Damon Knight - Orbit 20

“Her guardian angel sure was with her,” Farley said as they drew near the boulders. One of the mammoth rocks was balanced on the edge of the crest.

“I don’t believe any of this,” Sam said angrily. He stopped. Ahead of them, lodged in a crevice, something gleamed in the sunlight. Farley took several cautious steps and picked it up. He handed it to Sam, a single key. Without comparing it, Sam knew it was a key to his camper.

They made their way among the boulders, through the only possible passage, and came out on top the ridge that now widened for several hundred feet. At the edge of it Sam could look down over the gorge; he could see the ranch road, and between him and the road there was a small sunken area, the sheltered spot where “Reuben” had taken Victoria. There was no sign of a campfire ever having been there. No sign of a horse, a dog, a camp of any sort. Silently the two men walked back to the road and the jeep.

Farley did not turn on the ignition immediately. “That was in April, three months ago. Why are you checking on it now?”

Sam looked at the gorge wall, imagined a river roaring below. “Mimi, the girl who was going to drive up with Victoria, came to see me last week. She and Victoria were friends, but Victoria dropped her too. Mimi thought something happened out here between Victoria and me, that I raped her, or tortured her, or something. She told me Victoria is sick, really sick, in analysis, maybe even suicidal. Whatever is wrong with her is serious and it started here.”

“You have seen her?”

“Yeah. For half a minute maybe. She wanted to see me like a rabbit wants to see a bobcat. Wouldn’t talk, had to run, too busy to chat.” He scowled, remembering the pallor that had blanched her face when she saw him. “She looked like hell.”

“So you want to get her back out here to find out what she saw.”

Sam grunted. After a moment he said, “I don’t know what I want to do. I have to do something. I just had to check for myself, see if there’s any way it could have been like she said.”

Farley put the key in the ignition. Without looking at Sam he said, “She could have gone back east, or to Texas, but she didn’t. She could have taken an overdose, slashed her wrists, gone off the bridge. She could have really hidden, but she kept in touch with the friend who could get to you. She wants you to help her. And you owe it to her for losing your temper because she had the vision you’ve spent so many years chasing.” He turned the key and started to drive before Sam could answer.

That night Sam said he would try to get Victoria to come back, and Farley said he would visit his parents in Bend to see if there was anything his father could or would tell him about the fenced-off acres.

Sam walked. If you really wanted to find a god, he thought, this was where to look. Such absolute emptiness could be relieved only by an absolute presence. Men always had gone to a mountaintop, or to the desert, in search of God. Not God, he thought angrily, peace, acceptance, a reason, he did not know what it was he sought on the desert. He would be willing to settle for so little, no more than a clue or a hint that there was more than he had been able to find. After he had quit his job with GoMar, he had tried drugs for almost two years. Drugs and a personal teacher of the way, and both had failed. He had found only other pieces of himself. He had turned to asceticism and study, had become a jeweler. He had fasted, had lived a hermit’s life for a year, had read nothing, denied himself music, the radio, had worked, walked, waited. And waited still.

He was out of sight of the ranch buildings, the spacious house with old oaks and young poplars sheltering it; the big barns, the small bungalows some of the hands lived in, the bunk house, machine shops . . .You stepped over a rise and the desert swallowed it all, just as it swallowed all sound, and existed in a deep silence, broken only by the voices of those few animals that had accepted its terms and asked for nothing but life.

And just having life was not enough.

He waited across the street from her apartment until she entered and, after ten minutes, followed her inside. When she opened her door and saw him, she hesitated, then with obvious reluctance released the chain to admit him.

“Hello, Sam.” She walked away from him and stood at the window looking out.

He remained by the door, the width of the room between them. He was three months too late. In those months she had turned into a stranger.

When they had returned to San Francisco in the spring, he had taken her bags inside for her, and then left. She had not invited him to stay, and he had not sat down as he usually did. “I’ll call you,” he had said.

But he had let the days slide by, pretending to himself that he was too busy sorting the material they had brought back, too busy with an order from a small elite store in Palm Beach, too busy, too busy. Every time he thought of calling, he felt an uprush of guilt and anger. Finally, filled with a senseless indignation, as if she were forcing him to do something distasteful, he dialed her number, only to get a recording that said her number was no longer in service. Furiously he called her office; she had quit, and left no forwarding address.

Relief replaced the anger. He was free; he no longer had to think about her and whatever had happened to her out on the desert. He could get on with his own life, continue his own search. But he could not banish her from his mind, and worse, his thoughts of her were colored with a constant dull resentment that marred his memories of the good times they had had, that quieted his sexual desire for her, that distorted her honesty and humor and made her seem in retrospect scheming and even dull.

Over the months that they had been separated the new image he constructed had gradually replaced the old, and this meeting was destroying that new image, leaving him nothing. He had to start over with her, falteringly, uncertainly, knowing that the real changes were not in her but in himself. There were intimate things to be said between them, but intimate things could not be said between strangers.

Everything Sam had planned to say was gone from his mind, and almost helplessly he started, “I treated you very badly. I’m sorry.” His words sounded stiff and phony, even to him. She didn’t move, and slowly Sam repeated his conversation with Farley, all of it, including Farley’s explanation of his rage. “It’s possible,” Sam said, then shook his head hard. “It’s true I was sore because you saw something I didn’t. I can’t explain that part. We both, Farley and I, want to find out what happened.”

“It’s true then!” Victoria said, facing him finally. She was shockingly pale.

Sam started to deny it, said instead, “I don’t know.”

“We have to go back there to find out, don’t we?”

“You don’t have to now,” Sam said quickly. “I think it would be a mistake. Wait until you’re well.”

“Thursday,” she said. When Sam shook his head she added, “You know I won’t get well until this is over.”

Color had returned to her cheeks and she looked almost normal again, as she had always looked: quick, alert, handsome. And there was something else, he thought. Something unfamiliar, an intensity, or determination she had not shown before.

“Thursday,” Sam said reluctantly.

She had never been so talkative or said so little. Her new job, the people in office, the changing landscape, a grade school teacher, sleeping in the parking lot, how easy driving the camper was . . .

“Mimi says you’re in analysis,” Sam interrupted her.

“Not now,” Victoria said easily. “She was more Freudian than the master. Treated my experience like a dream and gave sexual connotations to every bit of it. The thing in the valley became phallic, of course, so naturally I had to dread it. Reuben was my father firmly forbidding my incestuous advances, and so on. I took it for several weeks and gave up on her. She needs help.”