Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

The drizzle had lightened but I didn’t stay on the terrace. I had begun thinking of Neil Armstrong and of those bland, tightly smiling descendants of people like him, who were more and more coming to rule the world. The John Glenn Hotel, indeed. John Glenn had been orbited like a fetus a hundred years ago, crouched in the belly of the hurtling whale more for publicity reasons than for engineering ones, and the people of Ohio had allowed him to make laws for all of us because of it. What folly. What an omen! I’d have voted for him maybe, for his being a sound, middle-aged test pilot before the razzmatazz of NASA, but never for his orbits, those pawn moves in the unholy game my country was playing with Russia at the time. What dangerous idiots we were in those days, with our weapons and our paranoia!

These thoughts about the United States and its long tradition of folly were doing me no good. Why was I so angry ? My nose was itching. I was catching cold.

My shorts in the bathroom, a sky-blue pair I’d worn halfway across the Milky Way and back, were dry enough to put on, since I’d draped them over a hissing radiator. I took a quick shower, got into the shorts, and with a restored sense of purpose went to the viddiphone in the parlor. For a moment I wanted to call Ruth, but I put that out of my mind. I told the machine to give me her brother’s number. I got him on the first try. “Howard,” I told him, “I need to see you and for God’s sake don’t tell anyone I’m in Columbus.”

I’d quieted down a bit by the time Gordon got to my room with the money. He tried to be hearty and companionable about it, but I wasn’t buying. I signed first-mortgage papers with him for a house I own in Key West and sent him on his way. Then I put what I could of the money into my belt, rolled the rest into a crapshooter’s roll and stuffed it in my jeans. When I put the belt on it was like putting a bicycle chain around my waist, but it’s the best way I know to carry liquid assets. They’d have to sever me to get at it.

Howard arrived a few minutes after Gordon left and I greeted him with a hug. It was good to see someone from the Isabel again.

“Well, Captain,” he said, “you look healthy. But I liked you as a blond.”

“Me too,” I said. “Let me get you a drink.”

I poured us both some Chinese wine. The living room had a fake fireplace with a pair of high-backed red armchairs by it; we sat in these facing each other. “Did you marry again, Howard?” I asked.

He shook his head slowly. “After the ship landed in Florida and the court let us go I was excited about finding a new wife. I felt…” He was sitting hunched over his wineglass and holding it in both hands. “I felt like a sailor in port, if you know what I mean.” He finished his wine. “But nothing happened.”

“You didn’t meet any women?”

“It seemed like a lot of trouble for nothing, once I got down to it. I took the bus to Columbus.” He smiled shamefacedly. “I suppose I’m getting older.”

I stared at him.

“I’m forty-four.”

I could have hit him with one of the artificial logs. But I didn’t do anything. The man had six divorces behind him. Maybe he knew something.

I got up and went to the bedroom. When I came back to my chair I handed him a packet. “Howard,” I said, “I need to have this analyzed by somebody who’s really good at it.”

“It looks like dope,” he said.

“It’s endolin. I want to find out if it can be duplicated.”

“I know just the man. A professor at Ohio State.” He held the packet in his hand as though weighing it. “Endolin didn’t look like this on Belson.”

“I learned a way to concentrate it.” I found myself getting more irritated with this conversation. Also, I was beginning to get a serious cold. I excused myself again and went to the bedroom for a handkerchief and blew my nose violently. My throat was sore and my skin felt prickly. I got out another pack of endolin and took a pinch, chasing it with the rest of my wine.

“Captain,” Howard shouted from the other room, “did the grass sing anymore?”

I felt annoyed with the question. “Yes,” I said, “once.”

He nodded. “Wasn’t the grass why you stayed? So you could hear it again?”

“I wanted to consolidate myself.”

“You could have done that on Juno.”

“I can be very self-defeating in how I live.”

He laughed as though I was joking, although I certainly wasn’t. “You know,” he said. “I wanted to stay myself.”

I stood in the doorway and looked at him awhile—at his sad face and stooped shoulders. He did look old. Then I said, “On Juno or on Belson?”

“Belson,” he said.

Oh yes , I thought, furious. There’s a lot of it going around.

I woke before dawn with my bedsheet wet from sweat and my nose and throat feeling stuffed with steel wool. My head throbbed. I got up shakily, feeling wretched, took some endolin and a glass of warm water and then got back in bed and waited. After a few minutes the throbbing stopped and I felt the fever abate, but the baroque world of predawn sickness was enveloping my spirit.

Eventually I fell asleep again, or something like asleep, with twisting around and fighting with the sheets, which would not seem to get straight and smooth no matter what I did. I remember sitting up in bed sometime that morning after the sun had risen and shouting, “Motherfuckers motherfuckers motherfuckers!” and trying to get the top sheet to cover my toes. “ Motherfuckers! ” Someone below me pounded on the ceiling and, fuming, I became quiet again.

I slept till ten and felt better when I awoke, again, to wet sheets. I called room service and got four soft-boiled eggs and a bloody mary. Then I put on my jeans and my red shirt, went to the living room and called Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals.

It took about an hour of switching around from office to office before I could get anybody important—which really meant anybody Chinese. She was a junior vice-president in charge of Development and clearly a fan of the National Cultural Revival: Pear Blossom Loo. A young woman of about thirty, with black bangs above a face as inscrutable as a cue ball. Nice teeth, though, as well as I could see. I was sitting with the shades down and in dim light to make sure I wasn’t recognized.

“Miss Loo,” I said, “my name is Ben Jonson. I’m a professor of biochemistry at Stanford and I’ve developed an analgesic substance that should be of interest to you.”

“I see,” she said. “The Research Division of Lao-tzu International is not here. Not in Columbus. Bogota.”

My fever was coming back and for a minute I just wanted to hang up and go back to bed and drink bloody marys. Damn these uptight Chinese women! Damn doing business anyway! But I pulled myself together as well as I could and tried to sound charming. “Of course,” I said, “but the research is done. What you need to do is test it out. That’s not really research.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jonson,” she said, “we do not have the personnel or the equipment in Columbus to do what you say.”

“Look,” I said, “you have a Shartz Analyzer, don’t you?”

“We have several.”

“That’s all you need for now.” I sneezed suddenly. “We’ve run tests for a year at the University. It kills pain as well as morphine and it’s not a narcotic.”

“I’m not certain, Mr. Jonson, that Lao-tzu…”

“Come on , Miss Loo!” I said. “You look like a smart woman to me. This will take a half hour of your time and it can give you the most profitable pill since Glandol, or time-release Valium. Since Fergusson, for Christ’s sake. Do I sound like a lunatic?”