Redshift Part 12

"And?" she insisted. "What is your point?"

"Well, it was no simulation. The movie was made before computers could turn any single image into some endless quilt. We were really see-ing this vast deserted housing project, high-rise after high-rise with the windows boarded up. The abandoned ruins of some ultra-modern city. it existed, but until that movie n.o.body knew about it. It makes you think."

"It doesn't make me think."

There was no way, at this moment, they were going to have s.e.x. Anyhow, it probably wouldn't have been safe. The boat would capsize and they would drown.

A sunless sea It was as though the whole beach received its light from a few candles. A dim, dim light evenly diffused, and a breeze wafting up from the water with an unrelenting coolness, as at some theater where the air-conditioning cannot be turned off. They huddled within the coc.o.o.n of a single beach towel, thighs pressed together, arms crisscrossed behind their backs in a chaste hug, trying to keep warm. The chill in the air was the first less than agreeable physical sensation he'd known in Xanadu, but it did not impart that zip of challenge that comes with October weather. Rather, it suggested his own mortal diminishment. A plug had been pulled somewhere, and all forms of radiant energy were dwindling synchronously, light, warmth, intelligence, desire.There were tears on Debora's cheek, and little sculptures of sea foam in the s.h.i.+ngle about them. And very faint, the scent of nutmeg, the last lingering trace of some long-ago lotion or deodorant. The ocean gray as aluminum.

the wailing Here were the high-rises from the movie, but in twilight now, and without musical accompaniment, though no less portentous for that. He glided past empty benches and leaf-strewn flower beds like a cameraman on roller skates, until he entered one of the buildings, pa.s.sing immaterially through its plate-gla.s.s door. Then there was, in a slower pan than the helicopter's but rhyming to it, a smooth iambic progression past the doors along the first-floor corridor.

He came to a stop before the tenth door, which stood ajar. Within he could hear a stifled sobbing-a wailing, rather. He knew he was expected to go inside, to discover the source of this sorrow. But he could not summon the will to do so. Wasn't his own sorrow sufficient? Wasn't the loss of a world enough?

A man appeared at the end of the corridor in the brown uniform of United Parcel Service. His footsteps were inaudible as he approached.

"I have a delivery for Cook, Fran," the UPS man announced, hold- ing out a white envelope.

At the same time he was offered, once again, the familiar, forlorn choice between Okay and Cancel.

He clicked on Cancel. There was a trembling, and the smallest flicker of darkness, but then the corridor rea.s.serted itself, and the wailing behind the door. The UPS man was gone, but the envelope remained in his hand. It bore the return address in Quebec of Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+.

There was no longer a Cancel to click on. He had to read the letter.

Dear [Name]: The staff and management of Xanadu International regret to inform you that as o/ [date] all services in connection with your contract [Number] will be canceled due to new restrictions in the creation and maintenance of posthumous intelligence. We hope that we will be able to resolve all outstanding differences with the government of Quebec and restore the services contracted for by the heirs of your estate, but in the absence of other communications you must expect the imminent closure of your account. It has been a pleasure to serve you. We hope you have enjoyed your time in Xanadu.

The law of the sovereign state of Quebec requires us to advise you that in terminating this contract we are not implying any alteration in the spiritual condition of [Name] or of his immortal soul. The services of Xanadu International are to be considered an esthetic product offered for entertainment purposes only.

When he had read it, the words of the letter slowly faded from the page, like the smile of the Ches.h.i.+re cat.

The wailing behind the door had stopped, but he still stood in the empty corridor, scarce daring to breathe. Any moment, he thought, might be his last. In an eyeblink the world might cease.

But it didn't. If anything the world seemed solider than heretofore. People who have had a brush with death often report the same sensation.

He reversed his path along the corridor, wondering if anyone lived behind any of them, or if they were just a facade, a Potemkin corridor in a high-rise in the realm of faerie.

As though to answer his question Debora was waiting for him when he went outside. She was wearing a stylishly tailored suit in a kind of brown tweed, and her hair was swept up in a way that made her look like a French movie star of the 1940s.

As they kissed, the orchestra reintroduced their love theme. The music swelled. The world came to an end.

PART TWO.

xanadu But then, just the way that the movie will start all over again after The End, if you just stay in your seat, or even if you go out to the lobby for more popcorn, he found himself back at the beginning, with the same pop-up screen welcoming him to Xanadu and then a choice of Okay or Cancel. But there wasalso, this time, a further choice: a blue banner that pulsed at the upper edge of consciousness and asked him if he wanted expanded memory and quicker responses. He most definitely did, so with his mental mouse he accepted the terms being offered without bothering to scroll through them.

He checked off a series of Yeses and Continues, and so, without his knowing it, he had become, by the time he was off the greased slide, a citizen of the sovereign state of Quebec, an employee of Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+ Temps E-Gal, and-cruelest of his new disadvantages-a girl.

A face glimmered before him in the blue gloaming. At first he thought it might be Debora, for it had the same tentative reality that she did, like a character at the beginning of some old French movie about railroads and murderers, who may be the star or only an extra on hand to show that this is a world with people in it. It was still too early in the movie to tell. Only as he turned sideways did he realize (the sound track made a samisen-like Tw.a.n.g! of recognition) that he had been looking in a mirror, and that the face that had been coalescing before him-the rouged cheeks, the plump lips, the fake lashes, the mournful gaze-had been his own! Or rather, now, her own.

As so many other women had realized at a similar point in their lives, it was already too late and nothing could be done to correct the mistake that Fate, and Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+, had made. Maybe he'd always been a woman. [Cook, Fran] was a s.e.xually ambiguous name. Perhaps his earlier a.s.sumption that he was male was simply a function of thinking in English, where one may be mistaken about his own ident.i.ty (but not about hers). I think; therefore I am a guy.

He searched through his expanded memory for some convincing evidence of his gender history.

Correction: her gender history. Her-story, as feminists would have it. Oh, dear-would he be one of them now, always thinking in italics, a grievance committee of one in perpetual session?

But look on the bright side (she told herself). There might be advantages in such a change of address. Multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms. Nicer clothes (though she couldn't remember ever wanting to dress like a woman when she was a man). Someone else paying for dinner, a.s.suming that the protocols of hospitality still worked the same way here in Xanadu as they had back in reality. This was supposed to be heaven and already she was feeling nostalgic for a life she couldn't remember, an ident.i.ty she had shed.

Then the loudspeaker above her head emitted a dull Dong!, and she woke up in the Women's Dormitory of State Pleasure-Dome 2. "All right, girls!" said the amplified voice of the matron. "Time to rise and s.h.i.+ne. Le temps s'en va, mesdames,le temps s'en va."

state pleasure-dome 2 "La vie," philosophized Chantal, "est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulagons toutes les seize heures. C'est un palliative. La morte est un remede." She flicked the drooping ash from the end of her cigarette and made a moue of chic despair. Fran could understand what she'd said quite as well as if she'd been speaking English: Life is a disease from which sleep offers relief every sixteen hours. Sleep is a palliative-death a remedy.

They were sitting before big empty cups of cafe au lait in the employee lounge, dressed in their black E-Gal minis, crisp white ap.r.o.ns, and fishnet hose. Fran felt a positive fever of chagrin to be seen in such a costume, but she felt nothing otherwise, really, about her entire female body, especially the b.r.e.a.s.t.s bulging out of their casings, b.r.e.a.s.t.s that quivered visibly at her least motion. It was like wearing a T-s.h.i.+rt with some dumb innuendo on it, or a blatant s.e.xual invitation. Did every girl have to go through the same torment of shame at p.u.b.erty? Was there any way to get over it except to get into it?

"Mon bonheur," declared Chantal earnestly, "est d'augmenter celle des autres." Her happiness lay in increasing that of others. A doubtful proposition in most circ.u.mstances, but not perhaps for Chantal, who, as an E-Gal was part geisha, part rock star, and part a working theorem in moral calculus, an embodiment of Francis Hutcheson's notion that that action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. There were times-Thursdays, in the early evening-when Chantal's bedside/Website was frequented by as many as two thousand admirers, their o.r.g.a.s.ms all bissfully synchronized with the reels and ditties she performed on her dulcimer, sometimes a.s.sisted by Fran (an apprentice in the art) but usually all on her own. At such times (she'd confided to Fran) she felt as she imagined a great conductor must feel conducting some choral extravaganza, the Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony.

Except that the dulcimer gave the whole thing a tinge and tw.a.n.g of hillbilly, as of Tammy Wynette singing "I'm just a geisha from the bayou." Of course, the actual Tammy Wynette had died ages ago and could sing that song only in simulation, but still it was hard to imagine it engineered with any other voice-print: habit makes the things we love seem inevitable as arithmetic."Encore?" Chantal asked, lifting her empty cup, and then, when Fran had nodded, signaling to the waiter.

Coffee, cigarettes, a song on the jukebox. Simple pleasures, but doubled and quadrupled and raised to some astronomical power, the stuff that industries and gross national products are made of. Fran imagined a long reverse zoom away from their table at the cafe, away from the swarming hive of the city, to where each soul and automobile was a mere pixel on the vast monitor of eternity.

The coffees came, and Chantal began to sing, "Le bonheur de la femme n'est pas dans la liberte, mais dans l'acceptation d'un devoir."

A woman's happiness lies not in liberty, but in the acceptance of a duty.

And what was that duty? Fran wondered. What could it be but love?

in a vision once I saw There were no mirrors in Xanadu, and yet every vista seemed to be framed as by those tinted looking gla.s.ses of the eighteenth century that turned everything into a Claude Lorrain. Look too long or too closely into someone else's face, and it became your own. Chantal would tilt her head back, a flower bending to the breeze, and she would morph into Fran's friend of his earlier afterlife, Debora. Debora, whose hand had caressed his vanished s.e.x, whose wit had entertained him with Cartesian doubts.

They were the captives (it was explained, when Fran summoned Help) of pirates, and must yield to the desires of their captors in all things. That they were in the thrall of copyright pirates, not authentic old-fas.h.i.+oned buccaneers, was an epistomological quibble. Subjectively their captors could exercise the same cruel authority as any Captain Kidd or Hannibal Lecter. Toes and nipples don't know the difference between a knife and an algorithm. Pirates of whatever sort are in charge of pain and its delivery, and that reduces all history, all consciousness, to a simple system of pluses and minuses, do's and don'ts. Suck my d.i.c.k or walk the plank. That (the terrible simplicity) was the downside of living in a pleasure-dome.

"Though, if you think about it," said Debora, with her hand resting atop the strings of her dulcimer, as though it might otherwise interrupt what she had to say, "every polity is ultimately based upon some calculus of pleasure, of apportioning rapture and meting out pain. The jukebox and the slot machine, what are they but emblems of the Pavlovian bargain we all must make with that great dealer high in the sky?"

She lifted a little silver hammer and bonked her dulcimer a triple bonk of do-sol-do.

"The uncanny thing is how easily we can be programmed to regard mere symbols-" Another do-sol-do. "-as rewards. A bell is rung somewhere, and something within us resonates. And music becomes one of the necessities of life. Even such a life as this, an ersatz afterlife."

"Is there some way to escape?" Fran asked.

Debora gave an almost imperceptible shrug, which her dulcimer responded to as though she were a breeze and it a wind chime hanging from the kitchen ceiling. "There are rumors of escapees-E-Men, as they're called. But no one I've ever known has escaped, or at least they've never spoken of it. Perhaps they do, and get caught, and then the memory of having done so is blotted out. Our memories are not exactly ours to command, are they?"

The dulcimer hyperventilated.

Debora silenced it with a glance and continued: "Some days I'll flash on some long-ago golden oldie, and a whole bygone existence will come flooding back. A whole one-pound box of madeleines, and I will be absolutely convinced by it that I did have a life once upon a time, where there were coffee breaks with doughnuts bought at actual bakeries and rain that made the pavements speckled and a whole immense sensorium, always in flux, which I can remember now only in involuntary blips of recall. And maybe it really was like that once, how can we know, but whether we could get back to it, that I somehow can't believe."

"I've tried to think what it would be like to be back there, where we got started." Fran gazed into the misty distance, as though her earlier life might be seen there, as in an old home video. "But it's like trying to imagine what it would be like in the thirteenth century, when people all believed in miracles and stuff. It's beyond me."

"Don't you believe in miracles, then?" The dulcimer tw.a.n.ged a tw.a.n.g of simple faith. "I do. I just don't suppose they're for us. Miracles are for people who pay full price. For us there's just Basic Tier programming- eternal time and infinite s.p.a.ce.""And those may be no more than special effects."

Debora nodded. "But even so ..." "Even so?" Fran prompted.

"Even so," said Debora, with the saddest of smiles, a virtual flag of surrender, "if I were you, I would try to escape."

those caves of ice!

Ebay was a lonely place, as holy and enchanted as some underwater cathedral in the poem of a French symbolist, or a German forest late at night. If you have worked at night as a security guard for the Mall of America, or if you've seen Simone Simon in Cat People as she walks beside the pool (only her footsteps audible, her footsteps and the water's plash), only then can you imagine its darkling beauty, the change that comes over the objects of our desire when they are flensed of their purveyors and consumers and stand in mute array, aisle after aisle. Then you might sweep the beam of your flashlight across the waters of the re-circulating fountain as they perpetually spill over the granite brim. No silence is so large as that where Muzak played, but plays no more.

Imagine such a place, and then imagine discovering an exit that announces itself in the darkness by a dim red light and opening the door to discover a Piranesian vista of a further mall, no less immense, its tiers linked by purring escalators, the leaves of its potted trees s.h.i.+mmering several levels beneath where you are, and twinkling in the immensity, the signs of the stores-every franchise an entrepreneur might lease. Armani and Osh-Kosh, Hallmark, Kodak, Disney-Mitsubis.h.i.+, American Motors, Schwab. A landscape all of names, and yet if you click on any name, you may enter its portal to discover its own little infinity of choices. s.h.i.+rts of all sizes, colors, patterns, prices; s.h.i.+rts that were sold, yesterday, to someone in Iowa; other s.h.i.+rts that may be sold tomorrow or may never find a taker.

Every atom and molecule in the financial continuum of purchases that might be made has here been numbered and cataloged. Here, surely, if anywhere, one might become if not invisible then scarcely noticed, as in some great metropolis swarming with illegal aliens, among whom a single further citizen can matter not a jot.

Fran became a mote in that vastness, a pip, an alga, unaware of his own frenetic motion as the flow of data took him from one possible purchase to the next. Here was a CD of Hugo Wolflieder sung by Elly Ameling. Here a pair of Lucchese cowboy boots only slightly worn with western heels. Here six interesting j.a.panese dinner plates and a hand-embroidered black kimono. This charming pig creamer has an adorable French hat and is only slightly chipped. These Viking sweats.h.i.+rts still have their tags from Wal-Mart, $29.95. Sabatier knives, set of four. A 1948 first edition of The Secret of the Old House.

Hawaiian Barbie with hula accessories. "Elly Ameling Sings Schumann!" a.s.sorted rustic napkins from Amish country.

There is nothing that is not a thought away, nothing that cannot be summoned by a wink and a nod to any of a dozen search engines. But there is a price to pay for such accessibility. The price is sleep, and in that sleep we buy again those commodities we bought or failed to buy before. No price is too steep, and no desire too low. Cream will flow through the slightly chipped lips of the charming pig creamer in the adorable hat, and our feet will slip into the boots we had no use for earlier. And when we return from our night journeys, like refugees returning to the sh.e.l.ls of their burned homes, we find we are where we were, back at Square One. The matron was bellowing over the PA, "Le temps s'en va, mesdames! Le temps s'en va!" and Fran wanted to die.

grain beneath the thresher's flail She was growing old in the service of the Khan, but there was no advantage to be reaped from long service, thanks to the contract she'd signed back when. She had become as adept with the hammers of the dulcimer as ever Chantal had been (Chantal was gone now, no one knew whither), but in truth the dulcimer is not an instrument that requires great skill-and its rewards are proportional. She felt as though she'd devoted her life-her afterlife-to the game of Parcheesi, shaking the dice and moving her tokens round the board forever. Surely this was not what the prospectus promised those who signed on.

She knew, in theory (which she'd heard, in various forms, from other denizens), that the great desideratum here, the magnet that drew all its custom, was beauty, the rapture of beauty that poets find in writing poetry or composers in their music. It might not be the Beatific Vision that saints feel face-to-face with G.o.d, but it was, in theory, the next best thing, a bliss beyond compare. And perhaps it was all one could hope for. How could she be sure that this bliss or that, as it s.h.i.+vered through her, like a wind through Daphne's leaves, wasn't of the same intensity that had zapped the major romantic poets in their day?

In any case, there was no escaping it. She'd tried to find an exit that didn't, each day, become the entrance by which she returned to her contracted afterlife and her service as a damsel with a dulcimer. Tw.a.n.g! Tw.a.n.g! O ciel! O belle nuit! Not that she had any notion of some higher destiny for herself, or sweeter pleasures-except the one that all the poets agreed on: Lethe, darkness, death, and by death to say we end the humdrum daily continuation of all our yesterdays into all our tomorrows.

The thought of it filled her with a holy dread, and she took up the silver hammers of her dulcimer andbegan, once again, to play such music as never mortal knew before.

As I stated two years ago in the headnote to Joyce Carol Oates's contribution to my last original anthology, 999, she is a phenomenon. She remains so. Everywhere you look-the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, lists of the year's best fiction (or nonfiction)-there she is. She's like a wonderful presence, writing wonderful things.

Here she's written her very first science fiction tale-which is amazing, if only because it's a first.

"Commencement" is creepy, somber, funny, and unique. It would have fit right into the original New Wave movement in the mid-sixties.

Commencement.

Joyce Carol Oates.

The Summons. Commencement! Bells in the Music College on its high hill are ringing to summon us to the Great Dome for the revered annual ceremony!

This year, as every year, the University's Commencement is being held on the last Sunday in May; but this year will be the two hundredth anniversary of the University's founding, so the occasion will be even more festive than usual and will attract more media attention. The Governor of the State, a celebrated graduate of the University, will give the Commencement address, and three renowned Americans-the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist-will be awarded honorary doctorates. Over four thousand degrees-B.A.'s, M.A.'s, Ph.D.'s-will be conferred on graduates, a record number. As the University Chancellor has said, "Every year our numbers are rising. But our standards are also rising. The University is at the forefront of evolution,"

And so here we are on this sunny, windy May morning, streaming into the Great Dome, through Gates 1-15. Thousands of us! Young people in black academic gowns, caps precariously on their heads; their families, and friends; and many townspeople a.s.sociated with the University, the predominant employer in the area. We're metal filings drawn by a powerful magnet. We're moths drawn to a sacred light. The very air through which we make our way crackles with excitement, and apprehension. Who will be taken to the Pyramid, how will the ceremony of renewal unfold? Even those of us who have attended Commencement numerous times are never prepared for the stark reality of the event, and must witness with our own eyes what we can never quite believe we've seen, for it so quickly eludes us.

The Great Dome! We're proud of our football stadium, at the northern, wooded edge of our hilly campus; it seats more than thirty thousand people, in steeply banked tiers, a multimillion-dollar structure with a sliding translucent plastic roof, contracted in fair weather. The vast football field, simulated gra.s.s of a glossy emerald green has been transformed this morning into a more formal s.p.a.ce: thousands of folding chairs, to accommodate our graduates, fan out before a majestic speakers' platform raised six feet above the ground, and at the center, rear of this platform, festooned in the University's colors (crimson, gold) is the twelve-foot Pyramid (composed of rectangles of granite carefully set into place by workmen laboring through the night) that is the emblem of our University.

A crimson satin banner unfurled behind the platform proclaims in gold letters the Universitymotto: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. ("A New Cycle of the Ages.") It has been a chilly, fair morning after a night of thunderstorms and harsh pelting rain, typical in this northerly climate in spring; the Chancellor, having deliberated with his staff, has decreed that the Great Dome be open to the sun. The University orchestra, seated to the left of the platform, on the gra.s.s, is playing a brisk, bra.s.sy version of the stately alma mater, and as graduates file into the stadium many of them are singing: Where snowy peaks of mountains Meet the eastern sky, Proudly stands our Alma Mater On her hilltop high.

Crimson our blood, Deep as the sea.

Our Alma Mater, We pledge to thee!

These words the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer believes he can hear, a mile from the University. A sick, helpless sensation spreads through him. "So soon? It will happen-so soon?"

The Robing. In the Great Dome Triangle Lounge where VIPs a.s.semble before Commencement, as before football games, the Chancellor's party is being robed for the ceremony. Deans of numerous colleges and schools, University marshals, the Governor, the Poet, the Educator, the Scientist, the Provost, the President of the Board of Trustees, the President of the Alumni a.s.sociation, and the Chancellor himself-these dis-tinguished individuals are being a.s.sisted in putting on their elaborate robes, hoods, and hats, and are being photographed for the news media and for the University archives. There's a palpable excitement in the air even among those who have attended many such ceremonies during their years of service to the University. For something can always go wrong when so many people are involved, and in so public and dramatic a spectacle. The retiring Dean of Arts and Sciences murmurs to an old colleague, "Remember that terrible time when-" and the men laugh together and shudder. Already it's past 9 A.M.; the ceremony is scheduled to begin promptly at 10 A.M. Already the University orchestra has begun playing "Pomp and Circ.u.mstance," that thrilling processional march. Declares the Chancellor, "Always, that music makes me s.h.i.+ver!"

Surrounded by devoted female a.s.sistants, this burly, kingly man of youthful middle age is being robed in a magnificent crimson gown with gold-and-black velvet trim; around his neck he wears a heavy, ornate medallion, solid gold on a gold chain, embossed with the University's Pyramid seal and the Latin words NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM. The Chancellor has a broad buff face that resembles a face modeled in clay and thick, leonine white hair; he's a well-liked administrator among both faculty and students, a graduate of the University and one-time all-American halfback on the University's revered football team. Each year the Chancellor is baffled by which side of his crimson satin cap the gold ta.s.sel should be on, and each year his personal a.s.sistant says, with a fondly maternal air of reproach, "Mr. Chancellor, the left. Let me adjust it." Such a flurry of activity in the Triangle Lounge! A TV crew, photographers'flashes. Where is the Dean of the Graduate School, in charge of conferring graduate degrees?

Where is the Dean of the Chapel, the minister who will lead more than thirty thousand people in prayer, in less than an hour? There's the University Provost, the Chancellor's right-hand man, with a sharp eye on the clock; there's the newly appointed Dean of Human Engineering, the most heavily endowed (and controversial) of the University's schools, talking and laughing casually with one of his chief donors, the billionaire President of the Board of Trustees; there's the President of the Alumni a.s.sociation, another University benefactor whose gift of $35 million will be publicly announced at the luncheon following Commencement, talking with his old friend the Governor. And there's the University Mace Bearer, one of the few women administrators at the University, with a helmet of pewter hair and scintillant eyes, frowning toward the entrance-"Where's my a.s.sistant?"

The a.s.sistant Mace Bearer, the youngest member of the elite Chancellor's party-where is he?

In fact, the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer is only now entering the Great Dome, at Gate 3.

Hurrying! Breathless! Amid an ever-thickening stream of energetic, fresh-faced young men and women in black gowns and mortarboards, flanked by families and relatives, being directed by ushers into the immense stadium.

"Show your tickets, please. Tickets?" The a.s.sistant Mace Bearer has a special crimson ticket and is respectfully directed upstairs to the Triangle Lounge. How has it happened, he's late. . . . Traffic was clogging all streets leading to the University, he hadn't given himself enough time, reluctant to leave home, though, of course, he had no choice but to leave his home and to join the Chancel lor's party as he'd agreed he would do; this is his first Commencementon the Pyramid. He's a recent faculty appointment, after only three years of service he's been promoted to the rank of a.s.sociate professor of North American history; for a thirty-four-year-old, this is an achievement. His students admire him as Professor S____, soft-spoken and reserved but clearly intelligent; not vain, but ambitious; and eager to perform well in the eyes of his elders.

"Still, I could turn back now." As he ascends the cement stairs to Level 2. "Even now." As he makes his way in a stream of strangers along a corridor. "It isn't too late. ..."

Those smells! His stomach turns, he's pa.s.sing vendors selling coffee, breakfast m.u.f.fins, bagels, even sandwiches and potato chips, which young people in billowing black gowns are devouring on their way into the stadium. You would think that the occasion wasn't Commencement but an ordinary sports event. The a.s.sistant Mace Bearer nearly collides with a gaggle of excited girls carrying sweet rolls and coffee in Styrofoam cups; he feels a pang of nausea, seeing a former student, a husky boy with close-cropped hair, wolfing down a Commencement Special-blood sausage on a hot-dog roll, with horseradish. At this time of morning!

Even as the Chancellor, the Governor, and the honorary degree recipients, the Poet, the Educator, and the Scientist are being photographed, and the Mace Bearer and the head University marshal are checking the contents of the black lacquered box that the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer will carry, the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer enters the Triangle Lounge. At last! Cheeks guiltily heated, he stammers an apology, but the Mace Bearer curtly says, "No matter: you're here, Professor S_____ ."

Chastened, he reports to the robing area where an older, white-haired a.s.sistant makes acheck beside him name on a list and helps outfit him in his special Commencement gown, black, but made of a synthetic waterproof fabric that will wipe dry, with crimson-and-gold trim, and helps him adjust his black velvet hat. . . . "Gloves? Don't I wear-gloves?" There's a brief flurried search, of course the gloves are located: black to match the gown, and made of thin, durable rubber. When Professor S_____---- thanks the white-haired woman nervously, she says, with an air of mild reproach, "But this is our responsibility, Professor."

She's one of those University "administrative a.s.sistants" behind the scenes of all Commencements, as of civilization itself. With a dignified gesture she indicates the boisterous Triangle Lounge in which the Chancellor's party, predominantly male, gowned, resplendent, and regal, is being organized into a double column for the processional. "This is our honor."

The Processional. At last! At 10:08 A.M., almost on time, the Chancellor's party marches into the immense stadium, eye-catching in their elaborate gowns and caps: faculty and lesser administrative officers first, then the Mace Bearer and the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer (who carries in his slightly trembling black-gloved hands the black-lacquered box), the deans of the colleges and the Dean of the Chapel, the Chancellor and his special guests. As they march, the orchestra plays "Pomp and Circ.u.mstance" ever louder, with more rhythmic emphasis. "Thrilling music,"

the Chancellor says to the Governor, "even after so many Commencements." The Governor, who has been smiling his broad public smile at the gowned young people seated in rows of hundreds on the stadium gra.s.s in front of the speakers' platform, says, "How much more so, Mr.

Chancellor, it must be for those whose first Commencement this is, and last." The elderly Poet marches at the side of the Provost, who will present him for his honorary degree; the Poet, long a revered name in American literature, was once a tall, eagle-like imposing presence, now of less than moderate height, with slightly stooped shoulders and a ravaged yet still n.o.ble face; where lines of poetry once danced in his head, unbidden as b.u.t.terflies, now he's thinking with a dull self-anger that he should be ashamed to be here, accepting yet another award for his poetry, when he hasn't written anything worthwhile in years. ("Still, I crave recognition.

Loneliness terrifies me. How will it end!") Blinking in the pale, whitely glaring light of the stadium, the Poet wants to think that these respectfully applauding young people-some of them alarm-ingly young-in their black gowns and mortarboards, gazing at him and the other elders as they march past, know who he is, and what his work has been-a fantasy, yet how it warms him!

Behind the Poet is the Educator, a hearty, flush-faced woman in her early sixties; unlike the tormented Poet, the Educator is smiling happily, for she's proud of herself, plain, big-boned, forthright, beaming with health and American optimism after decades of professional commitment; never married-"Except to my work," as she says. The Educator is one of the very first women to be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University, and so it's appropriate that she's being escorted into the stadium by the Dean of the Education School, another woman of vigorous middle age, who will present the Educator for her award. This is the Educator's first honorary doctorate; she's thinking that her years of industry and self-denial have been worth it.

("If only my parents were alive to see me! . . .") Behind the Educator is the Scientist, a long-ago n.o.bel Prize winner, with gold-glinting gla.s.ses that obscure his melancholy eyes; another ravaged elderly face, rather equine, with tufted gray eyebrows, a long hawkish nose and enormous nostrils; unlike the Educator, the Scientist can't summon up much enthusiasm for this ceremony and can't quite recall why he'daccepted the invitation. ("Vanity? Or-loneliness?") For, after the n.o.bel, which he'd won as a brash young man of thirty-seven, what do such "honors" mean? The Scientist, in his ninth decade, has come to despise most other scientists and makes little effort to keep up with new discoveries and developments, even in his old field, biology; especially, he loathes publicity-seeking idiots in fields like human genetics and "human engineering"; he believes such research to be immoral, criminal; if he had his way, it would be banned by the U.S.

government. (However, the Scientist keeps such views to himself. He knows better than to say such inflammatory things. And he has to admit that, yes, if he were a young man again, very possibly he'd be involved in such research himself, and to h.e.l.l with the views of his elders.) Marching into the stadium, past the rows of gowned young people, so fresh-faced, so expectant, blinking at their revered elders and intermittently applauding, the Scientist oscillates between a sense of his own considerable worth and the fact that, to all but a handful of the many thousands of men and women in this ghastly open s.p.a.ce, he's a name out of the distant past, if a "name" at all; younger scientists in his field are astonished, if perhaps not very interested, to hear that he's still alive. Such a fate, the Scientist thinks, is a kind of irony. And irony has no place on Commencement day, only homilies and uplifting sentiments. "The young know nothing of irony, as they know nothing of subtlety or mortality," the Scientist observes dryly to his escort, the Dean of the Graduate School, who inclines his head politely but murmurs only a vague a.s.sent.

With "Pomp and Circ.u.mstance" being played so loudly, as the processional of dignitaries pa.s.ses close by the orchestra, very likely the Graduate Dean can't hear the Scientist.

As the Mace Bearer and the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer ascend the steps to the platform, there's rippling applause from the graduates a.s.sembled on the gra.s.s. "With young people, you can't tell: are they honoring us, or mocking us?" the Mace Bearer observes with a grim smile to her silent a.s.sistant. Professor S_____, who has attended a number of Commencements at the University, as a B.A. candidate (summa c.u.m laude, history) and more recently as a young faculty member, would like to a.s.sure the Mace Bearer that the applause is genuine, but it isn't for them as individuals: the applause is for their function, and more specifically for the contents of the black-lacquered box. Taking his seat beside the Mace Bearer, to the immediate right of the Pyramid, the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer glances out at the audience for the first time and swallows hard. So many! And what will they expect of him! (For the nature of the a.s.sistant Mace Bearer's task is that it cannot be rehea.r.s.ed, only "premeditated," according to tradition.) A thrill of boyish excitement courses through him. He's breathing quickly, and grateful to be finished with the procession. Nothing went wrong; he hadn't stumbled on any steps, hadn't become light-headed in the cool, white-tinged air. The thought has not yet come to him sly as a knife blade in the heart: But now you can't escape. By his watch the time is 10:17 A.M.

The Invocation. The Dean of the Chapel, an impressive masculine figure in a black gown trimmed with crimson-and-gold velvet, like the Chancellor a former University athlete (rowing), comes forward to the podium, in front of the Pyramid, to lead the gathering in a prayer. "Ladies and gentlemen, will you please rise?" Despite its size, the crowd is eager to obey as a puppy. The gowned graduates, and the spectators in the steeply banked stadium, all rise to their feet at once and lower their eyes as the Dean of the Chapel addresses "Almighty G.o.d, Creator of Heaven and Earth," alternately praising this being for His beneficence andasking of Him forgiveness, inspiration, imagination, strength to fulfill the sacred obligations prescribed by "the very presence of the Pyramid"; to enact once again the sacred "ceremony of renewal" that has made this day, as "all our days," possible. The Poet is thinking how ba.n.a.l, such words; though they may be true, he isn't listening very closely; in a lifetime one hears the same words repeated endlessly, in familiar combinations, for the fund of words is finite while the appet.i.te for utter-uig them is infinite. (Is this a new idea? Or has the Poet had such a thought numerous times, while sitting on stages, gazing out into audiences with his small fixed dignified-elder smile?) The Educator, seated beside the Poet, listens to the chaplain's invocation more attentively; she can't escape feeling that this Commencement revolves somehow around her; there are few women on the platform, and it's rare indeed that any woman, however deserving, has received an honorary doctorate from the University. She imagines (not for the first time!) that, in any gathering, young women are admiring of her as a model of what they might accomplish with hard work, talent, and diligence. ("And self-sacrifice. Of course.") The Scientist is s.h.i.+fting restlessly in his chair, which is a folding chair, and d.a.m.ned hard on his lean haunches. Religious piety! The appeal to ma.s.s emotions!

Thousands of years of "civilization" have pa.s.sed, and yet humankind seems incapable of transcending its primitive origins. . . . The Scientist oscillates between feeling despair over this fact, which suggests a fundamental failure of science to educate the population, and simple contempt. The Scientist resents that he has been invited to this Commencement only to be subjected to the usual superst.i.tious rhetoric in which (he would guess!) virtually no one on the speakers' platform believes; yet the chaplain is allowed to drone on for ten minutes while thousands of credulous onlookers gaze up at him. "... we thank You particularly on this special day, the two hundredth anniversary of the University's Commencement, when Your generosity and love overflow upon us, and our sacrifice to You flows upward to be renewed, in you, as rainfall enriches the earth. . . ." So the broad-shouldered Dean of the Chapel intones, raising his beefy hands aloft in an att.i.tude of, to the Scientist, outrageous supplication. There's a brisk, chilly breeze; the sky overhead is no longer clear, but laced with cloud-like frost on a windowpane; the crimson banners draped about the platform stir restlessly, as if a G.o.d were coming to life, rousing himself awake.