Motorman (6 page)

“I don't care what you know, Bunce. I still intend to ignore you.”

“Suit yourself. I tried to help you. You once had a wart on the quick of your thumb. You habitually chewed on it and over the years it shrank and went away, leaving a small oval scar. As a boy you stashed coins and licorice in your cuffs. Nothing escapes me, Moldenke. Nothing.” 

Moldenke hung up.

31]

He sat on the seawall, chewing stonepicks, and watched the first artificial sun break apart and burn out. A slow, dry rain of white ash persisted through summerfall. By winter a second sun was up, blinding to look at and almost warm enough.

32]

The moons were nearly down. He would read a final Burnheart letter and then make for the bottoms.

Dear Moldenke,

How many wonders has mother science put to sleep?

As ever,

Your country friend,

Burnheart

He remembered writing back:

Dear Doctor,

I don't know. I wonder. And it keeps me awake. Apologetically yours,

Moldenke

He saw the last flash of moon through the lookout. He went to the door, listened, put his hand on the doorknob. Inflations, deflations. He would have to forget the jelly. He waited, went back to the chair, tried to get his mind to wander off to the acre of weed and pollen. He chewed a stonepick, tied on a gauze pad. He went back to the door, listened. A labored inflation, an extended deflation, and a lull. The feet shuffled back and forth at the door. His major heart thundered, the others ticked rapidly. He imagined himself a bloated fish, dead on a beach. The jelly, still there. He imagined himself a tripodero, racing along the hedgerows. No, still the jelly. He would have to hurt himself. He went to the refrigerator, placed his hand on the door seal and closed the door. The pain was immediate, completely distracting. He wrapped gauze around his swelling hand, left the room. The hallway was empty. He found himself on the street.

33]

She followed the lines in his face with a geographical eye and an imaginary pen, giving each line a name, as though they were discovered rivers.

He arranged a bed of peat bags and they chewed stonepicks. Sounds feathered and nested in silence. She took off the Indian dress and draped it over an elephant plant.

He parted labia with his thumbs.

She said, “What are you doing?” She laughed, peat chips caught in her hair.

He said, “The little man in the big boat.”

She said, “What are you talking about?” She counted panes of glass in the greenhouse roof.

He said, “Never mind. Boat isn't right. Canoe. The little man in the big canoe. Cock?”

“What? What are you talking about? I'm not something to be opened like a grape, a warm vegetable. What are you doing?”

“Cock, the little fellow says he wants a cigar. He's all excited. Shall I give him a blue cigar?”

“Give him anything, Moldenke. Please stop talking. I don't follow.”

“Yes, I'm sorry. I forgot the T.S.R.”

“The T.S. what?”

“The Twenty Second Rule. I've talked about the same thing for more than twenty seconds. I shouldn't do that. My apologies.”

“Moldenke, where are you?”

“Here, by the River Odorous. Can't you see me? Have you gone light-blind? Wear my goggles.”

“Where am I, then? Where is your temporary Cock?”

“Quiet, Cock. Let him smoke in peace. Don't surround him with question marks.”

“Moldenke, please.”

“I don't know what to say, Roberta. I have no feeling.

He smoked a cigar. They watched the suns go down. She said, “You've left me leaking, Moldenke. It's running down my leg.”

He said, “I'm dead, Roberta. I have no feelings. I
do
like you though, I think. But I can't feel you. My hand passes through the flesh. I see only an outline.”

He bumped the ash from his cigar. A moon fluttered up and settled in its spot.

34]

At one time Moldenke enjoyed the oncome of winter, greeted it with a flourish of ritual activity. He was comfortable in a state of cold. Twigs snapping underfoot with icy reports. The air was never still enough for Moldenke's comfort until it was heavy with frost or wet with sleet. When the new snow came he would go out and piss his name in it. As years succeeded, the rituals went on. He noted the fall of the last leaves, the changing angle of sunslight, the shift of winds. He felt relief when the final evidence of green was gone, when the fur of animals thickened. He would light his k-heater, take down blankets, snap in the storm windows.

Once Burnheart had said to him, “Moldenke, puff out those cheeks, please.” Moldenke had done that and Burnheart had said, “As I thought. Dink, you grow more like a gopher every season. I know it's not the cold you like so well. No, it's the defensive pleasures of remaining warm
within
the cold. It's that. I know the story, son. Quick to cocoon but slow to change. It's an old tale.”

Summerfall came differently. He would watch the earth dry and crack in repeated patterns. Greenbirds came, land turtles walked over country roads, surly grasshoppers baked in the sunslight. Rising temperatures set Moldenke on the offensive, causing him to speed from A to B, from thought to thought, from one thing to the next thing. “Pace yourself,” Burnheart had told him one summerfall. “Pace yourself or you'll never make it in the army.”

35]

He stood against a building. Occasionally a k-vehicle would pass in the street. The night sirens rang. A woman walked by, wrapped in a dog fur. Moldenke stepped out of the shadow.

“Miss, excuse me...miss?”

She turned and looked at him from the dog fur.

“I'm a stranger in town, miss. Could you point me to the south?” He searched for eyes in the coat.

She turned her head in a certain direction and indicated it. She said, “South, that way.” She walked off in the coat, the dog fur, northward, tokens clattering in her pockets.

He backed into the shadows again, considering things. The first light of a sun ballooned over rooftops. He would go south toward the bottoms. He would cross the bottoms and then sit with Burnheart and Eagleman by the fire, eat popcorn.

A double-dawn. One sun from the west, another northeast. The shadows would be confusing. As Burnheart had suggested, he would move now.

He followed alleyways, climbed fences. Things were thrown at him from windows. The running increased his heartbeats. One heart seemed to beat inside his injured hand. He walked, stopped, leaned against a wall, took shallow breaths. A lookout opened. A jellyhead boy squirted jelly from an ear valve, relieving pressure. The lookout closed. Moldenke walked. Another jellyhead lay deflated on a mock mattress. He crossed a wooden bridge, entered the outskirts of the city, keeping the northeast rising sun to his rear left, heading south. Fewer and fewer buildings, the streets tapering into mud ruts and finally ending. Out of the sirens' sound, city noise behind.

He walked a klick or so into the bottoms and stopped. He would have breakfast. Prune wafers and a cricket or two. He would pull together a mound of leaves and tree bark and cypress knots, build himself a fire, warm his feet.

Had Burnheart said to travel by night and sleep by day, or the other way around, or not at all? His hand hurt badly. He couldn't remember what Burnheart had said about traveling.

He ate a prune wafer. It gummed in his teeth.

The fire smoldered flamelessly.

He would travel whenever he could, whatever Burnheart had said, if anything. Whenever the opportunity for movement presented itself, Moldenke would move.

No artificial barriers at this juncture. Always to the right, always to follow the natural impulse. The hum and the flow. Everything was tight.

He lay back against a cypress knee, watched the second rising sun overtake the first. In the city k-buses would be taking jellyheads to work, shifts would be changing, the street music would be deafening.

He ate a cricket, spitting the legs into the smoking leaves, took off his coat. The double suns said ten o'clock, although Moldenke read them as eight. He put on his goggles and the refraction corrected his error. It was later than he thought and getting hot. He took off his coat, stirred the fire. A rooster comb of flame burned a moment and died.

Perspiration broke around the goggles and soaked the gauze pad. He tied on a dry one, ate another cricket, dropped his trenchpants, squeezed several turds onto the fire, pissed away the last of the smoke.

He walked south, chewing a stonepick, wondering if he would clash with Eagleman. With the tip of his tongue he rolled the stonepick across his bottom lip.

He reached into a low swirl of ether branches and took down a snipe. He pinched its neck and dropped it into his sidepack. He would have it for supper. It had been weak, hadn't attempted to fly away. “Nothing here but food,” he said. “Burnheart was right.”

Had Burnheart mentioned liquids? He would wait. Somehow there would be water, a trickle from the rocks, if there were rocks.

He would smoke a cigar as he walked. He focused sunslight through a lens of his goggles, held the hot beam at the tip of his cigar until a spark caught and circled. He puffed, put the goggles on again.

36]

Eagleman's moon, the first moon, had been a shadow game, a projection of zero on a screen of gas. A mock month before it went up Moldenke learned of it in a letter from Burnheart:

Dear Moonless,

You will soon have a reason to take a look at the night sky again. Eagleman has a moon on the drafting table. The concept of it is difficult even for me to grasp, the way he explains it. Actually, what it amounts to is not much more than a photograph, a slide picture of the old original moon projected against the gassier layers. And he's provided for changing your slides for the various phases and so on. A very efficient, quite portable moon, Moldenke. The man is a repository of mechanical wisdom, a swarm of intelligent thoughts in his head. Some day we'll all look to Eagleman to get us through. Mind what I say. And keep your eye on the sky.

Hopefully yours,

Burnheart

37]

He found himself standing at the foot, one of four such feet, at the base of the legs of a weather tower. The wind picked up, the weather was changing. He shaded his eye and looked up to the top of the tower. There was a windsock, windfilled, a weathercock spinning, and a brace of antennae. He turned up his collar, snorted, blinked his eye. One sun went down behind the tower.

A bank of brown clouds erased the other sun and forced an early night.
Too bad,
Moldenke thought,
and it isn’t quite noons yet.
The jellyheads had learned to sleep at will, could doze whenever an unexpected night came on. Moldenke couldn't.

He strapped himself in the lift chair and pressed the buzzer. A voice came down the slot: “Good morning and good night, Moldenke. I saw you coming. Fill up your lung and I'll bring you up. Try to hold the stomach in so we won't spill any food. Have you tied the footstraps?”

Moldenke said, “You know me?” The voice in the talk tube had sounded familiar, but Moldenke couldn't place it with a body, or a face, or a name.

“I knew your name and I knew you were in the area. How many walkers do you ever see in these parts? Who ever crosses the bottoms these days? How many people do I see wearing a trenchcoat, trenchpants, carrying a sidepack and a backpack and wearing purple-view goggles? Who else could it be but you, Moldenke? I said I knew you were coming. I didn't say I knew you socially. My name is Shelp. How do you do? I'm the weatherman.”

Moldenke remembered the radio voice, the weather reports.

“You're Shelp? The weatherman?”

“Didn't I say that? I remember saying that.”

“Yes. Glad to know you. Call me Moldenke.”

“Shall I send the lift chair up, Moldenke? ”

“Shelp?”

“Yes?”

“You said to fill my lung. You used the singular. You know me fairly well, don't you?”

“Not at all, Moldenke. I only know a few of your anomalies. I'll bring you up now. Have you got the crotch buckle tightened?”

“Yes, I'm ready.”

“Breathe in.”

Circuits opened and closed in a box on the arm of the lift chair and he went up. At the deck he unstrapped himself, cricket and prune knotting in his stomach. The ride up had loosened his shoes. He knelt and rebuttoned them.

Shelp took his elbow and showed him into the weather room. A wood fire burned in a floor pit. Moldenke sat in a chair. Shelp threw genuine oak on the fire.