Дэймон Найт - Orbit 11

And that was the end of that. We tiptoed down the stairs, and Kitty said she had to go home. And did. Otherwise I honestly think that in the long run I would have married her.

I remember the years of the war, the headlines and the blackouts and the crazy way everything was changing under my very eyes. Paulie had it made. He enlisted first thing, and wrote me clipped, concise letters about the joys of close-order drill. I remember buying his old car the last time he came home on furlough, with his cuffs tucked in his paratrooper boots, telling deadpan stories about the hazards of basic training. The car was a 1931 Buick, with a jug cork in the gas tank instead of a cap. I sold it for the price of two train tickets when I ran out of gas-ration coupons in Pittsburgh, on my honeymoon. Not with Kitty. Kitty had gone far out of my life by then. Her dancing lessons had paid off: amateur-night tap dancer to Film Fun model to showgirl at the International Casino; and then she’d gone abroad to Paris with a troupe and been caught in the Occupation. Well. Mutatis mutandis and plus ça change and so on. Or, as one might say, things keep getting all screwed up.

I breezed through the war. Barring a company clerk in Jefferson Barracks who I really wanted to kill, there was nothing I couldn’t handle; Paulie had lied. Or maybe for me it was a different war. I had got into newspaper work, which let me get into Special Services when my time came. Nobody was shooting at unit managers for USO shows. I went through forty-one months of exaltation and shame. You see, this was the war that really mattered and had to be won; and how I burned, with what a blue-white flame, with pride to be a part of it. And how I groveled before anyone who would listen because my part was mostly chasing enlisted men away from big-breasted starlets. Do you suppose it’s really true that somebody had to do that job, too? I couldn’t believe it, but it was because of that that I met Kitty again.

She turned up looking for a job as a translator, looking very much as she always had. She was different, though. She was married, to this very nice captain she had met during Occupation days in Paris, and she had become a German national. It was a grand reunion. I took her to dinner and she told me that Paulie had been wounded in the Salerno landing and was still in the hospital. And a little bit later she told me about her husband, the darling, dimpled SS officer, who was now a POW on the Eastern front. And for four months in Wiesbaden she lived in my billet with me, translating day and night; and, actually, that’s what happened to that first marriage of mine, because my wife found out about it. I don’t think she would have minded a Fraulein. She minded my shacking up with a girl I’d known before I knew her.

I remember more consequential causes than I can count. When I look inside my skin I don’t see anything but consequences; all I am is the casual aftereffects of, item, an unemployed carpenter evicted from his home and, item, a classification clerk who had been in the newspaper game himself once, and all the other itemized seeds that have now blossomed into fifty-two-year-old me.

I remember more than I absolutely want to, in fact, and some things I remember in the context of a certain time and a certain place when, in fact, I really learned them later on.

The man on the landing. Years after the war, when I had become a TV producer doing a documentary on the Depression, I put one of my research girls on checking him out. She was a good girl, and tracked him down. That’s how I know he had been a carpenter. The banks closed and the jobs vanished, and he wound up on the fire escape. It happened that when the police chased him away a reporter was in the precinct house, and he wrote the story my girl found.

And I remember Paulie, twenty-nine years old and weighing a fast ninety pounds, gasping hoarsely as he reached out to shake my hand in the VA hospital ward, the day before he died. He had been there for three years, dying all that time. He looked like his own grandfather. That was a consequence too: a landing in the second wave at Salerno and a mine the engineers had missed. He got his Purple Heart for a broken spine that kept getting worse until it was so bad that it killed him.

I think I’ve seen the place where he got it—assuming that I remembered what he said well enough, or understood him well enough, when he was concentrating mostly on dying. I think the place it happened was on the city beach at Salerno, way at the north horn of that crescent, about where there’s a little restaurant built out over the water on stilts. I stood there one afternoon on that beach, looking at the floating turds and pizza crusts, trying to see the picture of Paulie hitting the mine and being thrown into the sky in a fountain of saltwater and blood. But it wasn’t any good. I can only see what I’ve seen, not what I’ve been told about. I couldn’t see the causality. All I could do was ask myself questions about it: What made him sign up for his hero suit? Was it really reading that Percival Christopher Wren book when he was thirteen years old? Or: What made me alive, and sort of rich, when Paulie was so poor and dead? Was it the four or five really good contacts I made in the USO that turned me into a genius television producer? Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence?

I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, producing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever. Just being careful isn’t enough to save us, but we do have to be careful. Smokey Bear wouldn’t lie to you about that.

If I’d married Kitty I think we would have had fine kids, even grandchildren by now; but I didn’t, not even batting .500 out of my two chances at her. First it was the old man on the fire escape, then it was the kindly Nazi she decided to go back to waiting for. She waited very well and for a long time, all through the years while the Russians were taking their time about letting him go and all through the denazification trials after that. I suppose by then she felt she was too old to want to start a family. And none of my own wives have really wanted the PTA bit.

And think of the consequences of that—I mean, the negative consequences of the babies that Kitty and I didn’t have. Did we miss out on a new Mozart? A Lee Harvey Oswald? Maybe just a hell of a solid Brooklyn fireman who might have saved a more largely consequential life than his own, or mine? Think of them. And that’s all you can do with those particular consequences, because they didn’t get born.

Percival Christopher Wren didn’t mean to kill Paulie. The sad old derelict on the fire escape never intended to break up Kitty and me. Intentions don’t matter.

We all live in each others’ pockets. If I drive my car along Mulholland Drive tonight, I only mean to keep my date with that pretty publicity girl from Paramount. I don’t even know you’re alive, do I? But the car is burning up the gasoline and pumping out the poison gas that makes the smog; and maybe it’s just that little bit of extra exhaust fume in the air that bubbles your lungs out with emphysema. It doesn’t matter to you what I meant to do. You’re just as dead. I don’t suppose I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except possibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch, and meanwhile I may be killing you.

So I walk out on my balcony and stare through the haze at the lights of Los Angeles. I look at where they all live, the black militants and the aerospace engineers, the Desilu sound men and the storefront soul-savers, the kids who go to the Académe Française and the little old ladies with Back Up Our Boys bumper stickers on their cars. I remember what they, and you, and each and every one of you have done to me, this half a century I’ve been battered and bribed into my present shape and status; but what are they, and all of you, doing to each other this night?