Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

When my lettuce matured I began to eat salads, even though I was not hungry. I kept them small and perfect, mixing Bibb and leaf lettuce equally and tossing them in the sunflower oil I got from my big coarse row of those enormous flowers. When preparing the oil I would recite Blake’s poem:

After a few days my peas matured and I would steam them a few minutes and add them to my lettuce. The salads grew to include onions and Kentucky Wonder Beans. I welcomed these additions, but Belson was still my primary nourishment. No words passed between us, but my planet fed me like the infant I was.

One morning I awoke from a night on the grass with bright cobwebs of sexual dreams in my head and discovered with a kind of awe that my penis was pointing skyward there in the Belson dawn, as firm and erect as it had ever been in my life. I lay there with my brain half asleep and felt strength radiating throughout myself from that red, erect, sky-pointing marvel: my loving member, my true self, risen at last. Great, tingling physical pleasure suffused me. The pleasure grew and I let it grow and grew with it. And then, almost in a swoon, I willed for myself an orgasm. Immediately I felt it begin to happen with that lovely sense of inevitability at the crossing of the physical threshold, and I lay there and watched myself come, jetting upward in heartrending delight into the pure air of Belson’s dawn.

What glory, to relearn it. I relaxed and my whole body softened. I fell back to sleep.

When I awoke to a distant roar Fomalhaut was high in the sky and I saw descending, riding a bright silver flame, the Isabel . A moment later I felt the ground of my planet receiving her, with a profound subcutaneous shudder.

Clearly the Isabel had landed several miles away in order not to cook me with her retros. It would be an hour before anyone showed up at my cabin. I felt resentful, knowing it was time to reenter the ordinary world—resentful even against Belson itself, whose timing was remorselessly accurate. I did not want to leave this placental grass and the stillness of my present life. I did not disturb my physical attachment to the grass, and fell back to sleep.

I awoke to shouting from the edge of the field. The voice sounded hollow and the words were indistinct, but I shuddered myself awake to the world of men. What a pain that is! What endless complications! I wished intensely for a moment that the grass could somehow absorb me into itself and fracture my body into a million blades so that I could lie there forever under the sun of Fomalhaut and when the time came, sing.

The voices kept up. Clearly the crew members did not want to walk out to me. Finally I pulled myself upright, breaking off the connections on my arms and back with little pops, feeling all those filaments severing themselves from my body.

“Okay!” I croaked skyward, “I’m coming.” My unused voice rasped in my throat. I sat silent for a full minute until my unease subsided.

Then I stood, slowly, and looked over toward them. Charlie the doctor, and Mimi, and three others stood by a green nuclear jeep.

I walked toward them cautiously. As I got near I saw a flicker of self-consciousness on several faces and remembered that I was nude. Wearing my birthday clothes, as they say.

“You okay, Captain?” Charlie said, with a kind of quaver.

“Did you find Isabel?” I said, hoarsely.

They just looked at me.

“Did you find her?”

“No, Captain. No we didn’t.” It was Charlie speaking again and his voice was soft. “Are you all right?”

I said nothing and walked past them toward my cabin. I could hear them following me, their gym shoes padding on the obsidian. They stopped at the cabin porch while I stepped up on it and walked in.

I crossed the room to my full-length mirror, taken from the Isabel’ s gym. I looked at myself for the first time in months. I saw John the Baptist. My hair was wild and sweaty, and my beard was a bramble. I was all bone and sinew and deep tan—angular and as tough-looking as leather. The most startling thing was my eyes, which were piercing and prophetic—the eyes of a mad seer. My prick and balls were heavy, and the hair on my abdomen and my legs was curled like wires; my eyes were the eyes of some mad old Jew come straight from the desert with his brains permanently addled by the force of the sun and of Jehovah.

I liked the way I looked and I did not want to put on clothes. I had come into the cabin with the thought of dressing myself, but now I did not want to. I wasn’t ready to don civilization with blue jeans and Adidas. I might never be ready.

I walked outside and ignored the crew members who stood there silently waiting for me. I walked between Mimi and Charlie, looking at neither of them, and across the bare surface toward my field of grass. I kept walking, crossing the field and coming back onto obsidian and then walking to another field. I turned back. I could see them standing, looking in my direction. For a moment I was furious and waved at them to go away. But of course they didn’t. In agitation I lay on the grass and held myself rigid, waiting for its tendrils to take hold, waiting for the rocking motion. But nothing happened. There was no movement beneath my body. After a frustrating twenty minutes, I stood and began walking back, crossing my first grass field again. I stopped in its middle and lay down again, but there was no hope in me. I got nothing from the grass.

I got up and continued walking, a bit less angry and a bit reconciled, until I came back to the crew of the Isabel , still standing by the cabin porch. They looked at me strangely but no one spoke. I nodded roughly and went past them and back into the cabin. I got my jeans and put them on. I slipped my Adidas over my bare feet and then put on a gray tee-shirt. Then I went to my pitcher of water, poured some into the bowl and washed my face and the back of my sun-wrinkled neck. The skin was shockingly rough to the touch.

I ran my fingers through my hair several times, wincing as I pulled out tangles. Then I looked in the mirror again and lit a cigar. I was now John the Baptist, Chairman of the Board. I took scissors and hacked off some of the bushiness at the sides of the beard, letting bunches of hair fall on the moonwood floor, watching myself in the mirror as I did so until what I saw was less a prophet than Ben Belson himself. Then I stopped, before all prophecy and mysticism had left my face. I did not want to forget how my bloodstream had been fed for two months, nor how my sexual self had spurted a seminal fountain that very dawn.

I stepped out onto the porch. They were standing around silently. When they saw me come out looking near-civilized and dressed again, I could see the relief on their faces. Mimi’s thin features lit up and Charlie smiled gently at me, clearly glad to find me more recognizable.

Mimi was carrying what looked like a gym bag. She set it on the edge of the porch, unzipped it, and brought out two bottles of Mumm’s and some champagne glasses. We all watched while she undid the wires around the corks and then blasted them out of the bottles like miniature Isabel s. She poured mine first and handed it to me. I held it and watched the way Fomalhaut’s blue light sparkled on its fizz. When the others all had glasses I held mine aloft for a toast. “To the United States,” I said. “Hear, hear,” Charlie said, and we drank them off. The taste was strange to my subdued tongue, acquainted of late mostly with salads. The fizz in my throat brought back New York, the opera, and women with white shoulders.