Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

Nothing fell from the sky on me and I did not become covered from sole to crown with sore boils, although I was ready.

I thought of a fissure in the obsidian nearby and walked over to it. I grabbed a handful of endolin and crunched it down raw, without a chaser. The taste was bitter and clean in my dry mouth. Then I went back into the cabin, opened up my one window to let some of the bad air out and then washed my face with the water left in the bucket. That felt better, and by then the endolin had eased my head.

Along the far wall of the cabin was a long moonwood shelf with over a dozen plastic cartons of dried food. I took a deep breath and walked over, a part of me thinking that surely nothing could have happened to my dried beans and potatoes and synthetic protein. But another part of me knew exactly what was going to be the case. I broke the heavy seal on one of the cartons and lifted out a plastic pouch of what should have been dried eggs. Inside was a light-brown mush—a kind of compost.

I ripped open the pouch and let the stuff fall into my left hand. It felt like rotten leaves and burned my skin lightly. I touched a bit of it to my tongue. It tasted like acid. I shouted a Chinese imprecation I’d learned as a student and hurled the mess out the front door. The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling. I was going to starve to death, and soon. I was already four days into it.

It was no way to go, and I knew it. I went over to my Eames chair, trying not to think about my stomach and the way it was beginning to come back to life, and seated myself slowly. I put my naked and dirty feet up on the ottoman. There was a distant humming in my ears. I clasped my sweaty hands behind my neck the way I had learned to in the Great Orbach’s office and played his sturdy old Viennese voice in my head: “Relax, Ben. The first thing is to relax.” I concentrated on my scalp and forehead, relaxing them. It didn’t work. I was tense as hell, as though I were made of stiff, vibrating wires. I looked across the room toward the drug synthesizer and saw a small white mound of fresh morphine powder sitting in its hopper. I quickly averted my eyes. There was not enough yet for an overdose anyway. I knew that I could, if push came to shove, make hydrocyanic acid—or for that matter nicotinic—and erase myself in a half minute. The modern world makes death one of the easiest things in life. If only it worked as well for sex, love and work.

I tried again to relax, concentrating on my calves and thighs. They felt in need of nourishment. There were flaky spots—my grim vegetable ashes in miniature—before my eyes. There was acid in my stomach. The humming in my ears grew louder. I remembered my near-suicide in Mexico, fifteen years before.

I was in my mid-thirties and so empty inside, so disappointed with life and with all the money I was making, that I began over a long number of sterile weeks to focus my attention on euthanasia. I’d read about it in Scientific American and saw a segment on it on a TV show. The new pills had been invented in Germany. Naturally. They were illegal everywhere but Mexico and Bolivia. The Life-Arrest pill put you on hold for up to a thousand years, as long as your body was encased in a box or tube. No refrigeration needed. They had places in Mexico to store you, tagged and ready for revival in the century of your choice. You popped one and you were rigid in three minutes, with no pain, no consciousness. The antidote was a brief flash of high temperature and a massive electrical shock in the chest, like the Frankenstein monster. If you didn’t trust Mexican engineering—and who did?—you could be shipped back home in the suspended state without legal problems, as long as you had a birth certificate and some other I.D.—like VISA. There was a place in Brooklyn that would store you underground, safe from nuclear attack and the IRS, and bring you out of it at the appointed time. Nobody explained what course your resurrected self was to take if there had been an H- or R-Bomb attack during your sleep. Maybe there would be another pill and a glass of water on your bedside table.

The other pill was called Permanent Arrest, and differed from the pharmacopoeia of the Borgias only in its speed and lack of pain; it switched you off like a light bulb. Then they dropped you into the crematorium, or recycled you in a Mexican garden. It was the latter I had in mind when I took the train to San Miguel Allende. I had no interest in trying to resume my life in the twenty-eighth or thirtieth century; I would be happy to have my private collection of dancing molecules dance again as poinsettias.

When I got there a Oaxacan Indian in a blue jumpsuit showed me the storage chambers in an old pink church, with row after row of coffin-sized plastic cartons. “These are our Survivors,” he explained, in oleaginous English. There was a name stenciled in dark green on each box, a good many of them were Japanese. Hara-kiri?

“What about the dead ones? I mean permanently dead?”

“You mean our Terminates,” he said. He led me to a stone undercroft lined with bookshelves. These were about half filled with what looked like coffee cans, a name stenciled on each. I shuddered slightly. What a small space to contain a person! What compression of a body that it takes so long to grow and age and get comfortable in!

“What about the others,” I said, “the ones you plant?”

He took me up some stairs and out into a garden filled with flowers and trees, but my spirit did not rise at the sight. They were shabby trees and unkempt flowers, with a lot of insect damage and sunburn on their leaves. What a misuse of human resources! I decided immediately that I did not want to join that sad aggregation of cloistered plants. At least not yet. I would sweat it out for a few more years in human form and see what happened.

On the train back to Atlanta, where I was living at the time, I thought of how close I’d come to dying, and I felt relieved and clear in the head. I thought of how many people must kill themselves in midlife, by blade or chemical or leap, rather than give up their jobs or divorce their spouses or take up a wicked habit. It struck me that the thing to do was quit the job or slug the boss or whatever. If it didn’t work out, if you really fucked it up, then you could commit suicide. I went back to work in real estate and took up cigars and love affairs. The real estate did well for me and I doubled my fortune in eight months; the other two were less productive, but they did fill in some empty niches in my being and I forgot about suicide. Until now, on Belson, faced with starvation. What an outcome for a man who loves eating as much as I do!

I lay back in my chair and tried to relax, but my body was stiff with fear and anger and would not let go. A part of me wanted to die and another part was terrified of dying. I tried to generate Orbach’s voice in my mind, but nothing happened; there was nothing in my head but the fear of death.

And then I looked across the room and blinked. My mother was sitting near the far wall, on our old Ohio sofa. Her pink chenille gown was open at the top and her breasts were visible—waxy, shining with sweat. On each side of her, candles burned in Belson air. On her face was emptiness and despair. She looked up at me as I stared and her face broke into a weak smile.

Shockingly, I found myself drawn toward that couch, toward that ruined face and those breasts. Flesh of my flesh; that loosely tied chenille covered the belly where I had once dwelt. There was my first hotel, where I had begun as a coiled marvel of gestation. I sat and stared at her, feeling drawn toward her empty and lonely death, by alcohol and cigarette and self-hatred, wanting to throw my arms around her waist and lean my cheek against her breast. I reached a shaky hand toward her and then I heard myself shouting, “ Goddamn you, Mother! ” and I was out of my chair and running.