Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“I’ll try it,” she said matter-of-factly.

I stared at her. Was it this easy after all?

“Daddy,” she said, “I trust you. And I’ve tried more painkillers than you have any idea of. Believe me, I’ve swallowed a lot of chemicals in my time.” She leaned forward, somewhat stiffly, and picked up the glass. Her hand was far steadier, despite the pain, than mine had been. “What do you call this stuff?”

“Endolin,” I said. “Just drink it off. There’s no special taste.”

She nodded and downed the glassful the way a sailor downs a beer. “Endolin, eh?” she said, with an edge of cynicism in her voice. Well I couldn’t blame her for being cynical, considering the number of things she must have tried. It was a testimony to her strength that, having used morphine and probably heavier stuff, she wasn’t a junkie herself.

I said nothing. It takes endolin about three minutes to work and there was no point in talking it up. I felt nervous and got up just in time to take my coffee from Martha’s tray as she came in the swinging door from the kitchen. I looked at a couple of contemporary holographic etchings on the wall for a moment; but those damned 3-D things always hurt my eyes. I looked out the window down to the street, which was now empty. It was one of those phosphorescent sidewalks that glow green in the dark and it eased my eyes to stare at it for a minute. I was itching in several places. I should take a bath.

Just then Myra said softly, “My God, Daddy!” and I turned around. She was still seated. Her face was strange and her mouth was half open in astonishment. As I looked at her she shook her head a couple of times.

“Is something wrong?” I said, alarmed.

She shook her head again, more violently, staring at me. I took a step toward her. She was beginning to cry. “Are you all right?” I said.

Her face was very serious and the expression was one I’d never seen before. “How long does it last?” she asked.

“About six hours.”

“Will I have a hangover?”

“Nothing, honey,” I said. “No hangover.”

“ Oh my God ,” she said and burst into tears. I squatted somewhat awkwardly by her chair and put my arms around her and hugged her. I could feel some of that pain that had just gone out of her, feel the shock of it. After a moment she pulled gently away and stood up, not using her crutches. She began walking around the room slowly and taking an occasional little two-step. “I used to take morphine sometimes, or shoot myself full of procaine and dance for an hour or so. But the thing was I couldn’t really feel my body. And my head would be fuzzy.”

“It just takes the pain away,” I said.

Myra went over to a bookcase, put a steel ball into a box and Chinese dance music filled the room. She began dancing more confidently, her face open and surprised still. I seated myself and watched. It was overwhelming to see her moving easily like that, still a bit careful in her movements because of her long history of pain.

After a while she stopped, perspiring and smiling now. She turned the box off and came and sat beside me. She let herself cry again for a minute, very openly and easily, holding her hands in front of her and flexing her fingers. We used to play chess with ivory pieces every now and then and sometimes it would make her wince in pain just to pick up a pawn. Now her fingers seemed completely easy and supple. After a moment she stopped crying and said, “How about that, Daddy? I think I always knew you’d come through for me.”

“I wish I could have had it twenty years ago…”

“Now is good enough,” she said. “When the pain is over it’s over.” She smiled a little wistfully. “Where did it come from?”

“From the heavens,” I said. “From a star.” I pointed downtown. “A star in Pisces Austrinus, called Fomalhaut. It has a planet with only two living things on it: a kind of wonderful grass and the little, ugly plant endolin comes from.”

“What’s the planet called? Or does it have a name?”

“It’s named Belson, honey.”

Myra laughed. “Just like you and me, Daddy.”

I looked at her. “And your Great Aunt Myra.”

I took a long, hot shower after that. Myra was able to find some men’s clothes that fit well enough, and I picked a denim work shirt and a pair of jeans that were a little loose in the waist. It gave me a tinge of pride to find my waist was smaller than whatever lover of Myra’s had left his pants behind. I brushed off my electronic running shoes and put them on over a pair of clean white socks. There is nothing quite like a shower followed by clean white socks. I was becoming a small fugue of good feelings; what I needed now was Isabel. And a few million dollars.

After showering and putting on clean clothes I had a quiet drink with Myra in her living room. She had come down a bit from her high, but she smiled a lot. She asked me about my travels in space and I told her about Belson and Juno, although I didn’t mention Juno’s star. It was fun to talk with Myra that easily, leaning back into a soft couch with a drink of good whiskey, seeing her face for once relaxed and her body at ease. From time to time she would flex the fingers of a hand or work a shoulder joint just a bit, with a pleasant surprise. She wanted to know everything about endolin, and I told her everything I knew about it. How we had found it growing in fissures in Belson’s impenetrable obsidian, how I’d learned to concentrate it and preserve it. It was wonderful to sit there with the windows open in Myra’s big living room with the barely luminous New York street outside the window hushed with an August hush, and me with my clean white socks, my skin clean, my hair still dyed and my beard dyed and combed and a fresh shirt on my strong chest, letting the old guilt seep out of my pores and away into the nighttime, off to Fomalhaut and beyond, into the outer reaches.

When I went off to bed a little before midnight, the moon was shining as full as a hundred-dollar silver coin into the bedroom window. On the night before, I had been its fellow orbiter, in a kind of sublunar funk; here I was now, a fugitive, a pirate, dispossessed, but tired and happy going to bed in a New York apartment, ready to sing hymns to the joy of my new life. “For he on honey dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise.” Coleridge. Another junkie. What the hell. I slept like a baby for a dozen hours.

Birds were singing when I awoke. Myra was up and had found Pain Chocolat and espresso for me and three fresh Havana cigars. Gueveras.

I dressed in jeans and a gray tee-shirt and went barefoot into the kitchen and began making an omelet with a fried banana on the side. There was coffee on the wood stove. Yellow morning sunshine came in the kitchen window as still and humane as in a Vermeer. The cup I drank my coffee from was Spode and had a decoration of two small green frogs, facing each other amiably; my heart glowed warmly to see such frogs, and on such china. Myra was wearing a blue denim smock, and walked as if on air, as if she had never gone to sleep with fire in her joints, as if she had had a childhood of skipping rope and tag and dancing. Her hair was tied loosely in back in a bun, her hazel eyes smiled. “Let me pour you more coffee,” she said, and I remembered her as a bright-eyed two-year-old, as lovely and heartwarming a thing as nature ever made. I had forgotten how much I loved my child.

“Honey,” I said to Myra, “do you know of an actress named Isabel Crawford? She was in the last Hamlet , playing the mother.”

Myra pursed her lips a moment and then nodded slowly. “British?”

“Scottish. In her forties. Very good-looking.”

“She’s a friend of yours then?”