“Okay,” the old woman agreed, and hurried off, hunched and little. She left the three rubber balls still rolling on the floor.
The person beside Bruce shut the door, and they walked along the hall. “How long has Donna been here?” Bruce said.
“A long time. Since before I came, which was six months ago. She started trying to juggle about a week ago.”
“Then it isn’t Donna,” he said. “If she’s been here that long. Because I just got here a week ago.” And, he thought, Donna drove me here in her MG. I remember that, because we had to stop while she got the radiator filled back up. And she looked fine then. Sad-eyed, dark, quiet and composed in her little leather jacket, her boots, with her purse that has the rabbit’s foot dangling. Like she always is.
He continued on then, searching for the vacuum cleaner. He felt a great deal better. But be didn’t understand why.
15
Bruce said, “Could I work with animals?”
“No,” Mike said, “I think I’m going to put you on one of our farms. I want to try you with plants for a while, a few months. Out in the open, where you can touch the ground. With all these rocket-ship space probes there’s been too much trying to reach the sky. I want you to make the attempt to reach–”
“I want to be with something living.”
Mike explained, “The ground is living. The Earth is still alive. You can get the most help there. Do you have any agricultural background? Seeds and cultivation and harvesting?”
“I worked in an office.”
“You’ll be outside from now on. If your mind comes back it’ll have to come back naturally. You can’t make yourself think again. You can only keep working, such as sowing crops or tilling on our vegetable plantations–as we call them–or killing insects. We do a lot of that, driving insects out of existence with the right kind of sprays. We’re very careful, though,with sprays. They can do more harm than good. They can poison not only the crops and the ground but the person using them. Eat his head.” He added, “Like yours has been eaten.”
“Okay,” Bruce said.
You have been sprayed, Mike thought as he glanced at the man, so that now you’ve become a bug. Spray a bug with a toxin and it dies; spray a man, spray his brain, and he becomes an insect that clacks and vibrates about in a closed circle forever. A reflex machine, like an ant. Repeating his last instruction.
Nothing new will ever enter his brain, Mike thought, because that brain is gone.
And with it, that person who once gazed out. That I never knew.
But maybe, if he is placed in the right spot, in the right stance, he can still see down, and see the ground. And recognize that it is there. And place something which is alive, something different from himself, in it. To grow.
Since that is what he or it can’t do any longer: this creature beside me has died, and so can never again grow. It can only decay gradually until what remains, too, is dead. And then we cart that off.
There is little future, Mike thought, for someone who is dead. There is, usually, only the past. And for Arctor-Fred-Bruce there is not even the past; there is only this.
Beside him, as he drove the staff car, the slumped figure jiggled. Animated by the car.
I wonder, he thought, if it was New-Path that did this to him. Sent a substance out to get him like this, to make him this way _so they would ultimately receive him back?_
To build, he thought, their civilization within the chaos. If “civilization” it really is.
He did not know. He had not been at New-Path long enough; their goals, the Executive Director had informed him once, would be revealed to him only after he had been a staff member another two years.
Those goals, the Executive Director had said, had nothing to do with drug rehabilitation.
No one but Donald, the Executive Director, knew where the funding for New-Path originated. Money was always there. Well, Mike thought, there is a lot of money in manufacturing Substance D. Out in various remote rural farms, in small shops, in several facilities labeled “schools.” Money in manufacturing it, distributing it, and finally selling it. At least enough to keep New-Path solvent and growing–and more. Sufficient for a variety of ultimate goals.
Depending on what New-Path intended to do.
He knew something–U.S. Drug Restriction knew something–that most of the public, even the police, did not know.
Substance D, like heroin, was organic. Not the product of a lab.
So he meant quite a bit when he thought, as he frequently did, that all those profits could well keep New-Path solvent– _and growing_.
The living, he thought, should never be used to serve the purposes of the dead. But the dead–he glanced at Bruce, the empty shape beside him–should, if possible, serve the purposes of the living.
That, he reasoned, is the law of life.
And the dead, if they could feel, might feel better doing so.
The dead, Mike thought, who can still see, even if they can’t understand: they are our camera.
16
Under the sink in the kitchen he found a small bone fragment, down with the boxes of soap and brushes and buckets. It looked human, and he wondered if it was Jerry Fabin.
This made him remember an event from a long way back in his life. Once he had lived with two other guys and sometimes they had kidded about owning a rat named Fred that lived under their sink. And when they got really broke one time, they told people, they had to eat poor old Fred.
Maybe this was one of his bone fragments, the rat who had lived under their sink, who they had made up to keep them company.
Hearing them talking in the lounge.
“This guy was more burned out than he showed. I felt so. He drove up to Ventura one day, cruising all over to find an old friend back inland toward Ojai. Recognized the house on sight without the number, stopped, and asked the people if he could see Leo. ‘Leo died. Sorry you didn’t know.’ So this guy said then, ‘Okay, I’ll come back again on Thursday.’ And he drove off, he drove back down the coast, and I guess he went back up on Thursday again looking for Leo. How about that?”
He listened to their talk, drinking his coffee.
“–works out, the phone book has only one number in it; you call that number for whoever you want. Listed on page after page . . . I’m talking about a totally burned-out society. And in your wallet you have that number, the number, scribbled down on different slips and cards, for different people. And if you forget the number, you couldn’t call anybody.”
“You could dial Information.”
“It’s the same number.”
He still listened; it was interesting, this place they were describing. When you called it, the phone number was out of order, or if it wasn’t they said, “Sorry, you have the wrong number.” So you called it again, the same number, and got the person you wanted.
When a person went to the doctor–there was only one, and he specialized in everything–there was only one medicine. After he had diagnosed you he prescribed the medicine. You took the slip to the pharmacy to have it filled, but the pharmacist never could read what the doctor had written, so he gave you the only pill he had, which was aspirin. And it cured whatever you had.
If you broke the law, there was only the one law, which everybody broke again and again. The cop laboriously wrote it all up, which law, which infraction each time, the same one. And there was always the same penalty for any breaking of the law, from jaywalking to treason: the penalty was the death penalty, and there was agitation to have the death penalty removed, but it could not be because then, for like jaywalking, there would be no penalty at all. So it stayed on the books and finally the community burned out entirely and died. No, not burned out–they had been that already. They faded out, one by one, as they broke the law, and sort of died.
He thought, I guess when people heard that the last one of them had died they said, I wonder what those people were like. Let’s see–well, we’ll come back on Thursday. Although he was not sure, he laughed, and when he said that aloud, so did everyone else in the lounge.
“Very good, Bruce,” they said.
That got to be a sort of tag line then; when somebody there at Samarkand House didn’t understand anything or couldn’t find what he was sent to get, like a roll of toilet paper, they said, “Well, I guess I’ll come back on Thursday.” Generally, it was credited to him. His saying. Like with comics on TV who said the same tag-line thing again and again each week. It caught on at Samarkand House and meant something to them all.