Robert Silverberg - Going

“My Guide is Martin Bollinger,” he says. “Would you let him know that I’d like to be transferred to the House of Leavetaking as soon as possible?”

Dr. James had told him, long before, that Departing Ones invariably came out of memory jolts in a state of ecstasy, and that frequently they were in such raptures that they insisted on Going immediately, before the high could ebb. Emerging from the drug, Staunt searched in vain for the ecstasy. Where? He was wholly calm. For some hours past, or maybe just a few minutes—he had no idea how long the memory jolt has lasted—he had tasted morsels of his past, scraps of conversation, bits of scenery, random textures of contact, a stew of incidents, nonchronological, unsorted. His music and his wife. His wife and his music. A pretty thin gruel for one hundred thirty-six years of life. Where were the storms? Where were the tempests? A single great tragedy, yes, and otherwise everything tranquil. Too orderly a life, too sane, too empty, and now, permitted to review it, he found himself with nothing to grasp but applause, which slipped through his fingers, and his love of Edith, and even that had lost its magic. Where was that excess of remembered love that Dr. James had said could be dangerous? Perhaps they had monitored him too closely, tuning down the intensity of his spirit. Or perhaps it was his spirit that was at fault. Old and dry, pale and lean.

Unlike the others he had heard about, he did not request immediate Going after his voyage. Without that terminal ecstasy, why Go? He felt not exactly depressed but certainly lowered; his tour of his yesterdays had thrust him into a sort of stasis, a paralysis of the will, that left him hung up as before, enmeshed by the strands of his own quiet past.

But if Staunt remained unready to Go, not so with others. “You are invited to the Farewell ceremony of David Golding,” Miss Elliot told him the day after his memory jolt.

Golding was the man who had had six wives—outliving some, divorcing some, being divorced by some. His heroic husbandry was no longer apparent: now he was small and gnarled and fleshless, and because he was nearly blind, his pinched ungenerous face was disfigured by the jutting cones of two optical transducers. They said he was one hundred twenty-five years old, but to Staunt he looked at least two hundred. For the Farewell ceremony, though, the technicians of the House of Leavetaking had transformed the little old man into something sublime. His face gleamed with make-up that obliterated the crevices of decades; he held himself buoyantly upright, no doubt inflated into a semblance of his ancient virility by some drug; he was clad in a radiant, shimmering gown. Scores of relatives and friends surrounded him in the Chambers of Farewell, a brightly decorated underground suite opposite the recreation center. Staunt, as he entered, was dismayed by the size of the crowd. So many, so young, so noisy.

Ella Freeman sidled up to him and touched her shriveled hand to Staunt’s arm. “Look there: two of his wives. He hadn’t seen one in sixty years. And his sons. All of them, his sons. Two or three by each wife!”

The ceremony, conducted by the relatively young man who was Golding’s Guide, was elegiac in tone, brief, sweet. Standing under the emblem of the Office of Fulfillment, the wheel and the gears, the Guide spoke briefly of the philosophy of making room for others, of the beauty of a willing departure. Then he praised the Departing One in vague, general terms; one of his sons delivered a more specific eulogy; lastly, Seymour Church, chosen to represent Golding’s companions at the House of Leavetaking, croaked out a short, almost incoherent speech of farewell. To this the Departing One, who seemed transfigured with joy and already at least halfway into the next world, made reply in a few faint syllables, blurrily expressing gratitude for his long and happy life. Golding barely appeared to comprehend what was going on; he sat beaming in a kind of throne, dreamy, distant. Staunt wondered if he had been drugged into a stupor.

When the speeches were done, refreshments were served. Then, accompanied only by his closest kin, fifteen or twenty people, Golding was ushered into the innermost room of the Chambers of Farewell. The door slid shut behind him, and in his absence the Leavetaking party proceeded merrily.

There were four such events in the next five weeks At two of them—the Goings of Michael Green and Katherine Parks—Staunt was asked to give the speech of farewell. It was a task that he performed gracefully, serenely, and, he thought, with a good deal of eloquence. He spoke for ten minutes about Michael Green, for close to fifteen about Katherine Parks, talking not so much about the Departing Ones, whom he had scarcely come to know well, but about the entire philosophy of Going, the beauty and wonder of the act of world-renunciation. It was not customary for the giver of the speech of farewell to manage such sustained feats, and his audience listened in total fascination; if the occasion had permitted it, Staunt suspected, they would have applauded.

So he had a new vocation, and several Departing Ones whom he did not know at all accelerated their own Goings so that they would not fail to have Staunt speak at the rites. It was summer now, and Arizona was caught in glistening tides of heat. Staunt never went outdoors any longer; he spent much of his time mingling in the recreation center, doing research, so to speak, for future oratory. He rarely read these days. He never listened to music. He had settled into a pleasing, quiet routine. This was his fourth month at the House of Leavetaking. Except for Seymour Church, who still refused to be nudged into Going, Staunt was now the senior Departing One in point of length of residence. And at the end of July, Church at last took his leave. Staunt, of course, spoke, touching on the Departing One’s slow journey toward Going, and it was difficult for him to avoid self-conscious references to his own similar reluctance. Why do I tarry here? Staunt wondered. Why do I not say the word?

Every few weeks his son Paul visited him. Staunt found their meetings difficult. Paul, showing signs of strain and anxiety, always seemed on the verge of blurting out, “Why don’t you. Go, already?” And Staunt would have no answer, for he did not know the answer. He had read Hallam four times. Philosophically and psychologically he was prepared to Go. Yet he remained.

In mid-August Martin Bollinger entered his suite, held out a sheet of paper, and said, “What’s this, Henry?”

Staunt glanced at it. It was a photocopy of the aria from The New Inn. “Where did you find that?” he asked.

“One of the staff people came across it while tidying your room.”

“I thought we were entitled to privacy.”

“This isn’t an inquisition, Henry. I’m just curious. Have you started to compose again?”

“That scrap is all I wrote. It was months ago.”

“It’s fascinating music,” Bollinger said.

“Is it, now? I thought it was rather harsh and forced, myself.”

“No. No. Not at all. You always talked about a Ben Jonson opera, didn’t you? And now you’ve begun it.”

“I was enlivening a dull day,” said Staunt. “Mere scribbling.”

“Henry, would you like to get out of this place?”

“Are we back to that?”

“Obviously you still have music in you. Perhaps a great opera.”

“Which you mean to squeeze out of me, eh? Don’t talk nonsense. There’s nothing left in me, Martin. I’m here to Go.”

“You haven’t Gone, though.”

“You’ve noticed that,” Staunt said.

“It was made clear to you at the beginning that you wouldn’t be rushed. But I’ve begun to suspect, Henry, that you aren’t interested in Going at all, that you’re marking time here, perhaps incubating this opera, perhaps coming to terms with something indigestible in your soul. Whatever. You don’t have to Go. We’ll send you home. Finish The New Inn. Think the thoughts you want to think. Reapply for Going next year or the year after.”