Eagle Eye (17 page)

“Got something else to show you, Bunty, something else. You don’t mind?”

“Mind? No, I don’t mind.” I minded his humbleness, though. Like his letter, theirs, it wasn’t to me, but to my youth—which made a nothing of me. And makes them angry in the end. Or depressed.

“Come on, then.”

He led me away from here, down and around corridors I planned to learn, to a door with no lettering. The whole place is like I imagine a brain to be, if you could live in it. Nothing in it too far from the rest.

This particular door was unlocked. There was nothing to steal here, that’s why. Barring a few of those worn possessions which drop off a family as it jogs, never to be seen again, unless—like here—they’ve been saved. Two morocco-leather couches whose heads make a corner, all the torn places showing tan under the black. A piano. Some pillows much too silly to have lasted. In the jointure of the couches, where the telephone used to be and still was, a crocky brass lamp. At the foot of one of them, a crumpled old throw. I walked over to finger it. Said to be camel’s hair once; by now it must be human skin. Its mottle was what memory is. Old on the eyeballs. The piano still said Kranich & Bach. Tackety-tock. Abe used to play a piece called Sentimental You on it, when he visited us. And the Continental Foxtrot.

“My corner,” I said. “At 101.”

“Abe’s old office in Brooklyn, first. Then mine.”

Not just 101 for me either; 101 was just the last. “I used to envy kids with houses—I didn’t think you could save apartments.”

Buddy laughed. “Saving is like spending, kid. A lifetime job.” He sat down suddenly.

“Abe’s office? How’d you come to bring it home?”

“I went bankrupt once and had no office. When you were just born.”

I sat down on the other couch. Sentiment is any story you haven’t been told. The more watery ones, usually. “Anything else I ought to know?”

“Why? I look sick or something?” He said it craftily, like they do. Wood-touching. Only his shoulders looked changed to me. Lost a little hope.

“Just saving. Like you said.”

He fingered the phone. “She had an abortion the following year. After that, only misses. So you’re the sole heir.”

On the wall opposite me was one of my own brass-rubbings, sent him the winter before. I was already hung on a wall, a family artifact. Creepy. It was a start.

“What was she
doing
there, Bunt? In that glass thing?”

“Gambling. Signaling?”

“I went to college, too.” His ugly style. And Abe’s. “Fuck the psychology.”

“In the dorm, we had two girls we were always breaking in on.”

The men more often managed without signaling. Or with more success. Like yours, Betts. Or those are the friends I get.

“I should never have let her build that fool place.”

That last little bubble from the bottoms? He couldn’t mean it. He could.

“You couldn’t help it. You’re rich.”

“That a putdown? From the ranks?”

“Sure is. Learned it from you.”

I walked over to the piano to calm myself. Picked out a tune. Onka-bonka. Going to the front. Outside, the world is fair. “She said you give the parties now. You give that one?”

“I have a secretary, is all. Easier for Blum to send the invites. And then, if I want a few of my friends—” He stumbled. “I mean, like Leskel. Hard to separate business from pleasure these days. In our business.” Then he did what they do, if we’re handy. “It was your party, after all.”

“She says she couldn’t give the kind you wanted.”

“So? I never wanted the parties, kid. Those parties. I’m a busy man. In a world she … Parties.” He spat into the air. It was a good tycoon imitation.

That’s where the stress is, onka-bonka. When you imitate.

“Not even in bed, she couldn’t. She said.” I saw the second capsule slip from his hand onto the Navajo rug Ike and I used to shoot immies on. “Tell you something, Buddy. Maybe it’s only because I’m young. But I never yet paid for it.”

What independence. Only one I have.

“Wait. Just you wait.”

What else is fear?

“No it’s not only that, kid. Look at yourself. You take after her. I’m the boy his mother had to tell him any boy doesn’t look like a monkey is okay.”

That’s one way they get at you—humility. Do I prefer pride?

“That lummox she had. A seed cataloguer. From Idaho.”

“Does she know you know?”

“I never said. In our family the women never—” He shrugged. Put his head on his fists. “God, I have to sleep.”

Never said, never went downtown, never did. I thought of the child I’d had for minutes—Jasmin’s. I’d have fed it all the music, from all the dixie cups.

He was scrabbling on the carpet for the capsule. On the pattern I knew by heart, I saw it, in the cranny where the smallest agates used to lodge.

He was watching me. “What do you think of us, Quentin? Tell us the truth.”

That trap.

“I mind inheriting it.” My lips went stiff. “It’ll come on me, and I won’t know how. Or even when. That’s the thing I mind.”

“What will?”

“The shabbiness.”

When he got up from the carpet, he studied the piano, ran a nail so lightly over the full keyboard that only one or two notes spoke. Came down hard forefinger, on middle C. “Shall I phone her? You didn’t say.”

When I didn’t answer at once, he slapped a pillow. Then the sofa. No dust flew, as it used to do. “I have his number. I
talk
to him.”

I picked up the capsule, still sticky from his hand. “I’d begin—not calling.”

He lay down slow, white, his eyes ranging the ceiling. I could give him his pill. I owed him something. I searched the room, looking for it. “You sure one-upped me with this place, though. This room I mean. You sure one-upped me there.”

Buddy looked at the wall. The computer-room, with its Zebel must be just outside, then the common room, the business ones and the pleasure ones, circled tight and interdisciplined, out to the city periphery that viewers up here owned.

“You don’t mind about that, huh? You don’t mind I one-upped you on that.” He smiled.

“No, I like it,” I said. “It makes me feel safe.”

When he slept, I laid the throw over him and lay down on the other sofa, our heads almost touching. Before I had television in my room we listened to the radio like that. Or the record player. Falling asleep until Maeve called. One thing I had managed for him tonight. He got to sleep without that capsule.

I got up after a while and flushed it down the toilet. Toilet was handy here; food would come on carts down the corridor, as wanted; the girl-market would be as easy as dialing a prayer. And when she got here, no matter her size and shape for the night, that brilliant band of city windows would hem her in like a diamond-broker’s inventory. Except for the room’s having no windows itself, and a certain taint in the air of crushed apartments, it would be a handy place to live. I didn’t suppose he’d figured in the computer that was just outside. I lay there, figuring it.

Now and then I could feel his breath on me, irregular. I could see how a letter to a son could be hard. Full of the naked family facts. So instead he wrote those crummy, humbly notes I got all year, full of his humility to my youth. Like the one I got in Paris that day and left on the washbasin, hoping the ink would run. He writes them virile, with a felt pen. “Full of his duty to me—what shit is that of mine?” I was holding onto Monica at the time, helping her over the bad spot. When she was coming down, she said, she always had trouble remembering who she was. She’d been repeating all the names she’d been christened with. “Monica Mary, shit. Isadora, shit.” She croaked. “Wigglesworth, shit.” She gave a hoot of laughter. “Ellsworth.” She took a deep breath. “Shit. When all we want—.” I wiped the spit from her hair. She was down. When she was leaving, she offered me her applecheek. The rest of her hadn’t been much. “Thanks for the assist. Maybe it’ll work out for me with those kids in Boston. If I can be an assist, to them.”

He used to breathe over me like this, in my youth-bed. When I got a full-sized one, he stopped, and I was glad. I was king of the mountain then. They told me so daily. It made him angry now. When what I needed now was what Monica called, “the other thing.”

I was on the same trip as her, really, I could smell how it should have been. Never spelled out or pressed, but a birthright too. A sense of my duty—to them.

It’s no trick at all to break away from a family. I can’t understand the public concern. You can cut up a family in one day’s night. With the facts. As a one-minute father, I knew that. But where do the facts go then? Can they be saved? Maybe there’s a vocation in that.

I thought I heard the computer breathing, outside, telling me so. But it was only my father.

“Doughty,” my father murmured, rolling deeper on his reef. “Blinded. They want permission to put
me
away.”

“We sup with devils,” I said.

In front of the computer it was cool as a field of cucumbers nobody had planted yet. I lay down on the rug with my face into the rug fibers, smelling the moths that never came.

I want to live in a room that is real.

What’s smart about me? What’s dumb?

I
WENT TO SEE
Janacek. Sitting behind a desk, he looks like a man with a lion’s head over his shoulders. But you can see the seam where it stops.

“How is she?”

“Calm.”

I doubted that. But it must be a relief to her that the sadness isn’t joint anymore.

“Want to tell me where she is?”

“Better not.”

He really believes we haven’t guessed.

“Does she want to see me?”

“Rather not.” He gazes at me without triumph. He must have to do this sort of thing all the time. For the families of the patients he is protecting from their families.

“She decide that?”

He nodded. I believed him. She’s smarter than Buddy there. The Bunty-doll—she’s throwing it away.

“Want to talk about it?” he said.

“You first. I’ll watch your earring.”

He laughed.

“Your mother was miming the stress put upon her,” he said artistically. “Those weights.”

“Screw that. It’s a simple country device. Let the porch fall.”

I could see her standing on the loaded back porch. Looking out. At the brambles.

“Amenia? Ah well, we believe in dwelling more on things that happen now.”

“Me—I’m reading a book about time-binding.” I was reading everything I could on that, and giving myself a course in the newest computer applications as well. And I was reading Babbidge at last. “You know we’re the only animal does that? Binds itself to time? Even the king of beasts doesn’t do that. Or so they say.” I was watching his ear-wire, but it wasn’t sending. “I’m not so sure though. Time’s an audience. Haven’t you watched even animals want that?”

“Animals?” He shrugged. “Animals.”

I thought I could smell the camp on him. Far, far back in memory veins he no longer thought funneled that black blood to his heart.

“Sure, you know. Performing dogs. Horses at dressage.” I mixed them more recklessly. “Flea circuses. Seals, kangaroos. Teddy bears.”

The earring jumped. “Shall we talk about your mother, please? I have only this hour to spare.”

He wanted to know. Already she was puzzling him.

He was formed to be puzzled if any child was. His own mother, sitting in her Queens kitchen all these years, folding gingham and ironing it, before the highest court. Jasmin went there once without his knowing. No gas in that kitchen. All electric. Very clean. No bones in the Disposall; it won’t take them. But she was proud of it. When she died, he thought he had disposed of her.

“A lot boils down to what audience a person has. I been thinking that out. In front of a good one. Best I could find.”

“God?” he said politely.

I burst out laughing.

“Ah. Another doctor, then.”

I couldn’t laugh twice. “A computer works by a magnitude of association, too. Only it isn’t burdened with its own time sense. It doesn’t have that dimension. For it, time isn’t either a poison or an antidote. Time is only a test. And one life isn’t long enough for all the storage it can take … Like if you could find a way to record your life in a 7090, you might have something. When you checked back.”

He leans back. The better to observe me, he thinks. The resemblance is remarkable. Eyes used to seeing the kill brought in. The big cat’s nose that must smell itself more than anything.

“A computer. Very chic. But will it listen? Like me now?”

We smile. At how much he must know about listening.

Everything—except that the children who talk to him nowadays are his audience.

“No. You’d be learning the language of your own life, that’s all. In enough time.”

If the computer could free us of our time—binding by seeing us free of it? By assessing us, assessing it all. As we went along.

I saw his fur stand up. But I wasn’t afraid of him—yet.

“Like, we’re so slow, Jannie. Like, when you told me about her—at my party. That second before you told it all. I was maybe a forty-five-second father. Or for minutes even. It gets longer and longer, in my mind. But it’s too late.”

“Bunty, we are not going to talk about her.”

Aren’t we. You are going to tell me about her. I am going to tell you about Maeve.

On the wall behind my head there was a picture. I saw it the minute I came in. I wonder if he kept the katipo.

“Want me to tell you about the picture behind my back, Jannie? … I will anyway. The shop also had one where the raindrop lines said
merde.
She thought that was too simple. The artist would do them to order, the shop said. But only if the artist liked the word suggested. And only five-letter words.” There was one picture that said
other,
and one said
given,
but those two were bespoke. And one, the raindrops said
Deary:
she thought that was kind of nice—did I?”
Cooperative art, the village is full of it, though,
she said, and buried her head in my neck. “I asked her why she chose
nihil.
” She bit me, and said did I know it was the Latin for nothing? “She said—‘Because it goes with rain’.”