The Essential Ellison Part 13

"Are you from one of those street gangs?"

"No, we're just a coupla patriots doing a good deed."

"I'm tired'a talking. Get it going, Rohrer."

"You...you're Jewish, aren't you?"

"I said get going, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Now!"

And they brought him to Lilian Goldbosch.

Wonder danced in her eyes. A dance of the dead in a bombed-out graveyard; a useless weed growing in a bog. She stared across the room at him. He stood just inside the door, legs close together, arms at his sides, his face as featureless as an expanse of tundra. Only the gray eyes moved in the face, and they did so liquidly, flowing from comer to comer, seeing what was there to be seen.

Lilian Goldbosch walked across the room toward him. Victor Rohrer did not move. Behind him, Arch and Frank closed the door softly. They stood like paladins, one on either side of the door. They watched-with intense fascination-what was happening in this silently humming room. As different worlds paused for an eternal moment.

They did not fully comprehend what it was, but so completely had the blond boy and the old woman absorbed each other's presence that for now they-the ones who had effected the meeting-were gone, invisible, out of phase no more a part of the life generated in the room than the mad little bird that dipped its beak in water, agonizingly straightened, rocked and dipped again, endlessly.

She walked up, very close to him. Where she had scratched him, his face was still marked. She reached up, involuntarily fascinated, and made as if to touch him. He moved back an inch, and she caught herself.

"You are very young."

It was said in appraisal, with a tinge of amazement, not a hue of poetry anywhere in it; an attempt to codify the reality bf this creature, Victor Rohrer.

He said nothing, but a faint softness came to his mouth, as if he knew another truth. On another face, it might have been a sneer.

"Do you know me?" she asked. "Who I am?" He was extremely polite, as if she were a supplicant and it had fallen to him to maintain decorum and form with her. "You're the woman who attacked me."

Her lips tightened. The memory was still fresh, an eroded fall on a volcanic hillside she had thought incapable of being ravaged again. "I'm sorry about that."

"I've come to expect it. From you people."

"My people..."

"Jews."

"Oh. Yes. I'm Jewish."

He smiled knowledgeably. "Yes, I know. It says everything, doesn't it?"

"Why do you do this thing? Why do you walk around and tell people to hate one another?"

"I don't hate you."

She stared at him warily; there had to be more. There was.

"How can one hate a plague of locusts, or a packrat that lives in the walls? I don't hate, I'm merely an exterminator."

"Where did you get these ideas? Why does a boy your age fool around with this kind of thing, do you know what went on in the world twenty-five years ago, do you know all the sorrow and death this kind of thinking brought?"

"Not enough. He was a madman, but he had the right idea about the Juden. He had the final solution, but he made mistakes."

His face was perfectly calm. He was not reciting cant, he was delivering a theory he had worked out, logically, completely, finally.

"How did you get so much sickness in you?"

"It is a matter of opinion which of us is diseased. I choose to believe you are the cancer."

"What do your parents think of this?"

A hot little spot of red appeared high on his cheeks. "Their opinions are of very little concern to me."

"Do they know about what you do?"

"I'm getting tired of this. Are you going to tell these two punks to let me go, or will I have to put up with more abuse from you and your kind?" His face was getting slightly flushed now. "Do you wonder that we want to purge you, purify the country of your filth? When you constantly prove what we say is so?"

Lilian Goldbosch turned to the two boys by the door. "Do you know where he lives?" Arch nodded. "I want to see his mother and father. Will you take me there?" Again, Arch nodded. "He doesn't know. He doesn't understand. I can't find out from him. I'll have to ask there."

Flames burned up suddenly in Victor Rohrer's eyes. "You'll stay away from my home!"

"I'll get my purse," she said, softly.

He went for her. His hands came out and up and he was on her, hurling her backward, over a footstool, and they went into a heap, the woman thrashing frantically, and Victor Rohrer coldly, dispa.s.sionately trying to strangle her.

Arch and Frank moved quickly.

Frank grabbed Rohrer around the throat in a hammerlock, and without ceremony or warning, Arch lifted a marble ashtray from an end table and swung it in an arc. The ashtray smacked across the side of Victor Rohrer's head with an audible sound, and he suddenly tilted to the left and fell past Lilian Goldbosch.

He was not unconscious, Arch had pulled his punch, but he was dazed. He sat on the floor, moving his head as if it belonged to somebody else. The two high school boys attended the woman. She struggled to pick herself up, and they helped her to her feet.

"Are you okay?" Frank asked.

She leaned against Arch, and automatically her hand went to her hair, to tidy it. But the movement was only half-formed, as if all those narcissistic acts she had used to make her life livable were now frippery. Her breathing was jagged, and red marks circled her larynx where Rohrer had fastened on tightly.

"He is the complete n.a.z.i," she husked. "He has eaten the n.a.z.i cake, and digested it; he is one of them. It is the old fear, the same one, the very same one, come again. Dear G.o.d, we will see it again, the way it was before."

She began to sob. From an empty room within the structure of her soul, tears that had dried years before were called on, and would not come. Ludicrously, she rasped and wheezed, and when nothing came to her eyes, she swallowed hard and bit her lip. In a while she had stopped.

"We must take him home," she said. "I want to talk to his parents."

They got Victor Rohrer under the arms, and they lifted him. He staggered and bobbled, but between them they got him downstairs and into the car. Arch sat in back with him, and Lilian Goldbosch stared straight ahead through the windshield, even when they finally pulled up in front of Rohrer's house in the suburb, Berkeley.

"We're here," Frank said to her. She started, and looked around slowly. It was a neat, unprepossessing house, set in a line among many such houses. It escaped a total loss of ident.i.ty by a certain warmth of landscaping: dwarf j.a.panese trees dotting the front lawn, a carefully trimmed hedge that ran down the property line on one side, ivy holding fast to a comer of the house with several years of climbing having brought it just under the second-floor windows. An ordinary house, in an ordinary town.

"Okay, Rohrer, out."

Victor Rohrer went wild! His face contorted. The cold logical animosity of the cool reasoning racist was suddenly washed away. He began speaking in a thin, venomous tone, the words slipping out between knife-edge lips; they did not hiss, but they might as well have; he did not scream, but it had the same shocking effect.

"Kike filth. How much longer do you think you're going to be able to push people around like this? All of you, just like you, with your rotten poisonous filth, trying to take over, trying to tell people what to do; you ought to be killed, every one of you, slaughtered like pigs, I'd do it myself if I could. You'll see, your day is coming, the final day for you..."

It was rasped out with such intensity, Lilian Goldbosch sat straight, tensed, unable to move, it was a voice from the past. Her body began to tremble. It was the old fear, the one that years of war and years of peace had put in a grave she now found had always been too shallow. The corpse of that fear had clawed its way up out of the dirt and ma.s.sed dead flesh of the communal grave, and was again walking the world.

Arch reached across and opened the door. He shoved Victor Rohrer before him. Frank and Lilian Goldbosch joined them as they walked up the front drive toward the little house.

"I've found my answer," Lilian Goldbosch said, terror in her voice. "It is the old fear, the terrible one, the one that destroys worlds. And he is the first of them...but there will be many more...many..."

Her eyes were dull as they reached the front door. Rohrer spun about, slapping Arch's hand off his arm. "You aren't going to meet them! I won't allow you in! This isn't a Jew-run town, I'll have you arrested for kidnapping, for breaking and entering..."

Lilian looked past him.

Past him, to the lintel of the door.

And the fear suddenly drained out of her face.

Victor Rohrer saw her expression, and half-turned his head. Arch and Frank looked in the direction of Lilian Goldbosch's stare. Attached to the lintel of the door, at a slant, was a tubular ornament of shiny bra.s.s. Near the top of the face of the ornament was a small hole, through which Arch and Frank could see some strange lettering.

Lilian Goldbosch said, "Shaddai," reached across Victor Rohrer and touched the tiny hole, then withdrew her hand and kissed the fingertips. Her face had been transformed. She no longer looked as though darkness was on its way.

Victor Rohrer made no move toward her.

"That is a fine mezuzah, Victor," she said, softly, looking at him now with complete control of the situation. She started to turn away. "Come along, boys, I don't need to see Victor's parents now: I understand."

They stared at Rohrer. He suddenly looked like a hunted animal. All his cool polite self-possession was gone. He was sweating. Alone, he stood, suddenly, on his own doorstep, next to a tubular ornament on a right doorpost, alone. Afraid.

Lilian paused a moment, turned back to Victor Rohrer. "It is true no one has a happy childhood, Victor. But we all have to live, to go on. Yours must not have been nice, but...try to live, Victor. You aren't my enemy, neither am I your enemy."

She walked down the steps, turned once more and said, kindly, as an afterthought, "I will say a prayer for you."

Bewildered, Arch and Frank looked at Victor Rohrer for a long moment. They saw a man of dust. A scarecrow. An emptiness where a person had stood a moment before. This old woman, with incomprehensible words and a sudden sureness, had hamstrung him, cut the nerves from his body, emptied him like a container of murky liquid.

With a soft sound of panic, Victor Rohrer hurled himself off the front steps, and ran across the yard, disappearing in a moment. He was gone, and the three of them stood there, looking at the afternoon.

"What did you say to him?" Arch said. "That word you said. What was it?"

Lilian Goldbosch turned and walked to the car. They came and held the door for her. She was regal. When she looked up at the boys, she smiled. "Shaddai. The name of the Lord. From Deuteronomy."

Then she got in, and they closed the door. Out of sight of Lilian Goldbosch, where she sat calmly, waiting to be driven home, Arch and Frank stared at each other. Total confusion. Something had happened here, but they had no idea what it was.

Then they got in the car and drove her home. She thanked them, and asked them to call on her again, any time. They could not bring themselves to ask what had happened, because they felt they should be smart enough to know; but they didn't know.

Outside, they looked at each other, and abruptly, just like that, everything that had gone before in their lives seemed somehow trivial. The dancing, the girls, the cars, the school that taught them nothing, the aimless days and nights of movies and cursing and picnics and drag races and ball games, all of it, seemed terribly inconsequential, next to this puzzle they had become part of.

"Shuh-die, " Arch said, looking at Frank.

"And that other word: muh-zooz-what it was."

They went to see a boy they knew, in their cla.s.s, a boy they had never had occasion to talk to before. His name was Arnie Sugarman, and he told them three things.

When they got back to Lilian Goldbosch's apartment, they knew something was wrong the moment they approached the door. It was open, and the sound of cla.s.sical music came from within. They shoved the door open completely, and looked in.

She was lying half on the sofa, half on the floor. He had used a steam iron on her, and there was blood everywhere. They entered the room, avoiding the sight, avoiding the ma.s.s of pulped meat that had been her face before he had beaten her again, and again, and again, in a senseless violence that had no beginning and no end. The two high school boys went to the telephone, and Frank dialed the operator.

"Puh-police, please...I want to report a, uh, a murder..."

Lilian Goldbosch lay twisted and final; the terror that had pursued her across the world, through the years-the terror she had momentarily escaped-had at last found her and added her to the total that could never be totaled. She had found her answer, twenty-five years too late.

In the room, the only movement was a small bird with a comic beak that dipped itself in water, straightened, and then, agonizingly, repeated the process, over and over and over...

Hunkered down in an alley, where they would find him, Victor Rohrer stared out of mad eyes. Eyes as huge as golden suns, eyes that whirled with fiery little points of light. Eyes that could no longer see.

See his past, his childhood, when they had used names to hurt him. When his parents had been funny little people who talked with accents. When he had been friendless...for that reason.

For the reason of the mezuzah on the lintel. The little holy object on the lintel, the ornament that contained the little rectangle of parchment with its twenty-two lines of Hebrew from Deuteronomy.

Back behind huge garbage cans spilling refuse, in the sick-sweet rotting odor of the alley, Victor Rohrer sat with knees drawn up, staring at his limp hands, the way a fetus " sees" its limp, relaxed hands before its face. Quiet in there, inside Victor Rohrer. Quiet for the first time. Quiet after a long time of shrieking and sound and siren wails inside a skull that had offered no defense, no protection.

Victor Rohrer and Lilian Goldbosch, both Juden, both stalked; and on an afternoon in Detroit...

...both had answered with their lives a question that had never even existed, much less been asked, by two high school boys who now had begun to suspect...

...no one escapes, when night begins to fall.

Pulling Hard Time In the maximum security VR wings of New Alcatraz, there is no light. None is needed. The prisoners are fed aerobiologically: five times a day the cells are fine-sprayed with a dispersion of microscopically-calibrated nutrients, pollens, bacteria-inhibiting spores and microorganisms, cleansing agents, and depilitants. All waste products gelate, coalesce and are sucked out of the null-gravity free fall enclosure through egress tiles in the sterile white pyrex floor. Random items of furniture-overstuffed easy chairs, end-table lamps, swatches of astroturf, saki cups-float relaxedly in the gentle air tides that waft through the cells.

These non-penal artifacts have been stored in the cells. For the most part, they are the property of Warden Emmanuel v. Burkis, a collector of household trinkets from the past. They have been laded in the null-g maximum security cells, where they share floating s.p.a.ce with lifers paying their debt to society, because storage s.p.a.ce is at a premium in the one hundred per cent automated environs of New Alcatraz. To take the job of overseeing the Rock, even at the handsome figure paid annually by the Internment Department of the United States government, Warden Burkis was gifted with unlimited shopping authority for his hobby-household trinkets from the past. It is a lonely and quiet place, the Rock.

The lifers who occupy these cells never object to the floating furniture. They, themselves, float. They exist in a transmundane virtual reality nexus, dreaming their special dreams, bobbing and slowly turning in the vagrant breezes that play forever through the VR wings. They are serving their lifetime sentences, hanging in null-g oblivion growing more grossly rotund and discolored by the decade. They will b.u.mp against walls and wedge in triangular dead ends where ceiling meets vertical tile surfaces till one night, or one day, they will expire in the middle of the special dream. And only through a death kept long at bay, to a.s.suage the demands of Society for retribution will their sentences be commuted. Commuted, that is, to a place (in the sentencing litany of the Universal Penal Code) "far worse than the h.e.l.l in which they have served their sentence." We are a nation in balance.

Charlie was out back, feeding the chickens, when he heard Robin scream. He dropped the tin bucket, spilling millet in a long swath. He ran back to the restaurant shack in a panic, tripping and falling once.

As he came through the screen door at the rear of the shack, he saw the four men tearing at Robin's clothes. They had her on her back on one of the tables, and one of the leather-clad bikers had already ripped her blouse off. Her ap.r.o.n hung off one ankle. Another had spread her legs, and was unzipping his roughout pants, pushing between her thighs as the shortest of the four, a little man with almost no hair on the left side of his head, cut away Robin's skirt with what looked like a fish-boning knife.

The fourth man sat at the counter, his back to Charlie, a bottle of Pepsi to his lips.

They had come in and ordered four Sunday chicken specials. Charlie had said he'd fry up the orders, but Robin had asked him to go out back and feed the chickens. Lumschbogen's Chicken & Bisquit Shack. Out on Route 5. Charlie had kissed his wife, and smiled at the four amiable bikers whose Harleys and an Indian and a Moto Guzzi 750 were ranked right outside the front door, and he'd gone out back. At first, he hadn't heard her screaming above the prattling of the flock.

The one at the counter heard Charlie come through the screen door, and swiveled on the counter stool. He had the Pepsi in his mouth. Charlie came at him fast and with the flat of his hand rammed the bottle through the biker's teeth, shoving the neck through the back of his mouth. It came out just above the nape. The man staggered to his feet, clutching his face, and fell backward into the three trying to rape Charlie's wife.

As he fell, he struck the little, half-bald one, the one who had ridden up on the 750 Amba.s.sador. His flailing arms struck the little man, and he stumbled against the tables driving the fish-boning knife into Robin's stomach. Her scream was worse than the ones before.

Charlie grabbed up the cleaver they used to dismember the chickens for the Sunday specials, and came around the counter swinging. In Ranger basic training at Fort Benning they had discovered the hated nickname the kids had concocted on the playground when he was growing up, and they tormented him with its use. They called Charlie Lumschbogen "Charlie Lunchbucket" and he was given an Article 15 punishment for beating up two of his barracks mates.

Charlie Lunchbucket did not stop hacking and dismembering, even after the Smokeys had grabbed him. They had to cold-c.o.c.k him with their riot sticks to get him to lie still.

Not even the extenuating circ.u.mstance of Robin, impaled and almost naked on a checkered tablecloth, saved him from the wrath of the law and order jury. The photographic blowups at the trial were just too grotesque. The walls of the shack had been redecorated like a pointillist canvas.