The Very Best of F & SF v1 (46 page)

“You should go
to hear them anyway,” Darrow says. “It’s Duke Ellington. Have you heard of him?”

“I don’t get on
with the titled nobility,” Wells quips.

“Oh, this
Ellington’s a noble fellow, all right, but I don’t think you’ll find him in the
peerage,” Russell says.

“He plays jazz,
doesn’t he?”

“Not like any
jazz you’ve heard,” Darrow says. “It’s something totally new. You should find a
place for it in one of your
Utopias.”

All three of
them are for helping the colored peoples. Darrow has defended Negroes accused
of capital crimes. Wells, on his first visit to America almost thirty years
ago, met with Booker T. Washington and came away impressed, although he still
considers the peaceable coexistence of the white and colored races
problematical.

“What are you
working on now, Wells?” Russell asks. “What new improbability are you preparing
to assault us with? Racial equality? Sexual liberation?”

“I’m writing a
screen treatment based on
The Shape of
Things to Come
,” Wells says. He tells them about
his screenplay, sketching out for them the future he has in his mind. An
apocalyptic war, a war of unsurpassed brutality that will begin, in his film,
in 1939. In this war, the creations of science will be put to the service of
destruction in ways that will make the horrors of the Great War pale in
comparison. Whole populations will be exterminated. But then, out of the ruins
will arise the new world. The orgy of violence will purge the human race of the
last vestiges of tribal thinking. Then will come the organization of the
directionless and weak by the intelligent and purposeful. The new man. Cleaner,
stronger, more rational. Wells can see it. He talks on, supplely, surely, late
into the night. His mind is fertile with invention, still. He can see that
Darrow and Russell, despite their Yankee individualism, are caught up by his
vision. The future may be threatened, but it is not entirely closed.

Friday night,
back in the barracks at Fort Hunt, Kessel lies on his bunk reading the latest
Wonder Stories.
He’s
halfway through the tale of a scientist who invents an evolution chamber that
progresses him through 50,000 years of evolution in an hour, turning him into a
big-brained telepathic monster. The evolved scientist is totally without
emotions and wants to control the world. But his body’s atrophied. Will the
hero, a young engineer, be able to stop him?

At a plank table
in the aisle a bunch of men are playing poker for cigarettes. They’re talking
about women and dogs. Cole throws in his hand and comes over to sit on the next
bunk. “Still reading that stuff, Jack?”

“Don’t knock it
until you’ve tried it.”

“Are you coming
into D.C. with us tomorrow? Sgt. Sauter says we can catch a ride in on one of
the trucks.”

Kessel thinks
about it. Cole probably wants to borrow some money. Two days after he gets his
monthly pay he’s broke. He’s always looking for a good time. Kessel spends his
leave more quietly; he usually walks into Alexandria— about six miles—and sees
a movie or just walks around town. Still, he would like to see more of
Washington. “Okay.”

Cole looks at
the sketchbook poking out from beneath Kessel’s pillow. “Any more hot pictures?”

Immediately
Kessel regrets trusting Cole. Yet there’s not much he can say—the book is full
of pictures of movie stars he’s drawn. “I’m learning to draw. And at least I
don’t waste my time like the rest of you guys.”

Cole looks
serious. “You know, you’re not any better than the rest of us,” he says, not
angrily. “You’re just another polack. Don’t get so high-and-mighty.”

“Just because I
want to improve myself doesn’t mean I’m high-and-mighty.”

“Hey, Cole, are
you in or out?” Turkel yells from the table.

“Dream on, Jack,”
Cole says, and returns to the game.

Kessel tries to
go back to the story, but he isn’t interested anymore. He can figure out that
the hero is going to defeat the hyper-evolved scientist in the end. He folds
his arms behind his head and stares at the knots in the rafters.

It’s true,
Kessel does spend a lot of time dreaming. But he has things he wants to do, and
he’s not going to waste his life drinking and whoring like the rest of them.

Kessel’s always
been different. Quieter, smarter. He was always going to do something better
than the rest of them; he’s well spoken, he likes to read. Even though he didn’t
finish high school he reads everything:
Amazing, Astounding, Wonder Stories.
He believes
in the future. He doesn’t want to end up trapped in some factory his whole
life.

Kessel’s parents
emmigrated from Poland in 1913. Their name was Kisiel, but his got Germanized
in Catholic school. For ten years the family moved from one to another
middle-sized industrial town, as Joe Kisiel bounced from job to job.
Springfield. Utica. Syracuse. Rochester. Kessel remembers them loading up a
wagon in the middle of night with all their belongings in order to jump the
rent on the run-down house in Syracuse. He remembers pulling a cart down to the
Utica Club brewery, a nickel in his hand, to buy his father a pail of beer. He
remembers them finally settling in the First Ward of Buffalo. The First Ward,
at the foot of the Erie Canal, was an Irish neighborhood as far back as anybody
could remember, and the Kisiels were the only Poles there. That’s where he
developed his chameleon ability to fit in, despite the fact he wanted nothing
more than to get out. But he had to protect his mother, sister and little
brothers from their father’s drunken rages. When Joe Kisiel died in 1924 it was
a relief, despite the fact that his son ended up supporting the family.

For ten years
Kessel has strained against the tug of that responsibility. He’s sought the
free and easy feeling of the road, of places different from where he grew up,
romantic places where the sun shines and he can make something entirely
American of himself.

Despite his
ambitions, he’s never accomplished much. He’s been essentially a drifter,
moving from job to job. Starting as a pinsetter in a bowling alley, he moved on
to a flour mill. He would have stayed in the mill only he developed an allergy
to the flour dust, so he became an electrician. He would have stayed an
electrician except he had a fight with a boss and got blacklisted. He left
Buffalo because of his father; he kept coming back because of his mother. When
the Depression hit he tried to get a job in Detroit at the auto factories, but
that was plain stupid in the face of the universal collapse, and he ended up
working up in the peninsula as a farm hand, then as a logger. It was seasonal
work, and when the season was over he was out of a job. In the winter of 1933,
rather than freeze his ass off in northern Michigan, he joined the CCC. Now he
sends twenty-five of his thirty dollars a month back to his mother and sister
back in Buffalo. And imagines the future.

When he thinks
about it, there are two futures. The first one is the one from the magazines
and books. Bright, slick, easy. We, looking on it, can see it to be the
fifteen-cent utopianism of Hugo Gernsback’s
Science and Mechanics,
that flourished in the
midst of the Depression. A degradation of the marvelous inventions that made
Wells his early reputation, minus the social theorizing that drove Wells’s
technological speculations. The common man’s boosterism. There’s money to be
made telling people like Jack Kessel about the wonderful world of the future.

The second
future is Kessel’s own. That one’s a lot harder to see. It contains work. A
good job, doing something he likes, using his skills. Not working for another
man, but making something that would be useful for others. Building something
for the future. And a woman, a gentle woman, for his wife. Not some cheap
dancehall queen.

So when Kessel
saw H. G. Wells in person, that meant something to him. He’s had his doubts. He’s
twenty-nine years old, not a kid anymore. If he’s ever going to get anywhere,
it’s going to have to start happening soon. He has the feeling that something
significant is going to happen to him. Wells is a man who sees the future. He
moves in that bright world where things make sense. He represents something
that Kessel wants.

But the last
thing Kessel wants is to end up back in Buffalo.

He pulls the
sketchbook, the sketchbook he was to show me twenty years later, from under his
pillow. He turns past drawings of movie stars: Jean Harlow, Mae West, Carole
Lombard—the beautiful, unreachable faces of his longing—and of natural scenes:
rivers, forests, birds—to a blank page. The page is as empty as the future,
waiting for him to write upon it. He lets his imagination soar. He envisions an
eagle, gliding high above the mountains of
the west that he has
never seen, but that he knows he will visit some day. The eagle is America; it
is his own dreams. He begins to draw.

Kessel did not
know that Wells’s life has not worked out as well as he planned. At that moment
Wells is pining after the Russian emigr
é
Moura Budberg, once Maxim Gorky’s secretary, with whom Wells has
been carrying on an off-and-on affair since 1920. His wife of thirty years, Amy
Catherine “Jane” Wells, died in 1927. Since that time Wells has been adrift,
alternating spells of furious pamphleteering with listless periods of suicidal
depression. Meanwhile, all London is gossiping about the recent attack
published in
Time and Tide
by his vengeful ex-lover Odette Keun. Have his mistakes followed him
across the Atlantic to undermine his purpose? Does Darrow think him a jumped-up
cockney? A moment of doubt overwhelms him. In the end, the future depends as
much on the open-mindedness of men like Darrow as it does on a reorganization
of society. What good is a guild of samurai if no one arises to take the job?

Wells doesn’t
like the trend of these thoughts. If human nature lets him down, then his whole
life has been a waste.

But he’s seen
the President. He’s seen those workers on the road. Those men climbing the
trees risk their lives without complaining, for minimal pay. It’s easy to think
of them as stupid or desperate or simply young, but it’s also possible to give
them credit for dedication to their work. They don’t seem to be ridden by the
desire to grub and clutch that capitalism rewards; if you look at it properly
that may be the explanation for their ending up wards of the state. And is
Wells any better? If he hadn’t got an education he would have ended up a
miserable draper’s assistant.

Wells is due to
leave for New York Sunday. Saturday night finds him sitting in his room, trying
to write, after a solitary dinner in the New Willard. Another bottle of wine,
or his age, has stirred something in Wells, and despite his rationalizations he
finds himself near despair. Moura has rejected him. He needs the soft,
supportive embrace of a lover, but instead he has this stuffy hotel room in a
heat wave.

He remembers
writing
The Time Machine,
he and Jane living in rented rooms in Sevenoaks with her ailing
mother, worried about money, about whether the landlady would put them out. In
the drawer of the dresser was a writ from the court that refused to grant him a
divorce from his wife Isabel. He remembers a warm night, late in August—much
like this one—sitting up late after Jane and her mother went to bed, writing at
the round table before the open window, under the light of a paraffin lamp. One
part of his mind was caught up in the rush of creation, burning, following the
Time Traveler back to the sphinx, pursued by the Morlocks, only to discover
that his machine is gone and he is trapped without escape from his desperate
circumstances. At the same moment he could hear the landlady, out in the
garden, fully aware that he could hear her, complaining to the neighbor about
his and Jane’s scandalous habits. On the one side, the petty conventions of a
crabbed world; on the other, in his mind—the future, their peril and hope.
Moths fluttering through the window beat themselves against the lampshade and
fell onto the manuscript; he brushed them away unconsciously and continued,
furiously, in a white heat. The time traveler, battered and hungry, returning
from the future with a warning, and a flower.

He opens the
hotel windows all the way but the curtains aren’t stirred by a breath of air.
Below, in the street, he hears the sound of traffic, and music. He decides to
send a telegram to Moura, but after several false starts he finds he has
nothing to say. Why has she refused to marry him? Maybe he is finally too old,
and the magnetism of sex or power or intellect that has drawn women to him for
forty years has finally all been squandered. The prospect of spending the last
years remaining to him alone fills him with dread.

He turns on the
radio, gets successive band shows: Morton Downey. Fats Waller. Jazz. Paging
through the newspaper, he comes across an advertisement for the Ellington
orchestra Darrow mentioned; it’s at the ballroom just down the block. But the
thought of a smoky room doesn’t appeal to him. He considers the cinema. He has
never been much for the “movies.” Though he thinks them an unrivaled
opportunity to educate, that promise has never been properly seized—something
he hopes to do in
Things to Come.
The newspaper reveals an uninspiring selection:
20 Million Sweethearts,
a
musical at the Earle,
The Black Cat
, with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi at the Rialto, and
Tarzan and His Mate
at the
Palace. To these Americans he is the equivalent of this hack, Edgar Rice
Burroughs. The books I read as a child, that fired my father’s imagination and
my own, Wells considers his frivolous apprentice work. His serious work is
discounted. His ideas mean nothing.