Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

He sat there awhile, looking very collected, very urbane. Finally he spoke. “I like things the way they are. I enjoy my work, Benjamin. The United States is doing very well under its energy laws, and I helped frame them.”

“And you profit from them.”

“They are good laws, for the resources we have.”

I just looked at him, feeling nothing. There was no way to get through to this man, and I knew it. He did not want to be partners with anyone, and the only way I could bargain with him now would be to tell him about Juno and how to get there. But then, thinking about that, I realized something I had missed before: if he really wanted to know where my uranium came from he would have found out from the crew. He could have locked them up as conspirators, or pirates, and pressured them until someone told him. And he hadn’t done that. “You don’t really want to know where I got that uranium,” I said.

He looked at me and smiled tiredly. “How perceptive you are, Benjamin.”

“You just want to keep things the way they are.”

“In a nutshell.”

I sat there awhile. Finally I said, wearily, “Can you get me some cigars?”

He smiled. “I’ll have a dozen boxes sent.” He stood up to his full height on the other side of the plastic. What a hugely tall man he was, and how light on his feet and flexible for his age! The goddamned devious son of a bitch.

“Sacre Fidels,” I said. And then, “Do you ever use Nautilus machines, L’Ouverture?”

He smiled down at me. “Daily.” He straightened his jacket and patted the pockets with his huge hands, smoothing them. “I have to go now,” he said.

I stood up. “What will you do with the Isabel ?”

“It can stay where it is. Its hatch has been welded shut. And the portholes are covered. It is under perpetual guard.”

“Like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier?”

“Exactly.”

“And it’ll just stay at Aynsley?”

“I have no interest in football.” He turned to leave.

“L’Ouverture,” I said, “when am I going to get out of this place?”

He turned back to me and shook his head sympathetically. “Benjamin,” he said, “I’d tell you if I knew.”

I nodded. It all seemed eerily natural, this conversation with the thick transparent plastic between us. “I know I was spotted in Philadelphia,” I said. “But how did you find out I was in Columbus?”

He stood silent for a minute before speaking. Then he said, “Sue Kranefeld. She called my office.”

The Reagan Stir is a wretched place—a kind of flophouse of prisons. I was given a cell with a tiny TV and a cold-water shower. There was a library and, thank God, a gym. I worked out with weights and an LAT machine twice a day and sometimes did pushups in my cell. They had me in Diplomatic Isolation, which meant no visitors and no newspapers and no news shows on my TV. I was in Washington, but I didn’t know if the public at large knew where I was. After a week I quit caring.

I hate to admit this, but a part of me warmed up to prison. I shifted into the psychic gear I had been in on Belson and all I really missed was my vegetables. I got the complete short stories of Henry James out of the prison library and spent my days between working out, reading and playing chess. At level eight. There was a UV booth in the gym; I added to my Belson suntan, which had faded a good deal. I wasn’t allowed to talk to other prisoners—although I always nodded at a woeful Arab who worked out on the LAT machine next to me—and that suited me fine. Ever since Father’s forget-me-nots I had known the game of spiritual Robinson Crusoe; I found sweet sadness in playing it yet again.

Sometimes at night I would watch TV, after getting weary with Henry James’s games of ethical chess and of people who responded to moral crises by not finishing sentences. The Chinese TV channel was doing a thirty-part dramatization of European history, shot in Peking, and I got hooked on it. It wasn’t the European history I had been taught and it was amusing to see it from a Chinese perspective. One Sunday night after a supper of frankfurters and beans I sat on my bunk drinking coffee from a plastic cup and idly watching a segment of the sixteenth century in England, when something about Queen Elizabeth caught my attention. Her walk seemed eerily familiar. I stared. It looked like Isabel in a red wig. I sat upright and turned up the volume. It was Isabel, in lace, pearls and heavy silk, looking like an authentic queen, even though it was ludicrous to hear her voice dubbed in high-pitched Chinese.

The Chinese view of Elizabeth was as a kind of virginal nymphomaniac. She was shown turning on Essex, and Cecil and Raleigh. Drake was trying to get into her pants. All of this was very disturbing, and when a scene came on where she was lying in bed with Essex, both of them naked, and she fending him off with chatter, I nearly choked. I wanted to kick the idiot who was playing Essex, grab Isabel by her lovely waist and demonstrate the folly of coyness. I could have pounded my head against the wall for the waste of my five months’ impotence with her. There I sat in my cell, staring at her electronic image with an erection—the only erection the sight of her body had ever given me and as useless, now, as an airplane on the moon.

I’d been happy enough with Henry James, chess and weightlifting before that, but it changed everything. I wanted to get out of prison and back to life again. It was toward the end of October; I’d been in stir six weeks, with no trial scheduled and no word from anybody. I stepped out of my Robinson Crusoe daze like stepping out of a pair of dirty socks and found myself in reality. It was awful. I was in prison, horny, angry, and ready to go, but I couldn’t get out. Four walls. Bars on the windows. Guards. Frankfurters, beans and instant coffee.

This kept up for two weeks and would have been the death of me if they hadn’t, suddenly and without notice, let me out. The eighth of November. Two guards came into my cell after breakfast and told me to pack. That took three minutes, including brushing my teeth. They took me to a desk where I signed papers, got back my billfold, was admonished to “watch my step” and taken to a coal-gas black Maria. I didn’t know what in hell was going on, but suspected it had something to do with the election. My prison had been well heated if nothing else; it was icy and gray outside. Glad as I was to get out, a part of me was sorry to leave the warmth of jail. We drove past the Washington Monument, looking bleak in the winter air, and then a few blocks later I looked down a side street and saw sticking up proudly into the sky above tall buildings, covered with snow, the Isabel ! That cheered me up. I blew her a kiss as we went by.

They pulled up at the Chinese Embassy and the guards ushered me into a back door, where four Chinese soldiers took me into a room with painted screens and modern furniture. Two Chinese ladies fingerprinted me, in red. A tall, thirtyish one who seemed in charge handed me rice paper forms to sign.

“What’s all this about?” I asked, in English.

She pulled a cigarette from her robe, lit it and blew smoke toward me. “I am taking you home, Mr. Kwoo.”

“ Kwoo? ” I almost jumped out of my skin. “What the hell is this Kwoo? ” I still hadn’t signed the papers. “Let me have one of your cigarettes if you don’t mind, and then explain to me what going home means and about this Mr. Kwoo.”

She gave me a cigarette and lit it with a little red electronic. “Mr. Kwoo is your Chinese name,” she said.

“That’s not what’s on my passport,” I said.

“We have a new passport. It seemed expedient to change your identity.” Her face was hard-looking but the voice pleasant enough. Except for the hardness she was a beautiful woman. “The United States does not want you to leave its shores. Senator Baynes would like to keep you under lock and key until… how do you say it in America?”