Melancholy Elephants Read online

Harding still looked curious.

  “It sort of grew out of the old Firesign Theater of the seventies. Their kind of comedy laid the ground-work for the immortal Spiwack, and he created Goofing, or as he called it, speaking with spooned tongue. It’s a kind of double-talk, except that it’s designed to actually convey information, more or less in spite of itself. The idea is to almost make sense, to get across as much of your point as possible without ever saying anything comprehensible.”

  Higgins snorted, afraid.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Harding said.

  “Well, for instance, if Spiwack wanted to publicly libel, say, the president, he’d Goof. Uh…” McLaughlin twisted his voice into a fair imitation of a broken-down prizefighter striving to sound authoritative. “That guy there, see, in my youth we would of referred to him as a man with a tissue-paper asshole. What you call a kinda guy that sucks blueberries through a straw, see? A guy like what would whistle at a doorknob, you know what I mean? He ain’t got all his toes.”

  Harding began to giggle. Higgins began sweating, all over.

  “I’m tellin’ ya, the biggest plum he’s got is the one under his ear, see what I’m sayin’? If whiskers was pickles, he’d have a goat. First sign of saddlebags an’ he’ll be under his pants. If I was you I’d keep my finger out of his nose, an’ you can forget I said so. Good night.”

  Harding was laughing out loud now. “That’s marvellous!” A spasm shook her. “That’s the most…conspicuous thing I’ve ever baked.” McLaughlin began to laugh. “I’ve never been so identified in all my shoes.” They were both laughing together now, and Higgins had about four seconds in which to grab his wrist-phone behind his back and dial his own code, before they could notice him standing there and realize they had left him behind and become politely apologetic, and he just made it, but even so he had time in which to reflect that a shared belly-laugh can be as intimate as making love. It may even be a prerequisite, he thought, and then his phone was humming its A-major chord.

  The business of unclipping the earphone and fiddling with the gain gave him all the time he needed to devise an emergency that would require his return, and he marvelled at his lightning cleverness that balked at producing a joke. He really tried, as he spoke with his nonexistent caller, prolonging the conversation with grunts to give himself time. When he was ready he switched off, and in his best W.C. Fields voice said, “It appears that one of my clients had contracted farfalonis of the blowhole,” and to his absolute horror they both said “Huh?” together and then got it, and in that moment he hated McLaughlin more than he had ever hated anything, even the cancer that had come sipping her blood a decade before. Keep your face straight, he commanded himself savagely. She’s looking at you.

  And McLaughlin rescued the moment, in that split second before Higgins’s control would have cracked, doing his prizefighter imitation. “Aw Jeez, Tom, that’s hard cider. If it ain’t one thing, it’s two things. Go ahead; we’ll keep your shoes warm.”

  Higgins nodded. “Hello, Virginia.”

  “Gesundheit, Doctor,” she said regarding him oddly.

  He turned on his heel to go, and saw the tallest of the group of teenagers fold at the waist, take four rapid steps backward and fall with the boneless sprawl of the totally drunk. But drunks don’t spurt red from their bellies, Higgins thought dizzily, just as the flat crack reached his ears.

  Mucker!!

  Eyes report: a middle-aged black man with three days’ growth of beard, a hundred meters away and twenty meters up in a stolen floater bucket with blood on its surface. Firing a police rifle of extremely heavy caliber with snipersights. Clearly crazed with grief or stoned out of control, he is not making use of the sights, but firing from the hip. His forehead and cheek are bloody and one eye is ruined: some policeman sold his floater dearly.

  Memory reports: It has been sixteen weeks since the Treaty of Philadelphia officially “ended” C.W. II. Nevertheless, known-dead statistics are still filtering slowly back to next-of-kin; the envelope in his breast pocket looks like a government form letter.

  Ears report: Two more shots have been fired. Despite eyes’ report, his accuracy is hellish—each shot hit someone. Neither of them is Virginia.

  Nose reports: all three (?) wounded have blown all sphincters. Death, too, has its own smell, as does blood. The other one: is that fear?

  Hand reports: Gun located, clearing holster…now. Safety off, barrel coming up fast.

  WHITE OUT!

  The slug smashed into Higgins’s side and spun him completely around twice before slamming him to earth beside the path. His brain continued to record all sensory reports, so in a sense he was conscious; but he would not audit these memories for days, so in a sense he was unconscious too. His head was placed so that he could see Virginia Harding, in a sideways crouch, extend her gun and fire with extreme care. McLaughlin stood tall before her, firing rapidly from the hip, and her shot took his right earlobe off. He screamed and dropped to one knee.

  She ignored him and raced to Higgins’s side. “It looks all right, Tom,” she lied convincingly. She was efficiently taking his pulse as she fumbled with his clothing. “Get an ambulance,” she barked at someone out of vision. Whoever it was apparently failed to understand the archaism, for she amended it to “A doctor, dammit. Now,” and the whip of command was in her voice. As she turned back to Higgins, McLaughlin came up with a handkerchief pressed to his ear.

  “You got him,” he said weakly.

  “I know,” she said, and finished unbuttoning Higgins’s shirt. Then, “What the hell did you get in my way for?”

  “I…I,” he stammered, taken aback. “I was trying to protect you.”

  “From a rifle like that?” she blazed. “If you got between one of those slugs and me all you’d do is tumble it for me. Blasting away from the hip like a cowboy…”

  “I was trying to spoil his aim,” McLaughlin said stiffly.

  “You bloody idiot, you can’t scare a kamikaze! The only thing to do was drop him, fast.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I nearly blew your damn head off.”

  McLaughlin began an angry retort, but about then even Higgins’s delayed action consciousness faded. The last sensation he retained was that of her hands gently touching his face. That made it a fine memory-sequence, all in all, and when he reviewed it later on he only regretted not having been there at the time.

  All things considered, McLaughlin was rather lucky. It took him only three days of rather classical confusion to face his problem, conceive of several solutions, select the least drastic, and persuade a pretty nurse to help him put it into effect. But it was after they had gone to his apartment and gone to bed that he really got lucky; his penis flatly refused to erect.

  He of course did not, at that time, think of this as a stroke of luck. He did not know Deborah Manning. He in fact literally did not know her last name. She had simply walked past at the right moment, a vaguely-remembered face framed in red hair, grey eyes improbable enough to stick in the mind. In a mood of go-to-hell desperation he had baldly propositioned her, as though this were still the promiscuous seventies, and he had been surprised when she accepted. He did not know Debbie Manning.

  In normal circumstances he would have considered his disfunction trivial, done the gentlemanly thing and tried again in the morning. In the shape he was in it nearly cracked him. Even so, he tried to be chivalrous, but she pulled him up next to her with a gentle firmness and looked closely at him. He had the odd, inexplicable feeling that she had been…prepared for this eventuality.

  He seldom watched peoples’ eyes closely—popular opinion and literary convention to the contrary, he found peoples’ mouths much more expressive of the spirit within. But something about her eyes held his. Perhaps it was that they were not trying to. They were staring only for information, for a deeper understanding…he realized with a start that they were looking at his mouth. For a moment he started to look back, took in clean high
cheeks and soft lips, was beginning to genuinely notice her for the first time when she said “Does she know?” with just the right mixture of tenderness and distance to open him up like a clam.

  “No,” he blurted, his pain once again demanding his attention.

  “Well, you’ll just have to tell her then,” she said earnestly, and he began to cry.

  “I can’t,” he sobbed, “I can’t.”

  She took the word at face value. Her face saddened. She hugged him closer, and her shoulder blades were warm under his hands. “That is terrible. What is her name, and how did it come about?”

  It no more occurred to him to question the ethics of telling her than it had occurred to him to wonder by what sorcery she had identified his brand of pain in the first place, or to wonder why she chose to involve herself in it. Head tucked in the hollow between her neck and shoulder, legs wrapped in hers, he told her everything in his heart. She spoke only to prompt him, keeping her self from his attention, and yet somehow what he told her held more honesty and truth than what he had been telling himself.

  “He’s been in the hospital for three days,” he concluded, “and she’s been to visit him twice a day—and she’s begged off our Orientation Walks every damn day. She leaves word with the charge nurse.”

  “You’ve tried to see her anyway? After work?”

  “No. I can read print.”

  “Can’t you read the print on your own heart? You don’t seem like a quitter to me, Bill.”

  “Dammit,” he raged, “I don’t want to love her, I’ve tried not to love her, and I can’t get her out of my head.”

  She made the softest of snorting sounds. “You will be given a billion dollars if in the next ten seconds you do not think of a green horse.” Pause. “You know better than that.”

  “Well, how do you get someone out of your head, then?”

  “Why do you want to?”

  “Why? Because…” he stumbled. “Well, this sounds silly in words, but…I haven’t got the right to her. I mean, Tom has put literally his whole life into her for ten years now. He’s not just my boss—he’s my friend, and if he wants her that bad he ought to have her.”

  “She’s an object, then? A prize? He shot more tin ducks, he wins her?”

  “Of course not. I mean he ought to have his chance with her, a fair chance, without tripping over the image of himself as a young stud. He’s earned it. Dammit, I…this sounds like ego, but I’m unfair competition. What man can compete with his younger self?”

  “Any man who has grown as he aged,” she said with certainty.

  He pulled back—just far enough to be able to see her face. “What do you mean?” He sounded almost petulant.

  She brushed hair from her face, freed some that was trapped between their bodies. “Why did Dr. Higgins rope you into this in the first place?”

  He opened his mouth and nothing came out.

  “He may not know,” she said, “but his subconscious does. Yours does too, or you wouldn’t be so damfool guilty.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you are unfair competition, he does not deserve her, and I don’t care how many years he’s dedicated to her sacred memory. Make up your mind: are you crying because you can’t have her or because you could?” Her voice softened suddenly—took on a tone which only his subconscious associated with that of a father confessor from his Catholic youth. “Do you honestly believe in your heart of hearts that you could take her away from him if you tried?”

  Those words could certainly have held sting, but they did not somehow. The silence stretched, and her face and gaze held a boundless compassion that told him that he must give her an answer, and that it must be the truth.

  “I don’t know,” he cried, and began to scramble from the bed. But her soft hands had a grip like iron—and there was nowhere for him to go. He sat on the side of the bed, and she moved to sit beside him. With the same phenomenal strength, she took his chin and turned his face to see hers. At the sight of it he was thunderstruck. Her face seemed to glow with a light of its own, to be somehow larger than it was, and with softer edges than flesh can have. Her neck muscles were bars of tension and her face and lips were utterly slack; her eyes were twin tractor beams of incredible strength locked on his soul, on his attention.

  “Then you have to find out, don’t you?” she said in the most natural voice in the world.

  And she sat and watched his face go through several distinct changes, and after a time she said “Don’t you?” again very softly.

  “Tom is my friend,” he whispered bleakly.

  She released his eyes, got up and started getting dressed. He felt vaguely that he should stop her, but he could not assemble the volition. As she dressed, she spoke for the first time of herself. “All my life people have brought problems to me,” she said distantly. “I don’t know why. Sometimes I think I attract pain. They tell me their story as though I had some wisdom to give them, and along about the time they’re restating the problem for the third time they tell me what they want to hear; and I always wait a few more paragraphs and then repeat it back to them. And they light right up and go away praising my name. I’ve gotten used to it.”

  What do I want to hear? he asked himself, and honestly did not know.

  “One man, though…once a man came to me who had been engaged to a woman for six years, all through school. They had gotten as far as selecting the wallpaper for the house. And one day she told him she felt a Vocation. God had called her to be a nun.” Debbie pulled red hair out from under her collar and swept it back with both hands, glancing at the mirror over a nearby bureau. “He was a devout Catholic himself. By his own rules, he couldn’t even be sad. He was supposed to rejoice.” She rubbed at a lipstick smear near the base of her throat. “There’s a word for that, and I’m amazed at how few people know it, because it’s the word for the sharpest tragedy a human can feel. ‘Antinomy.’ It means, ‘contradiction between two propositions which seem equally urgent and necessary.’” She retrieved her purse, took out a pack of Reefer and selected one. “I didn’t know what in hell’s name to tell that man,” she said reflectively, and put the joint back in the pack.

  Suddenly she turned and confronted him. “I still don’t, Bill. I don’t know which one of you Virginia would pick in a fair contest, and I don’t know what it would do to Dr. Higgins if he were to lose her to you. A torch that burns for ten years must be awfully hot.” She shuddered. “It might just have burned him to a crisp already.

  “But you, on the other hand: I would say that you could get over her, more or less completely, in six months. Eight at the outside. If that’s what you decide, I’ll come back for you in…oh, a few weeks. You’ll be ready for me then.” She smiled gently, and reached out to touch his cheek. “Of course…if you do that…you’ll never know, will you?” And she was gone.

  Five minutes later he jumped up and said, “Hey wait!” and then felt very foolish indeed.

  Virginia Harding took off her headphones, switched off the stereo, and sighed irritably. Ponty’s bow had just been starting to really smoke, but the flood of visual imagery it evoked had been so intolerably rich that involuntarily she had opened her eyes—and seen the clock on the far wall. The relaxation period she had allowed herself was over.

  Here I sit, she thought, a major medical miracle, not a week out of the icebox and I’m buried in work. God, I hate money.

  She could, of course, have done almost literally anything she chose; had she requested it, the president of the hospital’s board of directors would happily have dropped whatever he was doing and come to stand by her bedside and turn pages for her. But such freedom was too crushing for her to be anything but responsible with it.

  Only the poor can afford to goof off. I can’t even spare the time for a walk with Bill. Dammit, I still owe him an apology too. She would have enjoyed nothing more than to spend a pleasant hour with the handsome young Orientator, learning how to get along in polite s
ociety. But business traditionally came before pleasure, and she had more pressing duties. A fortune such as hers represented the life energy of many many people; as long as it persisted in being hers, she meant to take personal responsibility for it. It had been out of her direct control for over a decade, and the very world of finance in which its power inhered had changed markedly in the interim. She was trying to absorb a decade at once—and determined to waste no time. A powered desk with computer-bank inputs had been installed in her hospital room, and the table to the left of it held literally hundreds of microfloppy discs, arranged by general heading in eight cartons and chronologically within them. The table on the right held the half-carton she had managed to review over the last five days. She had required three one-hour lectures by an earnest, aged specialist-synthesist to understand even that much. She had expected to encounter startling degrees and kinds of change, but this was incredible.

  Another hour and a half on the Delanier-Garcia Act, she decided, half an hour of exercise, lunch and those damnable pills, snatch ten minutes to visit Tom and then let the damned medicos poke and prod and test me for the rest of the afternoon. Supper if I’ve the stomach for any, see Tom again, then back to work. With any luck I’ll have 1987 down by the time I fall asleep. God’s teeth.

  She was already on her feet, her robe belted and slippers on. She activated the intercom and ordered coffee, crossed the room and sat down at the desk, which began to hum slightly. She lit its monitor screen, put the Silent Steno on standby and was rummaging in the nearest carton for her next disc when a happy thought struck her. Perhaps the last disc in the box would turn out to be a summary. She pulled it out and fed it to the desk, and by God it was—it appeared to be an excellent and thorough summary at that. Do you suppose, she asked herself, that the last disc in the last box would be a complete overview? Would Charlesworthy & Cavanaugh be that thoughtful? Worth a try. God, I need some shortcuts. She selected that disc and popped the other, setting it aside for later.

  The door chimed and opened, admitting one of her nurses—the one whose taste in eyeshadow was abominable. He held a glass that appeared to contain milk and lemon juice half and half with rust flakes stirred in. From across the room it smelled bad.