Dance the Eagle to Sleep (31 page)

There was still that swelling—the baby. Now he did not want to think about it. Time enough when it appeared yelling. Sometimes he thought of it strongly as his. Imagined she would give it to him. Sometimes he thought of it as hers: she had wanted it, and now she had it. He let himself remember at times that Shawn wanted her, that Shawn had let him take her because Shawn felt guilty and could not assert his desire. It would be all right. He would arrange it all. Perhaps there would be Ginny and Shawn. Perhaps he
would get around all of them, fix things with Joanna so he could keep them both. Maybe Joanna would still feel guilty about Shawn, so she would have to accept Ginny. But at any cost, he would have Joanna back. So he withdrew into himself and waited, while on the last night Ginny lay beside him sobbing in the dark and he pretended sleep, made himself into rock to wait.

He could see Joanna’s red hair in the pass before he could see her clearly. He could see her red hair as he came down the pass toward the rendezvous. She sat on a rock in the morning sun. They were between the two armies, the army of metal and the army of flesh. As he came close and she was still there, he wondered how he had seen her hair, because she wore a straw hat that covered it and threw patchy shadow on her face. She looked different. She slumped there waiting. She glanced occasionally at the pass, oftener at a book she was reading. He tried to make himself strong to endure what she had gone through in prison and among the enemies. Maybe his had been the easier road in spite of all, and he had to think of that now in order to reach her.

She was wearing bright cotton pants and a striped shirt that looked clean and new. They must have issued her clothes for the meeting. She looked bigger and older. She had put on weight. Prison and lack of exercise.

“Hello, Corey” She nodded, squinting against the sun, and gave him her hand to shake formally. It was hot and dry.

He could not touch her yet. He could not put his hands on her, although they itched and the fingers curled on nothing. Were they watching from nearby? “Is this an ambush? Do you know?”

“Don’t be silly. They could have shot you any time coming down. They want to give you a chance.” She sounded impatient and a little bored.

As soft as he could, he asked, “Are they listening?”

“You’ve become very paranoid.”

“A lot of killing does that” He was angry for a moment. He saw the thing he hated most to see: the body of the last of their babies, Sarah Jean, with the blood pouring out from her torn chest, and the heart exposed and still spurting blood, throbbing like a small animal, like a red frog. Her mouth open. Her eyes open. He sat down beside Joanna.

She moved away a little. He was almost too shy to look at her. Then he made himself. Joanna, Joanna, Joanna. Her hair was cut shorter and processed in some way that took the kinks out. It was neatly and fussily curled around the bottom of the hat. It did not look quite real. It needed to be loose in the wind.

“Take off your hat.”

“The sun bothers me” She stirred under his eyes. “I’ve gotten fat, haven’t I?”

“The more, the better. You look good to me.”

“I put on a lot of weight in the hospital. Insulin therapy does that”

“The hospital? Were you sick?”

“I was in bad shape when they took me in. I started a fire, you know. So I had to go into the hospital for treatment. First they tried electroshock and then insulin.” She grimaced. “I really hated electroshock. It was all pretty grisly the first couple of months”

He could not speak. His throat turned into a bone. He took her hand and held it against his mouth.

She detached it. “I was in very bad shape. Doctor Hayes, the psychiatrist I had after the first month or so, was very good. He brought me through the tunnel. It’s like being born all over again, it really is. I suppose that sounds like nonsense to you, until you go through it yourself. I feel as if he’s my real father. I put up such a fight at first, not to let him get through to me, not to let him reach me. But he’s such a wonderful, devoted doctor, he wouldn’t let me discourage him. It was like learning to read, except this time I was learning to read myself.”

Her voice went on. He could not speak. He sat in a stiff huddle beside her. She was somehow bigger than him and puffy. Maybe she was puffy with the words they had injected into her. He had to listen and wait—wait for Joanna to come out.

She giggled suddenly. “I’m supposed to be talking to you about terms and all that. You have to come in, to bring in whoever is still running around up there with you, before it’s too late. But I really wanted to tell you about all I learned about myself. I think you could be helped, Corey, I really do.” Voluntarily she reached out this time and patted his arm.

He seized her hand inside his. It sat there, hot and dry and impassive, in his grip.

“I want to try to help you, Corey, honestly. Because I came to understand why I did what I did with Shawn. Well, I was trying to castrate you.”

“Never mind about that shit. I understand it my own way now. I haven’t been faithful either. I don’t want us to get stuck talking about that stuff now. What matters is getting you back.”

“But I did castrate you. I mean, you were impotent then.”

“Only that time, Joanna. It wouldn’t have lasted.”

“But you were. All week. You don’t have to deny it.”

“Oh, Jesus, don’t think that. Come here” He tried to draw her closer.

“It was the whole matter of my penis envy. I had no good female models. I wanted to be a boy and I tried to turn myself into one. For instance, sleeping around and running away from home and trying to reject myself—pre-tending my name was Joanna, pretending I could become someone else. My name is Jill, and I wish you’d use it. Wanting to be a warrior—what was that but wanting to be what my father was? It was that whole fixation on the Army. But there was a positive side in me, even then. For instance, Dr. Hayes pointed out that I was captured because I was in Tunnel D with the babies. That was my effort in a crisis situation to act out my femininity”‘

“That’s bullshit. Sylvie deserted her post. You got stuck. It was an accident”

“You speak of accidents because you repress these things. I don’t need to, any longer. I’m ready to face myself and accept who I am and live in the world.”

“Joanna, Joanna, what do they have to give you that you want? A pair of new pants and a clean shirt? Words that make your tongue go flap, flap? That awful stuff they put on your hair to make it lie flat? Your hair is naturally wild and beautiful.”

“I have problem hair, but I accept that now. I don’t exaggerate it. I was like a child who’s naughty to attract attention. I wanted to be loved because I was bad, instead of acting in such a way that I would attain real relationships with people”

“Shut up!” He made his voice softer. “Don’t parrot their garbage. You’ve been processed, and you’ve taken it in, so that you could survive. But listen, Joanna, you’re a few feet away from freedom.”

“You listen to me, Corey. I’m where I want to be now, and I don’t mean sitting on this crappy rock. I’ve got a scholarship to a decent school. I’m going to be a teacher. I’m going to be something on my own.”

“Joanna, your people are up there in the mountains waiting, Shawn and Ginny and Marcus—remember Marcus and Tiger from the Catskills? Your people are waiting to take you back. The enemy has hurt you, but the pain will go away and leave you tougher and stronger. Freedom and your own people.”

“How can you talk about freedom, when you’ve come to negotiate surrender? Now look at this damn paper. You have to sign it. Or take it back and have a council and bring it down tomorrow.” She thrust something at him, fine print, lists of conditions.

“Don’t think that. I came down to get you! Joanna, look at me! Look at me!”

She turned her head, and her brown eyes met his, squinted against the
sun’s glare. Eyes like hubcaps. They gave him nothing human. Only himself reflected twice looking back. A robot that looked a little like Joanna. A plastic doll with rubbery skin and a smell of plastics about it. He was suddenly running before he knew he had stood up. He turned, tearing up the stiff pages of the treaty. She frowned after him.

“Corey, come back here. Sit down. We have to settle things. Corey!”

He hurled the fragments of paper at her. He wanted to throw them in her face, but they drifted lazily in the sunny air and idled away. A funnel was closing on his head. Claws in his chest. The air was glass. It was crushing him as he ran blindly, and a choked scream escaped him like an injured bird drag-flapping off, like a wounded crow. He screamed again, again muffled, and fell to his knees. The rocks were spines under him. His hands scraped at his pounding chest. The pressure had warped his head.

Then he was lifted up. Shawn pulled him to his feet and hoisted him and carried him over his shoulder. His head hung down and he could hear Shawn panting as he trotted. Corey’s head banged against Shawn’s back. Then his sight riddled with red and black holes and receded, as he willingly let go of consciousness and slipped down into the swift dark river and was carried away.

“It’s better to die than to become plastic. It’s better to be shot than to be reconditioned. It’s better to live your own death than somebody else’s life.” That was Corey’s message to the people. He could not tell them the terms because he had not received them. He said unconditional surrender. Some went down. Most stayed.

Ginny had taken her knapsack and cooking pot and gone to Marcus. She was mad at Shawn too. She stood up and said that she was leaving, and she wasn’t going to surrender either. She was going to try to get through the encirclement. Why wait for death? As long as there was a chance, take it. But she did not go. She spent her time persuading other people to leave, and some of them did slip out by ones and twos to try to escape. She wanted Marcus to leave with her, but he wasn’t ready yet.

Corey paid no attention. He had only to look at her belly, and he did not believe she was about to go off from him. He found himself blocked. He could not make himself move. He was frozen with despair and the lush desire to die. He knew he must steal time, the terrible luxury of time, to fast and wait. He must cleanse himself of his despair and wait for the knowledge of what must be done. His desire to be alone was like an intense thirst. He did not care for anyone. He did not care for himself. Abstractly
he worried for his people, but he could not connect enough to bring that to action.

Early in the morning, he climbed to what felt like the peak of a nearby mountain. Clouds filled in the valley and the ravines as he climbed, and though he scrambled above them into the sun, he could see nothing but the immediate brownish rocks and the shaggy white ceiling of cloud below. He fasted and sang chants and waited. He slept and was wakeful. But he did not even dream. He passed through hunger into weakness and then into a dry lightness, like a desiccated leaf. He rose into the clear purified state in which vision came. Yet nothing happened. He remained still and empty and waiting.

The gods lose interest in a loser, he told himself. No vision came because he had squandered the one he had been given. Nothing moved through him. No power used him as its nexus for coming into the world. He remained only Corey—thin as wire and dry as paper, sitting cross-legged in the sun on a pile of rocks with a cold wind going through his ribs like a buzz saw. Below somewhere was the bloated shell of his other self, his love, his desire, his fearful dependency. Below somewhere too were his wife and his unborn child and his friend.

Vision would not come. After a while he could not keep his mind quiet. His mind came out of him in the form of a gnomic old man who skipped round and round him with the sun firing off Ben Franklin specs and explained and explained in a voice as monotonous and inevitable as the multiplication tables.

He had only thought of getting the kids out of the system. The system was such a nightmare to him that he had not tried to decipher its machinations, but only to make people feel the weight that pressed on them. Everything they might have offered as program seemed reformist and compromising in the face of apocalyptic revolution. Yet you could not win a violent revolution in the center of the empire with rifles against tanks and planes, if the Army would fight against you. You could not win with an isolated minority.

The secrecy, the paramilitary measures they took against police infiltration finally made them vulnerable to raids. The model of warfare, without the firepower to wage it, had seduced their imaginations. The lads who came in search of them were moved by their own alienation and the lure of their style, but for the passive others, the angry others, there were only the horror-story caricatures of the mass media to shape their responses. They had done no propaganda. They had been too turned off by the great square
glimmering vacuums to do other than turn away, so they had no allies. If they would not consume, the society would turn and consume them. It would all work out in terms of profit and loss. Stability would return. The labor market would be less glutted. Whose children were these? Children of the gray box, children of the print-out, children of the deadly ray, of the comic book and the Pentagon. Their deaths would move only each other. Their putative parents grazed on meadows of corporate newsprint and grew fat and took pills to soothe their stomachs.

No vision came to him. No god, no totem, no devil on the mountain. No vision of the kingdoms of the earth or his psyche. On the fourth morning he made a small fire to cook the dried soup he had brought with him. Then as his strength came back, he went down the mountain.

Where his people had been encamped, he found a vast parched place, as if a desert had fallen over the land he remembered. There were no trees, no bushes, no birds, not a green or living thing. There were signs of great heat. The earth itself seemed shriveled. A fine ash blew in the breezes here and there. Baked clay and rock.

Now he must be seeing visions. Now finally he must be mad. He stopped to eat some chocolate and raisins, squatting, and then retraced his path up the mountain and jogged down again.