Compleat collected sff w.., p.410
COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 410
Never mind. Don't think about Miranda.
But, going back to civilization, here in the clean-smelling, gently humming plane, in the flowered plush seats, is it possible not to think of Miranda? God knows I didn't think enough about her when she was alive. Maybe she still would be if I'd listened when she wanted to talk to me. If I'd thought more of her as a woman and less as a beautiful puppet to act as I wanted her to on stage.
Don't think about Miranda.
My image in the window beside me caught my eye. I seemed to be flying along out there effortlessly, keeping pace with the plane, transparent though I was with the stars shining through me. I looked at myself out there and tried to think of anything but Miranda. It wasn't any good. The thought of that last day was moving up on me inexorably, smooth and relentless, and how could I stop it? Once it starts, there's nothing you can do.
It's funny how quick a memory can be. I couldn't get the bottle to my mouth fast enough to keep that last day, that last night from flashing back through my mind, completed from start to finish, the end simultaneous with the beginning and everything in between as clear and perfect as if I'd just finished living them, every detail there.
Life and the drowning man. That's what they mean. The whole picture can flash by that fast. While the whiskey ran down my throat it went by again, retracing the well-worn groove of memory I had spent three years trying to wipe out.
Scene, backstage at the Andrew Raleigh Theater, New York's best and newest. Characters, the cast and crews that were staging Beautiful Dreamer for a rerun, starring, of course, Howard and Miranda Rohan. Lead character, Rohan himself, husband, director, and co-star of the beautiful dreamer. Curtain rises on Rohan projecting frenzy better than Stanislavsky could have done it. Louder, anyhow.
Absent from stage, Miranda. Desperate search going on. Her understudy rehearsing hopefully while the search grows more and more desperate. No luck. Miranda missing from morning appointments, missing from her matinee, missing from rehearsal, missing from the night's performance. Rohan going on with half a dozen drinks in him, too frantic to feel them. Rohan snatching drinks every time he steps off stage. Rohan, sober as a judge from start to finish.
Finish—phone call just after the second-act curtain. The police have found—them. Them? Them? There must be some mistake. Who could Miranda be with that she'd miss two performances in a row without a word to me? I forgot about the play. I walked out on the last act. That's me, never-do-anything-by-halves Rohan. Drive yourself and your cast crazy working for impossible perfection, sure, but drop it flat and leave the audience buzzing and be all husband, desperate and bewildered, when word like this comes in. I guess I never was as good as I'd thought as actor, director, or husband if I could turn in a performance like that.
Actually I really did forget about the last act. Our two understudies struggled through it in front of a house frill of whispers and rumors while Rohan in a police car, with the siren making the kind of noise he felt like making, headed for the Saw Mill River Parkway and the wreck that had killed both of them. Miranda and her lover. The man I had never heard of.
Sometimes, now, I wonder if I'd ever really seen or heard of Miranda. The real one. If this could happen without my guessing, had I ever known her as she was? Thinking back over and over and over, I could remember times when she was moody and withdrawn, times when it seemed to me she was about to say something she never quite got out. Because I was busy and preoccupied. Because there was never a time for relaxation between jobs and the job at hand filled my whole mind. I can remember now the many times she almost told me—something. But she put it off too long.
The photographers hadn't got there yet when the police car and I arrived. I saw her as they found her. She was lying half out of the smashed car, and except for the back of her head there was hardly a mark on her. She had nothing at all on except a Japanese kimono I had never seen before in my life. Why she had gone out that way, what unknown apartment they had left, where they were going, I never knew.
She looked beautiful. She always did look beautiful. Even when there was nothing remaining any more to control her body and arrange her gestures, she lay against the hillside in her flowery kimono as if a portrait painter had arranged her to show her beauty best. The kimono covered her very decently, considering. You had the feeling that Miranda's ghost must have paused, looked back, and stooped to twitch the brightly colored silk into place, wanting her to look her best even now.
Did they ever find out who the man was? I think so. I'm not sure. It didn't matter. Just a man of no special importance in the world to anyone except—perhaps—Miranda. I don't remember how he looked at all.
What I remember is standing there wondering just when Miranda had made the decision that had led to this moment. It might have been any of the times when she had been on the verge of saying—something—to me and I hadn't waited to listen.
What I remember is the feeling that I might have saved her—could have saved her—and I had not saved her. There would never be another chance. The curtain went down then.
The curtain never rose again.
You see how fast it goes through the mind? You can remember in no time at all. From the moment the rot-gut hit my throat to the time it began spreading around the walls of my stomach I lived the twelve tours over.
I drank the rest of my pint in a couple of gulps. There wasn't much, but enough. The Rohan who had stood on the grassy bank above Miranda and the Rohan who floated easily along outside the plane window and the Rohan inside on the deep plush seat all got blurry together. They all passed out at the same moment.
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CHAPTER III
I WOKE UP IN bed.
I was sober and it felt terrible. Everything around me had clarity too explicit to endure without my buzzing walls to filter out reality. The room was an average bedroom, a little on the luxury side. I sat up and began to shake all over. My head felt groggy and there was a sore spot at the inside of the elbow where the vein comes to the surface. Some kind of injection? I couldn't remember a thing, but a dream I'd just been having stirring uneasily around in the back rooms of my mind, insisting it was important. I tried to remember.
It seems the whole population of the United States had shaken me by my shoulder and said they were in grave danger. No, it was President Raleigh, and he told me he'd never meant things to come to this, and after he died there'd be some changes made. No, after all, it was just a man in a red uniform who said his name was Comus. He was just about to kill himself and he wanted me to help. He planned to use a—what was it?
An antic.
That much I remembered clearly. He also told me. I was on my way to California, where I must be sure to look up a Mr. Heiress. I was to give his love to somebody whose name I didn't catch at all. And he also advised me to collect swans. Even in a dream I rejected this kind of logic. I told him to go away.
But he was persistent. He told me a long, complicated tale in a hoarse whisper that tickled my ear, all about what an important man I'd once been and the big things the future might still hold in store if only I——But here a touch of irrational nightmare came in. Whatever it was he wanted me to do scared me. The whole country seemed to go unstable when I thought about it. He said I didn't need to think about it, but he had to have help in killing himself on account of the antic. And don't forget the swans.
I said I had nothing against the Secretary of Communications personally—and how he came into the conversation isn't clear—and the man in the red coat kept whispering about you know what. Only I didn't, and this was the part that scared me. He said I didn't need to think about it now, because I'd remember when the time came—but he had to tell me while he could.
That part was pure nightmare. I wanted to yell at him that he was only a dream and to shut up and get out, but I was too groggy and he kept right on. When I put my hands over my ears he began to talk in letters of fire that hung in the air over his head. Luckily I couldn't read. "And be sure you ask for the swans," he said intensely, and vanished into thin air at the sound of approaching footsteps, leaving the letters of fire behind him. Just in time I reached out and pushed them into a bottomless pit which had been there all the time. They dropped, circling, getting clearer the farther they fell until I could almost read them. But not quite, thank God.
Just before they got too clear to escape, I woke up.
I was sitting there trying to make sense out of all this when a door opened and a man in a white coat came in. I looked up sharply, thinking for one irrational moment it would be a man I knew. The man who had sent for me. Ted Nye. I knew it had to be Ted. Nobody else had quite such connections as this, though the Howard Rohan of three years ago had known a lot of important people. None of whom would remember me now.
It had to be Ted Nye. Which was why the Secretary of Communications played a bit part in my dream. That cleared that much of it up, anyhow. Ted and I started out together a long time ago. I rose high. Ted topped me by a long shot and he was still up there, in the Communications chair in Raleigh's cabinet, and slated to go even higher, for all I knew, when the old man died.
Much too important to be coming into my bedroom in a white coat, of course. The man in the doorway was a stranger. And a doctor, if the white coat meant anything. He took my wrist in a professional grip and looked searching at me. "Feeling all right?"
"I feel terrible. What I need is a drink."
"You'll do," he said. "For now, anyhow. Get dressed."
"What about that drink?"
He just shrugged and walked out, shutting the door. So I got up, shuddering a little. There were ants crawling around just under my skin. I went to the window and looked out. New York Area, Manhattan. Very familiar. By stretching my neck slightly I could probably see the roof of the Raleigh Theater, scene of my rise and fall. I didn't try.
My clothes, neatly laundered, hung ready. In the bathroom was everything I needed to get myself clean and shaved. I settled for brushing my teeth. I felt grimy, but I wasn't going to make concessions to anybody. Whoever had sent for me was going to get me just as I stood.
A guard in a red Comus uniform stood outside my door. Oddly enough, it all tallied with the dream. This was the door the population of the country had come in by. Here on the threshold the bottomless pit had opened. I looked down to see if the letters of fire had left any marks on the floor.
"Good morning, Mr. Rohan," the guard said.
"I need a drink," I told him. "See?" And I held out my hands to show him my shakes.
"Will you come with me, please?" he said politely. "Uh—would you like to clean up a little first?"
"No," I said.
"This way, please," he told me, shrugging.
Five minutes and three floors later he paused in front of a door, spoke briefly into his lapel mike, and then said, "In here, Mr. Rohan." I went in.
It hadn't changed much, Ted Nye's office. At first glance you think you've walked into a picture gallery, and then you see all the pictures are live action. Ted's desk is in the middle with all the banks of buttons on it that connect him with their nerve endings of the nation. There's a small bar against one wall, a lot of deep chairs around, a glass tank full of tropical fish, and hanging from the ceiling a round brass cage with a round pale yellow canary inside.
A small man stood at the bar with his back to me. He wore knee-length shorts and a striped shirt. He was clinking glasses. Above him in heavy, ornate gold frames the United States unrolled itself across the walls. Clouds floated lazily in one frame over blue mountains marbled with snow. Next to that San Francisco stood dazzling against her green bay, tiny boats moving slowly over the water. Next to that a doll-sized tractor dragged a broad swath of harrows across a stretch of farmland, scoring the brown earth into patterns. And all of it merely the outward and visible background for the inward, invisible webs of Comus, drawn taut and singing with tension as Prowlers policed the roads of the nation, sifting the population man by man through psycho-polling research. They kept the electronic computers humming day and night, straight around the clock. I could imagine I felt them now, vibrating under my feet, for here was the heart of the Comus administration. And here before me in a striped shirt was the man who controlled Comus.
I was surprised at the sudden surge of bitter resentment that rose in me at the sight of him. We started out level. Look at us now. A wave of the intolerable itching which all Croppers are heir to swept over me and for an instant I could smell the sweat and disinfectant that halo all Croppers like a cloud. I probably carried it with me now, but mostly I was too used to it to notice. Resentment said, "What right has Ted Nye to stand here clean and happy and powerful, while I——" But reason broke in, "You asked for it, Rohan. Calm down."
Without turning, Ted Nye said, "Come on in, Howard."
I walked fast across the flowered carpet and reached past his hands at the bar. I grabbed the first bottle within striking distance and tipped it up to my mouth, hearing the gurgle, feeling the bottle jump in my hands a little as the whiskey poured down my throat. It was strange to taste good scotch again. Ted pulled the bottle away after a moment.
"That's enough for now, Howard." He looked up at me searchingly. 'It's been a long time," he said.
I tried to return his gaze objectively. He was clean, all right, but this little dark wizened face had heavy shadows under the eyes and something was badly wrong somewhere in back of his face. Trouble. Ted Nye had his problems too.
I said coldly, "I don't know you."
His deep-set eyes darted anxiously at mine, the focus shifting rapidly from left eye to right in a ridiculous little dance. I felt better after the whiskey. I felt better than he looked.
"Having trouble with your memory?" he asked.
"No trouble. I like it this way." Again the itching swept me, more a ghostly itch than a real one since my clothes at least were clean now. I held every muscle tense until it passed.
Still looking closely at me, Nye walked over to his desk and punched one of the shiny-faceted buttons under the little intercom screen. A greenish office with a greenish-tinged girl about two inches high came into focus in the greenish glass of the intercom. It occurred to me very briefly that every living thing here was scaled down to smallness to match Nye's.
"Give me the file on Howard Rohan, Trudy," he said to the minuscule girl. A musical humming and then a faint pop sounded, and from a slot on the desk a red folder came out like a tongue from a thin mouth. The canary moved uneasily on his perch, looking sidewise at the source of the musical sound. He tried a tentative chirp and then gave up and settled down into himself, closing his eyes.
Nye flipped the folder open, handed me the single sheet lying on top of the stack inside. I took it without much interest, glancing down casually. Then I shook my head to make my eyes come into focus, and my hand shook too. I couldn't quite believe what I saw, but there it was—the staggering "Howard Rohan" scrawled on a dotted line, and the ironclad Cropper contract above it, the contract that said five years and meant the rest of my life.
Ted Nye twitched it neatly out of my hand as I stood there gaping. I made a futile grab. "Not so fast," he said. "I've got a job for you. Howard. Do it and you can have this back."
I said warily, "What kind of a job?"
Watching me, he said, "Theater. We're setting up something new. Maybe a little bit dangerous. I need you, Howard."
For a moment a shock of excitement flickered like lightning through my mind. I was back very briefly in the old, bright, shining days when Miranda was alive and Rohan was himself and all the lights were dazzling. But then I remembered. Rohan was washed up a long time ago. I thought of all the times since Miranda died when I'd blown up in my lines and had the curtain rung down on me. I remembered the times I'd gone on stage too drunk to be sure what play I was in. I thought of all the friends who'd lent me money until I couldn't seem to find them any more.
I glanced around the office. "How do I get out of here?"
"Don't act like this, Howard," Nye said.
"It's not acting."
"You still hold a grudge, don't you? I did everything I could for you when you cracked up, Howard. You must know that. At the end it wasn't I who revoked your license. It was Comus. Maybe you think I control Comus. I don't."
I felt like laughing. Ten years Secretary of Communications, and he didn't control Comus? But all I said was, "I'm not holding any grudges. I get along fine."
"The hell you do."
"Do I make trouble? Have I pulled any reports?"
He rubbed his face nervously. "Howard—we used to be friends. I'd like to help you if I can. And you could help me."
