Eagle Eye (18 page)

We both glanced at the window. Today was rainy. She knew what she was doing.

“I always wondered, Jannie. If she ordered it.”

He stared up at it, over my chair. I stared at my knuckles. People fall. In all variations. I suspect him of nothing. Except of knowing. “The day she was in that crowd was rainy. I looked it up.”

I got up; in a second I was going to be very afraid of him. “Do you really believe? In light skulls?”

He lowered his head. I could smell his childhood on him. It reached out for me. I stepped back just in time.

“Keep your dirty kid hands off that.”

“I keep wondering if I should have broken in on her, that’s all.” I could have, once. He couldn’t have. Too late for him, by then.

He knows that. She was wrong though, if she thought he doesn’t feel. He’s leading the linear life, that’s all. They’ve straightened him out.

“I thought she always let you in,” he said. Hoarse.

When I came.

“I came to talk about her because she’s dead. Don’t we have to? Don’t I? From now on, she’s only in what we say. Forget I was one of her guys.”

“Why are you here then?”

“What you said. Hunting necessity. I remembered it.”

He was shivering like a cat about to spring. Forward. Or back.

“What we say of the dead—that’s our language too, Jannie, isn’t it? I never had anybody dead before. Much.”

“Wait till you have hundreds. All the same age.”

That whisper. How often she must have had to hear it, talking of the dead.

“The same age?”

“As yourself.”

So that’s why I came to him.
K-k-k.
Blood soy.

“I went to Riverside Church, once,” I told him. “In that program they had—maybe they still do; why should it stop? Reading out the names of the war dead. You take your turn, then the next one does, like a marathon. After a while the names become a nothing. It’s on a long roll of paper you hand to the next reader; you don’t see the end of it.” Then you go home.

He was listening.

It does help.

“I get a bug sometimes,” I said. “Intestinal.”

“All the deaths you didn’t die,” Jannie said.

“What do you do about it?”

“I wear an earring.”

He got to his feet. “Time’s up. Sorry.”

Somebody ought to touch that seam of his. I wasn’t afraid any more.

“Listen, Jannie,” I said quick. “Watch out. About her audience. Maeve’s. Buddy could take it small at home, because he had his business scope. But she never had a scope. So her audience stayed shapeless. And that’s terrifying. That’s why her white hair looks too old for her. She stayed young.” How could I tell him quick enough? “She dwarfed the world down to him.”

“Okay, Bunty … Okay, young man.” He had opened the door. The next comer, a tyke, was standing there patiently. It sobered us both.

“I’m calling myself Quentin now. When you go home—tell her that.”

He half-closed the door again. “
One
of her guys? You were the only one.”

So that’s why I came to him. To be told.

“I didn’t pay in, did I Jannie? A machine would have done better. If properly set.”

He doesn’t answer. We’ve done our bit for each other, that’s all. But I’m not his style of listener.

I opened the door to the tyke. Leaned down to him. “Touch his earring.” And pushed him inside.

Small wars. Small wars.

But it’ll be all right about Maeve. Jannie will talk to her like to a child. And she will cradle him.

I
WENT TO SEE
my father, who was in the kidney-machine.

Two of the cousins were just leaving him. One sister said loud in my right ear “Thank God—” The other, softly into my left one, “—that he can afford to pay for it.”

We don’t mention Maeve. Blum tried to get in touch with her. No soap, but Blum tried. The family is rallying round. All of us.

Because Buddy wants to talk about Maeve. And Buddy is going to be lost.

I talk to him about her, about everything. He’s helpless now; even at his best he can’t walk much, or screw, or work. And that—helps.

Watching him on the machine is like watching a birth. Of a full-grown man. And during that time, all the time he can, he is watching me.

I do my best.

“Like it down there?” Buddy’ll say. “At the office.”

He’s always a better color, afterwards. And he keeps a tanning lamp here. The only telltale is that over-clean look he has, of the well-hospitalized. In my mind I keep dressing him in street clothes, walking him down the corridor he does twice a day—and out. But the machine doesn’t work on his heart. His faithful, imitative heart.

“It’s neat down there. Great.”

I’m living in that room at One Chase, weekends. And working up at MIT, on my life.

“Blum leaves me pies. Last week, apple. This week, coconut.”

“When she makes it champagne, look out.” He’s got an imitation smile on him.

“I don’t bring girls there. At least, not yet.”

“Cambridge okay, hmm?”

“Cambridge okay.”

“MIT’s great, hmm; I always respected it.”

“I’m learning to.”

Doing a thesis on Babbidge, on what he might do with computers, if he lived now.

“Great stuff … Look behind my pillow. That section you gave me last week. I did it all.”

At the start I gave him Babbidge, but he didn’t dig it.

Digs everything modern I can get him; he’s following my course. He’d be a hotshot at it, if he had the time.

Nowadays I give him all the pills he wants. “Not everybody in the class can do his homework on his own set-up.”

“Works fine, huh? … I wish—”

Works like a dream, like a fucking dream … I wish he could.

“Lucky I only live there weekends. I’d never get away from it.”

“David and Sol give you any more trouble?”

His loving partners. “Those two? Vultures in wolf’s clothing. But at the moment, they don’t have their eye on me.”

“Who then?” His face went dark.

“Can they buy you out?”

“Ha. Not unless they persuade me.”

“They’re going to try.”

“Ha.”

“On the grounds you’ve got nobody in the firm coming after you. Or in the family.”

“Nobody else but them, they mean.”

Or me.

“Can you buy them out? Blum says the agreement between you and them at the outset was written so you always could.

“They can never get control. Even if we go public. I have the controlling shares. Plus the right to buy them out at any time, at market value, plus a certain sum not less than their joint compensation. Based on their salary for that fiscal year—for the next five years. That was the deal.”

I leaned back. Some men lean forward when they mean to make a deal, some back. I see it all the time at One Chase. Getting there a little early now and then, Friday afternoons maybe. Staying on Monday-Tuesday, a little late.

“Got the cash to do it?”

“Got the—.” He chuckled.

I knew he did. Just doing everything I can.

“Then will you?”

“Who for?” It’s been ravaging him.

I’m wearing a pair of shades I bought one Saturday night in Montmartre, because everybody seemed to be wearing them to keep their eyes from exploding in the fireworks of spring. Purple-green lenses (very popular that year with cyclists) that reminded me of the Jap beetles I had collected all one summer and kept in a jar on a window-ledge, until Doorman Shannon, spotting one, flicked the little mirror-back plague from my palm. “Want to murder the park?” he said. Sure enough, in Paris the next morning, the lenses turned out to be reflectors on their other side. So now, all that summer in Paris is an iridescent jar. And Buddy, looking at himself in my shades, sees a clean, little oval of a man, with plague.

“Saw Shannon the other day, remember him? The doorman, at old 270 East. He’s still working, two doors down.” I’d passed him slowly but without stopping, thinking of causes and effects.

“Sure, Quent; I recall he had your same hair.” Buddy knows in a deal you sometimes shoot out sideways; he’s even savoring it. But he’s short on time. “I asked you, Quent.” He likes calling me that. “Who for?”

I leaned farther back. They had good armchairs in that hospital. To sustain the guests. “For me.”

“Y—. But you just quit architecture.”

He’s afraid I’m a quitter. They always are.

“Money is architecture.” A tour of his office taught me that.

“Builds houses, for sure.” His eyes veiled themselves, before he reached for his own shades, black-lensed tortoise-shell. “But I’ve an idea you don’t mean that.”

“No.”

“And MIT?”

“A computer is architecture. I’ll teach it that.” I leaned forward. “Other day, I finally looked up the word ‘actuary.’ Jesus.” I pulled the dictionary page from my pocket. Like an eye that might explode. “One whose profession is to solve monetary problems depending on Interest and Probability, in connection with
life, fire, or other accidents.
” Italics mine.

“Insurance actuary? Like Abe? You want to go back to being that?”

I wondered if Abe’d ever written him letters. I put the page back in my pocket. If I ever had office stationery, I’d put that quote on it. If I ever had a son. “Why couldn’t a computer handle
all
the probabilities?”

“What others are there?”

I could see them—for him. Memory and sadness, and the glass cage of family that had crashed from him, all joined together, keeping him alive and killing him, like a capon’s breastbone sticking out of a man’s throat. Even so, I whispered. “Why couldn’t it help organize—a whole single life?”

He reached out and took off my shades. To see if I’m nuts. Or to make plain he thinks I must be. Any layman would say so at once. But he’s had the course. And already he’s reacting like the first man at MIT I spoke to. And the second, and the one those two brought in, a day after. He’s already sold.

Just to say it, sells them. Just to hear it. “Can you implement?” they say, if they’re on the inside—and start telling you how. Just to think it. The chance of seeing your whole life, in a clear eye-cup—it maddens us. Once it must have been like that when they listened to Freud.

“You could end up providing a service just like laundry,” I said, not forgetting to laugh. A consultation service; organizing a man’s knowledge of his own life.” Not just for payrolls, or for interplanetary, either. For down here. And not just for crowds. You’d need whole banks of 7090’s, or better. “It would be a life-bank like the records the government is building. Only every man for himself.” But all I’d need to begin is old Batface. And me.

Experiment on yourself, that’s in the tradition,
the MIT guy said. Pleased.
Data processing’s a whole life for you kids, isn’t it. Anyway for a thesis, it will do.

I was hoarse, and no wonder. I’d just written him the hardest letter of my life.

“In exchange, I’ll handle Dave and Sol for you,” I said. “I’ll learn the banking business, so’s I can handle them.”

“Handling. That all it is to you.”

“I
have
got ambition, Buddy. Just not the old ones. Just—not yours.”

We looked at each other.

That’s all that’s different. That’s what’s so sad.

“The hardest thing is still to tell, Buddy.”

“Tell it.”

“I want to bring in Maeve.”

He leaned forward.

“I saw Janacek. He’s not a man to stay with steady. But he’s very needy. So I don’t know how long it will take.”

“Maeve down at the office again? You flatter yourself.” But he was still leaning.

“You’ll see.” I don’t tell him I plan to bring her in as a kind of partner eventually—the kind he would never let her be. Maeve once studied to be a broker, Blum said. I can just see her handling Sol and Dave. Just hold yourself open for anything, I’ll tell her. Like people our age. You can do it. You did it once.

“Yes, I can see it,” Buddy said. “It’ll happen when I die.” Suddenly he reached for my shades. Put his tortoise-shells on my nose. Put my shades on his.

I leaned forward. I saw blackly through his lenses. Behind mine, were his eyes exploding? It was a long time until spring. In the mirror-lenses, I saw myself, in him.

“Snap out of it,” I said. “It’s only a business deal. Abe
liked
Christian help, didn’t he? For the humility.”

The air in a hospital reverberates anyway—so why not?

“Won’t you want to travel again soon?” he said, from behind. And from between his teeth.

“Nossuh.” I could feel my old jauntiness rising between us. “I’ll be a world-bum at home.”

When I got up to leave, he was staring hopefully. I had brought him the right pill.

I wasn’t at all sure Maeve would ever come back. But meanwhile it all helps, along with the kidney machine.

We are taking his wastes.

“Take it easy,” I said, exchanging the shades. “You were brought up to expect the best, that’s all. Us to expect the worst. It’ll work out.”

“Smart,” he said. “Very smart.”

Outside the room, I stood against a wall, exhausted. Love is obligation. You lean forward; you lean back.

A nurse came along. “What’s the matter, kiddo?” When I raised my head, she said “Uh—ooooh … Kid-do.” Pretty girl, prepared to make something of it. When she saw I couldn’t, she put a hand up, and patted. My shoulder. My cheek. Smiled. And went on her way.

Grace always breaks me up. Anybody’s.

My tears for him sluiced through my fingers like his money. Nothing I could do for him either way. Live an imitation life, you get an imitation death.

H
E WENT TO SEE
Father Melchior. These days, when he left the office, he went on foot—there was such wonderful chance in neighborhoods. The days were growing cold and he wore his jacket again for the first time. Souvenir of the hunting world his father had tried to put him in, it brought him back the guerrilla ways of summer. Ducking two trucks, he let a Yellow Cab tickle his heel, stopped it dead on his turf—he had the light with him—said, “Yalla?” to it as city boys used to do, and made it to the faded red-brick compound across the street, and up a set of those high Roman Catholic steps.

… This is the neighborhood Shannon once came from. Found him going on his lunch hour like always, for a sandwich and a snifter at his brother-in-law’s bar. Shannon’s father worked in a saloon on Ninth Avenue all his life. The brother-in-law’s is still on Second Avenue, next door to a thrift shop. Used to be called Dugout For Buddies, now it’s the Green Beret—that’s how you missed it. Sure and I remember you boy, walk along. Getting to be hard, doing these ten blocks two ways every lunchtime; when I can’t, I’ll quit for good. Set ’em up, he said, when we were inside; here’s one of my boys. Used to steal my quarters, he said, leering fondly. Sure an’ it’s Eagle Eye, I said, fellas, when the boy came up to me. The line at the bar laughed; they knew he didn’t remember me. “He don’t play that shill-game here.” When they wanted to know where I’d been in the war, I said India. On reconnaissance. He’s looking for a profession, Shannon said. Sanitation was still good, the bar-line said. Union tight as drum. But the Port Authority is still open. He’s in with his father, you boobies. Shannon made eyes at them to let me ante for the beer after all. He’s a
tenant,
Shannon said.