"
"I"m not ready to fade out," Jason said.
"--you can fade out and watch with happiness, and with cool, mellow, alpha contentment, the highest form of contentment, the living on of one of those you love."
"But they die, too."
"True." Ruth Rae chewed on her lip.
"It"s better not to love so that never happens to you. Even a pet, a dog or a cat. As you pointed out--you love them and they perish. If the death of a rabbit is bad--" He had, then, a glimpse of horror: the crushed bones and hair of a girl, held and leaking blood, in the jaws of a dimly-seen enemy outlooming any dog.
"But you can grieve," Ruth said, anxiously studying his face. "Jason! Grief is the most powerful emotion a man or child or animal can feel. It"s a _good_ feeling."
"In what f.u.c.king way?" he said harshly.
"Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can"t feel grief unless you"ve had love before it--grief is the final outcome of love, because it"s love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don"t want to think about it. It"s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That"s what death is, the great loneliness. I remember once when I first smoked pot from a waterpipe rather than a joint. It, the smoke, was cool, and I didn"t realize how much I had inhaled. All of a sudden I died. For a little instant, but several seconds long. The world, every sensation, including even the awareness of my own body, of even having a body, faded out. And it didn"t like leave me in isolation in the usual sense because when you"re alone in the usual sense you still have sense data coming in even if it"s only from your own body. But even the darkness went away. Everything just ceased. Silence. Nothing. Alone."
"They must have soaked it in one of those toxic s.h.i.t things. That used to burn out so many people back then."
"Yes, I"m lucky I ever got my head back. A freak thing-- I had smoked pot a lot of times before and that never happened. That"s why I do tobacco, now, after that. Anyhow, it wasn"t like fainting; I didn"t feel I was going to fall, because I had nothing to fall with, no body. . . and there was no down to fall toward. Everything, including myself, just"-- she gestured--"expired. Like the last drop out of a bottle. And then, presently, they rolled the film again. The feature we call reality." She paused, puffing on her tobacco cigarette. "I never told anyone about it before."
"Were you frightened about it?"
She nodded. "Consciousness of unconsciousness, if you dig what I mean. When we do die we won"t feel it because that"s what dying is, the loss of all that. So, for example, I"m not at all scared of dying anymore, not after that pot bad trip. But to grieve; it"s to die and be alive at the same time. The most absolute, overpowering experience you can feel, therefore. Sometimes I swear we weren"t constructed to go through such a thing; it"s too much--your body d.a.m.n near self-destructs with all that heaving and surging. But I want to feel grief. To have tears."
"Why?" He couldn"t grasp it; to him it was something to be avoided. When you felt that you got the h.e.l.l out fast.
Ruth said, "Grief reunites you with what you"ve lost. It"s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that"s going away. In some fashion you split with yourself and accompany it, go part of the way with it on its journey. You follow it as far as you can go. I remember one time when I had this dog I loved. I was roughly seventeen or eighteen--just around the age of consent, that"s how I remember. The dog got sick and we took him to the vet"s. They said he had eaten rat poison and was nothing more than a sack of blood inside and the next twenty-four hours would determine if he"d survive. I went home and waited and then around eleven P.M. I crashed. The vet was going to phone me in the morning when he got there to tell me if Hank had lived through the night. I got up at eight-thirty and tried to get it all together in my head, waiting for the call. I went into the bathroom--I wanted to brush my teeth--and I saw Hank, at the bottom left part of the room; he was slowly in a very measured dignified fashion climbing invisible stairs. I watched him go upward diagonally as he trudged and then at the top right margin of the bathroom he disappeared, still climbing. He didn"t look back once. I knew he had died. And then the phone rang and the vet told me that Hank was dead. But I saw him going upward. And of course I felt terrible overwhelming grief, and as I did so, I lost myself and followed along with him, up the f.u.c.king stairs."
Both of them stayed silent for a time.
"But finally," Ruth said, clearing her throat, "the grief goes away and you phase back into this world. Without him."
"And you can accept that."
"What the h.e.l.l choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don"t ever completely come back from where you went with him--a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A nick out of it. A cut that never heals. And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can"t feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You"ll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you."
"There are no cuts in my heart," Jason said.
"If you split now," Ruth said huskily, but with composure unusual for her, "that"s the way it"ll be for me right then and there."
"I"ll stay until tomorrow," he said. It would take at least until then for the pol lab to discern the spuriousness of his ID cards.
Did Kathy save me? he wondered. Or destroy me? He really did not know. Kathy, he thought, who used me, who at nineteen knows more than you and I put together. More than we will find out in the totality of our lives, all the way to the graveyard.
Like a good encounter-group leader she had torn him down--for what? To rebuild him again, stronger than before? He doubted it. But it remained a possibility. It should not be forgotten. He felt toward Kathy a certain strange cynical trust, both absolute and unconvincing; one half of his brain saw her as reliable beyond the power of the telling of it, and the other half saw her as debased, for sale, and f.u.c.king up right and left. He could not put it together into one view. The two images of Kathy remained superimposed in his head.
Maybe I can resolve my parallel conceptions of Kathy before I leave here, he thought. Before morning. But maybe he could stay even one day after that . . . it would be stretching it, however. How good really are the police? he asked himself. They managed to get my name wrong; they pulled the wrong file on me. Isn"t it possible they"ll f.u.c.k up all down the line? Maybe. But maybe not.
He had mutually opposing conceptions of the police, too. And could not resolve those either. And so, like a rabbit, like Emily Fusselman"s rabbit, froze where he was. Hoping as he did so that everyone understood the rules: you do not destroy a creature that does not know what to do.
12
The four gray-wrapped pols cl.u.s.tered in the light of the candlelike outdoor fixture made of black iron and cone of perpetual fake flame flickering in the night dark.
"Just two left," the corporal said almost soundlessly; he let his fingers speak for him as he drew them across the rental lists. "A Mrs. Ruth Gomen in two eleven and an Allen Mufi in two twelve. Which"ll we hit first?"
"The Mufi man"s," one of the uniformed officers said; he smacked his plastic and shot nightstick against his fingers, eager in the dim light to finish it up, now that the end had at last come into sight.
"Two twelve it is," the corporal said, and reached to stroke the door chimes. But then it occurred to him to try the doork.n.o.b.
Good. One chance out of several, a minor possibility but suddenly, usefully true. The door was unlocked. He signaled silence, grinned briefly, then pushed the door open.
They saw into a dark living room with empty and nearly empty drink gla.s.ses placed here and there, some on the floor. And a great variety of ashtrays overfilled with crushed cigarette packages and ground-out b.u.t.ts.
A cigarette party, the corporal decided. Broken up, now. Everyone went home. With the exception perhaps of Mr. Mufi.
He entered, shone his light here and there, shone it at last toward the far door leading deeper into the over-priced apartment. No sound. No motion. Except the dim, distant, muted chatter of a radio talk show at minimal volume.
He trod across the wall-to-wall carpet, which depicted in gold Richard M. Nixon"s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below. At the far door he trod on G.o.d, who was smiling a lot as He received his Second Only Begotten Son back into His bosom, and pushed open the bedroom door.
In the big double bed, pulpy-soft, a man asleep, shoulders and arms bare. His clothes heaped on a handy chair. Mr. Allen Mufi, of course. Safe and home in his own private double bed. But--Mr. Mufi was not alone in his very own private bed. Involved with the pastel sheets and blankets a second indistinct shape lay curled up, asleep. Mrs. Mufi, the corporal thought, and shone his light toward her, with mannish curiosity.
All at once Allen Mufi--a.s.suming it was he--stirred. He opened his eyes. And instantly sat bolt upright, staring fixedly at the pols. At the light of the flashlight.
"What?" he said, and he rasped with fear, a deep, convulsive release of shaking breath. "No," Mufi said, and then s.n.a.t.c.hed for some object on the table beside his bed; he dove into the darkness, white and hairy and naked, for something invisible but precious to him. Desperately. He sat back up then, panting, clutching it. A pair of scissors.
"What"s that for?" the corporal asked, shining the light into the metal of the scissors.
"I"ll kill myself," Mufi said. "If you don"t go away and-- leave us alone." He stuck the closed blades of the scissors against his hair-darkened chest, near his heart.
"Then it isn"t Mrs. Mufi," the corporal said. He returned the circle of light to the other, huddled up, sheet-covered shape. "A wham-bam-thank-you-ma"am one-time g.a.n.g.b.a.n.g? Turning your foxy apartment into a motel room?" The corporal walked to the bed, took hold of the top sheet and blankets, then yanked them back.
In the bed beside Mr. Mufi lay a boy, slender, young, naked, with long golden hair.
"I"ll be darned," the corporal said.
One of his men said, "I"ve got the scissors." He tossed them onto the floor by the corporal"s right foot.
To Mr. Mufi, who sat trembling and panting, his eyes startled with terror, the corporal said, "How old is this boy?"
The boy had awakened now; he gazed fixedly up but did not stir. No expression appeared on his soft, vaguely formed face.
"Thirteen," Mr. Mufi said croakingly, almost pleadingly. "Legal age of consent."
To the boy the corporal said, "Can you prove it?" He felt intense revulsion now. Acute physical revulsion, making him want to barf. The bed was stained and damp with half-dried sweat and genital secretions.
"ID," Mufi panted. "In his wallet. In his pants on the chair."
One of the team of pols said to the corporal, "You mean if this juve"s thirteen there"s no crime involved?"
"h.e.l.l," another pol said indignantly. "It"s obviously a crime, a perverted crime. Let"s run them both in."
"Wait a minute. Okay?" The corporal found the boy"s pants, rummaged, found the wallet, got it out, inspected the identification. Sure enough. Thirteen years old. He shut the wallet and put it back in the pocket. "No," he said, still half enjoying the situation, amused by Mufi"s naked shame but becoming each moment more and more revolted by the man"s cowardly horror at being disclosed. "The new revision of the Penal Code, 640.3, has it that twelve is the age of consent for a minor to engage in a s.e.xual act either with another child of either s.e.x or an adult also of either s.e.x but with only one at a time."
"But it"s G.o.dd.a.m.n sick," one of his pols protested.
"That"s your opinion," Mufi said, more bravely now.
"Why isn"t it a bust, a h.e.l.l of a big bust?" the pols standing beside him persisted.
"They"re systematically taking all victimless crimes off the books," the corporal said. "That"s been the process for ten years."
"_This?_ _This_ is victimless?"
To Mufi, the corporal said, "What do you find about young boys that you like? Let me in on it; I"ve always wondered about scans like you."
""Scans," "Mufi echoed, his mouth twisting with discomfort. "So that"s what I am."
"It"s a category," the corporal said. "Those who prey on minors for h.o.m.os.e.xual purposes. Legal but still abhorred. What do you do during the day?"
"I"m a used-quibble salesman."
"And if they, your employers, knew you were a scan they wouldn"t want you handling their quibbles. Not after what those hairy white hands have been handling outside the workday. Right, Mr. Mufi? Even a used-quibble salesman can"t get away morally with being a scan. Even if it"s no longer on the books."
Mufi said, "It was my mother"s fault. She dominated my father, who was a weak man."
"How many little boys have you induced to go down on you during the last twelve months?" the corporal inquired. "I"m serious. Are these all one-night stands, is that it?"
"I love Ben," Mufi said, staring fixedly ahead, his mouth barely moving. "Later on, when I"m better off financially and can provide, I intend to marry him."