The Grasshopper King (5 page)

“Potato,” he said.

“Potato?” Rosso asked. Around him sat the members of the emergency faculty committee, nursing stale coffee. “You're sure that's what he said? Potato?”

“I
told
you,” Cheryl said tearfully. “I asked him which he wanted and he said ‘Potato.'” She dragged one frilly sleeve across her nose. They'd made her wear her Happy Clappy's uniform for the reenactment.

“You're doing fine,” Rosso told her. “Nobody's saying otherwise.”

He directed a gathering-in gesture at the row of wan faces flanking him, soliciting consensus. Oh no, came the murmur. Nobody's saying that.

“But I want you to think back very carefully now, one more time, and tell me if Professor Higgs might have said anything
besides
‘Potato.'”

“Potato,” Cheryl said. “That is absolutely the last thing and then I gave him his cheeseburger. Which he ate and then left. Can't I go home?”

The rest of the committee was growing restless. It had been two hours and they'd learned nothing. Dean Moresby leaned forward. “I think we ought to end this,” he told Rosso.

“All right,” Rosso said, reluctantly, “the meeting is adjourned. Thank you, Cheryl.” Still crying, clutching her starched sides, the girl fled.

What had happened? In brief: the word “potato” was the last one Higgs had spoken. After eating his cheeseburger he'd gone back to his office and begun writing letters: a note authorizing Ellen to make financial arrangements in his name, references for his few persisting graduate students, a petition for sabbatical, effective at once and continuing until such time as Higgs saw fit to end it. Since then he had not spoken to anyone, nor had he communicated in writing. The professors and the Dean had tried every flavor of cajolement and threat; all in vain.

Only Ellen seemed unperturbed. “I suppose he'll talk again,” she said, “when he has something to talk about.” After she'd gone, the committee members buzzed at her equanimity. Rosso wondered aloud how long she'd keep it up. Rosso, Dean Moresby reflected, hadn't known the girl when she was twelve.

Months went by; Higgs remained speechless. His story went out as human interest on the
AP
wire. In April, Harry Reasoner arrived on campus to film a piece on Higgs for
60 Minutes
. The segment, when it aired, implied strongly that the whole enterprise was a veiled act of protest against the war. A movement, Reasoner hinted darkly, might be on its way. In those days it was possible to imagine such a thing; silent professors on every corner, accusing and significant, our homegrown variety of torched monk. But it didn't catch on.

Higgs retreated to his house on the cliff. Every so often the student paper ran an article: “
PROFESSOR STILL IN SECLUSION
” or some such, on the back page, under the comics. That was all.

One afternoon in September, Ellen responded to a knock on the door to find her father on the stoop, accompanied by two professors she didn't know, a nervous-looking graduate student, and a pair of technicians laden with tape recorders, microphones, and yards of wire.

She stepped into the doorway and crossed her arms. “What's this all about, Daddy?”

Eyes fixed on the lintel, he explained: the Henderson scholars had formed a plan. Recalling that Higgs's shorter pauses had invariably concluded with some concentrated insight, they had reasoned that the current silence promised a breakthrough on a previously unimagined scale, a Grand Unified Theory of Henderson. They were terrified of missing it, when it came. They had no reason to be confident that Higgs would publish, or even repeat himself for their benefit. So the Henderson Society had arranged a substantial fund to assure that Higgs's next words would not go unwitnessed. The nervous graduate
student would sit all day with Higgs; the tape recorders would run all night. In this way an exhaustive record could be kept.

“Absolutely not,” Ellen said. “There will not be strangers in this house bothering my husband.” She shut the door and barred it.

“Honey, be reasonable,” Dean Moresby said through the door. “You'll get used to it.”

“Out of the question.”

He took a deep breath. “I don't like to have to remind you that your house is owned by the university.”

“Then don't.”

“Think how terrible it will be if the police have to come.”

After a meaningful interval Ellen pulled back the bar, allowed the intruders to file shamefacedly past. Higgs was sitting in the kitchen, eating corn chips one by one from an ancient-looking wooden bowl. Ellen stepped behind his chair and laced her fingers together; and in this conjugal tableau, silent and stubborn, they remained, as the workers installed the recorders and the mikes. But when the technicians started upstairs to the bedroom she balked.

“But in case he should talk in his sleep . . .” her father explained.

“He does not,” she said icily. And Dean Moresby ordered the men back downstairs. He didn't want it to be any harder for his daughter than was necessary. And this
was
necessary: that, he believed. He was as convinced as he had been two decades before that in Higgs, somehow, lay the university's salvation. With his decline the rest of the faculty had slunk back to its traditional malaise. The torrent of graduate applications was a dripping tap again. And LaBart's boys had never really adjusted to the climate; the taller and more playful Eastern teams were drumming them off the court. A word from Higgs, he thought, the
right
word, could change everything back. Whenever he imagined letting go of that certainty he felt sick and confused. He did not expect Ellen to forgive him.

And indeed, she never did. She made some inquiries about a suit; but the Henderson Society was wealthy, who knew how, and conversant
with strange byways of influence, and it was clear before long that the scholars could mire any litigation perhaps indefinitely—certainly beyond her ability to pay a lawyer on Higgs's salary. She had no money of her own with which to move out, and, under the circumstances, she couldn't ask her father. So Ellen made do with a more personal defiance. Whenever the nervous graduate student, or one of the successors to his position, was with Higgs, she made a point of banging pots, vacuuming, knocking over chairs, running the blender empty. The radio was always on, as loud as it would go. She didn't speak to her father. And Higgs didn't speak to anyone.

Thirteen years later, I, Samuel Grapearbor, graduated from Chandler State University—penniless, dissatisfied, experienced at nothing, in need of a job.

CHAPTER 2

A LITTLE ABOUT MYSELF

Now that my younger self is about to enter the story, I find myself a little reluctant to get on with it. So let me pause for a moment and explain how I came to be involved with Henderson, and thus with Higgs—a story, in its own way, as unlikely as the professor's own.

I was born in 1963 on the outskirts of Chandler City, in a three-room apartment above my parents' business, the Grape Arbor Café and Grill. Eight months before, my parents had moved from New York, where they had operated a restaurant by the same name which enjoyed much traffic in the dignitaries of the nascent counterculture. Look it up: you can find my mother in any number of poems, minor, uncollected ones, from that brief and in its own way exalted period when people
wrote
poems in restaurants, on the backs of checks, or rather when anything written in a restaurant, on the back of a check, was a poem, simply by virtue of its staggering and implausible success at existing in the world. But those times were coming to a close. Our reputation had become great enough that thrill-seekers flooded the café after the plays let out, hoping for an overheard snatch of cool, or at the very least a whiff of reefer. And the poets, in their fickle way, were tiring of the spontaneity of unmediated experience; the most advanced ones were rhyming again. Many were going back to school. “It's time to go,” my mother told my father; and when she read the story of Tip Chandler in a magazine, she knew where.
My father, a mild man, dedicated to prudent consistency, demurred. But my mother kept at it. They would be close to the wilderness, she pointed out, and far from the draining pretentiousness of city life. And artists were bastards, who left insulting tips, if any. The disappointed thrill-seekers were no better. It wasn't long before he came around.

There was one more reason to move, which she didn't bring up, because my father didn't know about it yet: there was me. I think she had some idea that, born in the West, I would grow up steely, level-voiced, inclined to swift action. My mother is a woman of passionate opinion, and has been wrong about many things; but never, I believe, more wrong than in this.

The Grape Arbor's vegetarian leanings failed to catch on with the miners, drillers, and mountain men, and we were too far from downtown to attract the university crowd. Before long my parents had to learn to grill cheeseburgers to survive. Business, even so, was slim. A year after the move my father started looking for a second job. Unbrawny, ill-at-ease around machinery, he was in trouble from the start; but eventually he secured a slot on Mayor Meadows's geothermal research team. Reading maps, digging holes, he could do, and the impossibility of advancement suited his constant nature. In this manner we mobilized upward. Starting from poverty, we topped out at bare subsistence.

Despite themselves, my parents began to think of New York nostalgically, even wistfully. My mother had come to the opinion that there wasn't much to the wilderness that couldn't be experienced adequately through nature magazines. And the artists—true, their tips had been small, their demeanor condescending, but at least there had been a certain standard of conversation. The artists had never spat chaw or slapped my mother's rear, and when they cursed it was in the service of wit. Their every rudeness seemed, in retrospect, like charm. But there was no money to go back now.

When I was old enough I was put to work in the restaurant, in charge of the grill and the fry-o-lator. I spent every afternoon engulfed in a miasma of singed Crisco, tamping down patties the size of drink
coasters, sullenly imagining myself in New York, where I was certain that I belonged, and where hamburgers, I was equally certain, were not cut so liberally with wheat germ that whole unalloyed pockets of it spilled out from the meat onto the grill and charred there, with a smell like a burning barn. Since, to my mother's way of thinking, the grill was strictly a sidelight, I was the waiter too. In fact, my cooking constituted the majority of what we sold. Her carrot manicotti, billed as “famous”—it had been in poems—languished. Apparently the people of Chandler City didn't care for fame. Nor did they care for her mock-Caesar salad, her several plates of crudités, her soy and brown-rice paella, any of the sugarless, dairyless, yeastless cakes that rested flat and foreboding in our display case like defunct
UFOS
. Mostly she sat at the window, glowered, and smoked. I often told customers I was not my parents' son, but an orphan midget, away without leave from the Dutch national circus. Some seemed to believe me.