The Grasshopper King (31 page)

I didn't find out about this until three years afterwards, when one Charlotte Amanezar, a student nurse at a retirement complex in Clearwater, wrote to tell me that Higgs, too, was dead. Ellen (remembering my feelings on good-byes?) had listed me as after-next-of-kin.

The retirement complex was called Sylvan Woods. Ellen's sister had sent him there. His considerable pension paid for it all: a room of his own, swimming lessons, new-American high-fiber cooking by a two-star chef, and Miss Amanezar, his private attendant. I learned all this from the brochure she sent me, which had Higgs on the front cover. He was sitting in a sturdy-looking chair, angled three-quarters to the camera, in his usual attitude of distant calculation, as if he were momentarily to deliver an accounting of the costs and benefits of spending one's twilight years at Sylvan Woods instead of some other, cheaper place of repose. One could imagine which way the sum would go.

Miss Amanezar thought I'd like to know that Higgs had been a model patient, popular among the staff and clientele. (Why not? He would have listened politely to people's war stories, their dimly recollected oat-sowage. He would never have sent his food back.) His funeral, a simple service, had been chock with mourners. “And I too,” she wrote, “will be sorry not to have him with us anymore; though I hope you will comfort yourself as I do that he has been taken to a better place.”

I looked at the brochure again. It was hard to imagine a better place.

The cause of Higgs's death was recorded as “respiratory failure”—the coroner's shrug. Miss Amanezar assured me that his passing had been painless and that, to the last, Higgs had been in perfect health. “It was just as if God had reached inside him and switched him off. Just like that.”

And me? I stayed in Chandler City, stayed alive. On occasion this thought occurred to me, banal and agreeable:
I have done well for myself
. The department granted me my doctorate the day my Sethius paper was accepted. A month later they offered me a permanent position.

Of course, they were not the first to do so; I had offers stacked on my bookshelves from every Gravinic department in the country, and most of those elsewhere. They'd sent me glossy campus albums, photos of my office-to-be, and the
letters
—committee chairs, distinguished men, fawning and wheedling like eunuchs. They were just the kind of letters Higgs used to get. And like Higgs, I decided to stay home. For maximum effect I kept my motive obscure; but in fact it was perfectly simple. I was happy where I was. I still lived in the
L
-shaped apartment, almost unsqualid now that I had it to myself. There seemed no reason, apart from the sentimental one, to move out. The ordinary thing, I understand, is to see the lost loved one in every corner, to move out (alternately drink, act, play football) in order to leave the accusing spirits behind, so that one might at last forget. But there was not a trace of Julia in the apartment. Even at the moment she'd left there hadn't been; even, I thought now, for some time before that. So why move? It was bad enough that other people did.

I took McTaggett's place, teaching the rudiments of Gravinic syntax for the first few weeks of each semester, and returning to my own investigations once the last of my students slunk bemusedly away. Even when Rosso left us, grinning and coughing, and I was named department chair, I continued to teach—still harboring some hope, I suppose, of finding a successor. So far I have been disappointed.

My deception was never uncovered. I came almost to believe in it myself, so implausible was the alternative version, my audacious, half-cocked secret-agentry, its unreasonable success. Even the most credulous, the dullest, zittiest, movie-hooked teen would have to shake his head: “Never happen.” But it had happened. And within months the silt of time and study had closed over my hoax and it was good as proved, good as if witnessed by angels. After a year: not a Gravinicist
of any note but was willing to hold forth on how obvious it should have been to everyone what Higgs would say—and how, in certain of the Gravinicist's own papers, it must be said by somebody, one could make out glimmerings of the revelation to come; one could, that is, so long as one was willing to read fairly, and not with an eye toward denying the insights of others, in the interest, presumably, of one's own rather far-fetched claim to primacy . . . And back and forth, and so on.

I held myself out of this wrangling, and once I was certain I would not be found out, I ceased even to read the claims and counterclaims. My interests lay elsewhere. I was bent on realizing my Jugendtraum, the new history of Europe—though before long it became clear that this ambition, dizzy, avaricious as it was, had been too small. It was the whole world we were after now. My colleagues and I placed copies of
Poems Against the Enemies
with Lin Biao on the Long March, and with an aide-de-camp to Abdel Nasser, of mysterious provenance, whose advice to his commander on the eve of the Six-Day War—“Strike now, and their limbs are pulped, their penises lie as dry sticks for the chickens to peck apart; wait, and ichor runs from our own ankles, and defeat, the black washerwoman, claims her husband”—differed only in its relative cordiality from the speech of the Minister of Ants in Henderson's “Feces: for Thisbe.” And more, and more, until there was not a two-bit revolution anywhere, no civil war, no organized slaying of any kind that had no Henderson in it.

And no one cared but us. I couldn't blame them, the real historians. We had our methods, and they had theirs: hundreds of them. So it was capital behind everything? You could make a case for that. Or the concentration of poor old agrarian man in the cities and the towns, or the coming dust-up of the races, or whatever was fashionable these days—you'll forgive me, I hope, if I can't take these “revisions” too seriously. Year by year they supplant one another—what is it,
genetics
now?—while we Hendersonists stay fixed on course.

They're not bad, all these theories I read about: they make sense, they fit with what we know, they have constituencies we can only
marvel at, and if they have no proof, well, neither do we. Remove Henderson and the world might be unrecognizable; but then again it might be exactly the same. It's circumstantial, what we do. In this way all historians are alike. We're right, and all the others wrong—that's the only difference. Each year it seems a smaller one.

My life settled into a spare, periodic state. I woke each morning at quarter to seven, drank two tumblerfuls of orange juice and ate a carton of yogurt; then listened to the day's news on the radio—Ellen's legacy, that habit—while I brushed my teeth and shaved, and was ready to leave at thirty-five past. I returned home at five-fifteen and ordered a pizza for dinner. (Even the Greek and his egg salad had left town.) After that I would work for five more hours, arrange my papers for the next day, shower, floss, and fall asleep without incident. My dreams were reassuringly conventional, tending toward boundless vistas, gliding, conversations in which I was not immediately involved. I often saw columns of figures and dates.

It seemed to me I had achieved a modest sort of pinnacle: a perfectly unmarked, unremarkable existence. My world was a closed system of which I had an absolute understanding. I knew what went where and what served what purpose. Higgs had been right about marriage: you couldn't be too careful. Another person, however closely aligned to my own temperament, would inevitably have introduced perturbations into my routine—noise, one could say, in the signal—and I had begun to value quiet above all else. I had accumulated a great store of it. A girl came by twice each week, once to pick up my laundry, again to bring it back along with the meager groceries I needed: soap, skim milk, toilet tissue, rat traps. The girl was seventeen or so, heavy-chested and sullen, but not dull; she learned quickly not to speak to me, and that one knock was enough. I changed faculty meetings from weekly to monthly, then eliminated them altogether. No one complained. When I did have to talk to someone—my typist, my undergraduates—I grew furious at the slow approximateness of speech.

I often thought of Higgs as I ate my nightly pizza. There were still those who speculated about his silence; but that was not what I was doing. I knew the truth now. There was really, in the end, no alternative to silence—so I told myself, with a certain tired satisfaction, as I lifted my oiled, grainy fingers one by one to my mouth. Each of my fingertips was stained a cheery, burned-looking red. There was nothing to say. There was just nothing to say. I supposed I had turned out much like the other professors after all—their nervous habits just beginning to make themselves known in me like a familiar syndrome—and while it was not the life I had planned for myself, it was, in its way, a rich one; and I had chosen it.

My serenity was disturbed only once: that was the day I received Miss Amanezar's letter. I had always casually imagined that Higgs and I would see each other again, would compare notes in the safety of reminiscence, like high-school reunion guests confessing their erstwhile crushes and their never-punished pranks. As ludicrous as this fantasy was, I found I felt a little remorse at seeing it finally torn down. When I was finished reading I slipped the letter into the drawer where I kept my personal correspondence (that is, my mail from Julia) and put it from my mind. Before me on the desk was a stack of Belgian deeds of trust, with which I meant to demonstrate that a certain acquaintance of Henderson's had, in the early 1950s, been in a position to influence administrative policies as regarded the Congo. But I couldn't concentrate. I was beset by thoughts of Higgs, of the farce we'd played out, of Julia and Ellen; then I found myself wholly occupied by the task of
not
thinking of these things. The Flemish street names broke up, recombined, a dancing grid of diphthongs; hopeless. I took out the letter and read it again.
A better place
. . .

I decided—and I shouldn't have to say how momentous this was—to go out for a walk.

I was not surprised to find myself heading for the campus, and, once on the campus, toward the cliff. I came to the site of Higgs's house. It was already two years since it had been demolished—but I'll say more
about that later. Now there was a gigantic cubical absence where the house had been. It was to be the foundation for the Moresby Research Center. At the bottom of the pit, a few distant workers were hacking dispiritedly at objects I could not make out in the hazy dimness of the afternoon. The red, scrubby hole looked like an outsized grave, like the graves the Russians were digging for Soviet statues. I'd heard about it on the radio: they had to lower them in with cranes, the hewn-out commissars and their deputies, wet-cheeked like ikons, but with vodka, from the bottles the crowds tossed at their clumsy granite heads. The onlookers lined the hole like the edge of a parade, shivering, cheering each smashed bottle, as the cold gusts of freedom whipped their threadbare coats around. But for Higgs, I thought gloomily, there'd been no one—no one but Miss Amanezar and whatever docile patients she'd conducted to the Pinellas County burying ground. I burned on his behalf at the placid, cotton-mouthed devotions she must have seen him off with. There was nothing he would have hated more—he the insister on precision, the enemy of every empty word—than to be subject, in his last aboveground moments, to the exhausted and puerile shaggy-dog jokes Miss Amanezar called prayers; and poor Higgs's boxed-up corpse, in every last case the painful, obvious punchline. Nobody deserved that. Not even the living.

Beside me on a broad picket sign was an artist's depiction of the Moresby Center as it would look when finished. The building was a windowed taper standing on the cliffside, matter-of-fact as a stalagmite, surrounded by impressionistic renderings of trees, cars, and students. Beneath the drawing was a list of the departments that had won a coveted space: chemistry would be housed there, and agricultural science, Spanish, creative writing, and drama, some branches of history. Anthropology, of course. I thought there was something a little belligerent about the building, its solitary height. To me it looked like the college, fed up at last, lifting a middle finger to the plain.

I turned away from the yellow safety rope. I felt skittish, inclined to bolt; but I was not yet ready to go home. Whatever impulse had
brought me there wasn't satisfied. I walked away from the cliff, toward the forest path, and in a few minutes I had arrived at the statue of Tip Chandler. To my surprise—how long
had
it been?—the founder stood upright. The patina was scrubbed off, too, and he was circled with a waist-high fence. I supposed they didn't want people sitting on him now. On a stone at my feet a bronze plaque was inset: “
HE LOOKED AT THE DESERT AND SAW ATHENS
.” I looked at Chandler. In his new posture he had lost the embarrassed dignity I had always liked him best for. Now he seemed serious, a believer, a little scary to be close to—much as he must have been in life.

Next I went to the classroom in Gunnery Hall where I had stumbled on McTaggett's class. The door was locked, and pressing my face against the grilled rectangle of glass I saw that the room had been converted for storage. It was row after row of prefab shelving now. Cardboard cartons, overflowing with printout, were heaped in the aisles. I abandoned campus and headed into town. The Tooth and Nail was still there, but inside it was unrecognizable. There were stucco partitions everywhere, and the lighting was pure white and sourceless, as in an art museum. At one end of the bar a group of wide-shouldered young men in business dress were arguing talmudically about the rules of Canadian football, as the Canadians tussled and disported on the big screen above them. Near the entrance, thin-faced girls stood in a circle, sucking at mixed drinks, planning something. I backed out.