Barbary Shore (22 page)

“Nothing at all.”

“One must always be prepared for delays I suppose.” He made a passing remark. “Can we think of this fellow as your brother?” In the course of saying this, he kept looking at his cigarette upon which a half-inch of ash had accumulated, and seeing no ashtray on the desk held it over the floor. “Do you mind if I drop it here?” he asked immediately after his first question.

McLeod answered the second. “I’ll get a plate for you.” He rummaged through the closet and came up with a single dish which he set upon the desk. “I’d appreciate it, Miss Madison,” he said quietly, “if you would use it as well. You may enjoy dirtying the floor, but you’ll have to curb the pleasure.”

Lannie’s hand trembled, her eyes seemed enormous. She was about to speak, and then restrained herself.

Hollingsworth cleared his throat. “I must ask you again to request Mr. Lovett to leave the room.”

McLeod looked at me and I shook my head. “Afraid not,” McLeod said.

Holding the pencil between his finger tips as though he were demonstrating the size of a fish, Hollingsworth waved both
hands slowly up and down in unconscious adjuration. “It would decidedly be for the better for all concerned.” His flat blue eyes stared past me lifelessly. “I shall have to make a report about this. Mr. Lovett will be in the position of a gentleman possessing State Information.”

“You’ve always got the option,” McLeod said slowly, “of taking me in and barring the cell. Why is it that you don’t?”

Hollingsworth made no answer.

“It occurs to me that you’re making no report about this little interview.”

“The department allows a wide latitude in interrogative techniques,” Hollingsworth said coldly.

“Not that wide. To skip the paper work? To have no record of what we say? Man, you’ve already committed the first heresy.”

“Much as a fellow might appreciate the benefits of your experience, I have to ask you to allow me my own methods.”

“I don’t think you understand yourself what’s in your head. If I were your superior, and knew you made no record, I’d set a man to watch you, and a man for him as well.”

Hollingsworth’s cheeks had reddened. He looked like a little boy being reprimanded. “I think the best thing is to proceed,” he said quietly.

“Oh, of course. To the workbench by all means.” To my surprise McLeod seemed furious. “For the record I protest this approach.”

Hollingsworth blinked his eyes slowly, pleased apparently by McLeod’s anger. “Would you care,” he said very softly, “to relate any special occurrences which took place while you worked as a statistician in the aforesaid and unnamed bureau of the government?”

“Nothing took place.”

Hollingsworth clicked his tongue. “I hate to be unpleasant, but this is an outright lie as we all know. It can only lead to a fellow making certain assumptions.”

A pause. “All right, it was a lie,” McLeod said. “Something did happen, but I know little about it.”

“If you would tell a fellow what you do know,” Hollingsworth requested courteously.

McLeod lit a cigarette and watched the flame on the match as it crept toward his fingers. When it seemed about to burn him, he blew it out and watched the smoke drift upward from the molten head, a dreamy smile upon his mouth. At last he seemed to collect himself. “I have your permission to be long-winded?” he asked Hollingsworth.

“I would like the story to be complete without being extended beyond the bounds of a fellow’s patience, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“There’s a lot for you to learn in it,” McLeod observed. “If you guard a machine ye’re obliged to suffer its anxiety.” He drew smoke from his cigarette, and began to talk. As though compelled to organize even those materials most alien to him, he delivered a long speech or more precisely a lecture, hurrying himself just perceptibly if he thought Hollingsworth about to ask a question, dallying over details when he sensed that he had our attention. The discourse was for Hollingsworth, but it was for myself as well, and there were moments when he was talking directly to Lannie.

“You may put it,” McLeod began, “that I worked in one of the endless ramifications of the embryonic State Capitalism, a big place with thousands of people and thousands of desks, and this but the local branch, mind you.”

He went on to describe with relish how the various parts of the organism fitted together, the circuits of the memos in their pneumatic carriers, the hierarchy of the telephones, the schedule of the elevators, the honor-guard of the secretaries, and the stenographers arranged by hundreds on the floor, geared to the communications which moved with their own laws and their own inertia from office to office, and occasionally embarked on a journey
between the outside world and the inner structure. “In all this, you might say I was only a blood cell in a minor organ.”

Then, after years of regular and orderly process, something happened. “I don’t know, I can’t tell you what it was,” McLeod said, “an object of some sort or other, not too large I imagine, but it was gone, and no one knew how.”

The organism reeled from the shock and trembled to its extremities. “You cannot appreciate it unless you were there, unless you’d donated your time to the tune of a thousand days, and each morning you’d passed the guards and gone to your own proper elevator, got off at your own floor and sat before your desk which rested there waiting for you all through the night. The displacement of that little object displaced a great deal else. Cysts broke, pus spread, the blood became infected and carried the fever with it. You should have seen the giant stagger. There were guards collected at every joint and operations galore. The stripping of elevators and the examination of cables, the counting of pneumatic carriers, the tapping of the telephones, the questioning of ignorant stenographers.” McLeod held out his hands to encompass the enormity of the operation. “You must understand,” he said, “that this was subtle as well. It didn’t happen all at once, and at no time did the works shut down. The memos still went back and forth, the desks were filled, the guards would nod at you in the morning, and the stenographers like the little geese they are would take off in a flock for the john at the stroke of ten.”

He extended his fingers before him and slowly made a fist. “But don’t let me deceive you. The organism was not the same.” He might have been glancing at Lannie from the corner of his eye. “In the beginning the fluids pass through a madman’s veins in ways indistinguishable from our own, and his body divides the food he receives into the same chemical proportions we fashion for ourselves. Only no one would mistake him for us. His mind is antithetical, and in time it exercises its influence
upon his body until even the organs are different, and a muscle common as the sphincter is attuned to distant stimuli so that he shits to the moaning of the wind and blows his nose into his soup.”

Grimacing, he sat back and folded his arms to indicate that he was finished.

Hollingsworth looked annoyed. “Is that all?” he asked.

“Not all exactly. I can’t tell you the rest. I decided my past was a poor companion, so I took off, and what’s happened since is a mystery to me.”

“It was at this time you married?”

“Shortly after I left the job, yes.”

Hollingsworth had taken out his pipe and was in the process of dismantling it. “Now,” he said casually, “when did your organization tell you to take the . .”

“The little object?”

Hollingsworth nodded.

“They did not tell me to take it because I had left them.”

Hollingsworth gave vent to a prodigious yawn. When his mouth was finally closed, he picked up the pipestem and began to blow through it. He looked bored. “One doesn’t just say goodbye to an organization of that variety,” he suggested.

“You know perfectly well,” McLeod said, “the conditions under which I left.”

“Why did you take the little object?”

“I didn’t take it.”

“Once again. Why did you take the little object?”

“I didn’t take it. I don’t even know what it is. Do you?”

Hollingsworth revealed his teeth long enough to bite on the pipestem.

“Let’s take a recess,” he said, and leaned back in his seat.

W
E
all sat staring foolishly at one another. McLeod got out of his chair, stepped carefully over Lannie’s legs, and sat down beside me on the bed. The hair at his temple was moist, and in a reaction he was incapable of controlling, his spectacles had fogged and he was obliged to remove them and wipe the lens.

Hollingsworth yawned again. “I wonder if it would be permissible to excuse myself for several minutes?” he inquired, and when there was no answer, he stood up, buttoned his jacket, nodded formally to each of us and stepped out of the room.

Lannie and McLeod were absorbed in regarding their legs. McLeod looked up. “Now that your boy friend is listening outside,” he murmured, “I suppose it’s time for you to begin.”

Lannie trembled. With a nonchalance she bore poorly, she turned slowly to survey the cold lines of the room. And when she spoke it was with an utter disregard of sequence so that one might have thought she had not been present during the last half-hour. “Your wife told me this room was open,” she said to McLeod, her eyes raising at last to gaze into his, “and that I could have it for a song, and I told her my pocketbook sings a dreary dirge.”

Even this effort apparently exhausting, her voice dropped.
“You see this place is so much cheaper than my own, and if I move over, your wife promised me out of her graciousness that I would be refunded on a pro-rata basis which comes to so many dollars, and I have need of money now.” Her eyes crossed his and darted away again.

“But I cannot bear this room,” she said abruptly. “It is dreary, and there is the smell of dry dry rot. No one has ever lived here and no bird sings.”

McLeod had been examining her with a blank stare, his mouth sucking with contempt at the imaginary lemon-drop. “No bird sings,” he muttered to himself, and laughed with caustic glee. Deliberately, he lay down on the mattress, his body behind me, crooked his arms in back of his head, and lay there, inert, the articulation of his limbs a foil to anything Lannie might say.

Apparently she could not bear to remain seated a moment longer. I watched her pace the length of the room, stand facing the door for almost a minute, and then return to the window. “Oh, there was a period long enough when I wanted to meet you,” she said over her shoulder so that at first I thought she was talking to me, “all the time the girl with the eyeglasses was in the corner taking notes for the green filing cabinet, and laying hands upon me were all the others in their white uniforms. They are the rulers of the earth, and I wondered at the face of their chief, but I should have known it would be like yours with the eye socket and the jaw socket sucking at the bone, for you are the undertaker of the revolution, and now it is too late, and all the slugs wallow in the bar, and men live by the clock and give a three times three hurrah as they bind the chains about them. There are only people left, people here and there.”

McLeod was very pale. With an effort he sneered, “A true revolutionary.”

“Yes,” she breathed. “People here and there with a look in their faces, and those I would revolutionize so they can live. But there is too much grass and it’s all withered and I have only a
teaspoon of water.” By an effort she choked off what she was saying, and returned to the cot, staring down upon McLeod. “They told me that I would find you at last, his Mr. Wilson and his Mr. Court, and they were kind and took me aside and told me all, and I begged to be the one to see your face.

“And, now seeing, I know … I know,” she cried, “that I could sit by and watch cutthroats club you to the grave, and I would shout them on, for I know that you are wholly irredeemable. I was afraid. I thought that I might have pity, that most crippling of the sentiments, or that looking into your face, I would say, he has suffered, or—and this is what tormented me most—that in helping them, what did I help? But you have buried the revolution, and it is fitting that they who exist because of you, they who rise to eminence here because you destroyed the revolution there, should have the right to flay your bones. And I shall cheer them on.”

McLeod began to titter. He held a fist to his chin and rocked back and forth through a small arc. “I saw it, I saw it,” he muttered. “I saw you from the beginning, m’girl.” Deep within his body, violence may have been stirring, but the summons too terrifying to measure, he merely shook his head.

“So long as he lived,” she whispered, “then everything didn’t belong to the man with the pipe, and Soso hated the idea of that, and he sent his messenger and I was the one who introduced them, and after that I had to give myself to the people with the white uniforms and now without me they cannot exist for if I’m not there to torture they must be at each other’s throat. They’re all that’s left and so I must love them, for if I cannot be in love …” She held her finger to her mouth.

“He was the man I loved, the only man I ever truly loved with heart and not with body, the man with the beard because he was a fool—a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax,
and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.” By now her face only a short distance above his, she seemed to press each word upon his supine figure, McLeod the effigy to her incantation. “Have you,” she asked, “have you ever opened the door to the assassin outside?”

“Leave off!” McLeod shouted. But the effort emptied him for he lay back again, a tight smile imprinted on his face, his narrow body held with rigidity.

The door opened and Hollingsworth walked in. “The recess is over,” he announced.

Lannie seemed not to have heard him. She almost fell upon McLeod. “Assassin,” she whispered.

“Take her away,” McLeod said.

“Assassin!”

Hollingsworth shouldered Lannie aside. “The recess is over,” he repeated, and stood looking judiciously at McLeod as though to assay whether the explosion were a success and foundations had shifted.