Damon Knight - Orbit 16

“Get cleaned up and we’ll go eat,” said Andrew. He pressed her hand and went into his office. Gudrun started for the dressing room, then remembered a script she had left with Andrew. She went back and knocked on the door. Inside, there was loud music.

“Andrew—?”

She pushed the door open silently. And froze.

Andrew was bent over his desk, coughing explosively into a tissue. The sound was masked by the music. He did not see her at the door, his eyes were tightly closed. The desk blotter was spattered with blood and sputum.

Gudrun saw nothing.

She quickly shut the door and went to remove her makeup. The face in the mirror was puffy and worn. She felt oddly dissociated, vaguely sick. She waited for Andrew. He came.

“All ready?” he asked, patting his stomach. The events of the morning had apparently been an appetizer.

They talk of natural beauty. They talk of a world uglified, desecrated by technology. They see one side only, discarding the whole of man’s national achievement like the very garbage they rail against. Who among us has not witnessed the unearthly beauty of a latter-day sunset, the roiling clouds of orange, magenta, puce—nature itself acknowledging submission, testament to man’s triumph? No preindustrial civilization could witness such a spectacle.

—Ona Ransome,

The Doctrine of Dionysus

They lunched alfresco at the art museum, on a garden patio with a view of Rodin’s vandalized “Thinker”; dynamited years before, the sculpture had been reinstated as a symbol of Sickness in Our Society. The anti-intellectual element. The Dionysians. Most of the sculpture’s base had been shredded away, and now its hollow remains rested in a wooden cradle, reminding Gudrun of Quasimodo riding a huge bronze bell.

Hidden oxyjets moaned softly.

“I know we don’t usually talk about . . . serious things,” Andrew began, folding his napkin. He had a lopsided but expressive face, lacking the regular good looks required of an on-camera performer. He laughed nervously, as if to weaken his delivery. “I’m sorry. Let’s drop the whole thing, okay?”

“No,” said Gudrun quickly, leaning toward him. But her gaze drifted to a nearby table where an airbrain sat with a watery-eyed little man.

Airbrains . . . They grew them that way, on special aerobic farms. Big, boyish, musclebound . . . superoxygenated specimens of health and vitality. Trained to deal with any crisis of identity or faith, they were sought out particularly by the infirm or chronically doubtful. The voice was soothing and unctuous: “. . . nothing really ends . . . only rebirth ... a continuous cycle . . .” The little man doubled up, wheezing, and the airbrain took him gently in his arms. Gudrun looked away.

“No, Andrew ... I mean, if there’s something you really want to talk about—”

“I wanted you to know that I didn’t like what happened this morning any more than you did. The girl, I mean. Yeah, I know, I’m one to talk. But I had my orders, and—well, to be brutally frank about it, I’m in no position to argue.” He paused, pressing his lips tightly together. “Ever since that girl—Carla, her name was—came in three weeks ago, things just haven’t been the same. Like a morgue.” Gudrun blushed. “You know how the tech crew has been. The secretaries have been the same way—cranky, irritable—just having her around is what did it. And today, that . . . coughing. It’s depressing.”

Gudrun shifted her weight uncomfortably.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately,” he continued. The usual things—money, status. Sex.” The nervous laugh. “It’s funny, the way things are. The way the world just kind of belches us all up out of nowhere, lets us run around on a leash for a while, then sucks us all back. Sophomoric, I know. Existentialism 101, right? Not worth talking about. I flunked philosophy in college, you know. Had to take it three times . . . there was this damn genius chink for a prof—I swear that man believed with his entire soul that the ‘relativism/absolutism controversy’ was the single driving force in the universe. Sometimes I feel so stupid—it’s silly, I know—for having never taken an interest in the big questions. What it all means. Christ, I must sound like an ass, a kid. Deep down, I know it’s all a lot of semantic drivel, philosophy and the rest . . . but sometimes I wonder, especially lately, whether or not it would make things any . . . easier.” He stared at the ice it the bottom of his glass. “Am I making any sense? Any at all?”

Gudrun didn’t listen to his words as much as the tone of his voice, the controlled rigidity broken by bursts of nervous, self-depreciating laughter. She looked at him, sitting there in that ridiculous coat with the padded chest and shoulders that she really didn’t want to think about. It embarrassed her. She felt a need to escape before he revealed too much, before they were bound together, inextricably, by some secret and terrible knowledge.

“I’m dying, Gudrun.” He looked her straight in the eye. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

His tone was becoming belligerent. Gudrun felt anger rising, defensively. I’m not one of your office girls! Leave me alone!

“Look at me!” he snapped. “That’s the very least you can do. I’m dying, for godsake. They don’t know what it is, exactly, but they do know it’s fatal.”

She tried not to hear him.

“. . . the body stops using oxygen efficiently, for one thing— there’s a theory that it’s all part of a new evolutionary step, the organism trying to adjust to a poisonous biosphere. In the meantime, we’re nature’s bloody guinea pigs.”

“Andrew,” she blurted, “I’ve been meaning to say this for a long time and I don’t care what it sounds like but I don’t think we should see one anoth—”

He was incredulous. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you? I’m dying, Gudrun, the way this planet is dying, and you can’t seem to appreciate either of those two facts.”

“Andrew, please—”

“Are you blind? Can’t you see that I’ve lost thirty-five pounds in the last six months, that I wear prosthetic clothing to hide the fact, and that I’m probably going to lose my job because I stink of death, Gudrun, death and graveworms and a hundred other terribly realistic things our society doesn’t even pay lip service to anymore!” He slammed his fist on the table. Heads were turned. Gudrun shut her eyes.

You are twelve years old and your father is a man named Gerhard Maxa who gets up every morning and coughs out his guts into a toilet bowl. The sound wakes you daily, raking, horrible, and you lie in bed and want to scream, it’s dirty, it’s filthy, these perverts your family—but who is there to tell ? And you carry your shame to school with you, while your father goes off to work in factories decent people don’t even think about.

“We have to survive, Andrew!” It was out in the open. “You people make it so difficult—”

“I know.” Andrew was no longer looking at her. “The persistence and ubiquity of denial,” he said, clucking his tongue. “That used to be my line, didn’t it?” His voice was cool and ironic. “You’ve learned your lessons well, Gudrun.”

She spoke clumsily. “I ... I won’t forget you, Andrew. Really, I won’t . . .”

“No hard feelings. We live in an age of transience, right?”

She bit her lip. “Thank you, Andrew. Thank you.”

After they parted, Gudrun’s head began to throb. Something in the air. A tension at the base of her skull. She didn’t have her mask with her, and her eyes began to water. She tried vainly to remember the pollution-level figures she had recited that morning. Above her, blue-grey clouds of vapor writhed like ectoplasm.