Thomas Disch - 334

“But,” Bernie pointed out cheerfully, sweeping up the fluff and plaster dust, “they never got into the office, thank God. They might have done actual harm there.”

“That’s a rosy view.”

“Well, the way I look at it, this is the best of all possible worlds.” Without a doubt he was soothed by the consolations of chemistry, but amid these ruins, why not?

“Do you know who did it?” She picked a lump of plaster off the bench, dropped it into his basket.

“Oh, I think I do. A pair of girls that the Council saddled me with has been threatening to scrub the office for months. I hope it was them—then the Council can pick up the bill.”

Like most analysts, Bernie Shaw did not make a living from his fees. Unlike most, he didn’t teach either. Instead he received a comfortable retainer from the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Youth Council for occasional services as a Reader and Advisor. Bernie had an uncle on the Council’s advisory board.

“Which is just the same as Historical Analysis, really,” he would explain at parties (and thanks to the same uncle he was invited to some very good parties), “except that it doesn’t involve history or analysis.”

When the basket was full, Bernie slipped on his professional manner, and they entered the inner, vandal-proofed office. His face gelled into a handsome, immotile mask. His voice thickened to a droning baritone. His hands froze into a single neat rock of thoughtfulness, which he planted in the middle of his desk.

They faced each other across this rock and began to discuss Alexa’s other inner life—first money, then sex, then whatever odds and ends were left. Moneywise she would soon have to decide whether to accept Arcadius’s long-standing offer to buy her melon fields. His price was tempting, but it was hard to reconcile the sale of farmland—and her patrimony at that—with an affectation of republican virtue. On the other hand, the land in question could hardly be called ancestral, having been one of Popilius’s last speculations before his death.

(Alexa’s father, Popilius Flamininus—born 276 a.d., died 354 a.d.—lived most of his life as a relatively impoverished Senator of Rome. After years of vacillation he decided to follow the Empire eastward to its new capital. Accordingly, one fine day Alexa, aged ten, was bundled into an oxcart and told to wave good-bye to the pretty idiot daughter of the superintendent of their apartment house. The journey to Byzantium took them two hundred stadia to the north and no distance eastward at all, for Popilius Flamininus had discovered that his purple stripe, so useless to him in Rome, was a social and financial asset in the hillside towns of Cisalpine Gaul. By the time she’d married Gargilius, Alexa was considered, locally, a tolerable heiress.)

Bernie took up the matter of her legal position, but she could cite Domitian’s revival of the Julian laws governing the property rights of married women. Legally the fields were hers to sell.

“So the question remains. Should I?”

The answer remained, adamantly, no. Not because it was hers from her father (who would have probably advised her to take the money and run); her piety was on a grander scale—Rome! Liberty! Civilization! It was to that burning ship that duty bound her. Of course, she didn’t know it was burning. One of the knottiest problems in analysis was to keep the historical Alexa innocent of the fact that she was fighting, for the short term anyhow, a losing battle.

She might have her suspicions—who didn’t, then?—but this was reason rather for resolution than for faintheartedness. A lost battle is not a lost cause. Take Thermopylae.

The contemporary transfigure of this temptation, whether she ought to keep her job with the MODICUM office, had the same hydraheaded way of surviving her most final decisions. She didn’t, except now and then, enjoy her work. She often suspected that the great machineries of the welfare service might actually do more harm than good. Her salary was only large enough to cover the extra expenses the job involved her in. Duty in these circumstances was an article of faith as thorny as the resurrection of the body. Yet it was only this faith—and a vague conviction that a city ought to be lived in—that helped her resist G.’s gentle, persistent drift suburbsward.

They breezed through sex by mutual agreement, for in that respect the last three or four months had been unadventurously pleasant. When she indulged in daydreams just for fun they were likelier to be about barbecues than orgies.

Alexa could compensate for her stints of dieting in the present with bouts of exquisite excess in the past, fantasies which she lifted whole from Petronius, Juvenal, or the younger Pliny—salads of lettuce, leeks, and fresh mint; the cheese of Trebula; trays of Picenumine olives, Spanish pickles, and sliced eggs; a roasted kid, the tenderest of his flock, with more of milk in him than blood; asparagus covered with the willful anachronism of a Hollandaise sauce; pears and figs from Chios, and the plums of Damascus. Besides, unnecessary talk about sex tended to make Bernie nervous.

With fifteen minutes still to go a puddle of silence formed between them. She searched through the week’s memories for an anecdote to float across it. The letter she’d written last night to Merriam? No, Bernie would accuse her of literature.

The puddle spread.

“Monday night,” she said. “On Monday night I dreamed a dream.”

“Oh?”

“I think it was a dream. Maybe I tinkered with it a little before I was completely asleep.”

“Ah.”

“I was dancing out in the street with a lot of other women. In fact I was sort of leading them. Down Broadway, but I wore a palla.”

“That’s a dichronatism.” Bernie’s tone was severe.

“Yes, but as I say, I was dreaming. Then I was in the Metropolitan Museum. For a sacrifice.”

“Animal? Human?”

“One or the other. I don’t remember.”

“Blood sacrifices were prohibited in 341.”

“Yes, but in a crisis the authorities would look the other way. During the siege of Florence in 405, which was years after the destruction of the temples—”

“Oh very well.” Bernie closed his eyes, conceding the point. “So, once again the barbarians are storming the gates.” The barbarians were always storming Alexa’s gates. Bernie’s theory was that it was because her husband was fractionally a Negro. “Then what happened?”

“That’s all I remember. Except one detail earlier in the dream. There were heaps of dead babies in the cess trenches in the middle of Broadway.”

“Infanticide was a capital offense from the beginning of the third century,” Bernie pointed out.

“Probably because it was becoming too common.”

Bernie closed his eyes. Then, opening them: “Have you ever had an abortion?”

“Once, ages ago, in high school. I didn’t feel much guilt though.”

“What did you feel about the children in your dreams?”

“Anger, at the untidiness. Otherwise they were just a fact.” She looked at her hands, which seemed too large, the knuckles especially. “Like a face in a news magazine.” She looked at Bernie’s hands folded on the desk. Another silence began to form, but gracefully, without embarrassment. She remembered the moment she’d found herself alone on the street; the sunlight, her pleasure. It seemed quite reasonable that people should expose their children to die. There was what Loretta had said yesterday—“I’ve stopped trying”—but it went beyond that. As though everyone had come to see that Rome, civilization, the whole burning issue wasn’t worth the effort any longer, theirs or anyone’s. Every infanticide was the kindness of a philosopher.

“Pish,” Bernie said, when she’d said this four or five different ways. “No one sees his own culture declining till around the age of forty, and then everyone does.”