Robert Silverberg - Going

The only one who did not visit him, aside from a few great-grandchildren, was his daughter Crystal. When he tried to phone her, he got no reply. His callers avoided any mention of her. Was she ill, Staunt wondered? Dead, even? “What are you trying to hide from me?” he asked his son finally. “Where’s Crystal?”

“Crystal’s fine,” Paul said.

“That’s not what I asked. Why hasn’t she come here?”

“Actually she hasn’t been entirely well.”

“As I suspected. She’s seriously ill, and you think the shock of hearing about it will harm me.”

Paul shook his head. “It isn’t like that at all.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Visions of cancer, heart surgery, brain tumors. “Has she had some kind of transplant? Is she in a hospital?”

“It isn’t a physical problem. Crystal’s simply suffering from fatigue. She’s gone to Luna Dome for a rest.”

“I spoke to her last month,” Staunt said. “She looked all right then. I want the truth, Paul.”

“The truth.”

“The truth, yes.”

Paul’s eyes closed wearily for a moment, and in that moment Staunt saw his son for what he was, an old man, though not so old a man as he. After a pause Paul said in a flat, toneless voice, “The trouble is that Crystal hasn’t accepted your Going very well. I called her about it, right after you told me, and she became hysterical. She thinks you’re being hoodwinked, that your Guide is part of a conspiracy to do away with you, that your decision is at least ten or fifteen years premature. And she can’t speak calmly about it, so we felt it was best to get her away where she wasn’t likely to speak to you, to keep her from disturbing you. There. That’s the story. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“Silly of you to hide it.”

“We didn’t want to spoil your Going with a lot of carrying on.”

“My Going won’t spoil that easily. I’d like to talk to her, Paul. She may benefit from whatever help I can give her. If I can make her see Going for what it really is—if I can convince her that her outlook is unhealthy—Paul, set up a call to Luna Dome for me, will you? The Fulfillment people will pay. Crystal needs me. I have to make her understand.”

“If you insist,” Paul said.

Somehow, though, technical problems prevented the placing of the call that day, and the next, and the one after that. And then Paul left the House of Leavetaking. When Staunt phoned him at home to find out where on the moon Crystal actually was, he became evasive and said that she had recently transferred from one sanatorium to another. It would be a few more days, Paul said, before the call could be placed. Seeing his son’s agitation, Staunt ceased pressing the issue. They did not want him to talk to Crystal. Crystal’s hysterics would ruin his Going, they felt. They would not give him the chance to soothe her. So be it. He could not fight them. This must be a difficult time for the whole family; if they wished to think that Crystal would upset him so terribly, he would let the matter drop, for a while. Perhaps he could speak to her later. There would be time before his Going. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Martin Bollinger came to him, usually in midafternoon, an hour or so after lunch. Generally Staunt received his Guide in his suite, although sometimes, on the cooler days, they strolled together through the garden. Their meetings invariably fell into three well-defined segments. First, Bollinger would display lively interest in Staunt’s current activities. What books are you reading? Have you been listening to music? Are there any interesting Departing Ones for you to talk with? Is the staff taking good care of you? Do your relatives visit you often enough? Has the urge to compose anything come over you? Is there anyone you’d especially like to see? Are you thinking of traveling at all? And so on and so on, the same questions surfacing frequently.

When the questions were over, Bollinger would glide into the second phase, a conversation with a quiet autumnal tone, a recollection of vanished days. Sometimes he spoke as though Staunt had already Gone; he talked of Staunt’s compositions in the same way he might refer to those of some early master. The symphonies, Bollinger would say: what a testament, what a mighty cumulative structure, nothing like them since Mahler, surely. The quartets, obviously akin to Beethoven’s, yet thoroughly contemporary, true expressions of their composer and his times. And Staunt would nod, solemnly accepting Bollinger’s verdicts in curious, dreamy objectivity. They would talk of mutual friends in the same way, viewing them as closed books, as cubes rather than as living, evolving persons. Staunt saw that Bollinger was helping to place distance between him and the life he had lived. Already, he felt remote from that life. After several weeks in the House of Leavetaking, he was coming to look upon himself more as someone who had very carefully studied Henry Staunt’s biography than as the actual living Staunt, the inhabitant of Staunt’s body.

The third phase of each meeting saw Bollinger turn quite frankly to matters directly related to Staunt’s Going. Constantly he pressed Staunt to examine his motives, and he avoided the false gentleness with which everyone else seemed to treat him. The Guide was pursuing truth. Do you truly wish to Go, Henry? If so, have you started to give thought to the date of your Leavetaking? Will you stay in the world another five weeks? Three months? Six? No, no one’s rushing you. Stay a year, if you want. I merely wonder if you’ve looked realistically, yet, at what it means to Go. Whether you comprehend your purpose in asking for it. Get behind the euphemism, Henry. Going is dying. The termination of all. For you, the end of the universe. Is this what you want, Henry? Is it? Is it? Is it? I’m not trying to make it harder for you. I’m trying to make it more pure. A truly spiritual Going, the rarest kind. But only if you’re ready. Are you aware that you can withdraw from the whole undertaking at any point? It isn’t cowardly to turn away from Going. See Hallam: Going isn’t suicide, it’s a sweet renunciation, properly reserved only for those who fully understand their motives. Anyone can kill himself in a fit of gloom. A proper going requires spiritual strength. Some people enroll in a House of Leavetaking two, even three times before they can take that last step. Yes, they go through the entire ritual of Farewell, almost to the end—and then they say they want to go home, and we send them home. We never push. We are not interested in sending victims out of the world. Only volunteers whose eyes are open. Have you been reading Hallam, Henry? Our philosopher of death. Look into yourself before you leap. Ask yourself, Is this what I want?

“What I want is to Go,” Staunt would reply. But he could not tell Bollinger how long it would actually be before he would find himself ready to take his leave.

There seemed to be some pattern in this thrice-weekly pas de deux of conversation with his Guide. Bollinger appeared to be maneuvering him patiently and circuitously toward some sort of apocalyptic burst of joyful insight, a radiant moment of comprehension in which he would be able to say, feeling worthy of Hallam as he did, “Now I shall Go.” But the maneuvers did not seem successful. Often, Staunt came away from Bollinger confused and depressed, less certain than ever of his desire to Go.

By the fourth week, most of his time was being given over to reading. Music had largely palled for him. His family, having made the obligatory first round of visits, had stopped coming; they would not return to the House of Leavetaking until word reached them that he was in the final phase of his Going and ready for his Farewell ceremony. He had said all he cared to say to his friends. The recreation center bored him and the company of the other Departing Ones chilled him. Therefore he read. At the outset, he went about it dutifully, mechanically, taking it up solely as a chore for the improvement of his mind in its final hours. Like an old pharaoh trying to repair his looks before he must be delivered into the hands of the mummifiers, Staunt meant to polish his soul with philosophy while he still had the chance. It was in that spirit that he plodded through Hobbes, whose political ideas had set him ablaze when he was nineteen, and who merely seemed crabbed and sour now. It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself:, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? Growing up in a tense, bleak world of peace that was really war, Staunt had found it easy to accept Hobbes’ dark teachings. Now he was not so sure that the natural condition of mankind was a state of conflict, every man at war with every other man. Something had changed in the world, it seemed. Or in Staunt. He put Hobbes away in displeasure.