The Ninth Configuration (3 page)

“Protect us,” added Fell.

Kane turned the medal over, and he said without inflection, “There’s something engraved on the back of it.”

“Ora pro nobis?”

“ ‘I am a Buddhist. In case of accident, call a lama.
’ ”

Fell did not react. He picked up a book from the floor.

“What’s Cutshaw’s religion?” Kane asked.

“I don’t know. Read the file; it’s all in the file.” Fell glanced at the title of the book he’d picked up. Elementary Psychology. He riffled its pages, noting marginal glosses and some heavy underlinings.

Kane took the book from Fell’s hands and carried it to a bookshelf. From somewhere in the mansion, the voice of an inmate shrieked, “Fucking Venusians! Clean up your act!”

“You’re a lucky man, Kane,” sighed Fell.

“I am?”

“Well, it’s one in a million, wouldn’t you say: a man in the service who’s properly assigned?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I’m a pediatrician.”

“I see,” said Kane, stacking books.

“Oh, well, let’s not carry on about it, Colonel. Take it easy!” Fell stooped to pick up some papers.

“We’re all miscast,” murmured Kane.

“What did you say? I didn’t get that,” said Fell, looking up.

Kane paused in his stacking, his face in shadow. “Before Pearl Harbor, I thought I was going to be a priest. We’re all miscast, one way or another. Just being born into this place …” His voice trailed off.

Fell waited, alert and intensely observant; his antic disposition had vanished. A keen intelligence shone from his eyes, a sense of caring. “Yes?” he prodded.

“I don’t know,” said Kane. His face was still hidden. “I think about
sickness; earthquakes; wars.” He lowered his head. “Painful death. The
death of children. Children with cancer. If these are
just part of our natural environment, why do they horrify us so? Why do we think of them as evil unless… we were programmed” -he felt for the words—”for someplace … else.” His voice seemed far away. “Maybe conscience is our memory of how things were. Just suppose that we haven’t evolved; that we’ve really been going backwards … more and more alienated from—” Here Kane stopped.

“From what?”

“Psychiatrists aren’t supposed to say ‘God.
’ ”

“Betch your ass; it’s going down on your record. Keep going.”

“Maybe everything evil is a frustration, a separation from what we were meant for,” Kane continued. “And maybe guilt is just the pain of that separation, that-that loneliness for God. We’re fish out of water, Fell; maybe that’s why men go mad.”

For a time there was silence. When Kane spoke again, his voice was a whisper. “I don’t think evil grows out of madness: I think madness grows out of evil.”

A pair of gabardine pants flew into the room and hit Fell in the chest.

“Well, here are my pants,” he said matter-of-factly.

Cutshaw stood framed in the doorway. “Fromme has decided to give all his goods to the poor of brain.” He glowered at Fell and then disappeared.

A shaggy and disreputable-looking mongrel dog trotted briskly into the room. It went to the desk and sniffed.

“What’s this?” asked Kane.

The dog lifted a leg and piddled. “I think it’s a dog,” Fell said.

The dog seized the cuff of Fell’s trousers in its jaws. It growled and tugged and Fell tugged back. “Goddammit, not the pants!” he yelled.

Suddenly the dog released its grip. It bolted to Kane and cowered behind him as an elfish inmate swooped into the room. He wore a tattered black cape atop his soiled green fatigues. He headed for the dog. “So there you are, you loafer!”

Groper raced into the room and pulled the inmate back. “I’m sorry,

Colonel Kane,” he said. “It’s hard to keep track of these—”

“Please let him go,” Kane told him.

“Sir?”

“Let go of him,” Kane repeated. His voice was mild, but Groper felt inexplicably menaced. He relaxed his grip.

Kane added, “They may see me whenever they need to.”

“You heard?” said Reno with satisfaction, fixing Groper with a glittering eye.

“Whatever you say, Colonel Kane,” mumbled Groper. He turned and left quickly, glad to get away.

“That man is a lunatic and dangerous,” Reno grumbled.

“Lieutenant David Reno, Colonel Hudson Kane,” said Fell, introducing them. He put an arm around Reno’s shoulder. “Reno is a navigator. B-52S.” He squeezed Reno’s shoulder with a comradely cheer and said, “That right, old buddy?”

“Fuck you.” Reno glared at Fell with distaste.

“Is this your dog?” asked Kane, looking down.

“Does he look like my zebra? Christ, what the hell’s wrong with you people?” The dog was licking Kane’s shoe. Reno pointed. “Look, I think he likes you.”

“What do you call him?”

“Irresponsible. He’s ten minutes late for rehearsal. Now out!” Reno commanded the dog irritably. It padded from the room with a dignified mien, and in the background Kane caught a glimpse of Fairbanks nimbly sliding down a drape from the second floor.

Fell cleared his throat. “Lieutenant, the colonel might like to hear about your work.”

Reno shriveled him with a glance. “Navigating? Child’s play! I leave it to the crows, to the hawks, to the swallows! I am not a mere device! I am not an albino bat! Please watch your cup, dear heart, it’s dripping.”

“Not navigating,” said Fell. “Your work. Tell the colonel.”

“Ah! You speak of matters tender!”

“Lieutenant Reno,” Fell explained, “is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs.”

Reno drew up proudly. “A labor of love! A fucking headache!

For God’s sake, somebody’s got to do it! Could you tell me your name again?”

“Hudson Kane.”

“Too Jewish. We’ll change it. Want to come to rehearsal?”

“What are you rehearsing?”

“We’re doing that gripping scene in Julius Caesar where this noble-looking Dalmatian wraps his toga around him-thusly!” Eyes aglow, he demonstrated with his cape. “And then he snarls: ‘Et tu, White Fang?
’ ”
Neither Kane nor Fell reacted. Slowly, Reno lowered the cape from before him, the mad grin of triumph melting from his face. Then he said, “You hate it.”

“Not at all,” Kane assured him quickly. “I think it’s interesting.”

“Good. We’ll have to discuss it more fully later. In fact, I’d very much like your opinion on a problem I’m having with the casting of Hamlet.

You see, if I put a Great Dane in the part, the fucking critics will accuse me of—”

Reno broke off as the dog barked urgently from outside the office door. “ ‘The time is out of joint,
’ ”
mourned Reno. “Shit, why do I have to live like this? One part and he’s Barbra Streisand.” He whipped the cape around him and rapidly moved for the door, calling, “Hold it! I’m coming, I’m coming, Rip Torn.” At the door he turned and said to Kane, “Read the classics. It improves the whole respiratory system.”

And then he was gone. They could hear him chiding the dog: “Where are your manners, Rip Torn? Where the hell were you raised, in a barn?”

Kane waited. Then he looked at Fell. “They’re all that bad?”

“Or that ingenious.”

“You believe that they’re faking it, then.”

“I don’t know.” Fell was sitting on the edge of Kane’s desk. He tapped out a cigarette, lit it and swallowed smoke. “I’ve only been here about a week myself.”

“That recently?”

“Sure.” He took another drag. “The biggest mystery is Cutshaw, I guess.”

“Why him?”

“Well, he wasn’t in combat. So why should he fake it?”

Kane bowed his head and said softly, “Yes.” He moved to a window and looked outside. A heavy fog shrouded the mansion.

“But then all these guys have high IQs,” brooded Fell, “a few near genius, in fact; and most other fakery I’ve seen in the service comes under the category of falling out of parade in front of a reviewing stand and then urinating, preferably on some field-grade officer’s leg.”

Kane nodded.

“Their obsessions are just too ingenious,” continued Fell. “They’re too wild, too pat. But how is it that all these guys have obsessions? Are they in cahoots? Are Martians grabbing them? What the hell is it? And how do you say that a man like Bennish is pretending insanity to get out of combat? He holds the Congressional Medal of Honor. It just doesn’t figure. I don’t know. What do you think?”

Kane turned to reply, but instead merely stared through the open door. Fell’s eyes followed his gaze. Krebs was outside in the main hall, moving quickly, following Fairbanks, who was costumed as a nun, his fencing foil protruding from his robes, enormous round-lensed sunglasses on his face. He was carrying a large tin cup. Coins jangled inside it as he whirled on Krebs. “It is one of my multiple personalities,” he growled. “I am Sister Eve Black.” Krebs said something that neither Kane nor Fell could hear, but Fairbanks’ reply was distinct: “The Little Sisters of the Poor is a recognized charity, Krebs. Fuck off!”

Fell closed the door and shook his head. “Fairbanks. There’s another mysterioso.” He sat down on a couch to the side, reaching over to an ashtray atop an end table. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Hell, who knows. He was flying that plane that we got from the British-you know, the one that takes off from the vertical and then flies straight? Twenty-four of them crashed for no damn reason; and right after number twenty-four is when Fairbanks started going to junior proms for trees.

Hell, maybe we ought to give all of them electroshock treatment. That would shake out the fakers in a hurry, don’t you think?” He saw Kane staring at the bottom of his boxer shorts, where the words “Vendome Liquors” were embroidered in red. “Or don’t you?” Fell added.

Kane looked at him intently. “You remind me of someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. You just seem so familiar to me. I suppose it will come to me.”

“So will Ann Rutherford: just change your name to Andy Hardy.” For a moment Kane continued to study him; then he stooped to pick up books and dossiers from the floor.

“Did you like my idea about electroshock treatment?” Fell asked.

“I thought you were joking.”

“Me joke? You’re not serious.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Yeah, think,” said Fell. “Think hard. That’s what you’re paid for. Meantime, let me know when you come up with an answer.” Kane nodded absently. Fell watched him for a moment, then opened the door and left. He went to his bedroom. Using a private line, he dialed a number that rang on a general’s desk in the Pentagon. When it answered, Fell said, “He’s here, sir.”

Most of the fog had thinned away, but the evening was quickening. Rain clouds threatened. Kane sat at his desk, his eyes deep wells in a haggard face, a man with an urgent task, pursued. He had read the case histories of all the inmates and now was absorbed in a psychiatric textbook. He underlined frequently with a yellow soft-lead pencil. It was the evening of his arrival.

He adjusted the desk lamp, craning the light down closer to the book; then he lowered his head and rested his eyes, breathing deeply and noisily, almost asleep. He roused himself abruptly, rubbed his eyes and continued to read. He underlined a portion of the text. It dealt with the curative aspects of shock treatment. He studied it for a time. Then he glanced at Cutshaw’s medal. It was still on his desk.

The office door flew open. It was Cutshaw, attired in swimming trunks, a beach towel over his shoulder. He wore a black armband and gripped the handle of a child’s pail and shovel. His feet were shod in frogman’s flippers and the swimming trunks and towel were patterned in a matching Polynesian motif. He slammed the office door behind him. “Let’s go to the beach,” he demanded.

Kane pushed the lamp head even lower, so that his face was hidden in darkness. “It’s night and it’s starting to rain,” he said gently.

Cutshaw walked forward, the rubber flippers thwacking squeakily against the polished oaken floor. His brows were beetled together in a scowl. “I see you’re determined to start an argument! Okay, then, let’s play doctor.”

“No.”

“Then jacks; do you want to play jacks?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good Christ, you don’t want to do anything!” Cutshaw shrieked. “There’s nothing to do around this place! I’m going crazy!”

“Cutshaw—”

“What do I have to do just to get in a word with you? Offer sacrifice? Well, here then!” He upended the beach pail onto Kane’s desk and then lifted it off and tossed it away, disclosing a mound of shaped damp earth atop an open dossier. “I’ve brought you a mud pie; now can I talk to you?”

“Will you talk about the moon?”

“Listen, everyone knows the moon is Roquefort; I’ve come here to talk about Colonel Fell.”

“What about him?”

“What about him? Are you a stone? Christ. Captain Nam-mack approached him this morning complaining of a strange and wondrous malady, and do you know what that quack prescribed? He said, ‘Here, take this. It’s a suicide pill with a mild laxative side effect.’ What kind of bedside manner is that?”

“What’s wrong with Nammack?” Kane asked softly.

“He’s got a tipped uterus.”

“I see.”

“Tell that to Nammack and see if it comforts him in his agony. What shall I tell him? ‘Listen, Nammack, take it easy? I’ve talked to Colonel Kane and while he sympathizes with you, he says to stuff your fucking uterus with suicide pills and aspirin, seeing as Fell is erratic but fair’? And that he also said, ‘I see’?” The astronaut switched to a whining tone. “Let’s go to the beach,” he repeated. “Come on!” He attempted to stamp his foot in pout and the rubber flipper cracked like a whip against the floor.

“It’s dark and it’s raining,” Kane replied.

Cutshaw’s face contorted into rage. He picked up the beach-pail shovel from the desk and broke it in two with a splintery snap. “There! I break the arrow of peace!” He flung away the pieces. “Son of a bitch! Listen, who the hell are you? I’m starting to think that you’re Fairbanks in some fucking new weirdo disguise. He came around once in the skin of a caribou, but we recognized him, the jerk. Do you know what we did to him then? We gave him the silent treatment! Hell, we didn’t even nod to him, that insolent, antlered schmuck. Finally he split.” The astronaut’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinized Kane. “Are you really a Catholic?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Tough shit. I’m a Flaming Knight Rampant of the Christian Hussars.

Would you like to ask me what we believe in?”

“What do you believe in?”

“That colonels consort with elks. Now get out of here, Hud! I’m losing patience with you swiftly!”

“You want me to leave?” Kane asked him.

Cutshaw lunged over the desk and seized Kane’s wrist. “Are you mad?” His eyes bulged wide in fear. “And lose the only friend I’ve got?” he cried. “Oh, God, don’t do it, Hud, please! Don’t go away! Don’t leave me alone in this house of horrors!”

The colonel’s eyes welled up with pity. “No, I won’t go away, I promise.

Sit down. Sit down and we’ll talk,” he said soothingly.

“Yes!” shrieked Cutshaw. “I want to talk! I want therapy!” He released Kane’s wrist and was instantly calm again. He flapped his way to the couch against the wall, where he flung himself down and stretched out on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “God, where do I begin?”

“Free-associate,” Kane suggested.

Cutshaw turned and eyed him severely. He got up off the couch, thumped over to the desk and recovered his medal, then returned to the couch and lay supine. “And now a few words about my

childhood. I was born in North Dakota in a tiny—”

“Your records say Brooklyn,” said Kane.

“Listen, I’ll come over there-okay?-and you come lie down here and we’ll see how well you do! Whose therapy is this?”

“Yours,” said Kane.

“Can’t I ask a rhetorical question without some asshole trying to answer it? Be quiet!” Cutshaw shouted. He flipped over on his belly. “I had three maiden aunts,” he recited calmly. “Their names were Ugly, Vulgar and Tawdry, and every Christmas they’d buy me a Monopoly game from a thrift shop, except that the board was always missing: I never had a fucking board. Sure, I finally made one, but how does it sound: ‘Go directly to jack-knife and do not pass frog’? Hell, I never even saw a proper board until I was almost twenty, and I had to put ice on the back of my neck to stop trembling! Ah, well, screw it; so I never had a board. But I’d never use that as a cop-out, Hud, that Jack the Ripper bullshit. Yeah, sure: Jack the Ripper was misunderstood. At the age of six he had a lucky knife called ‘Rosebud’ and somebody stole it, so Jack spent the rest of his lifetime looking for it, but Jack had this silly idea that the knife had been hidden in someone’s throat. Now, do you buy that crap? You can answer.”

“No,” said Kane.

“You’re funny that way. There were kids on my block who tortured caterpillars; they’d cut them up and burn them. And you know why they did it? Because they were bastards. Every mean insensitive grown-up bastard started as a bastard. Show me a kid who tortures caterpillars and I’ll show you a son of a bitch. Do you approve? I crave approval. I need approval. I would rather have approval than a jelly roll with yogurt. Incidentally, have you noticed that Groper never showers? It’s because we’d see the caterpillar blood on his legs! The hateful bastard!

He’s a regular Santa Claus: every Christmas he jumps in his sled and delivers napalm to the poor. That son of a bitch. A dumb stray dog with a coiled-up tail came up and whined and licked his shoe one day on the drawbridge, and Groper right away whipped out a jack-knife and sliced the dog’s tail off, cropped it real close, and the dog is screaming and going crazy and then Groper says he helped it on account of the fleas; they collect in the tail. Christ, he’s up to his knees in caterpillar blood! You know, he used to be a writer for Time magazine and for years he always talked in captions: he was always saying, ‘After the melon, a grape,’ and things like that in the fucking mess hall. Also, he loved to say ‘brouhaha.’ But that was in the old days, Hud. I mean, now he only does it when he drinks. The poor slob was a colonel once, did you know that? Then he said ‘brouhaha’ in front of MacArthur and they busted him back to major. Wake up. Are you awake?” The astronaut turned for a look at Kane.

“Yes, I’m awake,” said Kane.

“So I see; but you were nodding, Catherine Earnshaw.” Cutshaw flopped over on his back once again and then queried, “What do you think of asps?”

“Asps?”

“You are absolutely incapable of giving a man a straight answer!”

Cutshaw produced a lollipop from a pocket and began to lick at it noisily.

“Cutshaw, why do you wear that armband?”

“Because I’m in mourning.”

“For whom?”

“For God.” Cutshaw sat up, removed the flippers and threw them down. “That’s right.” Now he threw away the lollipop. “I don’t belong to the God Is Alive and Living in Argentina Club.” Cutshaw stood up and began to pace in agitation. “Basta! No more talk about God! Wrap it up, that’s enough. Let’s get back to psychiatry.” He paused by the desk. “That reminds me. Some psychiatrist! You haven’t even asked me if I have obsessions.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do. I hate feet. Christ, I can’t stand the sight of them. How could a so-called beautiful God give us ugly padding things like feet!”

“So you can walk.”

“I don’t want to walk, I want to fly! Feet are disfiguring and disgraceful.” Cutshaw looked down at his own bare feet, strode over to the couch, sat down and tugged the flippers back on. “If God exists,” he said, “he’s a fink. Or more likely a foot: a giant, omniscient, omnipotent Foot. Do you think that is blasphemous?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I believe that I capitalized the F.”

The astronaut studied Kane as though attempting to evaluate him. “How many times,” he asked him finally, “can a person break a shish kebab skewer in half?” He stood up on the couch, reached out for the mounted head of a boar, and gripping its tusks, began to sway gently back and forth in midair. “Everything has parts,” he continued, in that posture. “The skewer has parts. Now, how many times can I break it in half? An infinite number of times or only a limited number of times? If the answer’s an infinite number of times, then the skewer must be infinite. Which is moose piss, why don’t we face it. But if I can only cut the skewer in half for a limited number of times… if I get down to a piece of skewer that can no longer be cut in half-I mean, assuming I were Foot and could do anything I wanted-then I’m down to a piece of skewer that has no parts. But if it has no parts, it can’t exist! Am I right? No. I see it in your eyes. You think I’m a crazy old man.”

“Not at all,” responded Kane. “You have merely failed to distinguish between the real and mental orders. Mentally-or theoretically-there isn’t any limit at all on how many times you can halve that skewer; but in the real order of things-or in other words, practically speaking-you would finally come to a point where, when you cut the skewer in half, the halves would convert themselves into energy.”

“Foot, you are wise!” breathed the astronaut. Something gleamed in his eyes. He dropped to the floor with a rubbery thwack, went over to the desk and replaced the medal in front of Kane. “You pass,” he said. “Now can you prove that there is a Foot?”

“I simply believe it,” said Kane.

“Can you prove it?”

“There are some arguments for reason.”

“Oh, are those the same things that we used to justify dropping atomic bombs on Japan? If they are, fuck them!” Cutshaw leaned over and spread the contents of the bucket all over Kane’s desk. “Here, draw diagrams in the dirt.” He threw himself face down on the couch. “This had better be good,” he warned, a cushion muffling his voice.

“There is a biochemical argument,” Kane said tentatively. “It isn’t a proof, exactly….”

Cutshaw turned on his side, yawned elaborately and checked his watch. “In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth,” Kane resumed, “there first had to be in existence a protein molecule of a certain dyssymmetrical configuration, the configuration point nine. But according to the laws of probability, for one of these molecules to appear by chance alone would require a volume of matter of more than-well-many trillions and trillions of times that of the size of the entire known universe; and considered strictly from the angle of time—”

“Timewise.”

“Considered from the angle of time, and given a volume of matter equivalent to the earth’s, such a probability would require ten to the two hundred and something power billions of years- a number with so many zeros in it you couldn’t fit them into a book the size of The Brothers Karamazov. And that’s just one molecule. For life to appear, you would have to have millions in existence and at roughly the same time. Which I find more fantastic than simply believing in a God.”

Cutshaw sat up. “Are you finished?”

“Yes.”

Cutshaw stood up and went to the door, where he turned and said cryptically, “Tawdry Groper eats unblessed venison.” Then he turned again and strode from view. The crash of a hammer pounding
plaster resounded through the wall. Kane walked out of his office. To the right of the door he saw Fairbanks, wearing an Air Force high-altitude helmet. He was holding a short-handled sledgehammer and was glaring at a hole in the wall. Groper raced up to him, cursing. “I hid it, goddammit, I hid it!” He ripped the hammer from Fairbanks’ hand. “How the hell did you find it?” he yelled.

“I wouldn’t dare tell you that,
”
said Fairbanks. He whipped the hammer back out of Groper’s clutch and told him, “Kindly stand aside.”

“You little—”

Groper had lifted an arm as though to strike him, when Kane intervened.

“Major Groper!”

“Sir, he’s been—”

“I don’t care what he’s done; you are not to lay hands on any of these men at any time for any reason.”

“But, Colonel—”

Groper was about to say more, but as his eyes looked into Kane’s, he broke off, took a step backward, saluted stiffly and retreated to his quarters.

Kane regarded the inmate kindly. “You’re Captain Fairbanks,” he said.