The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man could move and no air ever came through. The earth rumbled down its alley like a golden bowling ball, shining.
Michael went on. "People used to imagine hell as a place where evil is done and being in hell as having evil things done to you eternally, praise God and don't push; there's plenty of room in the balcony for all the blessed souls. Well, Morgan amplifies this. Hell is forever. Hell is having anything done to you constantly, good or evil. There isn't any good or evil after a few billion millenniums. There's just something happening that has happened before. Think of it—forever. For ever. We don't know what the word means, and we die ignorant and unarmed. Don't ask me to come to any more jolly sessions around the campfire, old friend. I'll come, of course. Wouldn't miss it. Just don't ask me."
He stood up again, moving down the steps and across the grass with the loose, bucking motion of a captive balloon; a manshaped reminiscence, a figment of his own imagination.
"I can't help you," Mr. Rebeck said. He spoke very quietly, but Michael heard him and turned.
"Why, I wasn't asking you to. I wasn't asking for help. I'm very fond of you, but I'd never ask you to help me. I'll never ask anyone to help me again. Say hello to Mrs. Klapper for me."
He walked away and the sun devoured him quickly. Mr. Rebeck sat on the steps of the mausoleum, grateful for the shade the building offered. A cooling breeze sprang up suddenly, making itself audible by shaking the grass and hissing richly in the trees, but it did not reach Mr. Rebeck at all. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it out of his pants, but the breeze was gone and the trees stopped moving. His skin remained oiled with sweat and he could smell the familiar sourness of his own body. Later, when it was dark, he would go down to the lavatory and wash himself. He did not like the liquid soap that you squirted out of a glass jar, but it would have to do.
I am tired, he thought. Maybe the heat is doing it, but I have sat through a good many summers here and never felt like this. I am tired of being helpful. I am tired of being comfortable. Why this should be I do not know, but my image of myself as an understanding old man, floating in kindness like a cherry in a sugared liqueur, is beginning to curl at the corners. I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.
He remembered the raven, clacking his beak and saying, "I'm stupid. I don't know how to help anybody. I was lost too."
I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one, either, nor understanding. And yet, if I lose this rumpled and comfortable skin that I wear, how will I ever find anything to replace it? I wish I were younger and could grow skin easily.
Then Mrs. Klapper called, "Hey, Rebeck!" and he scrambled hastily up from the cellar of his mind, jumped to his feet, and started down the path to meet the woman, who waved as she came toward him. He felt his loose shirt flapping around his waist, and he stuffed it into his trousers as he walked. He buttoned it all the way up to the top and then opened the collar button.
Mrs. Klapper was wearing a blue dress that he had liked on her before, and an irrational crescent moon of a hat that she loved and defended violently. He had become fond of it himself, but that was one of the things he refused to admit to her. Now he prowled around her, hands clasped behind his back and head thrust forward, staring at the hat. She twisted her neck to follow him.
"All right, already," she said. She put one hand up to her head as if to protect the hat from any onslaught he might be contemplating. "I'm wearing it, I'm wearing it. You want I should wear a helmet like Doctor Livingstone? Leave the hat alone, Rebeck."
"It fascinates me," Mr. Rebeck said. He stood with one hand in a hip pocket and the other scratching the back of his head. "I can't take my eyes off it. Do you pin it on?"
"No, I had this jar of library paste, it seemed a shame to waste it. Rebeck, leave me the hat. The hat never hurt you." She was breathing hard and fanning herself ineffectually with her hand. "Hoo, it's hot. Ninety degrees, it says on the radio. Let's go somewhere we could sit down."
"All right," he said. He noticed that she was carrying a light raincoat over her arm. This did not surprise him too much, even in the hot weather. He knew that Mrs. Klapper regarded the weather as about as dependable as bus schedules. Had she lived during an earlier time, she would have propitiated a weather god possessed of a vindictive intelligence and a squad of little helpers that rushed to inform him whenever Mrs. Klapper decided to go somewhere.
As they walked back toward the mausoleum, Mr. Rebeck said, "I thought you weren't coming." He said it as casually as he could, not being by nature a casual man.
"The subway got tied up in a knot," Mrs. Klapper said very quickly. "There was a train in front of us and a train behind us and we were in the middle and nobody was moving and there was a big tsimmis with the whistle and the buzzing and the fans didn't work right in the middle. Half an hour we lost, maybe more. So excuse my being late, please."
"I waited all afternoon," Mr. Rebeck said. It was a straight statement of fact, but Mrs. Klapper took it as a mild reproach and an expression of self-pity.
"It's good for you to worry a little. That way you never get fat." She walked as if all roads were sidewalks and every one of them ran uphill. "Anyway, I hurried. Look how I'm panting, like a dog. I run any faster, I'll have a stroke. Then you'll be happy?"
"I'll dance in the streets," Mr. Rebeck said. They had reached the mausoleum, and Mrs. Klapper brushed off the top step as she always did and sat down with a large sigh of contentment. She took off one shoe and began to massage her toes, occasionally wriggling them to see if they were responding to treatment.
"Completely numb," she said, looking up at Mr. Rebeck. "My toes got no more feeling than a salted herring. Also I think I busted an arch. Call the ambulance, Rebeck. Get a stretcher, carry me out of here, what are you standing around for?" She gripped her tortured toes in one hand and crackled them like peanut shells.
Mr. Rebeck stood awkwardly in the presence of the unpretentious femininity involved even in the massaging of toes. Mrs. Klapper's foot, he noticed, was small and clean, marred only by the calluses on the ball and heel that a foot develops if its owner is in the habit of roaming around the house barefooted. An attractive foot, judged simply as a foot. He felt better when she slipped her shoe back on. "Would you like some water?" he asked. Mrs. Klapper nodded eagerly. "You got some? Bring it on." She frowned then. "Wait a minute. You got to go all the way back to the gate to get it, forget the whole thing. That thirsty I'm not. Forget it."
Mr. Rebeck smiled and patted her shoulder. "Fear nothing," he said. "I'll be back in a minute."