“Just wait,” he said. “And pray.”
“That’s bullshit,” Donna said. “Prayer, I mean. I prayed a long time ago, a lot, but not any more. We wouldn’t have to do this, what we’re doing, if prayer worked. It’s another shuck.”
“Most things are.” He followed after the girl a few steps as she departed, drawn to her, liking her. “I don’t feel you destroyed your friend. It seems to me you’ve been as much destroyed, as much the victim. Only on you it doesn’t show. Anyhow, there was no choice.”
“I’m going to hell,” Donna said. She smiled suddenly, a broad, boyish grin. “My Catholic upbringing.”
“In hell they sell you nickel bags and when you get home there’s M-and-M’s in them.”
“M-and-M’s made out of turkey turds,” Donna said, and then all at once she was gone. Vanished away into the hitherand-thither-going people; he blinked. Is this how Bob Arctor felt? he asked himself. Must have. There she was, stable and as if forever; then–nothing. Vanished like fire or air, an element of the earth back into the earth. To mix with the everyone-else people that never ceased to be. Poured out among them. The evaporated girl, he thought. Of transformation. That comes and goes as she will. And no one, nothing, can hold on to her.
I seek to net the wind, he thought. And so had Arctor. Vain, he thought, to try to place your hands firmly on one of the federal drug-abuse agents. They are furtive. Shadows which melt away when their job dictates. As if they were never really there in the first place. Arctor, he thought, was in love with a phantom of authority, a kind of hologram, through which a normal man could walk, and emerge on the far side, alone. Without ever having gotten a good grip on it–on the girl itself.
God’s M.O., he reflected, is to transmute evil into good. If He is active here, He is doing that now, although our eyes can’t perceive it; the process lies hidden beneath the surface of reality, and emerges only later. To, perhaps, our waiting heirs. Paltry people who will not know the dreadful war we’ve gone through, and the losses we took, unless in some footnote in a minor history book they catch a notion. Some brief mention. With no list of the fallen.
There should be a monument somewhere, he thought, listing those who died in this. And, worse, those who didn’t die. Who have to live on, past death. Like Bob Arctor. The saddest of all.
I get the idea Donna is a mercenary, he thought. Not on salary. And they are the most wraithlike. They disappear forever. New names, new locations. You ask yourself, where is she now? And the answer is–
Nowhere. Because she was not there in the first place.
Reseating himself at the wooden table, Mike Westaway finished eating his burger and drinking his Coke. Since it was better than what they were served at New-Path. Even if the burger had been made from groundup cows’ anuses.
To call Donna back, to seek to find her or possess her . . . I seek what Bob Arctor sought, so maybe he is better off now, this way. The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love the most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it.
So maybe we saved him from something worse, Westaway concluded. And, while accomplishing that, put what remained of him to use. To good and valuable use.
If we turn out lucky.
“Do you know any stories?” Thelma asked one day.
“I know the story about the wolf,” Bruce said.
“The wolf and the grandmother?”
“No,” he said. “The black-and-white wolf. It was up in a tree, and again and again it dropped down on the farmer’s animals. Finally one time the farmer got all his sons and all his sons’ friends and they stood around waiting for the blackand-white wolf in the tree to drop down. At last the wolf dropped down on a mangy-looking brown animal, and there in his black-and-white coat he was shot by all of them.”
“Oh,” Thelma said. “That’s too bad.”
“But they saved the hide,” he continued. “They skinned the great black-and-white wolf that dropped from the tree and preserved his beautiful hide, so that those to follow, those who came later on, could see what he had been like and could marvel at him, at his strength and size. And future generations talked about him and related many stories of his prowess and majesty, and wept for his passing.”
“Why did they shoot him?”
“They had to,” he said. “You must do that with wolves like that.”
“Do you know any other stories? Better ones?”
“No,” he said, “that’s the only story I know.” He sat remembering how the wolf had enjoyed his great springing ability, his leaping down again and again in his fine body, but now that body was gone, shot down. And for meager animals to be slaughtered and eaten anyhow. Animals with no strength that never sprang, that took no pride in their bodies. But anyhow, on the good side, those animals trudged on. And the black-and-white wolf had never complained; he had said nothing even when they shot him. His claws had still been deep in his prey. For nothing. Except that that was his fashion and he liked to do it. It was his only way. His only style by which to live. All he knew. And they got him.
“Here’s the wolf!” Thelma exclaimed, leaping about clumsily. “Voob, voob!” She grabbed at things and missed, and he saw with dismay that something was wrong with her. He saw for the first time, distressed and wondering how it could happen, that she was impaired.
He said, “You are not the wolf.”
But even so, as she groped and hobbled, she stumbled; even so, he realized, the impairment continued. He wondered how it could be that . . .
_Ich unglücksel’ get Atlas! Eine Welt,
Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen muss ich tragen,
Ich trage Unerträgliches, und brechen
Will mir das Herz im Leibe_.
. . . such sadness could exist. He walked away.
Behind him she still played. She tripped and fell. How must that feel? he wondered.
He roamed along the corridor, searching for the vacuum cleaner. They had informed him that he must carefully vacuum the big playroom where the children spent most of the day.
“Down the hall to the right.” A person pointed. Earl.
“Thanks, Earl,” he said.
When he arrived at a closed door he started to knock, and then instead he opened it.
Inside the room an old woman stood holding three rubber balls, which she juggled. She turned toward him, her gray stringy hair falling on her shoulders, grinning at him with virtually no teeth. She wore white bobby socks and tennis shoes. Sunken eyes, he saw; sunken eyes, grinning, empty mouth.
“Can you do this?” she wheezed, and threw all three balls up into the air. They fell back, hitting her, bouncing down to the floor. She stooped over, spitting and laughing.
“I can’t do that,” he said, standing there dismayed.
“I can.” The thin old creature, her arms cracking as she moved, raised the balls, squinted, tried to get it right.
Another person appeared at the door beside Bruce and stood with him, also watching.
“How long has she been practicing?” Bruce said.
“Quite a while.” The person called, “Try again. You’re getting close!”
The old woman cackled as she bent to fumble to pick the balls up once again.
“One’s over there,” the person beside Bruce said. “Under your night table.”
“Ohhhh!” she wheezed.
They watched the old woman try again and again, dropping the balls, picking them back up, aiming carefully, balancing herself, throwing them high into the air, and then hunching as they rained down on her, sometimes hitting her head.
The person beside Bruce sniffed and said, “Donna, you better go clean yourself. You’re not clean.”
Bruce, stricken, said, “That isn’t Donna. Is that Donna?” He raised his head to peer at the old woman and he felt great terror; tears of a sort stood in the old woman’s eyes as she gazed back at him, but she was laughing, laughing as she threw the three balls at him, hoping to hit him. He ducked.
“No, Donna, don’t do that,” the person beside Bruce said to her. “Don’t hit people. Just keep trying to do what you saw on TV, you know, catch them again yourself and throw them right back up. But go clean yourself now; you stink.”