Quartet for the End of Time (26 page)

In fact, Alden didn't realize until long after that night—until he had folded Joe's stiff limbs into the cab and it had driven away—that, despite the chill that had inadvertently run down his spine at Elizabeth's words, he had failed to properly listen. In part this was because of the disarming beauty of Bits, who had been seated across from him, and in part it was because of the (not unrelated) growing warmth that had all that time been spreading through him. It was nice to have company. To be buoyed by the flirtatious vitality of Elizabeth's steady stream of conversation—
an interruption to the monotony of his days—and he remembered thinking that he would need to find more women to spend time with after that. That they really did provide the necessary release from the strain of the working day. That without women, one might become—like Joe (though even he had a wife)—on the whole, really quite dull. By the time all of Elizabeth's fingers had been counted out flat, Alden found that he had missed more than half.

Sooner or later, Elizabeth had said then, everyone who once supported the party (and here her eyes flashed at Joe, causing Alden to wonder suddenly if there was anything, or had been anything before, of a
romantic
nature between them, if such a thing was possible) would be grossly disappointed.

But Alden was himself not terribly troubled by the warning. And as she continued to speak, he was still hardly listening, instead thinking primarily now of the possibility that Joe had indeed had
relations
with Elizabeth, and if so, what kind. Wondering if Elizabeth was as freethinking in her sexual practices and policies as she was in other areas, and if perhaps tonight was not a night that would end triumphantly for them all.

T
HINKING ABOUT THIS MONTHS
later as, after disposing of Joe, he walked home alone, made him feel about ready to burst with longing. It was a strange, inside-out feeling—almost as though he had burst already, and so wanted now only to be able to put everything back together again. He hadn't felt that way since he'd read the news about the Indian on the front page of the
Washington Post
. Everything in little pieces inside him—even his blood coursing through his veins suddenly in pieces, like little bits of glass, so that as he walked he actually began to itch all over in this crazy way. He had to stop in the middle of the street, even, in order to scratch at his skin, and the way that his fingernails felt on his arms—their absolute impotence on the surface of his skin, as they failed utterly to disrupt whatever it was that was at that moment coursing through his veins—was so enraging to him that he simply sat down on the road and cried.

He hoped, as he cried, that he did so mostly for poor Elizabeth Gregory,
who had so recently disappeared, but it was more probable—and he recognized it, as he continued to weep—that he did so for Joe, and for himself. And perhaps a little for the Indian—though he had been dead by then nearly two years. Or (but here he began to tremble) for Arthur. Whose name he could hardly bear to pronounce inside his mind.

It was almost as if even the rough idea of the man he had betrayed— in so vast a way, and so irredeemably, that he could not even understand exactly how, or in what form—touched too close to … whatever it was … that knot at the core of himself, which he could not undo. On account of it, whenever his mind drifted even close to Arthur, or Douglas, or the events of the twenty-eighth of July, 1932, he flinched in almost physical pain. He thought of what the Indian had said (it was, he realized only then, very nearly the
last thing he'd said
), about Arthur—how he had lived out at least a part of his life in the body of another man, and he wondered if perhaps such a thing, without his noticing it, had happened to him. That somehow it was Arthur's life and not his own that—having inadvertently stumbled into it somehow—he was obliged to carry on with now. It would explain the physical pain he felt, increasingly perhaps, at the memory of him—when he could not, by his usual means, keep it at bay—as well as why Arthur himself, so far as he knew, had all but disappeared—

Perhaps that was just it, he thought. What had happened to Elizabeth. To anyone that just … “disappeared.” They found themselves living out their lives in other people's bodies: too exhausted by the effort of it to guess at how they had arrived there, or why.

W
HAT LITTLE
J
OE KNEW
of Elizabeth's actual “disappearance” he had told Alden that night. Just as she had promised, she had—shortly after they had met in Washington—
quit the party
, as well as her related (unmentioned, but no doubt intricate) involvements with its more sensitive inner workings. And just as she herself had anticipated, an invitation to Moscow had followed promptly—an invitation she had the audacity to refuse. It was directly after that she disappeared. Bits reported that she simply didn't return from work one day. After quitting her job at the
AAA she had got a job as a secretary at a small law firm, Johnson and Mallory, in the Bronx—thanks to the assistance of her uncle, Bob Mallory (Bits's father), one of the partners there. Bits herself worked in the office, but had taken the day off sick. Elizabeth had left in the morning for work at the usual time, but was reported to have left the office at the end of the day half an hour after she ordinarily did—five-thirty in the afternoon. She had appeared, by all accounts, “her usual self” throughout the day, but, after she took her hat from the hook in the office's small antechamber, poked her head around the corner to the inner office, shared by three Johnson and Mallory employees, including Bob Mallory himself, said good night, and offered a general wish that the weather would turn soon and relieve them all of the unseasonal humidity (it was only mid-April), she was never seen again.

A
LDEN REMEMBERED VERY LITTLE
of the rest of that spring. He went to work. He returned. He rarely talked to Joe anymore. Sometimes he saw him in the coffee room at work, and when he did they would both nod solemnly and then one or the other of them would duck his head back into his sandwich or mug of coffee or give a little jump and turn on a heel in an unexpected way as if he suddenly remembered he had forgotten something in another room. To see big Joe Hodge jump was unusual, but it became less and less so as April gave way to May and then to June and the humid air settled in, as if it had no thought any longer, nor ever would, of any other place to go. Then, sometime in the middle of June, Joe suddenly became very still and quiet again, almost like he had the night Alden had sent him off by himself in a cab. Alden thought that this was probably on account of the weather. Imagine that. The man was about to jump to his death from a tenth-floor window, and Alden attributed the strange calm that had settled over him to the oppressive heat.

But by the time Alden learned of it, he had his own worries, and so the details of Joe's death, accompanied by whispered speculation as to whether or not he was a spy, on whom and what he had or might have been spying if he was, and the sequence of events that led to his untimely end, Alden barely heard.

Just two weeks before, he had been approached by Ted Wainwright, Coates's boss. It had been brought to his attention, Wainwright said, that there were certain
arms
of the party that stretched into the very
highest
government positions, and the thoughts of the repercussions of such an extended
influence
were making it difficult for him, and most conscientious right-thinking Americans, to sleep at night. Was Alden so afflicted?

Alden swallowed, and nodded yes.

It was not a lie. He had not been sleeping properly since Elizabeth Gregory had disappeared, and that was going on two months. Without the company of Joe after work he went on solitary walks, which extended longer and longer into the evenings. The light didn't fade until about nine o'clock that time of year, and it would be dark by the time he got in. He would then enter the silent house and go into the kitchen, where he would help himself to whatever he could find. Sometimes there would be a plate left out for him, other times not—there never did seem to be a pattern to it he could rely on. He would wash down the cold meal with a glass of milk, and count the interval between the humming of the refrigerator and the moment it shuddered loudly and was still. Sometimes—and for this, too, there was no regular pattern, at least not one he could easily discern—his mother would call his name out in her high, brittle voice. More often than not this occurred in the moments just after the shuddering motor of the refrigerator had dropped him momentarily into deepest silence.

Is that you? she would call, and each time, without fail, no matter how much or even at times how eagerly (so desperately lonely was he in those days) he waited for it, it would make him jump to hear it when it came. His heart would quicken and he would have to pause in order to regain his composure before he responded—a note of annoyance, on account of being surprised, always therefore pronounced on his tongue.

Yes, it's me, he would say. Who else?

Sutton would already be tucked upstairs, where she now spent most of her time. His father, equally, kept to his end of the house; more and more they heard from him only the steady
swish swish
of the old riding whip as it beat time against the empty air.

Despite how much Alden anticipated it, even longed for it, each time
his mother's voice actually arrived—when he was reminded, with the sudden introduction of her voice, that he was not alone; that she was waiting for him behind her semi-shut door, and, now that his identity had been confirmed, expected him to enter; to duck his head down to hers, be kissed by her pale mouth, and sit beside her afterward for a while, her hand from time to time reaching out to touch his own—he would feel a deep resentment begin to stir in him. He no longer wished to be in any company, least of all his mother's. He did not wish to seek out the correspondence any longer between the voice that had disturbed the brief calm of his after-dinner quiet, as he had swallowed the last of the milk from his glass in the dark kitchen and the refrigerator had shuddered to its brief repose, and the lips that had raised it. Though when the voice did not come he would always await it with anticipation (which was, he told himself, not truly desire but only the usual degree of anxiety produced when there is any degree of uncertainty about what the immediate future will bring), once it came, he could with conviction regret it bitterly, and it was a relief to do so—because it had come.

After he left his mother, planting a final kiss on her thin hair, saying, Good night, Mother, I must leave early again tomorrow, she would often delay him, one excruciating moment longer—reaching up to catch at the sleeve or the lapel of his coat.

You are less and less yourself these days, Alden, she would say.

Given this, or a similar excuse for genuine annoyance, he would bat her hand away.

Good
night
, Mother, he would say, and climb the stairs to his bedroom, making a note of the pale glow from beneath his father's office door. The perfect symmetry of the light that leaked from beneath it to lie in a triangle there at the foot of the hall never altered in dimension, day after day. It existed there just as surely as the silence of the house existed—aside from the occasional throat clearings of the refrigerator, or the other small sounds, so ordinary and rhythmic in nature as to not even be heard. (What else, he would wonder sometimes when by some chance occurrence his attention was drawn to them, did he fail to hear?)

Sutton's room, her door shut tight, would confront him at the top of the stairs. Often, he would linger just outside it for a while, pacing back and forth in as natural a pattern as he could, so that the loose board by the rail would make its characteristic squeak—according to which anyone within hearing range was always alerted to any traffic in the hall. But the door always remained firmly shut, and after a time he would locate his own room, and at the center of it, his bed, and would fall into it with such intense exhaustion that he could almost
see
sleep as it approached him in a wave.

But then, just at the peak, when he was certain there was no escape— that in another moment it would be upon him—he would be wide awake again, and there was nothing to do but lie there in the darkness—sometimes all night—only falling into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. But this early-morning sleep, with its repetitive dreams of ordinary waking tasks (of the alarm's buzz, of greeting his father as he descended the stairs), would be so tedious it never seemed to provide him any rest at all. So real did it all seem that if it were not for the fact that he could nearly always count on a single skewed detail—a missing tooth in the mirror, an egg that refused to boil, a stranger's face looking back at him where his father's should have been—he would never have known that he was dreaming and quite possibly never have awoken.

S
O HE COULD ANSWER
the question posed to him two weeks before Joe Hodge's death in all honesty. He was certainly one of those who was losing sleep. It did not take much, after that, for Ted Wainwright to persuade him to report everything he knew: of the professor, of the Indian, of Elizabeth Gregory, and of Joe Hodge himself.

Two weeks later Joe was dead, and Alden was making arrangements to leave the country, with the help of a letter from Wainwright and his father's connections to the embassy in France. By the middle of August 1934, he had already reached Paris, having purchased a second-class ticket bound for Liverpool—then traveling overland to Dover and, by ancient steamboat, to Calais.

IV.

( I
NTERLUDE
)