Jesse Ball - Samedi the Deafness

— I would have, said Stark, but for the fact that there were many who wanted to do this thing for me. It was right that they go, because it was a thing that they could do, while there is a thing yet that I can do, that they cannot.

— What is that? asked James.

— To interpret the disaster to the world. Part of that, of course, is in your keeping. You are to have the record of it all. In the floor of this building there is a stair down beneath the ground. It leads to my cellar, where the wine is kept. Beneath that, there is another stair that leads to a bunker. I have built this bunker so that we may preserve our hearing and emerge, in three days' time, to find the clouds abated. You will stay with me this day, and memorize all that I need you to memorize, and then in the morning we will all go down into the ground together. Do you see?

Stark put his hand on James's shoulder.

— Do you see that you have been singled out from the rest to be saved?

James looked from Stark to Torquin to the girl. Torquin and the girl were looking at him with a kind of awe. How lucky he was, they seemed to be thinking.

There was something hypnotic to Stark's rhetoric. James spoke.

— I haven't got a choice. I will do what you say, if only because of Grieve. You should know, though, that luck has played a part in your plan. It's because of her that I'll help you.

— Luck is the key to every plan, said Stark.

James leaned back against Grieve. He could feel the side of her face against his. He looked up. Through the colored glass, he could see clouds moving and changing with the wind.

They sat a moment and Torquin came over. He asked James if he would have a word with him.

James got up, in much uncertainty. He followed after the man to the far side of the room. Torquin was looking at him in a somewhat menacing manner. Then all at once Torquin stuck out his hand for a handshake, and a smile broke across his blocky features.

— I didn't know what you were made of, said Torquin, but when you pulled the trigger on me, I knew you were the right sort, even if the gun didn't go off. I like a man with guts.

James shook his hand.

Torquin leaned in closer and said in a whisper:

— Some of them around here couldn't paddle a baby. You'd be disgusted if you saw how spineless they can be.

He laughed in a conspiratorial kind of way, stepped back and spoke again in an ordinary tone of voice.

— Anyway, I wanted to say there's no hard feelings on my part. We're going to be in close quarters for a while now.

James smiled.

— That we are.

Torquin gestured to the maid.

— Her name's Margret. I don't want any bad blood between the two of you either. She's a good girl, was just doing her job. Matter of fact, we're engaged.

James agreed that it was so; she had just been doing her job. He smiled at Margret.

Torquin nodded and went out the door. Margret came over. She stood very close.

— You know, she said. Don't tell him about how we. . I mean. . I was just acting, but he wouldn't like it, you know.

James assured her he would say nothing about anything to anyone.

— Thanks so much, she said, almost curtsying. I'm going now. I'll see you later — I mean, tomorrow, I suppose.

— James!

Grieve was calling.

Margret left and James went back across the room.

— Come back in an hour, said Stark. There's much for you to do.

He gestured at the desk on which sat various papers, leather ledgers, and assorted books.

James nodded. Grieve took his hand and led him out.

The hospital was empty. Much of the work of the past few days had been the transfer of the truly afflicted liars to other institutions.

These patients are particularly undesirable in psychiatric institutions, but Stark's hospital had been dedicated solely to them. It was the only institution of its kind in the world.

They wandered through the empty halls, looking in rooms and running together in a sort of anxious glee. James felt a lightness in his soul. The disaster was impending, and it horrified him, but the fact that he knew he would slip it, that he would escape it, and that Grieve would as well, gave him a joy like mercury that ran through his limbs and legs. I want her to be happy, he thought, and he looked at Grieve, skipping beside him. He felt too a gladness in knowing the extent of what was true and what was not. He had been plagued for days by versions of things, which had yielded enormities of misunderstanding and difficulty. Now at least he knew something, and he could hold on to it.

Grieve drew him down onto a bed in a long white room full of pallets. Thirty white pallets in a row, and on one they lay together. His head still swam in a slightness of pain from the blackjack, but he felt Grieve about him and in him, and he in her, and the immediacy of what was to come gathered them up like cloth lifted at the corners. The room was lifted like cloth at the corners and carried in a haze of motion. James held Grieve in his arms and she held him. What more could there be?

A dozen minutes passed, a dozen more, an hour, and the light had gone out of the windows, gone long into the corners and edges of the room, making shadows of the beds, and shadows of the hung linens.

— We are for each other, said Grieve. How fine that is, how perfect. Do you know that my father was an adviser once to the king of Siam? He learned all the king's secrets, and then controlled the king like a puppet. He does so still today. That's where we're going after the clouds come.

— It's not even called Siam anymore, said James. But do you know where we're going? Will we leave the rest and go, just you and I somewhere?

— Let me have at least one secret, she said, and they left the room and the bed, leaving it unmade, one unmade bed in the midst of thirty.

And, of course, the birds all fell immediately from the sky. Afterwards one would exclaim often relating a new observation to this long-ago occurrence; it was in that day that all the birds fell from the sky. Here and there in the street you would see them, lying in long rows sometimes, their having toppled off a telephone line or out the eaves of six companionable neighboring houses. Of course, none of us could hear then, so it was not so much the sound of the birds that we missed, but the sight of them, their fluttering at the corners of sight, their taking up happily all the little incidences, all the little portions of architecture, making use of tree branches, of far-flung high places where no one else could go. There is a feeling things have when use is not being put where it might. Shall I say the world soon bore this feeling? Yes, the world bore this feeling like a loose scarf that flaps insolently against one's perhaps too frivolously jacketed shoulder.

And so as evening came, James sat with Stark, and Stark spoke of intentions. He gave James documents and journal entries to memorize, the which he would, after James's perfunctory nod, immediately destroy in the fireplace. Grieve stayed in the room, roaming about from one side to the other, coming over at times to rub James's shoulder or whisper some comment in her father's ear. It seemed to James that she wanted to remain close to him in all the hours to come. He thought then of her room, and of how happy he had been to find it. He wondered if they would ever have the chance to lie together there. For, on the day they emerged, would they not try to leave the country? Indeed, it didn't make very much sense to James that Stark had stayed in the country if everything had already been set in motion. Why not leave now, while it would be easy? After the inevitable disasters, nothing would be certain, least of all travel out of the country.