The Essential Ellison Part 15

"I'm ready," said the old man, and he extended his left hand for the grasp. He set down the bulb of vik with his other hand.

The feel of hardening came stealing through him, and it was as though someone had taken his hand in return. Then, as he thought he was to go, alone, he said, "Good-bye to you, Pretrie, friend."

But there was no good-bye from the alien beside him. Instead, the Jilkite's voice came to him as through a fog softly descending.

"We go together, friend Pederson. The Gray Man comes to all races. Why do you expect me to go alone? Each need is a great one.

"I am here, Gray Man. Here. I am not alone." Oddly, Pederson knew the Jilkite's claw had been offered, and taken in the clasp.

He closed his blind eyes.

After a great while, the sound of the harp crickets thrummed high once more, and on the porch before the hutch, there was the silence of peace.

Night had come to the lonely lands; night, but not darkness.

The Time of the Eye In the third year of my death, I met Piretta. Purely by chance, for she occupied a room on the second floor, while I was given free walk of the first floor and the sunny gardens. And it seemed so strange, that first and most important time, that we met at all, for she had been there since she had gone blind in 1958, while I was one of the old men with young faces who had dissolved after being in the Nam.

The Place wasn't too unpleasant, of course, despite the high, flat-stone walls and the patronizing air of Mrs. Gondy, for I knew one day my fog would pa.s.s, and I would feel the need to speak to someone again, and then I could leave the Place.

But that was in the future.

I neither looked forward to that day, nor sought refuge in my stable life at the Place. I was in a limbo life between caring and exertion. I was sick; I had been told that; and no matter what I knew-I was dead. So what sense was there in caring?

But Piretta was something else.

Her delicate little face was porcelain, with eyes the flat blue of shallow waters, and hands that were quick to do nothing important.

I met her-as I say-by chance. She had grown restless, during what she called "the time of the eye," and had managed to give her Miss Hazelet the slip.

I was walking with head bowed and hands locked behind my bathrobe, through the lower corridor, when she came down the great winding stairway.

On many an occasion I had stopped at that stairway, watching the drab-faced women who scrubbed down each level, each riser. It was like watching them go to h.e.l.l. They started at the top, and washed their way down. Their hair was always white, always lank, always like old hay. They scrubbed with methodical ferocity, for this was the last occupation left to them before the grave, and they clung to it with soap and suds. And I had watched them go down to h.e.l.l, step by step.

But this time there were no drudges on their knees.

I heard her walking close to the wall, her humble fingertips brus.h.i.+ng the wainscotting as she descended, and I realized immediately that she was blind.

That blindness deeper than lack of sight.

There was something to her; something ephemeral that struck instantly to the dead heart in me. I watched her come down with stately slowness, as though she tripped to silent music, until I was drawn to her in spirit.

"May I be of service?" I heard myself politely inquiring, from a distance. She paused there and her head came up with field mouse awareness.

"No, thank you," she said, most congenially. "I am quite able to care for myself, thank you. Something that person," she twitched her head in the direction of upstairs, "cannot seem to fathom."

She came the remainder of the steps to the napless winecolored rug. She stood there and exhaled deeply, as though she had just put a satisfactory finis to an immense project.

"My name is-" I began, but she cut me off with a sharp snort and, "Name's the same." She giggled prettily.

"Names ring of little consequence, don't you agree?" and there was such conviction in her voice, I could hardly disagree.

So I said, "I suppose that's so."

She snickered softly and patted her auburn hair, bed-disarrayed. "Indeed," she said with finality, "that is so; very much so."

This was most peculiar to me, for several reasons.

First, she was talking with a rather complicated incoherence that seemed perfectly rational at the time, and second, she was the first person I had spoken to since I had been admitted to the Place, two years and three months before.

I felt an affinity for this girl, and hastened to strengthen our flimsy tie "And yet," I ventured, "one must have something by which to know another person." I became most bold and went on, "Besides-" gulping, "if one likes someone..."

She considered this for a long second, one hand still on the wall, the other at her white throat. "If you insist," she replied, after deliberation, and added, "you may call me Piretta."

"Is that your name?" I asked.

"No," she answered, so I knew we were to be friends.

"Then you can call me Sidney Carton." I released a secret desire of long sublimation.

"That is a fine name, should any name be considered fine," she admitted, and I nodded. Then, realizing she could not hear a nod, I added a monosyllable to indicate her pleasure was also mine.

"Would you care to see the gardens?" I asked chivalrously.

"That would be most kind of you," she said, adding with a touch of irony, ''as you see...I'm quite blind."

Since it was a game we were playing I said, "Oh, truly? I really hadn't noticed."

Then she took my arm, and we went down the corridor toward the garden French doors. I heard someone coming down the staircase, and she stiffened on my arm. "Miss Hazelet," she gasped. "Oh, please!"

I knew what she was trying to say. Her attendant. I knew then that she was not allowed downstairs, that she was now being sought by her nurse. But I could not allow her to be returned to her room, after I had just found her.

"Trust me," I whispered, leading her into a side corridor.

I found the mop closet, and gently ushered her before me, into its cool, dark recess. I closed the door softly and stood there, very close to her. I could hear her breathing, and it was shallow, quick. It made me remember those hours before dawn in Viet Nam, even when we were full asleep; when we sensed what was coming, with fear and trepidation. She was frightened. I held her close, without meaning to do so, and her arm went around my waist. We were very near, and for the first time in over two years I felt emotions stirring in me; how foolish of me to consider love. But I waited there with her, adrift in a sarga.s.so of conflicting feelings, while her Miss Hazelet paced outside.

Finally, after what seemed a time too short, we heard those same precise steps mounting the stairs-annoyed, prissy, fl.u.s.tered.

"She's gone. Now we can see the gardens," I said, and wanted to bite my tongue. She could see nothing; but I did not rectify my error. Let her think I took her infirmity casually. It was far better that way.

I opened the door cautiously, and peered out. No one but old Bauer, shuffling along down the hall, his back to us. I led her out, and as though nothing had happened, she took my arm once more.

"How sweet of you," she said, and squeezed my bicep.

We walked back to the French doors, and went outside.

The air was musky with the scent of fall, and the crackling of leaves underfoot seemed a proper thing. It was not too chilly, and yet she clung to me with a soft desperation more need than inclination. I didn't think it was because of her blindness; I was certain she could walk through the garden without any help if she so desired.

We moved down the walk, winding out of sight of the Place in a few seconds, s.h.i.+elded and screened by the high, neatly pruned hedges. Oddly enough, for that time of day, no attendants were slithering through the chinaberry and hedges, no other "guests" were taking their blank-eyed pleasure on the turf or on the bypaths.

I glanced sidewise at her profile, and was pleased by her chiseled features. Her chin was a bit too sharp and thrust-forward, but it was offset by high cheekbones and long eyelashes that gave her a rather Asiatic expression. Her lips were full, and her nose was a cla.s.sic yet short sweep.

I had the strangest feeling I had seen her somewhere before, though that was patently impossible.

Yet the feeling persisted.

I remembered another girl...but that had been before the Nam...before the sound of a metallic shriek down the night sky...and someone standing beside my bed at Walter Reed. That had been in another life, before I had died, and been sent to this Place.

"Is the sky dark?" she asked. I guided her to a bench, hidden within a box of hedges.

"Not very," I replied. "There are a few clouds in the north, but they don't look like rainclouds. I think it'll be a nice day."

"It doesn't matter," she said resignedly. "The weather doesn't really matter. Do you know how long it's been since I've seen sunlight through the trees?" Then she sighed, and laid her head back against the bench. "No. The weather doesn't really matter. Not at this Time, anyhow."

I didn't know what that meant, but I didn't care, either.

There was a new life surging through me. I was surprised to hear it beating in my ears. I was surprised to find myself thinking minutes into the future. No one who has not experienced it can understand what it is to be dead, to no longer think of the future, and then to find something worthwhile and begin to live all over again. I don't mean just hope, nothing that simple and uncomplicated. I mean to be dead, and then to be alive. It had come to be like that in just a few minutes since I had met Piretta. I had ignored the very next instant for the past two years and three months, and now suddenly, I was looking to the future. Not much at first, for it had become an atrophied ability in me, but I was expecting from minute to minute, caring, and I could feel my life ranging back to pick me up, to continue its journey.

I was looking ahead, and wasn't that the first step to regaining my lost life?

"Why are you here?" she inquired, placing a cool, slim-fingered hand on my bare arm.

I placed my hand over it, and she started, so I withdrew it self-consciously. Then she searched about, found it, and put it over hers again.

"I was in the War," I explained. "There was a mortar and I was. .h.i.t, and they sent me here. I-I didn't want to-maybe I wasn't able to-I don't know-I didn't want to talk to anyone for a long time.

"But I'm all right now," I finished, abruptly at peace with myself.

"Yes," she said, as though that decided it.

Then she went on speaking, in the strangest tone of voice : "Do you sense the Time of the Eye, too, or are you one of them?" She asked it with ruthlessness in her voice. I didn't know what to answer.

"Who do you mean by them?"

She let her full upper lip snarl, and said, "Those women who bedpan me. Those foul, crepuscular antiseptics!"

"If you mean the nurses and attendants," I caught her line of thought, "no, I'm not one of them. I'm as annoyed by them as you seem to be. Didn't I hide you?"

"Would you find me a stick?" she asked.

I looked around, and seeing none, broke a branch from the box hedge. "This?"

I handed it to her.

"Thank you," she said.

She began stripping it, plucking the leaves and twigs from it. I watched her dexterous hands flitting, and thought How terrible for such a lovely and clever girl to be thrown in here with these sick people, these madmen.

"You probably wonder what I'm doing here, don't you?" she asked, peeling the thin, green bark from the stick. I didn't answer her, because I didn't want to know; I had found something, someone, and my life had begun again. There was no reason to kill it all at once.

"No, I hadn't thought about it."

"Well, I'm here because they know I'm aware of them."

It struck a note of familiarity. There had been a man named Herbman, who had lived on the first floor during my second year at the Place. He had always talked about the great clique of men who were secretly trying to kill him, and how they would go to any extreme to get him, to silence him before he could reveal their dire machinations.

I hoped the same thing had not befallen her. She was so lovely.

"They?" "Yes, of course. You said you weren't one of them. Are you lying to me? Are you making fun of me, trying to confuse me?" Her hand slipped out from under mine. I hastened to regain ground. "No, no, of course not; but don't you see, I don't understand? I just don't know. I-I've been here so long." I tried not to sound pathetic. Somehow, this seemed to strike her logically. "You must forgive me. I sometimes forget everyone is not aware of the Time of the Eye as I am." She was pulling at the end of the stick, drawing off the bark, making a sharp little point there. "The Time of the Eye?" I asked. She had said it several times. "I don't understand."

Piretta turned to me, her dead blue eyes seeing directly over my right shoulder, and she put her legs close together. The stick was laid carelessly by her side, as though a toy it had been, but now the time for toys was gone. "I'll tell you," she said.

She sat very still for an instant, and I waited. Then: "Have you ever seen a woman with vermilion hair?"

I was startled. I had expected a story from her, some deep insight into her past that would enable me to love her the more...and in its place she asked a nonsense question.

"Why...no...I can't say that I..."

"Think!" she commanded me.

So I thought, and oddly enough, a woman with vermilion hair did come to mind. Several years before I had been drafted, the rage in all the women's fas.h.i.+on magazines had been a woman named-my G.o.d! Was it? Why, yes, now that I looked closely and my memory prodded, it was-Piretta. A fas.h.i.+on model of exquisite features, l.u.s.trous blue eyes, and an affected vermilion-tint hairdo. She had been so famous her glamour had lapped over from the fas.h.i.+on magazines, had become one of those household names everyone bandies about.

"I remember you," I said, startled beyond words of more meaning.

"No!" she snapped. "No, you don't remember me. You remember a woman named Piretta. A beautiful woman who attacked life as if it was her last lover, and loved it fiercely. That was someone else. I'm a poor blind thing. You don't know me, do you?"

"No," I agreed, "I don't. I'm sorry. For a moment-"

She went on, as though I had never spoken.

"The woman named Piretta was known to everyone. No fas.h.i.+onable salon gathering was fas.h.i.+onable without her; no c.o.c.ktail party was meaningful with her absent. But she was not a shrinking violet type of woman. She loved experience; she was a nihilist, and more. She would do anything. She climbed K.99 with the Postroff group, she sailed with two men around the Cape of Good Hope in an outrigger, she studied the cult of Kali in India, and though she had come to them an infidel, at the end the Society of Thugs took her as one of their acolytes.

"That kind of life can jade a person. She grew bored with it. With the charities, with the modeling, with the brief fling at films, and with the men. The wealthy men, the talented men, the pretty men who were attracted to her, and who were at the same time held at bay by her beauty. She sought new experience...and eventually found it."

I wondered why she was telling me this. I had decided by now that the life I was anxious to have return was here, in her. I was living again and it had come so quickly, so stealthily, that it could only be a result of her presence.

Whatever indefinable quality she had possessed as a world-renowned mannequin, she still retained, even as a slightly haggard, still lovely, blind-eyed woman of indeterminate age. In her white hospital gown she was shapeless, but the magnetic wonder of her was there, and I was alive.

I was in love.

She was still speaking. " After her experiences with the jet ski set and the artist's colony on Fire Island, she returned to the city, and sought more and different experiences.

"Eventually she came upon them. The Men of the Eye. They were a religious sect, unto themselves. They wors.h.i.+ped sight and experience. This was what she had been born for. She fell into their ways at once, wors.h.i.+ping in the dawn hours at their many-eyed idol and living life to its hilt.

"Their ways were dark ways, and the things they did were not always clean things. Yet she persisted with them.

"Then, one night, during what they called the Time of the Eye, they demanded a sacrifice, and she was the one so chosen.