Same Hodding, Drozma. Late of the Wales Foundation, and evidently still with this crowd. I don’t get it. May have a chance to dig up something.
Max was showing fatigue, darkness under the eyes, when I shook hands for good night. Interesting, being near enough to a Great Man to notice the bad breath. But what I saw at that leave-taking was not a Great Man but a scared child, the kind who’s just put an iron pipe on a railroad track. For that matter I met a really great man once. It makes a difference, a greater ease in meeting malign pygmies such as Joseph Max. I visited the White House in 30,864. One doesn’t forget.
3
Through the thick apartment door I heard limping footsteps, and turned my changed face away, though I knew I would never be any readier to look at what nine years had done. The door was opening. It was after ten-thirty; I assumed Keller would have gone to work. Namir? To hell with him.
The boy’s no taller than Sharon. I realized I was staring at his shoes. No brace; the left sole is thickened. “Mr. Keller home?”
“Why, no. He’s at his office.” He has a good voice, mature and musical. I had to meet his eyes, which haven’t changed. A V-shaped scar over the right one. No recognition. “He left about an hour ago.”
“I should’ve phoned. You must be — Mr. Brown?”
“That’s right. Phone him from here if you like.”
“Well, I…” I blundered in past him, a confused and silly old man. “Think I left something here last night. Stopped in for a drink before he took me upstairs to meet Max. You were practicing, I think.”
“Left something?”
“Think so. Can’t even recollect what — lighter, notebook, some damn thing. Ever have your memory go back on you? Guess not, at your age. Only had a couple of drinks at that. Name’s Meisel.”
“Oh yes. Bill spoke of you. Look around if you want to.”
“Hate to bother you. If I did leave something, guess Mr. Keller’s uncle wouldn’t’ve noticed — no, he’d already gone upstairs.”
“Mr. Nicholas? Hate to wake him. He’s not well, sleeps late—”
“Heavens no, don’t bother him…. Smoke?”
“Thanks.” I used the fancy lighter. While he was intent on the flame I managed for the first time to look directly at his face. The angel of Michelangelo has hurt himself, Drozma. “I’m always forgetting things too,” he said. Yes, even at twelve he had that sort of tact.
“Just my eighty-year-old memory playing tricks.”
“You don’t look eighty, sir.” Sir? Because I’m old, I guess. It’s an almost obsolete courtesy.
“Eighty just the same,” I said, and dropped in an armchair with a grunt. “You have another sixty to go before they call you well preserved.”
His beginning smile vanished as he cocked his young head at me. “Haven’t we met somewhere?” I couldn’t answer; before my eyes found the painting near the foyer entrance, I glimpsed fear in him. “It’s your voice,” he said. Fear, and defiance too. “I can’t place it though.”
“Maybe you heard me when I stopped in last night with Keller.” He shook his head. “I don’t hear anything when I’m practicing.”
Yes, that dreadful Bach…. “Going to music school?”
“No, I — Maybe next fall. I don’t know.”
But why was he afraid? “I heard a fine recital Wednesday. Newcomer. Sharon Brand. Audience went nuts and no wonder.”
“Yes,” he said with too much control. “I was there.”
So much for our celebrated Martian sixth sense! He was there, remembering Sharon. Perhaps even near me on that balcony, seeing the gleaming downstream passage of that ship as I saw it. Near enough to touch. And because his mind must have been full of Sharon, perhaps he even remembered me too, now and then — a ghost, a moving shadow. “Splendid talent,” I said. “She must’ve given up everything else for it, to get so far at nineteen. Well, I happen to know she did. Known her since she was a little girl.”
I still peered stupidly at the painting, knowing the hand with his cigarette had stopped halfway to his mouth. He said with desperate politeness: “Oh…? What sort of person is she, off the stage?”
“Very lovely.” I wanted to yell at him. He should have been bursting with a need to say: “So have I! So have I!” “Mr. Keller told me you painted that.”
“He shouldn’t’ve hung it there. Most people don’t care for it.”
“I suppose…. Still, why not?”
“Too gloomy maybe. I was trying to find out how Rembrandt made a heavy background mean so much. Unfortunately I’m not an artist, Mr. Meisel. I just…” Not an artist, Angelo? “Look, I could swear I’ve heard you speak somewhere, sometime.”
I gave it up, Drozma. A revulsion against all pretense. I know: that’s the medium in which we Observers must live. Yet if I didn’t have that vision of Union within a few centuries I don’t think I could stand this swimming in lies. The superimposing of a human lie on our inevitable Martian lie was too much for me, that’s all. I slumped back in my chair and watched him helplessly. I said: “Yes, Angelo.”
“No…” He started toward me. He gazed foolishly at his cigarette fallen on the carpet, and did not bend to retrieve it until a feather of smoke was curling upward. “No,” he said.
“Nine years.”
“I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”
“My face?”
“Well?”
I shut my eyes and talked into reeling darkness: “Angelo, when I was middle-aged, years before I met you in Latimer, my face was badly injured. A gasoline explosion. I’d been a lot of things before then — actor, teacher (as I told your mother), even a sort of hobo for a while. Shortly before that injury I’d struck it rich — invention, happened to catch on. So I had money, took a chance on a surgeon who was working out a new technique. Prosthetic material I don’t begin to understand myself. Unfortunately he had success in only about a third of his attempts, and it raised hell with the failures. Never publicized. He had to give it up. Died a few years ago, knocked himself out trying to develop a test that would eliminate the sixty-odd per cent who couldn’t use it. But I was one of his successes, Angelo. What it amounts to: the stuff is malleable under heat; I can alter the cheekbones if I like, and that changes the whole face.” A smaller lie anyway: one that needn’t cloud our relation — if we were to have any relation. “I did that, when I left Latimer. Took on a new personality, as most people can’t readily do. There was a possibility the police would think I had something to do with your disappearance, and Feuermann’s. Do you remember Jacob Feuermann?”
“Of course,” he whispered, and I could look at him. “What — what became of Uncle Jacob?”
I wobbled on the edge of forbidden truth. “Disappeared, same night you did. All we ever knew. Tried to find you maybe. As I have.”
“Find me…. Why?”
I didn’t even try to answer that. “Do you believe I’m Ben Miles?”
“I — don’t know.”
“Remember the headstone of Mordecai Paxton?”
“Mordecai… Why, yes.”
“Ever tell anyone, who might have passed word to me (whoever I am), that you put dandelions around that headstone?”
“No, I — never did.” And Namir was somewhere close by — sleeping? The doors were closed, our voices very low.