‘weep talking.”
“When I attend conferences on international monetary affairs, when I go give my little speeches, or go earn a little fee for consultation, I hear of many things. They alarm me. I cannot tell you how much they alarm me. In Iran a little band of schoolteachers dribble gasoline around the circumference of a movie house and light it, incinerating four hundred and thirty people, most of them children. In Guyana nine hundred Americans kill themselves, for reasons as yet unexplained. There are over four billion people in the world, and each day more and more of them are dying in bloody and sickening ways. The pot is beginning to simmer. The little bubbles appear around the edged Intrigue, interconnected, is multiplying geometrically, helped along by the computer society. Orbiting eyes in the sky scan us all. Poisons abound. The sick birds fall out of the air. Signs and portents, Travis. And here we are in happyland, in a resort town, with the bright sunshine, bright boats, humid young ladies. This is all stage setting. Carnival. Scenario. The real world is out there in a slow dreadful process of change. There is a final agony
The Green Ripper of millions out there, and one and a quarter million new souls arriving every week. We try to think about it less than we used to. None of it makes any sense, really. But then whatever it is that is out there, it moves into this world in the shape of a tiny sphere of platinum and iridium and deadly poison. Now we have to thinlr about it, but it cannot be personalized. It is all a thing, a great plated toadlizard thing with a rotten breath, squatting back inside the mouth of the cave, infinitely patient.”
“So keep on having fun?”
“That’s not very responsive.”
“Sorry.”
“Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.”
“Except joining the Church of the Apocryphal”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Brother Titus will forgive my sins.”
“It’s an idiotic idea.”
‘] have to go out to California anyway, with… the ashes.”
‘when are we leaving?”
I smiled at him and shook my head. “Not this time, Meyer. Part of this trip is trying to get away from myself somehow. I have no delight in what and who I am. Not any more. Not here.”
Meyer sat and looked at me for a long moment, the small bright blue eyes intent, the face impassive. “You take yourself wherever you go, Travis.”
“A popular truism.”
He finished the beer and put it aside. “I’ll go get the urn.”
“You don’t have to bother right now. I can come and get it when I’m ready to leave.”
“I might not be there. I’ll get it now.”
He was back in ten minutes with a cardboard carton, a vise-grip wrench he had borrowed a year ago, and fifteen dollars he claimed he owed me and insisted I take.
And then he was gone. It had not occurred to me that I would hurt Meyer, but there seemed to be no point in going over and apologizing to him. Through me, he had acquired a taste for the salvage business. Now there was nothing left to save but myself. And he couldn’t help me there.
I fixed myself another heavy drink and, carrying it along, I went through all the interior spaces of The Busted Flush. I remembered all the lovely women. I looked at the huge shower stall, the sybaritic tub, the great broad bed in the master stateroom. I looked at the speakers and turntables, the tape decks and tape racks. Everything had a sweet, sad look. Like a playpen with scattered toys after the child has died.
When the drink was gone, I went down to my hidey-hole in the forward hull and removed all my reserve and took it up to the lounge. Ninety-three hundred-dollar bills. Life savings. Wisely invested, it might bring me almost eighty dollars a month. I sat and planned what I would wear and what I
The Green Ripper would carry, and mentally distributed my fortune in inconspicuous places.
Then I looked directly at the cardboard carton for the first time. Firmly taped and tied. Ten inches square, twelve inches tall. All the remains of the physical Gretel.It hefted at about the weight of a sizable cantaloupe.