Revolution Number 9 (12 page)

It was still one all when Blake batted again with two out and a man on second in the bottom of the ninth. The big righty was throwing as hard as he had in the first, and had given up nothing but an infield single, a walk, and Blake’s home run. Blake’s team was working on its fourth pitcher and had been in trouble almost every inning. They were running out of chances. “This would be a good time,” said the coach, still conversational, as Blake left the dugout.

Blake dug in. He’d been watching the pitcher from the dugout, learned something of how smart he was, baseball smart, as well as physically skilled: too smart to start with the heater this time. The pitcher looked in for the sign, eyes narrow, then went into his stretch, rocked back and kicked. Blake cocked his bat and waited for the hook.

It came, sharply defined and pure white against the background of the green center field fence, came high and hard at his left ear. Blake waited, waited to pick up the telltale spin, waited for that wicked, big-league break. And in that split second he saw, peripherally and far away, the flag, the stars and stripes, flying on the pole in center. And in that split second, when he should have been seeing that the ball had backspin instead of topspin, that it was a heater high and in and not a curve, in that split second when he should have been bailing out, Blake Wrightman thought of his father. Then came a sound that everyone in the park heard but him, and unconsciousness.

S
hoes and socks back on, Charlie sat in front of a microfilm viewer in the periodical room of the main library. He had the place to himself; nothing moved except the dust motes drifting through the sunbeams and the microfilm blurring across the screen. Charlie scrolled through May 1969 issues of the
Campus Record
until he came to one with a photograph of a falling ballplayer on the front page. The caption read: “Star frosh center fielder Blake Wrightman hit by a pitched ball in yesterday’s loss to the Greenmen.” In the picture, taken from the first base side, the batter’s knees were buckling, and the impact of the ball had turned him halfway around, so his number—nine—was visible. With the severe contrapposto of the figure, the arm flung up, too late, in self-defense, the bat flying out of the top frame, it was a dramatic composition, if not in perfect focus.

The universe started with a Big Bang, but there had been this little bang before it. One triggering the other, Charlie thought suddenly, the way an A-bomb is used to trigger an H-bomb. Had his subconscious self always understood the relationship of the two events? Maybe; and now the knowledge was rising to the surface. In the still, silent room Charlie’s vision grew almost intolerably sharp, sharp and clinical. He had no memory of the moment recorded on film, as though it had happened to someone else. He stared at the dots on the newsprint that shaped the face of the someone else, and thought he saw deep inside him.

Three days in the infirmary, head wrapped in bandages: the patient cheerful, relaxed, even funny, the way hospitalized people can be when there is nothing seriously wrong with them and the right painkillers are at hand. The editor of the
Record
sent a writer for a follow-up interview; the photographer who had taken the picture went with him. During the interview the patient was more cheerful, relaxed, funny than ever. Perhaps it was because of the photographer. She had wild black hair, alert brown eyes, flawless skin, even white teeth—a strange, only-in-America combination of both the healthful and the Bohemian ideals.

“Who won?” the patient asked her.

“Won what?” said Rebecca Klein.

The reporter asked a few questions, and the photographer shot a few pictures. They left, the patient slept. He awoke that night, momentarily disoriented, to find the photographer sitting by the bed. She looked down at him. “You saw the picture?” she asked.

“Picture?”

“My picture. Of you.”

“Yeah.”

Pause. The patient gazed into those dark eyes and saw signs of powerful thoughts and emotions. He was far too young to know what they were.

“Did it …?”

“What?”

“Make you feel used.”

“Used?”

“Exploited.”

The patient shook his head. That hurt, so he stopped. “It happened, didn’t it? It was my own fault.”

“It was?” The photographer’s eyes narrowed; the intensity of her expression, an expression he would see again and come to think of as her Torquemada face, discouraged him from full explanation.

“I took my eye off the ball,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, an “oh” that among other things told him she had no interest in baseball. He watched her face relax. She saw him watching and smiled, a wonderful smile that seemed to radiate happiness through the room—a rare smile, he would come to know, seen only when she emerged completely from those thoughts and emotions he had sensed. “I was worried you might be upset about the picture,” she said.

“That’s why you came here?”

“Partly.”

“And the other part?” She didn’t answer.

“You’re a ball fan?”

Rebecca laughed.

Overnight, over that night, Blake Wrightman lost interest in baseball. He never played another game, never had another at-bat. Would it have happened without Rebecca Klein? Would it have happened in 1959 or 1989? Or was it all because of the beaning: did Blake Wrightman, secretly knowing he would never be able to stand in at the plate again, take the first life-changing opportunity that came along? These were questions that Blake never asked himself. They were only now rising up into Charlie’s conscious mind, stirred by the sight of his long-ago self frozen in a fall.

· · ·

Blake’s bed, Stu Levine’s bed, and all the beds Blake had seen on campus, were identical: simple primer-painted steel frames with wire springs and thin mattresses. Rebecca’s bed, in her room on the top floor of Cullen House, a neo-Georgian residence for sophomore women, was different; she had brought her childhood bed from home. It was an antique, dating from the reign of some Roman-numbered Louis or other, and had handcarved posts, a headboard with painted putti, a silk canopy, a plump feather mattress. It left room for almost nothing else but the posters on the walls. The posters: Marx, Engels, Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, La Pasionaria, Mao, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, General Giap. Late that spring, the spring of his beaning, lying like a potentate in all that softness for the first time, with Rebecca’s head on his shoulder, Blake asked, “Who’s that?”

“You don’t know Malcolm X?”

“The guy with him.”

Shaking hands with Malcolm X was a smiling white man with wild graying hair and glasses pushed up on his broad forehead.

“That,” said Rebecca, “is Daddy.”

“He knows Malcolm X?”

“Daddy knows everybody. Everybody on the left.” Blake examined the poster. He noticed that Malcolm X looked irritated about something, and that while Rebecca’s father was smiling, his smile was directed at someone outside the picture. He turned to find Rebecca watching him. “You never talk about your father,” she said.

“No?”

The narrow-eyed expression appeared on her face. “No.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re doing now—trying to see right through me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” He rolled on top of her, looked into the dark eyes. “There,” he said, “have a field day.”

“That’s my plan,” she told him, reaching out to switch off the light. “Bodies like yours aren’t found in my circles.”

“What circles are those?” Blake asked. But by that time Rebecca was busy with something else.

· · ·

Charlie rewound the microfilm and brought it to the desk. “Is there a list of alumni?” he said.

The librarian looked up from the book she was reading. “The
Alumni Directory
, do you mean?” She was young, probably a student with a summer job in the library, except that Charlie didn’t remember students reading books like
How to Make a Bear Market Work for You
. He nodded. “This year’s won’t be ready till September,” she said.

“Last year’s will do.”

Charlie sat at a desk looking through last year’s
Alumni Directory
. The listings, alphabetical, included each alumnus’s class, home address, and profession. There were thousands of them, but none for Rebecca Klein or Andrew Malik, as Charlie had expected; otherwise, Mr. G would have no need of him. He had expected an entry between Ricardo Levin, ’74, eco-planner from Colorado Springs, and Amy Lewis, ’88, analyst at Morgan Stanley, but there was nothing there, either; nothing where Stuart Levine should have been.

Charlie looked up. The librarian was watching him. Why? Had she somehow recognized his face? He had the unlikely thought that he might be the subject of a history paper she’d written on campus unrest, or at least a footnote.

“Need some help?” she asked.

He tapped the directory. “What if someone isn’t in here?”

“Then they’re on the lost list. Or dead. You’d have to call the Alumni Office to find out which.” She picked up a phone and started dialing. “What’s the name?”

“Stuart Levine.”

The librarian lowered the phone. “Undergraduates aren’t in the book either, of course.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They’re not alumni, by definition. Like Stu Levine. He’s in my class.”

Charlie had heard of adults returning to college after long absences, but he couldn’t see the Stu Levine he had known in that role. “How old is he?”

“I don’t know. Nineteen or twenty. My age.”

“Then he’s not the one,” Charlie said, closing the directory.

The librarian was watching him again. “Stu is a Junior, though, I think.” Charlie rose and moved toward the door. “I don’t mean a junior, like in freshman, sophomore, although he is one,” the librarian continued. She waited for Charlie to respond, but she had lost him. “I mean Junior like in Stuart Levine, Jr.,” she said. “Maybe he’s the son of the one you want.” Charlie stopped and turned to her. “And the thing is you can talk to him if you want. He’s got some assignments to finish.”

“In the lab?” Charlie said.

“How did you know that?”

The science building was new, and in the context of its red brick and white clapboard neighbors, aggressively so. It might have been designed by architects hoping to land fat contracts when the time came for the colonization of Mars. The lobby had black floors, black walls, a hanging silver globe, and a black leather sign-in book at the unattended modular desk. The last entry, written in an uneven, spiky hand, read “Levine, Rm. 310.” Charlie looked for stairs, found none, and rode the elevator to the third floor.

The door to room 310 was closed. Charlie was about to knock when he heard a crashing sound inside, followed by a cry, almost a wail, of “Shit, shit, shit.” He opened the door.

There were half a dozen big chemistry desks inside, equipped with sinks, burners, retorts, test tube racks. A skinny young man stood at one of them, staring down at a pool of yellow ooze spreading across the floor. It began to smoke.

“Stuart Levine?” Charlie said.

The young man, a boy really, pale and bony, looked up, squinting at Charlie through the fingerprint-smeared lenses of his glasses. “Geez,” he said, “I’m booked in here till three, and it’s only …” He checked his watch. “Oh, God. I’m hopelessly …” For a moment, Charlie, shocked by the resemblance, couldn’t say a word. This was Stu Levine, his Stu Levine—Bombo—and twenty-two years hadn’t passed and none of it had happened. Except for the Martian building he was standing in, that is, and the pain deep under his sternum where Svenson’s rifle butt had struck, he might have almost believed it.

Charlie said, “It’s OK. I don’t need the lab.”

Stuart Levine, Jr., nodded, but might not have absorbed the information. He was distracted by the yellow pool at his feet. It was hissing.

“What is that stuff?” Charlie asked, coming closer.

“This and that,” said Stuart Levine, Jr., and Charlie wondered whether there was a gene that programmed helplessness.

“Hadn’t we better get it cleaned up?”

“I guess so,” said Stuart Levine, Jr. But he didn’t move. Perhaps he wouldn’t until the liquid dissolved the floor and he fell through.

Charlie opened a closet, found mop, pail, detergent. He filled the pail with water and approached the spill. Remembering rules for dealing with this sort of thing, he said: “Is it acid?”

“Partly,” said Stuart Levine, Jr.

Charlie withheld the water, returned to the closet. In the end he scooped the liquid up with steel dustpans and dumped it into a container marked “Toxic Waste.” All that remained was a blackened circle on the floor. Stuart Levine, Jr., rubbed at it with the sole of his sneaker but it wouldn’t go away.

The top of the desk was a clutter of test tubes filled with different-colored liquids and solids. Two centrifuges spun at the center, and a colorless liquid in a large retort heated over a bunsen burner. “What’s this all about?” Charlie asked.

“Oh, ions and stuff,” said Stuart Levine, Jr., waving his arm over the desk in a dismissive way. His hand brushed a beaker, which overturned, dumping its contents in the sink. “Christ,” he said, quickly placing the plastic cover over the sink. He glanced at Charlie to see if he had noticed this latest accident. Charlie pretended he hadn’t. Stuart Levine, Jr., now taking him in for the first time, said, “Uh, thanks for helping with the …” He waved his hand in another loose gesture, this time without consequences.

“You’re welcome,” Charlie said.

“Thanks.” Stuart Levine, Jr., out of conversation, at the mercy of events, shifted from foot to foot.

Charlie said: “How’s your father?”

Stuart Levine, Jr., squinted up at him through the smudged glasses. “You know my father?”

Charlie thought:
How easy to be a wolf at a place like this, among innocents like Junior
. He said: “I knew him at one time.”

“Yeah? When, like?”

“A while back.”

“Before SLI?”

“SLI?”

“Stuart Levine Industries,” said Junior, looking surprised.

“Right. Before.”