Case and the Dreamer (25 page)

The bathroom.

The light came on automatically as he passed through the just overlapping drape. Not quite angry, not quite laughing at himself, and commanded by his bladder more than by his brain, he used the bathroom “now that I’m here.” And as he emerged, “Wouldn’t you know …” he said ruefully, for there on the edge of the bed sat the long limbed Aurora, wheeled table alongside, pouring coffee. Not for the first time he was struck by her beauty: how could anyone so tall be so perfect? The cup, the saucer, the coffee pot seemed like doll furniture in her long, tapered hands. And she smiled at him, set down the coffee, and rose to meet him halfway, put her arms around him, pressed him to her wonderful body, held him, released him. “I’m glad you’re still here,” she said.

“Where else would I be?”

“Wherever it is you go when you leave—”

“I know, I know. ‘The Country of Afterward.’ When are you going to give me a straight answer about that?” And he felt a flick of astonishment at hearing himself, for though the words were those
of the crabby and testy Michaelmas, the tone was, for him, something new. The cutting edge wasn’t there. Rorie captured his eyes with hers for a moment; her face flicked from profound seriousness to a radiant smile, as if she had found something she hoped for. “That’s exactly why I came in just now—to give you answers. Come sit by me.”

They perched together on the edge of the huge bed. The table was a vase, the food a bouquet: yellow rice, tiny green peas, scarlet pimentos, orange-pink lobster meat, blue-black mussels, white chicken, mother-of-pearl inside the just-burst, juicy clams.

“I’ll tell you a story,” said Rorie, around and between her food. “Maybe you’ve read it, maybe you know it, but let me tell you anyway, because I have a point to make.

“It’s in Victor Hugo’s big novel
Les Miserables
, and is one of the finest pieces of writing anywhere in this world. It deals with a sailing ship, a French naval vessel and a terrible storm. The ship had a weather deck, and right under it the gun deck where the cannons were kept. They were tied down behind the gun ports, ready to be run out and used in battle. Big brass cannons, you know, on wheels.

“Well, in the storm one of the cannons got loose, and I’m sorry I don’t have the book with me to read you that part; you’d never forget it; you’d think you’d been there. As the ship rolled and plunged in the storm, the cannon was like something alive and crazy, charging up and down across, smashing into the bulkheads, splitting the timbers of the ship’s sides, bearing down on crewmen trying to find some way to stop it. It began to look as if that berserk cannon was going to sink the ship and kill everybody.

“Then a young gunnery officer snatched up a long ramrod and ran out to the middle of the gun deck. He was like a dancer, a matador, a prizefighter all at once; and he dodged, and he spun, and he ducked this crazy cannon as it ran at him until he saw his chance, and then he dove under it and shoved the ramrod into the wheel spokes, stopping the thing in its tracks until the crew could get ropes on it and tie it down.

“Want some more lobster?”

Mr. Michaelmas, munching and agog at the thrum of her voice, shook his head.

She went on:

“Late the next day when the sea was calm, the captain called up the whole crew on the main deck. He and his officers were in full dress. He had the gunnery officer, front and center, and he came down with a metal on a chain, and he decorated the officer and kissed him on both cheeks, the way they do in the French military to this day.

“Then he went back up on the high poop deck and called down a question, ‘Now which man is responsible for that cannon getting loose?’

“And the hero with the shiny decoration on his chest, proud and honest, answered, ‘I was, sir.’

“Then the captain called up the sergeant of marines. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘take that man, and a squad, up to the foredeck and shoot him.’

“And they did.”

Mr. Michaelmas took a while to realize he had stopped chewing. This lady really knew how to tell a story.

“That’s one part of what I have to tell you,” Aurora said. “Push it aside—” (she pushed his plate aside as she said this, and replaced it with a dessert, a whipped and shaped mound of something with real flower petals in it) “—and let me give you another part. They’ll all come together. You’ll see.”

He started to respond, then gave it up. He was beginning to learn (relearn?) that things could happen without his having to make them happen.

The tall girl lay down and rolled over on her stomach, and propped herself up on her elbows. “That Apricot,” she said finally, “she’s crazy, you know, but she’s also some kind of saint. And she—well, she just doesn’t think like other people. The veteran’s hospital bit was only the beginning. Want some more coffee?”

“I’ll get it,” said Mr. Michaelmas. “Go on.”

“She read an article in an old magazine one day. It was a very funny bit, written during one of America’s so-called ‘police actions’
against Communists. This writer had gotten hold of a newspaper story about how much money it cost to kill one of the enemy. He multiplied this by the total body count to date, and came out with a huge figure, which he said would be enough to buy a villa on the Riviera for every family of five in the entire enemy country. He said this would do two things: it would stop the killing, and would knock the hell out of communism.”

They laughed together. Aurora said, “That’s funny, and it’s sharp, but it set Apricot to thinking: Here was an alternative to war, ridiculous as it was. She’d never wondered before if there could be alternatives—who does?

“And that led her to wonder how it was, if there were alternatives, the final choice always seemed to be mass killing. What bothered her most was that in a war a country always screens out the strongest, the quickest, the smartest young men that can be found and sends them out to get their heads blown off.

“And she thought, who makes these decisions? Almost always, old men. ‘Old’ didn’t have to mean years; ‘old’ means with all the juices dried up. ‘Old’ means (whether or not they know themselves) that they hate the young just for being young; they are jealous, envious and angry. It’s nothing new, you know. The old bulls are always afraid of the young ones coming up. This kind of thing was around before humanity was out of the trees.

“Now here is crazy Apricot deciding to do something about it. If the old ones are sitting safe in front of their acres of polished mahogany, sending the young ones to die with a stroke of their ballpoint pen, then, says Apricot, let’s find a way to put the juice back into them. Because she believes that a good little man is as good as a good big man, and a good old man is as good as a good young one. Sometimes better,” she added, smiling and reaching to stroke Mr. Michaelmas’s thigh.

“Now,” she said “
you
. Some men collect companies to make conglomerates. You’ve been collecting conglomerates. I don’t know why—you certainly don’t need the money, and you’ve proved yourself over and over; I don’t understand it, and I won’t try. But I won’t fault you for it. It’s your thing, and it’s what you have to do.

“But in doing it you became a gold-plated bastard. You got so you didn’t care how many faces you walked on with your climbing cleats on, and then you got so you enjoyed it. You especially enjoyed crunching young people, young enterprise, young ideas.”

“Now, just a damn minute—”

Aurora raised a finger, overriding him. “I’m reading from the record, Mr. Michaelmas. We’ve planned this for you for a long time. And I’m not saying what you are,” she added. “I’m saying what you’ve been.” She rose up on the bed and came to him, pressing him back with one hand while the other sought his groin. “Your juices are running again. You’ve been fed and rested and tuned up, and you’ve been balled to the point where you had all the pleasure you can handle and
have started to give it back
. You know what you did for the four of us. Stiff or limp, fingers, mouth or whatever, you looked out for us all; you wouldn’t quit until you were sure.

“And that’s what the Country of Afterward is all about, Mr. Michaelmas. You take off your clothes to have sex, right? Well, good sex takes off your gender—do you see what I’m saying? It’s the one time when human beings have the chance to meet each other without the old chase, without game-playing and manipulating and tit-grabbing. And it’s the one time when a lot of people—I’m sorry to say mostly men—roll over and go to sleep, leaving the other—usually the women—depressed, even crying and not knowing why.”

Mr. Michaelmas felt very strange. Aurora’s lovely face and brilliant eyes seemed to be coming into sharper and sharper focus, while the rest of the room seemed to be fuzzing out.
What’s the matter with me?

To his astonishment, Aurora put two fingers in her mouth and produced a short, piercing whistle. Somewhere behind her the drapes billowed, and they all came in—Rietta, Pam, Apricot. He could not move … and the hand moving in his groin was exquisite. “Must’ve been something I ate,” he mumbled.

“Sure it was,” said Aurora. Her face, her eyes, moved closer; her voice soft and strong, drove into him. “When anybody, young or old, starts showing the signs of being the kind of bastard you were before you came here, you remember that you’re the captain.
You’re going to find a phone number in your side jacket pocket (when you have a side jacket pocket). You’re the captain,” she said again, “and you will call that number, but you won’t say ‘take that man out and shoot him.’ You will say ‘take that man out and fuck him.’ And if, when he comes back, he still acts like a bastard, you will call again and say ‘take him out and fuck him again’—which, you will agree, is better than having to shoot him again. Mr. Michaelmas, we are going after bastard captains in government and industry, and we won’t stop until the juices are flowing again all through the summit.”

Apricot vaulted lithely to the bed behind him; lifted his head and put it in her lap. Rietta fitted her strong body to his; Pam flung her dark silk over his torso and smoothed his chest with her cheek. No one hurried. Gently, sensation rose without pausing at any plateau, rose and peaked and gently overflowed, and he fell asleep in the Country of Afterward.

Midmorning. Autumn. Warm. A laughing wind. Traffic. Voices. Mr. Michaelmas opened his eyes; whatever it was that had blacked him out left him with a click. He felt fine, and more alert than he had been in years. He looked across a small park at the front of his own office building.

“Jesus Christ! Mr. Michaelmas!”

“Wrong on the first, right on the second. Hello, Joe.”

Joe Flagg dropped down on the bench next to him. “I got your message that you were out here. Someone phoned. Where were you? I began to think you were never coming back. Even thought you’d been kidnapped, but nobody ever—”

“Been minding the store?”

“I’ve done the best I could, Mr. Michaelmas. Well what I did, I tried to do everything the way you would.”

“Did you, now.”

Flagg began excitedly to recite what he’d done. It went on while they crossed the park, crossed the street, crossed the lobby: foreclose, acquire, outbid, outplay. Freeze, force, pull the rug. Variously, men squealed, ran, turned pale, you should’ve seen his face when I
 … By the time they entered the elevator, Flagg had almost run down. Mr. Michaelmas interrupted the last punch line of corporate triumph with “You’ve turned into a gold-plated bastard, Flagg.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

Well
, thought Mr. Michaelmas,
he’s had a good teacher
. They entered his private office from the back corridor; a gamut of astonished staff was a thing he was not prepared to run. Mr. Michaelmas dropped into his familiar old chair. The convolutions of the old leather seat did not exactly fit his buttocks as they had. Well of course: Flagg had been using it. He looked up at his Number Two Man, who was (a little nervously) picking up things from the desk: a picture, a file of papers, a little clock. “Get this stuff out of your way … you want me now?”

“Not now.”

Flagg backed out.
Backed out
. Was he in the presence of royalty, or did he expect to be shot if he turned around?

Mr. Michaelmas stretched. He felt just fine. He put his hands in his pockets, found his wallet, keys. A card with a phone number. He dialed.

Two rings. “Afterward.” An answering machine.

He said, “This is Michaelmas. Tell Apricot the gunnery officer is Joseph Flagg.”

Clopclick
, and a voice:
this
was no machine saying excitedly, “Mike! Oh, Mike, I hoped it was you! This is Apricot.”

He felt, suddenly, like a blushing high-school kid. “Apricot … Apricot, am I ever going to see you again?”

“You just name it. You really are wonderful, you know.”

“Really?”

“Honest to really, Mike.”

So he made the date. Then he buzzed Flagg.

“Get in here.”

Flagg appeared, his face carefully composed, but his hands holding his hands very hard.

Mr. Michaelmas detached his gold key from the bunch and slid it across the desk. “Have one of these made for yourself. And call me Mike.”

He thought Joe Flagg was going to cry. “Yes, sir, Mr. Michaelmas. Thank you, Mr. Michaelmas.” He backed out.

Mike
, Mr. Michaelmas told himself, feeling the juices run within him,
you really are wonderful, you know. Honest to really
. He leaned back and stretched, feeling the old leather molding again to fit his body, and fell to thinking about his date, and afterward.

“Privilege,” murmured Perk. “Truly, an honor and a privilege.” He didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he laid them against his side-seams. This brought him to parade attention, and the old Chief hadn’t ordered it, so he set his shine-to-wincing boots slightly apart. The old Chief hadn’t said “At ease!” either, so he didn’t put the hands behind him. He didn’t know what a stance like this was. He didn’t altogether know what he was, or why he was here. “Having the opportunity,” he said after a while, because the old man was so still, staring, apparently, at his crotch. He thought a hysterical thought about zippers and controlled the impulse to check it out with an effort somewhat greater than four hours on the obstacle track might cost him. “All by myself,” he added insanely. “I mean, with you, sir, privilege.”