Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

He figured out a rough dose and I took it. It was bitter, like aspirin. Howard protested that we should try it on some lab mice first, but I went on ahead.

My headache vanished in three minutes. Vanished completely and stayed vanished. It was then that I began to believe the planet was intelligent and that it had goodwill. Belson spoke my language. The music had spoken to my heart as directly as that plant had spoken to my nervous system. That kind of a fit cannot be accidental; the odds against it are too strong.

I developed my theory of an intelligent planet and tried it on Ruth. She was polite but clearly didn’t buy it. I dropped the subject. Ruth had been having dinner with me since the first week on Belson, but we didn’t sleep together and we didn’t talk much. She was busy with her scientific thoughts and I with my mystical ones. And my morphine. And I had sex problems.

I named the little shrub endolin. It turned out there was a lot of it around, growing out of cracks in the obsidian. I had come to Belson looking for power; instead I’d found music, euphoria and relief from pain. I was beginning to love this place.

Why did I buy this ship in the first place, this small portable universe? Well, for one thing I had gone impotent. My once enthusiastic and catholic member had become shy, sullen, and would not serve me. Would not serve my lady friends either. There were quarrels, recriminations; I tried resorting to masturbation and, to my dismay, found that was out of the question too. My joint had taken leave of its senses and my senses had taken leave of my joint. It went on like that. I began to feel disgraced. I wanted to kill someone. My therapist said Mother; he was probably right, but Mother was already dead.

Isabel was my eventual port in this storm and kept me from going completely bonkers. She worked with me physically for a few days—and it was indeed work—and then abandoned that, sensibly saying,” It’s best to wait awhile, Ben.” I moved in with her, into her little studio apartment on East Fifty-first Street, and slept with her and her two big chunky cats in the little loft bed that she had built with her own pale, esthetic hands. Isabel was a good carpenter; she had worked on theater sets for years before developing the courage to try acting. God, what a tiny place that was! And you could never escape the street sounds from the windows: the shoutings of drunks and mad bombers and all-purpose crazies at two in the morning; the steam-powered garbage wagons at four, and the screeching wood vendors at seven-thirty. Wood was seven dollars a stick in midtown, and Isabel had a fireplace. It was the worst winter in forty years; on most mornings the water in the toilet would be frozen solid. I tried enormous bribes on the super for heat; he would give me his shy Yugoslav smile and pocket my hundreds, but the heating pipes remained silent. I tried, one frostbitten morning when the weight of three blankets was suffocating me, to bring Isabel to her senses and get her to sail to Yucatan with me for the winter. But she was adamant. She held the covers up to her chin and said, “You know I’m in a show, Ben.”

I could feel the little hairs in my nose as stiff as icicles. “Honey,” I said, “you’ve got six fucking lines in that show, and one of them is, ‘Hello.’” I couldn’t see outside because ice had formed on the windowpanes. And we had a fire in the grate; I had thrown some sticks on it at four in the morning, shaking so much from the cold that I’d almost missed. What would all the poor people downtown be doing, the ones who couldn’t afford wood and insulation and storm windows? The Red Cross gave out blankets, but there were never enough. I made a mental note to give a quarter million to the Red Cross. Or maybe a sheep ranch, so they could grow their own. It was seven in the morning and I could hear the wind howling around the corner from Third Avenue.

“Sweetheart,” Isabel said, “I’m not going to be your dependent. And I’m warm enough.” Isabel slept in long woolen underwear, hiding all that radiant skin of hers and those girlish breasts under scratchy BVDs. I slept wrapped around her warm body, dressed in a flannel nightgown and gym shorts.

We’d had that argument enough times before, so I gave it up. Isabel wasn’t about to take advantage of my wealth. That afternoon I hunted around and found a big old coal stove at a blackmarket shop on Seventh Avenue and got the name of a dealer. Burning anthracite for private heat was illegal, under the Nonrenewable Resources Act; it took hard-coal trains to move the food and other essentials around the country, and the enforcement was pretty tough. But I had connections and was willing to take the chance. After all, I was in the business: Belson Mines. I managed after three phone calls to get two dozen cabbage-sized lumps of anthracite and promise of another delivery in five days. Isabel and I were warm enough after that. My dealer, a skinny little fellow in a pea coat, tried to sell me some cocaine along with those black lumps, but in those days I had no interest in drugs. It took a voyage to the stars to get me hooked.

With coal in the grate, Isabel went back to sleeping naked, but it didn’t help my impotence. I remember waking up at 5 A.M. sometimes with a yearning in my groin, but if I woke Isabel—no easy task, since she slept and snored like a hibernating bear—it was no good. My scared member would retreat and I would be frustrated and feel like a fool to boot. And have Isabel furious with me for wakening her to another strikeout. “Ben,” she’d say, “if you want me take me. But quit waking me up for these experiments .” I blushed like a child and couldn’t get back to sleep. It was horrible. This was after that conversation in Jamaica with the geologist; I began to have daydreams of space travel. I will say this about myself: when I sublimate I sublimate grandly.

So I bought this ship and furnished it, made sure there were a few attractive women in the crew, and set forth to the stars with a limp penis.

“Doctor,” I said to Orbach, lying on the leather couch in his office, my big lumberjack shoes resting on the arm, my head against a fat leather pillow, “If I don’t get some orgasms soon…”

“I wish you wouldn’t pressure yourself so much,” he said. “There are other ways to use your energies.”

“I could lie, pillage and kill. I could run for President. I could travel through space.”

His voice was wry. “The last sounds the least destructive.” And that clinched it. The next day I told my lawyers to find a spaceship. The one I eventually got was Chinese; it was called Flower of Heavenly Repose . I had most of its old scientific gear junked, built a launching pad in the Keys, furnished the captain’s quarters with antiques, hired a crew, and took off for Fomalhaut. This took a year. It would have taken five if I hadn’t been wound up like a steel spring with celibacy. If I couldn’t push myself into a woman’s body by an act of will, will would push my body across the galaxy. I hated the spiritual algebra of it, but I understood the equation well enough; I had been robbing Peter to pay Paul for most of my life. That’s how you get rich in a world of dwindling resources, a world with its springs running down.

Somebody years before had told me about sleep body-building; you could avoid the boredom of getting into shape by doing it in a long chemical sleep. I hated exercise and the idea had charm, but I didn’t feel then that I could disappear from the world of the awake for two months without financial risks of the worst kind. When I learned that, despite the spacewarp tricks my ship was capable of, it would still take three dull months to get across the Milky Way, I decided to grab the opportunity and I had the Nautilus machines installed. I had been developing flabby pectorals and a pot. Firming up my body might firm up its sweetest part too. Hell, maybe in a two-month nap I might have a cascade of wet dreams and get some relief that way. But as it turned out, I didn’t; I spent most of my dream time with Father.