Oberheim (Voices) Part 39

"Yes. It seems my curse to have lonely old men confide in me."

"Listen to me Brunner," said the captain sternly. "Don't be that way.

We need him. We need his firepower. Whether you like it or not, we need you to listen to his every word, and learn what you can from him.

Account yourself as befits the situation! We are in enemy s.p.a.ce now, and the Soviet detection screens won't hide us forever."

"Captain. They are not going to turn and leave us now."

"You must not count on that! And I am still your commanding officer, however vague the current status. Remember that."

"Yes, sir."

He performed officiously the duties of a long day, with growing impatience, but simultaneously fearing for the time to pa.s.s. For at least now he still had hope. He could still imagine the happy reunion with Ara, still picture the moment of finding her: the tearful embrace and releasing of pent-up, brutalized emotions---the lonely hours of anguish, always fearing the worst, listening to the battle rage inside him.

And yet in the end came the thought, the realization, that he NEEDED TO KNOW. Sixty odd hours, then the battle. Then the landing on Dracus.

When his shift was over he went to the officer's mess and partook, what little he ate of it, of the evening meal. He sat alone at an empty table and spoke to no one, but the others were used to this. With different words they all realized that he had sunk very deep into himself, and did not wish to be disturbed in his reverie. And they were right. Almost he feared to take comfort in the company of other men, as if this might somehow lessen the prayerful necessity of finding his wife.

He returned again to his room. Taking out a pen and pad of paper he made some notes for the following day, then picked up his copy of A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, and began to read. Dragged down after a time by its minute detail and understated hopelessness, he placed a marker in the book and set it down, scrawling idly some verses that came to him then. Weary and lethargic he lay back on the bed, though he did not yet wish to sleep.

Nevertheless he felt his eyelids drooping heavily. To block it out. .

.to shut off the day..... Even for a little while. But he could not sleep now, or he would be unable later.

He tried thinking of his mother and brother, grateful that she had escaped from the destruction of Schiller, and that he, still in training, would not see combat for some time. But he was forced to admit that these meant little to him. His brother's life (until very recently, when he had joined the s.p.a.ce navy after the fall of Athena), had taken a different path. Tomas was an artist, he a soldier. They were no longer close, as in childhood. And his mother, too, was like a distant figure, his affection for her a dying ember that the fearful walls of her religion kept any living breeze from ever fanning. He cared for nothing and no one, but Ara.

The thought came to him again of his own existence without her. His stomach crawled. He got up and paced back and forth in nervous agitation. This restlessness was maddening! His mind raced, but could seize hold of nothing concrete to calm it. At length, the mock energy expended, he lay down again and covered his eyes, not caring.....

He woke two hours later, feeling stifled in his clothes. And checking the clock he saw that deep night was only just beginning. And knew that he would not be able to sleep for many hours. He sat on the edge of the bed and took off his shirt. His arm started for the light switch, but something drew back the hand. Moved by what he could not say, he reached instead into the drawer of his dressing cabinet and pulled out from it the thick tallow candle, bra.s.s capped, that had been given him by his wife. Taking out also the metal igniter, he touched a flame to the wick and set it before him.

For a long time he did not look at his reflected image in the closet mirror, holding his head in his hands, incapable of purity of thought or emotion. He felt little outside his own fatigue, but also a slow strange stirring of the soul.

He looked up, studied his features in the soft, forgiving light of his lover. The face that he had never a.s.sociated with himself..... His eyes were drawn downward to the wiry muscles that reached from his chest to his arm. Always slender and taut, they now looked almost famished, layered rope wrapped stranding and twine after strand into nothingness. What were they for? And the rage inside him. Could he tear down the walls? Could he dive through the mirror and come to the place where his wife lay needing him, distraught, possibly frightened and in torment?

And suddenly the image changed, becoming sinister and spectral. The remembrance was almost audible.

"And how would you judge me while a Belgian officer was raping your wife?"

Caught in a trap of near despair, simultaneously hit by a rush of dizzy sickness---a lethal virus had, in fact, attacked his stomach---his mind and courage reeled in a half physical, half emotional torment.

s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversations with Dubcek came back to him, echoed and enforced, made indisputable by the darkness that hung thick and menacing around him. They dove and swirled like insane, angry birds.

His spirit palled before them.

"You must learn to be cynical"

"Some day you will be hurt very badly"

"It is the key to all truth"

"Forget your fairy-tale notions"

"While a Belgian officer was raping your wife"

"You will be hurt"

"Very badly"

"Raping your wife"

"Raping your wife"

"Raping your wife---"

"Stop it!" he cried in answer. "Get away from me!"

A foul nausea engulfed him as he staggered toward the bathroom, falling to his knees and retching violently into the toilet. Hardly able to breathe, feeling the very soul torn out his throat, he fell back against the wall and tile as wave after wave of hot sweat dizziness broke over. Finally, as if the agony that raped him had expended itself he was left, a forlorn and shivering ball on the floor, hopeless and friendless and lost.

But now the cold truth of it was clear, needing no help from the physical a.s.sault. She was gone from him forever. She had been too beautiful, too spirited. At best she was the unwilling mistress of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d animal. At worst she was dead. Dubcek was right. There was no unseen G.o.d to protect her, no Comforter to see him now and ease his pain. He had been a fool, and now he would pay for it. He should have told her to evacuate. They should never have come here. Fool! Fool!

Fool!

He wept no tears and shivered and struck the wall weakly with the side of his fist.

"Dear G.o.d don't let it be. Don't leave her! Don't leave me here....."

He sobbed. "Don't leave me."

Not much like a prayer that his mother might have taught him, but still he spoke it with all his soul. A young ensign, hearing his cries, came in from the hallway and found him there. Putting his head through Brunner's crooked arm, he lifted him and took him to the Infirmary.

The doctor had to be wakened, and did not come at once, so that he was left in a half-lying sit in a bed behind a wrap-around screen, given time, as it were, to gather himself. He felt nothing but weakness and a blank mental stupor. That things had gone too far he knew, but to whom should he address this complaint? He felt as low, though less bitter and sharp-edged, as he had ever been in his life.

He had prayed, and not in the moment of fear and anguish, but in their afterglow. This in itself was enough to show him that Dubcek had not won a convert, though he was still probably right. But this sense of wrongness and self-deprecation began to bring back bitterness. He shut it off.

I'm sorry, Ivan, he said to himself. You're a good man and I know you tried to keep me from being hurt. But I can't see the world through your eyes, or I despair..... And I cannot do that yet. Not while there is any hope.

With this a ghost inside him seemed to rest more easily. Or something.

The doctor drew back the screen and with a sleepy, objective and infinitely forgettable manner began to examine him and ask him questions, mildly rebuking him for not coming sooner.

"It is obvious that you are suffering from acute anxiety as well as the virus, and that the two feeding off one another have brought you to this state. I have been told you are here searching for your wife and that is all fine and good, but you must take better care of yourself or you will be of no use to anyone. I am going to give you an injection for the virus and prescribe lozenges to help you sleep. Yes, yes I know you do not like to take drugs into your body and if you sleep on your own you will not need them. I want you to have them anyway. You are to spend this night in hospital and the next two days off duty then you may do as you like but if you have any sense you will put from your mind what is beyond your control and guard your health more closely.

You are not the only one with problems and concerns in this time of unrest, and though you are young....."

When she left Brunner turned his head to one side against the hard pillow, still half upright, and let his thoughts and feeling sink down like stirred silt in a stream. NILEMUD AND CROCODILES. He remembered the phrase from "Portrait." What the h.e.l.l did Nilemud have to do with anything? And why was Joyce always writing about himself? Did he imagine he was the only one who suffered? And why call Ireland a sow that eats its fodder? Like murdering a sick patient.

Joyce. That was the Colonel's name as well. He wondered if they were related, or how a Joyce had come to settle in Leningrad. THE Leningrad. He compared his perceptions of the two.

Thus his mind vomited what his body could not, pa.s.sing time in words, until he started to feel dizzy again and another rush of anguish folded over him. He endured it, and with almost unselfish reserve except for the thought, again, that it was too much. Any one of the things he had felt in the past months, heightened now by nearness, might have been bearable singly, or even in bunches of two and three. But all at once and one after another was like an endless trap, with no escape from the steady flow of consciousness. But for sleep, which of late had become a fickle and untrustworthy ally.

Unbroken flow of consciousness. Perhaps that was what Joyce had been after (he suspected the thought was not original). Certainly his self-endowed character Stephen had been trapped, feeling rare moments of freedom and longing for the sky, but always coming back to himself in a dirty world. More trapped in the human sh.e.l.l than in Dublin. Did he ever truly fly? Certainly the rambling phrases were incoherent.....

And so at long length his thoughts become more natural and sleep came back to him, and shutting his eyesmind and heart, he pa.s.sed through a thick black night without dream.