Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“Yes you do, Mr. Jonson,” Pear Blossom said crisply. I found myself staring at a blank viddiphone screen. She had hung up on me. “Son of a bitch!” I said and began sneezing. Then the sneeze turned into a cough. I got up and went to the bathroom and coughed and sneezed and spat voluminously into the toilet, occasionally stopping long enough to shout, “Motherfucker!” Whoever was below me pounded the ceiling again. I could picture some chubby, balding druggist hitting upward with a broom handle. I went on coughing, bent over and holding my belly. My nose was running.

Eventually the coughing stopped. I called room service for two bloody marys and then reached out for the Repeat button on the phone to get Pear Blossom back, but interrupted myself with another fit of coughing. What the hell , I thought, and called Ruth.

She came on looking sweet and chubby and a little disheveled. Good old Ruth! I thought, and my heart warmed at the sight of her there in front of me.

She was staring at me, apparently not sure who it was. “Ben?” she said.

“That’s right, Ruth,” I said warmly, with the cold now in my voice, since my nose was plugged up. “I’m in Columbus.”

She kept staring. Then suddenly she looked almost awed. “ Oh Ben ,” she said, “I thought I’d never see you…”

“I’m at the John Glenn, Ruth.” Just then a knock came on the door. “Wait a minute,” I said. I left the phone and walked over, opened the door and took the tray with the drinks from the waiter. I pulled a fifty from my jeans pocket, handed it to him and went back to the phone. “Ruth,” I said, “you don’t know how much good it does just to see your face.” I guzzled one of the bloody marys and snorted.

Ruth looked worried. “Are you drunk, Ben?”

“I’m sick, Ruth honey. I’ve got a cold. It feels… interstellar.”

She looked relieved. “Do you want me to bring you some hot soup? I go to work in twenty minutes, and I could drop by…”

“Ruth,” I said, interrupting, “I want more than soup. I’d like to move in with you for a week or two, while I get over this thing. I need to get a World Viddiphone Line and I need a set of barbells…” I sneezed again. “How about it?”

She hesitated, started to say something. Then she said, “Are you all right, Ben? Weren’t the police…?”

“I eluded them, Ruth, as the papers said.”

“Oh,” she said. “Ben, you look strange . Did you kick it? Morphine?”

I was starting to feel angry again. “Yes. I changed a lot, on Belson. Can I come and stay for a week?”

She looked at me silently for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Ben, it’s too late for that. I have a man living with me. I can bring you some food, and a doctor if you need one…”

It was a setback for my vanity, but I managed to hide it well enough. “I’ll be all right, Ruth.”

She smiled sadly. “Sorry, Ben.”

After talking with Ruth I sipped another bloody mary and permitted myself the old childhood gloom, then shook it off. What the hell, it was time to be grown-up about it. I’d tried the alternative enough in my life. There was business to take care of, and Isabel to locate. I pressed the Repeat button on the phone twice and got Lao-tzu again.

“Pear Blossom Loo, please,” I said.

The head on the screen disappeared and was replaced by that of Pear Blossom’s secretary. He put me through to Pear Blossom with some reluctance.

When she saw me she looked ready to hang up again. “The Research Division of Lao-tzu is in Bogota, Colombia, Mr. Jonson.”

I kept my composure, although I felt like throwing an ashtray at her disembodied head. “Miss Loo,” I said, “I’ll be in your office tomorrow afternoon. Do you really want me going to Parke-Davis first?”

“I will be in conference all day tomorrow.” Her face was a study in blank dislike.

“I’ll be there anyway,” I said, and hung up. Her head and shoulders disappeared from the screen.

I fumed around the room for a while after that, cursing China in general and Chinese bureaucrats in particular. What Lao-tzu Pharmaceuticals needed was somebody like Arabella Kim to run it, with her good wrinkled face and tobacco-stained teeth. It was about noon, and there were things I wanted to do in Columbus—like getting a set of barbells—before going out to Lao-tzu in the morning, but I was beginning to feel as if I wouldn’t be able to do any of it. This cold, or whatever it was I had, was bad . I was sticky from sweat and my nose and throat were stinging. I took endolin and it kept down the pain, but it didn’t do anything for the cold itself. I knew what I needed was a transfusion from Belson grass, but that was out of the question. I climbed into bed, jabbed out my cigar in an ashtray, put a pillow over my head, and passed out. Falling asleep, I wondered briefly about Sue—about where the train would have been when she came to and found me gone.

I awoke late in the afternoon feeling feverish, dazed and unworldly. I knew I was sick, but I also knew it was only a cold. Something deeper was troubling me, some old loneliness. I’d had a Private World Line installed in the room and could talk through scrambled microwaves with considerable security to any phone in the world. I could do therapy this way. I sat up in bed, adjusted the sheets, relit my cigar, and called Orbach.

Orbach came on with his usual somberness. “Hello, Benjamin,” he said. “Welcome back into the world.”

“Orbach,” I said, “can you spare me an hour? Things are happening.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I have a patient arriving. I can connect you with my surrogate…”

“ Orbach! ” I said, desperate. “I don’t want to talk to a computer. Give me twenty minutes.”

Orbach looked at me sadly. “I’m truly sorry, Benjamin,” he said. “I can give you the noon hour on Thursday.”

“I don’t want Thursday,” I said. “Give me your computer.”

“It’s good to see you back safely, Benjamin,” the Great Orbach said. There was a slight click and the screen went milky white. Then Orbach’s synthesized voice came from the speaker. “Hello, Benjamin,” it said. “We can talk if you’d like.”

“Hell yes, I’d like,” I said.

“You sound angry,” the voice said.

“I’d like to talk to my mother,” I said grimly. What the hell.

“Your mother is dead, Benjamin.”

“I’ve heard that you machines can fake it.”

“I don’t know the voice,” the machine said. “I know parts of the personality, from your remarks in the office. Perhaps you can help me.”

I nodded. I’d been offered the chance to do this before but refused it as being too contrived. “First, she was a woman. Of sorts.”

“Yes,” said Orbach’s voice, now female.

“I want you to be her at about thirty-five, when I was a teenager. There was a nervous quaver in her voice. She was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987 and she spoke with an Ohio accent. She was a narcissistic drunk and she tried to be casual in her speech, but the self-regard and worry were always there.”

There was a pause and then the machine said, in a genteel, quavering female voice, “Do I sound like your mother now, Benjamin?”

“That’s pretty good,” I said grimly.

“If you have a picture I’ll put it on the screen and animate it.”

“I’m not sure…” I said. But I was sure. I was faking it for the benefit of the machine. I did have my mother’s picture in my billfold; I’d carried it for over thirty years and never told a soul. I reached over to the table beside the bed, took my billfold, opened it, slipped out a polychrome holo card and squeezed it on. And there sat Mother with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking at the camera in a patronizing way. Her brow was furrowed half in irony and half anxiety. Her hair needed combing. I stared at her for a long time, unsure what I was feeling.