“Some very exciting things have come to light,” said Butler. “Certain
historians at the Dallas Center feel that there is some proof that she
was Cave’s sister.”
I was startled by this. “How could that be? Wasn’t she from Detroit?
and wasn’t he from Seattle? and didn’t they meet for the first time in
southern California at the beginning of his mission?”
“I see you know more Cavite history than you pretend,” said Butler
amiably. “That of course has been the traditional point of view. Yet as
her influence increased in the world (in Italy, you know, one sees her
picture nearly as often as Cave’s) our historians became suspicious. It
was all perfectly simple, really: if she could exert nearly the same
power as Cave himself then she must, in some way, be related to him. I
suppose you know about the Miami business. No? Well, their Resident,
some years ago, openly promulgated the theory that Cave and Iris
Mortimer were man and wife. A great many people believed him and though
the Chief Resident at Dallas issued a statement denying the truth of
all this, Miami continued in error and it took our indoctrination
team several years to get the situation back to normal. But the whole
business _did_ get everyone to thinking and, with the concurrence of
Dallas himself, investigations have been made. I don’t know many of the
details but my colleague probably will. He keeps track of that kind of
thing.”
“If she is proven to be Cave’s sister will she have equal rank with
him?”
“Certainly not. Cavesword is everything; but she will be equal to him
on the human level though his inferior in truth: at least that appears
to be the Dallas interpretation.”
“She was very active, I suppose?”
“Right until the end. She traveled all over the world with Cavesword
and, when she grew too old to travel, she took over the Residency of
New York City which she held until she died. As a matter of fact, I
have a picture of her which I always carry. It was taken in the last
years.” He pulled out a steel-mesh wallet in which, protected by
cellophane, was a photograph of Iris: the first I had seen in many many
years. My hand shook as I held the picture up to the light.
For a split second I felt her presence, saw in the saddened face,
framed by white hair, my summer love which had never been except in my
own dreaming where I was whole and loved this creature whose luminous
eyes had not altered with age, their expression the same as that night
beside the western sea ... but then my fingers froze; the wallet fell
to the ground; I fainted into what I supposed with my last vestiges of
consciousness to be death, to be nothing.
3
I awakened in my own bed with my old friend Doctor Hussein beside me.
He looked much concerned while, at the foot of the bed, stood Butler,
very solemn and still. I resolved not to die with him in the room.
“My apologies, Mr Butler,” I said, surprised that I could speak at all.
“I’m afraid I dropped your picture.” I had no difficulty in remembering
what had happened. It was as if I had suddenly shut my eyes and opened
them again, several hours having passed instead of as many seconds.
Time, I decided, was all nonsense.
“Think nothing of it; I’m only....”
“You must not strain yourself, Mr. Hudson,” said the doctor: a touch
of sun, a few days in bed, plenty of liquids, a pill or two, and I was
left alone with a buzzer beside my bed which would summon the houseboy
if I should have a coherent moment before taking a last turn for the
worse. The next time, I think, _will_ be the final one and though I
detest the thought, these little rehearsals over the last few years,
the brief strokes, the sudden flooding of parts of the brain with the
blood of capillaries in preparation for that last arterial deluge,
have got me used to the idea. My only complaint is that odd things are
done to my memory by these strokes which, light as they have been,
tend to alter parts of the brain, those parts which hold the secrets
of the past. I have found this week, while convalescing from Tuesday’s
collapse, that most of my childhood has been washed clean out of my
memory. I knew of course that I was born on the banks of the Hudson
but I cannot for the life of me recall what schools I attended; yet
my memories from my college days on seem unimpaired though I have had
to reread this memoir attentively to resume my train of thought, to
refresh a dying memory. It is strange indeed to have lost some twenty
years as though they’d never been and, worse still, to be unable to
find out about oneself in any case, since the will of others has
effectively abolished one. I do not exist to the world and very soon
(how soon I wonder?), I shall not exist even to myself, only this
record a fragile proof that I once lived.
Now I am able to work again. Butler pays me a daily visit, as does the
doctor. Both are very kind but both tend to treat me as a thing which
no longer matters. I have been written-off in their minds: I’m no
longer really human since soon, perhaps in a few days, I shall not be
one of them but one of the dead whose dust motes the air they breathe.
Well, let it come. The fraternity of the dead, though nothing, is the
larger kingdom.
I’m able to sit up in bed (actually I can get around as well or as
badly as before but it tires me too much to walk so I remain abed).
Sunday is here at last and from the excited bustle in the air which I
feel rather than hear, Butler’s colleague must have arrived. I am not
ready for him yet and I have hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door,
composed emphatically in four languages. It should keep them out for a
few days.
I have a premonition of disaster which, though it is no doubt perfectly
natural at my age with the last catastrophe almost upon me, seems to be
of a penultimate nature, a final _human_ crisis. All that I have heard
from Butler about this young man, this colleague of his, disposes me
to fear him. For although my existence has been kept a secret from the
newer generations, the others, the older ones, the chief counselors
are well aware of me and though I have so far evaded their agents and
though they undoubtedly assume that I am long since dead it is still
possible that a shrewd young man with a career in the making might grow
suspicious and one word to the older members of the hierarchy would
be enough to start an inquisition which could end in assassination
(ironic that I should fear _that_ at this point!) or, more terrible, in
a course of indoctrination where my apostasy would be reduced by drugs
to conformity. It would be the most splendid triumph for Cave if, in my
last days, I should recant: the best victory of all, the surrender of
the original lutherist upon his deathbed.
Yet I have a trick or two up my sleeve and the game’s not yet over.
Should the new arrival prove to be the one I have so long awaited, I
shall know how to act: I have planned for this day. My adversary will
find me armed.
But now old days draw me back; the crisis approaches in my narrative.
4
The first summer was my last on the Hudson, at peace. Iris wrote me
regularly from the Florida keys: short, brisk letters completely
impersonal and devoted largely to what “he” was doing and saying. It
seems that “he” was enchanted by the strangeness of the keys, yet was
anxious to begin traveling again. With some difficulty, I gathered
between the lines, Iris had restrained him from starting out on a world
tour: “He says he wants to see Saigon and Samarkand and so forth soon
because he likes the names. I don’t see how he can get away yet, though
maybe in the fall after his tour. They say now he can make his talks on
film all at once which will mean of course he won’t have to go through
anything like last winter again.” There followed more news, an inquiry
into my health (in those days I was confident I should die early of
a liver ailment: my liver of course now seems the one firm organ in
my body; in any case, I enjoyed my hypochondria) and a reference to
the various things I was writing for the instruction of converts and
detractors both. I pushed the letter away and looked out across the
river.
I was alone, awaiting Clarissa for tea. I had actually prepared tea
since she never drank alcohol and I myself was a light drinker at best
... a non-drinker that summer when my liver rested (so powerful is
imagination) like a brazen cannonball against the cage of bones.
I sat on my porch which overlooked the lawn and the water; unlike the
other houses on that river, mine had the railroad behind it instead of
in front of it, an agreeable state of affairs; I don’t mind the sound
of trains though the sight of them on their squalid tracks depresses me.
Beside me, among the careful tray of tea things, the manuscript of my
dialogue lay neglected. I had not yet made up my mind whether to read
it to Clarissa or not. Such things tended to bore her; yet, if she
could be enticed into attention, her opinion would be useful: such a
long memory of old customs would be invaluable to me as I composed,
with diligence rather than inspiration, an ethical system whose single
virtue was that it tended to satisfy the needs of human beings as
much as was possible without inviting chaos. I had, that morning over
coffee, abolished marriage. During lunch, served me by my genteel but
impoverished housekeeper (although servants still existed in those days
in a few great houses, people like myself were obliged to engage the
casual services of the haughty poor), I decided to leave marriage the
way it was but make divorce much simpler. After lunch, suffering from
a digestive-inspired headache, I not only abolished marriage again but
resolutely handed the children over to the impersonal mercies of the
state.
Now, bemused, relaxed, my eyes upon the pale blue Catskills and the
summer green, the noise of motorboats like great waterbugs in my ears,
I brooded upon the implications of what I was doing and, though I was
secretly amused at my own confidence, I realized, too, that what I felt
and did and wrote, though doubtless unorthodox to many, was, finally,
not really the work of my own inspiration but a logical result of
all that was in the world: a statement of the dreams of others which
I could formulate only because I shared them. Cave regarded his own
words as revelation when, actually, they only echoed the collective
mind, a plausible articulation of what most men felt even though
their conscious minds were antipathetic, corseted and constricted by
stereotyped ways of thinking, the opposite of what they truly believed.
Yet at this step I, for one, hesitated. There was no doubt but that the
children and the society would be the better for such an arrangement
... and there was little doubt that our civilization _was_ moving
toward such a resolution. But there were parents who would want to
retain their children and children who might be better cared for by
their progenitors than by even the best-intentioned functionaries of
the state. Would the state allow parents to keep their children if they
wanted them? If not, it was tyrannous; if so, difficult in the extreme,
for how could even the most enlightened board of analysts determine who
should be allowed their children and who not? The answer, of course,
was in the retraining of future generations. Let them grow up accepting
as inevitable and right the surrender of babies to the state. Other
cultures had done it and ours could too. But I was able, vividly, to
imagine the numerous cruelties which would be perpetrated in the name
of the whole, while the opportunity for tyranny in a civilization where
all children were at the disposal of a government brought sharply to
mind the image of the anthill society which has haunted the imagination
of the thoughtful for at least a century.
I had got myself into a most gloomy state by the time Clarissa arrived,
trailing across the lawn in an exotic ankle-length gown of gray
which floated in yards behind her, like the diaphanous flags of some
forgotten army.
“Your lawn is full of moles!” she shouted to me, pausing in her
progress and scowling at a patch of turf. “And it needs cutting and
more clover. _Always_ more clover, remember that.” She turned her back
on me to stare at the river which was as gray as her gown, but, in its
soft tidal motion, spangled with light, like sequins on a vast train.
She had no criticism of the river when she at last turned and climbed
the steps to the porch; she sat down with a gasp. “I’m boiling! Tea?
Hot tea to combat the heat.”
I poured her a cup. “Not a hot day at all.” Actually it was very warm.
“If you didn’t get yourself up as a Marie Corelli heroine, you’d be
much cooler.”
“Not very gallant, are we today?” Clarissa looked at me over her cup.
“I’ve had this gown for five hundred years. There used to be a wimple
which went with it but I lost it somewhere.”
“The material seems to be holding up quite well,” and now that she had
mentioned it, there _was_ an archaic look to the texture of the gown,
like those bits of cloth preserved under glass in museums.
“Silk lasts indefinitely, if one is tidy. I also don’t wear this much,
as you can see, but with the devalued state of the dollar (an ominous
sign, my dear, the beginning of the end!) I’ve been forced to redo a
lot of old odds-and-ends I’ve kept for sentimental reasons. This is
one of them and I’m very fond of it.” She spoke this last slowly, to
forestall any further ungallantry.
“I just wondered if it was cool.”
“It is cool. Ah, a letter from Iris.” Like a magpie she had seen the
letter beside my chair and, without asking permission, had seized it
and read it through quickly. “I admire a girl who types,” she said,
letting fall the letter. “I suppose they all do now though it seems
like only yesterday that, next to opening a tearoom, one typed, working
for men, all of whom made advances. That was when we had to wear
corsets and hatpins. One discouraged while the other quite protected.”
Clarissa chuckled at some obscene memory.
“I wonder if Paul can keep Cave from wandering off to some impossible
place.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised.” She picked at the tea sandwiches
suspiciously, curling back the top slices of bread to see what was
underneath: tentatively, she bit into deviled ham; she chewed; she
swallowed; she was not disappointed; she wolfed another sandwich,
talking all the while. “Poor Cave is a captive now. His disciples are
in full command. Even Mohammed, as strong-headed as he was, finally
ended up a perfect pawn in the hands of Abu Bekr and the women,
especially the women.”
“I’m not so sure about Cave. He....”
“Does what they tell him, especially Iris.”
“Iris? But I should have said she was the only one who _never_ tried to
influence him.”
Clarissa laughed unpleasantly. A moth flew into her artificial auburn
hair; unerringly, she found it with one capable hand and quickly
snuffed out its life in a puff of gray dust from broken wings. She
wiped her fingers on a paper napkin. The day was full of moths but,
fortunately, none came near us again, preferring lawn and trees to us.
“You are naive, Eugene,” she said, her little murder done. “It’s your
nicest quality. In theory you are remarkably aware of human character;
yet, when you’re confronted with the most implausible appearance, you
promptly take it for the reality.”
I was irritated by this and also by the business of the sandwich, not
to mention the murder of the moth; I looked at Clarissa with momentary
dislike. “I was not aware....” I began in a chilled voice but she
interrupted me with an airy wave of her hand.
“I forget no one likes to be called naive ... calculating, dishonest,
treacherous, people rather revel in those designations, but to be
thought trusting....” She clapped her hands as though to punctuate her
meaning; then, after a full stop, she went on more soberly. “Iris is
the one to look out for. Our own sweet, self-effacing, dedicated Iris.
I adore her; I always have, but she’s up to no good.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You will. You would if you weren’t entirely blind to what they used to
call human nature. Iris is _acquiring_ Cave.”
“Acquiring?”
“Exactly the word. She loves him for all sorts of reasons but she
cannot have him in the usual sense (I found out all about that, by
the way). Therefore, the only thing left her to do is acquire him, to
take his life in hers. You may think _she_ may think that her slavish
adoration is only humble love but actually it’s something far more
significant, and dangerous.”
“I don’t see the danger, even accepting your hypothesis.”
“It’s no hypothesis and the danger is real. Iris will have him and,
through him, she’ll have you all.”
I did not begin to understand that day and Clarissa, in her pythoness
way, was no help, muttering vague threats and imprecations with her
mouth full of bread.
After my first jealousy at Iris’s preference of Cave to me, a jealousy
which I knew, even at the time, was unjustified and a little ludicrous,
I had come to accept her devotion to Cave as a perfectly natural state
of affairs; he was an extraordinary man and though he did not fulfill
her in the usual sense, he gave her more than mere lover might: he gave
her a whole life and I envied her for having been able to seize so
shrewdly upon this unique way _out_ of ordinary life and into something
more grand, more strange, more engaging. Though I could not follow her,
I was able to appreciate her choice and admire the completeness of her
days. That she was obscurely using Cave for her own ends, subverting
him, did not seem to me possible and I was annoyed by Clarissa’s dark
warnings. I directed the conversation into the other waters.
“The children. I haven’t decided what to do with them.”
Clarissa came to a full halt. For a moment she forgot to chew. Then,
with a look of pain, she swallowed. “_Your_ children?”
“Any children, all children,” I pointed to the manuscript on the table.
She began to understand. “I’m quite sure you have abolished marriage.”
“As a matter of fact, yes, this morning.”
“And now you don’t know what to do about the children.”
“Precisely. I....”
“Perfectly simple.” Clarissa was brisk: this, apparently, was a problem
she had already solved. “The next step is controlled breeding. Only
those whose blood lines seem promising should be allowed to procreate.
Now that oral contraceptives are so popular no one will make babies by
accident ... in fact, it should be a serious crime if someone does.”
“Quite neat, but I wonder whether, psychologically, it’s simple.
There’s the whole business of instinct, of the natural desire of a
woman to want her own child after bearing it.”
“All habit ... not innate. Children have been subordinate woman’s ace
in the hole for generations. They have had to develop certain traits
which, in other circumstances, they would not have entertained. Rats,
whom we closely resemble, though they suckle their young will, in
moments of mild hunger or even exasperation, think nothing of eating an
entire litter. You can condition human beings to accept _any_ state of
affairs as being perfectly natural.”
“I don’t doubt that. But how to break the habits of several thousand
years.”
“I suppose there _are_ ways. Look what Cave is doing. Of course making
death popular is not so difficult since, finally, people _want_ it to
be nice: they do the real work or, rather, their terror does. In place
of superstition, which they’ve nearly outgrown, he offers them madness.”
“Now really, Clarissa....”
“I don’t disapprove. I’m all for him, as you know. To make death
preferable to life is of course utter folly though a perfectly logical
reaction for these poor bewildered savages who, having lost their old
superstitions, are absolutely terrified at the prospect of nothing.
They want to perpetuate their little personalities forever into space
and time and now they’ve begun to realize the folly of that (who, after
all, are they? are _we_? in creation?) they will follow desperately the
first man who pulls the sting of death and Cave is that man, as I knew
he would be.”
“And after Cave?”
“I will not say what I see. I’m on the side of change, however, which
makes me in perfect harmony with life.” Clarissa chuckled. A fish
leaped gayly in the still river; out in the channel a barge glided by,
the muffled noise of its engines like slow heartbeats.
“But you think it good for people to follow Cave? you think what he
says is right?”
“Nothing is good. Nothing is right. But though Cave is wrong, it is
a _new_ wrong and so it is better than the old; in any case, he will
keep the people amused and boredom, finally, is the one monster the
race will never conquer ... the monster which will devour us in time.
But now we’re off the track. Mother love exists because we believe it
exists. Believe it does not exist and it won’t. That, I fear, is the
general condition of 'the unchanging human heart.’ Make these young
girls feel that having babies is a patriotic duty as well as healthful
therapy and they’ll go through it blithely enough, without ever giving
a second thought to the child they leave behind in the government
nursery.”
“But to get them to that state of acceptance....”
“Is the problem. I’m sure it will be solved in a few generations.”
“You think I’m right to propose it?”
“Of course. It will happen anyway.”
“Yet I’m disturbed at the thought of all that power in the hands of the
state: they can make the children believe anything; they can impose the
most terrible tyranny; they can blind at birth so that none might ever
see anything again but what a few rulers, as ignorant as they, finally,
will want them to see. There’ll be a time when all people are nearly
alike.”
“Which is precisely the ideal society. No mysteries, no romantics, no
discussions, no persecutions because there’s no one to persecute. When
all have received the same conditioning, it will be like....”
“Insects.”
“Who have existed longer than ourselves and will outlast our race by
many comfortable millennia.”
“Is existence everything?”
“There is nothing else.”
“Then likeness is the aim of human society?”
“Call it harmony. You think of yourself only as you are now dropped
into the midst of a society of dull conformists. That’s where you make
your mistake. You’ll not live to see it for, if you did, you would be
someone else, a part of it. No one of your disposition could possibly
happen in such a society. There would be no rebellion against sameness
because difference would not, in any important sense, exist, even as
a proposition. You think: how terrible! but think again how wonderful
it would be to belong to the pack, to the tribe, to the race, without
guilt or anxiety or division.”
“I cannot imagine it.”
“No more can they imagine you.”
“This will happen?”
“Yes, and you will have been a part of it.”
“Through Cave?”
“Partly, yes. There will be others after him. His work in the future
will be distorted by others, but that’s to be expected.”
“I don’t like your future, Clarissa.”
“Nor does it like you, my dear. The idea of someone who is gloomy
and at odds with society, bitter and angry, separate from others ...
I shouldn’t wonder but that you yourself might really be used as a
perfect example of the old evil days.”
“Virtue dies?”
“Virtue becomes the property of the race.”
“Imagination is forbidden?”
“No, only channeled for the good of all.”
“And this is a desirable world? the future you describe?”
“Desirable for whom? For you, no. For me, not really. For the people
in it? Well, yes and no. They will not question their estate but they
will suffer from a collective boredom which ... but my lips are sealed.
Your tea was delicious though the bread was not quite fresh; but then
bachelors never keep house properly. I’ve gone on much too long; do
forget everything I’ve said. I’m indiscreet. I can’t help it.” She
rose, a cloud of gray suspended above the porch. I walked her across
the lawn to the driveway where her car was parked. The breeze had,
for the moment, died and the heat prickled me unpleasantly; my temples
itched as the sweat started.
“Go on with it,” she said as she got into her car. “You may as well
be on the side of the future as against it. Not that it much matters
anyway. When your adorable President Jefferson was in Paris he
said....” But the noise of the car starting drowned the body of her
anecdote. I caught only the end: “That harmony was preferable. We were
all amused; I was the only one who realized that he was serious.” Dust
swirled and Clarissa was gone down the drive at a great speed, keeping,
I noticed, to the wrong side of the road. I hoped this was an omen.
5
I got through an unusually sultry July without much interference
from either Cave or the world. Paul paid me a quick visit to get the
manuscript of the dialogues and I was reminded of those accounts of
the progresses made by monarchs in other days, or rather of great
ministers, for his party occupied four large cars which gleamed side
by side in my driveway like glossy beasts while their contents, Paul
and fourteen assistants, all strange to me save Stokharin, wandered
disconsolately about the lawn until their departure.
Paul, though brisk, was cordial. “Trouble all over the map but b-i-g
t-r-o-u-b-l-e,” he spelled it out with relish, size was important, I
knew, to a publicist, even to one turned evangelist.
“Is Cave disturbed by it?”
“Doesn’t pay any attention. Haven’t seen him but Iris keeps me posted.
By the way, we’re hiring a plane the first week in August to go see
him, Stokharin and me. Want to come along?”
I didn’t but I said I would. I had no intention of being left out of
anything: there was _my_ work still to do.
“I’ll let you know details. This is hot stuff?” He waved the sheaf of
papers I’d given him.
“Real hot,” I said but my irony was too pale, only primary colors
caught Paul’s eye.
“I hope so. Got any new stunts?”
I told him, briefly, about my thoughts on marriage or rather Cave’s
thoughts. The literary device was for me to ask him certain questions
and for him to answer them or, at least, to ask pointed questions in
his turn. Cheerfully, I had committed Cave to my own point of view and
I was somewhat nervous about his reaction, not to mention the others.
So far, only Clarissa knew and her approval was pleasant but perhaps
frivolous: it carried little weight, I knew, with the rest.
Paul whistled. “You got us a tall order. I’m not sure we’ll be able to
handle that problem yet, if ever.”
“I’ve done it carefully,” I began.
Stokharin, who had been listening with interest, came to my aid. “In
the Centers we, how you say, Paul? soft-pedal the family. We advise
young boys to make love to the young girls without marrying or having
babies. We speak of the family as a social unit, and society changes. I
am most eager to study Mr Luther’s approach. Perhaps a little aid from
those of us in clinical work....”
But then the dark sedans began to purr; nervous attendants whispered
to Paul and I was soon left alone with the fragments of our brief
conversation to examine and interpret at my leisure. I was surprised
and pleased at Stokharin’s unexpected alliance. I had thought of him
as my chief antagonist. But then, my work finished, I tended roses and
read Cassius Dio until the summons in August came.
6
The plane landed on a glare of blue water, more blinding even than the
vivid sky about the sun itself which made _both_ elements seem to be
a quivering blue fire in which was destroyed all of earth save a tiny
smear of dusty faded green, the island of our destination.
The pilot maneuvered the plane against a bone-gray dock where, all
alone, Iris stood, her hair tangled from the propellers’ wind and her
eyes hidden by dark glasses. Like explorers in a new country, Paul,
Stokharin and I scrambled onto the dock, the heat closing in about us
like blue canvas, stifling, palpable. I gasped and dropped my suitcase.
Iris laughed and ran forward to greet us; she came first to me which,
even in my dazzled, shocked state, I realized and valued.
“Gene, you must get out of that suit this minute! and get some dark
glasses or you’ll go blind. Paul, how are you? It’s good to see you,
Doctor.” And, in the chatter of greetings, she escorted us off the dock
and across a narrow white beach to a grove of palm trees where the
cottage stood.
To our delight, the interior was cooled by machinery. I sank into a
wicker chair even while Cave was pumping my hand. Iris laughed, “Leave
him alone, John. He’s smothered by the heat.”
“No hat,” said Cave solemnly after the first greeting which, in my
relief, I’d not heard. “You’ll get sunstroke.”
Paul was now in charge. The heat which had enervated both Stokharin
and me filled him with manic energy, like one of those reptiles which
absorb vitality from the sun.
“What a great little place, John! Had no idea there were all the
comforts of home down here, none at all. Don’t suppose you go out much?”
Cave, unlike Iris, was not tanned though he had, for him, a good color,
a ruddiness of tone unlike his usual sallowness. “I don’t get too much
sun,” he admitted. “We go fishing sometimes, early in the morning. Most
of the time I just hang around the house and look at the letters, and
read some.”
I noticed on the table beside me an enormous pile of travel magazines,
tourist folders and atlases: this had obviously been Cave’s reading. I
anticipated trouble.
Paul prowled restlessly about the modern living room with its shuttered
sealed windows. Stokharin and I, like fish back in their own element
after a brief excursion on land, gasped softly in our chairs while
Iris told us of the keys, of their fishing trips. She was at her best
here as she had been that other time in Spokane ... being out of doors,
in Cave’s exclusive company, brought her to life in a way the exciting
busyness of New York did not. In New York she seemed like an object
through which an electric current passed; here on this island, in the
sun’s glare, she had unfolded, petal after petal until the secret
interior seemed almost exposed. I was conscious of her as a lovely
woman and, without warning, I experienced desire: that sharp rare
longing which, in me, can reach no climax. Always before she had been a
friend, a companion whose company I had jealously valued: her attention
alone had been enough to satisfy me, but on this day I saw her as a man
entire might and I plummeted into despair while talking of Plato.
“The Symposium was the model, yes. There are other ways of casting
dialogues such as introducing the celebrated dead brought together for
a chat in Limbo. I thought, though, that I should keep the talk to
only two. Cave and myself ... Socrates and Alcibiades.” Alcibiades was
precisely the wrong parallel but I left it uncorrected, noticing how
delicately the hollow at the base of her throat quivered with life’s
blood and although I attempted, as I often had before with bitter
success, to think of her as so much mortal flesh, the body and its
beauty only pulp and bone, only beautiful to a human eye ... hideous,
no doubt, to the eye of a geometric progression ... that afternoon
I was lost and I could not become, even for a moment, an abstract
intelligence again: I saw the bone; I saw the dust, yet I saw her
existing, despite her nature and her fate, triumphant in the present. I
cursed the flaw in my own flesh and hated life.
“We liked it very much,” she said, not divining my mood, unaware of my
sudden passion and its attendant despair.
“You don’t think it’s too strong, do you? All morality, not to mention
the churches, will be aligned against us.”
“John was worried at first ... not that opposition frightens him and
it is _his_ idea; I mean you wrote the dialogue but it reflects
exactly what he’s always thought.” Though in love’s agony, I looked at
her sharply to make certain she was perfectly serious: she was; this
helped soothe the pain. She had been hypnotized by Cave. I wondered how
Clarissa could ever have thought it was the other way around.
“In a way we’re already on record,” Iris looked thoughtfully across the
room at Cave who was showing Paul and Stokharin a large map of some
strange country. “The Centers have helped a good many couples to adjust
to one another without marriage and without guilt.”
“But then there’s the problem of what to do with the children when the
family breaks up.”
Iris sighed. “I’m afraid that’s already a problem. Our Centers are
taking care of a good many children already. A number, of course, go
out for adoption to bored couples who need something to amuse them.
I suppose we’ll have to establish nurseries as a part of each Center
until, finally, the government assumes the responsibility.”
“_If_ it becomes Cavite.”
“When it becomes Cavite.” She was powerful in her casualness.
“Meanwhile there are laws of adoption which vary from state to state
and, if we’re not careful, we’re apt to come up against the law.”
“Paul looks after us,” she smiled. “Did you know that he has nearly a
hundred lawyers on our pay roll? All protecting us.”
“From what?” I had not kept track of this.
“Lawsuits ... mostly attempts by state legislatures to outlaw the
Centers on the grounds of immorality and so on. The lawyers are kept
busy all the time.”
“Why haven’t I read about any of this in the papers?”
“We’ve been able to keep things fairly quiet. Paul is marvelous with
the editors ... several have even joined us, by the way ... secretly,
of course.”
“What’s the membership now?”
Iris gestured. “No one knows. We have thirty Centers in the United
States and each day they receive hundreds of new Cavites. I suspect
there are at least four million by now.”
I gasped, beginning to recover at last from the heat, from my
unexpected crisis of love. “I had no idea things were going so fast.”
“Too fast. We haven’t enough trained people to look after the Centers
and on top of that we’ve got to set up new Centers. Paul has broken the
country up into districts, all very methodical: so many Centers per
district each with a Resident in charge. Stokharin is taking care of
the clinical work.”
“Where’s the money coming from?”
“In bushels from heaven,” Iris smiled. “We leave all that up to Paul. I
shouldn’t be surprised if he counterfeits it. One thing I know, though,
I _must_ get back to New York soon, to the school. I shouldn’t really
have gone off in the middle of everything but I was tired and John
wanted company so I came.”
“How is he?”
“As you see: calm. I don’t believe he ever thinks of any of our
problems. He never talks about them; never reads the reports Paul sends
him. He seldom reads the attacks from the churches and we get several a
day, not to mention threatening mail. It’s got so bad that we now have
full-time bodyguards.”
“You think people are _seriously_ threatening him?”
“I don’t know how serious they are but we can’t take chances.
Fortunately, almost no one knows we’re here and, so far, no cranks have
got through from the mainland. We get our groceries and mail brought in
by boat every other day from Key Largo. Otherwise, we’re marooned here.”
I looked about me for some sign of the guards but they were elsewhere:
a Cuban woman glumly vacuuming in the next room was the only visible
stranger.
Cave abandoned his maps and atlases long enough to tell me how much the
dialogues pleased him.
“I wish I could put it down like you do. I can only say it when people
listen.”
“You feel I’ve been accurate?”
He nodded solemnly. “Oh, yes ... it’s just as I’ve always said it, only
written down.” I realized that he’d already assumed full responsibility
(and credit, should there be any) for my composition; I accepted his
presumption with amusement. Only Stokharin seemed aware of the humor of
the situation. I caught him staring at me with a shrewd expression; he
looked quickly away and his mouth was rigid as he tried not to smile. I
liked him at that moment: we were the only two, evidently, who had not
been possessed by Cave. I felt like a conspirator.
For several days we talked, or rather Paul talked. He had brought
with him charts and statements and statistics and, though Cave did
not bother to disguise his boredom, he listened most of the time and
his questions, when they did occur, were apposite. The rest of us
were fascinated by the extent of what Paul referred to as the “first
operational phase.”
Various projects had already been undertaken; others were put up to
the directors for discussion. The mood was, due to Paul’s emphatic
personality, more like that of a meeting of account-executives in an
advertising firm than the pious foregathering of a messiah’s apostles
... and already that word had been used in the press by the curious
as well as by the devout. Cave was the messiah to several million
Americans, one not come with fire to judge the world, nor one armed
with the instruction of a supernatural being whose presence was
elsewhere but whose secret word had been given this favorite son ...
no, Cave was of another line: that of the prophets, of the instructors
like Jesus before he became Christ, like Mohammed before he became
Islam. Cave was the one in our age whose single task it was to speak
out, to say the words all men waited for yet dared not speak nor
even attend without the overpowering authority of another who had,
plausibly, assumed the guise of master. I could not help but wonder as
I watched Cave in those hectic conferences if the past had been like
this.
Cave certainly had one advantage over his predecessors: modern
communications. It took three centuries for Christianity to infest the
world. It was to take Cave only three years to conquer Europe and the
Americas.
But I did not have this foreknowledge in Florida. I only knew that Paul
was handling an extraordinary business in a remarkable way. There was
no plan so vast that he could not contemplate its execution with ease.
He was exhausting in his energy and, though he did not possess much
imagination, he was a splendid improviser, using whatever themes were
at hand to create his own dazzling contrapuntal effects with.
We decided upon a weekly magazine to be distributed gratis to the
Cavites (I was appointed editor though the real work, of which I was
entirely ignorant, was to be done by a crew already at work on the
first issue); we determined to send abroad certain films to be shown
by Cavite lecturers; we approved the itinerary of Cave’s national tour
in the fall (Cave was most alive during this discussion; suggesting
cities he wanted particularly to see, reveling in the euphony of such
names as Tallahassee); we planned several dinners to be held in New
York with newspaper editors and political figures and we discussed
the advisability of Cave’s accepting an invitation to be questioned
by the Committee on National Morals and Americanism of the House of
Representatives, a remarkably powerful Committee which had begun to
show an interest in the progress of our Centers. It was decided that
Cave delay meeting them until the time was propitious, or until he
had received a subpoena. Paul, with his instinctive sense of the
theatrical, did not want to have this crucial meeting take place
without a most careful build-up.
We discussed the various steps taken or about to be taken by certain
state legislatures against the Centers. The states involved were
those with either a predominantly Catholic or predominantly Baptist
population. Since the Centers had been organized to conform with
existing state and federal laws (the lawyers were earning their fees),
Paul thought they would have a difficult time in closing any of them.
The several laws which had been passed were all being appealed and
he was confident of our vindication by the higher courts. Though the
established churches were now fighting us with every possible weapon of
law and propaganda, we were fully protected, Paul felt, by the Bill of
Rights even in its currently abrogated state.
Late in the afternoon after one of the day’s conferences had ended,
Iris and I swam in the Gulf, the water as warm as blood and the sky
soft with evening. We stayed in the water for an hour, not talking, not
really swimming, merely a part of the sea and the sky, two lives on a
curved horizon, quite alone (for the others never ventured out), only
the bored bodyguard on the dock reminded us that the usual world had
not slipped away in a sunny dream, leaving us isolated and content in
that sea from which our life had come so long ago ... water to water,
I thought comfortably as we crawled up on the beach like new-lunged
creatures.
Iris undid her bathing cap and her hair, streaked blonde by the sun
(and a little gray as well), fell about her shoulders. She sighed
voluptuously. “If it would always be like this.”
“If what?”
“Everything.”
“Ah,” I ran my hand along my legs and crystals of salt glittered and
fell; we were both dusted with light. “You have your work,” I added ...
with some malice though I was now under control ... my crisis resolved
after one sleepless night. I could now look at her without longing,
without pain; regret was another matter but regret was only a distant
relative to anguish.
“I have that, too,” she said. “The work uses everything while this ...
is a narcotic. I float without a thought or a desire like ... like an
anemone.”
“You don’t know what an anemone is, do you?”
She laughed like a child. “How do you know I don’t?”
“You said it like somebody reading a Latin inscription.”
“What is it?”
I laughed, too. “I don’t know. Perhaps something like a jellyfish. It
has a lovely sound: sea anemone.”
We were interrupted by a motorboat pulling into the dock. “It’s the
mail,” said Iris. “We’d better go back to the house now.”
While we collected towels, the guard on the dock helped the boatman
carry two large boxes of groceries and mail to the house.
Between a pair of palm trees, a yard from the door of the house, the
bomb went off in a flash of light and gray smoke. A stinging spray of
sand blinded Iris and me. The blast knocked me off balance and I fell
backward onto the beach. For several minutes, my eyes filled with tears
and burning from the coral sand, I was quite blind. When I was finally
able to see again, Iris was already at the house trying to force open
the door.
One of the palm trees looked as if it had been struck by lightning,
all its fronds gone and its base smoldering. The windows of the house
were broken and I recall wondering, foolishly, how the air-conditioning
could possibly work if the house was not sealed. The door was
splintered and most of its paint had been burned off: it was also
jammed for Iris could not open it. Meanwhile, from a side door, the
occupants of the house had begun to appear, pale and shaken.
I limped toward the house, rubbing my eyes, aware that my left knee
had been hurt. I was careful not to look at either the boatman or the
guard. Their remains inextricably strewn among tin cans and letters in
the bushes.
Paul was the first to speak: a torrent of rage which jolted us all out
of fear and shock. Iris, after one look at the dead men, fled into the
house. I stood stupidly beside the door, rolling my eyes to dislodge
the sand and listening to Paul.
Then the other guards came with blankets and gathered up the pieces
of the two men. I turned away, aware for the first time that Cave was
standing slightly apart, nearest the house. He was very pale. He spoke
only once, half to himself for Paul was still ranting: “Let it begin,”
said Cave softly. “Now, now.”