Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

Réponse. Judas was a moral man. He did what he had to do. A vous.

I don’t like, no, the States. We all know now it’s a failure and we’re ashamed. That’s what the French, the Polish, reading, that’s what it all means. I feel I’m spiritually European. Or want to be. Then why do you stay here. Why did you come back. Because I belong here.

Artaud. Giving his reading. In Paris, he’d been locked away in mental asylums for nine years, all the Paris élite came. And every few minutes he’d stop and look out at the audience, out at Gide and Breton and Jean Paulhan and Camus and Pichette and his friend Adamov and all the others. In despair. And he would try to explain, When you come round you simply cannot find yourself again. Life itself has been permanently debased, and a portion of original goodness and joy lost forever. He would say, I have agreed once and for all to give in to my own inferiority. He would stop and look around at all the faces and surrender. Give up in the middle of a poem, Putting myself in your place I can see how completely uninteresting everything that I am saying must seem. What can I do to be completely sincere? And then to go back and read L’Inconditionné. She is sitting up in bed. As he tells her this, again. Naked. Her breasts are larger than you think, perhaps in contrast to the smallness of her body in the tall window now. The motel sign red on the glass. Or the weight she’s lost. She has seen a story of his in a magazine. Though he has been careful never to show them to her. And asks about the title. That Buddhism sees the Self, Etre, Being as a bubble. Nothing inside. Nothing at the centre. And Sartre’s Cartesian phenomenology too but go ahead and call it existentialism if you want to. Sartre doesn’t care. And I don’t. And so there are just gestures, that’s all we have. And the bubbles are all the time going higher and higher, getting larger. Like lies. Which essentially they are of course. And soon to burst. She hated it when he talked like that.

Do I. Belong here. Yes. Quel sens. Then to ask another name. To watch her. To turn her face away.

She would come back with her body bruised and torn. No explanation, I am doing what I have to do. And nothing else would have changed. Or had the power to change. Effects. And that pale residue of sadness inside. Somewhere.

A quote for you. Like many young men in the South, he became overly subtle and had trouble ruling out the possible. C’est moi.

Living now in this house in Pennsylvania. And she comes round. All the questions unanswered. Or unasked. Peirce’s old house down the road with a little plaque out front to tell everyone who he was. And Peirce who once wrote, Actuality is something brute. There is no reason for it. For instance putting your shoulder against a door and trying to force it open against an unseen, silent, and unknown resistance.

So let me tell you how it will be. The end. One night you will be lying alone in bed. You will hear sounds downstairs. You will hear feet coming slowly up the stairs. You will hear them pause at the door. You will hear the doorknob turning. You will hear the door open. You will hear the footsteps again. On the rug now. You will be lying alone in bed. You will never see his face. You will never know his name.

“Don’t be myzled by the cultural imperative,” the image on the vidphone said as the colors flowed and the face turned into polychromatic knotty pine.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Murdock asked. He felt desperate. His head ached. He massaged his temples and leaned against the desk. “I just want to know if the deal’s gone through,” he said. “Now, please. Have we got the bulkhead rights or not?”

“Hard-boiled haddock is up two points,” his partner said with a thin green grin. The image split; two faces grinned at him.

And the line went dead for the third time that afternoon.

Murdock considered smashing the phone with his fist, then thought better of it. The damn things were expensive as hell.

He looked down from the blank screen. His monogrammed marble egg lay atilt in the white bone china eggcup on the dark blue desk blotter. The egg was rose-colored, veined with gray and black. The very sight of it comforted him.

He brushed his fingertips across it, closed his hand around it, rubbed his thumb against the cool smooth surface. He held it and gazed at the ornate initials.

His.

His marble egg, his mahogany-topped desk, his lushly carpeted office paneled in polished brown silitex, his aquarium, his deluxe model 5472 vidphone.

Scowling at the phone, he punched 0 for operator.

A girl’s face appeared on the screen. She was young, red-haired, efficient. “Your call, sir?” she said briskly.

“I’ve been disconnected.” He worried the monogrammed marble egg as he answered.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“This is the third time this’s happened in the last two hours. I’m paying plenty for service and I expect—”

“Did you dial directly, sir?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What is your number, please?”

“MOrris 54692.”

“And what number are you trying to reach, please?”

“I haven’t been trying to reach him. I’ve been reaching him and getting disconnected.”

“His number, sir?”

“DEsmond 69969, Punta Gorda, Florida. That’s on the West Coast. Area B813.”

“Thank you, sir. One moment, please.”

Murdock clutched the marble egg. He stared at the ONE MOMENT, PLEASE sign on the screen and tried to ease back into the depths of his chair. His back was beginning to ache. His eyes watered. The operator appeared on the screen again, slightly blurred.

“Sir, service has been temporarily disrupted in Area B813. Shall I call you when we regain contact?”

“Disrupted? By what?”

“Hyperactive sunspots, sir.”

“Let me speak to your superior,” Murdock said. “This call is of the utmost importance to me.”

“Certainly, sir. One moment and I’ll connect you.”

This time, instead of the ONE MOMENT, PLEASE sign, a beautiful girl with a dazzling smile came on the screen.

“I am a recording,” she announced happily. Then her tone became sterner. “You have dialed a wrong number. Please disconnect and dial again.” She smiled the dazzling smile. “I am a recording,” she repeated. Then, with a trace of disappointment, “You have dialed a wrong number. Please disconnect and dial again.”

She smiled dazzlingly and Murdock hung up.

The operator he reached this time was a brunette. When he’d finished his story, she connected him with a motherly middle-aged supervisor who heard it through again. Her superior was an owlish woman who listened with an intent expression of disinterest.

The marble egg warmed to the heat of his grip. His fist felt clammy. He waited as the supervisor made connections with her immediate superior. The screen blinked twice, dimmed, then revealed a dour-faced executive with a black carnation pinned to his lapel.

Murdock fixed his attention on the flower as he launched adroitly into his story. He’d reduced the telling time to ninety-four seconds, including dramatic pauses.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do, sir,” the man said.

“I can’t stress the importance of this call too highly,” Murdock said.

“I appreciate your plight, sir. However, sunspot activity is beyond the control of The Phone Company. I sincerely regret any inconvenience this interference may have caused you, but you must understand that we can take no responsibility for the interruption of service due to natural causes.” The man inserted a dramatic pause of his own. “I’m certain you understand.”