The Ninth Configuration (8 page)

The following morning just before seven, Kane sat waiting in his staff car, having sent Krebs to go and fetch Cutshaw. When the astronaut finally appeared, he was dressed in a clean khaki uniform, stiff with starch. His hair was thick with Vaseline and his face was cleanly shaven, but he still wore his sneakers and his tattered college blazer, and affected a bold, high Buster Brown collar tied with a bright-red bow. Kane at first insisted that he remove the collar and sneakers, but relented when Cutshaw argued, “Would Foot give a shit about what I’m wearing?” They drove to the church, a modest A-frame in the seacoast town of Bly. They were a few minutes late.

As they emerged from the staff car, Cutshaw looked suddenly terrified and gripped Kane’s hand. He would not let go until after they had entered the church.

In the vestibule, Kane stopped to dip his hand into the holy-water font, and Cutshaw walked rapidly toward the front of the church, assuming a rapid, pigeon-toed gait and listing his shoulders from side to side. When he reached the front pew he paused and called to Kane in a loud stage whisper, “Hud, up here! Let’s see the statues!”

Kane walked down the aisle, ignoring the curious looks of the parishioners. He genuflected outside

the pew, then rose and knelt down next to Cutshaw. The astronaut was kneeling stiffly, staring piously at the priest, whose hands were upraised, his back to the parishioners. “Is that Edgar Cayce?” he asked in a voice that carried to the altar. The priest paused briefly and looked around, then resumed the saying of Mass.

Cutshaw was quiet until the sermon, which concerned the Good Shepherd who was willing to “lay down his life for his sheep.” Whenever the priest made some trenchant point, Cutshaw applauded or murmured “Bravo!” The priest, a former missionary who had lived much of his life in China, decided that Cutshaw was drunk and certainly no more of a nuisance than squalling infants or belching warlords. When Cutshaw applauded he would raise his voice a notch and offer it up to God.

When it came time for the collection, Cutshaw loudly demanded a nickel. Kane gave him a dollar. But when the collection basket was thrust at him, Cutshaw held it firmly and poked his nose in it, sniffing furiously; then he abruptly waved it by. He crumpled the dollar into his pocket.

Kane turned his gaze to him as they knelt for the consecration. Cutshaw’s hands were clasped before him as he stared up at the altar, his pixie head awash in sunlight shafting narrowly through stained glass. He looked like a Christmas-card sketch of a choirboy.

Cutshaw behaved with decorum through the remaining parts of the Mass, except once, when he stood up and said, “Infinite goodness is creating a being that you know in advance is going to complain.”

As they walked back up the aisle, Cutshaw took hold of Kane’s hand once more. Outside, on the steps, he turned and said simply, “I dug it.” He was silent on the drive back until the car pulled up to the door of the mansion. Then he said in a childlike voice, “Thank you.”

“Why did you keep the dollar?” Kane asked him.

“For suckers,” said Cutshaw, and he glided into the mansion. He came out again quickly.

“If you die first and there’s life after death, will you give me a sign?” he asked.

“I’ll try.”

“You’re terrific.” Cutshaw crouched away. A mist of rain began to descend. Kane looked up at the sound of distant thunder. He stepped into the mansion’s main hall and met Fell, who was buckling the belt of his trench coat. “Did Cutshaw behave himself?” he asked.

“As usual,” answered Kane.

“Why did you take him?”

“He wanted to go.”

“Stupid question.”

“Where are you going?”

“Over to the beach.”

“It’s cold and it’s raining,” Kane said.

Fell glanced at him oddly. “I’m just going there to eat, not to swim, old sport. There’s a diner there with great eggs Benedict. You want some? Come on.”

“No, I think I’ll lie down for a while. I feel tired.” Fell gave him a searching look. “Excuse me,” said Kane. He walked past Fell toward the staircase.

“Sure sorry,” said Fell. “I was hoping you’d come so you’d pick up the check.” Kane seemed oblivious, walking on. Fell shook his head. He changed his mind about going out. He headed for the mess in search of coffee and did not notice Krebs coming out of Kane’s office. The sergeant hurried after Kane.

“Colonel? Colonel Kane, sir?”

Kane stopped and turned at the head of the steps. There were heavy, dark sacs beneath his eyes. And pain. He waited for Krebs to reach him.

“Colonel?”

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just the new man, sir.”

“New man?”

“The new inmate, Colonel. He got in about half an hour ago.

I put him in your office. I’d thought you might not want him to be mixing with the others until you’d-well-sort of explained things to him. He seems-well-pretty straight, sir. Just combat fatigue, from the look of him. That’s as much as I know.”

“I’ll be there in just a minute.”

“Very good, sir.” Krebs retreated down the stairs.

Kane entered his bedroom. He locked the door and walked into the bathroom, where he plucked an aspirin bottle from the medicine cabinet and shook its contents into his hand until he reached the 100-milligram Demerol tablets he had pilfered from the drug chest. He took three of them: nothing less could allay the pain.

He went down to his office. As he opened the door, Cutshaw approached him. “Would you please talk to Reno?” the astronaut complained to him. “Could he get his fucking dogs the hell out of the tunnels? There’s slippage enough as it is down there.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him,” said Kane. His voice was subdued.

“I want to talk about Christ’s resurrection,” said Cutshaw. “Do you think it was bodily?”

“We can talk about it later,” said Kane.

“No, now!” Cutshaw threw open the door all the way. The new arrival, a Marine Corps lieutenant named Gilman, was sitting on the sofa, a rain-moist duffel bag at his feet. A Z-shaped scar was etched into his brow just above his right eye. He looked up at Kane, startled. “I don’t believe it,” said the lieutenant. “ ‘Killer’ Kane!”

In the fall of 1967 he was in Vietnam in command of a Special Forces camp just south of the perilous demilitarized zone. Once, at the end of a particularly hazardous mission, a second lieutenant discovered him standing by a tree at the rendezvous point. He was staring vacantly into the dusk.

“Colonel Kane!” the lieutenant whispered. “It’s me-Gilman!”

Kane’s head was lowered. He did not answer.

Gilman squinted into the gloom. He came closer and noticed the wet blood streaking the grease paint that covered Kane’s face. He followed Kane’s stare to the jungle floor and saw the frail and bleeding body of a black-pajama-clad Vietcong. It had no head.

“You got a Charlie,” Gilman said tonelessly.

“Just a boy.” Kane’s voice was dreamy. He lifted unseeing eyes to Gilman’s. “He spoke to me, Gilman.”

Gilman stared uneasily. Kane was partially turned away from him. “Are you all right, sir?”

“I cut off his head and he kept on talking, Gilman. He spoke to me after I killed him.”

Gilman was alarmed. “Come on, sir, let’s go,” he urged. “It’s getting light.”

“He told me I loved him,” Kane said dully.

“Christ, forget about it, Colonel!” Gilman’s face was close to Kane’s.

He squeezed his arm with heavy fingers.

“He was only a boy,” said Kane. Then Gilman stared in horror as Kane raised his hands. Cradled in them was the severed head of a fourteen-year-old boy. “See?” Gilman stifled a scream. Savagely he knocked the head out of Kane’s hands. It rolled down an incline and finally thumped against a tree.

“Oh, my Christ,” moaned Gilman.

Eventually he got Kane back to the base. But when Kane was put to bed he was still in a trancelike state. A medical orderly recorded the incident, noting that Kane would bear further observation.

The following morning Kane behaved normally and continued with his duties. He seemed to have no recollection of the head. In the days to come he was to wonder why Lieutenant Gilman eyed him oddly whenever he saw him. Kane made sure that Gilman never again accompanied him on a mission. He could not pin down his reason for this; somehow it just seemed more efficient.

Some two weeks after the incident, Kane was standing by a window of his adjutant’s sandbagged shack. He was staring at the drumming torrential rain that had not ceased for the last four days. The adjutant, a dark-eyed captain named Robinson, was hovering by a TWX machine that spewed out messages a chattering inch per thrust. It mingled in ominous syncopation with the pounding of the rain.

Kane suddenly started; then relaxed. He thought he’d heard a voice from the jungle: a single cry that sounded like “Kane!” Then he saw the bird taking off from the treetops and remembered the screech of its species.

There was an unaccountable trembling in his fingers; a twitching in his bones: they had been his companions ever since first he had come to Vietnam; they and the sleeplessness. And when he slept he was haunted by dreams, chilling nightmares always forgotten. He tried to remember them but couldn’t. There were even times when he would tell himself in a dream that surely this time he would remember. But he never did. Each humid morning’s only legacy was sweat and the drone of mosquitoes. Yet the dreams, he knew, never left him: they still ran darkly through his bloodstream. Behind him he could sense vague tracks, feel menacing eyes that were fixed on some easy prey within him. He was nagged by a prescience of disaster.

The TWX machine clicked its teeth without pause.

“Can’t you turn that damned thing off!” snapped Kane.

“Special orders coming in, sir,” Robinson told him. The machine fell silent. Robinson ripped away the message. When he looked up, the colonel was gone and rain splattered in through an open door. Robinson carried the message to the doorway and saw Kane walking toward the jungle; he was coatless, hatless, instantly drenched in the violent downpour. Robinson shook his head. “Colonel Kane, sir!” he called.

Kane stopped dead, then turned around. His hands were cupped before him like a child’s catching the rain, and he was looking at them.

The adjutant flourished the message. “It’s for you, sir!”

Kane walked slowly back to the shack and stood staring silently at Robinson. Trickles of water plopped down from the bottoms of his trousers and sleeves and puddled on the floor.

The TWX machine had received a set of special orders assigning Kane to the state of Washington. Robinson looked rueful as he handed them to Kane. “Oh, well, Christ, it’s an obvious mistake, sir. Some half-ass computer must have goofed.” The adjutant pointed to some wording. “See? Your serial number’s wrong, and it gives your MOS as ‘Psychiatrist.’

There must be another Colonel Kane.”

“Yes,” murmured Kane. He nodded his head. Then he took the TWX from Robinson and stared at its contents. His eyes were alive with struggle. Finally, he crumpled the TWX in his hand and went out into the rain again and walked until he disappeared from view. Robinson kept staring into the torrent. His heart was heavy. Kane’s recent behavior had been anomalous. It had not gone unwatched.

Night fell suddenly. The adjutant paced in his quarters, chain-smoking

nervously. Kane had been gone for hours. What should he

do? Send out a patrol? He would like to avoid it if he could; avoid the necessity of explaining that “Colonel Kane took a walk in the rain without a hat, without a coat, but I thought it in keeping with his recent behavior, which has generally seemed unglued.” He was protective about the colonel. Everyone else regarded Kane with a mixture of awe, dislike and fear; but he had treated Robinson gently, sometimes even with fondness, and had let him glimpse, from time to time, the sensitivity trapped within him.

Robinson crushed out a cigarette, picked up his pipe and chewed on the stem. Then he saw Kane standing drenched in the open doorway. He was smiling faintly at his adjutant. “If we could scrub away the blood, do you think we could find where we’ve hidden our souls?” he asked. Before Robinson could answer, Kane had walked away and down the hall to his room. The adjutant listened to his footsteps, the opening and muted closing of his door.

The following morning Kane told Robinson that in spite of the discrepancies in the orders, he thought them correct with respect to their substance. He would go to Washington.

Robinson knew he would have to report it.

“By the time he hit the States, they’d caught the mistake.” Fell sat against the edge of the clinic examining table. He popped a cigarette from a packet and with shaking hands struck a match. He inhaled smoke and then blew it out. “By then it was clear that he meant to go through with it.” Fell cupped the burned-out match in his hand and stared at an ad on the crumpled match-book, a technical training school promising employment; then he slowly turned his gaze on each of the grave, bewildered faces of the men he had gathered together in the clinic:

Groper, Krebs, Christian, the medical orderlies-and Gilman. “They’d heard a lot of stories about him cracking. He seemed on the edge of a very bad breakdown. When he took the assignment, though, that was it. We knew that he’d had it.” Fell shook his head, and then continued. “But how do you tell a man with a record like that?”

Groper looked down at a set of orders in his hand. He shookhis leonine head, amazed; then he thrust the orders out toward Fell.

“These orders of yours,” he said to him. “They’re for real?”

Fell nodded. “You can put it in the bank,” he said firmly. Then he pulled at the cigarette. “Kane didn’t pick his line of work.” The words came out softly, with exhaled smoke. “In World War II he was a fighter pilot. Then one time he bailed out behind enemy lines and had to fight his way back. That time he killed an even six. It happened again. And he killed five more. So headquarters figured he had a talent. And they made him a specialist. They’d drop him behind the lines on clandestine missions and let him get back as best he could. He always did. And he wasted a lot of the enemy. A lot. With a knife. With his hands. Most times with a wire. And it ripped him apart. He was good. A good man. We stuck that wire in his hands and said, ‘Get ‘em, boy! Get ‘em for God and country! It’s your duty!’ But part of him didn’t believe it; the good part. That’s the part that pulled the plug. Then some computer dropped a stitch and gave the poor bastard a halfway out: a way to find help without facing his illness; a way to hide, to hide from himself; and a way to wash away the blood: a way to do penance for the killing-by curing.

“You see, at the start it was just a pretense,” Fell continued. “But somewhere on the way back from Nam it developed into something more; much more. His hatred of the Kane who killed became denial; and in time the denial became so overwhelming that it totally obliterated Kane’s self-identity: he suppressed the Kane who killed and became his better self-completely. Except when he dreamed. In the conscious state he was Kane the psychiatrist; and whatever contradicted that belief he denied and incorporated into his delusionary system.”

Fell looked down at his cigarette ash; it was long. He cupped a hand beneath it and tapped it off. “Ah, my God, he had it all,” he said. He shook his head. “Fugue states, redeemer complex, the migraines. You all must have seen some of that-the pain. That’s what got him into drugs.”

Krebs looked down at the floor as though abashed.

“Krebs knew,” said Fell.

Krebs nodded, still downcast, as the others turned and looked at him. “Anyway, I talked them into letting him go through with it,” Fell resumed. “It was an experiment. Partly. That was part of it. So they let him go ahead. Kane was inside the problem, looking out-an inmate functioning as a psychiatrist and coming to bear on the problem like nothing we’d ever seen. We hoped he might come up with some new insight. Oddly enough, I think he did. I think the other inmates have been responding to him. But he’s suffered a setback today. A pretty bad one. Really. Bad. You see, his one big hope of a cure for himself is to wipe out his guilt by a saving act; to cure the other men, or at least see improvement. But that takes time-time and your help.”

Fell gestured toward Groper. “You’ve seen my orders. I’m in command. But I want Colonel Kane to play out the string.” Fell turned to Gilman. “Gilman, I want you to try to convince the other inmates that you were mistaken. That shouldn’t be too difficult to sell around here. Can you do that, please, Gilman? Would you do that?” A note of pleading had crept into Fell’s voice.

“Oh, well, sure,” said Gilman quickly. “Sure. Absolutely.”

“Thank you.” Fell turned to the adjutant. “Groper, you and the rest of the staff will back up Gilman. So will I.”

Groper looked up from the orders, befuddled. “Colonel, let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ve really been in charge here all the time?”

Fell nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “He’s Vincent Kane. I’m Hudson Kane. I’m the psychiatrist. Vincent is my patient.” Fell’s eyes were flooding and his voice began to crack. “When we were kids I used to always make him laugh. I was a clown. And I’ve been trying to help him … remember me. But he won’t.”

He could not hold back the tears any longer. He said, “He’s my brother.”

Kane awakened in his room. He was lying on his bed, fully dressed. He sat up with an awareness of something being wrong. He saw his brother leaning forward in a chair by the bed, an odd expression of concern on his face.

“How are you feeling?”

Vincent stared without comprehension. “What? What’s going on?” he asked.

“What happened?”

“You fainted. Don’t you remember?”

Vincent looked disturbed. He shook his head.

“What do you remember?”

“Nothing. I was walking to my room and now I’m here.” He looked puzzled.

“I fainted?”

Hudson looked at him intently. “You remember the new inmate?”

“New inmate?”

“You don’t.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What’s going on?” He sounded angry.

Window glass shattered and a rock flew into the room. It hit a wall, fell on a nightstand and bounced to the floor. Enraged and hysterical, Cutshaw called up from the mansion courtyard: “Tell me all about God, you butchering bastard! Tell me again about goodness in the world! Come on down here with your wire, you bastard! Come on down!”

The psychiatrist looked at his brother anxiously; he saw the consternation on his face. “Dumb bastard Krebs,” he muttered. “He let a package from Cutshaw’s mother go through without bothering to open it. I knew it was booze.”