The Grasshopper King (11 page)

“Is Professor Higgs downstairs?” McTaggett asked.

“Where else?”

McTaggett turned to me. “Then down we go.”

So the two of us started down the stairs; and when we reached the bottom I forgot the noise, forgot my nervousness. Neither Slotkin nor McTaggett had bothered to prepare me for my first sight of Higgs's astounding basement.

I have already mentioned that the house had once belonged to the university's anthropology department. The move had been hurried,
and the anthropologists had used the excuse of haste to leave behind everything they didn't want: specimens which were duplicates, or demonstrably forged, or simply poor examples of their kind. In all the years the Higgses had lived there, they (I mean Ellen) had never seen fit to get rid of it all.

The basement was a little, stuffy room, packed halfway up the wall with the anthropologists' unsorted leftovers: flint blades and arrowheads, fat daikoku, fertility dolls, chipped pots and fragments of pots, Kachinas of various provenances, tiny woven mats, handleless vases, noseless statues, chisels, pestles, adzes, scattered across the concrete floor, heaped in the corners, without regard for function or origin. A few exasperated-looking masks hung from sills beneath a row of half-height windows. In places the floor was three deep in tattered prayer rugs. It was as if the world's forgotten cultures had pooled their meager resources and mounted a garage sale.

Across from the stairs there was a richly filigreed sarcophagus, wide open, and inside it a wrapped, mummified corpse. (“Twentieth-century forgery,” McTaggett explained to me later. “A couple of Belgians dug up an Arab and pickled him. A real one wouldn't last a month in this climate.”) Next to the Arab was the only evidence of modern times: the bank of tape recorders which were to capture Higgs's remarks, when and if they came.

For the second time in five minutes, I stumbled backwards in dismay.

“I should have told you,” McTaggett whispered, shaking his head. “Stupid of me not to have thought.”

I mention Higgs himself last because, to be honest, he was the last thing I noticed. He was sitting in the far corner of the room at a round card table, facing us, apparently unperturbed by my novel presence. He looked much as he had in the newspaper photographs from thirteen years before; older, of course, but the architecture of his face was the same, his haircut, even the musty-looking shirt he wore.

(But there was one difference, one I didn't know about. Higgs's gaze, by the time I met him, no longer flickered from person to person, near
to far; instead it was steady, fixed on an unexceptional point in space, a few feet in front of his sheepdog eyes.)

“Professor Higgs,” McTaggett said, “this is Samuel Grapearbor. He'll be sitting with you from now on.” McTaggett inclined his head toward the chair opposite Higgs; dutifully, I sat.

“I'm going,” he said. “Well. Good luck.” He clomped upstairs. Faintly, under the music, I heard the front door open and shut.

So this is it, I thought. Postgraduate education.

I slid my chair over to what I estimated to be the focal point of Higgs's gaze. “Hello, Professor Higgs,” I said, experimentally. “I'm a great admirer of your work.”

His fixed stare and the unrelenting calm of his expression made me nervous, the way a defective child makes one nervous, but worse in this case because I knew he was
not
defective; I had to keep reminding myself that Higgs was no doubt executing a mental description of me, even as I was of him. And what must he have thought of me? Probably not much. To him I was just another entry in the long undifferentiated series of young men who had shared his cluttered basement, waiting for him to speak.

Of course, I was special; I was the last one. But even Higgs could not have known that yet.

My duties were simple. I was required to stay with Higgs from nine in the morning until eight o'clock at night, when Ellen would take him up to bed. The tape recorders were staggered, so that reels ran out at every even-numbered hour. When a tape ended, I was to remove it from the recorder, label it with date and time, and replace it with a fresh one from the cabinet behind the mummy. Were Higgs actually to speak, I was supposed to move into my position across from him at the table and record, in a stenographer's notebook provided me for this purpose, whatever gestures and expressive actions accompanied his words. Barring that, all I had to do was wait. It was dull, all right. I wished now that I had brought some work to do.

At half-past eleven Ellen came downstairs dragging an electric vacuum cleaner behind her like a reluctant dance partner. The machine set to a furious screw-loose clattering the moment she turned it on. She took care to cover every part of the floor, some more than once; often the fringe of a rug or the end of a flax rope would catch in the nozzle and the noise would excite itself to an even higher, more discomfiting pitch. When she was finished, not having spoken a word, she disappeared upstairs. An hour later, she came back down and started over.

“This place must collect a lot of dust,” I said, as congenially as I could.

Ellen ignored me. She kicked aside a pile of eccentric grindstones and vacuumed the immaculate floor underneath. I was struck suddenly by the absurd fear that she had recognized my voice from my drunken phone call, three years before; that she was waiting for me to apologize, or worse, that she had no interest in my apologies. I pushed it aside.

“Saturday's a good day for housecleaning,” I offered.

She lifted up a stack of thatch something-covers and a dozen or so insects leaped out, bouncing into far corners and disappearing before I'd gotten a good look.

“You've got crickets?” I asked.

“Grasshoppers,” she said. “They've been down here since we moved in. We tried poisoning them.” Then her face closed up. She seemed angry that I had gotten her to speak.

Later in the day I went upstairs to look around, on the pretext of needing to use the bathroom. I was desperate for something to do. I had picked up, looked over, and set down every slingshot and bridle in the place—some twice. I had made my egg salad sandwich last an hour and a half.

The above-ground portion of the house, now that I had seen the basement, was stirringly ordinary; although in isolation it might have been a bit unnerving. The light filtering through the poured-glass window was gray and cool, more like March than June, and the house had a shut-in, bookish smell, although there were no books anywhere.
In fact, there was not much of anything anywhere. By means of some slow gravity the upstairs was as empty as the basement was full. There were no tables in sight, no coatrack; no chairs, no shelves, not even any lamps. The only furniture I could see was Ellen's stereo, which squatted at the center of a Stonehenge of speakers, its equalizer lights fluctuating now to the beat of an auto commercial. I'd been in the house eight hours and already it didn't seem so loud.

I nearly collided with Ellen in the foyer.

“Yes?” she said—hostile, frank.

“The bathroom . . .”

She jerked her head leftward at a door I hadn't noticed.

The bathroom, unsurprisingly, was bare; but tucked under the lower rim of the mirror there was some minor ornament, miraculously left in place. Looking closer, I saw it was a remote microphone. McTaggett had explained this to me. There was a pick-up in every room but the bedroom, wired to the banks of recorders downstairs. Wherever Higgs decided to hold forth, the apparatus would be ready.

Even the water was loud. When the toilet flushed it sounded like a jetliner launching through hail.

Back downstairs, no vehicles for amusement having sprung up in my absence, I suddenly remembered Slotkin's last piece of advice.

“You want to play checkers, Professor Higgs?”

Not even a flicker in return. But I was too bored to be deterred. I found the checkerboard propped up by the sarcophagus.

“We're going to play some checkers now, okay?” It comforted me to keep talking. “Here we go . . . I'm setting up the board now. I'm going first.”

During my preparations Higgs's gaze had not once deviated from its position; but as soon as I had made my opening move, his eyes snapped down to the board. He moved his man. Within five minutes he had beaten me handily. We played six more games and I lost every one.

“You're very good, Professor Higgs,” I said, and although his expression did not, of course, change, I postulated a slow inner smile,
imagined him luxuriating in the idea of a new opponent, someone else to teach, slowly and by example, working upward through the levels of strategy, postponing as long as possible the despairing moment when both players' knowledge of the game was exactly equal. With Slotkin that moment must have been years past.

When I came home that night there was a lasagna on the bed. It was piled into a stewpot, a little lopsided, and under its weight our sad mattress sagged almost to the floor.

“Hi, breadwinner,” Julia said. “What do you think?”

“It looks great,” I said, a little guiltily; guiltily because my first reaction, when the startling smell of a cooked and actual meal had met me at the door, had been to think,
I'm in the wrong place
.

“I got the recipe from our secretary. And the pot is from the kitchenette in my old dorm.”

We sat down on either side of the bed and dug ambitiously in. “How was the first day?” Julia asked me. Beneath the first layer of noodles the cheese was waxy and cold. Strangely, this touched off in me a little hubbub of affection.

“I couldn't wait to get home,” I said.

Meanwhile, I was learning more about Henderson. By the time I came to the subject, his life story had been scavenged and glued into something that almost made sense. It turned out Henderson was the terminus of a somewhat noble English line, which had been reduced by the end of the nineteenth century to landlessness and progressive politics. In 1895, his parents, reckoning correctly that no proletarian revolution was imminent in Britain, picked up their meager stakes and moved east. They settled in the Gravine as party organizers, and, when the revolution finally came, were rewarded for their efforts by being purged. Henderson left for Berlin a month later. He stayed there until 1940, when, having somehow run afoul of the Nazis, he fled to London.

In the intervening years he wrote, and he published; mostly, that is, he copied out his verses in his own painstaking hand, and passed them
out at streetcorners, or in parks, or in front of churches and banks. On one occasion he released a hundred copies of “Vile Mouse Conspiracy” from the roof of an apartment house in Potsdam. (That was what had gotten him the littering citation.) His poems, which he carefully marked with the date of composition and his initial “H,” formed a more or less complete record of his time in Berlin. The only break of any size was a six-month interval in 1932, which time, Henderson intimated later, he had spent in Holland. He never said why.

McTaggett had me working on a short story of Henderson's that had appeared, with the author's own impenetrable translation alongside, in a 1922 number of an agrarian-feudalist monthly called
Tractor
. Each day I brought the story with me to Higgs's house, where I sat in the chair across from him, translating, my copy of Kaufmann on the table between us, trying to ignore the racket from upstairs. I had hoped that the sight of Henderson's text in the original Gravinic might catch Higgs's attention—in vain. Only the checkerboard could stir him. We played fifteen or twenty games each afternoon. I had gotten into the habit of making a running commentary as we played, partly to hear the sound of a voice, and partly to convey the idea that my attitude toward the game was one of detached amusement, that it was nothing more than a mildly entertaining respite from my work, one about which I maintained a healthy sense of humor, and that it certainly did not matter to me when I lost—which was every single time.

“A costly miscue by Grapearbor,” I'd say, as Higgs laid me open with a triple jump. “The champion wastes no time taking advantage of the upstart challenger's childish blunder.” Then, a little later: “Grapearbor's defense is in disarray. Ladies and gentlemen, the desperation is palpable. It appears Grapearbor has no chance . . . and Higgs jumps Grapearbor's final man. This one is history. Higgs is the winner.”

When Higgs played checkers, he made a small continuous sound, deep in his throat, a bit like a growl but with no connotation of menace. It was as if the checker-playing segment of him had grown noisy with age and overuse, like Ellen's vacuum cleaner. I noticed the sound
only after a few days; it took me that long to pick it out under the general din from upstairs. Ellen would change the channel on the radio now and then, to keep me distracted, I supposed, and some days would leave the tuner between stations, besieging me with static and the distant, panicky voices of churchmen. Even so, I learned in time to hear the smaller noises: Higgs's sound, and the collective murmur of the grasshoppers, which was loudest in the morning and faded as the day wore on. Each day Ellen came down four or five times with the vacuum; each time I tried vainly to engage her in conversation. I was no longer trying to be friendly. Now it was one hundred percent spite.

“Take it easy on her,” Julia advised me, “you can't blame her for not wanting you there. You wouldn't want you there, if you were her.”