The Genocides (12 page)

“Throw us down the rope,” Anderson shouted hoarsely. He was not hurt, but he was shaken.

Instead of playing out the rope, Orville, with a happy, carefree shout, dove into the flossy mass. As he was swallowed into its darkness, he addressed the old man below: “Your prayers have been answered, sir. You’ve led us across the Red Sea, and now the Lord is feeding us manna. Taste the stuff—taste it! We don’t have to worry about those supplies. This is the reason for the Plants. This is their fruit. This is manna from heaven.”

In the brief stampede over the edge, Mae Stromberg sprained her ankle. Anderson knew better than to pit his authority against raw hunger. He hesitated to eat the fruit himself, for it could be poisonous, but his body’s need strained against an overcautious will. If the rest of them were to be poisoned, he might as well join them.

It tasted good.

Yes
, he thought,
it must seem like manna to them
. And even as the sugary floss condensed on his tongue into droplets of honey, he hated the Plant for seeming so much their friend and their deliverer. For making its poison so delicious.

At his feet the lamp burned unnaturally bright. The floor, though hard enough to hold him up, was not rock-solid. He took out his pocket knife, brushed away the matted floss, and cut a slice of this more solid substance from the fruit. It was crisp, like an Idaho potato, and juicy. It had a blander and less acid taste than the floss. He cut out another piece. He could not stop eating.

Around Anderson, out of range of the lamp, the citizens of Tassel (but was there still a Tassel of which they could be said to be citizens?) snuffled and ate like swine at a trough. Most of them did not bother to press the floss into comfortable mouthfuls but pushed it blindly into their mouths, biting their own fingers and gagging in their greedy haste. Strands of the pulp adhered to their clothes and tangled in their hair. It stuck to the lashes of their closed eyes.

An upright figure advanced into the sphere of lamplight. It was Jeremiah Orville. “I’m sorry,” he said, “if I started all this. I shouldn’t have spoken out of turn. I should have waited for you to say what to do. I wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s all right,” Anderson assured him, his mouth full of half-chewed fruit. “It would have happened the same no matter what you did. Or what I did.”

Orville sat down beside the older man. “In the morning…” he began.

“Morning? It must be morning now.” In fact, they had no way to know. The only working timepieces—an alarm clock and two wristwatches—had been kept in a box in the commonroom for safety. No one escaping the fire had thought to rescue the box.

“Well, when everyone’s fed full and they’ve got some sleep—that’s what I meant—then you can set them to work. We’ve lost a battle, but there’s still a war to fight.”

Orville’s tone was politely optimistic, but Anderson found it oppressive. To have come to sanctuary after a disaster did not erase the memory of the disaster. Indeed, Anderson, now that he had stopped running from it, was only just becoming aware of its magnitude. “What work?” he asked, spitting out the rest of the fruit.

“Whatever work you say, sir. Exploring. Clearing out a space down here to live in. Going back to the main root for the supplies we dropped there. Pretty soon, you might even send a scout back to see if anything can be salvaged from the fire.”

Anderson made no reply. Sullenly he recognized that Orville was right. Sullenly he admired his resourcefulness, just as, twenty years earlier, he might have admired an opponent’s fighting style in a brawl at Red Fox Tavern. Though to Anderson’s taste the style was a little too fancy, you had to give the bastard credit for keeping on his feet.

It was strange, but Anderson’s whole body was tensed as though for a fight, as though he
had
been drinking.

Orville was saying something. “
What’d
you say?” Anderson asked in a jeering tone. He hoped it was something that would give him an excuse to smash his face in, the smart punk.

“I said—I’m very sorry about your wife. I can’t understand why she did that. I know how you must be feeling.”

Anderson’s fists unclenched, his jaw grew slack. He felt the pressure of tears behind his eyes, the pressure that had been there all along, but he knew that he could not afford to give in to it. He could not afford the least weakness now.

“Thank you,” he said. Then he cut out another large wedge of the solider, more succulent fruit, split it in two, and gave part to Jeremiah Orville. “You’ve done well tonight,” he said. “I will not forget it.”

Orville left him to whatever thoughts he had and went looking for Blossom. Anderson, alone, thought of his wife with a stony, dumb grief. He could not understand why she had, as he considered it, committed suicide.

He would never know, no one would know, that she had turned back for his sake. He had not yet taken thought of the Bible that had been left behind, and later, when he would, he would regret it no more nor less than Gracie’s death or the hundred other irredeemable losses he had suffered. But Lady had foreseen quite accurately that without that one artifact, in which she herself had had no faith, without the sanction it lent his authority, the old man would be bereft, and that his strength, so long preserved, would soon collapse, like a roof when the timbers have rotted. But she had failed, and her failure would never be understood.

More than one appetite demanded satisfaction that night. A satiety of food produced, in men and women alike, an insatiable hunger for that which the strict code of the commonroom had so long denied them. Here, in warmth and darkness, that code no longer obtained. In its stead, the perfect democracy of the carnival proclaimed itself, and liberty reigned for one brief hour.

Hands brushed, as though by accident, other hands—exactly whose it made little difference. Death had not scrupled to sort out husband and wife, and neither did they. Tongues cleaned away the sweet, sticky film from lips that had done feasting, met other tongues, kissed.

“They’re drunk,” Alice Nemerov stated unequivocally.

She, Maryann and Blossom sat in a separate cove dug from the pulp of the fruit, listening, trying not to listen. Though each couple tried to observe a decorous silence, the cumulative effect was unmistakable, even to Blossom.

“Drunk? How can that be?” Maryann asked. She did not want to talk, but conversation was the only defense against the voluptuous sounds of the darkness. Talking and listening to Alice talk, she did not have to hear the sighing, the whispers—or wonder which was her husband’s.

“We’re all drunk, my dears. Drunk on oxygen. Even with this stinking fruit stinking things up, I know an oxygen tent when I smell it.”

“I don’t smell anything,” Maryann said. It was perfectly true: her cold had reached the stage where she couldn’t even smell the cloying odor of the fruit.

“I worked in a hospital, didn’t I? So I should know. My dears, we’re all of us higher than kites.”

“High as the flag on the Fourth of July,” Blossom put in. She didn’t really mind being drunk, if it was like this. Floating. She wanted to sing but sensed that it wasn’t the thing to do. Not now. But the song, once begun, kept on inside her head:
I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy
.

“Sssh!” Alice ssshed.

“Excuse
me!”
Blossom said, with a wee giggle. Perhaps her song had not after all been altogether inside her head. Then, because she knew it was the correct thing to do when tipsy, she hiccoughed a single, graceful hiccough, fingertips pressed delicately to her lips. Then, indelicately, she burped, for there was gas on her stomach.

“Are you all right, my dear?” Alice asked, laying a solicitous hand on Maryann’s full womb. “I mean, everything that’s happened—”

“Yes. There, you see! He just moved.”

The conversation lapsed, and through the breach the assault was renewed. Now it was an angry, persistent sound, like the buzzing of a honeycomb. Maryann shook her head, but the buzzing wouldn’t stop. “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh!”

“There, there,” Alice soothed.

“Who do you think is with him?” Maryann blurted.

“Why, you’re all upset for no reason at all,” Blossom said. “He’s probably with Daddy and Orville this very minute.”

Blossom’s obvious conviction almost swayed Maryann. It
was
possible. An hour ago (or less? or more?) Orville had sought out Blossom and explained that he was taking her father (who was naturally very upset) to a more private spot, away from the others. He had found a way into another root, a root that burrowed yet deeper into the earth. Did Blossom want to go there with him? Or perhaps she preferred to stay with the ladies?

Alice had thought that Blossom would prefer to stay with the ladies for the time being. She would join her father later, if he wished her to.

Anderson’s departure, and the departure with him of the lamp, had been the cue for all that followed. A month’s dammed energy spilled out and covered, for a little while, the face of sorrow, blotted out the too-clear knowledge of their defeat and of an ignominy the features of which were only just becoming apparent.

A hand reached out of the darkness and touched Blossom’s thigh. It was Orville’s hand! It could be no other. She took the hand and pressed it to her lips.

It was not Orville’s hand. She screamed. Instantly, Alice had caught the intruder by the scruff of his neck. He yelped.

“Neil!” she exclaimed. “For pity’s sake! That’s your sister you’re pawing, you idiot! Now,
get!
Go look for Greta. Or, on the other hand, maybe you’d better not.”

“You shut up!” Neil bellowed. “You ain’t my mother!”

She finally shoved Neil away. Then she laid her head down in Blossom’s lap. “Drunk,” she scolded sleepily. “Absolutely stoned.” Then she began to snore. In a few minutes, Blossom slept too—and dreamed—and woke with a little cry.

“What is it?” Maryann asked.

“Nothing, a dream,” Blossom said. “Haven’t you gone to sleep yet?”

“I can’t.” Though it was as quiet as death now, Maryann was still listening. What she feared most was that Neil
would
find his wife. And Buddy. Together.

Buddy woke. It was still dark. It would always be dark now, here. There was a woman beside him, whom he touched, though not to wake her. Assured that she was neither Greta nor Maryann, he gathered his clothes and sidled away. Strands of the sticky pulp caught on his bare back and shoulders and melted there, unpleasantly.

He was still feeling drunk. Drunk and drained. Orville had a word for the feeling—what was it?

Detumescent.

The grainy liquid trickled down his bare skin, made him shiver. But it wasn’t that he was cold. Though he was cold, come to think of it.

Crawling forward on hands and knees, he bumbled into another sleeping couple. “What?” the woman said. She sounded like Greta. No matter. He crawled elsewhere.

He found a spot where the pulp had not been disturbed and shoved his body into it backward. Once you got used to the sticky feeling, it was quite comfortable: soft, warm, snuggly.

He wanted light: sunlight, lamplight, even the red, unsteady light of last night’s burning. Something in the present situation horrified him in a way he did not understand, could not define. It was more than the darkness. He thought about it and as he dropped off to sleep again it came to him:

Worms.

They were worms, crawling through an apple.

“Who’s
your
favorite movie star, Blossom?” Greta asked.

“Audrey Hepburn. I only saw her in one movie—when I was nine years old—but she was wonderful in that. Then there weren’t any more movies. Daddy never approved, I guess.”

“Daddy!” Greta snorted. She tore off a strand of fruit pulp from the space overhead, lowered it lazily into her mouth, mashed it with her tongue against the back of her teeth. Sitting in that pitch-black cavity in the fruit, her listeners could not see her do this, but it was evident from her blurred speech that she was eating again. “And you, Neil? Who’s your favorite?’

“Charlton Heston. I used to go to anything with him in it.”

“Me too,” said Clay Kestner. “Him—and how about Marilyn
Mon
-roe? Any of you fellas old enough to remember old Marilyn
Mon
-roe?”

“Marilyn Monroe was vastly overrated in my opinion,” Greta mouthed.

“What do you say about that, Buddy? Hey, Buddy! Is he still here?”

“Yeah, I’m still here. I never saw Marilyn Monroe. She was before my time.”

“Oh, you missed something, kid. You really missed something.”

“
I
saw Marilyn Monroe,” Neil put in. “She wasn’t before my time.”

“And you still say Charlton Heston’s your favorite?” Clay Kestner had a booming, traveling-salesman’s laugh, gutsy and graceless. In former years he had been half-owner of a filling station.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Neil said nervously.

Greta laughed too, for Clay had begun to tickle her toes. “You’re all wet, all of you,” she said, still giggling but trying to stop. “I still say that Kim Novak is the greatest actress who ever lived.” She had been saying it and saying it for fifteen minutes, and it seemed now that she would say it again.

Buddy was mortally bored. He had thought it would be better to stay behind with the younger set than to go along on another of his father’s tedious, purposeless explorations through the labyrinthine roots of the Plants. Now that the supplies had been gathered in, now that they had learned everything about the Plant that there was to learn, there was no point in wandering about. And no point in sitting still. He had not realized till now, till there was nothing to do, what a slave to work and Puritan busy-ness he had become.

He rose, and his hair (cut short now, like everyone else’s) brushed against the clinging fruit. The fruit pulp, when it dried and matted in one’s hair, was more aggravating than a mosquito bite that couldn’t be itched.

“Where are you going?” Greta asked, offended that her audience should desert her in the middle of her analysis of Kim Novak’s peculiar charm.