Women and Men (233 page)

Both anthropologists insisted on talking at the same time. The sexton in his survivor’s robe answered easily, as if the questions were all one. So why’d the bomb zap clothing now but not before? Did he mean us to believe that that thought of his about clothes just before the bomb detonated was just a coincidence? And how come he wasn’t upset about his church being demolished? And
had
the thought preceded the bomb?

Ah, what would be the point of getting upset? said this increasingly benign elder, his glasses intact; and in any case in the absence of debris what evidence was there that the church
had
been demolished? If the bomb respected life, perhaps it had one of its own both in substance and in its eternal formula and was therefore capable of growth; and if so, perhaps its growth was reciprocal with our own, and coincidence no more than the powers of the multiverse converging as the hand learns to love the leg, the body the mind, the brain the heart. And the sexton raised a hand in greeting or farewell, and his lips hardly moved, if they moved at all, as he apparently said, "The main thing is that all the survivorsjfo?/ so good."

Whereupon his questioners were distracted by the appearance here and there of other robed survivors. The two anthropologists remembered they had neglected to ask this humble savant why the hundreds of
other
survivors had not been denuded in this latest test. They saw the boy baseball player, the stubbly derelict, and, from the building that had been the bomb’s central target, two male elevator operators and a female draftsman raise a hand in the same manner as the sexton simultaneously although they were not all in sight of each other. The sexton turned away, and the anthropologists were ushered out before they knew it.

Jim Ash, who, humble journeyman, found himself drawn inexorably toward hard science, noted that the two investigators did not report back to their watchdog subcommittee. They volunteered for the next available test. The debriefing lab teams weren’t talking, and Jim Ash reported that
they
had now been sequestered. Asked how they had fallen safely from great heights, many survivors smiled with a new form of wordless generosity. An elevator operator said it wasn’t like falling down a shaft; there
was
no shaft. A pilot, who had been weekending in the penthouse of a targeted structure, said that for her it was like being struck dumb by love and that instead of
support
being taken away when the building was erased, on the contrary some
impediment
had been removed, and she knew deep within herself that she and gravity were friends. An anti-abortion group said the women survivors were hysterically possessed. The small but vocal political opposition to the government charged that survivors ate and worked sparingly, seemed at times drugged yet suspiciously alert, and stuck together. Large groups of survivors turned up in parks and open plazas and brought with them a silence natural and fascinating to bystanders—to "non-survivors," as Jim Ash called them. In these hushed gatherings the survivors would nod or shake their heads, smile or open their mouths as if to breathe something more than air. They communicated among one another without words and often without looks. Two sailors reported that in the vicinity of a group of survivors odd shifts of air current and moisture-dryness ratio were felt.

Eventually a survivor was kidnapped. It was the former National Guard major who had been an executive in the seaport outerwear factory. The kidnappers phoned Jim Ash to report that their captive had disappeared on them. Several known survivors phoned Jim Ash to say they were convinced there had been a raid on the rural lab where the bomb formula had been discovered. The ex-major was accused in absentia by the Committee for a Sane Bomb of stealing the formula to sell. The kidnappers reported that the major had had a peculiar incision in his chest
before
they had worked him over; the committee accused the government of altering the survivors. A hundred survivors selected at random were called in and found to be feeling fine. Ash was known to have visited the missing ex-major’s physician. Ash phoned to give us in strictest confidence a fuller account of what Mara had told him in the valley. Several foreign powers complained that the varying effects of the bomb made its formula difficult to infer. Unaccountably, Washington offered to share the bomb. The sharing would be phased. Demonstrations would be given abroad on targets mutually agreed upon though chosen by the United States. Then the formula would be passed to nations that could show a real need for it. Gradually, postblast findings would be shared. A mass protest of archaeologists in a green field near England’s famed ancient baths was given a surprise bombing, to demonstrate good faith by the targeting of an area where there were only people and no buildings; the archaeologists reported afterward that they, in the American phrase, had a good feeling and in terms of their profession were looking inward as never before.

Unavailable for almost a month, Ash was reported to have said that the increasing sophistication of the bomb’s effects—its growth, if you will— might not be the result of tinkering with the formula. Jim was usually onto something when he was not in touch with us. Now he phoned to report that a top science adviser had told him that in fact, from one test to the next, no changes in the bomb’s formula
or
in the operational nuts and bolts had been contemplated. "They" were letting the device "have its head." They were going to clear away the Golden Gate Bridge in an upcoming test in order to prepare for the construction of a new bridge which the contractor had promoted by enlisting several survivors as advisers.

A brain-scan technician at the original Stateside postblast debriefing had asked to be included in the upcoming test. His request had been denied, and he was in a dangerous state. On a day when saffron ceilings of pollution over New York, Denver, and Los Angeles mysteriously turned into three great gentle gray clouds suggesting the forms of future animals and then almost simultaneously condensed into a rain so rich that acid lawns turned blue and the very police stripped themselves naked in the avenues giving thanks to that tonic flood of new weather, the technician whose request had been denied expressed his rage by calling a press conference. He would tell all, or at least more than he knew.

It was a violent scene. Jim Ash and others blocked the double doors as long as they could. The technician was letting it all out—anger and information. Survivor brain voltages, if anyone cared to know, had hit levels so far beyond parameter models as to be either freakish and lethal or an adaptive mutation that made this a whole new ball game. Moreover, these unthinkable sharp loads of electrical charge—if it
was
electricity—were coming from such a small fraction of the brain that large areas "looked" positively dead, and this was presently borne out by the trimensional pictures, though they came out spotty. But one thing was clear: there was endless variation from survivor to survivor as to which brain areas were nonfunctional, yet the actual
amount
was a pretty consistent fifty percent in most of the subjects, while from other brain sectors came these giant flows of more force than you would think a head could handle.

The technician stopped—his mustache drooped—something in him had stopped, or his powerful rage at being rebuffed in his effort to be a bomb survivor was beginning to translate force into guilt. Newspersons scuffled with federal officers at the door. Facing a dozen questions at once, the technician ignored them and talked fast. These survivors had seemed to know each other. No matter who they were. Yes, and they laughed too damn much, many of them at the X-rays. They said the machine must be one of the early models. Big joke. What happened to the synthetic sieve my surgeon tucked into my liver last Christmas? one asked. A more potent X-ray "eye" was flown in from the Caucasus. One survivor had laughed so hard he clapped a hand over his chest and his eyes stood out; his hand covered an incision. He wasn’t the only one with an incision. Like some others with incisions, he looked at his X-ray and said, "There’s nothing there." Big joke.

Jim Ash, struggling with federal officers who were trying to enter the long room, called out over his shoulder, "Was that man a part-time major in the National Guard?" but the technician, in whom for a moment resentment had seemed to slow down into nostalgia, pressed on: These people! Secretly communicative people! Happy,
frighteningly
happy! Well, when their follow-up scans came in, the voltages had risen again but now the huge charge had distributed itself, and amazingly the voltages were coming from all quadrants and yet the new trimensionals showed that the
dead
hunks of brain were now gone, obliterated, what have you, removed—

"Vaporized?" a woman called, and Jim Ash picked her out.

—but the measurable brain power now perfectly spread itself, the technician continued, and came alike from the cell matter that had gone on living as well as from these gaps, these vacancies, these voids with shapes that you had seen before . . . these voids . . . presumably left by the bomb.

The fugitive technician had rediscovered sheer science. His ruminative pause made Jim Ash and the other defenders at the door turn to look, and this was just long enough for the feds to rush the room. This happened so suddenly that Ash had a moment to get away.

The officers were not interested in him then. The former major’s physician phoned to ascertain Jim’s whereabouts. A medical hardware firm phoned, wanting Ash to see their lab in a remote wooded area of New England; they sounded too nice. One of the six biggest cathedrals in an unidentified eastern European country was reported to have been resolved and absorbed in a test employing American advisers and technicians. More and more survivors were being sequestered because their common problems of adaptation were thought to be best met among their own kind. A woman known to be checking out the links between the breath of survivors and recent changes in weather patterns was visited by Jim Ash, who tried to explain what an early survivor woman had revealed to him—how total-body auras dispersed pure vibration prior to the light of dawn.

Ash at last phoned in to report that two California survivors, who had been about to present to the bridge contractor their plan to replace the Golden Gate Bridge with a force field spread like an airy milk by the energy of people who had been resolved by survival, had suddenly been sequestered. A test on an Austrian concert hall was called off because Ash was reported to be racing there in order to become a survivor, but later a group of heart specialists convening only a stone’s throw from the concert reported that Ash had come and urged them to support the bomb as a cure, whatever it did to the pacemaker industry.

Above the Hungarian pampas an unidentified hovering object was resolved without residue in a test that failed to determine if any aliens
or
Hungarians had been aboard. Here in the U.S. in areas where homes had been resolved/ subtracted, we arrived at a new clemency of weather. The government investigated a link between this meteorological change and a diminution of wind velocities at what had been the third windiest place in America. Jim Ash was caricatured in the newspapers as a man both hiding out when no one was looking for him and trying to discover the next test site in order at last to become a survivor himself. The Committee for a Sane Bomb advised the President that these unpredictable alterations in the weather were due to the wholesale elimination of building across the continent. A philosopher replied that Memory is the estranged spouse of Prediction. We could not put all these facts together but we knew again that the contemplation of a completed past might yield not just regret but certainty.

The government shut up shop and declared the so-called "People-Oriented Bomb" illegal. We were not clear if the now very great number of survivors sequestered around the world were letting themselves be sequestered or couldn’t help it; and were they affecting the rest of us from their safe distance or not? and was it safe? Widespread information on the dynamics between the extant and the vacant areas of survivors’ brains achieved fabulous proportions. It could now be told that many survivors had disappeared during extended debriefing; they had relatives to prove it. More disappeared than reappeared. One day a man called to say he was the kidnapped major whose landmark pacemaker had been vaporized; he had felt so good after the resolution of his three-story outerwear factory and subsequent debriefing and hilarious X-rays that he had tried to double his luck and had got past the guards claiming to be a physician in attendance. So he had been resolved twice over, and this second time he had had exploded out of his overall person that last anxious urge to maintain his body as constant evidence of the past and assurance of the future. Thus, he had found he could suck by means of a quickened circulatory system all of himself into those new gaps of brain vacancy that this charge, so curiously equal in distribution, disguised as regular cells. But he did not take to invisibility and was glad of it only since it had helped him escape his kidnapper-torturers who were prepared to impose old-fashioned nuclear blackmail upon a major city to be named later even though everyone knew the government would not buckle under.

When we spoke of Mara’s love for Jim Ash, we knew it was the truth. Her two loves, really. We remembered the first, who had died of excess charge and died at dawn. Jim, then, had been the second love, but it was the two men together who were the love of Mara’s life. And Jim she had loved too much to attach him to herself. He must remain outside the company of survivors. This was a familiar issue. Had the sexton called forth by his thought about clothes the new added capability of the People-Oriented Bomb, or had the potential in the bomb caused him to think the thought that proved to be prediction? Likewise, Jim had often said he wanted no part of survival and would rather be himself, as long as he had all his faculties and, if it wasn’t asking too much, his limbs and principal appurtenances, and would rather from his limited angle look at these people and the powers which survival gave them—and here the former major was saying Mara had
wanted
this for Jim, perhaps destined it for him.