Robert Silverberg - Going

He was almost afraid to turn to Montaigne, fearing that that other great guide of his youth might also have soured over the long decades. But no. Instantly the old charm claimed him. I cannot accept the way in which we fix the span of our lives. I have observed that the sages hold it to be much shorter than is commonly supposed. “What!” said the younger Cato to those who would prevent him from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached with yielding up my life too soon?” And yet he was but forty-eight years of age. He thought that age very ripe and well advanced, considering how few men reach it. Yes. Yes. And: Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The profit of life is not in its length but in the use we put it to: many a man has lived long, who has lived little; see to it as long as you are here. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, to make the best of life. Did you think never to arrive at a place you were incessantly making for? Yet there is no road but has an end. And if society is any comfort to you, is not the world going the selfsame way as you? Yes. Perfect. Staunt read deep into the night, and sent for a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem from the House of Leavetaking’s well-stocked cellars, and solemnly toasted old Montaigne in his own sleek wine, and read on until morning. There is no road but has an end.

When he was done with Montaigne, he turned to Ben Jonson, first the familiar works, Volpone and The Silent Woman and The Case is Altered, then the black, explosive plays of later years, Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn and The Devil Is an Ass. Staunt had always felt a strong affinity for the Elizabethans, and particularly for Jonson, that crackling, hissing, scintillating man, whose stormy, sprawling plays blazed with a nightmarish intensity that Shakespeare, the greater poet, seemed to lack. As he had always vowed he would, Staunt submerged himself in Jonson, until the sound and rhythm of Jonson’s verse echoed and reechoed like thunder in his overloaded brain, and the texture of Jonson’s mind seemed inlaid on his own. The Magnetic Lady, Cynthia’s Revels, Catiline his Conspiracy —no play was too obscure, too hermetic, for Staunt in his gluttony. And one afternoon during this period he found himself doing an unexpected thing. From his data terminal he requested a print-out of the final pages of The New Inn ’s first act, with an inch of blank space between each line. At the top of the sheet he wrote carefully, The New Inn, an Opera by Henry Staunt, from the play of Ben Jonson. Then, turning to Lovel’s long speech, “O thereon hangs a history, mine host,” Staunt began to pencil musical notations beneath the words, idly at first, then with sudden earnest fervor as the proper contours of the vocal line suggested themselves to him. Within minutes he had turned the entire speech into an aria and had. even scribbled some preliminary marginal notes to himself about orchestration. The style of the music was strange to him, a spare, lean, angular sort of melodiousness, thorny and complex, with a curiously archaic flavor. It was the sort of music Alban Berg might have written during an extended visit to the early seventeenth century. It did not sound much like Staunt’s own kind of thing. My late style, he thought. Probably the aria was impossible to sing. No matter: this was how the muse had called it forth. It was the first sustained composing Staunt had done in years. He stared at the completed aria in wonder, astonished that music could still flow from him like that, welling up without conscious command from the gushing spring within.

For an instant he was tempted to feed what he had written into a synthesizer and get back a rough orchestration. To hear the sound of it, with the baritone riding tensely over the swooping strings, might carry him on to set down the next page of the score, and the next, and the next. He resisted. The world already had enough operas that no one listened to. Shaking his head, smiling sadly, he dated the page, initialed it in his customary way, jotted down an opus number—by guesswork, for he was far from his ledgers—and, folding the sheet, put it away among his papers. Yet the music went on unfolding in his mind.

In his ninth week at the House of Fulfillment, finding himself stranded in stagnant waters, Staunt sought Dr. James and applied for the memory-jolt treatment. It seemed to be the only option left, short of Going, and he rarely contemplated Going these days. He was done with Jonson, and the impulse to request other books had not come to him; he peeked occasionally at his single page of The New Inn, but did not resume work on it; he was guarded and aloof in his conversations with Bollinger and with his occasional visitors; he realized that he was sliding imperceptibly into a deathlike passivity, without actually coming closer to his exit. He would not return to his former life, and he could not yet surrender and Go. Possibly the memory jolt would nudge him off dead center.

“It’ll take six hours to prepare you,” Dr. James said, his long nose twitching with enthusiasm for Staunt’s project. “The brain has to be cleared of all fatigue products, and the autonomic nervous system needs a tuning. When would you like to begin?”

“Now,” Staunt said.

They cleansed and tuned him, and took him back to his suite and put him to bed, and hooked him into his metabolic monitor. “If you get overexcited,” Dr. James explained, “the monitor will automatically adjust the intensity of your emotional flow downward.” Staunt was willing to take his chances with the intensity of his emotional flow, but the medic was insistent. The monitor stayed on. “It isn’t psychic pain we’re worried about,” Dr. James said. “There’s never any of that. But. sometimes—an excess of remembered love, do you know?—a burst of happiness—it could be too much, we’ve found.” Staunt nodded. He would not argue the point. The doctor produced a hypodermic and pressed its ultrasonic snout against Staunt’s arm. Briefly Staunt wondered whether this was all a trick, whether the drug would really send him to his Going rather than for a trip along his time-track, but he pushed the irrational notion aside, and the snout made its brief droning sound and the mysterious dark fluid leaped into his veins.

He hears the final crashing chords of The Trials of Job, and the curtain, a sheet of dense purple light, springs up from the floor of the stage. Applause. Curtain calls for the singers. The conductor on stage, now, bowing, smiling. The chorus master, even. Cascades of cheers. All about him swirl the glittering mobile chandeliers of the Haifa Opera House. Someone is shouting incomprehensible jubilant words in his ear: the language is Hebrew, Staunt realizes. He says, Yes, yes, thank you so very much. They want him to stand and acknowledge the applause. Edith sits beside him, flushed with excitement, her eyes sparkling. His mind supplies the date: September 9, 1999. “Let them see you,” Edith whispers through the tumult. A hand claps his shoulder. Wild eyes blazing into his own: Mannheim, the critic. “The opera of the century!” he cries. Staunt forces himself to rise. They are screaming his name. Staunt! Staunt! Staunt! The audience is his. Two thousand berserk Israelis, his to command. What shall he say to them? Sieg! Heil! Sieg! Heil! He chokes on his own appalling unvoiced joke. In the end he can do nothing but wave and grin and topple back into his seat. Edith rubs his arm lovingly. His glowing bride. His night of triumph. To write an opera at all these days is a mighty task; to enjoy a premiere like this is heavenly. Now the audience wants an encore. The conductor at his station. The curtain fades. Job alone on stage: his final scene, the proud bass voice crying, “Behold, I am vile,” and the voice of the Lord replying to him out of a thousand loudspeakers, filling all the world with sound: “Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency.” Staunt weeps at his own music. If I live a hundred years, I will never forget this night, he tells himself.