Read Echo Round His Bones Online
Authors: Thomas Disch
Echo Round His Bones (8 page)
Hansard looked away from his ex-wife's romance with the same embarrassment
he would have felt had he walked in upon her in the performance of a
shameful act. He made up his mind to leave the apartment.
Then his son came into the room.
It must have been to let him in that Marion had risen from the couch.
His hair was darker than Hansard remembered, and he had lost another milk
tooth. Also, he was dressed more poorly than when he went for a week-end
expedition with his father.
The man in the black hair-bubble spoke to Nathan Junior in an equable
manner, and Hansard was more than ever assured that he enjoyed resident
status in his ex-wife's apartment. Marion returned from the kitchen and
also addressed her son, whose cheeks were beginning to color. He seemed
to be protesting what his mother had just told him or commanded him to do.
More than ever Hansard was distressed by the vast silence of his present
world. It may be amusing for a few moments to watch television with
the sound cut off, but it is quite another thing when you see the words
spilling soundlessly from your own son's lips.
The man in the black hair-bubble concluded what must have been an argument
by pushing Nathan Junior gently but firmly into the outer hall and locking
the door behind him. Hansard followed his son into the elevator. He knew
from experience that no elevator in S-S Manors could move quickly enough
to be any danger to him.
S-S Manors had been so designed that children played on the high rooftops
instead of cluttering up the sidewalks and streets below. The architects
had designed the lofty playgrounds with considerable imagination and poor
materials, and now the labyrinth, the honeycomb of playhouses, and the
elaborate jungle-gym were all in the first stages of disintegration.
Originally a cyclone fence had screened the entire play area, but there
were only a few shreds and tatters left. Even the guardrails were broken
through in places.
As soon as Nathan Junior came out of the elevator he was herded into the
labyrinth by an older boy. Hansard followed him inside. The twisting
concrete corridors were jammed with children, all as small or smaller
than his son. Any kind of games were out of the question here. The rest
of the playground was monopolized by the older boys for their own games.
Nathan Junior fought his way to a group of his own friends. They stood
together whispering, then the seven of them ran peil-mell out of the
labyrinth toward that corner of the roof where a game of isometric
baseball was in progress. The leader of the escapees (not Nathan Junior)
caught the ball and ran with it back to the labyrinth. Nathan Junior,
not being a very good runner, lagged behind and was caught by one of
the older boys.
This boy -- he was about fourteen -- took hold of Nathan Junior by
the ankles, turned him upside down, and carried him to the edge of the
roof where the fencing had been caved through. He held the smaller boy,
twisting and screaming (though for Hansard it happened in dumb-show),
out over the abyss. It was a sheer drop of thirty-five stories to the
street. He let go of one ankle. Hansard had to turn away. He told himself
that what he was seeing was a common occurrence, that it had probably
happened to every one of the children up here at one time or another,
that his son was in no real danger. It helped not at all.
At last the torture was brought to an end, and Nathan Junior was allowed
to return to the little prison that the architects had unwittingly provided.
I'll leave now, Hansard told himself. I should never have come here. But he
was no more able to follow his own good advice than he had been to help
his son. He followed him into the labyrinth once more.
Nathan Junior pushed his way through to where his friends were, and
immediately he struck up an argument with a slightly younger and smaller
boy. The victim became the aggressor. A fight started, and it was clear
that the smaller boy stood no chance against Nathan Junior, who was soon
sitting on his chest and pounding his head against the concrete surface
of the roof.
"Stop it!" Hansard yelled at his son. "For God's sake, stop it!"
But Nathan Junior, of course, could not hear him.
Hansard ran out of the labyrinth and down the thirty-four flights of stairs
to the street. In his haste he would sometimes plunge through walls or
trample over the residents of the building who used the stairwells as
their community center, faute de mieux. But at street level he had to
rest. He had not eaten for five days. He was very weak. Without having
intended to, he fell into a light slumber.
And he was there again, in the country that was so intensely green.
But now it was black, and a buzzing was in his ears. It was black, and
the flame thrower was in his hands, his own hands. The little boy who had
broken out from the stockade -- he could not have been more than four
years old -- was running across the blackened field toward him. Such a
small boy, such a very small boy: how could he run carrying that heavy
carbine? His arms were too short for him to raise it to his shoulder, so
that when he fired it he had to let the devastated earth itself receive
the recoil. He ran forward screaming his hatred, but for some reason
Hansard could hear nothing but the buzzing of the flame thrower. He ran
forward, such a very small boy, and when he was close enough Hansard
let him have it with the flame thrower.
But the face that caught fire was no longer a little chink face. It was
Nathan Junior's.
When Hansard, considerably weakened by his exertions of the afternoon,
returned to the reservoir that night to drink and fill his canteen,
he found that the high barrier that had been built around the pumping
station was being patrolled by Worsaw's men. Throughout the night the
men kept doggedly to their posts. From a distance Hansard reconnoitered
their position and found no flaw in it. The lamps of the Real World shone
brightly on the streets surrounding the barrier, and there was no angle
from which Hansard might approach near enough unseen to the barrier to
be able to swim the rest of the way underground.
At dawn the men surrendered their posts to a second shift. They must be
running out of meat, Hansard thought. His canteen had given out. He had
very little strength left. In a siege he had no doubt that they would
outlast him.
And therefore, he decided, I shall have to make my raid tonight.
He returned to the library stacks to sleep, not daring to go to sleep
within hearing range of his hunters, for it was only too likely that he
would wake up screaming. He usually did now.
SEVEN
SCIAMACHY
Since there was a danger that he might exhaust all his strength in
rehearsals, after the second trial run he rested on the library steps
and basked in the warm air of late April. He could not, so weak as this,
so hungry as this, take much satisfaction in mere warmth and quiet --
unless it could be called a satisfaction to drift off into cloudy,
unthinking distances. The sun swooped down from noonday to the horizon
in seeming minutes. The simulated stars of the dome winked on, winked off.
Now.
He walked over to the Gove Street intersection. Half a mile further down,
Gove Street ran past the pumping station. A number of cars were stopped
at the intersection for a red light. Hansard got into the back seat of
a taxi beside a young lady in a mink suit. The taxi did not start off
with too sudden a jerk, and Hansard was able to stay on the seat.
The pumping station came in sight. The taxi would pass by it, many feet
nearer than Hansard would have been able to approach by himself. He took
a deep breath and tensed his body. As soon as the taxi was driving parallel
with the barrier Hansard leaped through the floor and down into the
roadway. He could only hope that he had vanished into the pavement before
either of the men guarding this face of the barrier had had a chance to
notice him.
He had rehearsed the dive, but not the swimming. Earlier, he had discovered
that without the onus of necessity he possessed neither the strength nor
the breath for sustained effort. This was not a clear guarantee that,
given the necessity, he
would
find the strength. (It is all very well
to praise the heroic virtues, but strength is finally a simple matter
of carbohydrates and proteins.) It was a chance he had to take.
A foolish chance -- for already he could feel his strength failing, his arms
refusing another stroke, his lungs demanding air, taking control of his
protesting will; his arms reaching up, to the air; his body breaking
through the surface, into the air; his lungs, the air, ah, ah yes!
And it was not after all a failure -- not yet, for he had come up seven
feet on the other side of the barrier. Seven feet! He would have been
surprised to find he'd swum that far altogether.
Ives had said there were at least seventeen men, and probably more. Two men
guarded each of the four faces of the barrier and they worked in two shifts.
That would account for sixteen. And the seventeenth -- wouldn't he be
guarding the reservoir itself?
He would be.
And he would be Worsaw.
Reasoning thus, Hansard decided, in spite of his weariness, to swim up the
hill. It wasn't necessary to go the whole distance in a single effort.
He stripped for easier swimming, hung the .45 he had taken from Ives's
pack in a sling fixed to his belt. Then, inchmeal, keeping as much as
possible within the interstices of flowerbeds and shrubs, he advanced
up the slope. He could see guards about the station, but they seemed to
be guards of the Real World.
Swimming, he thought of water, of the dryness in his throat, of water,
the water filling the immaterial shell of the pumping station. He had,
since his first visit here, developed a theory to account for what he had
seen then. The ghostly water produced by the echo-effect of transmission
was contained by the floor and walls of the station, just as the ground
of the Real World supported the ghostly Hansard. The
why
of this was
as yet obscure to him, but he was pragmatist enough to content himself
with the
how
of most things.
When the pressure of the mounting water became too great, the excess
quantity of it simply sank through the floor of the station. Just so,
Hansard could submerge himself in the ground by entering it with sufficient
force. As for the turbulent bubbling he had observed, that was undoubtedly
caused by the "echo" of the air that the other pump was producing as it
transmitted air to the Mars Command Posts. The air pump was below the
level attained by the water, and so the ghostly air would be constantly
bubbling up through the ghostly water and escaping through the skylight
in the ceiling.
About thirty feet from the station Hansard was confronted with a blank
stretch of lawn from which the nearest cover, a plot of tulips, was
eight feet distant. Hansard decided to swim for it underground.
He came up on the wrong side of the flowerbed and was blinded at once
by the beam of a flashlight. He ducked back into the ethereal subsurface
with Warsaw's rebel yell still ringing in his ears. Below the surface he
could hear nothing, though he deduced, from the sudden stinging sensation
in his left shoulder, that Worsaw was firing at him.
Without knowing it was stupid or cunning, only because he was desperate
and had no better plan (though none worse either), Hansard swam straight
toward his enemy, toward where he supposed him still to be. He surfaced
only a few feet away.
Swearing, Worsaw threw his emptied pistol at the head that had just
bobbed up out of the lawn.
Hansard had taken out his .45, but before he could use it he had to fend
off Worsaw's kick. The man's heavy combat boot grazed Hansard's brow and
struck full force against the hand that held the automatic. The weapon
flew out of his hand.
Hansard had drawn himself halfway out of the ground, but before he could
get to his feet Worsaw had thrown himself on top of him, grabbing hold
of Hansard's shoulders and pressing them back into the earth. Hansard
tried to pull Worsaw's hands away, but he was at a disadvantage --
and he was weak.
Slowly Worsaw forced Hansard's face below the surface of the earth and
into the airless, opaque ether below. Hansard grappled with the other
man, not in an effort to resist him -- he had too little strength for
that -- but to guarantee that when he went under Worsaw would go under
with him. So long as they maintained the struggle, there was no force
to prevent their sinking thus, together, into the earth; eyes open but
unseeing, going down ineluctably, neither weakening yet, though surely
the first to weaken would be Hansard. And then?
And then, curiously, the chill turpentine-like substance of the earth
seemed to give way to another substance. Hansard could feel the water --
real and tangible -- fill his nostrils and the hollows of his ears.
The water within the building, seeping through the floor under its own
pressure, had spread out to form a sort of fan-shaped water table beneath
the station. It was to the edge of this water table that the two men
had descended in their struggle.
Worsaw's grip loosened -- he did not assimilate novelty so quickly --
and Hansard was able to break away from him. He swam now into the water
table and upward, and in a short time he was within the transmitting
station, though still under water. He surfaced and caught his breath.
If only Warsaw did not realize too quickly where . . .
But already Warsaw, deducing where Hansard had gone, had entered the
transmitting station and was swimming up after him -- like the relentless
monster of a nightmare that pursues the dreamer through any landscape
that is conjured up, which, even when it has once been killed, rises up
again to continue the pursuit.
Hansard took a deep breath and dove down to confront the nightmare.
He caught hold of Worsaw's throat, but his grip was weak and Worsaw tore
his hands away. Improbably, he was smiling, and his red hair and beard
waved dreamily in the clear water. Warsaw's knee came up hard against
Hansard's diaphragm, and he felt the breath go out of his lungs.
he would have felt had he walked in upon her in the performance of a
shameful act. He made up his mind to leave the apartment.
Then his son came into the room.
It must have been to let him in that Marion had risen from the couch.
His hair was darker than Hansard remembered, and he had lost another milk
tooth. Also, he was dressed more poorly than when he went for a week-end
expedition with his father.
The man in the black hair-bubble spoke to Nathan Junior in an equable
manner, and Hansard was more than ever assured that he enjoyed resident
status in his ex-wife's apartment. Marion returned from the kitchen and
also addressed her son, whose cheeks were beginning to color. He seemed
to be protesting what his mother had just told him or commanded him to do.
More than ever Hansard was distressed by the vast silence of his present
world. It may be amusing for a few moments to watch television with
the sound cut off, but it is quite another thing when you see the words
spilling soundlessly from your own son's lips.
The man in the black hair-bubble concluded what must have been an argument
by pushing Nathan Junior gently but firmly into the outer hall and locking
the door behind him. Hansard followed his son into the elevator. He knew
from experience that no elevator in S-S Manors could move quickly enough
to be any danger to him.
S-S Manors had been so designed that children played on the high rooftops
instead of cluttering up the sidewalks and streets below. The architects
had designed the lofty playgrounds with considerable imagination and poor
materials, and now the labyrinth, the honeycomb of playhouses, and the
elaborate jungle-gym were all in the first stages of disintegration.
Originally a cyclone fence had screened the entire play area, but there
were only a few shreds and tatters left. Even the guardrails were broken
through in places.
As soon as Nathan Junior came out of the elevator he was herded into the
labyrinth by an older boy. Hansard followed him inside. The twisting
concrete corridors were jammed with children, all as small or smaller
than his son. Any kind of games were out of the question here. The rest
of the playground was monopolized by the older boys for their own games.
Nathan Junior fought his way to a group of his own friends. They stood
together whispering, then the seven of them ran peil-mell out of the
labyrinth toward that corner of the roof where a game of isometric
baseball was in progress. The leader of the escapees (not Nathan Junior)
caught the ball and ran with it back to the labyrinth. Nathan Junior,
not being a very good runner, lagged behind and was caught by one of
the older boys.
This boy -- he was about fourteen -- took hold of Nathan Junior by
the ankles, turned him upside down, and carried him to the edge of the
roof where the fencing had been caved through. He held the smaller boy,
twisting and screaming (though for Hansard it happened in dumb-show),
out over the abyss. It was a sheer drop of thirty-five stories to the
street. He let go of one ankle. Hansard had to turn away. He told himself
that what he was seeing was a common occurrence, that it had probably
happened to every one of the children up here at one time or another,
that his son was in no real danger. It helped not at all.
At last the torture was brought to an end, and Nathan Junior was allowed
to return to the little prison that the architects had unwittingly provided.
I'll leave now, Hansard told himself. I should never have come here. But he
was no more able to follow his own good advice than he had been to help
his son. He followed him into the labyrinth once more.
Nathan Junior pushed his way through to where his friends were, and
immediately he struck up an argument with a slightly younger and smaller
boy. The victim became the aggressor. A fight started, and it was clear
that the smaller boy stood no chance against Nathan Junior, who was soon
sitting on his chest and pounding his head against the concrete surface
of the roof.
"Stop it!" Hansard yelled at his son. "For God's sake, stop it!"
But Nathan Junior, of course, could not hear him.
Hansard ran out of the labyrinth and down the thirty-four flights of stairs
to the street. In his haste he would sometimes plunge through walls or
trample over the residents of the building who used the stairwells as
their community center, faute de mieux. But at street level he had to
rest. He had not eaten for five days. He was very weak. Without having
intended to, he fell into a light slumber.
And he was there again, in the country that was so intensely green.
But now it was black, and a buzzing was in his ears. It was black, and
the flame thrower was in his hands, his own hands. The little boy who had
broken out from the stockade -- he could not have been more than four
years old -- was running across the blackened field toward him. Such a
small boy, such a very small boy: how could he run carrying that heavy
carbine? His arms were too short for him to raise it to his shoulder, so
that when he fired it he had to let the devastated earth itself receive
the recoil. He ran forward screaming his hatred, but for some reason
Hansard could hear nothing but the buzzing of the flame thrower. He ran
forward, such a very small boy, and when he was close enough Hansard
let him have it with the flame thrower.
But the face that caught fire was no longer a little chink face. It was
Nathan Junior's.
When Hansard, considerably weakened by his exertions of the afternoon,
returned to the reservoir that night to drink and fill his canteen,
he found that the high barrier that had been built around the pumping
station was being patrolled by Worsaw's men. Throughout the night the
men kept doggedly to their posts. From a distance Hansard reconnoitered
their position and found no flaw in it. The lamps of the Real World shone
brightly on the streets surrounding the barrier, and there was no angle
from which Hansard might approach near enough unseen to the barrier to
be able to swim the rest of the way underground.
At dawn the men surrendered their posts to a second shift. They must be
running out of meat, Hansard thought. His canteen had given out. He had
very little strength left. In a siege he had no doubt that they would
outlast him.
And therefore, he decided, I shall have to make my raid tonight.
He returned to the library stacks to sleep, not daring to go to sleep
within hearing range of his hunters, for it was only too likely that he
would wake up screaming. He usually did now.
SEVEN
SCIAMACHY
Since there was a danger that he might exhaust all his strength in
rehearsals, after the second trial run he rested on the library steps
and basked in the warm air of late April. He could not, so weak as this,
so hungry as this, take much satisfaction in mere warmth and quiet --
unless it could be called a satisfaction to drift off into cloudy,
unthinking distances. The sun swooped down from noonday to the horizon
in seeming minutes. The simulated stars of the dome winked on, winked off.
Now.
He walked over to the Gove Street intersection. Half a mile further down,
Gove Street ran past the pumping station. A number of cars were stopped
at the intersection for a red light. Hansard got into the back seat of
a taxi beside a young lady in a mink suit. The taxi did not start off
with too sudden a jerk, and Hansard was able to stay on the seat.
The pumping station came in sight. The taxi would pass by it, many feet
nearer than Hansard would have been able to approach by himself. He took
a deep breath and tensed his body. As soon as the taxi was driving parallel
with the barrier Hansard leaped through the floor and down into the
roadway. He could only hope that he had vanished into the pavement before
either of the men guarding this face of the barrier had had a chance to
notice him.
He had rehearsed the dive, but not the swimming. Earlier, he had discovered
that without the onus of necessity he possessed neither the strength nor
the breath for sustained effort. This was not a clear guarantee that,
given the necessity, he
would
find the strength. (It is all very well
to praise the heroic virtues, but strength is finally a simple matter
of carbohydrates and proteins.) It was a chance he had to take.
A foolish chance -- for already he could feel his strength failing, his arms
refusing another stroke, his lungs demanding air, taking control of his
protesting will; his arms reaching up, to the air; his body breaking
through the surface, into the air; his lungs, the air, ah, ah yes!
And it was not after all a failure -- not yet, for he had come up seven
feet on the other side of the barrier. Seven feet! He would have been
surprised to find he'd swum that far altogether.
Ives had said there were at least seventeen men, and probably more. Two men
guarded each of the four faces of the barrier and they worked in two shifts.
That would account for sixteen. And the seventeenth -- wouldn't he be
guarding the reservoir itself?
He would be.
And he would be Worsaw.
Reasoning thus, Hansard decided, in spite of his weariness, to swim up the
hill. It wasn't necessary to go the whole distance in a single effort.
He stripped for easier swimming, hung the .45 he had taken from Ives's
pack in a sling fixed to his belt. Then, inchmeal, keeping as much as
possible within the interstices of flowerbeds and shrubs, he advanced
up the slope. He could see guards about the station, but they seemed to
be guards of the Real World.
Swimming, he thought of water, of the dryness in his throat, of water,
the water filling the immaterial shell of the pumping station. He had,
since his first visit here, developed a theory to account for what he had
seen then. The ghostly water produced by the echo-effect of transmission
was contained by the floor and walls of the station, just as the ground
of the Real World supported the ghostly Hansard. The
why
of this was
as yet obscure to him, but he was pragmatist enough to content himself
with the
how
of most things.
When the pressure of the mounting water became too great, the excess
quantity of it simply sank through the floor of the station. Just so,
Hansard could submerge himself in the ground by entering it with sufficient
force. As for the turbulent bubbling he had observed, that was undoubtedly
caused by the "echo" of the air that the other pump was producing as it
transmitted air to the Mars Command Posts. The air pump was below the
level attained by the water, and so the ghostly air would be constantly
bubbling up through the ghostly water and escaping through the skylight
in the ceiling.
About thirty feet from the station Hansard was confronted with a blank
stretch of lawn from which the nearest cover, a plot of tulips, was
eight feet distant. Hansard decided to swim for it underground.
He came up on the wrong side of the flowerbed and was blinded at once
by the beam of a flashlight. He ducked back into the ethereal subsurface
with Warsaw's rebel yell still ringing in his ears. Below the surface he
could hear nothing, though he deduced, from the sudden stinging sensation
in his left shoulder, that Worsaw was firing at him.
Without knowing it was stupid or cunning, only because he was desperate
and had no better plan (though none worse either), Hansard swam straight
toward his enemy, toward where he supposed him still to be. He surfaced
only a few feet away.
Swearing, Worsaw threw his emptied pistol at the head that had just
bobbed up out of the lawn.
Hansard had taken out his .45, but before he could use it he had to fend
off Worsaw's kick. The man's heavy combat boot grazed Hansard's brow and
struck full force against the hand that held the automatic. The weapon
flew out of his hand.
Hansard had drawn himself halfway out of the ground, but before he could
get to his feet Worsaw had thrown himself on top of him, grabbing hold
of Hansard's shoulders and pressing them back into the earth. Hansard
tried to pull Worsaw's hands away, but he was at a disadvantage --
and he was weak.
Slowly Worsaw forced Hansard's face below the surface of the earth and
into the airless, opaque ether below. Hansard grappled with the other
man, not in an effort to resist him -- he had too little strength for
that -- but to guarantee that when he went under Worsaw would go under
with him. So long as they maintained the struggle, there was no force
to prevent their sinking thus, together, into the earth; eyes open but
unseeing, going down ineluctably, neither weakening yet, though surely
the first to weaken would be Hansard. And then?
And then, curiously, the chill turpentine-like substance of the earth
seemed to give way to another substance. Hansard could feel the water --
real and tangible -- fill his nostrils and the hollows of his ears.
The water within the building, seeping through the floor under its own
pressure, had spread out to form a sort of fan-shaped water table beneath
the station. It was to the edge of this water table that the two men
had descended in their struggle.
Worsaw's grip loosened -- he did not assimilate novelty so quickly --
and Hansard was able to break away from him. He swam now into the water
table and upward, and in a short time he was within the transmitting
station, though still under water. He surfaced and caught his breath.
If only Warsaw did not realize too quickly where . . .
But already Warsaw, deducing where Hansard had gone, had entered the
transmitting station and was swimming up after him -- like the relentless
monster of a nightmare that pursues the dreamer through any landscape
that is conjured up, which, even when it has once been killed, rises up
again to continue the pursuit.
Hansard took a deep breath and dove down to confront the nightmare.
He caught hold of Worsaw's throat, but his grip was weak and Worsaw tore
his hands away. Improbably, he was smiling, and his red hair and beard
waved dreamily in the clear water. Warsaw's knee came up hard against
Hansard's diaphragm, and he felt the breath go out of his lungs.
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