Thomas Disch - 334

A jet went past, coming in low for the Park, winking a jittery rhythm of red, red, green, red, from tail and wing tips. Ab wondered whether Milly might be on it. Was she due in tonight?

“Look at it this way, Ab,” Martinez said. “You’re still paying for last month’s luck.”

He had to think, and then he had to ask, “What luck last month?”

“The switch. Jesus, I didn’t think any of us were going to climb out from under that without getting burnt.”

“Oh, that.” He approached the memory tentatively, not sure the scar tissue was firm yet. “It was tight, all right.” A laugh, which rang half-true. The scar had healed, he went on. “There was one moment though at the end when I thought I’d flushed the whole thing down the toilet. See, I had the Identi-Band from the first body, what’s-her-name’s. It was the only thing I got from that asshole White. … ”

“That fucking White,” Martinez agreed.

“Yeah. But I was so panicked after that spill on the stairs that I forgot, see, to change them, the two bands, so I sent off the Schaap body like it was.”

“Oh Mary Mother, that would have done it!”

“I remembered before the driver got away. So I got out there with the Newman band and made up some story about how we print up different bands when we send them out to the freezers than when one goes to the oven.”

“Did he believe that?”

Ab shrugged. “He didn’t argue.”

“You don’t think he ever figured out what happened that day?”

“That guy? He’s as dim as Chapel.”

“Yeah, what about Chapel?” There if anywhere, Martinez had thought, Ab had laid himself open.

“What about him?”

“You told me you were going to pay him off. Did you?”

Ab tried to find some spit in his mouth. “I paid him off all right” Then, lacking the spit: “Jesus Christ.”

Martinez waited.

“I offered him a hundred dollars. One hundred smackers. You know what that dumb bastard wanted?”

“Five hundred?”

“Nothing! Nothing at all. He even argued about it. Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, I suppose. My money wasn’t good enough for him.”

“So?”

“So we reached a compromise. He took fifty.” He made a comic face.

Martinez laughed. “It was a damned lucky thing, that’s all I’ll say, Ab. Damned lucky.”

They were quiet along the length of the old police station. Despite the green pills Ab felt himself coming down, but ever so gently down. He entered pink cloudbanks of philosophy.

“Hey, Martinez, you ever think about that stuff? The freezing business and all that.”

“I’ve thought about it, sure. I’ve thought it’s a lot of bullshit.”

“You don’t think there’s a chance then that any of them ever will be brought back to life?”

“Of course not. Didn’t you see that documentary they were making all the uproar over, and suing NBC? No, that freezing doesn’t stop anything, it just slows it down. They’ll all just be so many little ice cubes eventually. Might as well try bringing them back from the smoke in the stacks.”

“But if science could find a way to … Oh, I don’t know. It’s complicated by lots of things.”

“Are you thinking of putting money into one of those damned policies, Ab? For Christ’s sake, I would have thought that you had more brains than that. The other day my wife …” He rolled his eyes blackamoor-style. “It’s not in our league, believe me.”

“That’s not what I was thinking at all.”

“So? Then? I’m no mind-reader.”

“I was wondering, if they ever do find a way to bring them back, and if they find a cure for lupus and all that, well, what if they brought her back?”

“The Schaap?”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t that be crazy? What would she think anyhow?”

“Yeah, what a joke.”

“No, seriously.”

“I don’t get the point, seriously.”

Ab tried to explain but he didn’t see the point now himself. He could picture the scene in his mind so clearly: the girl, her skin made smooth again, lying on a table of white stone, breathing, but so faintly that only the doctor standing over her could be sure. His hand would touch her face and her eyes would open and there would be such a look of astonishment.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Martinez said, in a half-angry tone, for he didn’t like to see anyone believing in something he couldn’t believe in, “it’s just a kind of religion.”

Since Ab could recall having said almost the same thing to Leda, he was able to agree. They were only a couple blocks from the baths by then, so there were better uses for the imagination. But before the last of the cloudbank had quite vanished, he got in one last word for philosophy. “One way or another, Martinez, life goes on. Say what you like, it goes on.”

The three of them were sitting in the arbor watching the sun go down over her damp melon fields—Alexa herself, her neighbor Arcadius, and the pretty Hebrew bride he’d brought back from Thebes. Arcadius, once again, was describing his recent mysterious experience in Egypt, where in some shattered temple the immortal Plato had addressed the old man, not in Latin but a kind of Greek, and shown him various cheap-jack signs and wonders—a phoenix, of course; then a crew of blind children who had prophesied in perfect strophe and antistrophe, the holocaust of earth; finally (Arcadius drew this miracle from his pocket and placed it on the dial) a piece of wood that had metamorphosed to stone.

Alexa picked it up: a like but much larger hunk of petrified wood dignified G.’s work table at the Center: russet striations giving way to nebular sworls of mauve, yellow, cinnabar. It had come from a sad and long-since-deleted curio shop on East 8th. Their first anniversary.

She dropped the stone into the old man’s proffered palm. “It’s beautiful.” No more than that.

His fingers curled round it. Dark veins squirmed across white flesh. She looked away (the lowest clouds were now the color flesh should be), but not before she had imagined Arcadius dead, and swarming. No, the historical Alexa would have dreamt up nothing so patently medieval. Ashes? At most.

He flung the stone out into the steaming field.

Merriam rose to her feet, one arm extended in a gesture of protest. Who was this strange girl, this wisp of a wife? Was she, as Alexa might have wished, just a new mirror image of herself? Or did she represent something more abstract? Their eyes met. In Merriam’s, reproach; in Alexa’s, an answering guilt contested against her everyday skepticism. It came down to this, that Arcadius, and Merriam too in a subtler way, wanted her to accept this scrap of rock as proof that lunatics in Syria have died and then risen from their graves.

An impossible situation.

“It’s growing chilly,” she announced, though this was as patent a fiction as any Arcadius had brought back from the Nile.

The path back home dipped down almost to touch the unfinished pool. A small brown toad squatted on the rib cage of the handsome wrestler that Gargilius had shipped up from the south. He had waited two years so, in mud and dust, for the pool to be done and his pedestal to be raised. Now the marble was discolored.

Merriam said, “Oh look!” The toad got off. (Have I ever seen a toad alive, or only pictures of toads in Nature World? Had there been toads that summer in Augusta? or in Bermuda? in Spain?) Out of the long grass, a deep burp. And again the burp.

The timer on the oven?

No, there was still—she checked her watch—a quarter-hour before Willa’s pies came out and her own daube went in.

Merriam faded to a gape. Worn strips of maple replaced the damp, elaborate grass, and the toad—