Quartet for the End of Time (23 page)

No! Mr. Rogers said again. His hands flew to his face—
a dead give-
away
, as any observer of human beings in compromising situations well knows. With one hand he adjusted his eyeglasses, and with the other he relieved a phantom scratch beneath his left ear.

No, I can with some confidence declare— he said. But here his voice faltered and he failed to complete the sentence.

Mr. Robins, the deputy said. Mr. Robins, Mr. Robins. Blink, blink. Raymond, he said. Come, now. It's all right. Everything will be all right now, Mr. Robins. Come home.

So that was how, in the second-to-last week of November 1932, Raymond Robins was returned to New York and the care of his wife, where—after only a brief stay at a well-appointed sanatorium outside the city—he regained his senses fairly quickly and was reestablished in his usual role in politics and society.

O
N THE AFTERNOON THAT
Raymond Robins returned from the dead, the Indian and Alden walked together and mulled the story over, turning it this way and then that. Perhaps, they considered, the real R. Robins had not returned at all—still holed up in some other out-of-the-way town somewhere, or else, having become more of a pain in Hoover's backside than everyone already supposed (he had, over the past months, become increasingly vocal about his disappointment in the government's continued refusal to recognize the Soviet Union), he had been hauled off somewhere to be otherwise disposed.

It is of some interest to note, on account of what happened next, that the Indian had a curious look on his face as the case was discussed. That, after a while, he became thoughtful and said that it did not seem to him to be, as it had seemed at first glance, a story of resurrection— but of death; he just wasn't sure whose. It could be Robins's, he reasoned. Perhaps a doppelgänger had been unearthed somewhere to replace him. That Mr. Rogers had been a real, honest-to-goodness businessman quietly going about his own life in Whittier, North Carolina, only to be surprised one day by the image of R. Robins, to whom he did bear an uncanny resemblance but of whom he—not a political fellow—had never until that moment even heard, let alone known.
That Mr. Rogers's hand had thus fluttered to his face not in
feigned
but in
genuine
confusion, whose dartings, left to right, of the eye had not revealed any
subconscious
doubts or fears, any panic at having been finally
routed out, exposed
… That, instead, everything was quite on the surface. That he was merely attempting to
make sense of
, and simultaneously searching desperately for
some way out of
, the bizarre predicament within which he had found himself. Perhaps, the “sanatorium” toward which “R. Robins” was at this moment, thanks to the loving direction of his wife, bound was really only a metaphor—the Indian suggested—for a state-of-the-art reeducation center that would include various different levels of “motivations” for the new “R. Robins” to comply with the constructed story of who he was and why, and what he would do next—which was, of course, the most interesting part of the story. No matter if the current R. Robins was “real” or not, it was certainly interesting to ponder what was
at stake
now in his
being
R. Robins in a way that no one, no doubt even R. Robins himself, had ever thought to ponder before, and it was just as they were beginning to ponder this that the Indian set off on a story of his own, after mentioning in passing that he did not believe that any one of us had any real or final right to the body that was his own.

When you think about it, he said, we all live our lives out in borrowed bodies, do we not? And as Alden nodded, considering this in the philosophical light he believed it had been thrown, the Indian added that it
did
happen, quite literally sometimes—as it had, for example, in the case of Arthur Sinclair, whose body had been borrowed from a prison guard in the Siberian wilderness back in 1919. Arthur had told him about it himself, the Indian said. About how he had walked for three days on borrowed feet, too tired to guess the connection they had to another man, before he woke up one morning and they were his own.

Alden must have looked incredulous. Even at the best of times to speak of Arthur, of whom nothing more had been heard since the afternoon following the riots, made him uncomfortable—and now here was this absurd story, which the Indian recounted with a straight face, as though it were something he should actually
believe
.

Yes, the Indian said, nodding. It was true. He had not even had a chance to look the man whom he had borrowed those feet from in the eye—on account of being surrounded by such a powerful darkness. A darkness, perhaps—the Indian added, after a moment of reflection— not so very unlike the darkness R. Robins had known before he, too, was “raised up” into the body of another man.

Their pace had slowed—it had become as ponderous as the Indian's tone. Alden waited for him to explain; for him to establish, somehow, what he had just said safely within the bounds of … a joke, or a metaphor for something, if that's what it was.

When he did not, Alden hesitated.

Do you—? he began. But then again he paused. It was all too ridiculous even to warrant further inquiry. Still, something compelled him to ask. Believe that? he finished finally.

When the Indian did not reply, he added, Arthur's story—what you just said.

The Indian's step faltered. He glanced briefly toward his companion, and as he did so, Alden's eyes slid, unconsciously, away. Something in the gaze disturbed him. He wondered what sort of information this subtle shift in his own gaze might have revealed, if there had been anyone present interested in its being so revealed—but then he saw very clearly that there had not. The look that he had, just a moment before, found too penetrating to bear, and from which he had averted his eyes, had not even been directed at him. He saw now that the Indian was in fact looking straight past him, toward some invisible point on the horizon—as if he were not even present at all.

Still, the sensation of that gaze—which had not even been directed at him—was one that he could always recall later, whenever he thought of the Indian—or of Arthur. And so vividly that he would almost feel it again—touching every hair on his head, and sending itself in ripples down his spine.

Shortly after that, they parted. As they had done on so many occasions before. Alden's path veering to the left and the Indian's continuing straight ahead, in the direction he'd been bound.

T
HE
I
NDIAN MUST HAVE
traversed the distance between the point at which their paths had finally diverged and the basement flat he shared with Aida and the child in record time. Alden was unfamiliar with the pace of the Indian, naturally, when he was not accompanying him, but there is no doubt that he walked at a rather quick step because, as Alden later calculated it, it took the Indian no more than forty-seven minutes after they had parted, at half-past five, to return home and get himself blown into so many unrecoverable parts.

The next day, the front page of the
Post
, as well as every other newspaper in the city, reported that the explosion occurred at exactly 6:17 p.m. That it had ripped through the building in which the Indian was found, reducing it—and two neighboring houses—to rubble, and killing not only the Indian, but two Polish sisters, and a stray dog that had reportedly been seen pacing the streets all day. The wife and child of the Indian (who'd had, the newspaper confirmed, known Communist ties) had avoided the blast; the wife was, at that moment, being held for further questioning.

Alden tried hard to appreciate the fact that—at least—as the newspaper indicated, Aida and the child had survived, but—perhaps because this fact was weighted equally against the fact of the Indian's death, and the deaths of a stray dog and two Polish sisters—he could not seem even to register the news. The details included in the account seemed, he reflected to himself, to create not a story at all, but only the effects of a distant constellation—each point equally suspended by and disconnected from the last. In this way, the Indian, John, existed in equally direct and abstract relation to the explosive materials that were later detected on the premises, and the time of day, 6:17 p.m., when these materials had apparently erupted—so that as Alden read over the article several times it became unclear to him if it was the materials or the time of day that had killed him. But there was one point in this constellation of facts as they assembled themselves before him on the page that stood out. He soon realized it was because it was not a fact at all. So closely did it resemble the rest of the points of the story according to which he had so far oriented himself, however, that he read the article through several
times before he noticed it. The recovered materials did not seem, the article reported, to either “indicate or merit” the explosion that had, at 6:17 p.m. at the corner of Heckman and First, subsequently resulted, the known details of which the article then went on to explicitly state. The question—upon which, Alden realized, all the disparate points in the story were hung—was: What missing element had caused an explosion nearly three times the velocity of that indicated as a possibility by the materials retrieved at the scene of the crime?

He must have read the article through three hundred times, until the words on the page danced in front of him, and recombined in increasingly meaningless sequence and, finally, the article held no meaning at all. All day people came and went, banging through the door, causing the ever-increasing pile of loose pages in his in-box to scatter uselessly across his desk. When this happened he would merely collect the pages and return them to the in-box, before retraining his attention to the front-page news, where, once again, he combed the words for content that it would not and could not possibly reveal. How badly he wanted to give that flimsy paper a shake and have the facts settle somehow differently on the page! But no matter how many times he read the piece, or shook the paper between his fists, or turned dully around in the small office only to sit again at his desk in order to confront the page once more, the facts stubbornly remained, perfectly detached from one another, and yet refusing to be in any other way arranged.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING TO
do at the end of the day but go home. He started out of the doors as usual, and turned toward the Mall. He could not help but slow his pace as he approached, waiting for—with every moment, expecting—the Indian to arrive. Though he told himself he would not come; though he contained within him the hard knowledge (precisely the size and shape of the letters that had assembled themselves that morning on the
Post
's front page) that he would not, there was something in him, larger and more substantial, that told him that he would. It settled in his chest, very solid and real, and he walked all the way home
with that very real thing inside him that told him that the Indian's footsteps would, at any moment, intersect with his own.

A whole week went by like that. Alden walked to work and numbly attended to his tasks. By the end of the next day he had regained the usual equilibrium between the incoming and outgoing files on the corner of his desk, and after a while he even began to take some pleasure in the methodical rhythm of the tasks—the same tasks that had, just days before, driven him nearly mad with restless boredom. He wondered, as he gazed around the office at the people around him who were bent to their own respective tasks—accomplishing them methodically and with the same vague pleasure that had previously bewildered him, but with which he now accomplished his own—whether they had not also experienced some terrible shock as disruptive to the system as the Indian's death had been to his, and whether the diligence with which they bent to their tasks, despite—or rather because of—their tedium was only the effect of that lingering trauma. Perhaps, he thought further, it was in this manner that one detached oneself from a constellation of facts from which one was finally excluded. It was, after all, he saw then, in the same detached manner with which he now moved through his days that his mother, and even his father (in a blunter and more ruthless way), moved through theirs—as if intent on protecting that one single thing at the center of themselves that remained real and unbroken. He had not known, until that point, what it was to suffer a great loss, or even a loss at all—so he did not realize at first that what he at that moment identified as “real” and “whole” inside him was not that way at all. That he was, as he would realize only much later, merely suffering from the common effects of a broken heart.

—

E
ACH DAY
,
AS HE LEFT THE OFFICE
,
SLOWING HIS PACE AS HE APPROACHED
the Mall, he expected the Indian to appear, and each day the Indian did not, until finally Alden did not expect him anymore. And just as he ceased to expect the Indian—or much of anything at all any longer—
the professor appeared. He did not intercept Alden's steps as the Indian would have, but stood waiting for him in an oversized coat at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, his eyeglasses frosted with the steam his breath made against the cold air.

Hello, he said, as Alden approached.

Hello, Alden replied.

He did not extend his hand toward Alden as he had done when they had first met, and Alden did not extend his own. Instead, just as Alden came level with him, he simply turned on his heel and fell in step beside him and they continued on together, in the direction of the Mall. They had walked almost to Fifteenth Street before the professor spoke again.

You'll be pleased—he said—then paused. He looked at Alden, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. They want you for one of the party's
special institutions.
(He added singular emphasis to these final words.)